The user experience of sex…

November 16, 2011 By

Really interesting video of Tor Myrhen, the President and Chieft Creative Officer of Grey New York using the tale of how he lost his virginity at age 14 to compare the user experience of the process between 1986 and 2011.

It’s a good reminder of how technology may change, but at their core people don’t, and how although the core desires and motivations remain identical, the ways in which we communicate and connect do lead to different interactions and outcomes. But where it goes further for me is in the repercussions of those changes and how they may have an effect on the way our core desires now manifest themselves

Desire in the connected age:

I’m not much younger than Myrhen, so most of the references are pretty familiar, particularly skateboarding. I actually have a VHS cassette that a friend put together of a group of us hanging out and attempting to skate from around 20 years ago, and I wonder whether I’d have let myself be filmed if I thought anyone outside of the five of us would ever see it? I’d still want to be an awesome skater, and I’d still suck, so would I dare go near a board if I thought it would end up on Facebook and Youtube in minutes?

Given the public nature of connections, would I have pursued the same girls, or had the same serendipitous moments of mutual interest? And would my friends have been using technology to screw them up more effectively than they managed in real life?

And when some of those teen romances inevitably ended, what implications does it have when it’s announced publicly on social networks, with an almost micro-celebrity level of PR regarding who was dumped, whose story gets out first, and who gets blamed?

As Myhren says, all of the data that got shared on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and indexed by Google, is essentially around for eternity, or at least as long as those companies are with us, so flashing forward 20 years in my own life, what effects does that have on me now? In my 30s in 1986 it would have taken a lot of effort to track down past friends and girlfriends if I was feeling nostalgic, compared to a quick search on Google and some social networks – I’m in regular contact with three of my best friends that I met living in the U.S despite being terrible at keeping in touch before the broadband revolution really took off in the UK, for example.

Out of curiousity, after seeing this, I did a quick check to see how many ex-girlfriends I could track down with barely any effort, and without revealing my personal quantitative data, I managed about 70% success in about an hour. Does that change what happens with regards to nostalgia and ‘ending’ relationships which can be so easily resumed? Does it mean that although the desire for a quick romance still exists for many people, the reality is that it’s always easy for one party to at least attempt to resume it online, whether or not that leads to problems?

After all, the rules and guidelines of society, whether legal, religious, or community generated have all come about to enable humans to combine their core desires with the need to live, work and exist together in a fairly mutually acceptable way. So given that those rules and guideliness are changing at a faster pace than ever due to the speed of technological change, are we going to cope with the new rules and guidelines, and what does that mean for our kids? We can talk about digital natives seeing the internet and mobile as natural parts of their lives, but our kids and grandkids will still have the same core desires that we’ve had for centuries. The difference will be how they reconcile them with the world around them, both digital and physical.

 

 

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Misunderstanding cigarette branding…

November 22, 2010 By

The UK Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley has suggested cigarettes should be sold in plain packaging, as ‘the evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers’.

Sadly for those who want to prevent smoking, he appears to be talking cobblers – as suggested by the fact the previous Government ditched the same plan two years ago due to a lack of evidence to that effect.

What’s happened is that there’s a misunderstanding of the role of branding in cigarette smokers.

  • People encourage other people to start smoking.
  • Branding and People influence which particular product someone smokes.

Removing branding won’t make any difference to the amount of people trying smoking. It might make a difference in the number of cigarette companies, but the spread of cigarette smoking is largely spread by encountering other people that smoke and being influenced by them in some way. There’s a handy chapter in The Tipping Point on the triggers for smoking, quoting examples of being influenced by people who were seen as cool, and also smoked. The basic hypothesis is that some people who smoke happen to be cool, and therefore smoking is perceived as cool (Rather than smoking making someone cool – the reality is that it makes people smell of tobacco, wheeze when they’re running, and end up dying earlier more often than if they hadn’t smoked – but as a smoker for over 10 years, I already know this).

Cigarette by SuperFantastic on Flickr (CC Licence)

So why do tobacco companies spend so much on marketing, and finding ways to place their brands in your eye, despite cigarette advertising bans?

The first cigarette I ever tried was a Silk Cut Ultra Light – and yet for 10 years I’ve smoked Marlboro. I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that Ayrton Senna drove a Marlboro McLaren, Wayne Rainey rode a Marlboro Yamaha, and I actually suffered through the feature film ‘Harley-Davidson and the Marlboro Man‘. Given the choice, I’ll pay a slight premium for the familiar taste and amount of nicotine, plus the branding and image etc. But if that brand vanished tomorrow, I’d find another one in the time it took to run out of cigarettes. The fact is that in the past I’ve bought John Player Specials (JPS Lotus, JPS Norton), and Rothmans (Rothman Honda in the Wayne Gardner era) as fall-backs which have no relation in taste or nicotine levels.

