Over the past week or so, I’ve noticed some of the ways folks in the media frame and express our relationship to entities we interact with on the web. There’s something odd about the murkiness of roles and power dynamics. One thing is for sure – it’s gone far beyond the consumer-producer relationship.

To Daniel Soar of the London Review of Books, with Google, users are like teachers. By interacting with Google we are unwittingly instructing the machine, giving it lessons on human behavior. I like to think Google, the distributed Google-monster, finds us fascinating, an enormous virtual Andy Warhol.

We teach [Google] while we think it’s teaching us. Levy tells the story of a new recruit with a long managerial background who asked Google’s senior vice-president of engineering, Alan Eustace, what systems Google had in place to improve its products. ‘He expected to hear about quality assurance teams and focus groups’ – the sort of set-up he was used to. ‘Instead Eustace explained that Google’s brain was like a baby’s, an omnivorous sponge that was always getting smarter from the information it soaked up.’ Like a baby, Google uses what it hears to learn about the workings of human language. The large number of people who search for ‘pictures of dogs’ and also ‘pictures of puppies’ tells Google that ‘puppy’ and ‘dog’ mean similar things, yet it also knows that people searching for ‘hot dogs’ get cross if they’re given instructions for ‘boiling puppies.’

To Matthew Creamer of Ad Age, with Facebook, we are like disgruntled, unpaid employees. A more pointless, powerless role may not exist!

Some things are lost with each one of these Facebook changes, but they are not only matters of usability, navigation, privacy and other factors in our part-time but ever-more-involving jobs working as ad impressions for a rich company in Palo Alto, Calif. The stuff that inconveniences you in the short-term may make you rage with a hotness that, if spotted by an alien scout, would either send the visitor whimpering back to Zebulon or alarm him onto war footing, but it’s only so important. You will adapt. Or you will leave.

So, have they got it right? Are we teachers? Employees? Something else? Have you noticed other examples? How would you describe your relationship to Google or Facebook?

See Steve’s recent related post on Facebook changes, in which the above Matthew Creamer quote is cited as a comment.

Tags: communications, facebook, google, omni, relationships, simile, social norms, technology, the omni project, warhol

Questioning the nature of research [research-live.com] – Ogilvy Group UK vice chairman Rory Sutherland advocates for context-based research to inform advertising, which is mostly served now by traditional quantitative market or survey research methodologies. We are messy beings, and straight-forward research approaches yield neat numbers that have nothing to do with the reality of decision making. This is preaching to the choir on this forum, but the interview is chock full of quotables! In the end, he calls for research that gets closer to people, and for an experimental approach to developing marketing and advertising.

No-one in any research group would ever say, “If there are four brands of shampoo, I’ll buy the one that has most bottles on the shelf”, or “I’ll choose the one that’s on the third shelf up because it’s the one that doesn’t require much reaching down” or “I’ll look at the prices of three products and choose the one in the middle.” In reality, we use heuristics and shortcuts and cognitively miserliness like this all the time. The mistake that quite a lot of advertising methodologies make is assuming that brand preference translates perfectly into purchase behaviour. It’s also making the assumption, of course, that preference is formed in advance of behaviour. Quite a lot of evidence from both behavioural sciences and from neuroscience suggests that we act first and form our opinions in light of our actions.

I think the way we think we decide and the way we actually decide don’t have that much in common. The conscious rational brain isn’t the Oval Office; it isn’t there making executive decisions in our minds. It’s actually the press office issuing explanations for actions we’ve already taken.

I’m emphatically not downplaying the importance of fame, awareness, mental availability – whatever you want to call it. What I would downplay is detailed dissections of consumers stated reasons for adopting or planning to adopt a particular course of action.

Quite often, people within a group will pretend they are a maximiser, when most of our decisions are taken as satisficers. We always claim in the presence of others that we are great connoisseurs looking for the best value for money we can find, but most of the time we simply don’t have the mental energy for that. It would be an insane use of our mental resources in any case. So what we do is look for something that is pretty much guaranteed not to be crap. That’s why in some ways you can never quite make sense of the popularity of McDonalds. Everybody, whenever you talk about food, they’ll always talk bullshit about health and Italy and olive oil. But actually, when it comes to eating, what we want is a place that won’t rip us off, won’t give us food poisoning, the toilets will be clean, the service will be OK, and everything will be pretty good. Paul Dolan, the government’s wellbeing adviser, says: “Nothing is as important as we think it is when we’re thinking about it”.

