five things i like about facebook more than google plus:

1. degree of interaction on my own posts. Part of it is that i know that i’m quirky and i don’t try to conform posts in a way to get more hits, something that can be very prevalent on g+. Another is that i’m not an attractive female who works in a geeky tech industry. Whatever the reason, if i post the same thing on fb vs g+ (of which my readers are pretty much a completely different group of 1000 people each), many more people will interact with me on the fb side than the g+ side.

2. visibility of interactions on pages and groups. when someone comments on something on the TUMB page on facebook, i can see that as a little notation-number on my main feed, so i get notified even if i don’t actively visit my page. on the TUMB page on g+, i need to navigate to that page first as an admin before i see whether or not i’ve gotten any interaction, and that’s an extra step that can be easily neglected, and thus make me lose some of my audience unless i’m actively diligent.

3. currency of contact information. a lot of my real-life friends and acquaintances keep their information up to date on facebook and use facebook regularly enough that it has made it possible for me to travel anywhere and know how to get in touch with someone to hang out. particularly for holiday travel, i’ve been able to touch base with people who i’d otherwise have no idea how to contact to get together with them. contacting people privately on g+ is clunkier given that it’s much closer to a twitter paradigm than a facebook one, which makes it more difficult to have quality private interactions.

4. there are less spam accounts on fb than g+. There are many times when someone circles me on g+, i go to look at their profile page and their stream, and it’s either a spambot whose entire stream is filled with links back to some fishy and phishy website or it’s a real person, but they’re using their personal account mainly to push their own marketing and otherwise has very little original content. With a few exceptions, all of my fb friends are just people being people and not trying to be a business, knowing that if they want to do more of that sort of marketing business it should be more in the context of a Page.

5. …okay. i can’t think of a number 5.

five things i like about google plus more than facebook:

1. quality of posts on my stream. hands down, my g+ is much more interesting for me to read. What flows through my stream is a combination of personal things by awesome people, posts about similar interests to mine, quality images taken by some phenomenal photographers particularly in the realm of world architecture, and other shares of some incredibly innovative technology ideas, deep political analyses, awesome recipes, or whatever. A lot of this comes from my very direct ability to control all content that appears in my stream through circle management – i don’t circle people who post an insane amount of #caturday posts or use their stream to just share their favorite music video of the day or are too anti-Apple or anti-facebook (which can be prevalent).

2. image quality. photographs and pictures are just better on g+ in what people opt to post and share and how those images are dealt with on g+/picasa. if i upload a 1440×1280 picture on g+ i can redownload it at the same dimensions and same quality as what i uploaded. If i do the same on fb, the only download i can do is the version that fb has compressed and reduced in pixels and quality, and although i’m no professional photographer, i do consider myself an amateur and boy does that irk me.

3. trust in google over facebook there’s a faction of anti-google people out there for whatever reason, people that see it as Just Another Huge Evil Corporation. Google has made its share of mistakes, but in general the quality of the products they put out is outstanding and the mission of the corporation from the top down is something i think is pretty amazing. I’m not a huge google fanboy exactly, but i do believe in the company, particularly since i soemtimes talk to my brother about it (who is a google employee) and i trust his judgement a great deal. I trust how they do their business, what experience they try to bring to the world and the reasons behind it. I have no such trust in facebook. i believe that zuckman is pretty much just out for #1, and the decisions that are made regarding data privacy, how they try to change the user experience, and the general integrity of the company do not make me trust it.

4. google plus promotes embracing a larger community and meeting new people in a way that facebook doesn’t. With the Prolific community on facebook being the noted exception, facebook is comprised 99% of people that i know in real life whether casual acquaintances or close friends. It’s not a platform in which i can discover new people easily. On g+, almost everyone in my circles is someone that i met only through g+, and some of them have become very good friends. In that way it reminds me much more of the way that livejournal used to be when that was the dominant social platform – strangers discovered each other, interacted with each other, and could have meaningful relationships and interactions. g+ is designed to foster that same sort of discovery, and has resultantly exposed me to a wider new orleans community as well as a like-minded base of people from everywhere across the world that i feel absolutely comfortable hopping into a google hangout with and just shooting the shit.

5. i completely control my stream content on g+ and it will never involve ads. One of the big differences between g+ and facebook in this regard is that g+ is just an aspect of a larger company that already has a hugely successful model for generating revenue, so there’s no need to put ads into g+. Especially since facebook’s IPO, Zuckman is under a lot of pressure to generate much more revenue and at a much higher pace than before facebook went public, and as a result facebook has seen more intrusive advertising on both the website and the mobile app. This is absolutely the right thing for facebook to do from a business sense, but it creates a tainted user experience which can already feel cluttered as it is as well as biased with the introduction of Promoted Posts.

The Bottom Line

Facebook and Google+ are different experiences. facebook is where i go to see what my friends decide to randomly post and is also my largest audience for personal and business content. google+ is where i go to meet strangers and read content from around the globe from fascinating people that have embraced google+ as their conduit, and it’s also a much more open platform where strangers from anywhere across the globe aren’t afraid to video chat together and find some amazing connections. They both have their roles and these days i’ve been embracing both accordingly.

That said, one thing that sticks out most between the two social media platforms is my attitude about migration. As in if all of my friends on fb migrated over to g+, then the only reason i would keep my fb is to administer the TUMB pages i control for my work. By contrast, if all of my friends on g+ migrated to fb, i wouldn’t give g+ up – i would go out and find more people or different content and likely use that as my primary place of internet surfing because there’s always new stuff to discover in a way that i can tune however i want.

