attention industry

Things I’ve learned as an Android user.

You can talk about freedom, or openness all you want, but it doesn’t really matter.

Innovation for the user isn’t happening on Android devices.

Moving from iOS to Android was an experiment to teach me something about other interfaces, to make me more well rounded as a strategist, and to challenge some of my assumptions about the ‘right’ or in some cases ‘only’ way of doing things.

All of that has happened.

But the primary feeling of owning an Android device is the feeling of being 6 months behind.

I bought a top of the line Galaxy SII in August. I’ve been using it as my primary phone since then, so for about 5 months total. In that time frame, I’ve waited for updates (none of which have ever come), waited for new and old apps to be ported to the platform (I’m still living sans-Instagram and Pinterest), and putting up with features of great apps that don’t work (I can’t record video on Path, or edit posts on Tumblr).

This isn’t really a complaint about Android. It’s a complaint about systems that are fragmented, both by OS and by hardware. And it’s a hint of ‘broken window’ theory, as well - if Google doesn’t care about this platform working well, why should developers.

I can completely understand the appeal of control, that Android devices promise. I was thrilled by it, for the first month or so I owned the phone. But that thrill of control fades, when you realize it can just as accurately be called management or maintenance, and it’s far from optional.

Assuming standard use, with minimal ‘management’ or ‘maintenance’, my experience on Android has been one of terrible battery life, intermittent crashing, software conflicts, and frustrating hardware issues (such as the infuriatingly loud buzzing noise the phone makes when vibrating, akin to a subwoofer rattling in a trunk). 

At this point, people will point out that 1) I’m not running Ice Cream Sandwich, 2) I should get a Nexus branded phone, rather than something running Samsung’s TouchWiz UI, and 3) I should root the phone, and just run Cyanogen, or something similar.

1) I can’t run ICS, Samsung hasn’t updated the phone.
2) That’s not an argument, it’s a suggestion that Android is a failed experiment, and that ‘open’ means failure unless you leave it unedited.
3) I don’t WANT to root my phone. I shouldn’t have to. If I need to make an unstable phone LESS STABLE to make it usable, it is a poorly designed and manufactured phone.

I’m not writing this as an Apple fanboy. I’m not writing this as someone who has no idea what he’s talking about, and hasn’t devoted time to trying to understand this platform.

I’m a reasonably experienced user, of a recent flagship device, of the most successful manufacturer of Android smartphones.

And I’m telling you, it’s not good enough.

There’s a reason a single manufacturer, with a line that has never exceeded the 3 phones it currently sells, makes the majority of profits in the smartphone industry (as of Q3 2011 numbers). \

It’s because, at core, they don’t really have any competition.

Protest, Fixed.

I spend a significant amount of my time in university feeling like protest, as a concept, was severely broken. To the point where I blogged about it a few times, completed a project under the name ‘ground war’ for a communication theory seminar, and basically attended a few protests in Nathan Phillip’s square just to get a bigger feel for what the issues were, for why protest didn’t seem to work.

Shortly after I started getting more personally and academically involved in the social web, I started wondering if there was any way that could help with protest. Poking around, seeing communities, discussions, flashmobs, etc. I came to the conclusion that no, it couldn’t. The gap between badging oneself as an activist online, and actually doing something about it, fell apart.

This year, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was wrong.

I’m not talking about the Arab Spring. While that was definitively a massive success of protest, I don’t see it as a massive success of digital protest. What got change to happen, frankly, was things getting bad enough that people were willing to risk everything to fight for change. While the internet was massively beneficial for organization, and sharing information, the actual fight happened in the streets, and it was quite literally a revolution, in most cases.

It wasn’t a facebook revolution, or a twitter revolution. These tools facilitated the flow of information, and were integral to changing worldwide opinion, and connecting individuals. But it was the people putting life, limb and livelihood on the line, in person, who made a difference.

No, I’m talking about the anti SOPA / PIPA protests that occurred recently online, and what made them different, in my mind.

Tumblr, Wikipedia and Reddit were standouts, but more than 75,000 sites did something that made a bigger difference than any online protest I had seen previously.

They generated personal, self-interested outrage, and then directed it meaningfully.

