Time for a new experiment, seeing as I haven’t written on this blog for almost a full year.
Below is sign-up link for an email newsletter I’ve started – aiming to collect the best few cultural reads each week. Pieces which point to larger trends and cultural shifts.
Arriving every Friday (as long as I’m not on holiday or really hungover).
Sign up from the link and remember to confirm subscription via the email which might end up in your junk filter.
Incidentally, I hoping this newsletter will be the polar opposite of spam.
Need further persuasion? I’ve written a few reasons why I think this is something worth doing (and reading every week!):
THE CATCH MANIFESTO
I. PAN FOR THE GOLD – there is a lot of absolutely brilliant journalism around, but also a lot of fluff – it’s useful to filter and find the reads which truly get you thinking.
II. BROADEN YOUR SOURCES – some of the best writing comes from unexpected places, and different parts of the media, so CATCH aims to take in a wide range of publications.
III. LONG READS OVER HOT TAKES – many think pieces are quick-fire and unconsidered, at worst exhibiting a deliberately calibrated ignorance in order to fuel clicks. It’s worth the time to digest something in context, in detail, even something that’s joy to read.
IV. POP CULTURE MATTERS – light and fluffy as it may be, pop culture reflects more fundamental characteristics and power structures within society, and yes that means representational politics occasionally.
V. NO POLITICS, BUT EVERYTHING POLITICISED – links in CATCH won’t come from the politics section but, as point IV suggests, it would be foolish to think that culture in its multitude forms is isolated from issues of power. Everything points to a larger picture.
VI. PERSPECTIVES SHOULD PROVOKE – in events and subjects that are well-covered often alternative views, or voices not visible in mainstream media, offer the most thought-provoking observations. They are worth finding.
VII. PERSONAL PREFERENCE RULES – life is way too short to worry about constantly appearing well-informed, so read what’s interesting and what you enjoy. If that includes a few links from CATCH all the better.
Lastly some personal motivations for this project.
I like to read. A lot. And more recently Twitter and an app named Pocket have dominated my reading activities.
Both allow a certain curation – of feeds and content – which help me stumble across particularly good articles. I constantly find myself sending links to people, or turning up at social occasions where people are discussing widely-shared pieces from the week.
Newsletters are in vogue – almost as distributed blogs – and I wanted to find a format concise enough which would still allow analysis and spark discussion.
As a digital strategist / planner (yes I’m a fully-fledged new media wanker) I’m also interested in how new technology is affecting journalism, people’s reading habits and consumption of media more broadly.
I claim no particular editorial expertise – of course the brilliant articles are from writers who deserve recognition, of which this newsletter is a very very small part – but hopefully the links in CATCH will be the proof of the pudding.
That’s all. Catch you next time…
Post-script. Credit where definitely due: Neil Perkin – whose newsletter Only Dead Fish is a proverbial must-read for anyone working in strategy, marketing or digital – was a partial inspiration and source of some extremely useful insight from veterans of the newsletter game.
Can’t believe we’re nearly a month away from the SxSW mayhem of March…
My first post on the newly launched Isobar blog is about privacy, and the emerging business value surrounding this immensely interesting subject. It’s a fascinating intersection of technology and social factors, and also seems to have exploded as a topic of discussion since the beginning of the year.
I feel like the small number of people foolish enough to follow me on Twitter probably deserve an apology for the sheer tech-orientated volume I’ve been blasting through over the last couple of days.
To say it’s been intense at SXSW 2015 is an understatement, but brilliant and inspiring too.
I’m no longer embarrassed by loitering next to plug sockets in hotel corridors, bleary-eyed; caffeinated, charging an array of devices while frantically typing up thoughts each day.
This post is a re-direction because any writing at the moment is most likely to be for the Isobar blog, along with various other pieces, and ‘Storify-ed’ happenings from each day as tweeted by #TeamIsobar, UK office.
Links for your pleasure and perusal:
A few drive-by pieces written for the IPA TEXAS tumblr each day:
It decouples existing functionality into a dedicated ‘service layer’ – which several clever people have observed as a trend in mobile experience for a while.
Groups shows Facebook responding to the way people actually want to socialise online, adjusting the experience they originally designed.
The app also bears a striking similarity to the circles of Google Plus, which are arguably a more accurate model of how people’s social networks operate in real-life. It’s interesting (and slightly terrifying) to think what would’ve happened if Google Plus had preceded Facebook, but instead we’re seeing the world’s biggest social network gradually learn how people really behave.
Historically these ‘vulnerabilities’ in the Facebook experience have come to light as users defect to other platforms:
Instagram does mobile and photos well – bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion.
Snapchat does ephemeral messaging well – Facebook tried to buy them in 2013 for a $3 billion.
WhatsApp does individual and group messaging well – bought by Facebook this year for $22 billion.
Is it too harsh to describe these acquisitions as the result of increasingly expensive mistakes? Maybe.
Rather than move fast, break things, perhapsFacebook’s motto should be rephrased: fail fast, fix things (once you realise they’re broken).
To look at another social network, one of the reasons LinkedIn is so successful at attracting users, despite receiving less attention from the media, is because most people benefit from a clear distinction between professional and personal profiles online. To date Facebook has never presented competition in this respect – for the professional network – though they are now reportedly developing a ‘Facebook at Work‘ offering.