We’ll start with the two blogs that i maintain, because although those are already pretty defined in my head, i’m going to adjust and refine the role that my blogs have to be an even greater separation between my professional and “conceptual” entries which will live on mendellee.com versus my life entries and “specialized” entries which will live on my livejournal. Before, my LJ served multiple purposes – it involved things going on in my life, but i also used it as a “short thoughts” blog, an “ideas” blog, a movie/game/tv review blog, things of that sort of nature. I still feel like it’s more appropriate to house my life and any random movie/game/tv reviews in that context, but i’m going to shift most of my “short thoughts” and “ideas” content to here, as well as some life stuff that may involve my schedule as it relates to creative projects or creative processes.

I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. One, I feel like this site needs to have more activity, that this should become a more important hub for my public presence, and hopefully shifting some of what used to be LJ activity will help with that. Two, I’m trying to encourage myself to write more about my Actual Life on my LJ which wasn’t exactly the idea when i first started my LJ but has leaned more towards that in the past year and I want to continue. There’s a multi-layered motivation for doing this related to a couple of events that happened over the summer which i may discuss in a separate post on my LJ.

That’s the easy stuff. Now we come to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Each of these needs to be addressed in two respects – as a contributor and as a reader. I’ll address each service separately.

Twitter: Originally I created a Twitter account as a means of shifting the concept of “status messages” from facebook to a paradigm where i felt it better fit. (in case you missed it, i wrote about why.) I then ported over selective statuses to fb by using “Selective Tweets.” Since that time, I’ve activated some privacy protocols that makes Selective Tweets not work, and i’ve relaxed my stance concerning the value of fb statuses as it relates to my fb page. So Twitter became a more nebulous space as a contributor, and with the inclusion of google plus, i started to use my twitter less and less, seeing g+ as a preferred method of posting random microblog bursts.

A part of me feels like I could abandon Twitter altogether, but a greater part of me feels like that’s the wrong thing to do. Twitter is a great tool with some key sets of expectation that isn’t met by any other social media. So in order to make myself more proactive in that realm, i need to create a definition for how i want to use it and brand myself in its use.

There are a few common paradigms for twitter use, and many of them are ones that I reject. I don’t want my twitter to be a personal advertising space. Neither do i want my twitter to be a conduit for my other presence on the web or for the “check-in” concept that’s promoted by the likes of foursquare or yelp.

So i think i’m going to use it in the way it used when it first existed: as a space for short life bursts. I’m also going to experiment with tweeting exclusively from a smart phone, considering it more of an on-the-go kind of thing.

Out of all of my social media, twitter will probably be my lowest priority when it comes to reading. I have a manageable list of people that i’m following, but some of the regular twitterers use it more as a conduit space than a speaking space, and that sort of tweeting to me is clutter and pollution that I don’t like filtering through. Check-ins are annoying because i don’t really care where people are. redirects or link postings are annoying because without having context that twitter can’t provide it’s a coin-toss whether or not i’d find the link worthwhile. Not that i’ll never read twitter ever, but i don’t feel an overwhelming need to stay on top of it.

Facebook: i was a relative latecomer to the facebook generation and have never been afraid to voice my opinions about what i feel are the big positives and negatives of facebook. I don’t hate it, but i am always mindful of some of its huge pitfalls and approach my use of it both as a contributor and a reader with a high degree of wariness.

what value i get from facebook as a reliable virtual rolodex, the kind of created culture that it represents, and the role it plays in my social presence as a personal broadcaster and a professional broadcaster through the marching band is too important for me to abandon facebook despite the fact that I don’t actually like it all that much. The recent facebook release in particular is problematic because there are now too many decisions about visual design and priority of content that are made for me behind the scenes, and those decisions are deliberately designed to be difficult to change. (i addressed this in the latter part of the aforementioned “social identity problems” post if you’re interested in the specifics).

What does this mean for me as a contributor and user of facebook now?

As a reader, what i want to happen is to be able to capture a slice of time of whatever happens to be on my news feed of the time of all 1000ish of my friends and be content with that. This means that i should probably do a similar thing that Mark did with his and do the painstaking work of changing all of my friends subscriptions to “all” posts instead of “most” posts (which i can unfortunately only do one friend at a time).

As a contributor, honestly, i still don’t have a great answer. I’ve decided that I still want my facebook to be pretty much All Surface and start to conceive of my google plus as being a potentially more intimate social atmosphere, something that can be inbetween facebook and livejournal, but exactly how that plays out practically is still yet to be defined. It still feels right for me to use fb as a conduit for my other social presence, but google plus has that place too, and i’m not sure how to achieve balance in how that could be used across both social mediums. It could be something as simple as “LJ entries go on fb, mendellee entries go on g+”, but with the power of g+’s circles allowing for more flexibility in that, that feels like an easy-but-not-quite-right answer that with a little work could be better defined and honed.

speaking of which.

google plus: in comparison to both twitter and facebook, my google plus feed is somewhat of a ghost town, and contrary to this being a deterrent, it’s rather a nice breath of fresh air. The problem is that if i want to try to shift more of my contributions and reading to google plus, it could easily end up feeling as unmanageable as facebook can be, both in the way i choose to write and the way i choose to read.