Step one was simple. Rather than saying ‘this ill-defined, unclear bad thing will happen to the future, they just DID it. They either blacked out, or pretended to black out, the content users were expecting, and SHOWED them, in no uncertain terms, what the worst case scenario of letting this bill pass was.

Crucially, they weren’t fair or balanced about it. That’s not how you drive people to action. The same ‘boston strangler’ language the content industries have been using for almost half a century is what gets a gut response. That’s how you drive action. You make it real, make it personal, and make it clear.

Wikipedia being dead? That is hard to ignore.

Step two was even better, and I think it was best handled by Tumblr. Rather than saying ‘This bad thing will happen if you don’t stop it’, they automated the next step – protest as flowchart.

Providing clear names, phone numbers, auto-populated email messages, and suggested scripts, the companies that drove this protest simplified politics, actually making sure the individual people who could have an impact understood the issue well enough to be heard.

This is something that is patently not a part of mainstream political action. It’s not about understanding complex issues of law and politics as a badge of your greatness. It’s about getting shit done, and the way to do that is to inform people.

By the end, the numbers I’ve seen suggest that almost 88,000 calls to congress were generated by the Tumblr community. Other protests generated nearly 3 million emails.

Outrage was generated, and then translated into a language government understands – personal appeals from angry, concerned, or scared constituents.

And, crucially, things didn’t need to get so bad that there were riots in the streets. This was a functional, organized, peaceful protest, and it was more powerful than one of the biggest lobbying engines in the world. This time.

So I can’t help but imagine what the semi-unified internet community could do, if it wanted to. This amount of action and outrage, spread globally, could make a sizeable dent in patent reform, or international aid, or pretty much anything.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix protest, but it seems to have been figured out. Maybe we should spend some time thinking about how to apply it.

Stop doing the same presentation.

Social media has built a cottage industry of self promoting pseudo experts. We all hate them. We all hate them to the point where, each one of you is thinking of a specific person who you think I’m talking about. That person? They hate social media douchebag guru ninjas, too.

So, it’s a problem, yes?

I’ve found a simple identifier: if you can hear someone giving the same presentation, the same advice, and the same examples, more than 6 months apart, they are likely terrible at what they do.

They need to stop giving the same presentation.

They are teaching you social media 101, using last year’s assistant profs notes, and a photocopied version of an out of date textbook.

This is a changing space. Rapidly changing. Massively changing.

And while I would never suggest everything new is relevant, even if google shoehorns it into search results at a baffling level, it is usually worth understanding.

Someone who is still stopping at “listen before you talk”, or “it’s about brand love” is still talking about 3 or 4 years ago. When this was still new enough that there wasn’t data. When this was still new enough that you had to convince clients it was important, rather than convincing them that they need more of a strategy than “we need to be on social media”.

The dummies books have been written. Repeatedly. You don’t have to keep preaching the gospel of “I understood twitter in 2008”.

Instead, a few polite suggestions:

Get some f**king data, to back up your assertions.

Stop pretending it’s simple. It’s only simple if you aren’t optimizing it. Expertise isn’t about stopping at simple.

Things are (always) different. Examples more than 6 months old are likely no longer representative of the current platform and community dynamics.

“Entry level” changes. If you’re giving the same ‘how to get started in social’ advice today, that you were giving even a year ago, you’re a fraud. Pick a new scam, please.

You can’t be a revolutionary after the war is won. You’ve either decided to become a productive member of post war society, or you’ve ended up unable to let go of the fight.

So either grow up with the rest of us, or pick a new fight.

Just because it’s online, doesn’t make it tech.

Us internet folk have a small problem. We keep forgetting that technology doesn’t always matter. In many cases, it’s an executional side-effect of what a company or person actually does.

You wouldn’t say Fed-Ex is a Car company, or a Plane company. But you could find an army of people who would tell you Amazon is a tech business. And I’ve never really understood that, except as a barrier to keep people from thinking they can understand, or contribute to something.

This came to my attention when I was discussing Wikipedia on twitter, with Spencer Saunders. We were talking about open source projects, and Wikipedia came up… But I think you can argue that Wikipedia is far more of a crowdsourcing success, than a technological one. The fact that a wiki is the backbone is less important than the fact that volunteer collaborators filled it with content.

Similarly, the fact that Amazon has a massive technological back end laser focused to optimize experience, is less important than the fact that they’re a massive retailer with the best catalogue ever.

