Alex Steer

1896 words | ~9 min

It's a hundred years since the Titanic sank. With the centenary, a lot of the questions about why the ship went down are being raised again. For me, the Titanic case is an important reminder about the relationship between risk and uncertainty, and how we react to extreme events.

Fates and flaws

Thomas Hardy, in his poem The Convergence of the Twain, saw the loss of the Titanic rather typically as an act of God or Fate against human vanity:

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her — so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,<
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event.

There is a touch of this, too, in the Spectator's reaction, from the 20th April 1912, which  it has re-published on its blog this week.

The destruction of the largest ship afloat on her maiden voyage, of a ship reputed to be unsinkable, of a ship followed everywhere with admiring thoughts as the last word in ingenuity, in luxury, and in the impressive accomplishments of science, brings to every thoughtful person a deep sense of powerlessness, of smallness, and humility. Even in these moments of crushing personal sorrow one is conscious — perhaps only to deepen the sorrow — of the overwhelming reverses of human confidence.

Happily, though, the article changes course fast, and shows an early public interest in the forensics of the disaster:

Although we do not know as we write these lines the details of the wreck, it is certain that the 'Titanic' struck an iceberg, and that there were not enough boats to take off more than about one in every three of the passengers. All the lifeboats carried by the 'Titanic' were picked up by the ‘Carpathia,' and the passengers in them — chiefly women and children — were saved. Although there was a slight swell there was no wind, and one cannot possibly escape from the conclusion that if there had been enough boats all the passengers might have been saved. Most people have learned with astonishment that it is possible for a ship like the ‘Titanic' to pass the Board of Trade tests with an insufficient number of boats.

I'd like to stick with the Spectator piece because it's so unusual. Looking back at archive material from the time, it's clear that in the days and weeks after the sinking the analysis of causes became increasingly sentimental. Yes, valuable criticisms like the one above, or the fault with the watertight bulkheads, were identified and raised. But we have also ended up with a long tradition of thought about the Titanic which tries to identify 'human confidence' or other moral flaws as the real reason the ship went down. From cowardly owners, to unwise claims about unsinkability, to a rash captain's decision to sail too close to the ice.

Here's how the Baltimore Morning Sun put the matter, just three days after the event:

Image from the Library of Virginia, used with thanks.

The Titanic sinking was seen as a tragedy, and thinking about tragic events in the early decades of the 20th century centred largely on the idea of the 'tragic flaw' in human character that inevitably leads to disaster. For a scholarly exposition of this, see for example Oxford Professor of Poetry A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, published in 1904. The Titanic seemed to have no shortage of Bradleian tragic figures. That same mode of thinking can be seen in James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, where you can pretty much pick which combination of character flaws (by Captain Smith, Mr Ismay, Mr Andrews, etc.) led to the disaster.

What's important about this line of analysis is the uniqueness. We try to see what was uniquely wrong with the Titanic that led to its demise - so of course it's easy to look at the unique combination of people who were on it, or the unique marketing claims that were made about the unsinkability of the ship. With the centenary we see a lot of this 'unique tragic flaw' theory turning up again in new clothes - such as Francis Wilson's Wall Street Journal piece, 'How bad management helped sink the Titanic', which is really just a Bradleian tragic analysis dressed up in MBA-speak.

Burying the survivors

Here's the problem with the 'unique tragic flaw' way of looking at extreme events. You ignore all the ships that didn't sink in 1912.

With a grim irony, the cognitive error that leads us to focus on the Titanic is called 'survivorship bias'. I don't have figures to hand, but imagine that in 1911-12 a hundred large cruise ships set off across the Atlantic, all similarly built and provisioned. Only one of them hits an  iceberg, and sinks, and causes the deaths 1,500 people.

We tend to look at the one that sank and ask, 'What was different?' That's a natural question - but it leads us to attribute all the causes of the disaster to things that were different about Titanic. And that leads us to assume, without questioning the evidence, that all the causes of the sinking were aberrations - things about Titanic, or its crew, that were unique. Specifically, we end up with the idea that the Titanic took unique risks, and paid the price.

Gary Cooper puts this superbly in an article on the ship's captain, Edward Smith, on the BBC News site:

Though Smith was undoubtedly a forceful sailor who pushed his ships hard in conditions that may have daunted other captains, it is a fact of history that providing the weather was calm and clear - as it was that night - it was not unusual for any captain to sail ships into ice regions at speed and several captains from other shipping companies testified to this at the disaster inquiries. [my emphasis]

Our survivorship bias tells us that Titanic must have done something abnormal - from offending the fates to sailing too fast, too close to the ice. In other words, the problem was one of risk.