This is where i think careful manipulation of my circles will come into play. Right now i have a lot of incredibly impractical circle definitions that all need a complete revamp. At a basic level, i need to create two kinds of circles: “reading” circles and “filtering” circles. Reading circles don’t need to be defined right now because my traffic isn’t high enough, but a part of me is starting to feel like the best way to deal with reading circles has to do with the frequency of a poster. Prolific posters will get one circle, once a week posters will get another, once a month will get another, and some levels in between based on the amount of traffic. The main purpose/function of this would be to ensure that amidst the regular g+’ers i don’t miss something from a user that sticks a singular post within the busy throngs, which is philosophically closer to how i treat livejournal (everything that’s written on my friends page/circles stream is important) rather than twitter or facebook (all i care about is what happens to be going on at the moment).

As far as filtering, the only one that’s currently important to define is current students versus non-current students to help create that necessary separation between personal and professional. Beyond that, defining filtering circles is more difficult because a part of me feels like it should be as much in the hands of those who are reading me as myself. It may be that i won’t mind sharing more intimate details with person A and B, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to actually hear it, and i want to be able to respect that.

Practically that’s a difficult thing to address. It’s fine if i just deal with the people who are in my “reading” circles now, but when someone new comes along, they don’t have a conception of how i could be using circles well enough to know how to fit in mine, and it’s counterintuitive to me to put someone who just added me into their circles through a equivalent of a detailed questionnaire just to put them into my circles. That’s just obnoxious.

That side of it is full of conjecture anyway because i’m not sure exactly how intimate of a space i can put myself into online in the first place – even in a relatively comfortable setting like livejournal i tend to hold back on things that make me feel weak or vulnerable. There’s a couple periods of my life where i went through some intense emotional trauma that still impacts my life outlook today, but to most of the world that trauma is invisible – as well it should be. That sort of stuff is not meant to be publicized no matter how close or intimate a “circle” can be. But as with all things, there’s a wide spectrum between extremes that can be explored and toyed with, and google plus is where that potential can be.

The other potential choice of “filtering” circles has to do with conduits. As in, if i start to use g+ in a conduit way like i use fb to publish videos, LJ posts, and mendellee.com posts, i can create circles specifically for those so that those who have no interest in being a part of my conduit world won’t see that stuff. So if you have absolutely no interest in seeing when i post up LJ posts because, say, you’re already my LJ friend or you just don’t care about my life in that sort of detail, you don’t go into the LJ circle which is the only way that you’ll see that stuff appear on my feed. Of course, this leaves out “lurkers” from being able to see whenever i post to LJ, and highlights one of the other issues of filtering circles in general which is that filtering circles necessitates a mutual relationship when maybe i don’t want it to be. If a stranger decides to follow me on g+, adding them to a circle kind of means that i’m following them back; sure, i can stick them into a circle full of people that i’ll never read, but that reeks of subterfuge to my virtual nose and i don’t want to be associated with that sort of virtual smell.

We’ll see how all of this develops; in any case, it’s a starting point, a way to more clearly define my roles in all of these mediums and start to use all of them to their fullest potential (at least for me). As these roles take shape over time, i’m sure some small and big adjustments will be made. If it’s significant and interesting enough for me to talk about, i’m sure another entry will pop here.

In other words, how do i choose to use facebook differently than google plus? What would make me write a blog entry on my domain blog vs. my livejournal? What constitutes a twitter status over a fb status or a g+ stream post? Some of these questions can be answered, but some of them cannot, and it’s the ones that cannot that i feel i need to focus on and refine.

With my two blogs, i deliberately separate what content i choose to put where. My livejournal blog is about my life and my friends and thoughts of a more personal nature, whereas this wordpress blog is my more public face with content bent towards thoughts of a more long-winded and cerebral nature. I call this wordpress blog my thoughts blog. I call my LJ my life blog. Even though there is sometimes a degree of blur, i think it’s pretty clear to myself and to my audience what content belongs where.

It’s this sort of distinction that i feel like i need to have between facebook and google plus. Like my two blogs, i feel like the purpose and audience of those are very similar, and therefore the uniqueness of them comes entirely from the content that i choose to write. despite the fact that one *could* use fb in the same way as g+, doing so arbitrarily is problematic because of the audience i’m trying to reach. I want my friends on fb to get something different than those who subscribe to my g+ feed. To have a heavy degree of duplication or even similarity in style between those two feels wrong; someone would likely only subscribe to one or the other, or those that subscribe to both wouldn’t get much different out of one versus the other, and that’s not what i want.

Despite the recent changes facebook has made that has seemed to alienate some people, facebook still holds my largest audience and thus it acts as my “hub” for most of my other social media, meaning that i import some of my tweets to fb, i post links from select blog entries here and LJ to fb, and i post links from my youtube page to fb. But i don’t want to use facebook as a hub for google plus. Google plus needs to stand out on its own in the same way that my blogs stand out on their own.

But how should that happen? I don’t really want fb or google plus to have the same professional vs. personal distinction that my blogs do. And despite my desire to not have a heavy degree of duplication between fb and g+, the fact is that what i choose to share of myself on the internet doesn’t have much content variance other than that.

So maybe this is an opportunity to change that. g+’s Circles has a great deal of flexibility as it relates to selective sharing, so it’s possible that i could write things of a more personal nature if i structure it in a way that i trust. Or maybe this is an opportunity to ween myself off of any direct relationship to fb and use it merely as a conduit, because the new changes that fb rolled out have some advantages, but they also a direction change for that platform that enhances everything about fb that i dislike.

That last statement warrants some expansion. There are two aspects of the new fb changes that bother me the most.

