As we wait for people and culture to catch up with technology, we find ourselves in this strange middle-place where ideas either seem too new, or not new enough, depending on your outlook. In the last few days I've been exposed to some very strange messages.
On Wednesday I saw an ad on a bus saying: "BBC iPlayer, now on TV" I can't even bring myself to try to get my head round that one. I think it will confuse different people in very different ways.
Then two nights ago I heard the following two messages on TV, in adverts:
1. "The network premiere of [such and such movie] coming soon" 2. "Best of Radiohead - out now"
The concept of a 'network premiere' seems so irrelevant it's almost funny. Exclusivity, when it comes to movies, ends about 24 hours after they appear in theatres. And a Best Of album has its obvious flaws too.
I have a feeling we're in store for a lot more of this kind of messaging while we slowly move away from the Internet, TV and other flashing screens being 'things' we need to differentiate between.
I treat 'high-culture' like a baby does his dinner: Thoroughly excited about it when it suits me and then quickly bored. I don't know. Blame MTV.
Last week however, I experienced something that literally got my heart racing in a way no visit to the Tate or spoonful of apple puree could. I went to The Masque Of The Red Death, an immersive theatre production at the Battersea Arts Centre. Based on the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
I was in two minds about posting about it, because my experience was certainly heightened by knowing nothing until I walked through the curtain. If you think you might go (apparently it comes to New York soon) then stop reading this now and just go!
For a full-ish review check this. It calls TMOTRD 'immersive theatre', but the word immersive doesn't do this justice. That's like calling TV 'interactive' when a red button icon flashes up. I'll try to find words that go some way to infecting you with the wonderful experience I had.
I'll break the experience into two observations. The first is about the narrative. The best way I can describe the sense of narrative is like a piece of music in a dream. You drift in and out of it (literally) as you make your own journey through the passages and hidden rooms. The trade-off with this more intimate approach is that dialogue is minimal and disorientating. I confess to have picked up very little of what was unfolding and yet it had its ghoulish claws around my gut every step of the way.
Then there is your part in this experience. Every audience member - who is wondering through the venue as an observer - wears the same mask. See above. It is a simple, powerful prop that makes everyone anonymous but also pulls you together like a hoard of ghosts, observing as a silent unit. In fact this was the single most amazing part of the evening for me: Feeling like a ghost; able to walk anyway, move around the actors, look them in the eye with the impression that I was invisible. I even found myself half-playing a character. I would chase actors down dark, winding staircases (not something I would do normally) and hover in the doorway as they burst into tears or embraced their lover.
I feel like a chimpanzee trying to explain where bananas come from. I love this topic but it's a little bigger than my brain. I will, however, continue to alternate between pointing at the gleaming yellow fruit I'm so fond of and gesturing to the tops of trees whilst making noises...
iii. Reassembly Do we really want to reassemble all this information back into bigger 'things'? Shouldn't we be grateful to this technology for freeing us from permanence? Isn't this the beauty of digital; that we are finally the masters of information, cutting and pasting code to deliver ourselves what we want, when we want it? These are open questions to anyone reading this.
Of course we should welcome our new freedom to manage information, but despite the ease with which we can fragment and filter data like this, I believe we have an in-built craving for mountains. We like 'things'. They're manageable, reliable and definite. They're there in the morning and when we get out the shower. And as Matt Webb and subsequently Russell Davies talked about, we have a desire to indulge in more substantial activities.
2007's uprising of widget culture is an interesting development in reassembling information. Widgets put a just little mountain back into the raindrop. Whether it's text, sound, video or imagery, widgets reappropriate information into neat little parcels that we can embed into our lives with a little aesthetic and conceptual stability.
But widgets don't help much with more substantial text-based information.
iv. Efficiency vs value In June 2006, The Guardian launched G24, an online service with which readers could print a Guardian-formatted pdf with the latest news in it. The content is updated every 15 minutes - pretty impressive if you compare that to a newspaper which only delivers you stories once a day.
