Talent imitates, genius steals

McTravel

And on your left you'll see the famous golden arches.

With Flickr in Mind

Street art has long been a favoured subject for the ever-growing shutterbug swarm - this grossly/wonderfully simple piece highlights this - and the increasingly dynamic interplay of offline and on that digital devices enable.

While read/write culture usually refers to digital content that is easily repurposed, it equally applies to the art of public spaces.

Hello Boys

My brother got me this book about 60's American advertising for Christmas [thanks dude!].

There's a lot of interesting stuff in there but the one that jumped out at me, so to speak, was the Maidenform ad.

The Maidenform "I dreamed" campaign ran for 20 years, ending only as the 60s did, featured proud young women dreaming of fantastical situations enabled in some unspecified way by their bras.

It sparked controversy and conversation at the time, just as Wonderbra did with their simplified poster version of the same endlessly fascinating image.

A feminist reading would see it as oppressive and exploitative - women dream of adventures, usually in roles associated with men [cowboy, fireman, toreador]  - whilst a fashion analyst would be more interested in the bullet shaped cones that vanished for decades, only to be re-introduced by Madonna / Gaultier in the 80s.

The whole book reflects the values and aspirations of their times.

And whilst treating the body of advertising of an age as purely reflective is misleading [the civil upheaval of the 60s is rarely evident - 60s advertising feels more like a weird nostalgia for the already idealised 50s] it certainly provides a window into what concerned the dominant discourse of the day.

Advertising operates in the realm of hopes and dreams and myths - these are the levers used to motivate purchase decisions.

The ads of the 60s seem obsessed with space, with women, with sophistication, with domesticity, with really big cars.

I wonder what our ads say about us.

Idea Immunity and the Meme War

So I posted about Preferential Looking, which led Andy to point me at this framework of intelligence, which suggests that that reason we fixate on the unexpected stimuli is because it doesn't conform to our predictive model of reality:

If your expectations about the door are violated, the error will cause you to take notice. Correct predictions result in understanding. The door is normal. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention.

Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence. The cortex is an organ of prediction.

This reminded me of an idea previously mooted by Dan Dennet:

the fundamental purpose of brains is to produce future…brains are, in essence, anticipation machines

Which in turn led me to the above awesome TED video, where he points out that growing up in a free, meme-rich, culture leads us in the West to develop an immunity to ideas, and that the war on terror is really a meme war.

One thing leads to another.

Attention Marketing

I saw this sticker advertising stickers and it made me chuckle. In some ways it's brilliant tactical media planning, right at the point of need, use, consumption.

But the invasion of non-commercial spaces, borrowing attention from toasters, is fraught with its own problems. You know how sometimes things just feel wrong?

Maybe that's creative / cultural blinking instinct kicking in. Maybe the stickers just need to be less lame.

When I was young, before the Cadbury Gorilla, people used to declaim the use of borrowed interest.

The thinking was that using 20 seconds to tell an unrelated joke, and 10 seconds to sell, was not a great idea.

And whilst this seems sensible, or did until the Gorilla, it didn't really sit well with me, since all interruption marketing is borrowing attention from the content it is interrupting.

Apart from posters, which increasingly I think of differently to other media. [There's a different kind of contract being struck with viewers, whether or not you think they have the right to exist at all.]

Which is why, as we know, things are so different now. We can't really buy attention anymore - people have got too good at not paying us any. We have to earn it.

Previously, the implicit value exchange - free content in exchange for watching ads - enabled the balanced value exchange between brands and people.

This model is best encapsulated by Homer Simpson:

Quiet, the commercial is on… if we don’t watch these, it’s like we’re stealing TV!

But that relationship has begun to breakdown in an on demand world, requiring a more explicit earning of attention.

Which is why I really liked the way Anthony Mayfield [at IAB Engage - I've put a bunch of slides up on Flickr] described the internet as an Attention Market.

It's been a decade since Wired realised that we are in an attention economy. Mass media lowered the cost to the point where significantly more ads can be transmitted to a 'consumer' than any person can process. Therefore, the relatively scarce resource needing allocation becomes attention.

The internet is a live, global attention market, dynamically allocating attention to those things that earn it best in near real-time. The speed of response has a corresponding diminution on the longevity of attention - everything becomes a flash in the pan. [This is just an acceleration of an existing trend - when gramaphone records replaced sheet music the record industry noticed a a distinct truncation in the longevity of hits.]

This of course puts the structure of the industry at odds with the attention market - we need a constant stream of new new things to maintain salience.

Understanding how attention is being allocated across the market is the next big frontier of analytics: Google trends, blog mentions, behavioural targeting - all attempts to track, understand, follow and then predict the allocation of attention.

This data has value - in fact its the driving value behind Google and Facebook - real, behavioural attention market data.

The Attention Trust  wants to wrestle that value back for the individual - imagine if you could actively trade attention, receiving value in return.

Back during gold rush of the web, a company called All Advantage tried to redress the attention issue and balance the value exchange by paying people watch ads. It also compensated members for promoting the site, which made it grow rapidly - one of the first viral marketing success stories.

The company died - I don't think paying people to watch ads is the right way to think about value - we'll see if it works in mobile credit - although it may have grown into a Nielsen if the ad bubble had collapsed so hard.

Thinking about value that way feels analogous to paying someone to be your friend - it's still buying attention, not earning it.

It time for brands to realise we are operating in an attention market and their money ain't no good here.

Welcome to the age of attention marketing.

Read Write Culture

My obsession with the remix is pretty well established.

