California’s Prop 8, Mormons, Twitter, and the wisdom of crowds

November 11th, 2008

Last week or so I was fortunate enough to get a quick email interview together with Internet personality Drew Curtis of FARK.com, which I posted to both my blog and Flip The Media. One thing Drew touched upon was, as he put it, the “bogus media creation of the ‘wisdom of crowds’.” This was also brought up again during Hanson Hosein’s latest lecture in our COM529 Research 2.0 course. The question is, essentially, is the sharing, collaboration, and collective action facilitated by social media always focused upon achieving a wise purpose? As Drew put it, crowds are “stupid, horny, and hungry”. There is an echo of this sentiment in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody; he asks the question: who decides which cause is right? As old media gives way to new, this becomes an increasingly important question. Like your mother always told you, just because everyone else is doing it, or in this case saying it, doesn’t mean it’s right.

Photo used from the Stranger Blog

So, I come to a matter of personal importance, which I have been following closely since last week’s historic election. In California, bellwether state of the nation, the electorate voted roughly 52% to 48% to remove the rights of gays to marry in their state. Some proponents of Prop 8, a constitutional amendment, argued that they were protecting the traditional definition of marriage. Many of the “Yes on 8″ supporters were of religious persuasion, and may have felt to ban gay marriage perhaps largely for religious reasons. Detractors of Prop 8, on the other hand, may have felt that the amendment was discriminatory towards gays and represented an affront to civil rights. It appears many of these detractors have pointed to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, typically called “Mormons”, as a primary factor in the measure’s passing. I know that many individual members of the LDS church, acting as citizens, campaigned for and contributed, individually, sometimes large sums of cash to the “Yes on 8″ cause. But, the legal entity that is “the church” did not. Notwithstanding, leaders of the church state that they exercised their rights in encouraging these activities from the pulpit. These efforts and the money raised, it’s alleged, directly led to the 53% win. I don’t wish to necessarily debate the rights or wrongs of such broad-based assumptions, of the ballot measure itself, the outcome, or the issues of religion or homosexuality in general here, but I do wish to highlight some of the interesting, and perhaps disconcerting things I have seen in the “crowd’s” response to the measure’s passing. Twitter, in particular, seems to be a social media tool contributing to the fervor and organization of the response from some of those individuals and groups that are opposed to the amendment, but there is no guarantee that what is found on Twitter is ever certifiable fact.

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Potentially dangerous interstate freeway exit ramps in Washington state

November 10th, 2008

For this entry I come back to the subject of design yet again.  Carolina, my Interaction Design instructor, asked us students to study the concepts shared by Donald Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things.  Afterwards, we were supposed to take a look at some everyday object, albeit one that does not possess a screen.  The everyday thing I chose was the left-side freeway off-ramps of Washington state.

So, I presumed this exercise was to help us disconnect just a little bit from our digital ways and see what the overall conceit of good design truly is.  To get just a little personal, I don’t have very much of a design background (which is one of the reasons why I am in the class) but I’m also not much of an engineer.  I do have some history of web design and video game design under my professional belt, though.  But, alas, I am more the beneficiary of good design than the creator.  But, I am also like everyone else the victim of bad design, too.  One thing about me, and it seems to be true of many people, is that we blindly accept loads of bad design and just cope with it despite the flaws.  Norman spells this out in his book.  For example, he talks about the doors of a Boston Hotel that sacrifice simplicity for aesthetics.  How often is this a parallel for our real lives?  We strive for the appearance of perfection rather than internal cohesion and understanding.

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How They Flipped the Media: Interviews with New Media Personalities - Drew Curtis, FARK.com

November 5th, 2008

Today, I am beginning what I anticipate will become a regular series of short interviews with web personalities. These short, three-question typewritten interviews will be cross-posted here and to the University of Washington’s Master of Communication in Digital Media’s blog, FlipTheMedia.com. I want to answer the question: How are these well-known new media or Internet personalities changing the face of media? What are they doing to “flip the media”, as we say in the MCDM program? Generally, I will ask the same three questions of each person interviewed. So, as you read below, you will be able to see what those questions will regularly cover. My first subject is Drew Curtis, founder of the popular on-line news aggregator FARK.com.

