Free R&D as a cultural movement.
I recently wrote a post regarding Twitter’s use of independent developers as free R&D. The point was driven home even more strongly during Apple’s WWDC, where many features implemented in iOS 5 were nearly identical to applications or services that already existed - in effect, both cases the company shipped a powerful but unfinished product, and asked third parties, and the user community, to tell them how to fix it.
And then, once value had been mined from the collaboration, it ceased to be a collaboration.
I’ve realized this isn’t just a phenomenon for large companies. Specifically given my experience in social media, the research and thinking time is often offloaded onto the individual, outside of work. The key similarity here is that a space and potential market is found, but those in positions of power are unsure how to create value and profit from that space.
And as a result, you get an industry filled with people like me, for whom digital communications is as much hobby and/or lifestyle as it is profession.
This has me wondering though, is the endgame the same?
Will there be a point where the agencies, consultancies, and corporations feel they’ve learned enough about mining value from online comms and culture that there is no longer that collaboration to explore and define the space?
I’d like to say no. But at the same time, I recognize that there isn’t an answer that would change my behaviour. This is the problem I’m interested in solving right now. How the role of people like me will shift after the problem is solved, is something to tackle in the future.
Pics or it didn’t happen Culture.
If a tree falls in the forest, and it isn’t captured, can we be sure it happened?
‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ started as an IRC in-joke, but it’s quickly becoming a cultural norm; it is so difficult for something be completely unobserved, we’re starting to demand visual ‘proof’ of any claim.
If you meet a celebrity, you take a picture. If you see an police officer abusing authority, you videotape it. Experiences are recorded to ensure we know they exist.
The interesting thing, is that I think this is good.
The most common example is people watching a concert through the screen of their cellphone, recording video and taking photos of the performance.
This matters, because it’s ranking the social element of an experience, sharing and using it as a means of developing relationships with others, rather than looking at the experience of solitary. Until we can actually distribute recordings of our sentences, we need to pick: Do I rank my experience over the ability to share it with others, or do I rank the relationship value of an experience over the personal value of that same experience?
As more and more people are using publishing as a form of communication, they are inherently taking the second option. They are quite literally putting others ahead of themselves, when it comes to their cultural experiences. Experiences are considered to be for sharing first, and for consuming second (although maybe not on a conscious level).
I thought of this while I was taking pictures of my niece on Christmas morning, because I knew that my sister (who couldn’t be there) would appreciate being able to see them. The cultural and relationship value of the experience was greater than the amount of immediacy sacrificed by putting a lens between myself and the action.
I’m pretty sure this will only become more true over time.
Three things lacking in current social media tools.
Recognition that content and identity shift based on the audience it’s targeted at. I’m different variations of myself with family, with friends, and with close friends. Usually the separation available is an ‘allowed to see’ or ‘not allowed to see’ binary.
A compelling mobile experience, AND a compelling desktop experience. Twitter is clearly (and intentionally) a better experience for me on a mobile device. Facebook is a desktop tool, with a reasonably functional mobile version. These experiences don’t need to be identical, but I’m looking for a solution that makes a platform compelling in both arenas.
Function as a collaborative tool. Nearly all social media tools I’ve seen have been under the umbrella of conversational publishing, or recording social behavior for distribution and posterity. Social structures help us build things together, too. I haven’t seen meaningful innovation on that front since wikipedia.
People have started saying “Like” in response to things.
Which is a better indication of the impact Facebook has on culture than the big, round, 500 Million user mark.
a few thoughts on culture
There’s a tendency to treat culture as an independent element of companies, which infuriates me. Culture is treated like something of a holy grail, a way to increase productivity, drive, and cohesion. Culture is a mixture of spirit, but also of processes and frameworks.
Dictating culture from the top down is like dictating an attitude - anything legislated will end up feeling fake or forced. Culture isn’t a checklist.
Culture also can’t be at odds with process. Process and structure are the purest expressions of culture, because they influence everything that happens in a company. You can’t advocate a culture of creativity and individual agency when every decision is top down. You can’t foster a culture of open and fun collaboration, while demanding that employees keep non-essential interaction to a minimum.
Your process and structure is a skeletal system. By the time you get to culture, you’re looking at developing a circulatory system, musculature, nervous system, and higher order thinking: if you don’t design core structure around a desired culture, you won’t be able to integrate ideals and actions.
Put more simply: when you want to make a major, positive life change, the first step isn’t to go shopping or tell everyone you know that you’re changing.
You need an honest examination of your underlying motivations, principles, and how you make choices. You need to identify the issues that are keeping you from being who you want to be. Then you go to the core causes of whatever the problem is, and start trying to change at that level.
Process is culture. Structure is culture. This is why watching culture driven companies get acquired always makes me uncomfortable - as the new parent company tries to create some synergy between the structures and processes of two disparate companies, there’s bound to be a backlash at a cultural level.
