As we rush ever faster towards the latest thing we risk being overwhelmed – by data, life, connections – the to do list that sits threateningly at the edge of our consciousness. In an age where the act of doing – of performance – supersedes the act of being, we can sometimes look over our shoulders and realise that while only twelve months has passed, it seems like a lifetime. The pace of change is certainly accelerating.
How do we cope?
Despite our often pathological resistance to change, human beings are supremely well adapted. We can quickly and consciously change our behaviours, our environments and our ways of thinking. We can assimilate technology, create innovation and do so single mindedly.
Google Instant taps into these evolutionary traits, giving us instant matches to our search terms. Now we don’t even have to wait to press the I’m Feeling Lucky button.
And while I like the cleverness of this technology, I am more impressed with the video clip that Google are using to launch it. It’s a nice piece of high-tech high touch that John Naisbitt would be proud of.
What happens when the cultural references of one generation echo into nothingness? What happens when a younger generation misinterprets an off-handed quip? Or tweet?
It’s not simply a few words that disappear into the ether. There are legions of stories, anecdotes and shared experiences that are erased.
So when I say, “I’m a little bit country”, what does it mean to you?
Regular readers will know that I love the idea of play. In fact, I love it so much I built a mnemonic around it – the P-L-A-Y framework for storytelling. But “play” goes so much further for me – it goes to the very heart of our existence. It manifests as what theorists would call a “libidinal drive” – something that compels us to do something – an action that creates an exchange.
But to “be” playful means inhabiting “playfulness”. It also means letting playfulness inhabit you. In many ways, this is what we call “personality” – those traits that show through while you are being yourself – being playful. Being serious.
Russell Davies has a great post on being playful – which actually leads in a different direction from what I was expecting (surprise #1). Rather than investigating playfulness, he looks, instead at “pretending” – and how our various consumer purchases open the door to our imaginary life.
Think, for example, of the link between an iPhone and a Star Trek communicator (so thoughtfully captured in this image!). You can’t tell me that iPhone and other gadget users don’t get a secret buzz out of living out their childhood fantasies. Brands that win are able to facilitate a sense of transference – allowing us to put ourselves into an imaginary space and project an alternative vision of ourselves. After all, I may ride a Ducati (or used to), but I’m never going to be a MotoGP world champion. As Russell points out:
But it's not just a matter of dressing up. A successful pretending object has to delicately balance pretending affordance with not making you look like an idiot. That's why so many successful pretending objects are also highly functional.
If the “pretending object” goes too far – it does indeed make us look idiotic. We become poseurs – mere representations of something more serious. But of the pretending object doesn’t go far enough – then it is trashed, considered lame, and discarded or ignored by its intended audience.
And this is the art in design and the fine line in communications. How do we allow people into the process of creating meaning without restricting their creativity unduly? I think the approach is to turn our “consumers” into Flaneurs. It’s about the experience – but on another person’s terms – not ours. It’s the placing of a product/service/offering in the service of another’s contextual experience. It means that the Flaneur’s experience is paramount – and the “thing-that-is-your-brand” will be recombined, re-absorbed and recontextualised according to its use-life.
The most pervasive aspect of living in an online, socially connected world is not identity –- but the traces of our identity that we leave with every click of the mouse. For every time we visit a website, download a PDF, leave a comment, buy a song or write a blog post, we leave something of ourselves behind.
In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida described a trace as the “mark of the absence of a presence” – which is precisely what happens to our digital “selves”. We are socially connected, operate in a sense-and-respond mode, exercise social judgement and all the while, leave our presence in places where “we” no longer exist. For all intents and purposes, the social web is Deconstruction made manifest.
I touched on this idea in The Evanescence of Social Media, but it also permeates much of my thinking here around social media, branding and identity. For whether we realise it or not, we increasingly live our lives in public –- over-exposed, unwittingly open, unknowingly tagged, tracked and accounted for -– our fragmented digital identities playing out a larger, uncontrolled version of our selves in a digital Pythagorean twist. You see, in the same way that social media demonstrates that businesses no longer have control over their BRANDS – it also shows that WE no longer have control over our own representations.
One of the uncomfortable truths that social media is hoisting upon us is that the clear separation between our personal and professional lives that most of our parents enjoyed during their careers is now nothing more than an illusion
The problem is not so much that WE inhabit these online networks, but that our traces can be interpreted out of context -– taking on newer realities, being reconstituted and recombined in ways that we did not anticipate. But this also has benefits, even if the risks may be random and powerful. For one thing, it allows for ambient intimacy (a term coined by Leisa Reichelt) – where the reader of a blog post, a Twitter message, Facebook update (or viewer of a Flickr photo or YouTube video) etc interprets this communication as a real-time, in the moment emotional connection. This fosters a sense of knowing and understanding in the reader -– creating the bonds of relationship:
Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.
And while this can be seen as “too much information”, for others it can provide a real window into the lives of those that we care about. The big difference of course, is that this ambient relationship is completely opt-in –- it is information that is pulled, not pushed. If we choose to, we can “unsubscribe” from our friends’ updates with the click of a mouse.
So, does this mean that online friends aren’t really friends? This has been (at least) partly blurred by Facebook’s appropriation of the term Friend as a form of membership status – but in an effort to bring some consistency of thinking around this, Mike Arauz has developed the spectrum of online friendship. This spectrum feels quite linear but it does capture the essence of the progressive nature of online interactions and relationships.
However, the traces of our identities left behind by various cultural productions (whether writing, image or video based) add a level of complexity. What this means is that you may find someone moving from passive interest to active interest by reading and interacting with content that you produced two or three years ago. “You” may no longer BE the same person that you were in 2006 -– and yet, the immediacy of your cultural artefacts continue to tell the story of “your self” as though it was hermetically sealed and protected from the ravages of time.
