I’ve had trouble putting my worries into words post-US election. Here’s my best attempt.
Context and Advertising: the Next Frontier
I haven’t updated in a while, due to plenty of interesting projects diverting my attention. One such project is working with my agency (VCCP)’s innovation team to cover and analyze in-house talks given by industry leaders in various tech-y fields. I thought I’d share an excerpt of my latest coverage on Spotify. You can see the article in full context here.
Let’s go!
Credibility and Crisis in Pseudonymous Communities
Last year, I did a Masters at the University of Oxford, studying at the Oxford Internet Institute. I focused on Credibility and Persuasion. My thesis has the oh so compelling name “Credibility and Crisis in Pseudonymous Communities.” I keep on intending to edit it for publication, but have yet to do so [edit: this was published as a chapter in “Establishing and Evaluating Digital Ethos and Online Credibility” in late 2016/early 2017]. As this is the case, I thought I’d put it out there.
Should you believe it? I’d say to take my results section with a grain of salt. The thesis was awarded a Distinction but had some pretty profound methodological limitations (I’m fairly sure the statistical models I used were not the optimal ones).
Fast Five over at VCCP Curious
Tash and I are going to be writing up Fast Five’s for VCCP Curious. Here’s the first one.
Content Marketing Ramble AKA Don’t Just Engage; Entertain
Given my job, I spend a lot of time looking at brand social channels. And a lot of the time, what I find feels lazy. By this, I don’t mean poorly made – often the content is actually quite well designed. What I mean is creatively lazy, a bit like checking a tick box off a list. Too often we’re just seeing the same block and tackle basics given a slightly different skin. Customer service efforts, giveaways, tutorials – these are all fine and necessary to an extent (I mean, it didn’t become the block and tackle for nothing) but when this is the totality of brand activity, in aggregate it begins feeling a bit stale.
This may in part be due to brand managers and agency people realising that people don’t really want to be their friends. From epic trolling efforts to platforms reducing brand post reach to placate users, one clear message rings out – people just want to be left alone. This is accepted to the point that incentives are nearly always talked about in social promotions; the default assumption is we’re going to have to twist a few arms to get the message across. When it comes to regular programming, brands often resort primarily to functional programming (how to’s, for instance), the logic being that it’s actually wanted and thus the branding is less offensive.
Is any of that thinking wrong? No. But it sure is limiting and not representative of everything that brands produce. That’s because some people recognise that there are more opportunities. I think some marketers can’t fathom why a coffee company would invest in 20 random crazy GIFs, a pizza chain would make a 6-second video about wizards, or a telecom would build a haunted house. They look at it all and just say, “Uh, why?”
The simplest way to describe it is this: the logic is the same as producing functional content. It’s giving people what they want, but instead of satisfying a functional need, it skews fantastical.
As a brand, the goal of social media advertising should just be to engage in conversations with customers. The bigger win is fuelling and informing the conversations they have with one another when the brand’s not even in the room (so to speak). Creatives should be aspiring the create content for brands that’s good enough to draw eyeballs on its own, funny enough to be shared, insightful, poignant, bizarre. We should just be trying to make things that are great, independent of context.
In a way, this aim brings social media marketing back into the remit of traditional advertising – seeking to populate pop culture. But the critical difference is that, unlike a TV spot or press ad, creatives have to assume that people won’t have the content shoved in front of them. Hell, customers will be doing anything they can to avoid it. So how are you going to draw them in?
It’s a high bar, but definitely the standard agencies and brands should hold their content to. Do the basics brilliantly, but go beyond that. Send a dude free falling from space, prototype stoner food en masse, lead social commentary, make a breathtaking film. Compete not with other brands, but with cinematographers, comedians, artists and sign your work instead of live in the middle of it. As for ROI, what you get out of it, well, that bit’s actually pretty simple: fame, consideration, and either solidified or adjusted brand positioning. Just like you’d get with a TV ad, but potentially even more effective if the customer is pulled in.
It’s a challenging task, sure. But it’s one that many brands are already rising to. Can yours afford to be left behind?
Don’t worry, we’re like you.
So, I’m not in the states right now, but this antismoking PSA apparently ran during the Grammys last night. For those who can’t be bothered to click the link, it’s a Tinder-themed music video urging young people to swipe left (aka reject) smokers. It’s an ad that’s got everything:
A girl group formed on the X factor;
YouTube stars;
Hashtags;
A Bound 2 reference;
An Azalea Banks rip off (itself arguably a Seapunk “rip off,” which, discussion for another time);
Junk food;
and an explosion transitioning into the end slate.
It is… a lot to take in. And not just for the reasons that pundits are identifying, namely the fact that anyone born after 1994 will find the content disorienting and potentially inaccessible. The target, after all, was born after 1994. It’s a video made to speak their language, which is a task in and of itself riddled with potential problems. Erik Oster of Adfreak (via Agencyspy) writes:
Between the myriad cameos from YouTube celebrities and references to Internet culture in general, the ad tries really hard to present anti-smoking sentiment as cool and smoking as a turn off. Of course, as has always been the problem with anti-smoking messaging to teens, this has the potential to backfire. While it may scare some into avoiding smoking so they can get some action, more rebellious teens may resent being so clearly targeted and light up anew.
So, fine, there’s that. That’s a problem, sure, fine. But not the problem I’d like to briefly discuss, which is, essentially, about cultural appropriation in an attempt to speak to appeal to a specific target.
I fucking love the agency that made this ad; they’re consistently responsible for great work. And don’t get me wrong, I understand (and don’t see anything inherently wrong with) strategy at play here. That’s almost the problem, that the strategy is so blindingly brazen that I can practically see the brief over the video itself. It’s essentially a series of sharable GIFs linked together, something meant to be shown as a package but also to be chopped up into bits and thrown about on Tumblr. If this is the goal, however, it might be best to create rather than “borrow” elements of the culture, a la this thing:
A borrowed look and feel does not a genuine article make. In fact, sometimes aesthetic has nothing to do with it; see the George Glass/”Skule” situation on tumblr. This is just random, broad application of fonts and backgrounds, without context or even real mimicry. And using so many of these cultural references so loosely has greater risks than simply putting off the target; it potentially makes the ones broadcasting the message look like sheep in wolves’ clothing. The effect is menacing instead of inviting, a “Don’t worry, we get you” delivered through far too sharp teeth.
I think that’s something that can be generalised to all audiences, not just teenagers. “Repackaging” cultural artefacts is not new, and is also not generally beloved. Surely not every ad can or will be a classic, but at the very least I’d assume we’d steer clear of certain tactics that are tried and untrue, so to speak.
There are ways to engage with specific audiences with ads and content that’s culturally resonant. It usually (but not always) involves producing brand new things that the audience would actually like to see. To stick to the youths, there’s a recent campaign by 180LA for HP that I thought incorporated the same type of Internet talent quite nicely and ultimately resulted in a socially valuable commodity, in this case a good music video. This isn’t to say that everything made for specific communities has to be driven and ultimately produced by group members, or that every campaign has to be a content campaign. It is to say that culture can’t just be ripped off. Doing so means you might end up with something… well, something like this.
Too Much Ads: Maintaining Delight vs Inspiring Fatigue
CES 2015 is happening in Las Vegas as we speak, and accompanying some cool new invention unveilings and generally bonkers tech demos, we’re being introduced to ad innovations. Like this one, from TapSense: wearable ads ready to run in a hyperlocal format.