The hard part of an organ transplant isn’t getting the connections and vessels lined up; the difficulty is in fighting the natural urge to violently reject anything that wasn’t part of the system as it developed.
Mark(Twain)eting
Theory: Mark Twain’s insistence that his autobiography not be published until a century after his death is marketing.
It is arguably the kind of marketing that wins awards.
In that it is creative, original, risky, and executed with a complete disregard for generating a result when it counts.
[Of course, in the situation the idea has been applied, it works perfectly - Twain didn’t need your money, and was well known for wanting to provide for future generations of his family. Most of your clients aren’t Mark Twain.]
A Consumerist Manifesto; or Why I Love What I Do.
Why wouldn’t we define ourselves by our possessions? They are a reflection of our tastes, our personalities, our vanities, our obsessions and desires. They are earned through our labour, shared with our aquaintances, shaped and scarred and stained by our experiences.
I won’t apologize for conscious, careful consumerism, they way I would for wasteful, destructive consumption. Surrounding myself with things that speak to me, that speak for me, is only logical - truth is expressed in subtext, explanations are what we need to spell out word for word, after we’ve already been misunderstood.
It’s the ultimate vanity, the chief arrogance of the artist, that you can only express yourself by that which you create with your own talents, your own two hands. The belief that expression is somehow limited to those with the skills, the talents, the words and images and passion that they can somehow force into life.
We all craft a life out of experience and object. Whether the art of your life is the conversations you have, or the actions you take, you create as surely as the painter, the dancer or the writer.
I don’t have a story for you. I don’t have art in any standard sense. But this is my art - the idea, the shift, the hope that my words can shape actions.
Don’t lecture me about the destructive nature of buying, or wanting and desiring and associating ourselves with the things that speak to and at time for us.
We attach meaning to things, so people can use things to attach meanings to themselves, so that people can tell their story in a passive meaningful way. In the real world, not behind the guise of fiction, behind the protective mask of art that saves us from needing to dissect, address and consider ourselves, the ugliness we can bring.
My things tell a story as surely as my words. And I don’t just write it, I live it, as do you. As do we all.
Faking Omnipotence, and the facade bargain.
It’s easier than ever to come across as though you are always watching, but not without being willing to spend a substantial chunk of your time watching regardless.
With a fairly simple mixture of push notifications, email alerts / notifications, a smart phone, and a pathological need to be connected, I’ve found I can usually respond to anything that doesn’t require further research or concentrated work, within 2-5 minutes. In social situations, the time frame is literally how long it takes for the notification to arrive, and how quickly I can type a response on my iPhone’s screen.
But faking omnipotence requires one commimtment that I’m entirely unwilling to make: I’d need to prioritize the information over the experiences it interrupts. While I might not interrupt a meeting to check my Boxcar notifications due to professional courtesy and a need to focus on the issue at hand, I’m trying to be better about not interrupting a conversation, or meal, or movie (I know, I know) to check my phone.
[If I check my phone constantly around you, either something important or stressful is happening in my ‘connected life’, or I consider you to be the kind of person who also enjoys constant connectivity, and will understand that me checking my phone doesn’t mean I’ve stopped listening.]
This is going to be the defining choice of this decade. It will be possible to fake an identity, fake 24/7 attention, fake omnipotence, and fake any number of other things. But to do so, you will need to subjugate everything else in your life to the facade, or it will fail publicly and painfully.
I’ve been saying for the last several years that there is no such thing as a secret online. My new stance is that creating a sustainably believable falsehood is just as much work as living your genuine life, and you’re going to have to pick one.
Which is why I’ve ignored the last three Boxcar notifications on my phone, to finish writing this.
[Note: This was also published at Maisonneuve’s website, a fact which delights me to no end.]
There is no line.
I’m officially uncomfortable with anyone who thinks there’s some line in the sand between the internet and real life. We’re not quite at the augmented reality stage where the internet behaves like an information layer on top of the universe, but we’re definitely far past the point where we can pretend that the internet isn’t a prosthetic for informational and social needs.
You should be able to hear anything you type online in your own voice. If you can’t, if the words seem foreign, you’re either shaming yourself, or faking it poorly.
This is real life. Real life no longer has to be in person. Live it that way.
Iteration and Evolution vs Stagnation and Revolution.
Everything is better if it’s iterative. Iterations inherently indicate that a concept or campaign is open to evolution, rather than revolutionary change.
Revolution always sounds great, but it only makes sense if you find yourself in a situation where what you’re doing is broken beyond repair. Revolution is sexy, and marketable. It also only makes sense if you are being held to an old model, or if you’ve been screwing up for long enough that you can’t undo it.
If you’re in charge, and revolution is necessary, you’ve done something wrong. Likely, not having iteration and evolution as a part of your culture.
(N.B.: I’d argue proper evolution necessitates the ‘measure constantly and alter strategy as needed’ model of decision making.)