Even the world’s biggest social network, and embodiment of agile start-up technology culture, has faced regular disruptive threats, though has managed on the whole to bounce back. Having the critical mass of users is a big advantage.
What these disruptions do highlight clearly though is how even very large companies with huge resources at hand don’t necessarily understand their users, sometimes known as people.
I’m currently reading Click Here To Save Everything: The Folly of Internet Solutionism, where Evgeny Morosov warns of thinking about digital technology as a ‘revolution’ and decisive break from the way things were before. The way people behave within their social networks (in the pre-digital sense) has not changed as radically as we might think.
OMG I love your skirt – where did you get it?
Yes there is no substitute for user testing, but we could also look at the vast amount of research that already exists into how people socialise in different situations, networks and cultures.
Maybe we could even apply it to the design of digital experiences.
Twitter is interesting to consider from this perspective. They are having somewhat of an identity crisis. Though oddly I think this is testament to the versatility of the tweet, because different communities on Twitter use it for incredibly diverse means:
– Breaking news portal
– Trending topics
– Political and activist platform
– Mundane cereal chat and ‘selfie-centric’ content
– Personalised news stream
– Celebrity news outlet
– One Direction hivemind
– Troll convention
– TV watercooler
Not all of these uses present immediate monetisation opportunities though.
Is it time we saw some brand comms from Twitter?
Google are certainly doing so with Android at the moment, with YouTube, and have done historically with Chrome and Google Plus. They’re certainly out of the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality.
I don’t envy the person with the task of defining what Twitter is, or will be, but it feels like starting with users – sorry people- and how they group together might be a good idea. With some network theory thrown in for good measure.
Sometimes you read an article so disagreeable – what’s said, and how – that it deserves a line-by-line take-down. This is one such occasion.
I have an intense/borderline unhealthy interest in culture, technology, literature; specifically dystopian literature, and all the messy overlaps these terms involve, so enthusiastically clicked-through from the following tweet like an excited cat on catnip:
It’s a provocative opinion piece, but on closer reading, really quite unconsidered and even disturbing in what it calls for. Although was also most likely pulled out of someone’s ass in 10 minutes, maybe 5, vomited uncritically into a word doc in some god-forsaken cloud server…
Why spend the time unpicking its argument then?
Sometimes it takes seeing something you disagree with (really quite a lot) to bring your own views into relief; this piece allows me to articulate a few of my own thoughts on technology and culture which have been simmering for some time unexpressed.
The article is by someone called Michael Solana, who I’m hoping is an intern, because the alternative is really a far bleaker indictment of contemporary journalism.
We begin with a listicle of global issues, from a US perspective:
“The news is bleak. With Ebola on US soil, we are one infected monkey away from the plot of Outbreak.
Russia is threatening to invade the Ukraine. We are blowing things up in Iraq again, where starving children are being massacred. There is overpopulation, and climate change; there is peak oil; there is a truly alarming spike in the diagnosis of autism. We are a society faced with many problems. Things, to put it mildly, could be better.”
Even the first line of this article would be enough for an essay on the American world view, contemporary media, Hollywood and global politics. It’s so packed with meaning I’m practically salivating over its semantic deliciousness. But I won’t subject people to that, at least not in this forum.
To summarise – bad things are happening – what’s the answer Michael Solana?
“Technology, for its natural inclination toward radical change, is perhaps the only thing that can make them better in a major, scalable way.”
*DING DING DING MAJOR ALARM BELLS RINGING*
Any deployment of the word ‘natural’ when discussing culture, a diffuse concept which is constructed – through language, media, opinion pieces, blog posts – is an immediate red flag. Solana is attempting to make ‘radical change’ an objective, essentialised quality of technology, rather than expressing an opinion, a subjective position.
This sentence, given as an answer to All The World’s Problems, reads as a mission statement, manifesto, raison d’être for much of Silicon Valley’s approach to technology. A book which I haven’t read, but increasingly feel I should, To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist, by Evgeny Morosov, modernday malcontent, provides extensive rebuttal to the dominant ‘there’s an app for that’ culture embodied by companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and so on. To quote one reviewer:
“A devastating exposé of cyber-utopianism by the world’s most far-seeing Internet guru”
(John Gray, author of ‘Straw Dogs’)
The opening lines of Solana’s Wired article represent the view that Morosov critiques, and it is this perspective which underpins the rest of his piece:
“But in the 21st Century, the average American is overwhelmingly afraid of artificial intelligence, NASA has abandoned its shuttle program, and the tech industry is the new darling villain of journalists across the nation. While innovation has improved our lives in almost every way imaginable, people are more frightened of the future than they have ever been. And after Battlestar Galactica, can you really blame them?”
There are several statements in this paragraph which collapse under mild scrutiny.
We are presented with the single piece of empirical evidence in this article, relating to perceptions artificial intelligence, but Solana misrepresents the results of the survey so drastically I’m half-convinced he’s trolling us all deliberately.
The page linked to presents a nuanced discussion of why the statement – I’m not afraid of intelligent machines, I’m afraid of how humans will use the technology – was included in a survey about AI, and ultimately ranked as the top response beyond a simple yes/no answer.