This is tantamount to blasphemy in certain circles, but I tend to treat first forays into advertising on new platforms with a degree of skepticism. There are bragging rights associated with premiering an ad on a new platform – a far more sophisticated version of the “first!!1″s that at one point littered comment sections – with good reason; being able to master something new is impressive, worth talking about, and gets you attention in the greater ad community. But does it make these first movers effective, from an ROI standpoint or even from a creative standpoint? Well.
Now could be a time to rattle off a series of first movers on multiple platforms, from Facebook Poke’s first ad campaign to Twitter’s, but there’s little point in this. Primarily, it’s unfair to those who are brave enough to go first, as everyone else has a bit more time to figure out what’s what. It also distracts from the larger point I’d like to make, which pertains not to these first few to debut creative on new platforms but, instead, the dozens that immediately follow.
It is almost too easy to advertise these days. People are increasingly easy to target, reach, and re-approach/re-target. Correspondingly, the bar is set ever-higher for what work actually breaks through and captures attention. One way to do this, as has always been the case, is to throw money at a campaign. Louder = better, surely. But particularly as we start to enter more spaces that could genuinely interrupt people’s everyday life – geofenced text ads, for instance, or ads on Google Glass or wearables – this strategy seems shortsighted.
There’s a balance to be struck between maintaining delight and inspiring fatigue. Christopher Heine, in his coverage of TapSense’s wearable ad debut, correctly points out that the platform is ideal for direct response marketing efforts. These are coupons, buy-now-and-you’ll-get pitches, etc; effective, but highly recognizable as ads. While correctly deployed direct response may, in fact, thrill someone – an overheated mall shopper receiving a free soda on a hot day – incorrectly deployed direct response is likely to feel like spam. This is always a danger, but somehow feels more acute when content is being beamed directly to one’s wrist.
My gut reaction is that people will be more protective of wearables and more likely to view marketing missteps as unwelcome invasions, inspiring backlash like that against Facebook ads (but even more pronounced). When you’re reading a newspaper, you expect to see ads. Same as when you go online. But in such a new device category, such expectations may not exist and, consequently, ads may be received particularly poorly.
My hope is that advertisers, when considering how to approach dealing with devices that broadcast ads so intimately, move measuredly, balancing haste with a desire to figure out the best approach. By “best” I mean something that works for both company and consumer; something that’s measurable and meaningful; something that’s both creative and uncannily effective. There’s a chance that, with wearables, everyone will want in; customers who are frankly on the cutting edge of tech use will suddenly be bombarded with well-intentioned, quickly-crafted offers that, in aggregate, feel like some sort of advertising assault. Ideally, we’ll all balance our desire to be first with our respect for customers and our desire to put platforms to their best possible use. Doing so would spare customers the ad fatigue and agencies the headache of once again having to abandon a platform we accidentally ruin for ourselves.
Net Neutrality: To Rebrand or Not To Rebrand
Something interesting is happening on reddit that has the potential to impact the net neutrality debate. A California Congresswoman, Anna Eshoo, is running a contest on reddit to rebrand net neutrality. Here’s the video in which Congresswoman Eshoo outlines the task at hand, and here’s the primary thread where the contest is going on.
So let’s jump in. I have some preliminary thoughts. I spent some time writing about the pros and cons of using reddit for this sort of endeavor, but I worry that’s burying the lede (the writeup is tucked away at the close of this blog post). I’d like to focus instead on questioning Congresswoman Eshoo’s underlying assumption that net neutrality is the concept that needs rebranding.
Quick take: rapid cycling discourse and the state of popular debate
Part of this morning’s media feed was this article on detecting important things on the Internet (satire, of course). In it, Capitalization Practices, salacious slugs, sensationalism, and more are given their due in brief. It is not a revolutionary critique. It is, in fact, pretty passé. We have all already complained about clickbait, traced the history of clickbait, redefined clickbait, and told each other to shut up about complaining about clickbait. We conclude that there’s nothing new to see here.The conversation’s tired. The conversation’s done.
This seems to be the flow of a lot of contemporary populist criticism. Stage 1: Raise Concern. Stage 2: Interrogate Definition of Concern. Stage 3: Criticize Those Who Are Concerned (often noting that Nothing is New).
And then comes Stage 4, which is roughly Recede from Debate.
I harbor what I think are legitimate concerns about the rapidity of issue cycles and its effect on public memory, political and social discourse, and mechanisms of social control. In brief, if we allow our critique to be as thin, rapid-fire, and utterly predictable as it is today, we risk glossing over issues that deserve sustained, in-depth attention. In a world in which “thought pieces” about major events have to be online in less time than it takes to properly think and in which the success of publications and social clout of individuals is, in part, incumbent upon one’s ability to jump on the latest trend, we are encouraged to ask only the simple questions and shy away from less easily-digestible critiques. And since the world is a tremendously complex place, the reduction of ongoing issues to rapid-cycling soundbytes means that issues can continue, not even necessarily behind the scenes or obscured from view. In other words, an ADHD approach to what we, the public, espouse concern about degrades the quality of of our critique and the effectiveness of our complaints.
This isn’t really about the death of long-form so much as it is about the half-life of a contemporary crisis. We’re constantly moving on to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing because we can (really because the existing publishing, technological, and psychological/social structures we’re embedded in converge to encourage this type of behavior). Those who demonstrate sustained concern, or else revisit existing arguments articulated to their satisfaction, are maligned for their continued boo-hooing and told that their interpretation of an issue is insufficiently original or otherwise not worthwhile. At times, there may be some truth to these assertions; after all, those engaging in the conversation later have had a bit more time to mull things over. Nonetheless, it’s unfortunate that this is the direction our discussions so often take.
How to fix this, I don’t know. One might even argue that I contribute to the problem through my work. Ironically, I must be brief as I’m working on a longer response to a different issue, something that I fear will remove itself from public view before I’ve got around to it. It’s certainly easier to complain about the state of things than to propose actionable solutions, and I’d like to make sure that any that I might outline are carefully conceived. So we’ll leave this here for now. Proposals welcome in the comments.
“The Scourge of ‘Relatability'” and Social Media: A Quick Hypothesis
This is just a quick thought, based off of Rebecca Mead’s recent piece in the New Yorker on relatability. In it, she laments the contemporary use of the concept as a yardstick of artistic virtue (apparently Ira Glass recently criticized Shakespeare as being unrelatable, a fact that is so deliciously just so that I can’t begin to unpack it properly). From the concluding paragraph:
“To reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize–because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy–is our own failure. It’s a failure that has been dispiritingly sanctioned by the rise of ‘relatable.’ In creating a new word and embracing its self-involved implications, we have circumscribed our own critical capacities.”
I too would hope that people look outside a work’s inherent relatability–familiarity–when judging its merit. I assume that my vantage point is slightly different than Mead’s, however, and I come down differently on the “scourge” that is this word. Allow me to contribute an entirely armchair analysis.
An Actual Response to the Unskippable Pre-roll Ad
Have you seen this? It’s a little ditty slapped together by an agency in the states that’s designed, in part, to get people to ask you just that–no one straps a puppy to a bunch of wires and can say otherwise. Beyond the obvious sensationalist leanings, however, is a message from one ad agency to the wider ad and marketing community: we’re wasting our precious preroll time. Start being smarter about how you use it.
I’ve been asked by multiple people what I think of this thing. My answers have been non-committal and positive-ish. Literally, my answer to the friend who asked about this on Facebook was, “These people are correct, mostly. Or this statement is more true: they are correct for now.”
I recognize that the above is a classic copywriter move; say something that sounds smooth and clever but contains zero content. So I’m remedying that.
