i’m not sure if word branding has a more technical term to it, but when i use it, i’m talking about one of two things. The first use has to do with how a brand can become powerful enough that the company word or name can replace the common name. Back in the day, Sony came out with the portable tape player called the “Walkman” and it had a strong enough brand presence that “walkman” became synonymous with the portable tape player, which is similar to the brand presence of the iPod becoming pretty synonymous with “portable MP3 player”. The brand has such an overwhelming presence that a decent portion of the consumer market doesn’t even consider that there might be portable mp3 players out there other than the iPod.

Using the term “google” for internet search is another great example of this. People don’t “internet search” anymore, they “google.” Common use of that automatically undercuts any other search engine that currently still exists. I imagine that half of the internet users now never even heard of altavista.

The power of that first use of word branding is pretty clear. There’s a second use that’s etched itself into my brain lately (and is the main point of this entry): the branding of a common word so strongly that it creates an association with a company. Whether or not this form of branding is successful or not is still rolling about in my head.

Way back in the early days of livejournal and before the likes of facespace and mybook (um), there ended up being a debate about LJ’s use of the word “friend”, and it was a big enough deal that LJ almost came up with a different term to describe people whose LJs were connected to each other. The issue was that a school of LJ users objected to the use of the word ‘friend’ for LJs that they were following and followed them because they felt that just because they were connecting with someone’s LJ that didn’t necessarily mean that they were actually friends with that person. Calling someone on LJ their ‘friend’ when they didn’t feel like they were actually ‘friends’ could potentially create an awkward social situation. There was also a concern that if two people who were actually ‘friends’ but one didn’t want to share their ‘friends only’ LJ with the other, that it could also create social awkwardness. “How can you call me your friend in real life if i’m not your friend on LJ?” and other similar nonsense.

LJ decided to hold on to the concept of “friend” and that years later became pretty moot as facebook became more popular and used the term “friend” in an even more reinterpreted fashion than LJ did. This is what i mean by “branding a common word” – the word “friend” has a different definition when put in the context of LJ and a further different definition when put in the context of fb, and on the internet, use of the word “friend” can potentially create an association with those websites in itself.

The second and much stronger example of this is the use of the word “like”. when fb first rolled out the “like” concept, it applied mainly to status updates, but it wasn’t too long before anything facebook was “like”able: status updates, shared links, comments left by other people on statuses or photos, &c. It became such a hit that they changed their “become a fan!” concept to “liking”, and it had such an influence that other websites started linking fb “liking” to their website or creating their own version of “liking” for their own website. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon you’ll be able to “like” best hits on a google search.

It’s clear that “liking” in that context is a strong brand with our current fb dominant generation. The question is whether or not creating that brand around the common word “like” is more successful than creating a custom brand that’s fb specific. On the one hand, i feel that branding the word “like” is unsuccessful because no matter how trendy and associative it can be, it’s still so much of a common word outside of the context of fb that it doesn’t create that association all of the time. when you’re in normal conversation and you say the word “like”, it doesn’t necessarily create an association with fb, whereas if you’re in normal conversation and you say “google”, the company and the web engine search immediately pops into mind. (i’m sure that the number one followed by one hundred zeros is misspelled “google” all of the time now.)
On the other hand, filter down to even a broad context of “the internet” and talk about “liking” something and that concept can be immediately associated with fb as the trend setter.

(as a tangent: for me, i’ve never *cough* liked “liking” on fb. it’s something that i will never do except in the case of what used to be “becoming a fan” because it doesn’t fit in my personality to “like” something rather than leave a comment. “liking’ something creates a level of interactive conformity that i already have issue with regarding facebook, and it’s more important for me to take the effort to actually say something, even if it’s just “awesome” and make it my own than to click on a button and have it potentially classified as just one in a throng of what someone else has done.)

Now, fb has rolled out something new: “Questions”. It’s a fascinating feature to me mainly because i feel like there are already so many forums for asking questions outside of the context of fb, but that’s beside the point. The question *cough* that springs to mind has more to do with the brand of it. Why call it “questions”? Why not give it a stronger fb identity? Even something like “AskFB” or even “FB?” with a custom logo using the fb blue and the fb “f” could create a stronger brand and eventually dominate in the same way that “google” or “xerox” does.

as i type this out, a new speculation comes to mind, particularly with this rollout, that maybe the lack of customized branding is a very strict and deliberate company choice. If that’s true, that’s fascinating and kind of funny because if philosophically fb is opposed to the idea of custom branding for whatever reason (off the top of my head it could be to try to keep things simple for all ages of users, but whatever), then it’s possible and maybe even probable that the concept of “like” becoming a common-word brand wasn’t a part of the fb strategy, it was just a side-effect.