It’s easy to see the overlap, but I think it’s important. We can’t keep pretending that everything online needs to be tech first, and something else second. There are ALWAYS going to be interesting technical problems and challenges to solve in the online space.

But this technology, for the most part, is soon going to be invisible, the same way a telephone is, or a cash register is, or a car is. Things on the web are already becoming black boxes that just DO what they are supposed to DO.

And I get that this scares people. I get that some deeply brilliant people, like Cory Doctorow, for example, will feel like a closed, Apple style product future for the web is terrible. I see his point. But what he’s forgetting is that EVERY CONSUMER PRODUCT IN HISTORY has undergone this transition.

You used to make your own clothes at home. Now you buy them in a store, and probably can’t fix them if they break. You used to build your own home. Now contractors do it, and allow you to have more complexity and range than you otherwise could have. 

You used to need to know how to maintain a car, to drive a car. Now you need a mechanic.

This isn’t downgrading or denigrating any of the skills mentioned. But it is making a very clear point - that expertise narrows over time for a reason. The average person can only master so many complex skills. And insisting everyone needs to know how to code to understand the online world is akin to insisting that someone needs to know how to repair an internal combustion engine to be able to commute.

I’m a digital person. I wouldn’t call myself a technical person, because frankly, I think we’re already starting to set the bar too low for that.

But I think it’s very important that we stop creating the impression that everything new, vibrant, and important online is really just for the internet people.

We need to worry more about making the technology invisible, for more than just the very lowest experience level of user.

The Problem with Dreams.

I’ve heard, and seen, many people justify a series of less than brilliant decisions with the argument that they’re ‘following their dreams’.

First: Grow the hell up.

Second: Chasing a dream isn’t the same as having a plan, or doing what you love. Chasing a dream is completely detaching your objectives from reality, and buying into the myth of north america; the idea that hard work, and dedication, can make anything happen.

It’s a beautiful myth. A necessary one, too. But it’s a myth all the same. Because hard work and dedication are important, but more often than not, it’s the stuff that you can’t really teach or learn, like talent, style, intellect or intuition, that take someone to the highest levels of something.

The important thing to note here, is that everyone needs to work hard and be dedicated to succeed. But the people who aren’t naturally good at something start at a terrible, and often insurmountable disadvantage, when it comes to getting to the top.

Here’s how someone’s career is likely to go, if they follow their ability and passion, rather than a specific dream:

They finish school, and look for a job where they can learn something, and get closer to getting paid to do what they love to do. That job helps them realize two things: that getting paid to do something you love is totally awesome, and that it’s even more fun when you’re good at it. So they begin to specialize, to chase the intersection of what they are interested in, and what they are good at.

If they continue chasing this intersection, they’ll likely ending up working in a bunch of different roles in the same industry, learning a ton, and most importantly, moving in the direction of not just getting better, but also picking what they are better at - as you progress in a field you are passionate about, you can learn what direction suits your natural talents and interests, and challenge yourself to grow in that direction.

[In my personal example, my interest in communication theory and copyright in online spaces took me from PR to design / production work, to internal client-side digital marketing, to digital and social strategy.]

Dreams don’t work like that.

If you have a dream to be a rock star, you work toward that one specific goal. You save up and get a guitar, you learn to play, you start a band, and you do other things to support yourself while you try to make it work. You continue working hard, being dedicated, and chasing your dream.

But you don’t really divert, from a dream. I find it’s rare that people who dedicate their lives to chasing a dream really shift their expectations. You don’t dedicate your life to an end goal, and work toward that end goal for years, only to end up somewhere else and consider it a success.

It comes down to whether you consider your career, and your life, to be about a destination, or a journey.

Journey people admit they don’t know where to end up. Ideally, they chase passion and talent, and see where the best next step there is for them to take will lead them.

Destination people focus more on what and who they WANT to be, than what or who they would be GREAT at being.

Dreams can be motivational, inspirational, and solve a hell of a lot of problems. But they aren’t anything near a plan, or even an optimization of circumstance.

Data Invisibility, Cost vs Benefit

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a good friend about someone we had both gone to school with, about a decade ago. They had just kind of dropped off the radar, and neither of us had heard anything. We didn’t think too much of it, but it became a sporadic topic of conversation, almost a game: why can’t we find any trace of this person online, anywhere?

