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.

Whenever I see an article that cites academic research in an oversimplified, generic way, one of my hobbies is to dig into the source papers to see if those glib statements are accurate1. For example, here’s a journey through an article that states that we supposedly get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex.

Having said that, naturally this paragraph from The Guardian’s The secrets of the world’s happiest cities intrigued me:

Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

This seemed exactly like the type of sweeping statement that every journalist thinks they can get away with because really, who’s going to read a 40-page academic paper to see if it’s true? Either that, or they don’t understand the research themselves. But let’s assume they’re cunning, not stupid.

Source: xkcd

Anyway, off I went to read the Stutzer and Frey paper Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.

To understand what the paper actually says, we need to dig into the methodology just a little bit. The authors based their study on the principle of economic equilibrium, which is “a state where economic forces such as supply and demand are balanced and in the absence of external influences the (equilibrium) values of economic variables will not change.” They apply this to an underlying mathematical model that predicts that both the monetary and the mental costs of commuting are compensated for on the labor market (higher salaries) and the housing market (lower rent).

In short, what this means is that Utility (the authors use commuters’ reported satisfaction with life as a proxy measure for individual utility) is made up of three factors in this model:

• The negative effect of spending more time commuting
• The positive effect of earning a higher salary
• The positive effect of paying less for rent

The important thing to understand is that it’s all about equilibrium. When people spend longer time commuting, they self-report lower life satisfaction (Utility in our model). So this lower satisfaction has to be offset by higher salaries and/or lower rent to keep the equation in a state of equilibrium.

Ok, now we’re ready to look at that statement again. The Guardian’s claim is derived from this section in the paper:

Before we discuss the potential explanations, we want to calculate how high the hurdle is. How far short of full compensation does the equilibrium prediction fall for people in the data set? In other words, how much additional income would a commuter have to earn in order to be as well off as somebody who does not commute?

The money quote is from this footnote:

Full compensation for commuting one hour (one way), compared with no commuting, is estimated to require an additional monthly income of approximately 515 Euro or 40 percent of the average monthly wage.

This shows us that there are two main issues with The Guardian’s quote:

1. Earning more money doesn’t increase satisfaction with life. It just compensates for the lack of satisfaction (“Utility” in the formula) caused by longer commutes. Remember, this model is about economic equilibrium. You’re still less satisfied, the additional money just makes you ok with that. To put it another way: more money doesn’t increase satisfaction, it just makes up for the lack of satisfaction caused by the longer commute. You’re not happier, you just deal with the unhappiness because you’re getting paid more.
2. It’s not “40% more money”, it’s 515 Euro, which equals 40% of the average monthly wage. For example, for commutes of 23 minutes (as opposed to one hour), that number is 242 Euros, which is equal to 18.86% of the average monthly wage.

A more accurate statement would therefore be this:

Stutzer and Frey found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 515 Euro more (or 40% of an average monthly wage in Germany) to compensate for the dissatisfaction caused by their long commute.

You might think that this is a storm in teacup. Why bother? So they printed a mildly inaccurate statement that most people will gloss over anyway, what’s the big deal? Well, the problem is that these things have a tendency to spread far and wide. Look at the number of retweets here:

A person w/ a 1hr commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office http://t.co/XZoOEKPs5H

— Charles Montgomery (@thehappycity) November 10, 2013

The statement is now even further out of context. Immediately we make the connection in our brains: more money = a more satisfied life. That’s not only not what the research says, we also know it’s just not true.

That’s why I think it’s important to call this kind of inaccuracy out, and why I want to encourage us to read the academic papers behind the easy percentages that get thrown around online. I learned a great deal about different economic and happiness models from this paper. It wasn’t boring at all, and I now understand what the research actually says. I think that’s time well spent.

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1. Yes, I need to get out more. Noted. ↩

We’ve seen a lot of articles about the negative effects of social networks this year. And yes, I’ve even written a few of those. So it was refreshing to read Roxane Gay’s What Twitter does — a reflection on the positive side of social networks:

Social networking does not offer a universal panacea, but it is something far more significant than “constant self-promotion.” The bonds of this community, at least the one I have found, are sprawled and unruly, but these bonds are not merely virtual. I travel all the time and wherever I go, I meet people with whom I am acquainted online. There may be initial awkwardness, but always, always, there is familiarity. We may not know each other but we know something of each other. We are a little less alone. Sometimes, the change technology brings is simple, intimate, and still significant.

One of the main criticisms against social media is that it fosters superficial relationships. Roxane’s point is that knowing a few superficial things about someone is better than knowing nothing, because it gives you a head start on a possible friendship.

Tom Chatfield looks at the meaning and value of our time and attention in What is the real cost of your online attention? He makes the point that we are now all amateur attention economists who have to make increasingly complex decisions about how we spend our time:

We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we solicit a friend’s endorsement; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates and stock responses. None of this depletes our bank balances. Yet its cumulative cost, while hard to quantify, affects many of those things we hope to put at the heart of a happy life: rich relationships, rewarding leisure, meaningful work, peace of mind.

What kind of attention do we deserve from those around us, or owe to them in return? What kind of attention do we ourselves deserve, or need, if we are to be ‘us’ in the fullest possible sense? These aren’t questions that even the most finely tuned popularity contest can resolve. Yet, if contentment and a sense of control are partial measures of success, many of us are selling ourselves far too cheap.

Tom Simonite wrote a very interesting investigative piece called The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It:

Wikipedia’s community built a system and resource unique in the history of civilization. It proved a worthy, perhaps fatal, match for conventional ways of building encyclopedias. But that community also constructed barriers that deter the newcomers needed to finish the job. Perhaps it was too much to expect that a crowd of Internet strangers would truly democratize knowledge. Today’s Wikipedia, even with its middling quality and poor representation of the world’s diversity, could be the best encyclopedia we will get.

The article also reminds me of one of the best episodes of Hypercritical ever, called Marked for Deletion. John Siracusa goes into a highly entertaining and informative tirade about the problems with Wikipedia, which is well worth the listen.

Nicholas Carr wrote a really interesting article on the dangers of computer automation. In All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines he weaves together stories about airline crashes and Inuit hunters to make salient points like this:

Psychologists have found that when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments — complacency and bias — that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift. We become disengaged from our work, and our awareness of what’s going on around us fades. Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears. When a computer provides incorrect or insufficient data, we remain oblivious to the error.

Carr goes to great lengths to make the argument that the automation of tasks is slowly robbing us of the ability to learn new skills. It is, in some ways, a more nuanced argument than his famous 2008 article Is Google Making Us Stupid? It’s well worth reading — even if you’re skeptical of this argument, it will definitely make you think.

I don’t know when it happened, but it seems we’ve reached a tipping point where most tech articles now take their titles out of the BuzzFeed playbook. That said, Christopher Mims’ Everything you know about Steve Jobs and design is wrong, according to one man who should know is quite interesting. His review of Hartmut Esslinger’s book Keep It Simple quotes these astute observations about design and corporate culture:

I explained that to make design a core element of Apple’s corporate strategy, it would have to be seen as a leadership issue; world-class design can’t work its way up from the bottom, watered down by the motivations and egos of every layer of management it passes through. […]

Bottom-up design never succeeds, because even good efforts by departments within such systems remain insulated within the layers of the company’s organizational structure and everything really new, courageous and potentially game-changing is destroyed by its passage through ‘the gates of rejection.’