First is the upper right news ticker. That news ticker doesn’t seem like a huge change, but i have to hand it to fb: it’s absolute genius.

Tickers are one of the big reasons why i never watch rolling news channels and why i can have issues watching sports channels. When you first get introduced to the idea of a ticker, it seems like a big distraction, but the more you watch the channel, the more you get used to it and incorporate it into your understanding of how that channel works. I don’t watch sports obsessively, but i watch enough of it that that i don’t notice the bottom ticker unless i want to. I don’t watch news channels ever, so those tickers are a constant source of flash and distraction, but if i were to watch the channel more often, i know that i would absorb and become accustomed to it. And once you get used to the ticker being there and what it represents, the ticker’s purpose has been maximized: to provide another avenue of constant change of information that’s designed to keep you watching.

The internet in general hasn’t really used the ticker paradigm for much; the NFL uses a variant of it on their website with big neon flashing signs whenever there’s a score change or a big play during a game that you’re not tracking or watching. But now, fb is changing that game, using that ticker formula in a way that will try to keep people logged on that much more often because they can and will always look at it for change of information whether they want to or not. And sure, most people hate it now, but give it some time for people to get used to it, and before you know it, it will seem Normal, and that constantly shifting and changing ticker of useless information will help make fb an even bigger time suck than it already is.

Secondly, fb has added a higher degree of customizability to how people view their feeds, and normally as a guy who is all about data and loves having the ability to be versatile with it, the way in which fb has incorporated this flexibility is counter to how i want to use fb.

fb is a dominant part of our culture. i don’t think that it’s inherently bad or good; like any tool or piece of technology, how bad or good it is is dependent upon how it’s used.

My use of fb as both a poster and a viewer is deliberately designed to be all surface – as a poster, fb acts as a good conduit for me to contact people and to get some basic interaction with those people. What fb does *not* serve as is a place where i want to have any real meaningful interaction. It is not a platform for my political views, it is not a place where i want to divulge the real personal details of the person that i truly am, and it is not a place where i am going to put important details about anything going on in my life in a way that assumes that people who are close to me are going to read it.

As a viewer, i want to see on my news feed a slice of what has happened the most recently with whoever has happened to post. i don’t assume that my friends that post important information on fb expect me to get that information only from fb; if i catch it, awesome, but if i don’t, then it’s not a big loss because i would assume that the people closest to me would tell me important things outside of that fb context.

And this is where the customizability of the new fb becomes useless to me, because all of the customizability assumes that i want to control that information in a way that takes fb much more seriously than it should be taken. “i care the most about seeing feed items from these important people in my life, so i’m going to tailor my fb feed to see their stuff the most.” But the amount of time that it would take for me to micromanage and microcontrol fb’s settings to make it do what i want is simply not worth it. To customize it properly would take constant adjustment – more time spent on fb – just so that i can make fb more appealing to me – and thus spend even more time there than i currently do.

It’s food for thought. We’ll see what happens in the next month or so as fb and g+ and their respective userbase evolves, and as i start to refine my thoughts about how the fb shift and my use of both platforms could potentially change. i know i’m not going to delete my fb, but it may be that it becomes just my virtual business card – an easy way for people to reach me if they don’t have my current info – and not much else.

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.

As a musician, composer, and educator, i’ve put a lot of thought into the audience of my craft, and recently those thoughts have led me to a radical sort of idea involving audience expectation. Most entertainment contexts these days have either a casual approach to audience protocol or have a more interactive/reactive approach to audience protocol. Sports crowds are a constant chatter of conversation and encourage loud reactions and interactions on big plays. Movie crowds are generally pretty quiet, but it’s still not unusual to get a loud reaction when one is warranted, particularly for comedies. Well-designed marching athletics in all of its forms have “reaction moments” built into the design so that the audience can applaud or whoop and holler if need be. Music concerts, whether big acts in stadiums or small acts in bars are set for a casual atmosphere where people are able to mill about, order drinks, &c.

In contrast, art music concerts have an implied audience expectation and protocol of “sit still and pay attention until we say that it’s okay to clap.” It forces the live concert-goer to completely internalize reaction until protocol dictates the time when it can come out, and to a degree even the manner in which it can come out. While i think that there’s a lot of valid reasons why this is set in place, there’s a part of me that can’t help but think that this rigid structure is part of the reason why these concerts lack appeal for newer audiences. It feels like an old-fashioned aesthetic that lacks context and thus is in its own bubble, which, while once had the strength to stand on its own, is now shrinking and will eventually dissolve into nothing.

Pitched like that, it should be fairly obvious what my idea is: change the protocol. Create a new paradigm for audience expectation for those sorts of concerts to be more casual such as the jazz club bar or the wedding reception band, or more deliberately interactive at times such as the winter drumline/drum corps show, or maybe even completely free such as the big rock concert venue or sports event.

Clearly there are challenges with this sort of shift in audience protocol, particularly as it relates to certain types of concert literature. Some pieces demand a concentrated audience awareness to achieve the maximum effect and would not fare well in a more casual environment, either for the performers or for the audience. I think overall there would have to be some experimentation with different pieces to determine how casual of an atmosphere it could support and the nature of that atmosphere. A couple of years ago the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra did a “concert in the park” deal in honor of a local supermarket opening. The supermarket cooked a huge barbecue and was selling beer/wine/liquor while the LPO played in an ampitheatre area where people could eat and listen casually to the music being played. That worked for that concert because it was free, it was a pops concert, and it was in a large open park area. You wouldn’t be able to pull that off with, say, Adagio for Strings.

