Usable Interfaces

Happy new year from Usable Interfaces! And to celebrate, it’s quiz time.

What do the following pictures have in common?

The answer: toughness.

And if one thing really is tough. It’s 2009. Like a smouldering James Cagney or an overly aggressive and motivated sportman. I’m not saying this from some sort of expert economics point of view.

I’ve got no idea what it’s going to be like.

But I think it’s fair to say that there is a consensus that whatever else it’s going to be… it’s going to be tough. Every newscaster, every newspaper, every CEO making redundancies, every retailer planning their constant campaign of sales, and just one word.

It’s certainly captured the common imagination but isn’t it a bit strange? Did 2008 have an adjective, did 1939?

Previously we might have thought that this might be the year that, perhaps, America will be hopeful or decisive. But not any more.

And what effect will all this toughness have on us all? If our common consciousness has managed to brand the year ahead of us especially in an area – the economy – which is so highly sentiment-based, are we predicting or actually determining the experience we’re about to have?

Inspired again this morning by a Clay Shirky twitter (this microblogging might have legs you know) 

Dear AAPL, re offer to upgrade to iTunes+ at $0.30 a song: Go fuck yourselves. I took yr stupid DRM off myself, too late to bill me now

This reminds me (a) of a great gaping void cartoon:

And (b) of a reductionist version of the plot of the Robert Redford and Demi Moore blockbuster. Redford says to Moore ‘Will you sleep with me for a million dollars’. Moore and that bloke from Cheers talk about it for a few days. They can use the money, it’s just the once etc etc and they decide to do it. Moore goes back to Redford and say’s ‘OK you’re on’. (This is where we diverge from the plot they actually showed in the film). Redford then says, ‘Well in that case, let’s make it $50′. Moore is shocked. ‘Well’, he say, ‘we’ve already agreed that you’re for hire (or  a less nice phrase), so now we’re just arguing about price’.

I think Shirky’s ire is slightly misdirected at Apple, who are only the middlemen in this one but the point remains the same. In this last stand in the DRM ‘debate’, the record companies admit defeat and still try and charge us more money for music we’ve often bought two or three times from them already. I still believe most users are willing to pay a reasonable price for music, but the record business will have to face up to the fact that they are not a monopoly. They are competing with a free market for identical (if illegal) products.

Disorganized ramblings from the ‘trying things out for size’ department and the ‘Yesterday was Epiphany’ team:

The original crisis in branding in the 70s – staring Bruce Willis – was a result of the multiple retailers asserting the power they had over the consumers’ attention spans to push out brands and promote own labels. And, of course, the ad agencies – including JWT who named the phenomenon – responded with oodles of  ads featuring puppies to find a way to drive consumer demand for particular brands, via the mass media.

Today’s crisis in branding feels somewhat more intractable, although the response has been the same. The onslaught this time, of course, is coming from consumers retaking control over their media environment.

Clay Shirky today took an interesting viewpoint on twitter: “when someone asks ‘how does this social media stuff really scale?’ they really mean ‘how do I become a spammer?’.

Was mass meida advertising SPAM? I think Russell Davies’ analysis is the clearest discussion of this I’ve read: advertising is tolerated when it is part of a value exchange; everything else is SPAM.

Is all online advertising SPAM? Well not the search stuff obviously, because its quite useful, at times – although, of course, advertisers are still using SPAM to try and get up there in the natural listings. But in the context of the internet, which is after all 99% SPAM in the first place, I’ve not seen much display advertising has can even match the charm of Coronation Street break-bumpers. Perhaps all banners should have a strip at the top saying ‘we’re paying for all of this you know…, so give us just a second of your time’.

If the challenge in traditional advertising is likability, online is way behind. First, we’ll first need to get to a situation where the ads are even perceived.

Even the agencies themselves seem to be wondering about the future of advertising. How many ads are BBH buying for Mrs 0 I wonder. Or is not advertising part of zagging?

Of course there’s branded utility. The second Nike+ should be along in just a moment. And of course, we learn that making better products will produce talkability. But how about these incontinence pants I need to market?

If money can’t buy you attention any more, and your product is never, realistically, going to be a purple cow today, how can we get the word out?