It's a brilliant idea. It takes raindrop culture and puts back a little solidity. It embraces the speed of the internet, but maintains value by turning it into a neat 'thing' which you can read on the bus or toilet, or even slot into an archive if you're into that sort of thing.
But whereas G24 concerns only Guardian content, I have a grander vision. I've had this fantasy for a while of creating my own bespoke editorial team; choosing the bloggers and writers I admire the most and having a beautiful document created by aggregating their independent efforts. Not only useful, but a new unique thing.
Currently, I receive RSS feeds from about thirty blogs. Most if it is for snacking, but the odd article jumps out as being a bit more weighty. These are the ones I have stars against and have occasionally printed out to read properly. But printing off random articles crudely onto a pile of A4 just isn't satisfying. I stuff them into my bag and maybe go through them on the train or just forget about them completely.
What if there was a single button that turned all my starred items into a short, beautifully designed pdf for printing. Let's go further and suggest that the template for this pdf was a little more sophisticated. Imagine you could choose your editorial team based on the following:
5 Headliners (these are the people/companies that write excellent, substantial posts) 6 Middleweights(the bloggers that are interesting, but tend to write in short bursts) 3 Quick-hitters (People that offer constant snacking: cool pictures, cartoons, snippets)
Every time you click the print button from Google Reader, you get a beautiful new object - a journal in the vain of G24 - filled with a nice selection from today's blogs.
Each post includes a photo of the blogger and their name. As time goes by, you tailor your editorial team based on your favourite writers etc. Don't like Jack's posts? Delete him. Think you'd like to open with Jenny's thoughtful pieces? Upgrade her to a headliner. Perhaps you could even choose a pool of designers or Flickr users and have your front cover feature their work. It isn't restricted to printing either. I imagine aggregating lots of different bloggers' content in one screen, where I can literally switch on and off the writers I do and don't like.
This reassembly I'm describing is akin to an evolutionary characteristic that Dawkins (if I remember correctly) calls the bottleneck. Simple cells grow into complex things, which produce simple cells and so on. It's a natural cycle to build things until they're too overwhelming to control and then break them into pieces to start again. After all, this is what happens in business every day. Three smart people break away from a corporation that can no longer negotiate the market nimbly enough. They grow their new venture slowly and the cycle continues. I'm rambling.
The balancing act between efficiency and palpable value is a delicate one. Total efficiency (Google Reader) leaves me a little cold. I see a lot of things, but nothing gets my full attention. Seeking out substance and indulging in it takes effort and time. But with a combination of automated aggregation and personal input, I think the fragments we continue to smash into more pieces can be reassembled in exciting new ways that are efficient, but also valuable and pleasurable.
So to conclude, basically when the wind blows those trees, these bananas fall down. It's brilliant.
Last week I suggested that our relentless fragmentation of information had perhaps eroded our sense of the whole. That filtering the information we want piece by piece is all very well, but that we could be in danger of losing 'thingyness' to wrap it all up in.
I must confess, I'm a little nervous about setting up this second part as though I have the answers. I don't. In fact, I've barely begun to grapple with this and the following will be riddled with holes and contradictions.
What I do have is some questions, a metaphor I rather like and a comments button, which I would love you to click.
Turns out I had more to say than I thought, so I've broken it into four parts:
i. Thingyness ii. The mountain & the raindrop iii. Reassembly iv. Efficiency vs value
i. Thingyness
“The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name.”
Those are the words of Richard Dawkins. He was referring to the physical world, but it's a good place to start. Because whether physical or otherwise, humans need to apply 'thingyness' to handle all the information around them. Whether it's a man-made name or a cluster of atoms, the same thing is true: We can only tame the world with a sense of thingyness to solidify the endless data. This is put a little more eloquently on the inside cover of Michael Frayn's The Human Touch:
"[Mankind] has had to fashion from its transitory contacts a comprehensible world in which action was possible."
ii. The mountain & the raindrop In discussing what makes a 'thing', Dawkins refers to The Matterhorn and a raindrop as examples of permanence and commonality, respectively. The Matterhorn is as permanent as anything you're likely to encounter. And raindrops, while short in lifespan, fall reliably enough to require a consistent label.
