photo credit: Ian Hayhurst

So this happened today.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post inspired by a piece in Slate all about literal titles and how they may or may not destroy narratives. We got around to talking about the Slate article and my interpretation of it during a team meeting at work today. It was a really interesting chat – one that covered a lot of ground and ultimately ended with me declaring “the internet sucks” just as time elapsed and we all went back to our work.

Cheery proclamation for a web consultant, no?

Anyway, I wouldn’t do the discussion proper service if I tried to capture it all here. Suffice to say, we spent some time pondering the role of things like SEO and intuitive labeling in a world where the volume of content published far exceeds our own ability to digest it all. It dovetailed with my previous post but took on some other dimensions as well, which ultimately prompted the outburst described above.

On further reflection, my objection really isn’t to the internet itself, of course. That rage is really just a manifestation of something I’ve long known about myself.

I really, really like words.

I love the way an artfully-turned phrase can elicit wonderfully nuanced reactions. I love the way that good storytellers use language to draw you into their narratives. The best know how to give you just enough context to serve as a common baseline but leave gaps so the audience can inject their own reality.

Wherein the author picks the easiest contrast in the world to make his point

Compare, for example, pretty much any song from The Weakerthans‘ extensive catalog of awesomeness with, say, Rebecca Black’s “Friday” (easy target, I know, but I’m citing the extreme example to make the point more digestible).

The Weakerthans’ John K. Samson is more poet than songwriter, crafting these really beautiful descriptions but somehow leaving enough room for you, the listener, to inject yourself in his words. Even as he describes something as specific as commuters biting their gloves off to hand over a bus transfer (how Canadian is that image, by the way) he still somehow makes it possible to imagine you’re the jilted bus driver in “Civil Twilight.” Or the heartbroken Greenpeace shill in “Pamphleteer.” Or the curler in “Tournament of Hearts.”

Then there’s Rebecca Black. Literally describing each and every step in its most banal form.

Both artists (ahem) are telling stories. Both take fairly classic narrative formats. But only one seems to make you part of their story.

The numbers don’t lie

And I guess that’s where we come back to my first post, the Slate article and the spirited discussion around the meeting room table.

As it becomes easier and easier to publish, more and more people are taking the opportunity to do so. And as companies and organizations follow suit, they spend more and more time thinking about how to cut through the clutter. Time and attention are a precious commodity and so conventional wisdom is to front-load your messaging. Get them there with a title that makes a promise that’s easy to keep, then deliver before they lose interest and move on to the next item in their newsfeed.

There’s no incentive to take a risk. To deviate from the expected. In fact, not only is there no incentive, there’s an active disincentive in the form of bounce rates, low time on page numbers and the dreaded abandoned conversion.

It’s safe and, more importantly, it’s measurable.

I can’t stay mad at you, internet

So is that it? Do we throw in the towel and accept that A|B testing of calls to action has forever replaced the sweet satisfaction of leaving some sort of kicker that rewards the reader for having read your work to the end?

Tempting as it is, the reality is that this isn’t a new problem. The internet didn’t invent this debate and while it seems the pendulum has swung decidedly to one side, the reality is that it is indeed a pendulum and things will even out at some point.

In fact, even the pendulum metaphor makes it too stark a contrast; too blatantly black and white. I believe it’s still possible to craft stories that cater to both interests. An intuitive title doesn’t preclude a whimsical or artistic approach to the content. The challenge is to force ourselves to be better than simply falling back to what’s easy.

So every once in a while, delight your readers. Throw them a bone for making it to the end.

We long-form advocates will win them back one kicker at a time.

I often like to think I’ve picked some of that up from him. My interest (and relative success, I guess) in my field stems from my love of telling a story in a way that the audience can appreciate. It’s a different beast to write a speech for an accountant to deliver than what Grandpa does but it comes from the same place, I think.

What do users want to experience?

But this article from Slate made me rethink things a bit, as articles from Slate tend to do (go read it, it’s worth the investment and doing a synopsis to distill its key points would really sort of undermine the whole angle of this post).

