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Small New World of Micro: Short Tales and the End of Big Ideas

The world is small. Art has known this for centuries and embraced a tradition that goes all the way back to Zen: the ability to reduce the complexity of the world into small things and short forms, geared towards niche audiences. Poets, novelists, sculptors, painters, and composers have always had an affinity for the beauty of small things and short forms -- sonnets; Cycladic figurines; La Rochefoucauld's Maximes; the two-and-a-half minutes of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10; photomicrography; Very Small Buildings in architecture; or the Japanese haiku. All these artifacts are tiny in scale, short in duration, and excessively modest in the claims they make on our attention. They occupy very little time or space and imprint themselves only lightly on the human senses -- like a stinging ray of light that illuminates hearts and minds for the blink of an eye and celebrates the presence of absence.

A particularly moving example is Hemingway's super-short tale "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The loquacious laconic of Hemingway's micro-story has now been given a new congenial forum with the emergence of micro-blogging -- an obvious match. New York Times writer Matt Richtel is writing a "Twiller," a murder mystery story in 140-character increments starring hookers, killers, and (surprise!) Barack Obama (more about him later). Other micro-story attempts on Twitter include Small Places, Slice, novelsin3lines, GoodCaptain, Twittories (a "Twiller" wiki), and Copyblogger's Twitter writing contest from earlier this year. Moreover, there are off-Twitter programs such as Wired Magazine's Very Short Story collection from 2006 (that featured six-word stories by renowned futurists and science fiction writers), mobile phone novels (so called "keitai shousetus," big in Japan), Nokia's (Wieden + Kennedy's) ad campaign "Somebody Else's Phone," Shortfolio (a blog that publishes stories with less than 500 words), Facebook application Just Three Words, and Brave New Fiction, a web site that helps writers compose entire stories by writing one 140-character line every day. Baby steps towards "War and Peace." And this is just the top of a whole long tail of short tales…

For (micro-) novelists, structural constraints (which, as we all know, fuel creativity) may result in "saying more with less," but how do you express big ideas such as, say, philosophical treatises, in micro-formats? That seems more of a challenge -- although one could argue that "what cannot be twittered, must remain in silence" (to paraphrase Ars Technica's cute paraphrasing of Wittgenstein).

This raises a bigger question: What if, on a philosophical level, the need for conveying big ideas is on the decline? What if the short tale is replacing the grand old narrative and in fact remains the only appropriate format in a small world that creates a growing number of small ideas in the absence of the big one(s)? Has the "end of history" (Fukuyama) bred the beginning of our stories? Are Twitter novels (and other micro-formats) perhaps the manifestation of a new plural, a new relativism that is not only salient in the fragmentation of media outlets ("Global Voices" instead of "Voice of America") but also the intellectual discourse itself? Or do they rather represent an activation and visualization of a plurality that has been latent anyway?

In a riveting BBC radio talk (listen to the full recording below), TED curator Chris Anderson (whose conference's mission is to promote "Ideas Worth Spreading") and philosopher and writer Alain de Botton recently discussed whether "the age of big ideas is over." De Botton opined that "I share the nostalgia for big ideas, but I'm also weary of them to some extent. I think that part of the problem of a big idea, as it's sometimes defined in the media, is that it has a certain simplicity and naivety to it. Many of the best ideas are really quite secular and quite small and have to do with very small but very important improvements to certain areas of life: an aspect of how to teach mass, a side of how you improve insulation in a building. These are not necessarily things that will get people out in the street, but they are significant ideas nevertheless."

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But what about Obama? Wasn't his entire platform built on "big ideas?" Doesn’t his election contradict de Botton or at least suggest that big ideas will enjoy a renaissance? De Botton offers a nuanced answer to this: "He didn’t say 'I've got one big idea.' He said 'We can make a change.' And I think that’s the right way to do it. If you say you've got one big idea, and that idea somehow comes on stock as one big idea normally does, then you're in trouble. Much better to say we can find inspiration and we can make a change, and then look for the smaller ones."

Hemingway on Obama: "Big challenges, many ideas, little time."

Disruptive Realism

Associate Creative Director Dave Hoffer has coined a new term: Disruptive Realism. After discussing some examples in this video, he was inspired to elaborate:

"I've had a number of conversations about this since the video was posted and I realize that the video doesn't give a really conclusive definition.

Disruptive Realism is an expression presented in an everyday context that disrupts peoples perceptions about different things. Expression can mean many things and it a way it's art but it's also much more expansive a term than just art.

Banksy's graffiti looks real enough that you might do a double take looking at it. It draws you into the content which is disruptive...like a little girl flying a refrigerator kite in New Orleans.

