Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
“My phone is off for you”. Have we become a culture where turning of our phone in the company of others is seen as a huge complement to the people we are physically with, and a great personal sacrifice for the one who turns off? (via @notcot)
The answer is yes. That's how culture works, after all. Ubiquity in one thing means scarcity in another, and things that are scarce are valuable. In this case we're talking about social value.
Think of it kinda like moving a piece of one of those hanging kinetic mobiles; "culture" is what balances it out.
This is what I mean by reactive culture.
According to art historian Robert Hughes the term avant garde no longer has any meaning. If anything and everything is acceptable there is no longer anything to be ahead of. Furthermore, there is an assumption that film, television and photography tell us most about society when in fact drawing and painting bring us closer to the truth about the human condition. What is therefore needed is a return to slow art – art that makes us think and feel.
This is reactive culture.
This is the reason I stopped worrying about the future. As change moves in one direction to fill any given need, it always leaves other needs behind. The above is the individual-level manifestation of why I say "culture is reactive." (ignore the defeated look on the boy's face; that's dystopic rhetoric. Try picturing him with a smile instead.)
Humans are remarkably adaptive to their conditions. By the time you reach the future, you don't realize it's already the present - and the thing about the present is you're just reacting to conditions like its normal everyday life.
In other words: the future isn't scary because the present isn't scary.
(see Homo Modernus and Doomsday Scenarios).
(side note: one could absolutely make a very good case that the present is in fact scary. I just find that to be a sad way to go through life.)
There are reality shows set in foreign deserts and on the decks of Alaskan frigates and amid the industrial mixers of gourmet cupcakeries, but over time, the series have taken on a predominant backdrop. You can probably picture it: The identikit mini-manses and the vast living rooms and gleaming kitchens within. The multiple garages housing SUVs that carry our heroes on their strip-mall errands. The empty strip-mall restaurants that become extravagantly air-conditioned OK Corrals when producer-mandated clear-the-air lunches degenerate into Chardonnay-powered tirade-exchanges.
Though this shrieking sprawlscape is not his preferred haunt, the celebrity urbanist Richard Florida will admit to occasionally cruising reality TV’s endless subdevelopments. Also, the author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Great Reset watches the Today show while he’s working out, and “when it changes over to Hoda and Kathie Lee, it’s suddenly all about these people on reality shows, so I hear about it there.” What he’s seen has led him to develop a working theory about the genre. It’s not just that a lot of the shows are set in suburbia—suburban life actually creates the appetite for them. “Reality TV (from the Kardashians to the Jersey Shore) is the product of isolation & sprawl” is how he put it when floating the notion via Twitter (tweets being the new white paper).
It was a jarring encounter with Kim and Khloe Inc. that first gave him this idea. “I was sitting in a hotel room in New York City; my wife was out. And here comes, I don’t know, The Kardashians Invade New York, or whatever it’s called,” he says. “And they made New York look like a mall!” Seeing New York flattened “into Orange County” by the Kardashians’ SUV-chauffeured, credit-card-powered sack of Gotham led Florida to expand his signature critique of atomizing sprawl to include JWoww, NeNe, and the other denizens of reality television’s Monster Island.
But Florida says he’s not trying to stuff burb-based reality TV into a cities=good, suburbs=bad rubric. Instead, he’s tracing a continuum that looks something like: sprawl+isolation=the substitution of televised, crazy-eyed pods of frenemies for actual human communities. “The knee-jerk reaction to reality TV is that it’s dumbification,” Florida says. “But it’s not, and the people watching aren’t dumb. They’re just looking for connection.” Florida uses Cambridge University psychologist Peter J. Rentfrow’s concept of communal consumers to describe reality junkies. “These are people who want stories about people and who used to rely on gossip, or on the little mini-dramas in their community,” he says. “And when you’re isolated in the suburbs, you don’t have that.”
The prospect of having to settle for the sniping of a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills (which has taken on darker overtones following the suicide of a cast member’s estranged husband) in place of a real drama-dishing housewife from down the block is pretty bleak. But such, Florida argues, are the results of picket-fence-bounded displacement. “Think of it this way,” says the New Jersey–bred Florida, setting up a comparison from his own upbringing. “My parents, growing up in Newark, had no need for these types of stories. They could get all the interaction and the drama they needed right there in the neighborhood.”