More to the point, I’m not necessarily suggesting that the paradigm needs to shift for established works (although i’m not closed to that idea either); it has more to do with new compositions and new composers making an adjustment to how they compose with that paradigm shift in mind, how that changes the nature or character of a piece of music when you plan to write for that sort of environment in the first place. Suppose you have a chamber group of fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, and there’s a section where you highlight an instrument or a duet of the instruments. A jazz club atmosphere would build in them being put more in the spotlight and there potentially being an outro transition moment that could be filled with applause. A large ensemble hit moment could lend to more stage energy from the performers that could support the audience reacting to that moment without it detracting from the music. Thinking about that sort of environment creates a different compositional aesthetic.

Maybe it’s a square-peg-fits-into-the-circle-hole sort of thing, but i think it would be neat to put on series of concerts like that, programmed with a bunch of pieces whether new or old that allows for and encourages the audience to have more freedom, and then gauge its success by the hype, the sales, the reactions. it would surely be awkward at first, but i think it has the potential to gain momentum and change/reinvent the concert paradigm in a way that would resonate more with current audiences and thus maybe provide a context in which the older concert paradigm could generate new life.

Maybe i just need to become a rock star.

a few people who know me pretty well said, “it’s funny to think of you with an iPhone,” and it’s true. i’ve stated a few times on this poor excuse for a blog how i distinguish between technology innovations that i feel are practical or useful or worthy of note versus technology innovations that are fluffy and uninspiring, and in my previous post i went off on how mobile and easy-to-access internet potentially creates a new psychological standard that is hazardous to our mental health. I’d used the iPhone a few times before, borrowing from one of my colleagues, and I was highly undecided about whether i thought the technology was of the practical and awesome category or of the fluffy and uninspiring category. Now that i actually own one, it brings to light how the question of which of the two category it belongs to is the the wrong one to ask; it’s not the iPhone itself that can be practical or awesome or uninspiring or fluffy, it’s how people choose to use it.

This is something i had already grokked when it comes to other uses of technology, most notably when it comes to technology with music. Finale was the pioneer of music notation software in the early 90s and as i started to use it as my main tool for music notation, i discovered how easily Finale could be used as a crutch if used the wrong way. Because of the kind of composer i am, the crutch of Finale for me was initially using it too often as a composition tool as opposed to a notation tool, meaning that I would do my composing directly in Finale and use the playback as a measure to “hear” how the piece was going.

I discovered that while there are times when that’s fine and effective for the kind of composition i do, more often than not it would a) limit my compositional creativity and space, putting that music into a particular kind of box that could fall short of its true potential, and b) potentially lock me into treating the crappy MIDI playback file as “this is how the piece will sound” as opposed to trusting how it would sound in my head. As such, i changed how i used the program, first by conceiving it to be the tail end of the process as opposed to the initial process by sketching my ideas out on paper first to get a big picture and some details of what the piece would turn into and then put the notes into Finale using it to fill in the blanks; secondly, by preferring to hear everything on a piano voice as opposed to their crappy MIDI instrument equivalents so that playback was used only to double-check harmony and pacing and not to represent the actual color, timbre, or overall feel of the piece.

Additionally, the training that i had as an electronic musician from two excellent professors (Larry Nelson and Jeffery Stolet) as well as some strong influence from Robert Maggio in one of my undergraduate compositions originally written for solo mallet player and electronic accompaniment taught me an important lesson about the representation of real instruments using electronic sounds, namely to avoid it as much as possible. Now if i’m going to write an electronic music piece where i want a piano or a flute sound, i prefer to use acoustic samples or live performers rather than try to emulate those sounds electronically; electronic music in that context is better suited to creating sounds not duplicatable by other means. Again, how someone uses the technology being the problem rather than the technology itself.

The iPhone has a large potential for abuse and fluff, and worse, a psychology that can convince people that these potential misuses are a neccessity. The easiest example is email accessability; the ability to check and reply to emails on the go has its uses, but for some it’s become an expectation, and it creates a newer kind of social structure that has staggering implications – and it’s not even necessarily an expectation of the person who receives email on the go, but an expectation of the sender who knows that the recipient has email on the go. They send the email and in knowing that the other person can receive it right away can then make assumptions based on whether they get an immediate reply, such as “oh, he didn’t reply to my email right away. he must be ignoring me.” While the social tension from that may be small in comparison to, say, not inviting your best friend to your birthday party, enough of that can start to create a pollution that is grounded on a particular understanding of email etiquette that could be completely false.

But again, while issues like that may be more easily brought to the surface because of the technology available, assigning the blame to those issues on the technology as opposed to how it’s used is an important distinction. The iPhone itself and what it has to offer is a pretty fantastic piece of technology in many ways both subtle and obvious, and while it has its share of issues, some of those i can temper based on how i incorporate it into my life. In particular, i’m very picky about how i use the internet on my iPhone, restricting myself mainly to email only, and then using the web only occasionally to keep up on livejournal and facebook, with the occasional wikipedia lookup when necessary.

After familiarizing myself with the iPhone and immersing myself more in the iPhone “culture” as it were, i can pick out what i feel is the strongest positive and negative thing about the whole deal. The positive is how the iPhone has helped revitalize the shareware paradigm that died after its prominence in the pre-broadband and pre internet 2.0 era. At first, the idea of applications that were “lite” versus “full versions” bothered me, but the more i thought about it the more i generally appreciated that the $1 and $5 application market exists as an avenue for basic apps and for the independent developers.