In fact, it's just as likely that the problem was not risk. To use Frank Knight's model, risk exists within a model where the potential probability of outcomes is known. If you and I flip a coin to decide who wins it, you know there is a 50% risk of loss. In scenarios where you can't calculate all the factors, we're not talking about risk - we're talking about uncertainty. In a highly uncertain situation, you can do all the things you normally do, and have a completely unpredictable outcome.

It seems the builders and owners and operators of the Titanic did the same as the builders, owners and operators of other ships. It's just that they happened to hit an iceberg. Of course, they had watertight bulkheads and lifeboats designed to cope with certain levels of damage. In other words, they treated icebergs and other events as calculable risks. Like the risk-management models that failed during the financial crisis, they assumed that the chances of a catastrophic event were low enough not to be worth insuring against. And in most cases, they were right - but in the Titanic's case, they were unprepared.

Futurists tell you that trying to calculate the risk from extreme events is pointless. Extreme events operate in the domain of uncertainty, and there's just not enough data (because they're so rare) to model the probability accurately. All you can do, in the end, is try to be resilient against the impact of those extreme events that you can imagine. And if you're a shipping company whose goal is to travel at high speed through the icy waters of the North Atlantic, you can definitely imagine a collision with an Iceberg. By getting hung up on likelihood, the White Star Line seem to have been blinded to possibility - the idea that a big enough Iceberg could destroy a whole ship, not just disable part of it. By this reckoning, the loss of the Titanic wasn't anything unique to do with the Titanic - it was a failure of resilience throughout the entire fleet, that just happened to make itself known one April night.

I'm going to end with a long quote from the 1912 Spectator piece. More than anything I've read on the subject from the last hundred years, this captures the difference between risk and uncertainty, the need for resilience, but also the inevitability of surprise.

The truth is, as we said the other day in writing about the Oceans, that every passenger ship puts to sea with the assumption that disaster will not happen. Far too much is taken for granted. The whole subject ought now to be threshed out and the proper provision of boats or rafts insisted on for ships of whatsoever size they may be. Even if seamen declare it impossible to manage more than an inadequate number of life boats, we cannot see why other means of life saving should not be perfected, such, for example, as having the top deck entirely detachable, so that in the last resort it could be floated off in sections, each of which would be a duly equipped raft. As for increasing the buoyancy of the ship herself we do not know whether experiments which are being tried with submarines would be possible with ships of great size. Perhaps not; the inflation of special floats in an emergency would probably not be possible on a large scale. But, however that may be, it is necessary seriously to meet the tragically established fact that all the bulkheads of the largest ship in the world may be so damaged, strained, or knocked away that she will sink just like a cheaply built tramp steamer.

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In the first of these posts we covered mounting concern about behavioural tracking and targeting by digital marketers, and traced some of the history of the 'data panic' that people are experiencing now - the sense that their data is at large, at risk, and for sale. Now it's time to take the temperature of data panic today, see where it might lead, and what marketers need to do.

Short-term vs long-term risks

As I said in the previous post, the current state of data panic is an odd mix of the well-informed and the ill-informed. Let's try to tease out those two strands in order to see what might change, and what might stick, in the current mindset around tracking and targeting. I should say up-front, this requires a bit of honesty.

After all, a lot of the things people are worried about, well... they are a bit true, aren't they? The technology, media and advertising industries have carried on quite happily over the past few years collecting data about their customers' online behaviours, without much scrutiny, and without much sign of wanting to take the conversation public. And that's a problem, because when it does come to light and people get concerned about it, nothing says 'you got me' like an awkward silence.

It doesn't help that the technology and the mathematics involved in targeting are so opaque and often rather hard to explain. As soon as you get into a discussion about cookies or sessions or clustering or segmentation or regression analysis, you're in a sort of voodoo country of the mind that calls up the ghosts of high-speed algorithmic trading and  Long-Term Capital Management and whatever the hell they were doing at Enron. Terrifying, confusing, the-machines-are-taking-over stuff.

