Alex Steer

779 words | ~4 min

When the BBC News website links to a story titled the lexicography of Starbucks, how can I say no? Even better is that it's actually pretty good, asking some of the right people the right questions about the ways brands try to insert their own language into the world. (BBC News, by the way, has some of the best popular coverage of language and lexicography topics. Thanks to Jesse Sheidlower for pointing me to this piece on the inclusion of vuvuzela in the Oxford Dictionary of English.)

The core of the story - about an English professor and a coffee-shop worker who basically started fighting in a Starbucks over the former's refusal to say something unimportant about wanting no butter on a bagel - is, as the Beeb says, 'bafflingly trivial'. But the quotes from the experts genuinely have the rare ring of thoughtfulness about them, especially this one from Susie Dent:

It is every company's dream to get their language out there and being used - it's linguistic product placement

And this from Jonathan Gabay (which itself borrows beautifully from Little Britain, of course):

The problem is when it's too heavy-handed and and the staff are effectively saying, 'Computer says no.' Marketing is ultimately about communication and some of these companies need to put down the guide books and remember that.

So why am I writing about this, except just because? Because I disagree a bit with the final thought of the piece, from Tony Thorne:

"Some of this stuff is ludicrous in its complexity," he says. "They're not trying to turn us into food snobs - it's simply about imposing their brand values. "It's intended to bamboozle and intimidate. I see it as a form of corporate bullying."

There's a slight confusion here between what brand lexicons intend to do and what they end up doing. Given my background I'm probably hypersensitive to this sort of distinction, but still. Popular thought about PR has been bound up for a long time with popular thought about language use. The classic caricature of the PR industry (never better portrayed than in Absolute Power) is of the slick operators of language, compelling people to use new, euphemistic words in place of old, damaging ones. This is all based on the popular version of George Lakoff's theory of conceptual metaphor: the idea that if you change the words people speak, you change the thoughts they think. If you want to see why its application to political and public communications is flawed, read Stephen Pinker's devastating knock-down of Lakoff's book Whose Freedom.

The point is that brands themselves are not the smooth arch-operators of language. They're often at the mercy of their own words and phrases. When you work every day inside any organisational environment, it gets hard to remember that the people you're marketing to don't see the world like you see it. They may not share your unbridled enthusiasm for your new bottle-tops, your catalytic converter technology or your fifteen different types of cappuccino. The public lexicography of brands is often an overspill of that internal enthusiasm, based on the belief that your customers not only want to talk to you, they want to talk like you.

The language isn't 'intended to bamboozle and humiliate', or even to impose 'brand values'. Most of the time it's just trying to communicate those values, which often come down to little more than the enthusiasm of people who spend all day thinking about coffee (or whatever). Sometimes it's more deliberate, an attempt to convey something of the spirit of the brand that, to the people inside, seems to justify that enthusiasm. ('Hey, we don't feel like menial workers, we feel like baristas!') The problem is not arch-cunning, but forgetfulness. The users of these lexicons forget what it's like to be a normal person, with only a brief and fleeting connection to a brand; to have no desire to speak its language at all. It's a kind of accident, like when you show your friends too many of your holiday photos.

Far better are those brands who don't need a complicated lexicon to talk to people, because they remember how ordinary people actually talk, and find their way of fitting quite naturally into those conversations.

593 words | ~3 min

I've spent the last two weeks exploring some parts of South Africa I wanted to see before leaving for New York at the end of this month. One of those was the Kruger National Park (which is, fantastically, the size of Wales).

Aside from suddenly feeling like a tourist again in the country I've lived in for the last year, the thing that struck me, as we drove around the park looking for animal sightings, was the way in which digital cameras have changed the way in which people's holiday snaps are boring.

In the age of print and slide, holiday snaps were dull because they were staged. When you only had 12, 24 or 36 shots on a roll of 35mm film, you chose your moments, so all of your shots were of you standing in front of things, or with people you met. There you were, frozen in time and usually frozen in position, near something that might be an elephant.