(Granted, i don’t know what sort of control Apple exerts over what gets put into the App store or anything else behind the scenes, and there’s the negative side effect of how some of those apps contribute to the overall fluff aspects of the iPhone.)

The strongest negative to me is that although i acknowledge that the iPhone is groundbreaking technology for the mobile phone market, i still feel that there has been too much value placed on the product rather than its innovation, and that has largely to do with Apple successfully marketing the iPhone to all demographics; as a power tool for corporate business folk, and as the new trendy technology fad for teenagers and college folk. As a result, AT&T can jack the price for a data plan and text messaging for the iPhone higher than that of other phones. This may be justified at some level due to the difference in the speed of the 3G network, but the extra price option isn’t sold that way, it’s sold as being “because you’re using an iPhone.” Those subtle forms of focus-shifting to increase the strength of the brand are the sort of thing that i both admire and loathe.

but more importantly, since the iPhone has defined the next generation of mobile phone technology, every other mobile company was forced to create their own copycat version of the iPhone in order to keep up with the trend. The best example of this haphazard copycatting was the LG Voyager. When the Voyager was first launched, it was basically a touch screen version of the LG enV; in other words, a touch screen phone in which the touch screen aspect added nothing to the functionality of the phone because the firmware was identical to the non-touch screen enV. Granted, they put out firmware updates and patches that started to use that, but instead of hammering all of that out and then releasing the product separately, they rushed the Voyager out hastily so they could boast that they had a touch screen too.

And as more of these touchscreen phones and 3g phones come out, i can’t help but feel that what the general consumer is starting to demand from its mobile phone is moving in the wrong direction, that instant connectivity at your fingertips, while having its benefits, will continue to enforce a set of values to this and future generations that i feel needs to be tempered or at least balanced.

as a post-note, i may blog a more technical review of the iPhone in the near future, as there’s a lot milling about in my brain about the effectiveness of the iPhone versus other mobile devices for what it is designed to do.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any feedback or commentary 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.

As a loyal supporter of Apple computers since about 1994, the direction that Jobs has taken Apple gives me mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s nice to see a company that was such an underdog to Microsoft bring itself back into the spotlight, and i admire the company for finding ways to evolve outside of its original box and continue to push technology innovation and trends. The iPod pretty much blew away any existing portable MP3 player at the time through its marketing scheme; the iBook (and now the MacBook) has helped make laptops of any sort more mainstream, affordable, and trendy, and the iPhone caused all of the competing mobile phone manufacturers to scatter like chickens with their heads cut off to develop their own touchscreen smartphones.

But a side effect of the growth and development of that level of iCraze is that Apple’s flagship product of desktop computers (currently the Mac Pro) has further distanced itself from the mass market.

yesterday when i went to the lakeside mall i decided to skim my way through the new Apple store that had only recently opened there. the last time i was in an apple store was a couple of years ago in san francisco, and at that time i was going in with the attitude of ‘let’s just wander around’ as opposed to this time, which was ‘let’s assess the situation’.

and as i walked around this particular store, i saw iPods and iPod accessories, iPhone and iPhone accessories, iMac and iMac accessories, and MacBooks – none of which i was looking for. There was no sign of the Mac Pro, no corner where a user looking for a more power computer user that has expandability out the wazoo could find information. It made me think that the store should have changed its name from the Apple Store to the iTrend store.

And this reflects a particular attitude that Apple seems to have about their two lines of desktop computers. The Mac Pro is a powerful machine and has been generally received well by the critics, but Apple decided once it went Intel to make it such an Ultimate High-End Machine that it doesn’t pander well to the consumer market. The base model starts at about $2300 (without monitor) and customizing the machine to give it more oomph can easily put it into the $3500-$4000 range. For what you get that’s not unreasonable (from what i understand after basic digging) but the bottom line is still pretty steep and more computer than most people have a need for.

Which is fine because it’s nice that that option is available, but the problem is that the only alternative cheap option is the iMac. The base model of the iMac is $1200 (without a need for a monitor) and can be upgraded and oomphed up to a price that hits the low end of the Mac Pro specs for a much relatively cheaper cost. And i’d be completely happy with that except that the All-In-One design of the iMac restricts the kind of expandability that i’ve always had and still want with my desktops. i want multiple RAM slots and multiple PCI slots and multiple hard drive and optical bays. i want the ability to add a second monitor to my set up and then replace it if i get a new one or need to transfer my current monitor somewhere else. I want to be able to put in a RAID card or upgrade my graphics card. etcetera.

Ideally it would be nice if Apple brought back the PowerMac series as a reasonable compromise to fill that gap: consumer level processing options but with the expandability of the Mac Pro. I believe the audience is out there – the ones who want a compact and efficient workstation that gets the job done but can be modded as time goes by. A Powermac G6 could start somewhere mid iMac price range and ramp up to the beginning of the Mac Pro range, offering similar if not identical processor specs to the iMac.

But honestly i don’t see that happening any time in the near future. Apple’s desktop computers already seemed to be taking a backseat in development before the iPhone came out; now, between the newest MacBook Pros, the MacBook Airs, the iPhones, the iPods, &c., i think that the Mac desktops will continue to fade into a niche obscure market and fanbase comparable to that of Linux.

Which for me means two options: buy an old Mac Pro or G5 off of a distributor site that’s cheaper and more in line with what i want, or, for the first time in many years, consider buying/building a Windows machine as my main operating computer.

