communications models
prettylittlehead |
don't worry. |
Hi! How've you been? Actually, you know, I honestly don't care that much besides, I feel pretty caught up on what's happening in your life vis-a-vis twitter and just the usual idle gossip at the internet nerd bars, and then there was that time I actually ran into you at an Internet nerd bar, so I think we can just consider each other caught up, right? You told me how your business is doing using some completely abstract (at least to me) employee/growth metric, and I generally evaded all questions about my professional status. It reminded me of when we were together, actually. Good times.
So, hey, look, I just saw Inception and it sort of made me think of you. Actually it made me think of this thing I experienced when we were first getting together. You might not really remember this story, because you were asleep at the time. But you probably remember that, as usual, I was awake before you, and that I kept getting in and out of bed for some reason, and that this would turn out to be pretty normal. Except, and you couldn't know this because I basically never told you what was going on in my life or my head, that morning was very different from all the subsequent mornings. I woke up that morning not because the alarm went off or I was stressed out about something, which was usually why I was awake before you, that and the mini blinds in your bedroom do not keep out any sunlight, so it's pretty much up with the dawn at your place, but anyway. What woke me up was a woman's voice. She had a funny almost-accent, one of those inflections and styles of speech you hear out west sometimes, basically signifying she wasn't very educated, but was pretty chatty, and full of "character". Yes, local color, she was, though where she was talking from I couldn't place at first. She was talking about this old man who'd come into her store and bought a t-shirt. She wasn't really talking to me, but I could tell she wouldn't shut about the old man until I got up and wrote down everything she was saying. So after several painful attempts to silence this woman, I gave up. I got out of the bed and went to the other room and I wrote it all down. She could have gone on for pages the way she described every detail of the old guy. I cut her off at two, I needed to figure out what to do about you, asleep there in my bed, and my writing class that was a few hours away, and my hangover. Two pages would just have to do. Later she started talking again, and I realized what was happening. A story was developing, and she was the pushiest character and she wouldn't shut up, not until I did something with what she was saying. I didn't tell you this, but that woman in my head, chattering away so early that February morning, begat several other characters, a town, and a plot. It became a short story, and my writing classmates and my friend that doesn't offer praise for short fiction, all say it should be a novel. So that is one thing I've been doing lately, procrastinating writing a novel. So what's this all got to do with Inception? Well, it's simple: that morning I had a real idea, and it's been growing, and it can be pretty consuming, and the thing about an idea is that having one can be a lot like going insane. Cheers, FarrahJust saw this entry over at Laughing Squid: 13 Year-Old Jimmy Page on the BBC Show All Your Own in 1957.
Go to this link, watch the YouTube video (a clip from this performance made it into the documentary It Might Get Loud). You'll notice a few things about young Jimmy Page and his skiffle buddies: 1. Most of them want to be scientific researchers. Jimmy wants to research germs and cancer. The drummer wants to research bigger biological entities not to make anything, he emphatically explains, but simply for discovery's own sake and because sharing what he discovers can be used by others to make new things. Wonderful. Then the other guitar player says he wants to be a research physicist and study electricity because it is "the lifeblood of the country now." It's amazing to see how inspired by technology, science and the simple concepts of discovery and understanding these kids were. 2. The bass player and the guitar player build things! The bass player made his own bass, and wanted to make a bigger and better one after all he'd learned in the process of making the one we see him play. The guitar player is making a balalaika. Goodness. Meanwhile young James Page is taking lessons and playing serious, non-skiffle music, and the drummer doesn't smile while he plays ... Because they all take the craft of musicianship incredibly seriously and recognize and embrace the complexity of it. 3. Watch Jimmy Page boogie down. He's not just performing, he's feeling it all. Truly beautiful stuff.Tonight I momentarily considered setting up on formspring.me, then realized hearsay is so much, well, funner.
Also, there's this:
ZOMG what am I doing?? (yikes @urlesque!)
Find out here: http://www.urlesque.com/2010/06/24/favorite-meme-internet-celebs/
“I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”
"Previous studies have documented an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s. And Americans in general perceive decreases in other people's kindness and helpfulness."What happened?... [T]he authors speculate a millenial mixture of video games, social media, reality TV and hyper-competition have left young people self-involved, shallow and unfettered in their individualism and ambition."The implications are hardly superficial. Low empathy is associated with criminal behavior, violence, sexual offenses, aggression when drunk and other antisocial behavior..."
"When did we start saying that we should limit the honors so only one person gets the glory?" asked Joe Prisinzano, the Jericho principal.
Two things I read in the Sunday NY Times Book Review:
"One of the things I've learned from writing profiles of larger-than-life people... is that they're not especially introspective. Maybe introspection bogs them down; it's just a neurotic, pointless use of their creative energy."
"The only thing universal in communication is our inability to say exactly what we mean."