Obviously there's a lot of misreporting here, as well as more well-founded concern. I think it's likely that, if privacy stays on the public agenda, it will lose some of its ability to shock.  Specifically, I think it will split out again into two separate discussions: about the merits of tracking and targeting, and about security of personal data. The second of these will remain high-stakes: when data has the power to expose or embarrass us, it matters. Tracking and targeting will probably become more transactional, though, as consumers either accept it as it is, in exchange for increased relevance and free services, or seek to gear the system more in their favour, for example by warehousing their behavioural data and selling it to advertisers. (Though I tend to buy Doc Searls's argument, that the benefits of giving data away are greater than the sale value.) Finally, while I think concerns about 'filter bubble' effects are legitimate, I don't think they're mainstream enough yet to drive the agenda.

Even if the privacy discussion matures, though, it hasn't yet. Let's not kid ourselves: there is public concern about targeting, and there is legislative pressure in the markets where the use of targeting is most advanced.

Why you can't just ride this one out

It's easy for industry insiders to succumb to a kind of disaster myopia around changes to privacy legislation. We tend to see data collection as not only so valuable, but so undeniably useful and beneficial, that we forget what a shock it is to users who barely know what a cookie is, let alone the extent to which their behaviours are being recorded and trafficked between servers for a profit. It's also easy for us to forget that the instincts of policymakers are likely to resemble those of the voting public, rather than those of digital marketers.

So let's assume that, a few months down the line, the US and EU require users to opt in before third-party cookies can be set on their machines. At the moment, when asked 'Do you mind if marketers track your behaviour?', the answer's hardly likely to be yes. If marketers want to avoid losing all their tracking data overnight, there are a couple of things they should be doing now.

The first is to get their data back under their own control. A lot of behavioural tracking is done on behalf of marketers by third parties who install their tracking technology (typically script tags) on marketers' websites. So data collected on domain1.com (marketer's website) is trafficked over to servers owned by domain2.com (tracking provider), and possibly beyond. That makes it hard for marketers to keep track of where they are sending their customers' data, and leaves them open to charges of negligence, not to mention security risks. Since third-party cookies are likely to be hit hardest by new legislation, marketers need to take more responsibility for data management.

The second priority is more basic. Marketers need to start being honest about data - and to take privacy seriously. The case for data collection has to be made by marketers, not just technologists, and it has to be put - genuinely - in terms of benefit to users, not just value to businesses and advertisers. We need to show that a better understanding of people's real behaviours isn't just used to serve up ads like cards from a deck - but to design better products and services, and give your users more relevant information.

We haven't been good at this, and we need to get good at it, fast. Otherwise we'll quickly find ourselves left behind.

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The stakes have been raised in the online privacy debate again. The White House recently announced plans for a data privacy bill of rights, which together with the EU's data protection reforms mean that it will be increasingly difficult to collect behavioural data from internet users without their consent. It's increasingly likely that the law will require users to opt in before their online behaviours can be tracked, stored and used for targeting.

When issues start to reach the attention of high-level policymakers, it's usually a sign that their time has come. Another sign of the times is the sudden appearance of pieces on online behavioural targeting in the business press. To their credit, the Wall Street Journal have been running with this for the last couple of years with their excellent What They Know site. But they're now being joined by a wave of other voices, including Jerry Michalski's in his piece for Forbes from a few days back, Big Data and the Stalker Economy:

Big data is strategic now. Facebook is valued at around $100 billion because it has collected a treasure trove of data that may unlock the secrets of selling more things to more people. Most other companies would like to have whatever they’re having. Google offers free email, word processing, mapping, analytics, video, videoconferencing and much more because they’re selling us to advertisers. The byword these days is, “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re the product.”

Not all commentators are as even-handed as Michalski. Expect to see a lot more pieces over the next few months like this one from Molly Wood at CNET, which takes data mining far more personally, and conjures up a cast of 'shadowy data brokers slurping up every last byte about you'.

As Victor Hugo put it (only in French), nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

It's time for those of us who work in the marketing technology industry to get serious about data, privacy and permissions.

Data panic: a history

Let's get this out in the open. I'm one of those shadowy data brokers (apparently). I work in digital marketing, in a part of the industry that relies heavily on using information about people's online behaviour to help organisations make decisions and respond to their customers faster, more efficiently, and (I hope) more effectively too.

So what does that mean? It means I absolutely have a stake in this game. So if you're looking for an entirely even-handed commentary you might not come to me first. But it also means I understand a lot of the uses of this kind of information, I know what gets collected and what doesn't, and I know some of the range of attitudes to people's data that exist within the industry. The problem with a lot of the commentary we're seeing it's that it's classic 'first draft of history' stuff - timely, urgent, powerful, but not always well informed. Of course, you don't just want to rely on experts when evaluating the social impact of a new technology. Experts, by definition, are always implicated, often very close to their subject, and can find it hard to step back. But when a debate's important (and I think this one is), it's important to scale up the expertise of non-specialists as quickly as possible, so that the debate is informed as well as lively.