Buying a Windows machine as my main computer seems absurd because i’m much more comfortable with macintosh hardware and software, and i have all of these programs and files and archives of things that are Mac only. I hate Windows Vista, am not terribly fond of Windows XP, and don’t relish having to find a whole new suite of applications that will likely be unable to read my mac files.

And yet it still falls under consideration simply because of the question: “what do i really need in a computer and how much is that need worth?” against all other considerations it seems horribly imbalanced, but it’s a valid concern since there are many other things i should be using my money for other than a $4k computer and i bet i’d be able to build a PC that meets my needs for half that price (although i’m not sure if i feel like it will last as long).

But we’ll see. All this is moot until 2009 in any case, so when it becomes relevant i’ll look at the current offerings both present and recent past and then assess the situation then.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. comments are preferred there.

in its infancy, “video game” meant “arcade game”, starting (essentially) with Pong and then developing into a thriving arcade culture of individuals who plopped quarter after quarter gobbling pellets, shooting asteroids or space invaders, or jumping over barrels. And whlie my personal experience in arcades growing up didn’t match the stereotype of angsty/rebellious teenagers, society definitely bought into that impression on both sides of the fence, and as the popularity of video games started to rise so did the concern of parents that video games were a bad influence on youth. Video games are a waste of money, they make our kids not interested in reading, they make our kids violent or lose touch with the real world, &c.

It’s impossible to say where video games would be right now if the Nintendo Entertainment System hadn’t revitalized the home video game industry after the video game crash of 1983. I think it was likely a mixed blessing for arcade machine developers; on the one hand, the success of the NES console took people away from the arcades and more money into cartridges, but on the other hand, if the NES hsdn’t resurged video gaming back into popular culture, the arcade industry would have probably died on its own.

The interesting thing to note about the arcade industry versus the home industry was how those competing yet co-dependent paths slowly diverged over time both in society’s attitudes about them and the experiences they tried to create. During the third and fourth generation of home consoles from the mid-80s to late-90s, home consoles were still “behind” when it came to replicating the arcade experience. The graphics weren’t as sharp, the home joystick didn’t have the same sort of “feel” as an arcade joystick, and more importantly, home consoles couldn’t match the social aspect of arcade video gaming, particularly in the early 90s when Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat brought people back to the arcades. But the home console market at that time was able to compete in a way that the prior home console market failed because they had a particular slice of video game aesthetic that wasn’t meant to replicate the arcade experience, it was supposed to stand on its own. Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, and early RPGs like the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games helped define the home market audience versus the arcade audience.

It was the next generation of video game consoles (Playstation, N64, Saturn) that started to shift the dynamics and attitudes in game development as technology and graphics for home consoles started to accelerate and create the market that still has strong influence today. The long platform/RPG and other “console specialized” sorts of games still had a strong following, but it was also around this time that consoles had advanced enough to create a truer arcade experience or create an experience that (in some views) *surpassed* the arcade experience in gaming. And when the next generation of consoles came out years after (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast), the arcade video game industry had to change its tactic to keep the arcade experience unique, which is how games with non-standard controllers rose to dominance, particularly music video games like Dance Dance Revolution and other bemani.

Through these decades of video game history, the overwhelming majority of consoles and systems were still aimed at the everchanging youth. Video games that were smash hits in the 8-bit era were abandoned as a home market aesthetic in favor of games that emphasized graphic superiority and/or a greater sense of epicism. and as that philosophy of “better graphics! more dazzle! who cares about gameplay? just blow things up!” gained momentem and became a standard to uphold in entertainment in general (don’t even get me started on the Michael Bay’s Transformers), it created a separation between the older and newer generation of gamers, leaving older gamers in the dust.

Until a new video game aesthetic started to creep into the mainstream which in its infancy was pretty invisible to the likes of me but is now impossible to ignore: the online casual flash game.

I’m not sure when casual flash games rose to such popularity, but it’s evident how much it has a strong foothold in the new video gaming culture not just because of the popularity of sites like kongregate, yahoo games, the casual game apps that exist on facebook &c, but also how much prominence casual games have in the current gen. consoles. The PS3 and XBox 360 certainly still have the genre of hardcore gamers that are looking for games that make full use of their power to give them that Next Dazzling first person shooter/racing game/sports game, but there’s an entire online paradigm for both of these consoles that is dedicated to the downloading and buying of casual games not unlike what is possible to do on the internet. In fact, some of the games that are available through those consoles’ online services are ones that were found on the internet first and developed as an enhanced version, such as N+ and Flow.

In addition to this, you have the Wii. Nintendo’s whole marketing strategy for the Wii other than its innovative controls is that it’s the video game console for the whole family, and with launches such as Wii Sports, Wii Play, and the like, it’s clear that part of the new controller design is optimized to help enhance the casual game experience with the unique Wii interface.

When i think about how and why casual games have risen to such prominence, a few key factors come into play. First off, i feel that the online casual flash game was the first video game genre that was targeted towards older people, particularly corporate office workers. Even small businesses have integrated high-speed internet as a part of their infrastructure, and when people need a break and are tired of reading news or looking at pictures or whatever, more people find a casual flash game to occupy their time. it’s the new version of the newspaper crossword puzzle or word scramble, and it succeeds at grabbing that new audience because a) the games are generally simpler in concept and execution than typical video games (compare point and click or finding words as opposed to executing a haryuken), and b) the games are generally short to finish, an instant gratification/momentary distraction sort of thing rather than a long involved mission that involves more walking and random encounters than people want to have even in real life.