When I say culture is reactive, I basically just mean that people have sociocultural needs, and any change that addresses any particular need tends to leave other needs behind. A new type of culture reacts accordingly, developing to fill the void. The above is an example.
Arthur C. Clarke told us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Head back to the 1800s with a Taser or a Prius or an iPad and the townsfolk will no doubt either burn you at the stake or worship you.
So many doors have been opened by technology in the last twenty years that the word “sufficiently” is being stretched. If it happens on a screen (Google automatically guessing what I want next, a social network knowing who my friends are before I tell them) we just assume it’s technology at work. Hard to even imagine magic here.
I remember eagerly opening my copy of Wired every month (fifteen years ago). On every page there was something new and sparkly and yes, magical.
No doubt that there will be magic again one day... magic of biotech, say, or quantum string theory, whatever that is. But one reason for our ennui as technology hounds is that we’re missing the feeling that was delivered to us daily for a decade or more. It’s not that there’s no new technology to come (there is, certainly). It’s that many of us can already imagine it.
I like to talk a lot about how culture is reactive, meaning something to the effect of "art exists in the voids left in the wake of change." That is to say, we're fond of worrying that some new change or new technology will obliterate the essence of meaning from the artist or the parent or any such thing. Or in the above case, the worry that technology is obliterating the essence of magic.
And of course technology does obliterate these things, but of course some new, equally meaningful perspective enters the scene, precisely because the old one was transformed. I sometimes draw this as the below (referencing a sociocultural flavor of the Adjacent Possible popularized by Steven Johnson, as a way to illustrate the notion that art exists on the cultural periphery):
The idea is that what's on the center today will be on the periphery tomorrow, and the nature of what's on the periphery today will find itself in the cultural center in some distant (or not-too-distant) tomorrow as well.
Or, in other words: there will always be something for culture to react to; as long as culture continues to change, there will forever be art and magical, wonderful things.
With that said, it's strange that I actually do relate to Seth's notion above. It's a curious thought that's come to me as I started thinking on how to make magic explicity from technology. My first approach came to me when realizing that the Android task automation app Tasker could potentially conjure all sorts of magic-seeming illusions, since this incredibly robust app allows you to command any kind of action that your phone can produce from any trigger that your phone can sense.
So I crafted a variant of the standard "I know what card you picked without you showing it to me" slight. Instead of just revealing the card to the participant, I'd subtly place it on my phone, which through the proximity sensor (the one that normally detects when your face is pressed against it) would then trigger a pre-loaded text message to the participant (with their card in the message).
It was interesting to see that time and time again this actually garnered far less wonder than if I had just physically pulled the card out of the deck to reveal their card - even if it was in no way apparent that the card touching the phone was the trigger of the text (I could just as easily achieve trigger the text by the motion of turning in a certain direction with the phone in my pocket).
...It's an old adage among magicians to leave no explanation for the audience to come to other than magic. In both cases it can be somewhat understood that I knew the card beforehand, but that fact is far more explicit when delivered by text. Physically producing the card leaves a lot of room for magical explanation - was it intensly acute slight of hand? Was it produced when I wasn't looking?
The text message on the other hand says very clearly: "Kyle knew this card beforehand, and was able to text it to you." The explanation instantly becomes less about how I was able to produce the card, and much more about figuring out how my phone was able to able to send the text.
I often say that at it's core there's nothing particularly special about magic - we may not realize it, but what we're rewarding when we applaud magicians is not the fact that they hold some secret that we don't, it's the fact that they've put the thousands of hours of work into making 15 seconds of slight flawlessly spectacular.
I actually often point to an earlier Seth post to illustrate this point, in which he points to the difference between knowing how to do something and doing it: "It's like the annoying kid at the magic show shouting, 'I know how you did that trick!' Of course you do." (I illustrate this with a very simple slight in which one card in hand is instantly changed to another, at the snap of the fingers. The trick is easy to understand - there are just two cards between my fingers. But just because someone knows that, doesn't mean they can replicate the illusion when I had the two cards over to them. It's far more a spectacle of fast-action muscle memory than it is knowing anything about 'magic.')
All of this has got me thinking that there is in fact a difference between magic and technology: we've come to understand that we can figure technology out - so the difference might be that we're aware that the work driving the illusion is all automated.
Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