Wayne Rainey driving out of turn 3 at the 1990...

Image via Wikipedia

I’d reveal a more effective way to tackle smoking, but unfortunately there’s a limit to how long I can write about the topic without nipping outside for a cigarette…

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Anecdotal insight into Twitter usage and Pear report backlash

August 19, 2009 By

Last night I spent a fair bit of time chatting about Twitter with a friend in the publishing industry, as we talked about how useful we find it, and how it has replaced some of our usage of email and Facebook. We’re both around 30, and we’re both mixing professional and personal use to connect with work contacts and friends.

And yet, sat on the train home surrounded by 10+ teenagers chatting away, there was not a single Twitter mention – overhearing them without trying to eavesdrop, my ears naturally picked up the 5 or 6 mentions of Facebook.

Anecdotal experiences are always interesting, but I’ve also been following the spread of Twitter surveys like the Pear Analytics ‘pointless babble’ whitepaper. By categorising 2000 tweets in English and in the US and putting them into buckets for News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value, they concluded that Pointless Babble makes up 40.55% of tweets, followed by Conversational and only 3.6% are news.

Many places simply repeated the study, but two people I respect a lot have responded:

There’s a great post by Stephen Fry, pointing out that Twitter was never advertised as anything other than a means to connect to people.

‘The clue’s in the name of the service: Twitter. It’s not called Roar, Assert, Debate or Reason, it’s called Twitter. As in the chirruping of birds.’

And the always well-reasoned research mind of Danah Boyd looks at whether the fact that conversation, both online and offline, tends to be social, is actually a good thing, anyway – and our obsession with trying to claim some measure of perceived value

‘I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It’s good for society.’

Well worth reading…

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Age is no barrier to success…

April 2, 2009 By

One of the blogs I subscribe to, The Blog Herald, recently carried a fairly standard story about an company acquisition. In this case, it caught my eye, because it’s Teens in Tech acquiring The Youth Bloggers Network.

The CEO of Teens in Tech is 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky, while 15-year-old Patrick DeVivo runs the Youth Bloggers Network. And they’re offering ad revenue split between publishers and host, custom domains, pro accounts, increased storage space etc.

Image by daedrius (CC Licence)

Image by daedrius (CC Licence)

It suddenly reminded of a quote (Thanks to @andjdavies, @neilperkin and @Rtyrie for reminded me of the source where Google failed).

It’s from the recently published and much discussed ‘Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable‘ by Mr Clay Shirky.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

The point isn’t that 14, 15 and 16 year olds are doing these things, which would suggest it’s solely the preserve of the young – the point is that there is no reason why the very young or old can’t become CEO of their own business. I talked with someone recently whose salesforce is way above the age you’d associate with internet businesses, but who is incredibly effective at what he does. It’s about the attitude, rather than skills, and the reason it’s more prevalent amongst the young is due to the access to technology, and changes in culture, which are more familiar, and not challenged by legacy practices.

Which means you’re not just going to face young rivals, but old rivals, middle-aged rivals, experienced rivals, inexperienced rivals, and your existing competitors.

And, as Mark would say, expert predictions aren’t very reliable, so the only real defence is to have a clear vision and aim on how you’re going to best use new and existing technologies and techniques, and start making yourself different right now.

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Is the Myspace generation really a myth?

July 2, 2007 By

There was an intriguing article in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday, now available online, which claims the Myspace generation is a myth.

The figures quoted from Synovate’s Planet Edge research are that 2/3s of UK 18-24-year-olds have never used Myspace, and across Europe 76% have never used it. 94% of British teens don’t use online dating, and 94% also claim that haven’t downloaded a ring tone for their mobile. It also mentions 31% prefer the radio to find new music, over the net, friends and MTV.
And, ironically for this blog, 89% have never blogged

It also points to greater involvement from the middle class and above, despite 87% of those surveyed having a computer at home.

However, although the survey isn’t publicly available, there’s one thing that surprises me as much as the claimed figures. The research was conducted by an online survey, of at least 400 people in 11 countries. If all those surveyed were in equal proportions, that’s less than 40 people per country. If it’s a 50/50 split between the UK and Europe, that’s still a tiny proportion of teenage internet users.

And why use a survey at all? Would tracking software not provide a more accurate portrait of what teens are up to? Myspace is no longer the cool place to hang out, and filling in an online survey hardly promotes honesty. It’s also not stated where this survey was made available.

UK teens might not have heard Myspace, but perhaps they use Bebo, Tagged, or one of the other popular European sites? Perhaps they’re using their mobile to surf the web, particularly if the computer is owned by parents, and in a living room. Are they using an Instant Messenger?

To be honest, the survey, in the publicly-reported form, raises more questions than it answers. Most enthusiastic social networkers have more than one profile on more than one site, so it’s obvious that user figures for sites can be inflated, but this survey seems to have shot off in the other direction.

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