Now that photographs are not limited to rolls, they are rolling - a semi-continuous record of holiday activity, like a dotted line between the states occupied by instant cameras (pull face, check hair, throw away) and film cameras (pose, smile, snap, print, mount, review). Taking photos of events is increasingly a default behaviour, and I'm not convinced we post-edit as much as we pretend we do, now that disk space is plentiful and cheap. That's why your holiday snaps are boring now: because there are hundreds of them.

Early one morning in the Kruger, a lion ran out in front of our car, across the road, and back into the bush. It took ten seconds at most, and between braking, oohing and aahing we didn't have time to reach for the camera before it was gone.

There are no blurry shots of hide or mane; no tail disappearing into the trees. It's just a story.

It made me think: is the value of unsubstantiated stories increasing? Is there now something special about events and experiences that slip through the tightening net of recording media?

Look at a lot of this year's Cannes Lions winners and you'll see media activations that were designed to be amplified through media and talked about far beyond the places where they happened. Think Kit Kat Chairs, Gatorade Replay, and T-Mobile Singalong. These are brilliant experiential marketing ideas that are only allowed to happen because they provide content for mass-reach advertising (often quite cheaply through social media).

Most media budgets won't allow for small-scale creative work that only reaches a few people, understandably. Some braver marketers invest in staging events in the knowledge that photos and videos will be captured and shared, though increasingly there's demand for a 'helping hand' from activation and digital agencies to ensure they get reach, which smacks of lack of confidence.

I never hear of creative activations which are designed only to survive as an urban legend. Which could mean they don't work, or could mean they aren't tried. Where could you do them? In a remote rural community? In a library? Underground? Wherever personal and social media aren't these days. They would be risky, but they would be special.

368 words | ~2 min

I wrote the other day about physically realistic interfaces and the dissatisfaction with signals and screens. I then followed that up with some off-the-cuff nonsense about modems.

My sense for fashion, design and craft leaves a lot to be desired, but I know people who know, as it were, and I'm noticing an expansion of the obsession material craft that characterises fashion, design and craft blogs. Look at WishWishWish, A Dress A Day, Designs and Wonders (disclosure: written by my wife), Conversation Pieces and the like. They're not just about designed objects, they're about the craft and the detail that goes into them. That can make them feel retro, but what they really are is materialist in the good sense of the word: obsessed with the kind of details and peculiarities that mass production often omits.

What's really interesting is that this good materialism extends to the blogs themselves, many of which are designed to look as 'made' as possible. WishWishWish, for example, clearly puts all its photographs through Poladroid or a similar image post-processor, to give them that old-fashioned, hand-developed feel. That pre-digital feel, I should say. It's a way of encoding a form of nostalgia for the harder craft of pre-digital production processes.

This jumps out at me because I'm seeing the same trend extending into the ways planners make presentations. Have a look on Slideshare and see how many decks you find that use images of old books, signs, posters, tapestries, paintwork, metalwork, and other residues of craftsmanship. Is this the first stirrings of a request that those of us who make our living designing and building digital products be treated, and be allowed to feel, like we're making things?

And, since it would be rude to talk about the party without going, here's a photo of me, on a boat in Cape Town harbour, run through Poladroid.

485 words | ~2 min

I seem to be having a lot of conversations with smart people at the moment about brands with well-established problems. Specifically, the kind of problem with a product, service or organsation that gets the kind of persistent 'yes' response that planners can only dream of. You know the kind. Stella's for wife-beaters, Skodas break down, Belgium is boring.

Typically, you can do one of two things with a problem like this. The first is to ignore it, and develop all your brand messages without ever giving the slightest hint that lots of people already have a strong point of view about your brand. Let's call this the 'Stella' option, for obvious reasons.

It doesn't work, obviously. It's fresh wallpaper in a condemned house.

Option two is the surprise tactic. Don't talk about your problem, but find ways in which your brand is the exact opposite and talk about those. Let's call this the 'Visit Dangerous Belgium' option. (As far as I know there hasn't ever been a 'Visit Dangerous Belgium' campaign. But there should be.)

Unlike the 'Stella' option, this can work pretty well, but you've got to work really hard to show that popular perception is wrong (to convince us all that Belgium really is thrilling and dangerous).

So let's talk about option three. The one where you say 'yes, we know'.

