In The ‘Mood Graph’: How Our Emotions Are Taking Over the Web Evan Selinger writes about the rise if emoji and other emotional signals in social media:

But there are costs to a mood graph too. The more we rely on finishing ideas with the same limited words (feeling happy) and images (smiley face) available to everyone on a platform, the more those pre-fabricated symbols structure and limit the ideas we express. Such general symbols can also lead to even more confusion or misunderstanding due to cultural, generational, and other differences.

And finally, drop-down expression makes us one-dimensional, living caricatures of G-mail’s canned responses — a style of speech better suited to emotionless computers than flesh-and-blood humans.

It’s a great article well worth reading all the way through. This trend is a continuation of something I’ve discussed quite often here over the years: our move towards a post-literate society:

What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?

I find myself here in full agreement with Guy English from his post Learn to X:

But, let’s not kid ourselves, literacy is the new literacy. The ability to read, comprehend, digest and come to rational conclusions — that’s what we need more of.

Emoji are fine, and I’m as much a fan of the animated gif as anyone. But I do feel like we’re trying to create all these shortcuts to express our emotions because it’s hard to do it in words. The thing is, though, it should be hard to express our emotions. That’s how we understand them and work through them. So let’s go easy on the giphy.com searches every once in a while, and try to find the right words instead.

Kathy Sierra wrote a brilliant post about loyalty called Your customer won’t take a bullet for you. She makes the point that to understand loyalty, we have to realize that we aren’t loyal to products, we’re loyal to ourselves:

If you want to benefit from a customer’s loyalty to himself, you can’t bribe it, you must earn it. Deserve it. Focus not on upgrading your product but upgrading your user’s capabilities. If you can’t enhance your product, enhance the context in which your product is used. Provide better and more inspiring documentation. Make YouTube tutorials. Join forums and offer expert help where it’s most needed. Use every nanosecond of your social media time to help people become better at something for themselves. Relentlessly ask, “How are we helping our users kick ass? What can we inspire, amplify, teach, enable, empower?”

This reminds me of Tom Fishburne’s “loyalty fatigue” cartoon:

In Idle minds L.M. Frank writes about what happens inside our brains when we’re not actively working on or thinking about something:

Some researchers now think that resting-state networks may prime the brain to respond to stimuli. “The system is not sitting there doing nothing and waiting,” says [Andreas Kleinschmidt, director of research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research’s Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit]. Cycling activity in these networks may be helping the brain to use past experiences to inform its decisions. “It’s incredibly computationally demanding to calculate everything on the fly,” says Maurizio Corbetta at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “If I have ongoing patterns that are guessing what’s going to happen next in my life, then I don’t have to compute everything.” He likens the activity to the idling of a vehicle. “If your car is ready to go, you can leave faster than if you have to turn on the engine.”

It makes intuitive sense that we can’t just continue to create and consume information — our brains need time to process it all. And yet we still so often celebrate 80-hour weeks and shun “downtime” because we’re so afraid of not being productive. It seems like we’re doing ourselves more harm than good if we don’t give our brains time to be idle.

John Tierney writes about the benefits of reminiscing in What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows:

Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer. […]

Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function,” Dr. [Clay Routledge of North Dakota State University] says. “It brings to mind cherished experiences that assure us we are valued people who have meaningful lives. Some of our research shows that people who regularly engage in nostalgia are better at coping with concerns about death.”

Of course, there’s a fine line between reminiscing about great moments, and allowing those memories to make you feel depressed. In the words of Stephen Stills:

Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now.

Bundled Out is a great post by Charles Miller on how every problem Microsoft is experiencing today was written into its DNA in the 1980s. You really should read the whole post, so I’m just going to quote a short teaser:

Software isn’t an industry where the monster company selling the last generation’s product gets to stay being the monster for the next generation. It’s the industry where a thousand hungry small companies are waiting for a shift in the market that will allow them to slay the monster, carve them up and eat them for breakfast.

Joshua Porter makes a good point about Amazon’s product pages:

The reality is that Amazon has designed themselves into a Local Maximum. They’ve tested and tweaked the same product page over and over and they’ve optimized it as much as possible. They can’t improve it significantly at this point without making a big change. But they can’t make a big change because the only changes they can make must increase revenue (or some closely related KPI). So any big change is a very, very scary thing when that page is driving billions of dollars in revenue. So it makes sense that Amazon only makes small changes to their product page design.

Amazon’s design is often held up as a gold standard in e-commerce, but at some point we have to realize that maybe the emperor has no clothes – and we need to start calling it out so clients can stop asking us to “just make it like Amazon”.

Geoff Livingston wrote a great essay called Is Existing Online a Quest of Loneliness or Giving? It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt that stuck out for me:

We exist in a time where anyone can determine and create unique lives online, accountable to no one, yet visible to and dependent upon all. Digital existentialism extends the sense of modernistic distress. There are so many red herrings and lost pursuits that distract. You can drug yourself digitally with almost any pursuit, and at the end find yourself nano-famous and alone.

That last line is so spot on. I thought about it again when I saw Shimi Cohen‘s excellent video The Innovation of Loneliness, which is making the rounds this week:

Later in his post Geoff says this:

We exist in the moment. Every effort spent, every tap on the keyboard provides a chance to impact an individual, contribute to the world, and add light to the picture.

Sure, efforts can lead towards darkness. Sometimes when we awaken to our outcomes, we realize the fruitlessness, or worse the destructiveness of our actions. What are you going to do, condemn yourself to the desert for a long march of hermitage? Or get up?

This is another good point. We’re all going to make mistakes. We might look at that video and feel like helpless victims. But that’s not true. We do have the power get up, to connect with people in a way that doesn’t just ignore the bad bits (I tried to do that here, and it worked out ok).

Related to this, I really enjoyed Chris Bowler’s Congestion, in which he discusses some ideas on how we might deal with this new reality of overload and over-connection:

To create is better than to consume.

But create for the few, not for the many.

Create for those you can see face to face.

Consume, but remember that the dose makes the poison.

When you consume something that is good, great, transcendent, consume it over and over … meditate on it, then act on it, be changed by it.

So much has been written about this topic, but I really like the common theme that runs through these posts and video: we are not victims of technology. We have a choice.

Ainsley Wagoner shares a story from architecture school in How We Measure Success. She describes a lecture in which their architecture professor first painted a picture of what it’s like to chase the best internships straight out of school, and work oneself to death. And then the professor contrasted that option with this one:

Or you can stop right now and ask yourself what kind of life you want to have. Look around you and figure out where you can make a real impact as designers and architects. Become developers, change the zoning laws, get involved in your communities to affect real change, you can do so many things besides being a cog in the starchitecture mega-firm machine. But whatever you do, you need to ask yourself what your priorities are. What do you want your life to look like in ten years? And allow the answers to that question influence your picture of success.

I don’t think this is a question you ever stop asking yourself…