The consequence of this could well be the impetus to constantly pro-create ourselves in the instant by updating our status, sharing our thoughts and ideas and advocating for our communities. So paradoxically, tools such as Twitter which were developed as a way of handling the speed of life, contribute to the sense of acceleration. It may well be that we are barrelling head-long into a future where the very nature (and rules) of friendship requires revision. We may well end up in a world that looks
It may well be that this life of delays, rewrites and echoes is closer to the dystopia shown in Josh Harris’ movie, We Live in Public. As Faris Yakob points out, while disconcerting, this vision of the future has become reality – at least for some parts of ourselves.
UPDATE: In an almost textbook illustration, John Johnston points out this post by Nicholas Carr from March 2007. I would have commented on it, but his blog no longer takes comments.
It seems that Twitter is the word on everyone’s lips at the moment. Perhaps, as it mainstreams, it will surf over the barriers that continue to hold sites like Facebook and LinkedIn back from true, widespread, public appeal.
One of the driving forces behind this is the ease with which celebrities can use and connect with their audiences. For while many celebrities use Facebook, they do so furtively and largely away from the prying eyes of the general public. The benefits of connection that we all find in managing our social graphs via Facebook is certainly well-known by celebrities – even if the occasional Paris Hilton privacy leak causes some ripples of concern.
Twitter, however, allows celebrities to simply and effectively extend their personal networks and reach much further – with little downside. They are, after all, already used to acting, behaving and interacting with people on a large scale. Twitter paradoxically, allows them more control than other kinds of media.
By using Twitter, celebrities can ACTUALLY communicate directly with their fans and friends – there are no agents, journalists or PR people involved. For once, a celebrity is able to communicate with their communities in an unmediated and unregulated manner. Stephen Fry is doing this successfully as is MC Hammer. Britney Spears has her own social media team, but also drops into the twitterstream from time to time. John Cleese provides excellent entertainment and diversion and Lance Armstrong is a must-follow for the cyclistas. The Guardian also shares a list of US politicians as well as porn stars who use Twitter.
This fascinates me. Many brands who begin to experiment with social media work from the concept of control outwards – gradually, through participation and experience, finding a comfortable method of managing conversations. Celebrities, however, start from the other end of the spectrum – un-managed conversations, direct discussions with fans and unmediated content.
Interestingly, I have a feeling that the adoption of Twitter by celebrities will actually drive the sort of widespread adoption that will break the mainstream barrier. I love that they “get it” immediately … after all, celebrities, like no other, understand the strange power of connecting with crowds.
But on that note … what is it REALLY like for a celebrity with thousands of followers? Recently, Ian Tait took the following video showing the twitterstream exploding with comment when Google’s Gmail service failed. It really is a torrent.
Some months ago, when I began talking to Isadore Biffin about her plans, I was shocked. Here was an eighteen year old girl working on a major project for her final year of high school, and she had a mind to change the world.
Isadore’s idea was to raise funds for charity. Great, I thought. But it wasn’t just ANY charity. You see, a couple of years ago, Isadore had done her Year 10 work experience (senior school) in Ethiopia – working as an aid worker; and while there she learned of the plight of a large number of children who were being recruited into the military in nearby Congo. She was determined to do something about this. The plan was to raise funds to help rehabilitate these kids – to give them a chance to heal from the horrors of what they had seen and done.
During 2008, Isadore began with some fundraising – she gave speeches at local community organisations and schools, she made cakes and so on. But she had a bigger idea bubbling away – what about a concert – like Live8 but smaller? That meant a whole lot more planning and effort … it meant funding, organising bands and speakers, finding a venue (and convincing them to support it); and it meant getting people along to a concert.
Over the last few months, I have been mentoring Isadore … helping her with a marketing plan and advice on how to execute it. We have discussed logos and designs, posters, advertising, social media, competitions, mobilising communities and so on. In all this, Isadore has shown tremendous resolve to move outside of her comfort zone – speaking with journalists, sorting out the various issues that arose, committing to contracts and gaining the support of businesses. She has shown true leadership.
On Sunday night, the Article Thirty-Nine concert was held at The Factory Theatre in Enmore. Over 250 people attended and over $6000 was raised for the Jesuit Refugee Service (the agency running the rehabilitation program). There are some great photos of the event on Isadore’s blog – and Moshcam will soon have streaming video available on the web (Moshcam generously supported the concert by filming it for free).
It just goes to show what CAN be achieved by a strong purpose and a supportive and interested community. And if you would like to contribute to the Article Thirty-Nine cause, leave me a comment.
When you are a child the whole world seems larger than life. The shops you go to are huge, the cars you drive in are enormous and the schools playgrounds seem to go on forever. Coming back to visit these places as an adult they appear to have shrunken … the spaces are smaller, claustrophobic even.
Public figures are different — well, those who capture and hold our imaginations are. Evel Knievel was, for me, one person who retained a larger than life imaginary space as I grew up. Perhaps it was to do with his ground breaking efforts and stunts, or the link he somehow made in my mind with Fonzie’s motorcycle stunt in Big Al’s carpark, or even the Evel Knievel stunt bike toy that I loved until it fell to pieces. But it is more likely that, in Evel Knievel, we all saw the potential to become an everyday hero … a real person capable of achieving close to the miraculous. May he rest in peace.
As you have probably guessed, I love television from the 80s. In particular, I love shows that have an over the top, silly feel to them … and when it comes to OTT, you can’t go past Mr T and the A-Team. So when I saw this great ad on Brent’s blog, I couldn’t resist sharing it.
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