Image from NPR.org

Drew Curtis is the creator of the on-line news headline aggregation and social news sharing site FARK.com. According to the site, Fark began in 1997 as a vanity site where Curtis posted an obnoxious but humorous picture of a well-endowed squirrel. I’ll say no more about the squirrel. In 1999, Curtis converted the site in to a place that readers could share news articles from across the web with one another. It was a way to get the news-consuming public to share perspectives and expose the often deplorable practice of journalists reporting “news” that simply doesn’t warrant the privilege of being called “news”. ‘Fark’ was a word Curtis coined to label the glut of sales and publicity-driven non-news that’s out there. Submitters to the site can re-write their own witty headlines and attach them to the articles they’ve linked, and forum threads for each article are established for people to leave commentary and engage in discussion. These threads themselves are often a hotbed of meme-centric content and image sharing as well as opinion-shaping commentary. Social media sites like Fark are changing not only the way people develop, share, and communicate opinions on topical subjects, but they’ve also proved the web’s power to help filter the real from the rubbish. As the site’s ‘About‘ page spells out, CNN and Fox News are two of the biggest corporate entities to traffic the site. Perhaps journalists at both of those networks are watching the things users of Fark are saying about the very stories they publish. Without a doubt, Fark has established itself as a major player in on-line journalism. Below are the three questions I sent Curtis, and his candid responses.

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Memes and the Brand Underground: Crossing the line from egoboo to real profit

October 30th, 2008

Rob Walker wrote an article about the brand underground in New York City for the NYT Magazine back in 2006.  It details how brands like aNYthing operating out of NY, which exist for the sole purpose and sake of being a brand, rather than having a branding initiative attached to an existing product, are emerging and how they’ve become viable business models.  As Walker rightly points out, we’re living in an age where emotional connections are being developed towards brands by consumers, in part due to the efforts of agencies and businesses to market their brands within certain social or cultural contexts that elicit those emotional connections.  He uses the example of certain fast food chains or beer bottlers and how they use iconography associated with so-called masculinity to develop emotional connections with their target demographics.  In other words, Joe the Consumer, who likes Miller Beer and Burger King, will associate certain male-centric imagery and messages with those products due to their respective branding, and feel empowered or supported in his personal idea of masculinity by consuming those burgers and beer.  So, in essence, the product existed before the branding and the branding was a means of pushing the product.

In stark contrast to that then we have brands like aNYthing, where the branding exists first and then the tangible goods are added to the mix.  Meaning, instead of Hanes tees, it’s Hanes tees with the aNYthing logo attached (although I don’t know who manufactures the goods in this case; that’s merely an example - and before you say, “hey, wait, brands like Nike push tees with their logo on it”, I will point out that in those cases the tee itself represents a product that existed first and is therefore selling an overall image associated with those pre-existing products, e.g., sports and athletic apparel/equipment).  With an underground movement like aNYthing, you create the brand then find ways to exploit it.  In that, it becomes adaptable to any number of durable goods or services.

So what is the strength of the brand, what makes it sell, and what the heck am I getting at in that headline about memes and egoboo? Read the rest of this entry »

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Intuition in interaction design: Project Inkwell

October 30th, 2008

If you possess intuition on a matter, it’s supposed to mean that you instinctively know something without having to apply a rationale.  IDEO, a hugely successful design firm in Silicon Valley, tries to design products that naturally apply user intuition.  I would say this is largely what makes them successful - they’re building products that don’t require a great deal of instruction to use.  Let’s take a look at one of their concepts currently being promoted on their website: Project Inkwell.

