I’m a little hesitant to believe these kinds of stats without seeing the actual research (and you have to pay for this report, which makes it even harder to verify), but Voxburner claims that 62% of 16-24s prefer books as physical products. That’s interesting in itself, but even more interesting is the reasons they cite:

There is less affection towards electronic versions of books. Whereas age is shown in the spine of each book — and commitment by the size of one’s bookshelf — digital files have no distinguishing characteristic. Most books adhere to the same fonts, as defined by the standards of ebook readers, and e-ink displays are void of any images besides the cover due to the lack of colour.

One of the things we sometimes miss in the ebook vs. physical book debate is that some of the inherent benefits of physical books have nothing to do with the act of reading. The experience of reading an ebook might be very similar to reading a physical book, but your Kindle doesn’t give you bragging rights. No one can walk into your house and see what kind of person you are just by looking at your Kindle — but they can learn a great deal by walking past bookshelves filled with the words that represent how you want the world to perceive you.

We often forget that physical products speak to a predisposition that digital products simply cannot counter: our own vanity.

Adam Corner provides a very interesting perspective on modern advertising in Ad nauseam — Advertising turned anti-consumerism into a weapon. He starts off by discussing a new brand of ad that wants to join us in our distaste for, well, advertising:

These ads want to be our friends — to empathise with us against the tyranny of the corporate world they inhabit. Just when we thought we’d cottoned on to subliminal advertising, personalised sidebars on web pages, advertorials and infomercials, products started echoing our contempt for them. ‘Shut up!’ we shout at the TV, and the TV gets behind the sofa and shouts along with us.

He cites this recent Orange ad as an example of an attempt to empathize with our contempt for excessive product placement:

Adam then goes on to explain why it matters to be wary of these techniques:

And the industry’s seemingly endless capacity to perpetuate itself matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It systematically promotes and presents a specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the more that we’re encouraged to obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with society’s more pressing problems. That’s a reason to want to keep a careful tab on advertising’s elusive and ephemeral forms.

Tim Caynes’ on exposure is an honest and accurate depiction of what it’s like to work at a design agency:

if there’s one thing that really hits home in your first 3 months of transition, it’s the change in pace. and it’s not that the change in pace is a bad thing. it’s just that it feels like you don’t have enough time to think. which means you don’t have enough time to design. which is stressful and surprising and difficult and awkward. because you might not actually be able to do it. you might fail. and everyone will be able to say they told you so. and you’ll be exposed.

And this:

be under no illusion, when you work for an agency, your constraint is time. but your reputation is all about quality. so quality is, and should be, ruthlessly monitored, evaluated, and understood. and that’s why the integrity of design and design thinking is the first thing that you will get caught out on. well, apart from the pace thing. but it’s not personal. even though that’s what it feels like the first few times someone like me sits down with you, looks at your designs and pulls that horrible squinty patronising-but-really-caring face that tells you there’s something not quite right.

This post hit home for me in so many ways.

In The Disconnectionists Nathan Jurgenson takes to task those who speak about digital detoxes and the negative social effects of being online:

Op-eds, magazine articles, news programs, and everyday discussion frames logging off as reclaiming real social interaction with your real self and other real people. The R in IRL. When the digital is misunderstood as exclusively “virtual,” then pushing back against the ubiquity of connection feels like a courageous re-embarking into the wilderness of reality. When identity performance can be regarded as a by-product of social media, then we have a new solution to the old problem of authenticity: just quit. Unplug — your humanity is at stake! Click-bait and self-congratulation in one logical flaw.

Which reminds me of this tweet of the picture below and the caption, “All this technology is making us antisocial. Before everyone used to talk to each other.”

There is nothing new under the sun… I also love this line from the article:

Disconnect. Take breaks. Unplug all you want. You’ll have different experiences and enjoy them, but you won’t be any more healthy or real.

It turns out our anti-social behavior comes not from technology, but from who we are.

I read two really great articles this week about a couple of recent language shifts. The first is Megan Garber’s English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet, all about the “because-noun”:

However it originated, though, the usage of “because-noun” (and of “because-adjective” and “because-gerund”) is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus (linguist Gretchen McCulloch: “It means something like ‘I’m so busy being totally absorbed by X that I don’t need to explain further, and you should know about this because it’s a completely valid incredibly important thing to be doing’”). It conveys brevity (Carey: “It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone”).

But it also conveys a certain universality. When I say, for example, “The talks broke down because politics,” I’m not just describing a circumstance. I’m also describing a category. I’m making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I’m offering an explanation and rolling my eyes — and I’m able to do it with one little word. Because variety. Because Internet. Because language. 

And then there’s Ben Crair’s exploration of SMS-speak in The Period Is Pissed — When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?:

The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.” […]

“In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Liberman wrote me. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’”

If you have an interest in language, you’ll enjoy both articles very much.

As we all know by now, The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is selfie. That annoying, ubiquitous self-portrait that you just can’t get away from no matter what social network you participate in (and taken to its illogical, wonderful extreme by mrpimpgoodgame on Instagram).

Most of the coverage of the culture of selfies is understandably negative about this seemingly overly narcissistic behavior. So it was with great interest that I read Casey Cep’s In Praise of Selfies: From Self-Conscious to Self-Constructive, a very intriguing history and defense of the self-portrait:

Self-portraiture, like all reflexive art, turns its gaze inward from what we see to the one who sees. In the digital age, the rise of selfies parallels the rise of memoir and autobiography. Controlling one’s image has gone from unspoken desire to unapologetic profession, with everyone from your best friend to your favorite celebrity laboring to control every word, every pixel of himself or herself that enters the world. Self-portraiture is one aspect of a larger project to manage our reputations.