The Uncanny Valley of Brand Tweets
There’s a concept familiar to tech nerds and fans of sci-fi called the Uncanny Valley. It posits that, as robots become increasingly human, individuals will feel increasingly empathetic towards them. People’s reactions will be more and more positive. There comes, however, a point at which the likeness becomes too close for comfort; the just-more-than-barely human entity becomes repulsive and terrifying and remains so until it is engineered to become indistinguishable from humans again. The dip in positive reception of robots (or other designed entities) that fall between almost human and totally human is the uncanny valley. Here, a graph from an academic paper by Karl F. MacDorman on the topic:
This concept is what springs to mind when reading Kate Losse’s excellent piece in the New Inquiry about #weirdtwitter being co-opted by brand twitter feeds. She starts off by pulling up Denny’s feed, which I’ll admit caught my eye recently. To be blunt, it’s on point. Here are a few examples:
Losse’s thesis, essentially, is that this type of casual, on-meme tone traverses traditionally acceptable brand voice and transgresses a niche realm of digital communication. In doing so, a brand stands to yield significant positive feedback (as we’re unaccustomed to hearing brands in this way) while becoming, in Losse’s words, “cuter than any person” in its ageless hip-ness. Her concerns center primarily around power, resistance, and intimacy. Through conversing this way online, brands hedge in on the social capital of individuals and assert the fundamentally uneven power dynamic between corporations and consumers. In concluding, Losse writes:
“It isn’t enough for Denny’s to own the diners, it wants in on our alienation from power, capital, and adulthood too. While we giggle at corporate #weirdtwitter tweets, the corporate invulnerability that makes them easy to follow is also what makes their assumption of a human, familiar voice feel, despite our laughter and faves, cold and a bit pathological. Denny’s too wants to belong.”
While I primarily agree with Losse’s analysis, I think that this can more profitably be analyzed from a far simpler angle, namely the quest for brands to become more human.
Side Notes: Napkin Backs and Connected Life 2014
When I’m not writing about the Internet here or writing about the Internet for school, I’m working on creative projects and coming up with ideas for ads. Here’s a bit on two things I’ve been working on lately, with links to check them out.
Napkin Backs
I’ve come up with a bunch of ideas for brands that fit on the back of a napkin. Each has a blurb and strategic breakdown provided in the caption, but I held myself to the requirement that the meat of the concept needed to fit in the napkin-allotted space. You can check out the collection here: http://napkinbacks.tumblr.com/
Connected Life 2014
I’m on the Marketing, PR and Web team for Connected Life 2014, the first iteration of a student-run conference for emerging Internet research. It’s being held at the University of Oxford on June 12th, 2014. Registration is open, and we’re still accepting submissions for student presenters. Learn more here: http://connectedlife.oii.ox.ac.uk/
Articulating the Need: Where Identity Marketing Falls Flat
“Products for women should be engineered, designed, colored, cushioned, and patterned to actually fit women and what we want; our music, our movies, and every sound.” This is the statement, smilingly recited by three women over a jingly, tambourine-laden indie rock backdrop, that surrounds SkullCandy’s launch of “headphones fine tuned for women.” And by fine-tuned, they don’t just mean color-coordinated and resized for comfort: they mean scientifically engineered to cater to differences in women’s hearing. Oh rly?
I take issue with a number of things here. The first is somewhat low-hanging fruit that, given past highly-publicized kerfuffles, one might think companies would avoid; the manufacture of products for the finer sex when use and enjoyment of said products is not actually dependent on gender. I had not realized I needed to coordinate my chromosomes with my choice of headphone or that the androgynous set I’m currently rocking isn’t adequately serving the “cleaner bass and very natural sounding vocals that… ladies prefer.” Thank goodness someone’s got my lady-like auditory predispositions in mind!
But diatribe be damned; I’m, for better or for worse, very used to sexism-masquerading-as-gender-catering in marketing campaigns. I won’t add to the slew of articles bemoaning this phenomenon. Instead, I’ve got a much more specific bone to pick.
Full disclosure: I’m an ad woman through and through. I watch commercials on my computer and trawl the net for neat print ads and interesting interactive executions. I’ve encountered my fair share of aggressively anti-female advertising that Skullcandy doesn’t begin (and wouldn’t want) to hold a candle to, as well as insipid, veiled appeals to femininity that some might argue more insidiously reinforce notions of gender divides. Despite my transient residence in the ivory tower, my stance on these sorts of things is less ideological and more pragmatic. Segmenting a market and defining a product’s target audience in part by gender is, in my book, not so objectionable. I don’t think marketing to women is bad or wrong, nor do I believe that explicitly labeling things as “women’s” products is inherently problematic. Advertising is driven on emotions and fulfillment of desires and needs; one’s portfolio of wants can be impacted by gender or sex. Sometimes, appealing to that angle is the smart path to take.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to frame and phrase advertising. Exceptional production values aside, I think Skullcandy’s missing the mark. They’re close—so close—to knocking this thing out of the park, but there’s a tactical judgment they’ve made that has the potential to unravel the campaign altogether. What I’m referencing is the umbrella-strategy that undergirds the flowery patterns, exhortations to “#RAISEHELL,” and website callouts that read “you know you’re a dime”: identity marketing that explicitly articulates perceived beliefs of the target audience and, in doing so, reflects imagined needs and stances that may not align with what the target actually believes or wants.
Co-creation, Clients, and Consumers: The Case of the Evolving Advertising Industry
Haven’t posted in a while (don’t worry; there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff in the works). In the meantime, here’s a quick (well, not so quick) take on the evolving nature of working relationships in advertising and how digital connectivity is transforming their orientation and direction:
Uncertainty
A side effect of my swimming in literature surrounding certainty, verifiability, and credibility is my increasing fixation on the epistemically shaky terrain we occupy, whether we like it or not. So many reassurances, platitudes, and dog-eared truisms boil down to some type of formal or informal fallacy. As long as I resist miring myself in philosophical texts (at least until I’m through writing my thesis), I’m left cradling a humdrum, freshman year humanities student conclusion: there’s no way to be certain about anything, anyway.
I’ll resist diving into the series of arguments that place “truth” in the realm of social facts (though, in my opinion, this might be where the money’s at) and will spare you a relativistic rant. Instead, a different question: Is uncertainty so bad?
Data, Knowledge, and Knowing Through Data
We live in a world ruled by data in all realms, not just the scientific or mathematical but the political and the personal. This comes with both benefits and costs. The benefits are well known. The unprecedented access to evidence allows for more detailed analysis and more informed research, for instance. The costs, on the other hand, are typically tied to ethical problems raised by data collection regarding invasion of privacy, digital dossiers, and database misuse. The influx of data and our increasing willingness to turn to it, however, generates a more pernicious problem closely associated what makes our surplus of data so great. We erroneously assume data is equivalent to knowledge, and in doing so grossly overstate our ability to know.
In research, there is the notion of validity, or whether a particular metric accurately captures the phenomena one is trying to measure. One can descend into the infinite regress of precision, complaining that any measurement is insufficiently exact or is merely a proxy. In the name of every person’s sanity, we state at a certain point that enough is enough and carry on.
The same is generally true for data collection. We can’t subject the world to constant census, which is why we tend to settle for random and representative. Now, however, we have datasets that auto-generate and are, theoretically, comprehensive. We can draw better conclusions because we have the whole “population”. Auto-generated datasets exist about very significant things. Metadata can paint quite the picture when used alone. Gain access to social media profiles, though, or credit card statements, browser histories–what can’t we prove?
This may be a less relevant question than one is led to believe, or its inverse might be more apropos. What can we prove? The issue of validity remains: are our data points truly tethered to the phenomena we’re investigating, or are they ineffective proxies? Further, what is the consequence of assuming all this data amounts to proof?