This can be hard, especially if you've spent your whole history pursuing option 1. But it can be a far more effective way of changing people's conversations about your brand, by taking away the covert character of the old conversations. You may feel like you're selling out your brand managers, but really, look at how well it can work. Marmite said yes, we know half of you hate the taste. Skoda said yes, we know you all think our cars are crap. Nationwide said yes, we know building societies are desperately boring. Now you're listening, let's talk.

People are basically pitiless when it comes to brands, mainly because brands deserve it. They will find and exploit weaknesses. And now they'll do it online, where everyone can hear. Who can blame them, when most brands spend so much time talking about how great they are? Nobody likes that. If you spend all your time alternating between telling people 'Brand X Baked Beans are great' and asking people to 'tell us how much you love Brand X Baked Beans', they will be praying for any chance to knock you down. (If you don't believe me, Google 'Skittles twitter' and see how the colourful candy brand died for your sins.)

I've seen this advice dressed up as 'creating a forum for brand discussions', or 'generating conversations around a movement'. Both those metaphors still imply that the brand remains in control. So I prefer to summarise what's above as 'dealing gracefully with the fact that some people hate you, working out why, and fixing it'.

Catchy, eh?

483 words | ~2 min

Wired report on the investment by Google and the CIA in Recorded Future, a predictive analytics tool. (There's a good piece in Fast Company too.)

Here's the showreel:

And here's the description of how it works:

1. Scour the web
   We continually scan thousands of news publications, blogs, niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more.
2. Extract, rank and organize
   We extract information from text including entities, events, and the time that these events occur. We also measure momentum for each item in our index, as well as sentiment.
3. Make it accessible and useful
   You can explore the past, present and predicted future of almost anything. Powerful visualization tools allow you to quickly see temporal patterns, or link networks of related information.

It feels like there's a lot of missing steps in point 2 there, but that's understandable, as I expect there's a lot of proprietary smartness around data extraction, categorisation and analysis, and natural language processing (all of which I'd love to find out more about). The Fast Company article linked to above makes the good point that, like a lot of 'predictive' analytics systems, it's more an assembly and connection tool than a predictor, and that 'the only way of really proving that the intel gathered is bona fide is common sense'. To that I'd add a caution about the data that's going in. Without guarantees as to how the compilers judge the informative content of input data, no guarantees are possible about the dependability of outputs (as ever, x in, x out).

But it's easy to bash a product you don't understand. Actually, my concern is that the whole thing feels over-branded. The name and the other associated terms ('Temporal Analytics Engine', for one) seem grossly out of step with reality. That's a shame, because it's clearly a fantastically smart system designed and analysed by equally smart people. Isn't that enough without forcing your marketing material to imply some sort of clairvoyance? All the 'news from the future' stuff is a bit offputting.

71 words | ~0 min

Writing the last post made me think, when was the last time you heard a modem?

Amazing how quickly technology changes and leaves a museum of sensory experiences in our memories, no longer being updated. What will be next to go? Will we look back fondly at that death-rattle noise you get when you're standing next to a speaker just before your phone gets a text message?

Maybe not fondly, actually...

417 words | ~2 min

haptic: of or relating to touch.

The last few years have seen a shift towards the haptic in personal computer interface design. For several decades now the main paradigm has been visual-spatial, based on the metaphor of seeing things in space and being able to control their movement and arrangement. Of course, the mouse involved using touch to direct movement, but was not really fully haptic because of the difference in location between the hand performing the action (below your eyeline) and the action performed (on the screen, in your eyeline). The new paradigm is visual-spatial-haptic, to coin a really awkward term. Touch-screen devices create the illusion of direct manipulation. Maybe it isn't even an illusion: you touch the screen, and changes take place beneath your fingers. This is not a new conversation.

But the idea of the haptic, as opposed to the purely visual-spatial, seems to be emerging now in media. Looking at (and cherry-picking, admittedly) some of this year's most awarded communications campaigns - think Nike Chalkbot, Tropicana Sun, KitKat deckchairs, that weird Nokia arrow-on-a-crane thing - the idea of the touchable world as a locus of interest seems to be on the rise.* The best communications, we seem to say, are those which touch the haptic, material world and change it, not those which just configure pixels on a screen or the vibrations of a speaker.