The other two examples are even more non-conventional than the word Art implies. Most people hear the word art and they think of a painting in a museum. Because Bruno Taylor's work is an experience that involves physical designs like the swing set in the bus stop, the viewer is no longer viewing, they're interacting and the videos he takes of people enjoying the installations are, in fact, part of the art. So this example is difficult to define, but definitely real and definitely disruptive.

Improv Everywhere is one part performance art and one part massive, crowdsourced goof. People get together (often strangers) to collaborate on a kind of a joke on the unsuspecting and unknowing non-participants. In a way, it's almost an anti-terrorism...Humorism? But again, very real and very disruptive.

In the case of the fake NY Times, I would say that absolutely, it's Disruptive Realism and if the issue's headline was that the wars are over, then it's a hopeful message, which is a very good thing.

Another example a friend pointed out to me was Reverse Graffiti, where Paul "Moose" Curtis (awesome middle name by the way) "makes pictures by cleaning." He goes on to say that reverse graffiti is also commentary in that he can't "not tow the environmental line" so his art is disruptive in that he says that people walk up to it and realize that his work is dirt removal and that the world is "really, really dirty." If that ain't reality and if that ain't disruptive then I don't know what is. Hopefully viewers are moved to clean more and ride their bike to work because the art is a very visceral represesentation of how nasty pollution is.

Yet another example was Orson Welles's 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, which was meant as entertainment and likely a commentary on how evolution had been twisted into Social Darwinism (which is an interpretation of the HG Wells book on which the broadcast was based.) Regardless of its intention, the broadcast caused mass hysteria. An excellent example of Disruptive Realism."

Social Media on Election Day

We’re only a few hours away from the US presidential election. There is arguably no other event in modern world history that would deserve more real-time attention. And there is no comparable democratic mass event that would justify more social media coverage. Power to the people!

BlogHerald has put together a great list with The Best Blogs and Social Media Resources on Election Day, many of them micro-blogging services. Micro-bloggers will be what bloggers were in 2004 – the early-birds-catching-the-worm-and-writing-about-it-in-real-time opinion-makers. Funny enough, editorialized blog outlets such as Daily Kos count as traditional media this time, while openly social micro-blogs will dominate the online live coverage and will certainly not miss a beat. Or at least it will be interesting to see if they supersede expert commentary or if they’ll be a vibrant complement, the heart to the brain, so to speak.

Twitter, the most popular micro-blogging service, has launched an official Twitter election stream. Silicon Alley Insider doesn’t find it all too helpful, but still considers it to be valuable background noise: “Scores of TV reporters will be dipping into the real-time Twitter Election stream.” A more practical service might be the Twitter Vote Report, provided by the technology-meets-politics gurus at TechPresident. Users can submit tweets from their cell phones on Election Day and inform other voters about the conditions at polling locations. There is also an iPhone app which lets you rate your voting experience and add an audio report.

The Long Tail has arrived in politics, and on Election Day it will wag the dog.

Somebody Else's Phone: Would You Look Through It?

Somebody Else’s Phone: Would you Look Through It? If you found somebody else's phone, would you look through it? That’s a rhetorical question. Of course! Your phone is your life, at least if you’re under 25, and there’s nothing more interesting than the “Lives of Others.”

Wieden + Kennedy London translated the idea of “Cellular Oversharing” into a much gushed-about advertising campaign for Nokia. "Somebody else’s phone" depicts the lives of three twenty-something’s through their text messages, MMS, and pictures, and it essentially creates a new story format: the phone novel. Fusing scripted content with real life audience interaction, the campaign runs in ten different languages, following the characters’ evolving storylines through a 24/7 feed of content, across three time zones, over 6 weeks.

Nice idea although the Luon blog comments: “Sometimes it feels a bit like trying too hard. The advertising-tries-to-be-socially-smart’ thing, where it's not clear what is real and what is fake.” But that’s exactly the point. Fake authenticity -- I’ve already written about “Mad Men” on Twitter in this context -- is a burgeoning trend. Fake is fine as long as it feels real. We’ll see more of it in 2009.

Live from the White House: Governance 2.0

On the occasion of Barack Obama’s nationwide TV prime time infomercials last night, Fast Company’s Ellen McGirt reviewed the campaign’s media strategy and in particular its innovative use of amateur (or “professional” amateur a.k.a. promateur) video. While the Obama camp has heaped millions of dollars on traditional TV broadcasters, setting a new record for ad spending ($250 million), McGirt believes that the true winners in this campaign are amateurs and democracy

To get an insider’s perspective, McGirt interviewed Obama’s director of field video, Arun Chaudhary, in a frog design mind event in July in New York. Some of the insights Arun shared were pretty amazing. You thought we’d live in an age of snack-size media? Think again!