A data-centric culture asserts that things exist absolutely and can be known and proven. It therefore assumes a number of binary distinctions are at play, “objectively true” or “objectively not true” being the most important one. This has two consequences. First, our ability to “prove” leads to a desire to prove more, and our need for data continually increases. Helen Nissenbaum, in “Privacy in Context,” puts this best: our faith in information generates an “unquenchable thirst that can only be slaked by more information, fueling information-seeking behaviors of great ingenuity backed by determined and tenacious hoarding of its lodes.” Second, the focus on data distracts from those drawing conclusions from it, who remain not only intimately involved but ultimately at the wheel. Having access to evidence is good, but we can’t forget that data doesn’t tell stories. The people who analyze it do.
At a macro level, when we talk about data and information and knowledge, we tend to utilize a hierarchy. Data constitute the raw material. Information, perhaps, is what can be constructed from these elements, and knowledge is a type of “end” product that results from interpretation. From this vantage point, it’s clear that each transition is a level of abstraction–necessary, perhaps, to derive meaning from white noise, but abstraction nonetheless. The very act of negotiating an abstraction, however, involves intention, agency, and angle. There is a pattern one is seeking out or a finding one wants to reinforce. Thus, embedded within the generation of knowledge from data are junctures at which perspective must be injected in order for analysis to continue, flipping the premise of data-as-unquestionable-proof on its head by virtue of its fundamental reliance on subjectivity.
Many recognize, as I do, the obnoxious intellectual high ground occupied by critique and its status as a dead end for generativity (unless we critique the critique… of the critique). So let me be clear–I don’t think data is bad. I am not opposed to data, or big data, or the use of big data to draw conclusions. I merely want to stress that simply having access to data doesn’t solve for everything. We should not assume that data is knowledge, or more importantly that our analysis of data is necessarily proof. There are implications, of course, beyond pedantic discussions of the nature of “proof” and the subjectivity of analysis. Nissenbaum, again in “Privacy in Context,” points out that our interest in data is not new, but that the efficient, automated, and impersonal nature of its collection is. A real issue with data analysis–one entirely separate from the dilemma addressed here–is information and identity security, which are inherently threatened by the collection of data itself. Before aggregating data, then, we ought to consider just how much we’ll really be able to learn–and whether it’s worth it.
Rough Consensus
While at the Oxford Internet Institute, I’m running the department’s graduate blog. We’ve just started posting again, but there’s sure to be all manner of interesting material. Head on over to http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/roughconsensus/ to read entries from past students and members of the current cohort; it’ll be updated at least twice a week for the rest of the year with some sort of musing re:the Internet.
Open Question: Is There Self-Defeat in Deconstruction?
I’m struggling with the following regarding the nature of research. If you, friend, stumble across this blog post and have a point of view, please share.
Some may argue deconstruction is only useful in so far as it promotes progress or suggests movement. Rigorous dissection of each and every thing renders itself counterproductive as we parse our way down to the neutrons and electrons. These same individuals might well argue that systems exist, in part, to endow clarity. Their very utility is the establishment of a common language that allows a range of participants to navigate with relative assuredness.
The level of discordance, then, within the qualitative research community is flummoxing. It’s not particularly surprising that individuals from different disciplines might disagree, but the level of analysis–and disagreement–presented in the introduction to The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research seems almost paralyzing at times. To argue, as the authors state Jan Morse does, that evidence cannot be collected (as there is no objective reality to collect) and must always be constructed is fair enough. Positioned as a criticism hurled in from the side lines, it’ll do. Integrated within a family of sciences that put a premium on rigorously collected data that stands muster to tests of internal and external validity, however, it’s almost too at odds, at which point one wonders whether the two aren’t better off playing in different sandboxes, which all parties claim isn’t the point.
We can extrapolate that these arguments aren’t idle. We presume the passion stems from a desire to do the job right, as it were. A necessary component of this must be, of course, the capture and subsequent sharing of findings, at a minimum to the academic community but in theory to the less ivory-ensconced “public at large” (though I suspect this, too, is up for debate). To the extent, then, that qualitative researchers continue to argue about the substrates of research, the relevant epistemology and ontology and nuances in interpretation, should it not be in pursuit of some semblance of agreement or unification? In other words, I’m all for the celebration of a multiplicity of realities and subjective experiences, but at some level shouldn’t coherence be the goal?
internet vs Internet and Internet Exceptionalism
In revising for exams, I keep on stumbling up against what seems like a relatively minor inconsistency: the capitalization of the word “Internet.” Some scholars do, some scholars don’t. After pouring over enough articles, the voice in the back of my head piped up loud enough and yelled, “Which one is right!?”
Now, if you’re a writer who’s friends with a sufficient number of grammar snobs, these things become hardwired into your internal style guide. I’ve been rapped on the knuckles enough to default to “Internet” with a capital “I”. A quick visit to the Wikipedia page on this issue reveals, however, that there’s actually a bit of a debate (yes, yes, I know, I’m citing Wikipedia. I’m aware this isn’t really legitimate, but aren’t you surprised that there’s a page on this? So leave me alone). The New York Times, Chicago Manual of Style, and AP swear by the capital letter. The Guardian, the Economist, and Wired do not.
You could argue that this is trivial. Since I’m writing about it, I clearly believe the contrary. Don’t worry–there is, in fact, a reason why. Wired put out an explanation of their decision to de-capitalize “internet” in 2004 (along with “web” and “net”). The logic put forth by Tony Long, copyeditor of Wired, is this: Continue reading
Modern Hoaxes, Sensationalism, and the Internet Press
Last week, the Internet was treated to a fun little feud between Elan Gale, random Internet stranger/reality TV producer, and an unpleasant woman on a plane. Of course, the whole thing was a hoax. Read any of these articles if you’d like more background. Or just peep at the image below to see Gale’s big reveal.
So, Gale lied. The Internet is full of lies. Lies, lies, lies. This is one lie, however, that received significant coverage. Gale’s Twitter feud got a lot of attention, notably on Buzzfeed and similar sites. David Weigel, over at Slate, has written a concise reaction to the repeated coverage of what turn out to be scams, from the recent homophobic receipt gambit to various late night comedians releasing viral videos into the wild. He concludes with the following:
“This is fairly messed up. Yes, people on the Internet want to believe salacious stories. Reporters want to publish stories that people read. If there’s a great reward, and little downside, to be had in publishing B.S., the Internet’s going to get more B.S. As one of my colleagues put it, “‘Too good to check’ used to be a warning to newspaper editors not to jump on bullshit stories. Now it’s a business model.”
I think Weigel’s on the right track, here. Many people (myself included) have written about or spoken on the messy state of Internet publishing incentives and the strain that aggregators of user-generated content can put on traditional news providers. Where Weigel is wrong, unfortunately, is in asserting that today’s state of affairs is new. Our repeated covering and debunking of hoaxes isn’t the problem; it’s a symptom. What we’re seeing is just one element of a publishing scheme as old as time (or the late 1800’s, at any rate), one that’s once again proving incredibly lucrative and is worth being aware of when we choose to click.
This Week’s Internet Dating Thought Piece: Lulu
The Internet is a great, pervy equalizer in that it allows anyone and everyone to judge people and rate their sexual attractiveness from afar. From the questionably wholesome OkCupid to the down-to-business Grindr to the friend/location-gated Tinder to my all-time-favorite super creepy crazily named app “Girls Around Me,” it’s variations on a theme. These are just more ways to look a pictures of hot strangers and avoid hooking up with someone who’s making a woman suit at home. You know, the basics.