For what it's worth, I'm more of a scaled-up non-specialist than an expert. As readers of this blog will know, my background's not in data science and analytics but in advertising, strategic planning and futures with a technology angle. My current interests are in helping clients make the best use of all this information, rather than in the complexities of statistics or modelling.

I'm close enough to my subject, though, to know that we're going through a period of what I call 'data panic' at the moment. If you know where to look, you can chart its mainstream evolution back over a period of about five or six years. Here are what I think are some of its important stages so far in the US and Europe (where it's most prevalent):

1. Several high profile public-sector data leaks (including this one in 2007, and endless stories about civil servants leaving laptops on trains) provide easy headlines in the classic 'incompetent public management' mould we know and love. They also start to highlight the scale of data collection by the state, and the lack of training and safeguards associated. A few similar leaks in the private sector hit headlines, including the huge leak of AOL search data in 2006.
2. Around 2009/10, the scale of social network use got impressive enough that social phenomena became observable. One of these was the possibility of embarrassment (or indeed unemployment) arising from your drunken photos turning up in front of your parents/loved ones/prospective employers.
3. The public-sector data leaks (point 1) lead to growing pressure against the expansion of public-sector data collection, and concern about proposals to join together existing databases held by different public bodies. The scrapping of the UK's ContactPoint database of children's personal information in 2010 is a case in point. At this stage, there is still little scrutiny of, or interest in, data collection by the private sector.
4. Not until about  late 2010/early 2011 does private-sector data become a hot topic. It starts, in the UK at least, with the kinds of loyalty card data that major retailers keep on their customers. Brands like Tesco become early targets for scrutiny.
5. At around the same time, social networks (especially Facebook) are really hitting their stride and coverage is starting to focus on the downside of their enormous popularity. Much of the early conversation is around the idea of 'context collisions' - as coined by BT's Bruce Schneier, mentioned in point 2 above - and the idea that parts of your life that were previously separate are forced together online. (This insight drove the development of Google Plus's 'Circles'.) But the scale of the issue starts to get attention too. That means journalists and analysts start looking not just at individual scare stories, but at the business models of social networks which depend heavily on collecting data, and often seem to make their privacy settings complex, hidden, and very open by default.
6. We come full circle with some high-profile data leaks and hacks - but this time with the focus on the private sector. Headline events like the Playstation Network hack and the Epsilon email marketing database reinforce the idea that personal data is both widespread and fragile.
7. Last but not least, as 2011 drew to a close, came a renewed focus on the unnoticed scale of online behavioural tracking. The WSJ, as noted, had run with this one for a while, but stories like the iPhone location file and Android keylogging gave it further momentum.

There are two strands to the story above. The first is surprising scale and the second is surprising exposure. As the two storylines have progressed over the last few years, the public has been left with the sense that more of their personal data is out there than they realised, and that it's in the hands of people who can't necessarily be trusted with it.

Now, as we move into 2012, let's throw another element into the mix: advertising. Let's face it, lots of us find the idea of advertising (as distinct from individual adverts) either boring, or patronising, or disturbing, or all three. Few of us like to think our attitudes - or behaviours - are influenced by the ads we see, and we don't want to volunteer to see more of the humdrum hard-sell that the A-word conjures up in our minds.

So there's a perception that we now live in a world in which the people who make ads are secretly tracking our every move, piling up our private data and selling it to each other... so they can show us more ads. This perception gets confirmed by those stories (which are now primed to hit headlines and be shared in a climate of real concern) in which the scale of data, the risk of exposure and the annoyingness of advertising come together in a perfect storm - like the recent one in which Target identified that a young woman was pregnant from her purchasing behaviour, before her father knew.

It feels intrusive and dangerous and underhand and wrong. And that's the context in which legislators are under pressure to make changes.

The next post in this series will deal with the short- and long-term risks of the current privacy environment, some likely developments in legislation and in public perceptions of data, and the need for some realism and honesty from marketers.

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How many digital agency pitches have you seen recently that started with some Big Scary Trends? Trends like the adoption rate of smartphones, or QR codes, or augmented reality, or geolocation, or microblogging, or the latest social network. Trends about media fragmentation or time spent online, telling you that your audience is falling away into a maze of channels, and paying less and less attention to messages from brands. Trends that would make any marketer nervous.

