the big changes.

As far as I’ve seen, the internet makes a few major changes to human culture, and extrapolating from those tells us where the future is going.

Time and space bias are becoming less and less important.  When and where no longer limit information, entertainment, communication or conversation.  Any business model based on exploiting time and space bias, or enforcing time and space bias, is officially on deathwatch.  Business based on making time and space bias entirely irrelevant will probably find an audience, and success.

Potentially everyone can publish.  This doesn’t mean that everyone has an equal voice, but it does mean that people will learn the responsibility of their works.  If your words, your ideas, are put in front of the world, you become responsible for them in a way you can’t be without an audience.  People fear an audience because it forces evolution and improvement.  People cherish an audience for the same reason.

Knowing about something is going to become less and less valuable, as information is rapidly becoming accessible from everyone, from everywhere.  Knowing how to do something is going to remain essential, because skill requires more than information.  Discovering information about something will always remain valuable.

If something exists, there is less and less resistance against it becoming ubiquitous.  This is currently true of information, and will likely be true of physical creations in the coming decades.

These are all fairly obvious at this point; I’m not breaking any new ground by writing this.  But I’m finding it next to impossible to come up with a recent world-changing development that isn’t explained by the logical progression of one of these factors. 

If I’m doing something that doesn’t address or leverage one of these issues, I can usually do it better by asking myself why.

 

i don't do press, i do narratives.

I've loved narrative for as long as I can remember.  I used to drive my mother crazy because I would read rather than do anything else.  Until I was 22 or so, my only career aspiration was novelist.

Narratives are the most important thing in getting attention, interest, audiences and markets.

I was never the kind of writer who planned everything out.  I developed my characters, a situation, some undefined ideas, and went to it.  Writing was a process of discovery.  I can't do that anymore.

PR isn't just about arranging press coverage.  It's about developing a narrative, and exploring and expanding it through the media.  This is a hell of a lot more complicated, because you need to plan around the unexpected actions of others, the trends that dominate the marketplace, upcoming changes in those trends, the personalities of your stakeholders, the tangents that drive away from the actual narrative, and, of course, the truth (which is essential, immutable and unavoidable).

I'm spending a lot of time crafting, developing, and planning the narratives I manage and create now.  It's very rewarding, in a very similar way to how writing fiction was.  If anything, it feels like a particularly complex version of the same, but rooted in truth and the real world.

Because your brand, your narrative, is no longer up to you in the post-internet world.  All you can do is create the set of concepts, framing, ideas and narrative that best defines your product and goals, while planning around the nearly limitless number of things the newly infinite citizen media can do with it.

It would be terrifying if it wasn't so much fun.

the bare minimum is insufficient.

No one is ever going to appreciate a person who just does exactly what they are supposed to do.

I don’t mean to suggest that completing tasks on-time, and competently is inherently insufficient.  I’m just saying that good enough doesn’t really warrant praise.  Praise is for exceeding expectations.

Some people, and many companies, deal with this fact by habitually under-promising, so they can guarantee over-delivering.  This works fine, but has the effect of underwhelming clients during a crucial phase, when you’re still trying to hook them.

The solution I aim for is to use the approach, and the creativity and strategy behind it, as a way of creating the interest, hooking the people I work with, and over-promising without committing to results that aren’t reasonable.

Of course, I will still under-sell the potential results.  The last thing anyone wants is a client expecting a best case scenario, and not getting it.  But if I’m going to impress someone with my pitch, it’s bad strategy to attempt to impress them preemptively with the results, rather than with the ambition and beauty of the strategy.

The more important part, though, is that a strategy or approach that impresses a client is more likely to bring intense work and dedication out of people on the implementation side - you don’t get people to work harder than they intend to by telling them they need to achieve impossible results.  You do it by giving them a process that is interesting enough to care about.

Alternately, you can under-promise, get people to do nothing more than what is expected, and then complain about your reputation, or lack thereof as ‘okay’.

ratings systems are terrible.

While perusing potential sources of new information on tumblr, I came across a post which included this tidbit:

I know it’s impossible, but it would be interesting to see how much more money this movie is going to make because it’s not rated R.

This caught my attention because rating systems are (always) a negative thing for creative products.  Frank Miller (creator of 300, Sin City, etc) has had a lot to say about this, but I can summarise his argument fairly well in two points; rating dictates audience dictates money, and people should be media literate enough to know what’s appropriate.