Of course, we must concede that these platforms can only be so effective. It’s an open secret that people tailor their social media profiles to seem as appealing as possible, accuracy sometimes taking a back seat. You can more easily manipulate perceptions or flat out lie when your you-ness is mediated by a set of screens. And though researchers have suggested that these deceptions are usually pretty minor (adding an inch or two to one’s height as opposed to, say, a history of being a fighter jet pilot)*, we’ve all heard our fair share of online dating horror stories in which a profile definitely did not match the person. Let’s be real. No matter what apps we make to reassure ourselves, we’re always still rolling the dice.
Some dating platforms eschew any premise of providing “the full picture.” Location-based dating apps, for example, aren’t really designed for getting to know someone in any other way than the biblical sense. But I’m always curious about those communities, apps, and platforms that promise to either deliver a more appealing specimen (like the eyebrow-raising BeautifulPeople.com) or else claim to let you know what people are really like. I approach these with a stifling cynicism or healthy skepticism, depending on your thoughts about online dating. I think it’s fun to look at these platforms and ask, “What’s your game, friend?” Because typically, the game is interesting or at least kind of weird.
Setting criteria for sharable culture (brain sketches)
This isn’t bonafide theory. It’s just a little thought exercise I’ve been tossing around for the last twenty minutes. Barreling on:
A few decades ago, Alvin Goldman proposed a set of secondary epistemic criteria–what he terms “veritistic” or truth-linked standards–which one can use to appraise the epistemic value of a particular social institution. I’d written out a definition for each, but Paul Thagard has done it much better. Roughly paraphrasing, then, these criteria are:
- Reliability, or the ratio of truths to total number of beliefs fostered;
- Power, or the ability to help cognizers find true answers (a sort of “how much knowledge can I acquire”; think of exponents, if that’s useful);
- Fecundity, or the ability to lead to large numbers of true beliefs for many people;
- Speed, or how quickly knowledge is acquired; and
- Efficiency, or how well a source or practice limits the cost of getting true answers.
This is a nice sort of way to evaluate the epistemic worth of Wikipedia, which is the context within which I first came across Goldman’s neat little set. Here, compared to a traditional encyclopedia, we trade off reduced reliability for increased, power, fecundity, speed, and efficiency. Don Fallis argues, in fact, that Wikipedia might not be so unreliable at all, detailing the sort of verification processes that articles are subject to and that contributors could be subject to, should someone causally perusing an article desire.
These five criteria also create an interesting prism through which to view the participatory memetic culture of the web as a whole. Taking each as being important for reasons other than epistemic, we can imagine a sort of sorting system that the web applies to symbols and goods, or alternatively a handy dandy guide to web content creation.
Search Engines and Gatekeeping
I wrote an essay on search engines and gatekeeping last night. It’s a little more dense than what I’d typically post, but if you’ve got a few minutes and want to learn about just one of the ways that things on the Internet are not as they seem give it a gander.
Internet and Babies
Quick question: why is it okay for me to look at other people’s babies on the Internet?
Probably necessary context: I use my phone a whole hell of a lot. My morning rounds, so to speak, involve a quick stop on my most-used social networks. This includes Instagram. I, like many users, follow some accounts not because of my connection with the user but due to my interest in the content that they publish. My enduring love of bento boxes (yes, I know. Enough already.) has resulted in my feed becoming littered with adorable little lunches and, increasingly, with photos of the children who will be eating them. So on any given morning, one of the first things I’ll end up doing is looking a pictures of children that I do not know.
In one sense, this is not as strange as one might think. After all, there are a number of toddlers who are Instagram celebrities of sorts, and at least one account with over 1 million followers dedicated to the street style of the pre-school set (the Sartorialist for tots, if you will). There are people all over the world who look at random adorable children on an on-going basis. Some Instagram accounts have a sophisticated editorial style and marketing strategy, the pet project of various lifestyle professionals with little ones in tow. Others, not so much. There’s one account (responsible for the image above) that’s solely pictures and videos of a Japanese baby and a cat. No end game that I’m aware of. Just baby + cat. Baby + cat that you can check in on on a daily basis.
The Stickiness of Subjectivity
Lately, I’ve been getting trapped in my thoughts. It’s a really nerdy version of the Life Alert commercial from the 80’s, but it’s my brain instead of the old woman screaming “I’ve fallen! And I can’t get up!”
Most mornings, as I’m making my breakfast at an ungodly hour, I start to think about my thesis topic: knowledge and persuasion on the Internet. Why do people believe certain things they find online? Is it the structure of the content? The environment in which the content is presented? The content itself? Some other variable I haven’t identified? Can these conditions be manipulated? Are these the relevant conditions? How do people come to believe things in general? Is it so different from what guides belief development on the web (and why/why not)? What does it mean to “believe” something (and, for that matter, to believe in something)? Do those who “believe” the right things fare better in life, and does the conclusion apply to all types of things? In some cases, does it really matter if we “believe” something but the inverse is true? What defines “true”? Who defines “true”? What is true? What is truth? What is? Cut to me repeatedly smashing my fist into my cereal and sobbing unconsolably as soy milk splatters on the ceiling.
Drilling down to the logical root of a question is important. The above paragraph is just doing that along a specific trajectory of inquiry. Know what else it is? Something that resembles the ramblings of a stoned sophomore sinking his hand into a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos (“What is? No, think about it, think about it–what. is?“), or else the internal monologue of a Starbucks panhandler who may or may not have a collection of tin foil hats. It’s simultaneously spacey and frenetic. It sounds a little unhinged.
I’m being harsh. I recognize, though, the futility of this exercise, something that stems from the delightfully flummoxing nature of subjectivity. Let’s just take one of the questions in the chain: What does it mean to “believe” something? Ask a lawyer, a make-up artist, a philosopher, a sociologist, a priest, a psychologist, a neuroscientist, a historian, a photographer, a politician, a teacher, and–oh, God–a writer this question, and you’ll get unique answers that complement and converge as much as they utterly depart from one another. For some, a response would come accompanied by a minor fumble for a reply or incredulity at the very query. These types of broad interdisciplinary questions are a bit like alphabet soup: tasty, if not ultimately fulfilling, and not entertained very often by most adults. Also, a little high in sodium.
So what? Subjectivity is the spice of intellectual life (a statement up for debate–and isn’t that lovely). No matter how often I pit explanations against each other in a weird-o gladiatorial fight to the death, no universally-championed victor will emerge. Likewise, there will be no critical hits, though plenty of injuries depending on one’s perspective. I have to reconcile myself to eventually hand-selecting a set of solutions for the sake of my own sanity, but the universe of possible answers will remain. And it will proliferate.
There’s no easy escape from mental quicksand. Any attempt to catapult myself out will result in me being sucked back in. Not to say that resistance is futile; rather, the way out is hand over hand, article over article, slowly but surely pulling myself out of the muck. Hey, who said grad school at Oxford wasn’t glamorous?
Is Content King?
Another day, another article about content marketing and brand-as-publisher, this time from Sam Slaughter at Contently (via Adweek). He argues that the content that a brand produces needs to be genuine and good. SHOCKING.
Here’s an excerpt, which comes after a paragraph that acknowledges and then accepts the premise that “content is truly king”:
“Broken down to their core elements, every brand’s content aim is actually the same: creating positive connections with its customers and potential customers. And accomplishing that is deceptively simple —give the user something compelling and of value that they can associate with the brand. Whether that’s a story that informs and helps drive decisions, or simply something that brings them delight….. Cutting corners here creates cheap brand publishing, makes for a lousy story and, by extension, the perception of a brand that doesn’t care.”