Tags: advertising, ogilvy, quickies, research methodology, rory sutherland

Here’s a snippet from What Was Facebook’s Best Redesign, Anyway? [Technologizer]

I had fun looking back at the fruitless nature of Facebook redesign backlash. No one is surprised anymore when a redesigned Facebook home page–such as the one that rolled out today–causes an outrage.

But that made me wonder: what design, exactly, do people want? Was there ever a single home page layout to which Facebook users, given the choice, would happily revert? In other words, have we cooked up in our minds some ideal vision of an “old Facebook” that never really existed?

I’d like to declare this as a National Week of Umbrage. Between Netflix and Facebook, it’s been a strange few days. And still, we have our share of “It’s just a [blank], get over it!” and (as in that post) “What do people WANT?” Sadly, most of it misses the point. While there are definitely features that suck (wait, I’ve got to manage two queues? wait, you’ve reordered stories from the friends I just recategorized according to what scheme again?) and of course features that are improved, this is really about how you manage change. This isn’t, ultimately, about features. Facebook is the social OS for many many people. Netflix is the entertainment OS for many many people. We invest countless hours in using the thing, including setting it up just the way we want. That’s our choice, in fact, it’s almost an imperative. I can organize my fridge and my sock drawer in a way that I find appealing, satisfying, efficient, or whatever. And no, I don’t have to be on the autism spectrum to do that and to find reward from doing that.

When things change, without warning, without rationale, without a clear sense of how things are different – and better – for me, without an easy way to adjust to the changes, then we’ve got a problem. Google Docs redesigned something or other the other day. Today I previewed the changes. They are vaguely dramatic, aesthetically. But my workflow hasn’t changed, and I will adjust. I didn’t find myself unable to find my docs, or having to do more work instead. I’d hardly hold up Google as some ideal user-centered culture, but they seem, in general, to roll out redesigns, and even business changes, without a lot of teeth-gnashing on our part.

The intimate relationships we have with these services are indeed emotional ones. When change is foisted surprisingly on you, it’s unsettling.

Change is inevitable, necessary, good. But I’d love to see some less-hamfisted rollouts, and I’d love to see these companies understand – at the very fiber of their being – how much we are connected to their products and how their brutish ways make us feel. It’s not the medium, it’s the lack of message.

Tags: change, customer, design, experience, facebook, manage, netflix, user

As I posted previously, we’re looking for examples of how technology has changed an ordinary task so fundamentally that you can’t believe you once did it differently. As I wrote “Even though I was there and did it, it is beyond my power to comprehend now.” Thanks to everyone who contributed:

Laura Borns: How did I ever figure out how to get places with a folded paper map rather than GPS?

Cyd Harrell: How did I ever maintain relationships without voicemail and text? Remember when you actually had to get somebody on the phone?

Chris Gielow: How did I ever get things done (like the bank and the office) when I had to physically go places to do them?

Grady Karp: How did I ever pick people up at the airport before cell phones?

Lora Oehlberg: How did we meet someone for lunch at a specific time and place? (cellphones have taken care of a lot of last-minute details of “I’m running late” or “I’m on my way” or “I’m on the other side of the street”)?

Lora Oehlberg: How did we find out about music we’d like before friends sending YouTube links, or Pandora (I suppose at a music store, at the radio, or mix tapes)?

Lora Oehlberg (who rocks, if you can’t tell): How did we figure out who was talking to us on the phone before Caller ID? I remember there used to be a polite way of inquiring who was talking, or informing the person on the other end who you were (I’ve forgotten how this exchange goes now). Now we either a) avoid unknown numbers or b) listen to a semi-familiar voice immediately start talking, assuming that we’ll eventually figure out who it is based on what they’re talking about.

Peter Stahl: How did we ever create a flyer or newsletter without word processing or presentation software; when all we had was scissors?

Peter Stahl: How did we ever create a photograph or movie without a phone (like I would have believed “phone” 15 years ago!); we had to use film: purchase, load, expose, unload, take to developers, wait, pick up from developers, pay!

Peter Stahl (who also joins the club of rock stars): How did we make copies before personal printers and scanners? We had to use carbon paper!

@Kimwolf notes that she never has to wait to get home to check her calendar, because it’s always in her pocket.

The smartphone makes a prominent appearance here, of course, but really it’s a nice list from information-related tasks, to social norms, to interacting and collaborating with others, to pure production. This is helpful to put together with our other work streams trying to get at the different thematic areas to explore.

We’ll be running our next crowdsourcing request soon. Meanwhile, feel free to add to this list wherever you are seeing it!

Updated!
Cat Macaulay: How did we distract ourselves from important tasks before social media? Guess that what was the executive toys were for, do they still exist or has the pendulum thingie been replaced by Twitter and Facebook?