Which probably says a lot about how much fb is dominating our culture, but that’s a separate topic.

neither of these things exicted me, and from this i think i’ve discovered that i’m pretty much over the newest mobile phone trend. i like having a phone on the go. i like having a handy camera in case i don’t have my real one. i like being able to text message and email. GPS is great in a pinch.

but the rest of it just doesn’t spark anything in me at all. the times i need or want web on the go is minimal. The only apps i use on my iPhone are iTick in case i’m missing my metronome, the facebook app because it’s sometimes nice to look at status pages without nearly as many quiz results, and Cribbage because it’s, well, cribbage.

additionally, it bothers me that touchscreen phones are becoming so mainstream. i can’t pinpoint exactly why, but i don’t think it’s merely my resistance to popular trends. it may have to do with the practical versus the flashiness for my own personal purpose. Touchscreen phones have their advantages in terms of ease of use – for things that i usually don’t use. On top of that, touchscreen phones have the distinct disadvantage of making me have to look at my screen to type numbers or letters or to find contacts, something that i don’t have to do with my enV.

But alas, everyone seems to think that touchscreen phones and smartphones are the coolest thing since light sabres, that internet on the go is now a vital part of their lives. and i sit here, usually an advocate of advances in technology improving the quality of life, sitting at home with two desktop computers and one laptop all of which i use on a regular basis, and i mentally scratch my mental head wondering what boat i’m missing and how much i care that i’m missing it.

that said, i probably should upgrade my phone from my enV sometime soon as some of the letters on the keyboard are starting to misfire from overuse and the battery life is starting to fail. If people have recommendations for what phone i should get, i welcome them. the most important features i’d *like* to have is both a numpad on the outside (which could be touchscreen) and a keyboard on the inside (which i would prefer not to be touchscreen). i don’t need or want internet on my phone since i already have it on my work phone, so an internet-specialized phone isn’t worth the cost.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any comments there.

But there’s a distinction i make between technology that i feel serves as positive enrichment versus progress-hindering. A while back i wrote a reaction to the Robotic Drumstick Haptic Guidance System, and i still stand by its thesis that such a device is poorly conceived as a pedagogical tool and that anyone who uses this as the basis for their musical knowledge and understanding could become an excellent “note player” but would become a poor musician.

i’ve also gone off on why i further disliked iPods when they could start playing movies and i still find value in that stance, although i think it needs to be refined somewhat. There’s no doubt that sometimes kids need attention and sometimes a parent needs to focus on other things. Distractions are a good answer to that, but i think that distractions need to be approached cautiously, first in the kind of distraction involved (i like to think that some degree of cognitive distraction is better than nonsense distraction), and secondly in the mindset that distractions of that sort of nature should never be an excessive or complete answer to everything (like if the iPod runs out of battery during a long car ride, the parents have no idea what to do beacause they’ve never actually talked to their kid in the car before). In that sense, the use and/or abuse of technology has to do with degrees and where to define the threshold of something moving from enriching/harmless distraction to harmful and potential long-term negative effects.

And now there’s a new technology trend that i feel is teetering dangerously away from its initial positive enrichment to progress hindering and backwards thinking: too much accesible information.

In the decades in which the World Wide Web continued to develop and grow, there were various stages of mindsets. In the early days, it was a “i can find useful academic information” mindset. As the internet became more mainstream and information outside of academics started to gain presence on the web, the mindset evolved into, “I might be able to find some of the answers i need on the web.” And then in what i consider the post-Google era, the mindset evolved into, “I can find anything on the web!”, or slightly more sinister, “Why can’t i find everything on the web?”

in a lot of ways, i think the easy access to any sort of information or opinions and the ability for so many people to connect in ways that weren’t possible before is fantastic and has a lot of potential to be more on the positive enrichment side of things. the problem is that there’s as much useless information as there is useful information out on the internet, and the ability to pull up any information at any point can make it too easy for people to transfix themselves on trivial information that ultimately serves no real purpose, and with the recent surge of mobile internet trend set by Apple and the iPhone, people can now increase their habit of merrily finding out whatever they want whenever they want whether they need to or not.