Placing technology in its social context (instead of in a falsely isolated context) suggests that people are NOT ACTUALLY AFRAID OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE per se, but this doesn’t suit Solana’s purposes so is ignored.
As for the other statements:
“the tech industry is the new darling villain of journalists”
OK yes the media does engage in scaremongering, but issues of surveillance, privacy, personal data and other ethical questions are real, large-scale stories in the public interest. This is not the whimsy of the press, and to suggest otherwise is to reveal a total and blindly uncritical support for technology.
“innovation has improved our lives in almost every way imaginable”
This is so blunt. Clumsy rhetoric. Evidence is needed if we want to have this statement as a serious discussion.
“people are more frightened of the future than they have ever been”
OH HONEY PLEASE. THE COLD WAR ANYONE? Again, evidence and more thought required for any serious consideration. Again, this is pure blunt-ended rhetoric. Like being hit in the face with a badly-made mallet.
Back to you Solana:
“Obviously science fiction is not the cause of the current mess we’re in. But for their capacity to change the way people think and feel about technology, the stories we tell ourselves can save us — if we can just escape the cool veneer of our dystopian house of horrors.”
Glad we’re acknowledging the effect of culture on technology, but we’re getting fairly hyperbolic now with this ‘save us’ bullsh*t.
‘Dystopian house of horrors’ is more interesting as a turn of phrase because it hints at the entertainment aspect of the dystopian scenarios currently presented in popular culture; a house of horrors may be scary, but is ultimately for our titillation, a contained experience which we leave behind when we return to our non-spooky suburban new builds.
Let’s continue…
“Science fiction has always built our culture powerful frameworks for thinking about the future. Computer sensors, “electronic paper,” digital newspapers, biological cloning, interactive television, robots, remote operation, and even the Walkman each appeared in fiction before they breached our physical reality. Has there been any major technological advancement that wasn’t dreamt up first in man’s imagination? Simon Lake — American mechanical engineer, naval architect, and perhaps the most important mind behind the development of the submarine — said of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, “Jules Verne was in a sense the director-general of my life.” This was a man who created space travel in the pages of fiction decades before Sputnik, while Arthur C. Clarke imagined satellite communication into existence in 1945, a full 12 years before the Russians fired the first shots of the Space Race. Who invented the cell phone, Martin Cooper or Gene Roddenberry? Who invented the earliest iteration of the computer, Charles Babbage or Jonathan Swift? And the list goes on. Either art is imitating life, or science fiction writers have been pointing to the future for over a century.”
Most of the above could usefully have hit the editing floor. Newsflash everyone, science fiction involves the future. *shocked face*
“So what the hell are we supposed to make of the Hunger Games?”
You tell me Solana. Why do I get the feeling this franchise is the root cause of whatever existential melt-down is currently playing out in this opinion piece…
The Hunger Games, on the face of things, is currently one of the most salient and visible critiques of capitalism, inequality and oppressive totalitarian government in popular culture. Yet it lacks political punch, because the Games are played out for an audience’s bloodlust and the couture tastes of the Capitol for visual spectacle.
Most of outfits Effie Tricket (denizen of the Capitol) wears in the films are not costume as such, but looks lifted directly from Alexander McQueen:
The parallel between real world and dystopian luxury indicates a reflection of contemporary culture ‘not so far away’, which when presented in a commercialised Hollywood context serves to flatter and condone rather than rebuke.
Solana goes on to touch upon the history of dystopian writing:
“Certainly dystopia has appeared in science fiction from the genre’s inception, but the past decade has observed an unprecedented rise in its authorship. Once a literary niche within a niche, mankind is now destroyed with clockwork regularity by nuclear weapons, computers gone rogue, nanotechnology, and man-made viruses in the pages of what was once our true north; we have plague and we have zombies and we have zombie plague.”
This is actually a reasonable observation. Dystopia has become the dominant mode of what Margaret Atwood usefully describes as ‘speculative fiction’, because in fact, a future vision of society does not necessarily have to contain conventional sci-fi tropes (space, lasers, aliens).
As early as the Renaissance, writers were imagining the utopian possibilities of science and technology. In fact the word ‘utopia’ was coined by Thomas More in 1516. It means ‘no place’, and there remains critical debate around the text, whether in fact More’s imagined society may constitute a dystopian reflection on scientific possibility.
A noticeable shift towards dystopian literature began in the early half of the 20th century – think seminal texts like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, the lesser know We – largely due to the reassessment of modernism’s idea of utopia following World War. (see note)
By referring to nuclear weapons, zombies, evil AI and the destruction of mankind, Solana actually squashes multiple sub-genres into the dystopian category, many of which have had their own specific cultural moments outside of the last decade. Particularly there needs to be distinction between apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives.
More Solana:
“Ever more disturbing than the critique of technology in these stories is the casual assault on the nature of Man himself. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was people walking through a black and white hellscape eating each other for 287 pages and it won the Pulitzer. Oprah loved it. Where the ethos of punk is rooted in its subversion of the mainstream, famed cyberpunk William Gibson’s Neuromancer is no longer the flagbearer of gritty, edgy, counter-cultural fiction; ‘life will suck and then we’ll die’ is now a truism, and we have thousands of authors prophesying our doom with attitude, as if they’re all alone out there in tinfoil hats shouting at the top of their lungs what nobody else will. Yet they are legion. In the Twenty-first Century, the most punk rock thing that you can be is happy, or — and this is really crazy — “happy ever after.””
