Is individuality lost?

Remember the Old Spice commercial? If so, open your facebook page. Pick the third person of the same gender as yours on the newsfeed and open his feed in a separate tab. Look at his last 8 wall posts. Now, back at yours. Now, back at what his posts are about. Now, back at yours. Chances are they don’t differ much. Yet, you do. Sadly, it’s barely visible through your web presence.

Statistically speaking, depending on your age, gender and friend count likeness, you use similar structures, words and write about corresponding subjects at corresponding times. In case of my facebook friends, there’s at least one niche music video link, at least one ‘funny picture’, at least one thankful post and at least one slightly ironic rant on — in general terms — state of the culture. Which makes 50% of the rather small sample entirely predictable. The question that follows is: are we entering the age of mass unification that reshapes us into rather amorphic and impersonal shells or simply are we that similar?

There are a few things to consider:

1 The medium is the message

Trivial as it has become, McLuhan’s notion of the medium affecting the content is still valid. If you ever had doubts on the extent of its relevance, consider the impact of a slight redesign of FB’s status update box on the use of pronouns:

‘Until March of 2009, the status update box appeared next to the person’s name. So, up until March of 2009, the most common status update motif was to state what you were doing or how you were feeling with a status update like “is happy,” which would show up as “Lars is happy”. When this changed, the usage of “is” dropped off dramatically and usage of “I” doubled almost overnight. After March, people started updating with “I am happy” instead of “is happy” to achieve the same message.’

However, what is often overlooked is the influence of the provided means of reaction by other people. We’re social beings, we supply content and share it to be admired, liked, to be understood, to feel accepted or solely heard. Consequently, sooner or later, consciously or not, we design our messages so that they’re more appealing to our target group. At the same time, it’s difficult to remain personal and relevant if you’re talking to 47 people at once. Besides, imagine that the person next to you is capable of only two reactions: ‘I like it’ and ‘I like it and repost’. Undoubtedly it would limit the scope and depth of a conversation, wouldn’t it?

Looking at this image, it’s hard not to draw a conclusion that we’re living in the Recommendation Age (or, to be precise, the Repost Age). Still, as much as soup.io is social, it’s a quite accurate tool for spreading memes, no less and so is the larger part of other social platforms.

2 Limits of control

Obviously, the majority of the social networking sites has some limitations to at least the length or the subject of the messages you exchange. If you ever tried writing movie summaries in 140 characters or less, you know that in most cases you inevitably end up with genre descriptions stripped of any kind of particularity that might have made a movie gripping. It becomes slightly more bearable if you apply E.M. Forster’s distinction between narrative and plot (Plot is ‘The queen died; the king died.’ Narrative is ‘The queen died; the king died of a broken heart.’). The difficulty is that if you’re not a screenwriter or currently suffering from dissociative identity disorder, you tend to think about your life expieriences in a plot rather than a narrative. Not to mention the miserably flat amplitude of real life drama compared to most of the stories we read/watch.

3 One to rule them all

Social networking sites are created as mass products, carved for the so-called average user. They are based on universal truths, universal paradigms and equally unversal models of interaction, expression and needs. At the same time they’re designed to provide means of personalization and become as transparent & technologically friction free as possible. The catch, as always, lies in between.

When considering technologically advanced, mass market tools or products, the simple rule applies: The more you try to make it universal, the more uniform the outcome is. One way of evading that is clearly through customization (e.g. NikeID), but still, does it make a product more universal or merely less uniform?

The deeper problem lies in the process of finding these universal truths. We’ve become infatuated with data, their patterns, networks and correlations. Evidently this is the age of information, since like never before we’re able to accurately compute and estimate almost every single thing. However, what we’re often missing is the difference between analysis and reasoning. Analysis is a description of a current state (think: Hans Rosling). Reasoning is taking the risk of forming judgements about the things that are not clearly visible in data. It’s the search for insight and superior understanding. We have knowledge, we need more wisdom. Without the latter we’ve created great tools for being connected rather than feeling connected.

Still, the infatuation with data and our computational capability is a mere side effect of the broader cult of staying up to date.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an average, slightly addicted social media user, clicking Like button 9 times a day, writing 25 comments and spending around 55 minutes per day, just to stay up to date. As such, I’m also inherently ‘resistant to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism’, as Georg Simmel described it.