Lora again: How did we get into buildings? Or control access to physical spaces over time? I’m at a university where RFIDs in cardkeys are THE way to let people in/out of rooms. Just set students’ cardkey access to the computer lab expire at the end of the semester, no problem.

Jeff McKown: How did they ever change the channel before the remote control? (Wait, I remember now…my dad would make me get up and do it.)

Nicolas Nova: How did I locate text in a document before Apple/Ctrl-F?

Scott Thorpe: I can’t even remember how I sent text-based messages before email. Did I print it out and mail it? Did I fax it? Did I just spend a long time on the phone waving my hands in the air explaining complex ideas?

Linda: How did we plan vacations without the internet? We relied on travel agents? And how did they know what places were worth visiting and what hotels were attractive and convenient?

Ryan DeGorter: How did I ever check the time while mobile? I no longer need to have an annoyance on my wrist 16 hours of the day.

Tags: adapt, change, norms, omni, technology, the omni project, xbeforey

The modem sound has gone the way of the brabble.

Robert Fulford: When words die [nationalpost.com] The Oxford Concise Dictionary has been forced to abandon words. Never fear, they will remain in the OED, which is not restrained by promises of concision!

The Concise has also set aside “threequel,” meaning the third book in a series; it never caught on, perhaps because trilogies are out of fashion. The Concise has likewise abandoned “brabble,” which means a paltry but noisy quarrel, and “growlery,” meaning the private den of a man. I knew none of these words in their prime and now must recognize that they are on their way out. It leaves an odd feeling, a cousin to the nebulous melancholy that accompanies the reading of an obituary of someone you would like to have known…Shouldn’t we have a category for endangered words? Perhaps we need a system of adopting words to keep them safe and well, the way people adopt favourite stretches of highway. We would sign up, promise to use our chosen words as often as possible and of course object when they are misused or threatened with abandonment.

Bleeoo! #RIPdialup [bleeoo.com] That strange modem sound hasn’t been heard for awhile in most parts, and is not missed, at least by this former dialer-upper. Yet, another strange nostalgia breeds, even for this horrible sound. The bleeoo-crackle meant that you were just sitting there waiting, pointlessly, anticipating the blissful connection. We endured it only because we had to. I guess it’s today’s equivalent of having to walk to school through the snow uphill both ways. Kids today!

Remember the glory of dialing up? Kids today won’t know the shrill cry of a 9600 baud, or the magical “doodleeedoo” of a 28.8 modem. Help preserve our digital history. Join us in recording your best impression of a “modem handshake” sound.

(Thanks Steve, for the pointer to Bleeoo!)

Tags: language, modem handshake, nostalgia, obsolescence, OED, Oxford, quickies, technology

Evocative example of stories and flow as elements of problem solving from Town of Cats, a Haruki Murakami story in the New Yorker. Note: emphasis mine.

He had been regarded as a math prodigy from early childhood, and he could solve high-school math problems by the time he was in third grade. Math was, for young Tengo, an effective means of retreat from his life with his father. In the mathematical world, he would walk down a long corridor, opening one numbered door after another. Each time a new spectacle unfolded before him, the ugly traces of the real world would simply disappear. As long as he was actively exploring that realm of infinite consistency, he was free.

While math was like a magnificent imaginary building for Tengo, literature was a vast magical forest. Math stretched infinitely upward toward the heavens, but stories spread out before him, their sturdy roots stretching deep into the earth. In this forest there were no maps, no doorways. As Tengo got older, the forest of story began to exert an even stronger pull on his heart than the world of math. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape—as soon as he closed the book, he had to come back to the real world. But at some point he noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of math. Why was that? After much thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that suggestion in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility.

Tags: fiction, flow, Haruki Murakami, literature, math, new yorker, problem solving, story

My town of Montara is one of those over-the-top Halloween communities that dot the October landscape. This place goes all out. Years ago, we moved in on the morning of Halloween and that afternoon the new neighbors stopped by to warn us: “Hope you’ve got a LOT of candy!”

Last year I saw this robot, now one of the images I chose for our business cards.

It was only in the last couple of years that we even decided to venture out; this past year we finally made it onto the Montara social register: we were invited to two parties-for-grownups with costumes and alcohol.

The party-for-grownup vibe permeates the whole town

As we reached one of our parties, we saw the abandoned robot costume beside their neighbor’s driveway. It was a glorious costume – the heart-shaped light would flash off and on – but obviously not that comfortable. So we passed by during the aftermath. Fortunately our friends showed us some video footage and the occupied costume was indeed wonderful. Still, the costume with its discarded legs has a special bit of the curious about it.