1) Good lord. Is there still really any confusion about this? Or, rather: I can’t believe there’s still any confusion about this. If you’re choosing content marketing as a content strategy, for the love of God, make sure that your content is good. Not “good” in a way that causes the brand manager of your luxury dish soap client to exclaim “Nice use of our value proposition!” (necessarily), but in a way that your target audience will see, appreciate, and link with your brand in some valuable way. Don’t stop at good; make sure it’s also genuinely, believably attached to your brand. This last part is key, and is why getting your college intern to slap together a listicle or find cute pictures of cats looking sad probably won’t cut it, either. If content shouldn’t be coming from your brand, people won’t ignore it; they’ll notice it, and then be bitter or annoyed that you put it in front of them. Be good and be genuine.
So, yes. Slaughter’s right. There’s a part of this that is, in fact, incredibly simple. Of course, there are other things to consider, which leads me to…
2) Is content really king?
Throw back – New York University Senior Thesis
I just noticed my senior thesis evaporated into the ether online. You can read it here. This is back from my days at NYU–circa 2011–so it’s a bit out of date, but none the less worth putting online. Please note the heinous design of my system at the end. On principle, it’s fine. It’s just clear evidence that I’m at my best when I’m working with a really, really good designer.
While we’re at it, here’s a video of the talk I gave as a result of said thesis work.
Oh, Internet.
A not-so-quick reflection on some reading
Classes start tomorrow, and because I’m responsible (or at the very least masquerading as such), I’m reviewing various readings. So forgive the highly specific musing on mediated environments and identity formation that’s about to tumble out here:
A text by John Thompson* we’re consulting for one of my courses includes a series of arguments rooted in hermeneutics (not a problem, in my opinion, but it’s–HAH–some nice context. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I have just face-planted into geekdom harder than ever before). These begin with the notion that identity construction is an active and self-reflexive process in which individuals are continually redefining who they are by drawing upon and incorporating the various symbolic resources they have handy. More plainly put, we are perpetually defining ourselves within the context of the culture, information, artifacts, and individuals we have access to; identity is flexible, in this sense, as it’s sensitive to new ideas and options. Identity formation is also (perhaps semi-subconsciously) self-directed. Let me bring in a useful quote from the author: “We are the unofficial biographers of ourselves, for it is only by constructing a story, however loosely strung together, that we are able to form a sense of who we are and what our future might be” (Thompson 210).
It’s a cool sort of thought, and one that is highly appealing to me as a writer-cum-branding nerd. But never mind that. I’m here because of the Internet! What does this have to do with the Internet? Well, as Thompson points out, the proliferation of media and digital networks inevitably leads to an expanded vocabulary of symbolic forms to consult and evaluate. This is helpful, in one sense, because we’re presented additional resources to draw upon when constructing our identity. One might argue that through this we gain a tad bit more agency when it comes to the definition of our “true self.” Of course, we’re also subjected to a battery of information and ideas like never before, which forces us to re-evaluate and reconsider and re-broadcast the self at a rate that’s unprecedented, sometimes with negative consequences.
Trees for the forest
I’ve been forgetting I’m at Oxford, sometimes.
It’s kind of silly. One would assume that that’s not the sort of thing that one forgets. Forgive the muddled sentence construction; the statement is wrong, anyway, so we can write the whole thing off. There’s so much to do and see here, but there’s also the matter of making proper meals with an induction hob and getting to yoga. It’s sometimes hard to look up and out and around.
My day to day goes against the grain of the environment. I’m studying the Internet as opposed to, say, ancient texts or British history or something, and I’m in the middle of writing a novel set in New York. Trying to conjure up what the floor looks like in the back yard of Mud Coffee or speed-watching the Ron Burgundy Chevy ads made by W+K doesn’t take advantage of being here–or it does, but not the “here-ness”, if that makes any sense. I’ve got such richness and texture at my finger tips. I have to remember to grab it while I’ve got a chance, lest the absurdity of all this get away from me.
Formal Place Card
Things are very official here.
First, Do No Harm.
On Tuesday, I attended the public launch of the OxIS 2013 report. OxIS–Oxford Internet Survey–reports have been published biennially since 2003, each shedding light on the Internet and how it is used in Great Britain. This particular iteration focused on, among other things, what lead researchers William H. Dutton and Grant Blank call the five cultures of the Internet, each of which is characterized by a series of attitudes and practices of Internet use. There’s also a lot about next generation usage and general patterns of digital media consumption across the UK. It’s fascinating and free to read, so take a gander at this report and others if you’re so inclined.
The event was a venue for commentary from a number of brilliant researchers and media professionals. What I started to think on stemmed off of a few remarks made by Holly Goodier of the BBC. One of Goodier’s responses to the OxIS report was a request for research that leaned more qualitative than quantitative (though she acknowledged how tricky that is in this area) so as to more accurately capture the public’s experiences of and with the Internet. This information, as well as the more nuts and bolts quantitative analysis, ought to yield a more richly illustrated understanding of the attitudes of Internet users (and non-users) and patterns of usage, facilitating the development of more effective and appealing content and interfaces tailored to each “culture” or audience.
I don’t take issue with any of that; in fact, I think that Goodier is spot on. We need both qualitative and quantitative assessments of use to improve what media professionals develop, which are either goods and services or interventions, depending on your view point. That this was brought up in a talk about attitudes about technology, however, raised a few red flags (if not red, maybe orange. Pink. Brightly colored, at any rate). Anecdotally speaking, those who work in media and tech tend to have more positive attitudes toward the development and dissemination of various technologies, particularly the Internet. Certainly tech evangelists are at the forefront of the field–and rightfully so. I mean, shouldn’t the people leading the herd believe in what they’re working on? Nonetheless, the following issue becomes apparent: given research like the OxIS reports (plus work being done by BJ Fogg, Jonah Berger, etc), those who feel positively about technology are able to develop more appealing and effective products for a variety of audiences whose bias may or may not be receptive. The ethical question is: should they?
Molehills
The Sriracha I’ve bought at the Tesco down the block doesn’t taste quite right. In the US, Sriracha has straightforward, garlic-y zing. In the UK, some of the herbs and spices seem to have been substituted with sugars. Maybe the company that produces Sriracha is catering to the local palate. Maybe hot sauce doesn’t ship that well cross-continentally. Maybe it’s all in my head. I don’t know. All I can say is: the Sriracha here is really, really sweet. It’s not as good with omelets and I am not a fan.
The last time I lived abroad, I faced different dilemmas. When I deplaned in Buenos Aires, my entire Spanish vocabulary consisted of a hand full of sauces one can eat on a burrito, “no entiendo,” and “no hablo español.” Of course, I had the major benefit of my Spanish-speaking then-boyfriend having set up shop a month before. When he wasn’t around, though, the day to day was difficult. The cultural mismatch was pretty pronounced and the language barrier was a perpetual problem even after I’d nailed conversational Spanish down. My strange little mind mangles “Sorry about my Spanish” into the almost incomprehensible “Disculpame; español no es la lengua de mí patria” or “Please forgive me; Spanish is not the language of my homeland,” which, like, come on. To make matters worse, my tendency to chatter away in little loops of humor (conversational crutch numero uno) didn’t translate. At all. In Spanish, I’m not funny. I’m just fucking awkward. When the time came, a large part of me was happy to head home.
That’s not a problem here. In fact, there aren’t really any problems. I’m settling in swimmingly. Sure, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a North American, but so what? Oxford is quite different, and that’s exciting. I’m the type, though, to get very tangled in my head (to try to, almost, when there’s simply no need), and without any major roadblocks I’m getting stuck on the little things. Why do I have to bring my own towel to the gym? What’s up with the peanut butter? Why oh why is bourbon roughly three times the price here, and who decided that Jack Daniels could or should be considered premium? These are things that mostly don’t matter, like the Sriracha or the power outlets or the lack of exclamation points in emails. We’re not dealing with a mountain here so much as slightly uneven topography. Guess I shouldn’t wear heels.