One thing is clear: the Obama campaign - just awarded "marketer of the year" by AdAge -- has raised the bar for political communications and has created new ways of citizen engagement. During the last presidential election I was working towards a masters' degree in communications at the Annenberg School, and I remember that I wrote a lofty paper about “super-democracy,” in which I drafted a radically idealistic vision of a media-driven democracy in real-time. It’s amazing to see that four years later this has become a reality beyond my boldest imagination. Leveraging the power of new web technologies, the Obama campaign has transformed political media from something to watch to something to do.

This means of course that we citizens expect this form of participatory democracy, transparency, and authenticity to extend to the White House. Interactive visualizations of federal budgets and tax dollar spending, open platforms for public deliberation and collaborative decision-making, instant polling via mobile apps, RSS feeds with policy updates, and fireside video chats with the President are just some of the possible formats that come to mind for the New Governance Media Platform – McGirt is right: Obama and team are on the hook.

Scarcity and Abundance: The Short Form and the Long Now

“Scarcity and Abundance” is the theme of this year’s Pop!Tech conference, and one can’t help but draw a parallel between the planet’s environmental resources and one of the most powerful capacities of its citizens: attention. Both are scarce. What is abundant, though, is the human need to communicate–and the vast number of channels a digital media society has for that purpose.

Something interesting is happening now that exposes the complex connection between these two scarce resources–nature and attention. With the emergence of micro-blogging services such as Twitter –- effectively filling the void between blogging and instant messaging -– a communication format is made scarce by design. Twitter allows users to post only Haiku-like short messages (140 characters or less) for their friends and followers. This “artificial scarcity” is a burgeoning marketing technique applied in other fields as well (from micro-dining to micro-brands to micro-literature to business-class only microjets to SMS to Radiohead’s “pay-as-you-will” release), but nowhere has it been more influential than with micro-blogging, which seems to have fostered an entirely new paradigm of human interaction. Twitter makes even blogging look antiquated; Wired in a recent article (“Kill Your Blog”) recommended blogging for “long-form content.” The regime of the short-form has gone mainstream.

 This trend implicates consequences for cognitive processes, and it points at what might be an important underlying dichotomy of our time. Let’s call it Twitter vs. Al Gore. With accelerated news cycles, attention spans shrinking, and communications fragmented into 140 character “tweets,” instant gratification and presence seem to have become the predominant paradigms of online interaction. This immediacy stands in stark contrast to the equally popular concept of sustainability, and a tension between the rise of the short form and the call for long-term thinking is inevitable.

Micro-blogging diversifies meaning into myriad atoms of communication, a hyper-targeted in-the-moment form of looking at the world by expressing it in real-time. Sustainable stewardship of nature’s scarce resources requires the exact opposite: a holistic, systemic view on the world, and big-picture thinking beyond instant gratification and self-actualization – both of which based on the insight that the “Future” will not happen if we only think about the “Now.” Philosophically speaking, aren’t speed-dating and sustainability diametrically opposed? And practically speaking, if we’re serious about sustainable solutions in housing, infrastructure, product design, and other areas, don’t we have to start with our day-to-day communications? If “Now is Gone” (Geoff Livingston) – how will we ever secure the “The Long Now” (Alexander Rose)?

Of course you could flip the argument and argue that imposing strict structural constraints on communications (as micro-blogging does) can help us recognize and responsibly deal with the scarcity of environmental resources. But that’s only half the truth. The irony is that the more sliced down the content, the more abundant the channels of communication; the shorter the attention span, the more abundant the volume of micro-formats. So how do we as digital citizens stay focused on the future under the tyranny of permanent distraction? How can we pay attention to the big issues, if attention is becoming an ever more scarce resource in a flood of abundant, ubiquitous micro-communications? Or can we perhaps find a way to utilize both scarcity of attention and abundance of communication for managing natural resources?

You may find these questions quite a stretch, but communications and behavioral change are naturally intertwined. Micro-communications vs. systemic thinking and instant gratification vs. sustainability present two daunting conflicts. If we believe it is paramount to find a more human balance between “scarcity and abundance,” we should start right there.

Who is Sterling Cooper?