More Montara at Halloween:

The line for the “Witch’s House” – a long-standing attraction

The town also hosts an increasing number of up-and-coming attractions

Kiddie and grownup flavors of frozen treats on the street

The neighborhood set decorator turns her front yard into a horrifyingly hilarious (or is that hilariously horrifying) scene. We learned about this place off-season when their garage sale featured a disproportionate amount of ghoulish cast-offs.

Tags: business cards, costume, halloween, Montara, robot

As we begin trying to define the focus and scope of our exploration, we’re in our own lives with our eyes and ears open, immersing ourselves in the space. We’re capturing sources for secondary research, speaking to each other about what we’re reading, and as we always do in in a project, bringing mindfulness and reflection to the topic as we experience it ourselves.

Last week we found ourselves reminiscing with wonder about our work environments from the 90s, where we were expected to perform as we do now, but without (among many tools) a way to schedule meetings with each other. If I recall, I never had a calendar (before a shared calendar across an office network appeared) of any kind. Other than an informal “Hey, let’s meet tomorrow at 10 about this…” we just didn’t formalize our schedules with the granularity that is common now. “How did we collaborate without a calendar program?” was my head-scratching takeway. Even though I was there and did it, it is beyond my power to comprehend now.

A few hours later (hooray for serial noticing) I see this post on Alissa Walker‘s Facebook page:

Aha. This is a thing. How did we do X before Y?

So what’s yours? (Yes, we’re crowdsourcing!) For you, what’s the thing you marvel at, where you savor the value of Y to help you do X and can’t imagine (even if you’ve experienced it) how it was possible?

Note that we’re looking for real examples from your own life. We’ll collect ‘em and put together another post with the results.

If you’re seeing this post on our you can comment here. If you’re seeing it on Facebook, you can comment there as well. Or tweet it, using hashtag #XbeforeY. Or drop us an email with your thoughts!

Tags: adapt, omni, technology, the omni project, xbeforey

The secret life of pronouns [newscientist.com] – James Pennebaker’s studies show that the use of small, seemingly insignificant “function” words reveal a great deal. We cognitively focus more on the “content” words, which provide meaning and provoke the imagination. Function words are used more unconsciously.

Function words serve quieter, supporting roles – connecting, shaping and organising the content words. They are what determines style… They are used at high rates, while also being short and hard to detect. They are processed in the brain differently than content words. And, critically, they require social skills to use properly… It seems the use of articles can tell us about the ways people think, feel and connect with others. The same is true for pronouns, prepositions, and virtually all function words. One area this is useful is in personality research. As you might guess, different patterns of function words reveal important parts of people’s personalities. In one experiment, we analysed hundreds of essays written by my students and we identified three very different writing styles: formal, analytic and narrative. Formal writing often appears stiff, sometimes humourless, with a touch of arrogance. It includes high rates of articles and prepositions but very few I-words, and infrequent discrepancy words, such as “would”, and adverbs…Those who score highest in formal thinking tend to be more concerned with status and power and are less self-reflective. They drink and smoke less and are more mentally healthy, but also tend to be less honest…We have also found that function words can detect emotional states, spot when people are lying, predict where they rank in social hierarchies and the quality of their relationships. They reveal much about the dynamics within groups. They can be used to identify the authors of disputed texts, and much more. The smallest, stealthiest words in our vocabulary often reveal the most about us.

He then turns it on himself!

Using a recording device programmed to switch on for about 30 seconds once every 12 to 14 minutes, I have been able to analyse my family’s interactions. The first weekend I wore it seemed uneventful. But when I transcribed my recording I was distressed to see the way I spoke to my 12-year-old son. My tone was often detached. I used big words, lots of articles and few pronouns. My language was warmer with my wife and daughter. The experience had a profound effect on me. Thereafter, I made a conscious attempt to be warmer and more psychologically available to my son. I have also analysed my language in emails, classroom lectures, articles and letters. Sometimes my language is predictable, sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, I learn something about myself.

Tags: content words, function words, language, pennebaker, pronouns, quickies

The Mechanic Muse — From Scroll to Screen [NYTimes.com] – It’s easy to get caught up in the user interface changes that digital technology brings to everyday activities like reading, but of course there are very cool precursors (if you will) in the history of book design.

But so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book. The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides

Thanks, Ilya!

Ultrabook: Intel’s $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game [Ars Technica] – Although a divergence from the main theme of the post, the author’s narrative of trying to make a laptop purchase online is hilarious and depressing all at the same time.