The Big Scary Trend is a staple of modern digital agency pitching. They’re designed to leave you with the impression that the marketing environment is increasingly out of your control, to leave you with that dizzying sensation that convinces you that your existing agency relationships (with ‘traditional’ agencies) are completely unequipped to deal with the baffling, scary, complicated and breakneck world of digital. So you’d better sign that contract.

And once you’ve signed, what’s the answer? More and more, the answer that comes back from digital agencies is ‘content marketing’. All businesses, however they generate their profits, must spend their marketing budgets producing ever greater quantities of content and publishing it to an ever-growing range of digital channels. It’s no longer enough for a soap-powder company to engage consumers with a product truth and an emotional connection. Now, it seems every business must also develop a large-scale publishing sideline and run it out of the marketing department, in the mere hope of grabbing some tiny sliver of a consumer’s attention for long enough to create an impression that might, one day, lead to them buying some soap powder.

But hang on. Is this really the inevitable future of marketing, in which the value-to-effort ratio falls through the floor in the face of inattentive, hostile and distant customers? Or is all this Big Scary Trends stuff, in fact, just bad client service? Shouldn’t agencies, with access to an increasingly powerful range of analytical tools, be first of all advising their clients on how to get those ratios back under control – in other words, how to get value for money?

The content marketing explosion

At risk of sounding like one of those pitches, this is what happens if you graph Google searches for ‘content marketing’ over the last few years.

Content marketing is itself a Big Scary Trend. Searches for it have rocketed in the past year and especially since the start of 2012, a sure sign of a phenomenon hitting the marketing mainstream. Brands now have Chief Content Officers and content strategies, and 61% of marketers plan to spend more on content marketing over the next year (according to the Content Marketing Institute).

It’s true that online content can deliver value for brands and businesses, and drive efficient reach in social channels where advertising-type messaging might not gain traction. But it’s also hugely time-consuming and expensive – and an increasingly crowded field. Businesses can burn through huge amounts of marketing budget creating branded content they hope will stand out, while all their competitors are doing the same, and flooding the web with content that (let’s be honest) will rarely compare favourably to the output of publishers or TV companies. When we’re all producing content, the returns on your content will diminish fast.

The right content, not more content

New media channels do pose new challenges for advertising and marketing. Branded messages now compete for attention not just with other ads but with TV shows, newspaper articles, and home videos of cats playing the keyboard – with all the riches of the web. In an open field, no brand stands a chance. No wonder the ‘make all the content you can’ approach can feel like the answer.

I'm lucky enough to work somewhere (Fabric Worldwide) that believes the opposite. Brands should create only as much digital content as they absolutely have to, to reach the right consumers with the right stimuli in the right channels at the right time. That means that every digital marketing strategy should start, not with a Big Scary Trend or a shiny new channel, but with a clear business objective, a robust and consistent view of target audiences’ needs and behaviours, and client/agency relationships that are strong and honest enough to ensure you’re all working towards a common goal of delivering efficient marketing-driven growth.

Looked at this way, content marketing isn’t a terrifying new world of increased effort and diminishing returns. It’s simply marketing: in new forms and in new channels, but with the same clarity of purpose and rigour of measurement. As for the task of choosing agency partners, marketers should still be looking for the great client service, strategic counsel and creative thinking that they can rely on in the long run. These skills should be joined with the technology and data expertise needed to find customer insights, deliver campaigns and measure effectiveness consistently across the growing digital landscape.

The future of digital marketing isn’t about churning out more and more work and living in fear of Big Scary Trends. It’s about reliable partnerships with great marketing technologists who can make the complex simple, and help you act on opportunities faster.

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The third part of Kantar's series of whitepapers on Putting Social Media in Context has been published. It opens with my piece on the future of social networks, based on the work I did at The Futures Company last year.

My piece argues that businesses need to take a more structured approach to understanding how people want to interact online, because this - rather than technology change - will mainly decide whether different social networking models succeed and fail. There are implications for marketing strategy, media investment, and product and service design.

Speaking of the design, the data visualisation work in these reports is lovely.

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There's an interesting thought in a piece in The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal:

What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. So, to make the metaphor here clear, Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers don't have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers).

The elaboration of the thought feels a bit overdone to me, suggesting various aspects of the movement as GET and POST calls, etc. - I'll let you read it and decide for yourself.

But the idea's stuck with me today, and has been elaborated by something completely unrelated, as so often happens. The something was Microsoft's announcement of the Kinect Accelerator program that it's launching to fund startups that take advantage of the Kinect user interface technology. This is an astonishingly smart piece of thinking from MS, who have continued to demonstrate that you can create far more value by incubating a technology platform than you can by just launching a product.