I’m unsure why exactly the ‘critique of technology’ should be disturbing, unless it’s scratching at your own unmovable, narrow-minded idea of what technology should look like. Similarly, why ‘casual assault’? The literary consideration of dystopian scenarios is anything but casual consideration of the human condition.
Solana points to the strong vein of dystopian thought in popular, film and literary culture and bizarrely acknowledges its influence (though incorrectly), perceives it as a threat, and yet at the same time dismisses it as a flimsy pop phenomenon, hence the Oprah put down.
There’s some serious underlying anxiety playing out here.
As a side note, “happily ever after” isn’t really punk rock. But fairytale revisionism – Frozen, Wicked, Maleficent – the idea of ‘dark Disney’ – is another prevalent trend in the film industry which may reflect a second look at the ‘innocent’ narratives our generation grew up with, and may be connected to the dystopian wariness of The Hunger Games.
More Solana – who moves onto a terrible scatter-gun deployment of film references:
“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind,” runs the wisdom of Clarke,”
‘Prepare people to accept’. These are the words of a dictator. Propaganda speak. Although I’m one for passionate exaggeration in the name of argument, this really suggests a quite alarming, almost brain-washed advocacy for the technology that corporate Silicon Valley companies want us to buy into wholesale.
“as quoted in The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, ironic in that central to Kubrick’s adaptation of 2001 is the story of a homicidal artificial intelligence let loose on a crew of archetypical American Hero astronauts. (But this is Hollywood. Historically, we haven’t expected much from our filmmakers by way of moral substance — which has actually allowed them to surprise us with some regularity. A world without Steven Spielberg, for example, is an undeniably darker place, and J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek has reinvigorated one of the most powerfully positive stories about the future that has ever been told.)”
Urgh this is exhausting and clunky. Why are you trying to connect Clarke with Kubrick while acknowledging they espouse different views which don’t really support your argument?
Are we also saying that E.T. and Star Trek can be read as advocating future technology? It’s a stretch. The opening sequence of Star Trek: Into Darkness concerns colonial-esque intervention into the affairs of a ‘primitive race’ which we could view as comment on US foreign policy. Discuss.
Solana does not have the time or inclination to do justice to the cultural impact or sophistication of these films beyond lazily name-checking them to bolster his worldview. There’s more…
“Yet from literature — despite the collapse of publishing, despite the 100-year-perennial argument that “people aren’t reading” — we continue to look for the height of our potential. To our science fiction novelists in particular, we ask, “What next?”
Um ok?
“Fiction is capable of charting our human potential — with science fiction the most natural and forward form of this — so anything less than a push toward good through the medium is not only overdone at this point, but an incredible opportunity squandered. Every fiction is an illusion, of course. The very real danger here is man’s tendency to look to his illusion for inspiration, which is the foundation on which we build society.”
More use of ‘natural’ – the lady doth protest too much, methinks – and the hyperbole at this point is ridiculous: ‘opportunity squandered’, ‘very real danger’. Solana wants science fiction to uncritically support and protect the advancement of technology-fueled capitalism without considering the human, social, political consequences.
In many ways I think this ‘fear’ is unfounded. To reiterate, my personal observation of contemporary dystopian representations is that they overwhelmingly serve entertainment purposes and lack any real political efficacy. We imagine radically re-structured worlds precipitated by apocalyptic events while unconscious of our imperceptible drift into conditions described in Orwell or Atwood’s worst imaginings: mass surveillance, militarised police, systematic oppression.
Solana gets pretty apocalyptic himself towards the end (if you’re still reading…):
“On this road toward Hell we’ve marched for decades now, as if to our doom by the Sirens’ song, there exists another story just beside us, more exciting and new.”
WTF dude. Are you really a trapped novelist? Do you secretly yearn to publish your own successful young adult trilogy?
“Our dystopian obsession has grown up in our nightmares as a true monster, which can only be countered by something truly beautiful. Simply, we need a hero.”
Only this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI0mSEzttx8
“Our fears are demons in our fiction placing our utopia at risk, but we must not run from them. We must stand up and defeat them.”
Seriously with the military metaphors *major side-eye*
“Artificial intelligence, longevity therapy, biotechnology, nuclear energy — it is in our power to create a brilliant world, but we must tell ourselves a story where our tools empower us to do it. To every young writer out there obsessed with genre, consider our slowly coalescing counterculture, and wonder what side of this you’re standing on.”
Hmm ‘coalescing counterculture’.
“Luddites have challenged progress at every crux point in human history. The only thing new is now they’re in vogue, and all our icons are iconoclasts. So it follows here that optimism is the new subversion. It’s daring to care. The time is fit for us to dream again.”
You get the picture. What starts as a potentially interesting observation on the role of dystopia in the discourse surrounding technology descends rapidly into a diatribe on why we all just REALLY need to buy a new iPhone now. And then some.
It’s slightly disconcerting that someone writing for a mainstream technology publication like Wired with a large readership could call for such a blatant ‘sci-fi as propaganda’ approach to culture’s reflection on future innovation.