I once lived with a man; after two years together we broke up, and I took myself on holiday to New York. My things were still in the apartment in Los Angeles, packed in boxes, waiting for me to drive them away. He called me while I was gone, asked me to account for everything I'd done and who I was with. "I need you to reassure me," he said, plaintively, into the phone. My temper flashed. How dare he demand reassurance from me! I no longer owed him consistency or commitment or congruence. I could fairly run amok if the spirit moved me. I spent the night with an old boyfriend. I did not do it to spite my freshly minted ex. I did not do it because I wanted to be with someone, or because I was promiscuous, or because I was drunk, or because of anything, really. I slept with that old boyfriend, because I liked sleeping with him. It felt good, and it was right there in front of me. All my ex ever wanted from me in that relationship was reassurance: reassurance that I wouldn't leave him, that I wouldn't change, that I wouldn't turn out to be something else. But he'd constructed a very small box, a box so small that I would have no choice but to escape. And so I did. A fine pair: a man who wants to nail someone down, and a woman who refuses to be confined.
Micro-behavior - what you might think of as baby steps - is, I believe, at the heart of culture.
Witness Facebook: you create a profile. You add friends. You post updates. You add photos. You tag yourself. You write on people's walls. They do the same stuff, with you. It creates a sense of community. Then add the much-maligned "Like" button. That there is no "Hate" or "Ambivalence" button speaks to the kind of culture that Facebook wanted to cultivate. You can comment, you can reply, you can like things. Save your hate for someplace else. The comments section on Gothamist or Gawker, for instance. Now add games. And games that don't do much, too. Farmville, CafeWorld, Mafia Wars - these games are grinds, repetitive activities aimed at adding life and points to your coffers. In a MMOG you'd be able to use health/points/coin to do cool stuff and level up. In casual gaming, you just accumulate and spend, and level up by completing more and more tasks. But in these games, they are seen as goals, or challenges, or opportunities. One way to level up is to have friends. Cooperating with and helping others by giving them things you have a surplus of, sharing useful information, or doing some work on their behalf - these are tasks you are encouraged to engage in because it helps you level up... but it also helps your friends level up. The games are like - in fact much of the ecosystem of Facebook is like - a more mutually beneficial form of parallel play. Toddlers do this - they are not yet socially sophisticated enough to really interact, so they engage in similar play near each other. We see this out in the real world, grown men and women at parties with a cocktail in one hand and an iPhone in the other, rapidly scrolling through their tweets, texts and email to see if maybe there isn't some little tidbit that can be transformed into a bon mot (or just as likely, whether there isn't someplace cooler to be). Casual gaming and social networks can be a little more robust on the interactivity metric - people actually say things to each other and are mutually reinforcing in a more direct way (this may have to do with the fact that toddlers aren't on Facebook). In focus groups, something I used to do a lot of, you would put a half dozen strangers in the room and you could conduct little social experiments on them. The simplest was setting the tone for the discussion - the person who runs the room can decide (and really, must decide) who is running the session (hint: it's the moderator) and how it will be run. A focus group can be serious, playful, collaborative, creative, didactic, conversational, rational, pragmatic, confrontational. Anything, really. Depends on the people, and the skill of the person running the show. My mother used to volunteer in the classroom and was a big believer that people live up to expectations - if you expect a kid to be a loser and disruptive, he will be; if you expect a kid to be polite and smart, he will be. I found the same to be true in focus groups - I could get people who would insist they were not creative or didn't think about certain topics to be creative and to think about those topics. But my favorite experiment was when I had a racist in a mixed-race focus group. I was in Charlotte, North Carolina, talking about science fiction. There were two black women, and 4 white women in the group. They were roughly the same age, and they all liked the same TV shows. One of the women was clearly uncomfortable with being in the room with black people. I wasn't going to let racism be a factor in my focus group, so I changed the exercises to pair people up to work together. And I made sure that my racist had to work with both of the black women. Now, this was the South, after all, and a lady is a lady. There was NO WAY she was going to behave badly. She was going to be polite. And because we were talking about TV and I was cracking jokes and everyone was talking about how hot that Agent Mulder is, even my racist had to give in and have a good time with everyone. I wondered, at the end of the night, how she would describe her experience when she got home. And then I realized it didn't matter - this two hour session had changed this woman's life in a small way. She had been forced to do something the other cultures she engages with don't force her to do - she had to be nice and cooperative and equal to a black person. People want to belong. People want to feel accepted. In the currency of Facebook and Farmville, belonging and acceptance are about sharing - sharing status updates, pictures, articles, and even 'work'. It doesn't require a conversion moment, or a major investment of time. The culture emerges gradually, and is defined by the structure of the 'place' and by the people in it. Culture comes from 'micro-behaviors' - colloquialisms, accents, stories, ingredients and spices, colors and materials. It comes from language, and it comes from tone, and it comes from the small things we do everyday with each other. You get back what you put in.If you haven't seen Paula Scher give her 'solemn v. serious' TED talk you absolutely must. In it she talks about the way that something serious (ambitious, exciting, new) can morph into something solemn (repetitive, ceremonial, dull), and the challenge of continuing to pursue the serious over the solemn.
smart thinking, especially about new ideas about the roles within communications agencies - no more two teams of two (brand planner & connections planner + art director & copywriter) instead a team of three (Interactive Artist, Story Architect, Engagement Strategist). would have loved to see it presented. if you can't see the embedded presentation below, you can always go here.
strategist, storyteller, sometime-writer, lover of dogs (& things that remind me of robots)