What's really nice about it is that it embraces the fuzziness - the hackability, if you like - of the Kinect concept. So many companies are fiercely protective, not just of their IP and their patents, but of their ideas about how people should use their products and services. (This is a hard habit to break - when you spend ages making something, whether it's an ad, an app or anything else, your first instinct is to be so protective when you release it that you want to shout, 'You're doing it wrong!', when you see how people respond to it.) What many companies treat as warranty-voiding behaviour, Microsoft supports, and is now backing financially. Good on them.

Which made me think. The one thing I keep hearing from observers of Occupy Wall Street and its family of protests is the idea that it's all very laudable, but if only they'd be a little bit more coherent. To use Alexis Madrigal's geeky analogy, if only we could see the underlying well-formedness of the API. If only it were making clearer calls.

I don't agree. Treating OWS as if it's a slightly dodgy hack of mainstream political philosophy, and therefore voids the warranty of serious debate, misses the point. Not the point of these protests, but the point of all protests. Protests exist to say, something's wrong, and to gather together a lot of people who agree with that simple sentiment. It's tough for smart people who care about quality of argument to hear, but protest isn't a mechanism for advancing a high-quality, well-defined argument. It's a device for amplifying the quantity of contention in a society: to make noise in the hope that others will make noise, and force a change. The mechanism for deciding which changes get made is politics, not protest.

Protests are platforms - designed to be extended, designed to be hacked. (The flip-side of this is that it makes little sense when the organisers of protest events disclaim all responsibility if they get turned into riots. You can't control a protest event, so you shouldn't imagine you can when you organise one.) They are not build for neatness, and insisting that they articulate themselves neatly means you end up hearing nothing, or a small something, when many discordant things are being said. That, of course, puts you at risk of being surprised by an unpredictable future.

There's an obligatory 'So what does this mean for communications?' note at the end, and this is it. What it means is that most 'movement branding' is getting it wrong because it still insists you can manage and 'own' social conversations. Getting it right means building a platform and letting people hack it, and not trying to own it. Of course, marketers and communicators also need to promote their own agenda, which is difficult in a platform. To do that they need to be good at politics, too - the art of advancing their own agenda while acknowledging the noisiness of the public sphere. Most marketers, even most advertisers, remain bad at that.

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This is a short post to draw your attention to The Futures Company's blog, where over the course of this week we're launching our work on the future of social networks. I've been leading this work, and have been busy on it for the last few months, and I've written a series of posts which we'll be posting on the blog over the course of this week, and which will be available after as a short paper giving an overview of the full report.

In a line or two, we suggest that too much attention is paid to technology change in online social networking, and not enough to changes in how people want to interact online. We identify six 'Pivot Points' - points of tension based on the choices people make when they engage online, and the conflicts they experience – that will shape the future of social networks. These decision points – around scale, privacy, specificity, pervasiveness, utility and worldview – will have different outcomes for different people across the world, but their different combinations will shape the future of online social networks. So rather than making big bets based on technology (or luck, or the latest fads in advice), business should understand what these Pivot Points are, and use them to see what decisions their customers are making about how they want to interact.

So there. If you want to know more, drop me an email or tweet, or go through more official channels and talk to @futuresco or sales@thefuturescompany.com.

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Just a quick post. I was sad to hear of the very early death of Amy Winehouse yesterday, and interested at the speculation it had prompted about dying young, and particularly drug overdoses, among musicians. (Note, the cause of death isn't confirmed at the moment.)

Impressively, National Statistics gets us pretty close to an answer with its Occupational Mortality in England and Wales series, and its datasheet on Occupational Mortality: Women Aged 16-59 for 1991-2001 [ZIP file, 2.6MB]

For the period 1991-2000, 13 women in literary and artistic professions in the England and Wales were recorded as having died from accidental poisoning by drugs. National Statistics puts the ratio of observed to expected deaths at 126, when standardized by age and social class. This is high: of the 188 occupations for which a ratio was provided, it ranks 13th highest. (Note that the nature of the 'accidental poisoning' is not specified.)

A further 2 women in literary and artistic professions in the England and Wales died from drug dependence, with an observed-to-expected ratio of 127.

In case you were wondering, the highest ratio of observed-to-expected deaths from accidental drug poisoning is among carpenters and joiners (927, but from a very very small sample of one death); the highest absolute number of deaths was among office workers and cashiers, at 136.