The question of utopia vs. dystopia is actually an interesting one, but both modes engage critically with technology, highlighting possibilities both positive and negative. Progress does not exist in a vacuum, but in the complex tangle of social, political, commercial and cultural factors.
There is more at stake than ever, so our questions should be diverse, wide-ranging and unrelenting.
This year Apple released a video showing their employees’ participation in the San Francisco Pride parade.
While it is not new to see companies promote their commitment to LGBT* equality, the message at the end of this film is freshly provocative: inclusion inspires innovation.
Innovation, that highly-sought force valorised at the centre of technology-led capitalism is said to spring from the inclusion of traditionally marginalised people in their workforce. In other words, one of the most valuable companies in the world attributes the primary driver of profitability to the diversity of its employees.
It’s a bold statement, and given Apple’s global reach and influence, a potentially powerful expression of support for individuals who continue to face discrimination around the world.
Yes it’s utopian, whether this statement represents a genuine commitment to social and political change or simply empty branded rhetoric remains to be seen, but it’s worth interrogating how this particular piece of content reflects larger shifts in culture, technology and business.
To look specifically at LGBT* pride for moment, the film may also constitute a subtle expression of solidarity from CEO Tim Cook, given recent media speculation around his sexuality, though Pride is increasingly a broader platform for equality: the rainbow now covers a wider spectrum, which in turn reflects the mainstreaming of LGBT* culture.
In London, LGBT* rights organisation Stonewall have shifted their communications to broader anti-discrimination messages, launching #NoBystanders as a campaign in March. This is recognition that, at least in the UK, many of the battles for civic equality have been won, so to maintain ongoing relevance a change in positioning is required. The corporate sponsorship of Pride, like Barclays this year in London, also indicates a mainstreaming of events previously driven by radical politics.
Ben Cohen, long-standing LGBT ally. (you’re all welcome)
The defining aspect of Barclays’ campaign is the inclusive hashtag #FreedomTo, which can be read as an open pre-fix to everyone’s brand of equality, a shopping list of Western liberal values. No doubt this was the strategic rationale for sponsorship. Freedom here represents a specific neo-liberal ideal which places the individual and their right – to earn money, to own property, to buy fabulous clothes – in alignment with Barclays economic goals, rather than alternative political stances which emphasise collective liberty, in the context of the structures and systems which curtail this freedom.
Now pride has cultural capital which goes beyond ideas of the ‘pink pound’, there are legitimate concerns that real ongoing issues and the radical potential of queer politics are supressed and obscured by glossy commercialism. The ‘Conchita Effect’ (credit to Ben Henham for this) sees the subversive creativity and flamboyance of LGBT* performers lend itself readily to larger audiences in the name of entertainment.
Apple’s statement offers inclusion within a commercial, capitalist framework, but as a strategy for the furthering of equality does it compromise other forms of resistance?
sequins in their eyes?
It is also interesting to examine where Apple’s statement sits in relation to the current discourse of ‘innovation’ and its close cousin ‘disruption’.
The fetishisation of hacking and start-up culture, ‘move fast, break things’ to quote Zuckerberg, has proliferated well beyond the technology categories where it began, but the limited, exclusive nature of this philosophy is rarely articulated. Kate Losse in her Medium piece on privilege and Palo Alto culture observes:
“don’t ask for permission” is a starkly if unconsciously raced and classed […] motto for Silicon Valley
She concludes:
By teaching primarily young white men to unreflectively “break things” and reward them when they do, Stanford and other Silicon Valley institutions like YCombinator are incubators not for social change or “disruption” but for the assignment of privilege to the people who are most likely to already have it.
If to innovate is to challenge the existing way of doing things, then Apple’s statement, as an alternative to the privileged ‘break things’ approach, recognises those people whose very identities and experiences represent a challenge to the norm: they are ‘rule-breakers’ born, not taught.
San Francisco Gay Liberation Marches – the original pride
Historically women, LGBT* people, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities sit outside society’s dominant power structures, the ways of working and doing things which exclude and harm them. It makes total sense then that given the chance these people would tear up existing ideas in favour of new ones. When people’s ability to innovate is determined by their capacity to see beyond received knowledge, the ‘outsiders’ of Pride appear perfectly suited to this challenge.
This is the real-life component of an idea one my colleagues (actually my boss) articulated about appreciating ‘the lives of others’ through fiction. The literary catalyst for disruption also makes sense, since deconstructionism and much of critical theory since the 60’s concerns itself with recognising and picking apart the structures of discourse which govern fiction, and indeed the real world.
“Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.” Derrida, Margins of Philosophy
(P.S. I make no real claim to actually understanding Derrida)
Ideas Without Limits, the creative proposition of the company I work for, is an expression of deconstructionist intent, laying waste to conventional boundaries and received knowledge of our industry. Funnily enough it proves the maxim that thinking outside the box, however cliche, is really quite valid.
A healthy dose of surrealism also helps.
Supporting statements, Powered by People, Enabled through Technology, wrap up my point here in this post, we’re asking: who can think outside the box? Maybe it’s not a group of straight white men.
That’s not to say they can’t – we’re not implementing renewed policies of exclusion – but alternative perspectives are exceptionally valuable, wherever they originate.