The options I get are just… meaningless. Yes, I want “Everyday Computing,” so I want an Inspiron. But hang on, I also want “Design & Performance,” so I want an XPS. Wait a second, I want “Thin & Powerful,” too. So maybe I want a Z Series? But the only line that apparently matches my broad search criteria—lightweight, 11-14″—I wouldn’t even consider because I don’t want a “gaming” laptop, and so I’m never going to click Alienware! Is this the best way to sell laptops? Create a bunch of categories with arbitrary, overlapping labels, and just hope that buyers manage to fight through the system to find something that isn’t wretched? Maybe HP will be better… no, not really. Their site has some outright weirdnesses (yes, I’m in the UK, and yes, we’re metric, but no, I don’t want my screen measured diagonally in centimeters; we don’t do that). The same odd labels cover everything—I know I don’t want “Mini/Netbook,” but I want both “Everyday Computing” (that term again) and “High performance” (because I don’t want it to be slow, do I?). And who knows what “Envy” means? When I tick my screen size and weight boxes, I get back a crop of lousy netbooks that are almost the complete opposite of what I want.

Tags: books, choices, codex, criteria, form, function, laptop, meaning, quickies, readingahead, scroll, shopping

Look out honey, cuz I’m using technology!^*

Today I’m thrilled to announce that Portigal Consulting is embarking on a self-funded study about the impact that digital technology is having on our lives. That’s certainly ambitious, when put that way, and of course we will be refining our direction, our research question, our business question, etc. in the initial steps (and beyond). We know what we think we want to understand, and we know that it’s going to change.

The impetus for this project is that we constantly hear from research subjects (almost across any project category) that they are challenged by technology, that they are “addicted” to their smartphone, Facebook, their Netflix queue, and beyond, and they struggle to balance the benefits with the more subtle impacts that they don’t understand. Erica (a participant in our previous self-funded study, Reading Ahead), says it well

For instance, my oldest and dearest friend was in Oregon. And sure, I had to pick up the phone and call her, and interact with her, and listen to her voice and talk to her, and a have a conversation. And I would do that. And gosh, like lately, it’s just horrible because, you know, “Oh, we should call. We should talk.” And then I see her Facebook statuses all the time, so in a weird way I feel like I’m completely caught up with her in ways that I would never have been before, which is great. On the other hand, it makes me very lazy. It’s just like I just don’t want to have a real connection in real life. It’s all just so trying and tired, like, “Oh, I don’t want to have the very like long call where I have to catch her up on all these things that involve lots of stuff.” I never used to be like that, so I’m worried that all of these devices that are supposed to make our lives easier and connect us more are, you know, in a sort of sci-fi-y way, making us a little bit zombied out…

At the same time, we are experiencing a torrent (if you will) of cultural stories about the positive impacts of technology (especially economically) and the big and small losses (e.g., Bill Keller on The Twitter Trap; Dalton Conley on college students seeking like-minded roommates).

As I challenged designers, marketers, innovators and product peeps in my interactions column The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It), these issues exist in much of the work that we are all doing, but they are also being ignored.

We hope to shed some light and provide some grip points (insights, frameworks, opportunities) that teams can use to deal with this complex situation.

An Open-Ended Approach

Unlike many of our engagements, where a specific scope is agreed upon, detailing methodology, timeline, etc. we are going to be a lot more free in our approach to the Omni project. Our priority will always be our client work, so as workflow and capacity shifts around, we’ll be fitting this in as we can. We also are excited about starting with less of a specific objective than in a consulting gig, and figuring it out as we go. We have a lot of ideas about methods already (from inventories of pop culture, to a bibliography and secondary research effort, to in-context interviews purely to try and formulate the problem) and know that those will continue to evolve, as we pick the next step that makes sense from that particular vantage point.

the Omni project?

We wondered who our client could be for this project and thought of Omni Consumer Products, the “fictional megacorporation” from Robocop (and not the real-yet-homagey company – see more on this from Rob Walker, if your bag is meta).

Omni Consumer Products, bringing every sort of technology to the masses, whether they want it or not

We also thought about OMNI magazine which, during my formative high-school years offered a science fiction/science fact vision of the future, the future we are living in now.

OMNI magazine – gaze upon just about every sciencelicious cover here

Of course, “omni” also evokes key attributes to how we’re experiencing technology right now, such omnipotent, omnipresence, and omniscient.



We’ll be continuously blogging about what we’re doing, what we’re thinking, what we’re learning. Stay tuned!

Tags: culture, omni, society, study, technology, the omni project