Over the years I checked social networks, googled a few dozen things a few dozen times, scrolled through photos and status updates of people who I knew used to be close to them, and still never really heard anything.

Understand, this wasn’t a serious investigation. I just found it odd that someone had remained so offline, and when their name arose again in conversation, I’d spend ten or twenty minutes seeing if I could track them down, this time. It was weird to lose track of a person to completely, in this day and age.

We used to throw theories back and forth; was this person dead? Moved to a country with less infrastructure? Changed their name, entered witness protection, joined an Amish community?

I found out not that long ago that essentially, to drop off the grid, it takes removal from mainstream society - the person in question had spent a period of time homeless. I only found this out when they appeared on (obviously) facebook, in conversation with someone else.

The reason I’m bringing all of this up, is that this is the reality of ‘total privacy’. Our online and offline societies are becoming so intertwined that you would need to withdraw from one, to withdraw from the other. The assumption that not using social media, or not owning a computer or smartphone, would keep you offline, is absurd. No one would argue that by not owning a camera, you can avoid having your picture taken. No one would suggest that you could avoid being written about by not keeping a diary.

The options for someone with severe fears about privacy, in a networked, social media driven society, are not exactly pleasant: you can participate actively despite your fears, you can passively be made a participant by those around you, or you can exile yourself from participation in mainstream society. 

In a world where you need to accept that you can’t be invisible, the next best thing is camouflage. 

And that’s why identity online is interesting as social media behaviours develop in the mainstream. You likely won’t be able to avoid having your legal name be searchable in a way that is connected to you. But you can establish a persona that you are comfortable with others seeing, a selective layer of your life that you’ve made peace with sharing with others, with the world.

Despite current, justifiable, fears related to privacy, the price of being invisible is too high. Instead, you need to focus on how you’re seen, and by whom.

Creation vs. Curation / Remix vs. Reblog

This is an old topic, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about recently, especially in reference to a recent quote from Drake in an interview with Billboard:

“I’m really scared for my generation, you know. The thing that scares me most is Tumblr. I hate what Tumblr has become. […] Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments. It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those things.”

This isn’t to say I agree with the argument at all, but I do find it interesting, suggesting that curation is both 1) inherently an attempt to express actual identify rather than affinity, and 2) that curation isn’t a creative skill. I feel like these positions are incompatible, when you dig into them.

Curation is becoming essential, especially for brands operating online - not just on Tumblr, but on Facebook pages, twitter feeds, etc. Finding enough stuff to talk about, or the Blank Box Problem, as the brains behind Percolate have dubbed it, is a lot of hard work, albeit a completely different type of hard work than creating something yourself.

I personally consider curation a low-order creative skill, because it does require some talent to do well (an eye or POV that is distinctive and developed), as well as dedication. But it’s not (to lapse into copyright lingo) transformative - and there’s a reason gallery curators are not generally considered artists in their own right. But this leads us to a solid point - curation is at core a developed form of appreciation, not one of creation. Building a collection isn’t about expressing what your life is, but instead about expressing your taste.

And doing so online means that it can be an order of magnitude removed from what you live, or could possible achieve.

Creation is an utterly different thing. When you create, you express some aspect of yourself, whether it be talent or intellect or perception. And the biggest issue that curation faces, as what is now the leading participatory activity online by my estimate, is that comparison with creation, with the generation of original work.

Because people are adding commentary, because they’re hitting a publish button, it’s easy to, without thinking, lump these two actions into each other. We use the same function on tumblr or facebook or twitter to share a meme we found amusing, as we do to share a carefully composed photograph we’ve taken with a new DSLR.

What we can’t continue to do, is pretend these are similar activities. Sharing is a class of action, but there are significant differences between the subcategories - debate and wordless screaming are both technically elements of vocalization, but we don’t insist that one has to be interpreted by the lens of the other.

Creative sharing involves originality, development of the content, and distribution. Curative sharing involves discovery, distribution, and possibly commentary. These are not comparable activities, and yet online we seem to insist they are.

If we don’t begin to draw the line between remix and reblog, in other words, we’re going to continue in the flawed assumption that we can learn the same things about a person, a brand, or a collective by looking at what they create, and what they curate.