It’s time we embraced #RainbowPower in all its refractions.
behold, postmodern chocolate.
Notes
1. In this post I’m dealing with Apple’s Pride statement as branded piece of communication to reflect upon shifts in culture and technology discourse. I’m well aware that a larger sense of inclusion and equality is probably incompatible with their current supply chain and the problems of third world labour. I’d welcome any comments from people with insight to lend on this.
2. I’ve used LGBT* throughout this post to be as inclusive as possible, and am also aware of the ongoing debate surrounding these terms and classifications. I again welcome any discussion on this point.
3. Why Derrida why?! I hear people asking… It’s not intellectual pretension (well maybe a little), but to highlight the similarities between academic writing on deconstructionism and postmodernism which typically unpick existing structures, with apparently novel takes on innovation and how to best innovate. The déjà vu occured when listening to start-up types, growth hackers, innovation gurus, generally prompts a sense of: “Honey we already dealt with this, welcome to the party, it’s about time”. And of course by ‘we’ I mean people vastly more intelligent than myself.
4. This post was updated on 22/06/14 (few days after original publication) to include a bit more on the politics and philosophy underpinning #FreedomTo. There is even more to unpick, discuss, and theory to introduce – if anyone is interested I can refer you to the expertise of people better informed.
Yesterday was St. George’s Day, oh and Shakespeare’s 450th birthday too, so Twitter was accordingly problematic:
But because patron saints are a UKIP-flavoured political flashpoint at the moment (*shudder*) most brands called off the content cannons.
Except those that didn’t. Google actually nailed it.
It’s much less fraught and arguably more fun to play on the mythical aspects of St George. The lack of national identifiers here, and a dragon channeling more “cosy cat” than Cumberbatch-ed force of terror, reflect Google’s shrewd yet minimal negotiation of cultural moments, as previously observed on StratChat. (smug retro-link face).
But some brands did attempt to ask – who’s celebrating?
(clue: no-one, OMG LITERALLY NO-ONE)
This, I think, is what’s known as a “stop trying to make [X] happen” moment, and although we were largely spared today, it feels as though “stop trying to make content happen” could usefully be applied to other parts of the calendar year.
By ‘seasonal content onslaught’ in the title of this post I don’t mean infrequent, but rather an ‘any date with nominal significance’ scenario, where the content budgets of every brand are relentlessly trained on our collective attention, driven by the relentlessly commodifying appetite of the content calendar.
Having endured Mother’s Day (long-time commercial stalwart), April Fool’s and St. George’s in the space of a month, these more prominent calendar dates should alert us to the forthcoming avalanche. Several commentators have pointed out the inevitable deluge of, ahem, crap which is soon to engulf us online, and April Fool’s was a key indicator of this over-crowding.
The canaries are screaming: holy moly save us from this excruciating mass of irrepressible beige.
At the start of the month a single day strained under the weight of branded misinformation – frankly exhausting as an addition to the usual noise we face from all directions – an opportunistic rush for attention in a spectacle not dissimilar to the real-time scramble which has overwhelmed a post-Oreo Superbowl.
clamouring for our attention (and our brains)
The unfortunate thing is though, that April Fool’s has wonderful potential as a carnivalesque space for marketing; which is otherwise so frequently risk-adverse and terminally earnest.
The chance to break a few rules and do something different (as though the internet weren’t sufficiently anarchic and kooky already) gives brands opportunity to be irreverent, interesting, even entertaining.
Everyone wants a piece of 1st April. Google do it as veteran fool-mongers with fun built into their doodles and fundamentally into their brand, so you can bet everyone else wants to join the party.
However, with the exception perhaps of Paddy Power, very few brands have the balls or the inclination to be adventurous with their humour and respond effectively (if controversially) to topical events.
Not every brand should attempt to be funny, kooky or interesting all the time, or even some of the time (I’m quite happy for my bank to be grey, serious and devastingly efficient thank you) but the larger call is for two things:
– Personality: with the body of evidence supporting the efficacy of humour and emotion in communications
– Unpredictability: avoiding the bloodbath where possible, providing ‘surprise and delight’ in way which belies the boringness of the phrase ‘surprise and delight’…
Although it’s fun to disparage content marketing in melodramatic terms, this is a culture-bound condition (adland only of course) where the reality of bland content is really more stark: no-one cares.
Even the term ‘content’ speaks to the malaise in this newfangled strategy as it gains wider traction; a word so hopelessly vague yet insidiously present it threatens to suck us into a blank hole of semantic obliteration.
1. an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.
2. an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations.
Now some context:
Things that are not new: drinking; students drinking to excess; peer pressure; students drinking in bizarre, ritualistic ways in order to terrorise middle England.
Things that are new (-ish): Facebook, YouTube, mass availability of mobile video, hashtags…
Yes. NekNomination is arguably the first big meme of 2014.
Inbetweeners: faithful touchstone for youth culture.
As I’ve attempted to make clear already, I’m fairly certain this doesn’t represent an exciting new cultural frontier or an embryonic hipster trend.
It’s a drinking game for the Facebook generation (as the Mirror have explained in their handy guide, scary ‘broken Britain’ connotations in tow) but also a drinking game for the mobile, short-form-video-enabled, Buzzfeed generation.