The mountain and the raindrop represent the two extremities of thingyness, from the "ok, we're stuck with it" to the "it's gone - oh here comes another."
When we move from the physical world to the digital world, the basic principals of thingyness remain: Lots of information, organised into human-facing 'things'. The key difference with thingyness digitally, is the concept of permanence. The internet - anything pixel-based, really - is generally more raindrop than it is mountain. (Bit of poetic license here - Amazon and Google are mountains in lots of ways) The transient nature of digital thingyness is set up nicely by these words by Frayn:
“[…] the world is shaped by the traffic that passes between us and it in that one single shifting instant. From that tiny blur of contact we have constructed the universe and ourselves.”
And millions of people spend most of their days trading in fleeting digital raindrops - each one helping to shape that moment. From the vastness of the internet we filter tiny droplets of information we like and spray them out again in new clusters.
The result of this culture is that the type of information we seek out changes. We snack. We peck away at tiny pieces of larger thoughts and longer articles rarely get a look in, as Matt Webb discusses during his piece on Peak Attention. Is putting these pieces back together part of the answer? Does everything need to be chopped into chapters?
It seems appropriate that I should now say: To be continued... tomorrow probably.
Last night in the UK, ITV's News At Ten returned after a nine-year absence.
Some reviews have been harsh and others more evenhanded, but I don't really care about all that. What I'm curious about is all the interest around its return. It's clearly big business and a flagship programme in the channel wars, but for us - the people with the tv remote and that other thing.. the internet - do we really care?
The purpose of this post isn't for me to try to answer that question (although I will share some thoughts). Rather I'd love to know what you think.
For me, choosing your newspaper is a significant consideration. I read the Guardian, partly because of the choice and style of the 'news', but even more so because of all the other bits: Society; G2; Arts etc. But when it comes to catching the news on the telly, I really can't tell the difference most of the time. I don't care who reads it. I don't have a preference at all. For me, it's pure information, with a dab of laziness preventing me from reading it myself.
The late-night news does carry some nostalgic appeal for me. It both regresses me to childhood at the same time as making me feel like I have actually become my dad. But is the evening news still an "event" in the way it once was? Is it different if you're over 35? Would you ever think: 'I don't like the way this guy pronounces Middle-Eastern names, I'm going to try the other channel? Do you watch the news daily or just catch it when it's on?
Please do share your thoughts on this. I'm curious to know if anyone cares about the battle of the news other than TV stations and advertisers.
For years we've been banging on about how the breakdown in music genres has opened the masses up to niches - how your Auntie now enjoys a bit of Danish hip-hop as well as Wet Wet Wet on her iPod. It only occurred to me recently - with any noticeable clarity - that the opposite is true: That the new long-tailed digital landscape also gives 'permission' for cooler kids to branch out into more mainstream music, freed from the stigma of its associated genre. I've more than once witnessed Klaxon-haired Hoxtonites hearing a Pussy Cat Dolls track and nodding approvingly. That's the shit that is.
AdWeek just published this article, that I wrote for them last month. It's about meat.
The importance of meat/substance in brand comms has been buzzing round my head for a couple of years and eventually made it down my arms and out my fingertips. In broad terms it describes the opportunity in the vacuum between fluffy comms ideas and 'brand utility'.
It was actually very tough getting it down to such a small number of words. It's a huge topic and one that deserves elaboration. Perhaps I'll use this post to encourage debate and to spark off further thoughts.
The article is - I'm sorry to say - short of any case studies (partly because of the lack of them) and I'd also love to be pointed to examples that challenge my concerns.