Project Inkwell is basically a concept for a highly mobile device that would enable learning anytime, anywhere, for kids grades K-12.  The prototype you see above is called the Spark.  It looks like it falls somewhere between laptop computer and smartphone, and it’s about the size of a small handbag or purse.

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The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3: How design makes them successful (or not) as brands

October 23rd, 2008

Shelley Armstrong, Interaction Design Manager at the Microsoft Design Center, spoke to my fellow students and I last week in our interaction design class.  She talked about the process of designing the look, the packaging and the “overall cohesive aesthetic” of the Xbox 360 (see Microsoft design center - our people for more).  She detailed the process of defining your problem (such as, make everything relative to Xbox’s design completely cohesive) and then the cyclical process of designing, prototyping, and evaluating a product until you can finalize it.  It was interesting to hear her story of taking on huge tasks from humble beginnings, where she began designing the dash for Xbox by herself to eventually growing and leading a major team through two console launches.

Armstrong worked on guiding the Xbox brand’s design through the entire production process to maintain uniformity.  Some of the insights that were shared by Armstrong with the class about her approach to even the most finite details of the Xbox packaging, even, are applicable to John Maeda’s ten laws of simplicity.  (If you’re not familiar with Maeda’s work out of MIT, please visit the Laws of Simplicity website.)  Armstrong, for example, spoke about dealing with the preponderance of warning text that would be found on plastic wrapping inside packaging, which results from having to duplicate choke hazard messages in multiple languages.  This was the initial result of choosing a certain type of font, in fact, which actually increased the amount of material that would have to be printed.  Here, in her attempt to follow law 2, or organize (in this case, keeping everything together with a common typography), she learned from law 9 it seems, failure - some things can never be made simple (or, to stretch, let’s say simpler here, in that it would be simpler to keep everything uniform to one type of font, in an ideal world).

Armstrong also spoke about how designing for one space is not the same as designing for another.  Here I will talk about how the brand design presents itself in two areas to illustrate this point.  Although both the Xbox website, available in web browsers of course, and the Xbox Live experience only available on the Xbox console are both navigable, thus lending themselves to what I thought would be similar designs, it turns out that the needs and uses of both spaces were different, and the design is not that similar.  Web users are looking for certain information, whereas the console has a contained environment that allows the user a different navigation experience to access the content they are looking for.  Nonetheless, the design aesthetic remains constant.  The brand is king as will be shown below.

For further illustration, just compare the Xbox Live website to the Xbox Live console experience:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live … hit that link for the first look, then take a look at this screenshot of the console:

While both look very different, both have a uniform aesthetic in colors, typography, and iconography.  They exhibit a cohesive look in keeping with the Xbox brand.

Enter Playstation 3.  The PS3 is another robust brand that offers a console network experience and a web presence basically the same way Xbox does.  However, PS3 isn’t maintaining its aesthetic between their web presence and what is known as the Playstation Network on their console (specifically some of its components, not all, so in this case, the Playstation Store is referred to, comparable to Xbox Live’s Marketplace in many ways).  This represents a significant divergence from Xbox’s brand model which remains cohesive from screen to screen.  See below:

http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3 …for the web presence, which is very black in tone, and the…

… Playstation Store, which diverges from the color schematic.

I think what has made both the Xbox and the Playstation 3 successful in terms of branding in each camp, at least in general (according to my personal observations) in their television and other marketing, both brands, is that they both keep the brands’ colors and other aesthetic elements generally uniform between different spaces in which the brands each separatly exist.  However, one can see that there is apparently more of a need on Sony’s part to keep the Playstation web presence separate in look and feel from the console-based Playstation Network, which takes a stylistic turn when you get to the store, for instance.  This would lead one to lean in favor of the Xbox 360 as a more successfully designed brand than the Playstation 3 moniker.