The solution for brand managers – unenviable title of the week – lies where they think the problem is… these damn kids. ‘Talking about brands’ is something that focus groups do, and agency directors, and my great aunts. For brands within genuine youth networks, brands are linguistic or social tokens.

Clearly, we’ve all seen that attempts to crassly motivate these networks; to feed in messages and propositions as we did with mass media, are prone to failure. Crass value exchanges – here’s a pacman game from Haribo – are not a lot smarter.

Instead we need to motivate discussion, to take themes that exist and amplify them or the communities that use them.

I’ve been thinking about what 2009 holds in store. 

At this point, I should of course wheel out all of the great reasons one should not make predictions (especially about the future). Or perhaps I should recall the fictional Magrethea in HitchHikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, a planet which decided to hibernate through Galactic recession – oddly tempting at the moment.

What I actually find myself doing is focussing all of my attention on one particular day in 2009, and one that is not that far away: January 20th. Of course, that’s the day that Barack Obama will officially be sworn in as America’s 44th President. 

Whilst we’d all talked about the way the mass intelligentsia here and in the states had taken to digital media, it scarcely seemed possible that anyone could truly harness these new approaches as a presidential candidate. But Obama did precisely that, collecting hearts, minds and dollars.

It seemed even less likely that Obama would continue post election with either the consensual style he adopted in the campaign, or the digital media he’s used to do it. But still he is sticking resolutely to path which looks likely to remould politics and attitudes to politicians, as much as it looks to bring about the change to the American way of life which was such a centrepiece of the campaign.

And so to inauguration. For the first time in many years, Obama has forgone the massive donations of corporate lobbies and is working to finance the inauguration with the $5 checks of his base which were such a large part – symbolically and financially – of the campaign. We can expect the speech itself to be an even more marked departure. 

The theme is given as ‘a new birth of freedom’, and it is being positioned as a suitable celebration of both the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and the 22nd Martin Luther King day.

I believe that Obama will not propose, however, any form of back slapping or self-congratulation for his nomination and election. I believe instead he will look to start a more radical redefinition of personal freedom from the perspective of responsibility, and of what it means to be an American. It will be ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ but for a different generation, and I believe with an even greater onus on practical participation.

It’s an interesting idea in a western democracy where we have come to be believe that politicians will gain favour by cutting taxing and increasing entitlements, the right course of action today is to encourage greater participation and contribution from the population, both in shaping the political movement, and in building and supporting communities.

Obama’s success in four year’s time will be contingent upon delivering a real vision of the American dream in action where the US of today performs the miracle of economic and social rebirth, not through handouts and state intervention, but through drive and determination. As Napolean said, the role of the leader is to “define reality and provide hope’.

The new first family change the perception of the US internally and externally just by the symbolic importance of their race. And, the freedom which is being reborn cannot, I believe, be a freedom to shop, a freedom to entitlements, rather I believe the emphasis will be on re-invigorating the spirit of hard work and determination which underwrote the freedom, and hope, of the founding fathers.

And, what better time for this message to be spread in America. As many of the new certainties of the Regan era flounder – the stock market won’t make us all rich (at least not all of the time), America hasn’t solved world peace (especially under hapless and incompetent Bush), jobs cannot be protected by governments from foreign trade.

If Obama can achieve this, the amazing success of the campaigns will pale into insignificance.

And where does this leave democracy? If Obama succeeds in reshaping the imperial presidency, around a new need for leadership (post the Bush vacuum, the incompetence and corruption of politicians) around consensus through straight-talk, around a liberal and academic view of the world; then we will see yet another complete upheaval in the concepts of media and a political domino effect around the globe.

Traditionally politics hangs on the coat tails of the latest corporate successes. Here political America will vastly have outdone corporate American in understanding the potential of the new medium. Of course, the Obama campaign used vast amounts of traditional media. It’s not so much the vehicle of promotion that shifted but the vehicle of engagement.

I think he will do it, and it will radically change the way we think of politics, democracy and America for the next eight years. 

Oh, and Apple will release a slightly lighter 17″ laptop, Microsoft will eventually get a good operating system out, having taken several years of not-very-subtle hinting  to heart, and Google will port Android to PCs and make an even bigger killing.