Much of what I do as a web professional falls under the broad realm of user experience design and definition. We talk about user-centered approaches to information architecture and persuasive design but really, at its core, its about reducing barriers to some sort of conversion. This might be more true for me than other web folks, I guess, given the enterprise nature of my clients, but at some level, we’re all focused on getting the user to take some concrete, measurable action.

And I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong. More often that not, we’re giving users what they want. They come to these sites to transact in some way, whether concretely (buying or signing up for something) or more abstractly (to get information or have a question answered). They don’t come for a narrative exploration of something, they come to do something.

And yet, aren’t the narrative experiences the ones we ultimately remember? Doesn’t a good story stick with us more than an efficient transaction anyway?

How the hell do you quantify that? The first person that does might just revolutionize the web.

photo credit: Jill Clardy

But on a larger level, I think I’m tired of blogging about online communications. Moreover, I’m tired of reading about online communications. I feel like we’re at a point where the actors outnumber the audience (to borrow from my friend Ryan‘s trusted metaphor) and I’m wary of contributing to the intellectual onslaught.

Signal < Noise

In a lot of ways it’s a bigger example of the driving force behind our decision to put Case Study Jam on hiatus. There’s so much noise right now that I fear we’re unwittingly feeding into the apprehensions and misgivings people have about the tools and channels that it seems a growing number are eager to champion.

As more and more people have adopted these things as mainstream, the chasm between “us” and “them” seems only to have gotten larger. And by constantly talking and writing and blogging and tweeting about them – by analyzing and quantifying the banal and mundane – the social media community is creating an illusion of sophistication and complexity that doesn’t really exist.

No market? No problem! Create one!

We make things sound more complex than they are and in so doing we’ve created a cottage industry of gurus and experts that feed on the insecurities of people who, if they would just step back for a second and apply some common sense, would realize that their years of experience being a fucking human being is all they need to draw upon.

We trumpet best practices and lists of 10 things you must know as though there are hard and fast rules about what we do. There aren’t. Ulimately, what works for you as an individual or as a corporation or as a brand will look a lot like what has worked for you before. There are new media but the messages are largely the same.

There are truly exciting things happening. Technology is evolving and changing the way people communicate. And yes, it’s happening faster than it’s ever happened before. But all of this change doesn’t make the experience of thousands of years of human civilization suddenly obsolete. Augmented reality doesn’t remove the need for empathy. Gamification hasn’t inverted the hierarchy of needs.

So what comes next?

I don’t know. This blog (which was never really supposed to be a social media blog but has come to be one, more or less) will continue to exist but I can’t say how often I’ll post or what it’ll be about. Hell, from time to time I’ll probably write about something related to social media, hypocritical as it may seem. I will continue to be the advocate in a room full of social media skeptics and the skeptic in a room full of advocates. And I will continue to challenge what I feel are misguided assumptions no matter where they stem from.

But I won’t be part of the problem. If you’re a social media person I hope you’ll take a step back once in awhile too. The world won’t end if you don’t write the umpteenth post this week on the importance of measuring influence.

photo credit: Davide Restivo

I encourage you to watch the clip, it’s a fast-moving five minutes. The nutshell version, though, is it depicts a fictionalized scenario starting with one woman rickrolling Chatroulette and ending with a riot that leaves dozens dead in a matter of hours. The truly terrifying part? The scenario, while fictional, is entirely plausible (and indeed each component of it actually happened, just never pieced together like this).

It’s a sobering reminder of just how quickly things can spread online but more than that, to me at least, it’s a sobering reminder that while social media can connect people unlike anything else that came before them, those connections can be dangerous.

You never really hear about sidewalk rage

We’ve all experienced the isolating effect of being in a car. When we’re on the road, contained in our bubbles of tempered glass and steel, we do things that we’d never, ever do in person. If someone cut in front of you on a sidewalk would you scream “HEEYYY!!!!” at them or flip them the bird? Not likely. But get in a car and suddenly you’re honking, screaming and giving them the finger like it’s going out of style.