Any R rated movie has a smaller audience.  This is fair, not everyone is mature enough to see the things in an R rated film.  At the same time, attaching an arbitrary age range further limits the number of people who will see it.  The real problem, though, is that films (as the most prominent rated medium) are written, filmed, and edited to the desired rating – meaning as a creative product, the rating outranks all artistic concerns.

Think about your favourite book.  Now consider if it wouldn’t have been published unless it was edited either 2 hollywood ratings up (i.e., from G to PG-13), or 2 hollywood ratings down.  Would it still be your favourite book?

The second point is that ratings don’t really protect anyone.  The people who care, or want to protect their children, should be able to tell from the title, posters, and trailer, which movies are appropriate.  The people who don’t care will take their kids no matter what the rating is.

I’d like to live in a society that assumes people are smart enough to entertain themselves appropriately.  I realize how absurd it is to have to say that, but here we are.

the transition from english lit to communications.

I studied English Literature for two and a half years at Wilfrid Laurier before I decided what I really loved was communication theory.  At the time, this seemed a little nuts, as I was fully committed to English as a path of study, and had taken a totally of one credit (2 courses) of Communication Studies.  I immersed myself in it anyways.

I didn’t have an explanation for why the transition felt so organic until recently.

My interest in English was mostly about techniques.  I liked reading and analyzing books because I found it rewarding to pick apart how certain effects had been used, what they accomplished for the overall story, the characters, the effects on the reader.  I liked learning about the history and range of different literary devices.

Basically, I liked media theory, studied in a Petri dish.  Arguably the most closely watched, developed medium for sophisticated, durable transmission of ideas in human history, the written word.

I was explaining recently to someone involved in Ontario Youth Parliament that getting an English degree is really about learning how to read critically.  And once you can read a novel critically, really critically, on the level of a trained expert, you can adequately dissect any piece of creative work, assuming you are willing to put in the time to learn the context, the background information, and the tropes of the medium.

The best explanation I can give for why the shift from English Literature to Communication Studies came so naturally is because English Lit is the best place I’ve seen to hone specific dissection skills for creative work, and Communication Studies is for people who want to use those skills, but have gotten bored of the novel.

curation, projected identity, and value.

The internet has become a taste economy.

Most of my daily reads are very selected reportings that reflect a view point. Most of this isn't wholly original content, either - it's analysis, or opinion, of news stories, and other creative artifacts. The few items that I encounter that are wholly new creative work, are usually presented without context.

Blogging is about curation, more often than not. Curation is about, at it's core, the idea that some people have superior taste, or at least a greater ability to separate the boring from the not boring. Entire businesses are based on this idea, the blogging just takes it further, because there is no minimum level of 'class' needed to rate an item being selected. This is in opposition to the idea of, say, a gallery or museum, where value (perceived or otherwise) is set rather high.

Like most shifts related to the internet, this is based on the non-rival nature of digital information. A gallery has physical space, and therefore limits. While there are maximum amounts of traffic, or maximum space that a site can take, these limits aren't hard and fast, and are expanded relatively cheaply.

This is a large part of why internet culture is so interesting to me. With the lowered minimum judgment of value, culture incorporates a wider array of objects and ideas into the presiding taste. As well, taste is fractured deeper - I'd argue the larger amount of more specific sub-genres is in large part to the minimum number of interested parties per area being reduced. It's easy to have a community even if no one around you wants to be part of it.

Curation is an interest of mine for a lot of reasons, but foremost because it's a function of persona. Whether the identity of the writer, or the brand identity of the company, website, what have you, curation is an act of forging identity. Attracting readers, interested parties, a group of stakeholders is more or less clear validation of the curator, and therefore the person they have constructed.

In terms of understanding what someone means, and who they are, there are few better tools for analysis than an ever growing selection of what they find interesting, relevant, and worth sharing.

Projected identity, in terms of brands, people, and websites, is the most important differentiator available. Be aware of it.

[Standard apology for radio silence.]

My good friend at Ghost Razor got me thinking about advertising and social networks. Well, he, the Microsoft-cash-certified 15 billion facebook valuation, and the fact that targeted advertising hasn’t really shown me much other than location targeting, and google style text ads that are based on the content of your screen / email / profile, etc.

The short version of this is there is a complete lack of creative work in these ads – text ads are boring. And text targeted ads result in some hilarious missteps, as well. Google is home of the brilliant proprietary algorithm, but I still get ads that suggest things based on sarcasm.