Perhaps the 'post-digital world' we're all beginning to think about now is actually a 'post-signal' world. Perhaps the last fifty or so years under the dispensations of television, radio and personal computers have been about deriving value and entertainment from the projection of electronic signals into our field of attention. Under those dispensations, visual-spatial interfaces with superficial manual manipulation (mice, buttons, switches, dials) was enough. Perhaps the next cycle of our relationship to communications technology will be about deriving value from the physical world and the things in it, with the insistence that interfaces extend our haptic reach (not just our sight and hearing) in ways that feel physically genuine. As telecommunications reach the post-scarcity phase, maybe we'll want our remote activities to feel more like our interactions with the things around us. And maybe the convergence of physical interaction and telecommunication will help us value both more. I hope so.

* I pinched most of these examples from @sarahewalker, who knows and thinks about them far better than I.

587 words | ~3 min

Another day, another Facebook privacy story. Well, sort of. BBC News reports on the publication of a data file containing the publicly-available details of 100 million Facebook users by security consultant Ron Bowles.

Predictably, there's anger and concern, much of it directed at Facebook. But I'm not sure the company itself is entirely to blame. I'm starting to think it's a generational thing among internet users.

This is, after all, publicly available information. Yes, Facebook's privacy settings are convoluted and offputting, but it is possible to lock down virtually everything with some determination and a small amount of time. Or - and I know nobody wants to hear this - you can simply not use Facebook if you're more deeply concerned about putting personal data online. In much the same way that, back in the olden days when I learned to use the interwebs, you might consider not having a web page.

So yes, there's still cause to grumble at Facebook for some of its points of view on privacy; but there's a more general problem. It's that a lot of social network users don't really know how computers work any more.

Specifically, they don't know how scripting works, and the ease and speed with which a publicly-accessible site can be read by a script, and structured data extracted and written to a file. Once written, it doesn't need supervision or amendment (as long as it's not buggy). It just runs and runs.

This breaks through what I call the 'effort threshold' for privacy. We tend to assume that there are some things people won't do to us because the cost in effort outweighs the possible benefits. For example, assume someone who lives in south-west London doesn't like me, and wants to punch me. A problem if I'm also in south-west London, and I might have a word with the local police. However, I live in South Africa, so I assume that the effort required to give me a black eye is so great that the risk is pretty low that he will fly out. I'm beyond the effort threshold.

The problem comes when we get the effort threshold wrong. That's easy to do online when you don't understand how tasks are performed by computers (and by people who know how to use them).

We're now well beyond the point at which most internet users had a pretty decent knowledge of computing generally. We can complain about this ('it's always September...'), or we can accept that it's a symptom of a maturing technology. It's probably the first time a media technology has had a cost of participation so low that this kind of 'mass error' has been a problem.

So by all means let's argue about privacy versus openness, and about settings on social networks (and whatever comes after). But let's also talk about what new kinds of knowledge are needed to avoid mass error with the technologies that increasingly define how the world works. That's a much bigger conversation. We're used to talking about a generation that's growing up digital as if that's a benefit, but it can also make that generation less well equipped to function than the members of the previous generation who had to learn their way into the future, one grep at a time.

(And if you don't get the pun in the previous sentence, ask a geek.)

260 words | ~1 min

Altimeter's paper on The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing makes for an interesting read.

Here are Altimeter's eight criteria:

And here's their heuristic analysis of how different categories are performing.

Retail and consumer goods are doing best; regulated industries and luxury hotels are doing worst.

But hang on. If you had to rank these industries by the extent to which they needed to be good at meeting the eight criteria above, wouldn't you generate something like this?

The paper seems to assume that brands in all these industries are playing the same game in respect of social media: that retailers are in the Premier League and luxury hotels are in the Vauxhall conference. But that assumes that social media is an equally useful and viable channel for them all, and that these objectives are equally necessary and desirable.