We cherish the possibility that someone, anyone, might see us. If photographs possess reality in their pixels, then selfies allow us to possess ourselves: to stage identities and personas. There is the sense that getting the self-portrait just right will right our own identity: if I appear happy, then I must be happy; if I appear intellectual, then I must be an intellectual; if I appear beautiful, then I must be beautiful. Staging the right image becomes the mechanism for achieving that desired identity. The right self-portrait directs others to see us the way we desire to be seen.

I’m not 100% convinced, but ok, I’ll give it a shot. Am I doing it right?

I just read the following sentence in some digital strategy PDF thing:

As digital adds value to the customer experience there is an opportunity to amplify what the person experiences on the application.

I have no idea what that means, and I don’t think anyone does. The state of business writing is just abysmal right now. So many words that sound fancy but don’t mean a thing. Here’s another example from something I had to read last week:

Economic volatility plus consumer tech revolution is changing customers’ expectation of brands.

Uh, what?

Anyway, I just started reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, a book I should have read a long time ago. First published more than 30 years ago, it’s still engaging and fresh. Consider this passage, which I couldn’t get out of my head as I read through those “digital strategy” documents:

Still, we have become a society fearful of revealing who we are. The institutions that seek our support by sending us their brochures sound remarkably alike, though surely all of them — hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, zoos — were founded and are still sustained by men and women with different dreams and visions. Where are these people? It’s hard to glimpse them among all the impersonal passive sentences that say “initiatives were undertaken” and “priorities have been identified.”

We all need to heed Zinsser’s advice on simple writing:

Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn’t think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple—there must be something wrong with it.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.

This is something I want to be a lot more cognisant of in my own writing going forward. So feel free to call me on it when I get too verbose.

The fifth and final Build Conf looks like it was, once again, a fantastic conference for web designers. The talks are still coming out, but so far there are two that really stood out for me. The first is Paul Soulellis’s Resistance — a fantastic essay on what an act of resistance looks like in design culture today:

I worry that this tendency to dismiss on the fly — as well as accumulating approval — might push us to make things for their ability to go viral. Designing for the showcase and rewarding smooth, easily digestible stories has become a kind of professional “code,” and I think this is where it gets dangerous.

Because some see it as permission to favor the quick fix of image-making over complex problem-solving. How many times have you been asked to build the site in a week. To design the logo in two days. To send files, right now. Somehow, we’re becoming a culture that values performance and instant product over presence.

Frank Chimero’s What Screens Want is another absolute must-read — one of the best essays of 2013. Frank goes on a journey to find the essence of digital design:

A designer’s work is not only about how the things look, but also their behaviors in response to interaction, and the adjustments they make between their fixed states. In fact, designing the way elements adapt and morph in the in-between moments is half of your work as a designer. You’re crafting the interstitials.

Both of these essays not only contain thought-provoking ideas, they’re also beautifully designed. Do yourself a favor and spend some time reading through both.

Rob Horning’s Google Alert for the Soul is a very dense read, but don’t let that put you off. It’s an in-depth, well-written exploration of how social media affects our sense of identity and authenticity. In particular, Rob discusses the idea of the “data self”, where our identity starts to come from the data that different social media sites collects about us:

The data self no longer seeks meaning through action; it seeks to be processed into meanings. It’s available for audit and pliable to the incentive structures built into social media platforms. By letting social media capture and process everything, a more reliable, socially authenticated version of the self is produced, better than what our memory can give. Facebook Timeline, for instance, can be seen as an infographic of our personality so compelling that we can comfortably overlook its formulaic nature. Facebook invites us to forget we even had a self before Timeline was there to organize it.

He goes on to say:

The pleasant Pavolovian buzz of seeing someone respond to one of our social media posts is not merely pleasure at having gained some attention but a momentary reassertion of control over identity.

With all of social media’s feedback loops, we get a comprehensive status update from ourselves, allowing us to consume our own personality as novelty. We effectively set a Google alert for our soul.

It’s an interesting idea, that through social media we effectively step outside of ourselves, and become observers into our own lives — as if we’re mere actors trying to convince the world that our “character” is the real thing. Notifications, followers, and likes become the barometer of how well our character(s) are doing at this life thing. So we also rewrite the script constantly based on the instant and constant feedback built into the system.

Once again it’s worth asking: Who will hold a brief for the real?

Andrew Romano’s The Beatles Succeeded Through Talent, Ambition, and a Lot of Arrogance is part takedown of Malcolm Galdwell’s “10,000 hours” rule, part Beatles history:

The Beatles’ secret ingredient was arrogance.

I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. Arrogance — a kind of foolish, adolescent self-belief; an ignorant, intuitive certainty that your way is the right way — is the root of all great art. Without it, talent and timing aren’t enough. We all have a dash of it when we’re young. In middle school we write Whitmanesque poems; in high school we start a Beatlesque band. But then we weigh the odds and consider our options, and reality sets in. Sometime around 18 we begin to assess ourselves more accurately — to find our proper rank in humanity’s big talent show. Our ambition stops outstripping our ability. And then we stall out and settle down.   

The Beatles never did that. Unlike most of us, they remained arrogant until their ability finally matched their ambition.

It’s a highly entertaining read all the way through. Well worth your time.