Arrived!
I’m here! I’m in Oxford!
I flew out on Sunday evening and arrived, inexplicably alert, on Monday morning. I was anticipating being plagued by a brutal case of jet lag, but instead found myself running/walking around the city until past midnight. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but whatever–I’m here.
First impressions:
- Oxford is simultaneously quite big and quite small. I’m housed up in Summertown, which is north of the city center by about two miles. It’s a 1.5 mile walk from my home to my department. In New York City, this would be no thing. Somehow, in Oxford, this seems like quite.a.thing.
- There are so many North Americans. Not that I have a problem with North Americans, of course, but we’ve really overrun the place. It’s absurd. In my cohort, there are eight or nine (if I’m counting correctly) Canadians and citizens of the United States. That’s out of a total of 23 or 24 candidates. There are five people who’ll be living in my flat; out of the three who’ve arrived (myself included), two are from the US. So much North America.
- Everyone is friendly! There is minimal avarice! Thank god. I’ve hung out with a number of people from my department, now, and not a one of them has demonstrated any of the bizzaro competitive traits I assumed would riddle anyone trying to obtain a degree here. It could be that the tales of Harvard students shredding their classmates’ notes and engaging in other aggressive acts of sabotage that had me unnecessarily freaked out, and that the pressure cooker personalities I anticipated are more commonly encountered in undergraduate populations. All I really care about is not having to deal with that, and it appears that I won’t have to. A+ gold star thumbs up hugs all around.
- When the graduate accommodation people informed me I’d have a sink in my room, they really, truly meant a sink. Not a private restroom. A sink. Like, a sink in my closet. So, there’s that.
There will be more, of course, that I’ll report back on. To be honest, even though I’ve met dozens of lovely people and have already managed to knock over things in multiple grocery stores (resulting in one clerk reassuring me with, “Don’t worry. It’ll get better.” Yikes), I’ve barely had time to catch my breath. Later today, likely, I’ll write something up on the OxIS event I attended yesterday and my thoughts on one point brought up in the panel discussion, but for now I’m off to try to figure out how to cook on the perplexing burner in my shared kitchen.
reddit is on the case
This morning, shots were fired at the Washington Navy Yard. My standard media mix has been humming with activity, updates, and coverage from the scene. And as distressing as news about this sort of thing normally is, my anxiety unexpectedly peaked when I saw the following phrase on Gawker’s afternoon recap: Reddit [sic] is already on the case.
Don’t get me wrong. reddit and I are a-okay. But even the most loyal redditor can concede that, as a collective, reddit doesn’t handle crisis super well. The sheer volume of users and frequency of posts means things can spiral out of control very, very quickly, and the rapidity of the “fact-finding,” lack of discipline surrounding reporting personal or sensitive information, and broadcast power of the Internet can lead to terrible consequences (see Sunil Tripathi and the Boston Marathon bombings; in fact, read this NYTimes article if you’re so inclined).
As Motherboard and countless others have already pointed out, this isn’t a problem unique to reddit; other social networks can generate the same sort of fervor and bonafide journalists and journalism institutions aren’t immune to trigger-happy reportage. The Internet makes verification and keeping up tricky for everyone. But reddit is, in fact, markedly different from other major social networks. It’s certainly different from broadcast networks. And it’s these differences that can create the sort of trouble I fear when I hear that reddit’s on the job.
Impostor Syndrome
I’m drawn to diagnosis (forgive me; I’m the child of a psychologist), and there’s one that’s weighed heavily on me for days/weeks/months now: impostor syndrome.
Impostor syndrome is very much what it sounds like. It’s the sensation that one is pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, that one’s a fraud, a charlatan, a–yes–impostor. A person with impostor syndrome isn’t able to effectively internalize success, instead dismissing each achievement as the result of a cosmic quirk or fluke. Possession isn’t nine tenths of the law here; it’s accident. As in, my successes aren’t really mine. I’m just lucky enough to have them.
Shocker: impostor syndrome is very commonly associated with academics and, specifically, graduate students. It’s heavily pronounced in me. I’m so goddamn unsure of the whole thing that I avoid identifying my future alma mater unless I feel like I have to do so, instead giving vague statements about traveling to the UK and dancing around the name of my specific program.
Those who know me well are familiar with my particular brand of neuroses and cognitive dissonance. I oscillate between utter seriousness and complete silliness, swing from fast-paced snark and sarcasm to embarrassing levels of earnestness, and seem unable to fully reconcile an irrepressible cockiness with my paralyzing humility. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I obviously do. I’ve worked hard and I deserve this, yet I so clearly don’t. It’s a tedious game of psychological ping pong, and rather than play to win, I just want both sides to get bored of the whole thing and go out for ice cream, or something.
Because to some extent, impostor syndrome is a distraction. It’s something to focus on other than bank accounts, visa hiccups, surprise emergency oral surgery (in four hours!), and required reading. Deservedness is decidedly beside the point. In twenty days, I’ll be dropping my suitcases in a dorm room and rushing full speed ahead into coursework and formals and all that there is to being a postgraduate. Intellectual credentials and CV will not be checked at the door.
So the question really isn’t: how did I manage to con them into letting me in?!
The question must be: what am I going to do about it?
Why I’m Going to Oxford
I don’t give people serious answers on what I’ll be studying at Oxford. Most often, I just say “THE INTERNET” and make a crazed face and talk about sorcery and majik and whatever. There is a reason I’m plunking down cash and hopping the Atlantic, though. It’s roughly as follows. Apologies for the length.
There are these things called memes. You may be familiar with them. They are “I Can Haz Cheezeburger?” They are “U mad, bro?” and the Me Gusta face and Shit My Dad Says and planking and owling and whatever. Reddit is full of them. Anchors on the morning news awkwardly try to interpret them. Memes memes memes all day every day.
But these “memes” are actually a subset of the universe of memes that exist. The term predates these specific cultural icons considerably, originating from Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene,” published in 1976. As defined by Merriam Webster, a meme is an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. Informally defined, they’re shared concepts and ideas that spread quickly within groups. They’re (upcoming obligatory inclusion) “viral” practices or stances that are adopted by a community at a moderate-to-rapid pace.
So chunky white text on stock image does not a bonafide meme make. The idea, object, or practice has to spread. It must be adapted. For example, the much lambasted female vocal fry is a meme. Obama’s 2008 campaign iconography and slogan (Yes, We Can!) was a meme. Twerking seems to have memetic power. Darkly, jingoistic war campaigns rely on memes as well. They’re not all kittens in banana suits or sneezing pandas; memes encompass much of what ends up constructing public, shared culture.
We’re dealing with new types of memes–like I Can Haz Cheeseburger?–in part because the way we socialize and the ability to produce spreadable media has changed. With the Internet and associated media developments, production and dissemination became cheaper, quicker, and more accessible, elevating motivated media consumers to the realm of media creators.* (If you want to torture yourself by reading a more detailed account of this, I can send you my lengthy lengthy undergraduate thesis.)
Not only are we dealing with different types of content and content producers, but also with different types of communities. Increasingly, people are able to self-organize at larger scales and share not only content but also experiences with a wider range of people. We aren’t bound by location or constrained by price or time! We can do what we want, share what we want, finance what we want! Connectivity, man! The interwebs is great!