References:

Microsoft design center - our people. Retrieved 10/23/2008, 2008, from http://www.microsoft.com/design/People/Detail.aspx?key=shelley

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Case Study Proposal: The Nintendo Wiimote, or Moving Towards Haptics and the Road to the Holodeck

October 23rd, 2008

I am storyteller, and story interests me like nothing else.  I’m interested in narratology.  I’m interested in drama.  I’m interested in the communication of perception, and vice versa, the perception of communication.  I’m interested in how we craft perception through narrative.  I’m interested in how we develop meaning through interaction.  How do we interact with cultural artifacts?  How are cultural artifacts representative of certain narratives?  What are some artifacts that invite interaction - interaction that inevitably generates new narrative?  Is consumption alone a form of narrative?  Is interaction the purest form of narrative?  How does the consumption of and interaction with culture define us, or, rather, how do we tell our stories through consumption and interaction?  And, above all, how can our interaction with tools and artifacts generate new narrative?  And on and on.

From Gizmodo (http://uk.gizmodo.com/2007/09/15/etchasketch_art_fetches_big_mo.html) (c) Newscom/Photshot. This toy, another cultural artifact, can be used to generate narrative, or, in this case, the re-creation of a different artifact, commoditized in a new form.

Retrieved from Gizmodo (c) Newscom/Photshot. This toy, another cultural artifact, can be used to generate narrative, or, in this case, the re-creation of a different artifact, commoditized in a new form.

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My Mormon Friend dot com… need help, get a mormon!

October 18th, 2008

What is MyMormonFriend.com, and who is “teh m0rm0n“?

Well, I’ll tell you. Early last year a friend of mine and I had the idea to develop a website and web campaign that would help promote one thing and one thing only: positive web videos about Mormons. Not videos about Mormonism, nor videos from the official Mormon church, but simply videos of great people doing great things, all of whom happen to be, well, Mormon. That’s what mymormonfriend.com is, a blog or video aggregator, essentially, highlighting these positive videos, wherever they may be found on-line.

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Pay for street parking with my cell phone? It’s more probable than you think

October 16th, 2008

In my COM 597 course at UW, aka ‘Theories and Practice of Interactive Media’, our Instructor, Carolina, challenged us students to contrast the interactive designs of two separate interactive spaces that essentially provide the same service. For example, one pair of students compared the websites (interactive spaces) of two different airlines, examining the sites’ interactive designs for differences that inculcate strengths or weaknesses in one or the other. Was one sleeker and more intuitive than the other? Was one easier to navigate? Was the information a user might need easily accessed? And so forth. After this, Carolina asked us to come up with an even more efficient design for the same kind of service within the same kind of interactive space.

My partner, Wei, and I took it upon ourselves to contrast the interactive designs of Seattle’s electronic street parking meters against traditional parking meters. How are these public service devices interactive spaces? Well, they both have screens or displays and controls that invite interaction in order to acquire their service (which service is not so much providing parking, in my opinion, but rather the service of NOT getting a parking ticket, but we all know that, wink wink). Then, Wei and I tried to come up with a way of creating a better design to acquire the parking privilege, but this time we were granted permission to ponder utilizing a new design space, the cell-phone.

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YouTube Audio Preview: is web communication actual “writing” or something else entirely?

October 10th, 2008

It’s generally held that teh intarweb pretty much separates itself from other media in that it’s a two-way street. I publish information in some corner of the web, you publish (as in, comment, vote, react, share, etc.) right back. Sure, “long ago” we had ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the paper, but now communication with those who publish information of any kind is taking place in a way planet Earth has pretty much never seen before.

So, the big questions that I am sure are being researched in the halls of academia today, especially in the field of linquistics, are probably these: How is the internet altering language?  How is the internet creating new words and new meanings, or even new languages, such as “AOL speak” (think the letters L-O-L, as in laugh out loud) or “1337 speak” (that’s the word “leet” - for example the 3’s are backwards E’s - as in, “elite internet user speak”, something only other nerds are supposed to understand)? Are typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors merely another way people are accepting written communication as the next evolution of the English language?  Is all this hurting or helping the English language? And so on and so forth.

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