I believe that culture is recombinant, that new ideas come from remixing old ones, that stealing is genius, but copying is lame.

That taking something and making it into something else constitutes fair use, that preventing it will ossify our culture and that thinking that way will render you obsolete, painted into a copyright corner.

That, like the postmodernists, you can attempt to create a higher order of meaning by standing on the semantic foundations of other creations, employing referents rather than starting from scratch.

That all culture is implicitly a comment on that which has come before. 

That the remix is the very nature of digital [to steal from Gibson, the sage of the age], of copy and paste, of hypertextual linking, of the internet.

I'm an especially big fan of enticing those pesky, fickle consumers we spend so much time begging for attention [like a child doing handstands and begging its parents to look, always being disappointed and crying "Hey your not looking!", half indignant half heartbroken] into messing with our ideas. I think it's crucial.

If people are interested in messing with our ideas, that's awesome: they are paying us some attention. And if people add something of themselves to what we do, that gives them a reason to pass it on.

In one of the new batch of TED talks, Larry Lessig explains the whole thing more eloquently than I could hope to, with better slides.

[Thanks Saul]

A Word with Ruby Pseudo

The awesome Ruby Pseudo has been interrogating the truth out of trendy tots for a while now, on her excellent blog.

Having given it away for free, she now wants to charge for it and has set up Ruby Pseudo Consulting for those clients that want more in depth neotenic anthropology [although the blog will stay free, she informs me].

Ruby shares some thoughts with PSFK here.

All of which I mention a] because Ruby is a legend and b] because I wrote this biog of her for the piece that they didn't use -  I didn't want it to go to waste so I'm putting it here:

Ruby Pseudo is a fearless investigator, bravely venturing into the dark heart of youth culture and returning [relatively] unscathed with nuggets of purest insight.

With a fearsome intellect and a laser-like wit, she goes boldly where the rest of us fear to tread, but she ain't no fool.

Sharper than a card sharp, braver than an indian brave, a dangerous drinking partner and haunting Audrey Hepburn impersonator, Ruby Pseudo is the real deal.

Observations from South Africa #1

McRock n Roll.

I really hope it isn't a new sandwich.

Eating in the Dark

I has dinner in complete darkness last night.

Dans le Noir is a concept restaurant that launched in Paris and has opened in London where the first bite isn't with the eyes as you can't see anything.

It was an amazing experience. Complete darkness is so odd. You keep waiting for your eyes to adjust and they simply can't - there's no light at all.

Negotiating your food is interesting but perhaps more interesting is the social effect - it's much easier to talk to people you don't know when you all can't see each other.

Dining in the total darkness represents a very unusual social experience. How many times have you ever had the chance to talk to people without any preconception that sight implies?

At Dans le Noir? there is no more pressure of other people’s visual judgment. You talk more freely and spontaneously. The absence of vision changes completely the way you act and react, both emotionally and socially.

That’s why Dans le Noir? is far more than just a restaurant: it offers a social and convivial experience. Dans le Noir? raises some questions such as the role of sight in the way we relate to others.

The waiting staff are all blind and incredibly adept and friendly - part of the idea behind the restaurant is to raise awareness of the challenges facing blind people and raise money for blindness charities.

In an age when brands are trying to find ways to bring people together and to find a socially responsible role in society, there are probably some interesting lessons we can learn from eating in the dark.

Inventing the Future

We live in accelerated times. For the first few millennia of [poorly] recorded history, not much changed. People living in AD4 and kids that grew up in AD1204 lived pretty much the same lives - same agrarian culture, same life expectancy and mostly the same technologies.

Sure there was progress, but it was incremental. Things changed very slowly. Then, suddenly, sometime in the middle of the C19th the Industrial Revolution kicked mankind's technological progress into exponential growth. This slide that Richard got from MB illustrates the shift in the angle of incidence really well, in relation to media fragmentation.

One of the cultural effects of this absurd acceleration we are currently experiencing is what I can only describe as this incredible weight I feel pushing back on us from the future. It's almost as though we are feeling the pressure from the future to catch up, which is what I think contributes to our fascination with what is to come and the existence of futurology as a science, of sorts.

The video above, following in the footsteps of the Googlezon video, portrays a similar single media platform of the future. Like all predictions, it's tainted by the concerns of the present. This presentism amplifies the prosumer and virtual worlds - because that's what we're all thinking about right now. The sheer novelty of the future is always the hardest thing to project precisely because the new new thing isn't an upgrade on some existing technology - it's a step change.

That said, life may imitate art, but so does science. One of the cool things about great science fiction is that it delivers the imagination, and then technology tries to catch up.

A great example of this is Snow Crash.  Without doubt the great novel of the modern Interweb age [successor to Gibson's prophetic Neuromancer], it was written in 1994. Cast your mind back. No Google, no social networks, no Hotmail, the web itself just barely online. 28.8k dial up modems. Take That breaks up.

Reading Snow Crash today, it's hard to get your head round this. In the novel, Stephenson predicts Google Earth, memory cards, Second Life and on and on. It's scary. He also created the term 'avatar' as we use it today in virtual worlds.

[UPDATE: My mate Fred has informed me that the guys who developed Keyhole, which become Google Earth, were inspired by the Earth application in Snow Crash. Detailed in Wired here. Awesome.]

Science imitates art.

In particular in the science of teleportation, where the stated aim is to replicate [pun regretted] the technology in Star Trek.

Alan Kay, terribly bright chap and one of the fathers of modern computing, summed this up brilliantly:

The best way to predict the future, is to invent it.

Which leaves a role right now for the imaginative: invent the future - someone out there will build it.