Let’s take a hypothetical example and compare mentalities:

You’re walking in the park or in a long car ride or whatever with a friend and you’re discussing the three live action x-men movies. In trying to compare the three movies, you remember that in the last movie, Kitty Pryde has more of a spotlight role than the previous two movies and that triggers a question, “wasn’t Kitty Pryde played by a different actress in the second movie? maybe even the first?”

in today’s Mobile internet world, finding the answer to that is a snap. pull out your smartphone, go to IMDB or wikipedia, find the answer you’re looking for instantly.

in yesterday’s world of internet-houses-all-information, you have to wait until you’re in front of a computer to find the answer. So one of two things happens: a) after the long car ride, you remember that this was information you wanted to know, so you find a computer, find your answer, and receive satisfaction for having answered an unanswered question, or b) you completely forget that you were curious about this tidbit of trivia and the question never gets answered which is fine because you didn’t remember that you asked the question in the first place.

in the pre-internet era, finding the answer would be damned difficult. likely it would involve more thought than the information really warrants; trying to trigger a memory, calling up someone else who has seen the movies on the offchance that they know the answer, or something similar. And eventually in your head you discover the answer (or what you think is the answer) or else you let it go or shelve it for later and move on with your life.

What’s striking to me about all of these scenarios is that i feel that the end result doesn’t actually change anything or fulfill any sort of enrichment. Whether you discover the answer to that question or *any* trivia question or not, the path that your life is taking remains the same. You could say that now you know something that you didn’t, but that doesn’t say much about how well you will retain that information (and in a world where the information is readily at your fingertips, there is less incentive to retain it on your own) nor does it speak to the value of the information.

So then you may argue, “if the end result is the same, then why does it matter? If immediate access to the information is a different means to the same sort of end, then i don’t see the problem.”

The problem is two-fold:

First, the easier it is to discover useless information, the more useless information people will fill their lives with. In the above example, particularly with IMDB and wikipedia, it becomes too easy to start link-hopping to tangenting articles, statistics, and other random findings. Oh, that’s right, Kitty was played by Ellen Page in the last x-men movie. I wonder what else she was in? Ooooh, she was the one that was the lead role in Juno! I loved that movie! When did that come out again? oh, i didn’t know that John Malcovich produced it! That “Being John Malcovich” movie was so cool. Didn’t that have John Cusack in it?… and on and on and on, so that now a harmless curiosity with a simple ten second answer turns into a thirty-minute tangent filled with information that is likely forgotten a month later, and that thirty minutes could have been used in a different way. And sometimes that thirty minutes can turn into hours of wasted time.

Secondly, becoming used to a paradigm in which information is expected to be so accessible can resultingly cause a new kind of psychological anxiety when that information is no longer accessible or if a partiuclar piece of information is not easy to find. this is well parodied in the South Park episode Over Logging, and it’s also reminiscent of the reason why i decided a long time ago to never wear a wristwatch which i blogged about on oscillate in 2004:

many many years ago i wore a watch around my wrist and… I reached a point where i would look at the time every two minutes out of habit, and that evolved into a *need* to know what time it was every second. I remember distinctly the first time i forgot my watch or lost my watch and there was no time piece nearby. i was in a state of total panic. I felt so afraid and insecure and alone and kept on looking around everywhere for something or someone to tell me what time it was. After that i… vowed never to ever wear a wristwatch on a regular basis ever again, opting for some sort of pocket timekeeper instead. because of this, a) i’m a much more relaxed individual, and b) i’ve developed the skill of knowing pretty accurately what time it is when asked even if the last time i checked a watch was hours before.

While not exactly analagous, i think it’s a close enough resemblance: we’ve reached a point in our culture where the expectation of information is so great that any information gaps regardless of its value can cause stress.

Again, the issue i have isn’t really with the technology itself, it’s with how it’s being applied. And it’s something that i have to be particularly careful about because of my own addicition to information. i love absorbing a wide variety of information whether important or not, and it’s for this reason that i’ve determined that mobile internet and smartphones are something i need to keep out of my life or give myself strict restrictions on how and when it is used. i’ve developed enough bad internet habits as it is.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate. I prefer any thoughts or comments there.