Why I'm sharing this embarrassing story I don't know. But it's a nice lead up to a conversation about value:
In 2004 I read an article in a UK newspaper about retro mobile phones. I was doing a lot of work for Motorola at the time and had already developed an interest in their vintage phones, like the StarTAC and the DynaTAC. The article told me these handsets were now worth about £50. Whether I thought about the money or whether this merely reignited my interest, I'm not certain. But I did go onto eBay and buy myself a beautiful StarTAC and a MicroTAC, still in their pristine boxes. The following week I ran into a friend. I told him about my new toys and about the £50 price tag I had read about. He laughed and asked me where I read it. I told him and he laughed again. Apparently he knew the journalist that wrote the article. In fact, the article's author had phoned him up whilst writing it and asked: "how much do you reckon they're worth?" "I dunno," my friend replied, "about fifty quid?"
To spare me some embarrassment and perhaps partly because he believed it, my friend (whose name I'm omitting only because I don't want to tarnish the reputation of journalists) said to me: "Look Andy, things are worth whatever people pay for them."
He was right. I still deserve ridiculing (the comments button is below), but he was right. Things are worth what they cost us and this means we often value them more if we pay more. I recall hearing about some leather wallets being sold cheaply in WH Smiths, or rather not being sold. With such a low price, people didn't value them. Only when the price was doubled did they start selling. In some instances, we want to pay more for things. If something is free, it isn't worth anything to us.
Another example is one from my student days. I was in Tower Records and reluctantly rubbed away the foil on a scratch card the teller gave to me. Surprisingly, I won - and a minute later I was awarded ten new albums, free. I remember distinctly, walking away with all these albums and feeling a bit odd. I wasn't excited. I felt cheated, because I liked the ritual of saving money, making a choice and then living with that choice. In fact, to refer to Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness (again) it's been proven that we subconsciously force ourselves to have more positive feelings when it's in our interest to. I.e. When we've paid for them and want to enjoy them more.
All this came flooding back when reading that Radiohead are allowing fans to choose how much to pay for their new album. This isn't the first time someone has had this idea. Songslide came up with it a while ago and research has shown that chosen prices are higher than expected. However, it's also clear that for the unknown bands on Songslide, family and friends make up for a good proportion of purchases.
I think this concept of price-choosing is a really interesting area and definitely worth exploring for digital (read: copyable) products whose markets need rethinking. Things are worth what people pay for them. And this means to some degree, you control the value of what you consume by how much you decide to fork out. When I bought those Motorola phones, my pleasure was increased by what I was convinced they were worth, which means - until the truth was revealed to me - they were worth more to me.
So the question is, if you decide to be tight, are you cheating the musicians, or yourself?
There's some chatter in the blathersphere at the moment concerning what the internet is now. Russell Davies suggests it's is more of a thing now and less of a service. Mark Cuban has rubbed a few people the wrong way saying the internet is dead and boring.
I have a cocktail of opinions:
1. Current discussions don't seem to acknowledge that there is no absolute perception of the internet. In parts of the developed world, for instance, when the only way you can "use" the internet is by walking five miles and paying a week's wages for it, then it's definitely a 'thing'. To a Hoxtonite blogging in a hotel bar, the internet is taken for granted.
2. There needs to be some distinction between 'the internet' and its applications and sites. "The internet" itself doesn't need new innovations, just as air does not need new innovations in order for new ideas to thrive in the physical world. Maybe a clever coder can tell me otherwise.
3. I see the internet almost as another sense/dimension: An empty channel for information exchange - defined only by what passes through it. I'm sure Mark Cuban wouldn't call "sight" dead and boring. We might however, agree that the novelty of seeing has worn off - at least until we see something new and incredible. (The term 'internet access' is a bit peculiar now too, as it's not really the internet we are accessing - just as looking at a picture isn't eye-access)
I disagree with Cuban's argument in its headline form, although I appreciate that the fabric of our lives isn't being constantly re-woven (perhaps gradually dyed) with current innovations. However, there are some very exciting and playfulnew experiments being explored.