Note: I originally said 'in the UK' here a couple of times. I meant, of course, 'in England and Wales', and have corrected.

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I don't normally talk about politics on this blog, largely because I'm not very good at it; and US politics, in particular, is a crowded space that you don't wade into lightly if you don't know what you're talking about.

However, I have spent a lot of this year tracking and trying to make sense of the attitudes, sentiments and values of people in the US on different issues (no easy task for a Brit). And I reckon whoever's running the Republicans' political strategy at the moment is basing it on flawed insights.

Even beyond the Tea Party movement, there's a new wave of Republicans in the House of Representatives who are trying to focus the political agenda on public debt, spending and the deficit. These more activist Republicans in Congress have forced the issue of the debt ceiling, and generated an equally stiff response from Democrats and the White House, leading to the current deadlock in debt talks - and, today, abandonment of the talks by the Speaker of the House.

The strategy, if you hadn't guessed, is to make the most of control of the House by showing some muscle, roadblocking initiatives coming out of the White House, and taking a firm and very simple line on debt, deficit and spending (summed up neatly, if cheesily, in the term 'cut, cap and balance'). I think the intended message to the American people from all this activity is: 'In a tough economy, you're learning not to spend more than you have; you expect the federal government to do the same; we're going to make sure government lives within its means.'

But that's not the message that's getting through. The reason is a combination of old insights and flawed planning.

When I say old, I don't mean that old - but that's the problem with public attitudes: they do have that awkward habit of changing on you. The Republicans seem to be assuming that, because economic conditions and consumer behaviour haven't shifted all that substantially since about mid-to-late 2009, insights into people's values around the economy and personal and public finances haven't changed all that much either. The thing is, that's not true.

When the shock of the recession first hit, people reacted by battening down the hatches - spending less, aggressively paying down debt (though, admittedly, only to about 2006 levels), trying to balance their personal budgets. It was around that time that sentiment began to shift away from the idea that decisive collective action was the best way to redress the balance of a catastrophic market failure: by December, when Time named Ben Bernanke their Person of the Year, the idea of celebrating Big Government's Mr Fix-It already seemed a little out of date.

The later part of 2009, and much of 2010, was characterized by exactly the kind of attitudes that the Republicans are currently betting on. Trust in institutions - government as well as business and finance - fell through the floor. Just as one of the purest expressions of the 'collective response' stance had been Obama's election victory, so this new 'won't get fooled again' self-reliance was captured in the emergence of the Tea Party movement into mainstream discourse (regardless of the very atypical demographic makeup of its support base). In 2009/10, the idea that the best thing government can do is pay its late bills and cut up its credit cards would have felt just right to a lot of people.

But in mid-2011, the landscape of attitudes has changed. In part, it's changed precisely because conditions have not. In July, when the latest employment data came out and showed that only 18,000 jobs had been added, instead of the roughly 101,000 predicted, it signalled another period of 'same old, same old': depressed growth, no jobs, low security. So it's easy to assume, looking at those numbers, and at consumer spending and economic confidence, that people will still be huddling from the howling storm, receptive to the same messages about fixing the roof and getting the house in order. Ask about people's attitudes, though, and it's a different story. I've mentioned before, in a post about the problem with consumer confidence, that pollsters too easily assume that attitudes are tied to hard numbers in the economy, and that consumer confidence in the economic future is a good barometer of the kinds of ideas and actions they will respond to in the present. That's broadly true of consumer behaviour (though even then it assumes that the conditions for consumption don't change much, and that businesses are largely reactive - in fact, they can create the conditions for stronger or weaker consumption, but that's another story). For attitudes, there's no such short-cut, and we're seeing that now. Yes, the economy's as bad as it was. Yes, job security and availability are unlikely to improve. But no, people are not still focusing on 'panic cutting' in the immediate present as their priority response.

Instead, people are starting to think about the future. It's clear there's no light at the end of the tunnel, so people are learning to live without it. I've described the mood in the US at the moment as 'post-optimistic', and I still think that's right. Rather than focusing on the immediate situation and waiting for things to change, people are adjusting their lives and their spending to equip them to cope with a longer-term future whose outline they can't yet see. I'd describe this as planning for everyday resilience. It's the reason why New Yorkers pack an umbrella, even on a sunny day (except me, apparently), or why you always carry a few notes in your wallet in case you end up somewhere that doesn't  take your debit card (note: not a credit card, not these days).