The response I’ve been seeing from advertising pros seem to be the most phoned in things in recent memory. I keep reading commentary about how targeted ads need ‘authenticity’ or how the essential missing ingredient is ‘engaging content’. For anyone who hasn’t been watching, this is the solution that is generally proposed by adver/creatives for anything in the universe. And it makes sense, because it’s important that spots be somewhat authentic, engaging, because these are code words for ‘not-insulting’ and ‘not boring’. Bravo.

There is place for creative content in targeted ads, and it just requires two major things – more work per account, and a better tool for profiling than just looking for keywords and spitting out the content that best fits.

My immediate reaction to being posed this problem was to think of profiling. Not in terms of looking for certain keywords and responding with certain ads, although that has a place. My interest is more in creating a dozen or so profiles for users that fit within the target market for your product, and then finding the interests, keywords, and relationships that identify these groups. This would require not only tracking the interests and usage of one person, but more important to track how interests spread between friends in the network – this could help in tracking the alpha consumers who are the holy grail. More importantly, it allows separation of users based on personality type, interest type in your product, related interests, etc.

Targeted advertising should be more than just sending people who say they care about something related to your product information, it should be about walking into the conversation of social networking, and treating different people with a past of different actions and different interests, differently. Treating people differently makes no sense in terms of broadcast model advertising, ie, advertising at scale.

This is different.

This is lucrative for both sides of the equation – the advertising agencies would now be creating multi-pronged campaigns with materials targeted to each of the X profiles created, so they would be (logically) charging substantially more. Also presumably logical would be increased effect from (actually) targeted advertising.

I guess all I’m saying is that targeted advertising means more to me than throwing the same content, or less involved content, at people who are more likely to care.

If facebook is worth 15 billion on the strength of the information it has gathered from it’s community, maybe targeted advertising should mean a little bit more in terms of giving people a personalized experience, rather than just very specifically aimed generic content.

digging in the detrius of days past.

I was walking through the mall, taking my mother to buy new speakers. We'd left my father to pay, as is our custom, and wandered aimlessly for about 15 feet until my mother pointed to a dress in a store window (it may have been Guess?) and said ' I had a dress like that for after my wedding'. This was horrifying at first, because it was a somewhat skimpy looking number with a bow right around the chest area, and I feared she was speaking to me about lingere. That she had worn. On her wedding night. But no, it was a dress, and the one she had had also been a dress, and all was well. I said something not-unlike me, that 'fashion is like everything else. Those who can't invent the future mine the past.' Mom got excited about that statement for some reason, and insisted I share it with people. I ignored the suggestion until I was watching tv, and the same idea came to be again.

This is unsurprising, as I'm certain the idea isn't original. But it keeps popping up. I was listening to the ongoing history of new music last night, and the focus of the episode was those accidental plagiarisms that make up so much of pop music. Combine this with the 'Melancholy Elephants' story by Spider Robinson that I posted recently, and I've been exposed to a large amount of material suggesting that the failure of creativity isn't any such thing, it's a mixture of going with what works, and of inspiration no longer having a longer collective memory than the human race. We're all mining in the past, and the only thing that matters is whether public opinion and that of the rights holders come down on the side of taking it as a compliment to the original, or taking it as a justification for legal action.

There's a reason I love the Creative Commons so much. Every few months I have a moment like the one I had in the mall with my family, and recall that every crutch I add to my memory locks ideas into a time and place that keeps them from becoming new again.

The telling thing is, as I was writing this, I kept wracking my brain in the hopes that I hadn't stolen the statement from somewhere. If I have, let me know.

ad commentary.

Nissan has an interesting idea here, so many kudos to the agency that came up with it. Surprisingly cheap to create a couple hundred thousand phony keys, and lose them in public spaces.

The cynic in me is wondering about the amount of waste which, though negligible in comparison with a lot of industries, seems somewhat unnecessary for a guerrilla-esque campaign such as this. Nine Inch Nails has come up with one of the most interesting virals I have heard of, but they manage to leave something behind in restrooms that people will keep (usb thumbdrives with music on them). This seems like a fair amount of waste for what will likely be a 30 second interaction with the key, it's message, and possibly one or two repeats to friends.

At the same time, it's a great idea, and that 30 seconds and two conversations, if even half the keys are picked up, is well, well worth the hundred grand.

[found via Agenda Inc.]

creativity.

This is just kinda cool.