Onto the sticky bit. Davies made two comments that initially appeared to contradict one another, but which probably do work together after all: 'it's more of a thing' and 'soon we won't mention it at all'. I've been racking my brain over this question of whether the internet is solidifying or becoming more invisible. And actually, I think both are true...
I disagree that the internet is more of a commodity (in the west) because wireless is on its way to blanketing the developed world - and Russell is right, we won't be mentioning it at all soon. AOL etc will milk the last few years of charging for "unlimited downloads!!!"
But the concept of 'thingyness' - to quote Michael Frayn - takes us into philosophical places that my brain is too tiny to go. I'll just paddle lightly:
The internet was arguably more of a 'thing' at the very beginning, when we needed to reduce a seemingly abstract idea to a pocket-size concept. At that time it was interpreted by many as 'the thing you do email with', but a thing none-the-less.
It would seem to make sense that as the number of things we do with the internet increases its thingyness should become less tangible. It's now many things! But maybe the point is that in the beginning it was the internet's infinite 'possibilities' that led us to make it a thing and now it is its infinite 'uses' that overload our brains and require us to distil it once more.
So the internet is 'the great invisible thing' (that won't be going into Wikipedia any time soon) - a technological apparition, both everywhere, nowhere, tangible and limitless. Helpful? Maybe not, but this invisible thingyness leads neatly onto a thought I had recently:
The internet is like water.
Broadband is running water. Dial-up is a well. Wi-fi zones are expensive bottled water: irritatingly convenient but a bad use of money. Internet cafes are warm, bottled tap water.
You only notice water/the internet when you don't have it.
In the developed world, you don't ask someone if they have running water - you assume they do and use it without thinking "I just used this tap (laptop/iPhone)". In parts of the developing world you might expect that running water is less common and that the well could be a long walk away.
The metaphor falls down (ok, amongst other places I'm sure) when you consider that we need water to survive. Although people in the west would argue this is true of the internet. But I think it's an interesting metaphor to attach the internet's invisible thingyness to in order to temporarily relieve us from the metaphysical.
Oh - and the internet also shares water's boiling point of one thousand degrees:
And when the world is one big wi-fi zone? Well maybe then we can all stop talking about the internet completely. It would be very sad however, if this happened before the same could be said for running water.
I've been a member of car-sharing service, Streetcar in the UK for over a year. It's great. Owning a car in London is really a luxury and the service is so cheap I've been a passionate ambassador for it.
A couple of months ago I noticed that US-based zipcar had also recently started up in London. This immediately got under my skin. Having a single car-share service in a city has a great opportunity to reduce the number of cars on the roads, the number of parking spaces needed etc etc. This benefits a huge number of people - it's a cultural improvement. Indeed, zipcar's homepage reads:
"Imagine a nation with a million fewer cars on the road... we do"
And yet they're putting more cars on the roads!
While I'm all for consumer choice and all against corporate monopolies, I think zipcar's move appears a little irresponsible and inward-looking. What if Flexcar opened there too? And a host of others after that? It would completely negate the purpose of the thought.
This kind of thing highlights how companies' interest in eco-friendly ideas so often seems to be about them and not about the environment at all.
If zipcar thinks genuinely that a second car-share company (I.e. more cars) will still lead to "less cars" then I'd like to see a more honest communication: One that acknowledges the presence of Streetcar; one that shows some numbers and perhaps that proposes a campaign to ensure that the number of cars is reduced (I.e. Encourage potential consumers to sell their existing cars to zipcar).
In other words: It should acknowledge the world beyond its own goals.
Am I being over-sensitive? Does anyone share the view that this "our brand is the centre of everything" approach is misplaced when the proposal concerns the bigger picture?