Post-optimism is driven in part by lack of trust, just as panic cutting was. In the last year or two Americans have felt let down by powerful institutions in all sorts of ways, from mortgage lenders to banks, to oil companies, to banks again (bonuses), to government (ask those teachers in Wisconsin). But planning for everyday resilience doesn't mean people expect government to just step aside. There's a recognition that government can help build resilience, file smooth some of the spikes of a market economy. It has to be accountable, and measurable, and it has to show that, in the face of uncertainty, it's focused on making the country tougher - not just cheaper.

And that's the problem for the Republicans. By making the conversation all about cutting the deficit and paying down debt, they've forgotten to remind people why any of those things might be a good idea when it comes to planning for everyday resilience, and trying to get a fairer deal for the next generation (and this generation as it ages). That's the big flaw in the strategy, and it's led to an even bigger flaw in the execution. By treating this as fundamentally an issue about public spending and government now, and not about securing the future, the Republicans in Congress have opened themselves up to accusations of grandstanding. People look at the situation and see it as a vast, remote political game, played for its own purposes, irrelevant and childish and stubborn. When they stop caring about the outcome of that game, they will support its fairest and most pragmatic player, not its victor.

If you happen to be reading this, and you happen to be a Republican political strategist (unlikely, I know, but possible), you need to start talking about the future in ways that are meaningful to the rest of us. You should know that I'm not a natural supporter of yours, but the current deadlock is self-serving and will do the opposite of what you intend in terms of sentiment and support.

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There's wisdom in two recent short pieces from the Ogilvy PR blog. The first is in Claire Lekwa's You Are What You Share: Why Pitchfork Gets It:

Today, sharing content is easy. But sharing goes beyond what happens online. Everything we choose to share about ourselves, in social media or face-to-face, defines who we are to others.

The second is in Maury Postal's The Medium Is Now More Than Ever The Message:

[McLuhan's] concept [that the medium is the message] has been refined and reborn in many forms and has underwritten the success of platforms like tumblr—by far the best self-expression mechanism in the known-universe—by allowing people to discover content they truly care about and claim ownership of in an active, vibrant community—one that fosters their personal growth and validates their actions or feelings.

[My emphasis.]

The implication is bigger than the individual points. It's that there's a growing emphasis on sharing and curation as a form of creative act. This is the sort of thing that divides people, obviously. I've heard it said that the emphasis on clipping and copying, made possible by platforms like Tumblr, is becoming a poor substitute for creativity. We're not writing, we're just pinching.

On the offchance that you read a lot of 18th/19th-century cultural history, you might recognize this argument as the sort of privileging of individual creativity and the originating genius that's cited as one of the defining traits of Western European romanticism. There's a tendency to think of the obsession with original creation as a Renaissance thing. It's not - it's much more strongly linked to romanticism. Anyway...

I'm in the opposite camp. I think it's hard to look at something like Dads Are The Original Hipsters, a very self-consciously curated thing, and not see some creativity in the selection and arrangement. If the 'original creativity rules' camp can be called the Romantic Mindset, I'm going to be just as cheeky and call this 'cut-and-paste creativity' model the Bonaventure Theory.

During the explosion of manuscript production in Europe in the central Middle Ages, the clerics who were churning out material didn't have Tumblr, but they did have a pretty elegant theory of the different ways in which you could contribute to the creative process. Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century bishop of Albano, pointed out four different modus faciendi librum (ways of making books):

Sometimes a man writes others' words, adding nothing and changing nothing; and he is simply called a scribe [scriptor]. Sometimes a man writes others' words, putting together passages which are not his own; and he is called a compiler [compilator]. Sometimes a man writes both others' words and his own, but with the others' words in prime place and his own added only for purposes of clarification; and he is called not an author but a commentator [commentator]. Sometimes a man writes both his own words and others', but with his own in prime place and others' added only for purposes of confirmation; and he should be called an author [auctor].

[Translated by J.A. Burrow in Medieval Writers and their Work.]

I like this model of the creative process. You'll notice it doesn't say anything about which kind of creation is best. It certainly doesn't privilege individual creativity- there's no option for writing something completely original in the bishop's scheme. The implication is that writing is to some extent always sharing - and that sometimes just sharing is enough. Bonaventure's thinking was hugely influential for several hundred years. You can see later medieval writers - including John Gower and Christina de Pizan - using it to humbly suggest that their very original creations were just cut-and-paste jobs - I'm just a humble compiler, not a real author at all, they'd say.

The simple, powerful idea is that individual creativity is beautiful, but sharing creates culture. It's good to see that idea coming to life again.