Mass-Produced Laborers

We all do something that contributes to someone, something, or a company. We all provide a service to each other, directly or indirectly. Someone is at least making decisions that impact the way customers interact with receiving the product from employees.

We’re all workers, separated by different types of tasks, some digital, some that require our feet to be on the ground making stuff at the factory or serving customers within the store.

At the end of the day, we have to work in order to eat and have time to play. We all have to do something in order to survive.

As mass produced laborers, which of us are leaders and which of us are lemmings? Pride is hard to come by. Making decisions from the top and doing the hard hand work below can be equally automated.

How to make a significant impact?

Bing Crosby discovered the microphone. He was also the first American to record on tape, which basically pioneered the hard drive.

Fast-forward into the mid-nineteen-forties. The Second World War had just ended. Americans were picking over the technological remains of German industry. One of the things they discovered was magnetic tape; the Nazis had been using tape recording to broadcast propaganda across time zones. It was a remarkable invention. Previous sound-recording technologies had used wax cylinders or discs, or delicate wires. But magnetic tape was remarkably fungible: it could be recorded over, cut and spliced together. Plus it sounded better.

There is a direct link in the Silicon Valley understanding between Bing Crosby’s crooning and the rise of the hard drive, which was designed as an improvement over magnetic tape. Or, to put it into an equation: microphones + crooning + Nazis + radio + fifty thousand dollars = Silicon Valley.

So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period.

The giant sucking sound of the digital economy.

Prosumer

Thanks to the Internet, we have become both producers and consumers. We are, in the futurist (how old-fashioned the term “futurist” seems now) Alvin Toffler’s unlovely phrase, “prosumers.” We tweet, and post, and update, and blog at the same time we are consuming other people’s digital productions. We are all part of a vast crowd that is unaware of how atomized it is, ignorant of the fact that it is both interconnected and isolated at the same time. - Lee Siegel

Whether it’s this blog or Twitter or Facebook I try to mix up the content between stuff I own/write and stuff that inspires me, which is mostly content I consume first and then retweet or reblog.

Zoom

fieldstudy:

Today, we introduce Days, a visual diary for the iPhone that lets you capture each day of your life as it really is: sunny or dark, exciting or tedious, exceptional or mundane—and always unfiltered.

Days is a product I am an incredibly proud of from a team I am lucky to work with. I could write for days (hehe) about what we’ve built. In the near future I’ll post some thoughts about the process, learnings I picked up along the way, and some of the cutting-room-floor stuff that we all like to get a peek at.

But for now, I just want to express a feeling that is hard to put into words. This app feels like something much bigger than the some of our small team’s efforts. I had my hands in every corner of this app. I know it in and out. And yet I continually find myself surprised. It is thoughtfully conceived, well engineered, and carefully designed. But what gets to me are the unexpected moments of small but meaningful connectedness. It’s been something I’ve been chasing in my product design work and I can say, with humble confidence, that we’ve begun to touch that beautiful feeling.

 Download Days

It’ll be interesting to see how this does against my personal favorite diary app Day One, which focuses more on text entries but also enables photos.

Niches are growing niches and the mainstream

The array of niches is making mass appeal less attractive but much larger. The long tail makes what’s popular even more popular, like an obsession.

Just scan your newsfeed. Everyone is tying in Jay Z, Beyonce, Bieber to one of their stories, hoping to woo a wider audience.

Forcing the conversation around a sly disconnect means that both people that love it and hate it will see it. The publications and celebrities both get richer, leaving limited space for new hyper-mainstream entrants.

On the whole, people gravitate to online tribes. The Internet connects a mass of niches and curators. Styles such as jean shorts and genres such as dub-step now have huge cult followings.

We really don’t even need the mainstream. It’s unnecessary noise acceptable only to people that don’t know any better. A online niche is a massive craze within itself.

He pointed out that there’s a lot of “reality” in the virtual, and a lot of “virtual” in our reality.

Internet fanatic Paul Miller went offline for a full year only to find out he lost day to day connection with friends and family. He also got really bored and resorted to old behaviors.

We live in a digital reality now. To ignore the Internet is to ignore basic communication.

There are clearly benefits to living offline: appreciation for nature, renewed focus, and intimacy. But those things can also get stale as they become the new normal.

The offline/online approach is ultimately about balance. The latter just may be a lot stronger. Pace yourself.

Alternative Thinking

Consensus begets decision. We all want to agree and keep on moving on. But consensus is the not the end to alternative thinking.

“The role of thinkers is primarily to keep options open.” - Milton Friedman

Work needs to be reevaluated, rejudged, and twisted into something new. No product nor marketing campaign should be repeated regardless of success.

