at the intersection of design, storytelling, technology, & love

New trend? Media companies are going shorter on virtual, longer on reality.

Yesterday’s communication technology enabled me to keep tabs on a handful of folks who I couldn’t easily see (e.g. calling my Aunt Najet who lives 3,000 miles away in Tunis). Today’s tech also enables me to keep tabs on a whole bunch of folks who I can easily see but do not (e.g. following the Facebook updates of a friend who lives in my neighborhood but who I haven’t met up with since high school).

HOLDING THE BABY
While every month I keep tabs on an increasing number of folks, I feel that the emotional input I get from these interactions has not increased accordingly. No matter how many pictures and status updates I see of my friend’s cute newborn on Facebook, no experience summons the same emotion as holding him in my arms. In short, the advantage of today’s tech (or data cloud) is that it enables me to easily keep tabs on lives of a whole bunch of people; the disadvantage is that more and more of my interactions lack physicality, or shared space.

BACK TO THE BODY
My hypothesis is that as I, and those around me, have a greater volume of interactions with people in the data cloud, a tension is building. The more interactions I have in the data cloud, the more thirsty I become for an experience in the physical world. I believe that the recent success of companies that provide a physical experience can be attributed to this trend.

In the video game industry, several decades and billions of dollars were spent on luring gamers into increasingly sophisticated virtual worlds. Yet after years of this, a console called the Nintendo Wii dispensed with the pursuit of creating sophisticated graphics, and reminded gamers that they had a body. By asking gamers to wave around their arms to control virtual characters, Nintendo hit a nerve and outsold all of its competitors. Today Microsoft is taking this one step further, and is developing an Xbox accessory that tracks a gamer’s entire body, including the expression on their face, and relays it to their on-screen avatar (see Project Natal).

In the web tech industry, companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn, that have generated millions off of sites that allow people to build virtual social networks, are pushing out applications (see Loopt) that enable users to locate friends in their surrounding area (say the mall), and actually meet up with them in person. Google recently released its own location-awareness app (see Latitude) and is pushing it across mobile platforms. Michael Arrington (see TechCrunch) calls location-awareness the next killer app.

CHEW IT OVER
It’ll be interesting to track which organizations step away from the data cloud, and find innovative ways to get back to reality. In the meantime, why not sit back and enjoy a stick of Dentyne gum, whose “Make Face Time” marketing campaign gets to the heart of this trend:

Cue Sweden. Small bricks lining a small footpath. Each brick, five centimeters wide, ten long, inserted adjacent to two others, its sides meeting the top of the first. Sign, marine blue, small boy holding father’s hand, positioned perpendicular to curb, itself at a 90 degree arc hanging over: street, manicured deep dark asphalt, striped with ribbons of dark, finely textured reflective white paint. Zoom out. Dark clouds, pregnant with rain, hanging ominously, (not forebodingly), over vibrant green pasture, spotted: heavy green of mossy undergrowth, lighter green of blades of grass. In grass (suspended), the following: white dandelions; violet ferns. Pan left. One horse. White calves, brown-black mane. Five body parts jutting out of ground: Two hind legs. Two front legs. Upper head + neck. Powerful hindquarters. Sounds: constant wind, sometimes heavy. Occasional chirp. Fresh rubber tires peeling off asphalt at high speed in distance, harmonizing with healthy hum of sports wagon, preferably Volvo. Shiny. Temperature: moderate/cold, with moderate swings appearing warm in relation. Atmosphere: raw (fresh grass). Fresh (raw milk). Zoom out. Fade to white.

Everything is already recycled. Creation is a restatement. A fresh arrangement of old matter. Matter so old its years are counted in light.

The cycle of life as it pertains to the physical is something I managed to grasp early on. Take some vegetation, compost it, water it, and out it springs into new life. It’s an easy process to understand, partly because it gives itself away. Smell anything in the lifecycle of, say, a log, and it’s easy to trace it to its other forms. It’s the mossy freshness. The earthy funk.

What has been less clear to me is how the intangible is recycled. What is the process of recycling the human spirit? Where is the soul’s funk? For me that one’s a bit harder to sniff out, but every once in a while its essence bubbles to the surface. For me it’s hard to watch this video and not see a constant resonance across everyone captured in its lens. In the street performers I see the energy of a musician, as timeless, tattered, and true as the instruments they’ve worn down with their bodies. Young and old, black, brown, red, and white, they are the fresh arrangement of old matter. Their energy is the funk.

Judge for yourself:

From Jonathan Ive’s one-button iPhone, to Haiku poetry, I’m inspired by the beauty of, and intellect behind, simplicity.

In my mind simple is what you get when you boil down a product or an idea to its essential elements. It means stripping an interface (in the case of the iPhone), or a language (in the case of the Haiku) to its most basic form. It means relying on my audience to draw on its life experience to understand what it is that I’m trying to communicate. This is really, really hard, and somewhat risky. Hard: it requires a deep understanding of my audience. Risky: strip my idea / product down too far and nobody will know how to use my gadget / understand my advertisement. (Good example? Perfectly round hockey-puck mouse that came with the original iMac — I never knew which was way up!).

The reward for striking the right balance, however, is a concept that resonates deeply with those who engage it. Below is an example of a pretty complicated advertisement that saves itself with a really simple tagline (at 1’16″): She arrived as Ms K Mathieson, Executive VP of Sales. She departed as Kate.

Having worked in the corporate sector for a few years, I totally get it. Simple, powerful stuff and, was the rest of the advertisement even necessary?

Watch the ad:

There’s something different about Indian jet lag. It steps beyond a movement of time and creeps into a movement of being. It’s not Starbucks in Rome to Starbucks in New York, it’s a 65 year old woman squatting in front of my apartment gutting fish to Starbucks in New York. It’s not sleepiness, it’s the feeling of power leaving my body. It’s soaking in the juices of one culture and being thrown back into my own. Alone. To dry. It’s sex. It’s watching a small dog’s strained eyebrows as he relieves himself in the middle of the Bombay tarmac, to breathing in sterile air out a quadrifiltered bicarbonate composite alloy air duct howling in the belly of a glass airport. An air duct large and strong enough to suck up the dog, his eyebrows, and recent creation in one fell swoop.