I had a great conversation last night, talking about the Starbucks digital strategy, in which the thought came up: maybe it's time for everyone to stop writing opinion pieces on social media marketing. Maybe it's just time to concentrate on start doing it, doing it well, and adapting it to specific business models. You know, like we do with TV and newspapers.

Reading this paper makes me think we had a point.

943 words | ~5 min

The BBC News website's Tech Brief pointed me towards this post on Religion Dispatches, which revisits the argument for the similarity between hypertext and the literary practices of medieval monks:

The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet “pages.” The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures”... did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it. The patron of the volume might be shown receiving the completed book or supervising its writing. Or, a scene related to a saint might accompany a biblical text read on that saint’s day in the liturgical calendar without otherwise having anything to do with the scripture passage.

My academic training was in medieval English bibliography, so it's always good to see medievalists clamouring for a bit of relevance. However, since medieval book-making and modern internet cultures are pretty much my specialist subjects, I have to disagree slightly with the claim.

It's true that glossing, whether pictoral or verbal, was a fundamental of monastic text production. In contrast with the modern tendency to privilege originality of composition, the mainstream of scholarly thought in the medieval west saw thoughtful reproduction (copying) as an important end in itself. In part this was due to the cost in time and materials to reproduce texts. Don't think of illuminated manuscripts here, necessarily. Most manuscripts are much simpler affairs, but even so required patience, skill and financial outlay. The best work (at least until about the late fourteenth century) was done almost exclusively in monasteries, a fact which had a major influence on both the texts which were copied and the discipline of copying itself. The best scribes were not just photocopiers with human faces, but thoughtful textual critics.

As you'd expect when most copyists were monks, textual criticism owed a lot of its theoretical foundations to theology. And, in fact, with its roots in the Late Antique period, the theology of the monasteries had been intensely aware of its dependence on textual criticism and the status of its faith as a religion of the book. Some branches of theology arose explicitly from the need to reconcile the interpretative difficulties of the Bible, and particularly the complicated relationship of the Old Testament (thought of as shared with the Jews) and the New. This need - to show that the New Testament represented a fulfilment of the Old, superceding but not obviating the Jewish scriptures - is at the root of typology, the discipline of Christian reading popularised by the work of Origen, which saw Old Testament figures and events as prefigurations of New Testament ones.

With so much of Christian textual theology dependent on analogy, it is no surprise that monastic copyists took pains to discern and point out the analogies, figurations and lessons in the texts they copied. Typological thinking was not reserved for the relationship between testaments, either. It pervaded monastic understanding of the past, present and future too. The theology of time saw it as a linear progression marked with cycles of return and repetition. This was true in the short term - the cycle of feasts and fasts which marked the progress of the liturgical year - and in the long term. So there was a religious imperative to teach people to draw out the parallels between past and present as a way of negotiating the perils of the religious life into the future.

Students of theology were taught to find the typological significance of all sorts of events. They were taught, in other words, to make links between texts.

But does this mean medieval monks were the original hypertext makers? My answer's still no. This may sound obvious, but the defining feature of hypertext is the ability to move between texts. What matters is the immediacy of access to another resource.

Unsurprisingly, this is lacking in analogical glossing. It's not just a technological barrier that means that a gloss is not a hypertext. The glosses acted as reminders, not just as references. Unlike hyperlinks, they did not necessarily point to 'something else' that should be chased up as soon as convenient. Instead, they referenced ideas and images that were already familiar. Whereas hyperlinks provide a series of optional next steps to new things, analogical glosses provided a whole frame of reference for thinking about something new.

That said, copyists were masters of intertext and metatext - respectively the referencing of other resources and the creation of information structures capable of organising resources by various kinds of relation. Intertextual and metatextual thinking are fundamental to hypertext, and more widely to search engines and the semantic web.

They're not a rediscovery, either. Intertextual and metatextual thinking underpins the arrangement of libraries, dictionaries, thesauruses, the indexes in books, footnotes, object-orientated programming, file dependencies, and most of the other innovations that make managing information bearable. This tradition is long, and more or less unbroken. Medieval monks weren't prefigurations of the internet. They wouldn't even have seen themselves as the originators of this kind of information organisation. But they were there, way upstream, pointing readers in interesting and useful directions.