All fine and good. More people engaged in a bigger, more democratic conversation with more people. Yes. Yay. Now to tackle the tricky flip side that we encounter with every coin. This enhanced access doesn’t mean that I’m chatting with a man in a yurt in Mongolia at one moment and a Nigerian school girl the next. Sure, I have friends located all over the world, but for the most part these are like-minded individuals with similar interests and beliefs and shared language. Most of these people grew up in “the West,” are of my generation, and have a similar level of education. We all listen or have listened to both Animal Collective and Kanye. Am I using the Internet to truly foster a greater sense of global understanding and communion? Fuck no. I’m using it to connect to more liberal hipsters. And chances are, if you’re reading this, you probably are, too.
A quick note here: even if I wanted to use the Internet to foster a greater sense of global understanding and communion, is there a straightforward way that I could? With SEO, search engines that feed me what I want, and my own linguistic quirks, could I actually gain access to something that hadn’t been set up for me, or someone like me? Further, would I naturally be inclined to? I’ll name check a number of issues re: the Internet and creating a global community: personal access, technological distribution, individual ability/competence/perceived need, and the regrettable fact that the lingua Franca of the Internet is so, so overwhelmingly English. Folks are working to combat a number of these problems (take a look at the work that Ethan Zuckerman is doing, for example), and it’s commendable. But not my primary focus at the moment.
SO, when we’re on the Internet socializing or digesting content for future social use, a great deal of the content we come across is related to or else a regurgitation of whatever culture we’ve thrown ourselves in. A recent study at UCLA** tackled this from a neurological standpoint and reinforced an idea that’s pretty intuitive: we’re interested in finding and sharing things that we think have social utility (read: what will make us influential in our circle), and that’s what gets spread. Whether it’s funny, informative, or just downright useful, we’re on the lookout for content or behaviors that will increase our cultural clout within XYZ community. And when these things get shared, if they’re successful in their influence, they’re shared again and again, resulting in everyone having the same take on, oh, I don’t know, Doritos Locos Tacos. These ideas become monoliths; they’re reified. By sheer force of repetition, they become verified. They become entities. That’s what happens when you’re just talking to a ton of people who are already on the same page.
But ah! Again! Another wrench thrown by some unruly monkey (get back in the cage!) is embedded in what I’ve just mentioned above. There is not just one page. There are MANY pages, many communities and cultures that exist on the Internet that rarely, if ever, overlap, communities exchanging their own viral content within themselves, self-circulating beliefs or practices that maybe aren’t as easy to remark on as, say, Dick in a Box, but that are no less significant. We’re forming opinions and establishing identities really quickly, and so are other people, separately.
So riddle me this: when multiple, non-convergent communities are engaged in their individual mimetic loops, how is behavior affected “in real life”?*** There’s a kind of thrill to the sort of bonding that can occur over cultural objects. And logic dictates that, when we’re dealing with a rapidly populating landscape of objects to choose from, we can either devote more time to one conversation or have shorter conversations about more things. How does that impact how we engage with memetic content and shared culture? What are the implications for cultural authority and who can assume it? What counts as authority, anyway? How do we measure that in this environment? So many questions.
Continuing, we know that some people, whether they’re a roommate or a staffer at Buzzfeed, know how to create memes better. That’s always been the case. In the last century, these people have gravitated to occupations in media and communications, product design, politics, the arts, and, very specifically, advertising (practically everyone I know, I’m looking at you). It goes without saying that individuals or organizations whose interests are exclusively financial have been creating memes for years, and that their current forays into memetic production are both admirable and expected (Hello, Old Spice Guy! What’s up, Oreo?).
I mean, commercialism, whatever. Political and cultural memes are far more interesting to me. Let’s talk about persuasion for a second, because that’s what memes are about: social influence. What happens, in this oddly fractured digital realm we now inhabit, when motivated, well-funded forces set to convincing us of something? Media already frames the world for us, and always has (and has had to, to some extent). The primary difference today, compared to, say, 50 years ago, or 200, is that our communities are more fractured and our sources more varied. We’re being convinced of things in smaller groups, and often these things we’re convinced of bear not even a fleeting resemblance to what we imagine is the opposing view.
More sophisticated media consumers are aware of this, surely, but it’s a tricky issue to remedy on even an individual scale (unless you’re poly-lingual and very dedicated). If you want to learn about the world outside your yard, you must turn to your media. That’s how things work, now. Recent political and cultural warfare in the US has outlined the pitfalls of our new media landscape–remember how shocked those Fox anchors were when Obama won last time around?–and how quickly we can get swept up (Kony 2012, anyone?) and be made to forget (Kony 2012, anyone?). So what’s going to happen now that we’re stuck in information cocoons (Cass Sunstein’s term, not mine)? How do you actually know what you know? And who’s going to take advantage of your lack of knowledge first?
So, to recap: I’m interested in how persuasion works now that we have the web, and its implications on both culture and behavior on individual and group scales. This is a very, very broad topic and I won’t be able to unpack it in the course of 11 months, but I’ll at least scratch part of the surface. That’s something.
*There’s ample conversation about a) access and the nature of access and use, as well as b) the nature of content being produced and the effects of a cluttered media landscape. This isn’t the time or place to lay these discussions out fully (whole books have been devoted to this. Whole careers), but suffice to say that of course not all content is created equal and we don’t have a flat environment with total production and consumption equality. It’s just substantially less sloped.
**http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/05/23/0956797612474670.abstract
***aside: IRL is increasingly the most misleading term ever.
Off I Go! In, like, a month and a half.
Right, so, I’m going to Oxford! I’m attending an eleven-month Master’s program in the Social Science of the Internet, where I intend to focus on the nature of opinion and persuasion on the web. The course starts in October and runs through the following summer. I’m going to document the whole process, from visa application through graduation, and I’m going to do that here.
Some (read:me) would call this move unexpected. After all, I’ve spent the last two years of my life as an agency copywriter, which involves a healthy amount of joking around and trying to convince everyone that all ads are improved by the inclusion of lasers or massive explosions. There’s also my enduring and seemingly unshakable impulse to run in the opposite direction of the ivory tower, evidenced in my line of work and inability to restrain from cursing like a sailor. A sabbatical from silliness and subsequent plunge into one of the World’s Preeminent Academic Institutions (capitalization constantly implied) seems unearned or, at the very least, disjointed. My neuroses about this, I’ve been told, amount to garden-variety impostor syndrome. Whether or not I agree with that assessment, here we are and off I go!
During a bit of downtime today, I remembered that I needed to apply for my visa. Thus, I set forth on the task of being accepted into the United Kingdom whenever it is that I’ll actually arrive (which is something else that needs settling).
Part of the UK visa application process is performed online. In my head, I’d assumed this would be akin to going on Seamless and ordering from the Mexican restaurant down the street, but instead of a vegetarian burrito with a side of guacamole, I’d get permission to enter another country and obtain my degree. This was a very stupid assumption.
There are multiple types of applications that have to be completed and all sorts of documentation and numbers to keep track of throughout the process. None of it is particularly challenging. It’s just a lot. For instance, I found myself having to recall exactly when, where, and how long I’d been out of the country over the last ten years, which was more challenging than you’d think. There was also a delightfully ambiguous question regarding whether or not people would assume I have “bad character.” Anyone who gives the affirmative to that should be denied a visa based on that decision alone (but perhaps applauded for ballsiness. And then slapped for idiocy).
So I think I’ve filled out one part of it correctly, and now have an appointment on the 13th where someone will fingerprint me and take other biometric information down. Then, it’s a waiting game. We will all have to cross our fingers that the paperwork is processed in time, or else starting this blog will have been a waste and I’ll have just contributed to Internet clutter.
Internet Secret Handshake 