Steve Jobs continually disrupted his own business, killing off the iPod with the iPhone and now the laptop with the iPad.

Learn from the past and experiment in the future. An agreement is only step one in the implementation process; there’s other ideas yet to be explored.

Dear Diary…

Diaries are no longer private. Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook posts have trained people into sharing thoughts, opinions, and personal images publicly.

People keep their diaries online.

It took a few years for people to get comfortable with digital sharing. Facebook became popular because it walled your content from the rest of the world. But then Twitter came along and trained everyone to become a mini-celebrity. All of a sudden people had a voice, a microphone, in less than 140 characters.

Now people can’t stop sharing. They want people to like, comment, share, retweet, favorite, repin, heart, and reblog their content. They share more when no one responds and they’re incentivized to share more when they do get a response.

The smartphone and Internect connectivity make capturing content just as easy as sharing it. You can snap a photo and publish it in three clicks/touches. You can just as easily keep this information private.

The challenge today is in knowing what information to keep to yourself. It could be an idea, a quick brain fart, or a to do list on Evernote or Day One. In a way, the practice of social sharing has increased the likeliness of private sharing.

Sharing is a mixture of self-promotion and selflessness. It publicizes your work and it helps inform others. Sharing with yourself, on the other hand, is more likely the act of discovering yourself.

“The benefit of keeping a diary is that it helps me figure out what the hell I’m doing with my time on earth.” - John Sundman, writer

Internet, freedom from constraint

Had the Internet not come along and become the fulcrum of technological innovation and creativity, I’d probably still think I’d want to go to Law School.

Instead, I’m thinking through blogging, writing a few eBooks, taking photos, and making beats.

Give anyone the tools and the worldwide reach and they’ll be make it happen.

Never unfilled, never bored. There’s always the next hyper-connected thing to do. Addiction, possibly, but the Internet is just too good to be true.

Rich Content ≠ Rich People

Virality is not a clear indication of great content. At the same time, just because your content doesn’t get shared with lots of people doesn’t mean your content sucks.

The problem with direct to fan marketing, aka Twitter or blogging, is that influencers are generally poor sharers. They’re riding the fame achieved through some other occupation: acting, writing, business. Celebrities are the unfortunate avenue in which many get their information.

Famous people will always have a high Klout score regardless of how boring or useless they are as social users. People are obsessed with engaging with anything celebrities have to say.

You may not be able to compete against the noise from Justin Bieber, Beyonce, Tom Cruise, or Rupert Murdoch. But you can at least share your voice and try to attract an engaged audience.

Quality content eventually finds the right people. If you don’t participate you don’t stand a chance at getting noticed.

Those of us waiting for replies shouldn’t be so quick to leap to negative conclusions. It’s unlikely your best friend suddenly hates you. Or you’ve alienated a co-worker. Reach out again.

Email is an unhealthy game, full of misinterpretation and unnecessary worries.

I’ve learned to just let it go or call or text if it’s urgent. Tweeting at them is off the table.

Will people walk down the street and talk to themselves on a phone?

The first cell phone call changed everything, that is until Steve Jobs completely reinvented it into a handheld computer. Now the question is: Will people ever look up again?

The Problem With Big Data

I know how many steps I take per day. But these get recorded on a pedometer, not an Internet connected device with algorithms on the back end. As a result, I don’t get push messages telling me how close or behind I am to reaching my goals. I just know some basics.

I love data. It allows us to make wise decisions about where, when, and how to move forward.

But I still believe data is really bad at predicting human emotion. Music, for example, is hard to recommend. There are special algorithms in Pandora that suggest new tracks in accordance to our tastes.

Based on my own experience, rarely does Pandora play something interesting and of good quality. Music, like books and movies, is not something you can predict with precision. Human Genome projects are great for recommendations and starting points but they try to plan too much. And it’s because we let them to, outsourcing responsibility.

The best part about the analog world is discovering something that aggregated data can’t predict. Discovery occurs through randomness as much as it does through suggested data. The data doesn’t know you’re open to completely new things; it’s going to keep feeding you the same stuff within that niche.

Machines that dictate our action dictate our behavior. Plugging out, being open, is just as important as being plugged in. The best recommendation engine may be yourself.

Keith Bnowak points out some forthcoming Internet trends, most notably that Facebook has been cut into a bunch of apps outside its ecosystem and that the web browser is antiquated.

Looking at my cousin’s iPhone home screen, it’s as if all of Facebook’s components were pulled out and replaced by standalone apps.

The internet is now accessed in piecemeal through a variety of apps instead of with a browser.

It’s not that the internet is powering the information and communication in the apps. The apps are the internet.

Bombtune

connecting the dots on screen

Bombtune

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