Lots of brouhaha around the characters of Mad Men (AMC's highly rated TV series about an advertising agency in the 60s), hijacked by fans gone wild on Twitter, in a highly self-referential plot. Here's what happened (so far): When Mad Men fans opened Twitter accounts under the names of the show's characters, AMC initially urged Twitter to close them, insinuating copyright misuse, but then, after some reflection, they realized that prohibiting the social media extension of the series would anger the fan base and in fact hamper free advertising. AMC made a U-turn and now endorses what is cross-media, interactive TV at its extreme: Fictitious characters representing a profession of fiction (advertising) are given a virtual double life by their most ardent viewers.

The "Mad Men on Twitter" drama is a case study about what happens when fiction and reality, TV and social web converge, and an old medium doesn't know how to respond to the conversations it spawns on a new one. "The medium is the message" was yesterday; today the media are the messages. If they're compelling, brands are transgressive and expansive; they become a movement of their own and as such harder to control.

The fans said it best in their manifesto "We Are Sterling Cooper," "a rallying cry to brands and fans alike to come together and create together:"

"Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it's not going away. We're your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets canceled we'll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don't treat us like criminals."

"We are Sterling Cooper" indicates that the napsterization of the music industry has shifted to good old TV, posing poignant questions about intellectual property: Who, indeed, is Sterling Cooper? Is it the authors, is it the production company, is it the network, is it the actor, or is it the viewers? At the very least, if ownership becomes "socialized," content developers and authors are well-advised to make the echo of the social web an integral part of their creations. Sharon Jaffe has some good suggestions. If the kids want to play, you gotta let them play. Listen to the Mad Men!

Or are digital marketing agencies already a step ahead?. Deep Focus, AMC's digital marketing agency, is rumored to be behind the Mad Men on Twitter. If that was the case, we can usher in a new marketing paradigm that makes things even more complicated and, wow, really post-modern: marketers as the impostors of the impostors, the fiction of the fiction of the fiction. Or simply: "Fake Authenticity."

The Obama SMS: (Un-)Gratifying Instantification

So the SMS went out to hundreds of thousands of Obama supporters. Not everyone got it at the same time (according to Textually.org, it took about 15 minutes for the bulk of the messages to get through the carriers' systems) or, in some cases, at all, but overall, the pre-announcement buzz (including some fake VP announcements -- "Michael Phelps!") was palpable and the word was spread.

"Be the first to know whom Barack picks as his running mate," had been the campaign's promise. The only problem: Those who had signed up to be the first to know, were not the first to know. About three hours before the Obama campaign deployed their SMS blast, John King of CNN broke the news, leaked from "Democratic sources." The "artificial exclusivity" of one-to-one marketing was undercut by the familiar means of traditional broadcasting. The thunder of Web 2.0 campaigning was stolen by old-school TV news coverage. The utterly disciplined Obama campaign seemed to have lost control for a moment and experienced one of its rare glitches. The "eventization" of news -- a social media paradigm so masterfully applied by the Obama camp -- was "uneventized" by CNN's preemptive strike. CNN suspended the suspense. What was supposed to be gratifying instantification – “all for this one moment,” as Lufthansa's advertising slogan goes, collectively shared -- became a shallow confirmation email devoid of any newsworthiness.

What this tells us: you gotta be faster! "Now is Gone," Brian Solis called his book about PR in the age of social media. Indeed. If CNN breaks tomorrow's news, you have to release yours yesterday.

Also read Tomi T. Ahonen's analysis including a great overview of SMS usage in the US.

Obama on Video: A New Way for New Media

In a very special design mind event at NYU last week, we featured Arun Chaudhary, who is traveling with the Obama campaign as director of video field production. The conversation between him and Fast Company senior writer Ellen McGirt brought forth some surprising insights into the emergence of online video (and new media in general) as a crucial component of political campaigning.

Although Chaudhary is a NYU film school graduate, the venue didn't provide a home court advantage. The audience -- a cross-section of New York's media community -- was attentive but critical. As became clear in the ensuing Q&A session, the openness that has become such hallmark of the Obama campaign doesn't go far enough for some of the attendees. A representative from RemixAmerica.org -- a project that invites users to mash up the whole content library of America's history of politics (speeches, debates, campaign ads, etc.) -- argued that while masterfully utilizing the "engagement" potential of social media the campaign would ultimately fall short of walking the walk, shying away from including users in (co-)creating content and losing message control. In Obama's media universe, the "clickocracy" (The Washington Post) remains a meritocracy: Not "everybody is a media outlet" (Clay Shirky). But then again, why would the campaign open the flood gates for mash-ups when YouTube is already over-populated with them? Just search for Obama's recent Berlin speech and you'll see what I mean.