I’m not always a fan of posts which take cultural phenomena and extract social media ‘learnings’ (urgh), but having acknowledged this, will proceed in semi-ironic fashion regardless. I think this particular cultural artifact crystallises quite a few of the principles which swirl (often on a current of hype and alarmist click-bait) around discussions of user-generated content and participation for brands who aspire to be shared in the, ahem, content economy.
Cadbury implore us to #ShareTheJoy
NekNomination differs from previous video crazes (like the Harlem Shake) because it involves individual stunts and an explicit sharing mechanic – the nomination – which accelerates its transmission through personal networks. Rather than playing out publicly across YouTube, most of these videos travel within the relatively private spaces of Facebook.
Essentially a video dare, NekNomination gives people incredibly powerful motivations to take part:
– pressure to maintain a sense of belonging within the social group
– chance to showcase individual creativity and bravado within a flexible but reassuring template
– opportunity to honour the long-cherished teenage value of #YOLO
Like a chain-letter for the 21st century, or simply a migration of behaviour from pub to digital platform, tagging is the key action which allows this targeted one-to-few movement to take place, rather than the broadcast one-to-many approach of Twitter and YouTube.
The personal connections involved in nominating also introduce what’s fashionably abbreviated (mainly by me) as FOMO – fear of missing out. People want to be selected to join so they can show-off just how YOLO they and their friends really are…
YOLO in action
If you terminate the chain you fail to perform in the most basic sense. It’s boring, not fun, uncool. So rather than stop the process, some people have subverted the challenge to present their own more responsible acts of charity, though this is still participating, still a performance.
And such strong motivational factors are fueling a new level of performance.
Selfies may be de rigueur for this generation but, as video is gradually mainstreamed by Instagram and Vine, things have become more involved. It’s one thing to craft fabulously-filtered one-frame photographic windows onto your life, but another entirely to choreograph your own unique take on a drinking ritual, whilst talking directly to camera for more than a minute.
Anecdotally, I wouldn’t be surprised if NekNomination is many people’s first foray into video on social media. And I hesitate to call this a tipping point (especially as Martin Weigel out-moded the term last week with devastating efficiency), but it does tell us something about the state of play across digital, social and mobile.
In fact the dare is not to drink – that’s easy – but to record yourself acting irresponsibly before posting it to social networks, implicating others at the same time. Drinking is the archetype of irresponsible behaviour for British youth, so NekNomination is deliberately positioned against the teen-driven adoption of more ephemeral platforms like Snapchat. It beautifully illustrates negotiation of public and private spheres within digital self-representation, and somewhat straddles the two.
Circles on Google+ in this case offer a more nuanced structuring of social groups online (work, family, friends, hard-core-friends-I-drink-with) which lend themselves to phenomena like NekNomination. Facebook’s largely undifferentiated relationships appear at disadvantage here. Options for scaling connections were introduced much later and don’t seem to be widely understood, if people’s current bugbears with the network are anything to go by.
Facebook have declined to censor NekNomination videos, probably because this is exactly the kind of content sharing the network thrives upon. They are at pains to demonstrate ongoing relevance at 10 years old.
Where Neknomination has started to ‘spill out’ into YouTube we’ve seen more of the extreme, absurdist qualities typical of this open platform: gross-out dirty pints invoking the allure of disgust, literally vomit-based virality; and exhibitionism, which plays on the frisson of watching people violate the social protocols of public space.
For example, woman rides horse into Tesco, downs drink:
The more extreme behaviour here (and hence minority participation) is driven by less powerful motivations. Not everyone is an exhibitionist, but they might be in front of close friends, where most people occasionally enjoy being the centre of attention, especially if invited to take the stage.
The small minority of YouTube stars currently dominating technology editorials (obscenely photogenic and prodigiously media savvy in a way which is really quite terrifying) risk distracting us from the everyday online performances we don’t see (because we’re not meant to).
Jack and Finn of Jack’s Gap – like Bieber before he went bad (in twin form)
Here, however, is where the opportunity may lie for brands. NekNomination is driven by an extremely potent combination of specific social and digital factors which contribute to its virality; if this was branded content people would be laughing all the way to Cannes. And a few recent examples show that brands are beginning leverage these chains of connection, suggesting that our understanding of content (especially user-generated content) and how it moves through social networks is maturing.
Innocent (so ahead of the game they’re conversely passe in some certain marketing circles) have a new integrated campaign, Chain of Good, which includes curiously half-finished billboards (presumably to pique curiosity and drive people online via search) whilst providing online users with irreverent compliments to share with friends. It stems from an ethical proposition which seeks to highlight positive connections between people across their business, rather than the exploitative supply chains people consider the norm.
Share with friends: the eternal call to arms.
Krave also challenged high-profile teen YouTubers to complete cereal-centric challenges – way more exciting than downing a pint – before nominating fellow vloggers to take part.
Full disclosure: this work was by my fabulous colleages at Isobar.
And I’m conscious that I just highlighted the media fascination with YouTube stars, but this campaign managed to reach existing audiences in a more relevant way by giving these channel owners permission to adapt and interact with the Krave brand, whilst supporting the key content with competitions to encourage wider larger participation.