Secondly, there’s the ease in which any random joe can program and develop a quality casual game. As opposed to console games which require a team of programmers and artists and what have you to put together, flash is relatively easy enough to learn that basic games can be a one-man show, and with sites like kongregate, they can gain free and instant exposure to tens of thousands of people. It’s even hit a point where those that can’t comprehend Flash can go to sites like simcarnival where a special application exists to make that process even easier, requiring practically no programming experience whatsoever.

Third, and in my opinion the most significant, some of the casual games that have come out of this have risen to true brilliance, and this is where i feel the video game trend has come full circle. Because surely there are current more standard video games that have their own sense of brilliance and success such as WoW or the Final Fantasy series or GTA or Mortal Kombat, but it’s been a long time since there has been a video game in which the brilliance matches the sensibility of how Pac Man and Tetris and Centipede and Asteroids were brilliant, or how Legend of Zelda and the original Super Mario Brothers were brilliant: that despite its seeming simplicity in concept, gameplay, and graphics, they never get tiresome or old.

And because of all of this, i have a suspicion that the Big 3 console companies are on their last legs in the market of video games unless the momentum can be rebuilt up because of the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Otherwise, i strongly suspect that people will soon be more likely to buy a $5 texas hold ’em application on their smartphone or pull up a game of chain factor or their favorite kongregate game than spend $50+ on a console video game.

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

Even though i’m outside of that direct television advertising culture, i’m still affected by it. i’ve never watched even a snippet of “Survivor”, nor have i ever seen an advert for it, nor do i care to know anything about it given my general loathe of reality telly. Yet i know the basic premise, i understand that the idea of being “voted off the island” comes from it, and i know that the show typically runs on thursday nights – all from word of mouth. And that’s just one example out of millions of telly shows, products, people, etc that are not simply given to promote an immediate sell or immediate gain, it’s a process of immersion, a way of slowly shaping aspects of thought and behaviour.

When the internet started to rise in prominence, early advertising came in the form of large click-banners. Click banners at that time were very straightforward – billboard style advertising that when you clicked brought you to the site and also a) paid the company responsible for the banner ad based on number of clicks, and b) logged information on clicks to either generate new sorts of clicks or sold that click information to other companies to send you more banners or send you spam.

Over the years, banner advertising has evolved and become more sophisticated. Banners that are contextual, banners made in flash that can react to your mouse movements, google’s revolutionary contextual “ad words”. But all of those sorts of advancements still follow the same basic paradigm of “clicks turn into money. clicks will get people to my website.” What those advancements lack is the ability to do what telly adverts do over the long term: create a sense of immersion. Part of that has to do with the nature of the advertising, but part of it has to do with the fact that web surfers are now so used to identifying banners and ad words that they know how to filter it out to grab main content.

Enter facebook.

Facebook has, in my opinion, managed to evolve past the mere click-banner form of advertising. Sure, they still have the basic banner advert on the left hand side of the screen which is generally difficult to completely ignore because the adverts are smart in how they’re generated. But Facebook also has other avenues of advertising both obvious and subtle that aren’t meant to be true click-ads; they’re ads that help create that same sense of immersion that television had full reign of so long ago.

One: Sponsored ads that are intertwined with news feeds. Internet magazine and news sites try to do this too by posting part of an article, then showing some ad links, then continuing with the article. That kinda works, but in that context it’s typically pretty easy to quickly distinguish between what’s article and what’s advert. But aside from a subtle “Sponsored” tag, sponsored adverts in the news feeds look practically identical to regular news feeds making it harder to filter out the content without at least some absorption of the content.

Two: Gifts. When i first signed up on fb, i didn’t understand the concept of fb gifts, but it’s become clearer now that gifts are another form of immersion advertising. A lot of the time, the gifts may be generic virtual objects, but every now and again, fb will make a Brand into a gift – a 7-11 Slurpee on free slurpee day, a little “Wall-E” doll on the weekend of the release of the movie. And it’s clear that gifts are treated that way because while i can remove the gift application from my profile page, i can’t turn notifications off about them on my news feed page.

Three: Becoming a “Fan” There are certainly things that i’m a “fan” of that i like to share with someone else if i think they’d also be interested, but becoming and sharing that you’re a “fan” of something on facebook doesn’t feel like that as much as free immersion advertising instigated by the populace. I’m a fan of Einsturzende Neubaten. If i made that public using facebook’s “fan” concept, it appears on my friends’ News Feeds not just telling them that i’m a fan, but with a promotional picture, a category classification saying that they’re “musicians”, and how many other people on fb are fans of Einturzende. Having only a seed of infomation saying “Mendel Lee is a fan of Einsturzende” will generally either get people to say, “oh cool!” if they also like the music, or have people shrug it off if they have no idea what or who Einsturzende is. But by adding those extra snippets of information, those that don’t know anything about Einsturzende now do. Oh, it’s a band. Mendel likes cool music. And look how many fans there are! Maybe i should check them out. And again – intertwined in the news feeds like the sponsored ads and the gift notifications.

While facebook isn’t as important to me as livejournal for keeping in touch with people, i do go on there on a daily basis to play loose voyeur like everyone else and to play prolific and the biggest brain app, and i’m coming to realize that i am in some degree back in an immersion advertising setting. it’s tricky, and very clever on the part of facebook, and i’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done about it other than deactivating my account – but it’s too late for that. Maybe just the awareness of it will help dull the effects of it all. We’ll see how i feel about it in, say, a year.