One of the last lines of Synecdoche, NY (which I cannot recommend enough) goes as follow:
‘You realize you are not special. At some point this is everyone’s experience, every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone.’

In a deeper sense, we are the same. We live the average, encounter the same joys, tragedies or monotony. Yet, what makes us exceptional and our relations meaningful are ideas. Not some abstractly conceptualized ideas but ideas expressed through our emotions, beliefs and broader idiosyncratic context. One may call them stories, I call them personalities:)

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Ogilvy’s principles of management

1. Remember that Abraham Lincoln spoke of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He left out the pursuit of profit.
2. Remember the old Scottish motto: “Be happy while you’re living, for you are a long time dead.”
3. If you have to reduce your company’s payroll, don’t fire your people until you have cut your compensation and the compensation of your big-shots.
4. Define your corporate culture and your principles of management in writing. Don’t delegate this to a committee. Search all the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.
5. Stop cutting the quality of your products in search of bigger margins. The consumer always notices — and punishes you.
6. Never spend money on advertising which does not sell.
7. Bear in mind that the consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Do not insult her intelligence.
[via: Patricia Sellers]

For the Love of Culture

“For 75 percent of the eighteen million books in our libraries, the rule of the plaintiffs would have been a digital death sentence. For these works–presumptively under copyright but no longer in print–to require permission first is to guarantee invisibility. These works are, practically speaking, orphans. It is effectively impossible–at least at the wholesale level–to secure permission for any use that triggers copyright law.”
Lawrence Lessig’s, as always insightful essay on Google, copyright and our future.

Milton Glaser: Ten things I have learned

1 You can only work for people that you like.
2 If you have a choice never have a job.
3 Some people are toxic avoid them.
4 Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5 Less is not necessarily more.
6 Style is not to be trusted.
7 How you live changes your brain.
8 Doubt is better than certainty.
9 On aging.
10 Tell the truth.
full post here & a short documentary.

Design Imperialism

“A key point of failure in today’s global design landscape lies precisely in the jargon — we need to invent new ways of writing, talking and thinking about concepts of “humanitarian design”; we need new language that doesn’t homogenize entire cultures, new vocabulary that better reflects the intricate lace of the world’s biocultural and psychosocial diversity as a drawing board for design.” Maria Popova on The Language of Design Imperialism. Insightful.

Of Frog Wines and Frowning Watches: Semantic Priming, Perceptual Fluency and Brand Evaluation

“Visual features that have no meaningful association with the product itself can actually make consumers like the product, provided that these features are something that the consumer can easily identify with.This means that critters on wine labels, however odd that may be, can be a good sales strategy. It allows a marketer to target a certain consumer by using images on labels that represent an important aspect of that customer’s life. Moreover, there are potentially many ways to make that label as unique as possible because a logo would be chosen based on who the target customers are and not on what that product is.” Building a Better Brand: How feelings shape product evaluation.

The Sins of St. Paul

“I did not know Paul Rand. I did not work for him or study under him. My understanding of his importance, then, has been gained in the same way as students and practitioners in years to come will gain theirs: through books like Modernist Design. (…) So it’s with some trepidation that I wonder if I might lodge a few complaints about Mr. Rand as a model for graphic design practice. But here goes.” M. Bierut on Paul Rand.

“Any design student could do a better job”

“I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace. This is a process that can take a year or more. Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali.
The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design” What they don’t teach you about identity design by Paula Scher.

Steven Heller on Olympic Pictograms

Briefly and to the point (& video): Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages.

Quiet logos

“Lindstrom suggests that too much messaging on a product’s packaging can actually prevent a sale. Logos and words can engage the rational mind, causing people to actually think harder about making a purchase. It’s a counter-intuitive notion, but then think about the effectiveness of the quiet logos on a bottle of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, or a Method product, or the entire Apple product line up.” The Myth of the Rational Buyer: How Too Much Thinking Can Hurt Your Brand

Meetings, the Google way

Not exactly on the main subject of this blog, but hey, branding actually IS about meetings. Meetings, the Google way:
1. Set a firm agenda. 2. Assign a note-taker. 3. Carve out micro-meetings. 4. Hold office hours.
5. Discourage politics, use data. 6. Stick to the clock. [via: supervolatile]

Idiologie / branding & everything else

Repost, Recommend, Rethink.