The fact that Chaudhary admitted that it's still a long way towards a campaign created "by the people for the people" ("we are just scratching the surface of this") supported the notion of openness more than revealing the lack thereof as a weakness (I wrote a while ago that one of the Obama brand's magic formulas is that it can turn weaknesses into strengths). Chaudhary was as genuine, smart, and eloquent as the candidate himself and not overly prepped with talking points for this speaking gig. The campaign didn't seem too concerned and controlling. If this implicit trust in their staff members as spokespeople was "by design," then Obama's spin doctors must really be exceptionally smart.

The other key takeaways of the evening were on demographics and viewing behavior. According to Chaudhary, the average viewer of videos on BarackObama.com and YouTube.BarackObama.com is 45-55 years old (not the pups you would expect in the heydays of the YouTube generation). Furthermore, and maybe even more surprising, those viewers prefer long-form content over the snippets everyone nowadays hails as the future of media. June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED.com, confirmed Chaudhary's stats by referring to her own TED Talks series -- a big online hit despite (or because of!) the typical running time of 30-45 min.

So, substance over style? Well, style matters, too. It is remarkable how Chaudhary's Obama videos are embracing a Jon Stewart-esque irony (as in "sovereign distance to subject"), using the instruments of satire and spoof (without ever drifting into caricature) to validate and enhance the intended message. Chaudhary not only deconstructs the opponent's videos (as he did with a fast response to Clinton's fear-mongering "3:00 AM" ad, starring the exact same girl that Clinton had used for her clip -- revealing her as an all-grown-up and fearless Obama supporter) but also his own. By doing so, he preempts any scrutiny of the medium's propagandistic intentions -- almost like clearing the air before you breathe.

This is a major difference to the use of online video in previous campaigns and only possible since video has become such a widely accepted part of mainstream media consumption. Precisely because everyone is now used to the authenticity of amateur videos on YouTube, and professional marketers have begun to mimic it for their own purposes, Chaudhary can make fun of it (this is, by the way, as Lee Siegel pointed out in the New York Times, the exact reason why the New Yorker's Obama cover did not work as a satire: the caricatured presumption was simply not part of US mainstream). Carefully curating Obama's not-so-funny jokes and stand-offish moments, Chaudhary's videos provide evidence that this candidate is real. The very questioning of authenticity verifies the authenticity. It's early nouvelle vague applied to new media: what you see is not what you get; it is already the reflection thereof. It's film-making that is fully aware of its persuasive power and thus carefully calibrates its messages.

It will be interesting to see whether Obama (and Chaudhary) can maintain this level of meta, irony, and self-deprecation once the candidate is in the White House. Campaigning by video is one thing, governing by video is another. When the campaign is over, Obama will have more than 700,000 friends on his Facebook page and still millions of eyeballs to his web sites. What will he do with them? Chaudhary hinted at the possibilities of "fireside video chats" and other public video forums. We shall see.

I will post a full-length video of the event later this week. In the meantime, enjoy some highlights:

...and some media and blog coverage:

Silicon Alley Insider: Obama's Video Guru Speaks: How We Owned the YouTube Primary, re-posted on CNET: Obama’s Web Video Strategy Revealed and The Huffington Post
TechPresident: Obama & Politics 2.0 Documenting History in Real Time
Mediabistro FishBowlNY: Live Twitter Stream from the design mind event
Disruptology: Everything You Know About Viral Video is Wrong
The Lessnau Lounge: Twitter Tweets about Obama as of July 16, 2008
Some random thoughts on design: Politics 2.0 and the Thirst for Content

frog Design Mind Event with Barack Obama's Director of Video Field Production

In a recent blog post on the upcoming Fortune Tech summit, Fortune's senior editor David Kirckpatrick hinted at the possibility of having "a super-amazing special guest from outside the industry who we aren't yet able to announce. (Joining us at the original Brainstorms were Bill Clinton, Shimon Peres, Jordan's King Abdullah, and John McCain.) This visitor could make things really rock."

Hmm…who might that be? The magazine, in its current print issue, just examined both candidates' economic policies in a 1-to-1 comparison, and, in a not so subtle endorsement, chose to display Obama on the cover….

While we at frog design won't be able to feature Obama himself, we will provide a look behind the scenes of his campaign. On July 16, at NYU, we'll host a very special Design Mind event with Arun Chaudhary, Obama's director of video field production. I just looked at the guest list so far, and it's going to be a fantastic crowd. EllenMcGirt from our co-host Fast Company, who wrote the magazine's April cover story on the "Brand Obama," is going to interview Arun -- about the impact of new media on this year's election, the new rules of political communication, and life on the campaign trail. Really looking forward to it.