Maybe there are two strands of content marketing emerging: one which encapsulates big budget Miley-style attention grabbing, the moon-shot (alla Red Bull Stratos), and the perceived holy grail of mass audience; and another which moves more stealthily through personal networks, equally as potent, but requiring (I think) a more sophisticated understanding of the motivations which underpin networks, creativity and connection online.
Brands could do a whole lot worse that taking NekNomination as a model for user generated content and participation. He who dares wins?
(p.s. feel free to nominate someone to read this post)
Among the more curious things drifting through the filter bubble today was a story about a few people and their objections to Google’s gesture of Remembrance for Armistice Day.
MP Gerry Sutcliffe (me neither) and ‘some other people’ on Twitter complained that the small poppy at the foot of the Google homepage was inadequate:
“Around Remembrance Day it is demeaning not to have something that is spectacular.”
and this from someone else on Twitter:
“Compare Google’s pathetic poppy with the majestic display on bing.com. I suggest searching on Bing…”
A rare point scored for Bing then? Will they be pursuing a new full-bleed photo nationalist content strategy? Probs not.
This story bears more of a passing resemblance to Buzzfeed posts which go: “OMG one person on twitter said [unacceptable thing] about [other thing]”, which do little but prove the well-marked internet truth: there is a troll for every flavour faux pas.
Actually no-one has ever said that. But for some journalists even a single tweet means that it’s officially a story, especially for articles which eschew any sense of editorial responsibility in favour of ALL THE CLICKBAIT #PAGEVIEWS. see also Miley Cyrus.
It’s also indicative of some seriously warped priorities at Westminster, belonging to people who in theory represent the general public.
But it’s worth remembering (#lestweforget) that Twitter is not representative. If fact it’s skewed violently towards whatever the One Direction hive mind feel like retweeting during break time. It’s basically a hormonal cauldron of clickbait, hashtags and blurry genitals. see also @harrymycatdied
@Harry_Styles my uncle just died I wish you were beside me to give me breath
Perhaps I should get to my point: the cultural pre-eminence of internet properties like Google and Twitter has reached a level where people see them as public property, public bodies even; barometers of popular opinion; the only authorities on what’s worth seeing.
Twitter though, despite what appears to have been a successful IPO, is not democratic reflection of our collective views, as this Laura Bates article on the Top 140 UK tweeters makes all too clear, but it definitely aspires to such status (and many wish it well on its way there).
Google too, of course, have no particular obligation to engage in acts of cultural remembrance, although it might be in their interests to do so: it’s testament to their branding (or perhaps simply their monopolised position as gatekeepers to the Western digital world) that people feel able to project expectations of this sort.
If poppy-gate was a proverbial storm in a teacup, then more people will have felt frustration with platform tweaks alla Facebook, Twitter, Gmail – where reactions range from mild irritation to full ALLCAPS meltdown with complementary #firstworldproblems crying lady meme. The furore over Michael Kors’ first foray into Instagram’s paid adverts is a recent example of the ‘ownership’ people feel over their profiles and feeds.
We pour ourselves into these online spaces, only to remember every now and then that they’re beyond our control. It is totally ridiculous that an online company could be perceived as having a nominal ‘duty’ to play in civic ceremony, yet here we are.
Poppy-gate underscores anxieties relating to the ephemeral nature and instability of digital structures, their apparently limited capacity ability to stand as edificial monuments for important things. The unbearable lightness of the cloud somehow lacks gravitas next to the inscribed solidity of the Whitehall Cenotaph.
There is also, I think, a question of dignity and sobriety online: can we be earnest, respectful or serious in an ecosystem which thrives on selfies, porn and cat GIFS?
Selfies at Auschwitz. As an outlook for humanity this might be best described as ‘fucking bleak’. Cue moral disorder and breakdown of civilisation; the Daily Mail becoming a credible media channel. No wonder people suspect the digital era is incompatible with dignified remembrance.
And beyond collective remembrance, anxiety colours our digital personas as they fragment across multiple social networks: Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. YouTube. Instagram. Pinterest.
Facebook offer memorial pages, though the administrative hoop-jumping required for their activation make this a reality rarely achieved. Most profiles sit in unused quasi-suspension, and a lot of people actually like this.
Maybe a future of comprehensive offline/online connection will give rise to health-tracking wearables which automatically activate our chosen post-mortem ‘completion’ protocols. It could be done now. *clicks over to Kickstarter*
A recent xkcd blog points to the moment at which the Facebook dead will out-number the living. Sounds chillingly apocalyptic: millions of lives scrawled intangibly onto a myriad of forgotten walls. Or something like that.
We’ve drifted from collective acts of remembrance, but I think the point stands that despite the above harbingers of #TotalFuckingAnarchy, digital technology could lend an interesting spin to our mortal coils…
What about blippable gravestones? The technology now seems inappropriately new, currently the preserve of a few Silicon Valley fanboys drunk on Google Kool-Aid, but when digital is no longer ‘new’ (will the real digital natives please stand up) then perhaps augmented reality, in a deliciously macabre sense, might offer an amazing way to preserve rich repositories of personal memories…
What about This Is My Final Jam? Everyone’s thought about the songs that could played at their funeral right? – or at least I hope they have because I have… #YNOT
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