Now take that phenomenon and isolate the person even further. Instead of a few inches of glass and metal, separate the people by thousands of kilometres. Take their faces and flatten them to a 2d image, maybe even a cartoon avatar. The scenario in the Ignite talk suddenly seems a lot more plausible, doesn’t it? No way the exboyfriend, coming across a crowd of people watching his former flame singing a shitty 80s tune in a public square, starts handing out her address on slips of paper. But put the same situation online and suddenly things are very different.

Stop the world, I want to get off

It terrifies me, in a lot of ways, because the speed with which technology evolves is incongruent with society’s ability to adapt the social norms we’ve come do depend on. We’ve had cars on highways for a century and yet we still act like total goons when we get behind the wheel. Rules of courtesy go out the window.

It’s too easy to ignore consequences when they aren’t there in front of you. We do things we never otherwise would because we’re not there to see the effects firsthand. It’s easy – too easy – to say or do something that a rational person would ultimately live to regret.

Technologies like social media have enabled a brand new way of connecting and interacting with our world and I don’t want to downplay the positive aspects of these connections and interactions because the examples of good are many. But we do ourselves a disservice if we pretend it’s all honey and roses.

photo credit: LunaDiRimmel

What would I say if this was the last post I’d ever write? Unlike Bob, who was the first person to take on this challenge, I’m not going to tackle it as a question of mortality (if for no other reason than the fact that I couldn’t come close to being as eloquent and moving as he was). But I will try to take it on as a question of legacy – what would I want people to take away from having known or encountered me? An “advice to future grads” for the broader audience.

In short, I’d implore you to think critically and be compassionate. I think there’s a tendency to see these almost as contradictory ideas but I don’t mean them to be.  Quite the contrary, actually. I see these things as two sides of the same coin.

First, think critically

In my younger days I tried and failed to start a  non-profit / think tank dedicated to promoting a responsible approach to journalism. I adopted “think critically” as the slogan for the organization. Critical thinking isn’t intended to carry a negative connotation, it simply means to ask the extra question. Dig a little deeper. Take the time to put things in context. Consider the source.

All the stuff they teach you in j-skool but that far too often falls by the wayside when working journalists are confronted with deadline pressures, reluctant sources and scarce resources.

Even though I’ve abandoned the project I’ve tried to keep the credo. I think far too often people accept what they’re told without asking the extra question. Critical thinking can be uncomfortable, especially when it involves challenging one’s own preconceived ideals or understandings of the world.

But it’s so very important, especially in the era of unfiltered information overload.

We are bombarded with data, information and opinions. In the face of such an onslaught, we seek out that which reassures us. The multitude of sources only compounds this by implying a variety of viewpoints that may not actually exist.

It’s easy to find 15 sources to support what you believe; it’s harder to seek out the other 15 that challenge you.

Think critically about what you read. Think critically about what you hear. Seek out alternative and dissenting viewpoints. Expose yourself to opinions you don’t share and try to see things the way others do.  Question your beliefs from time to time – if they’re worthwhile you’ll come back to them and you’ll be richer for having challenged them.

Which brings us to the second point.

Then, be compassionate

If it’s important to think critically about issues, ideas and information, it’s just as important to apply these principles to people. Try to understand people. Try to see things as they might. Examine their motivations.

Then remind yourself that they are people, just like you.

War and genocide and terrible things like that depend on the dehumanizing of the enemy. Less dramatically, it’s easier to rail against “them neo-cons” or “the socialists” than it would be to rail against the guy that sits down the hall or the woman you met at yoga.

People are flawed. All of them. But they’re people. Their opinions and beliefs are based on their experiences, just like yours. That might frustrate you, that might confound you and that might even offend you. But try to understand why they are the way they are before you pass judgement.

You don’t have to like them. You don’t even have to respect them. But try to understand them. And remember that there but for the grace of whatever deity you believe in or life choices you’ve made…

In conclusion

Think. Challenge yourself. Make yourself uncomfortable every once in awhile. Walk the proverbial mile in someone else’s kicks. You’ll be better for it.

photo credit: rogilde – roberto la forgia