What can we learn from "The Dress" today?

"#TheDress" is an interesting thing to think about because in itself, it doesn't matter. In 2015 it was a social, viral, publishing phenomenon. In 2021, at best, its the answer to a trivia quiz question in a loosely defined "the internet" category. Nobody really cares about it. (Except possibly that person who had the tattoo...)

But it tells us something about how people come together on the internet in a way that they didn’t just a few years previously. And that is something that does matter.

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Back to Normal

its become pretty clear to me that this (#gestures vaguely around#) is "normal" now. No, we haven't gone "back to normal", whatever that might mean (I don't think it really means anything in this context, other than the fantasy of a world without SARS-CoV-2 and all that it entails... which is basically everything that has happened in the last 6 months or so...) But I think we can say that whatever this (#gestures again#) is is "normal" now.

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Data Art

Some people look at data art as a challenge to do the most original, visually interesting, arresting piece of art that somehow corresponds to a data set. Thats fine… But it’s the line of thinking that gave us all those 3D charts in old versions of Excel and chartjunk galore.

The other way of looking at it can get you to a different place - how do you make 'art' that actually represents the data? I think some of the best data art boils down to a straightforward bar chart, and this is no exception…

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For now...

What I write here tends to be what I'm thinking about, with a general theme of 'how people adapt to technology'. Right now, our society is undergoing a seismic shift - millions of people are suddenly living and working in a totally different routine, much of which is enabled by the internet and online services - meaning I've got way too many things to be thinking and writing about to actually write any of them down.

So, this is a "for now" post while I try to get my head around what comes next.

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For Whom the Bell Tolls

“No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

Context: Brexit: Big Ben fundraiser given £50,000

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Made up my mind

The "I'm still a bit undecided about my vote direction this coming Thursday" copypasta meme has made my mind up. (I've seen it from a couple of people on Facebook not really linked to each other, so I assume it's done the rounds and we've all seen it now.)

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How much has TV viewing really changed?

In a recent episode of the “Rule of Three” podcast, Joel Morris (one of the podcast hosts) says, about 4 and a half minutes in;

I was always under the impression that Googlebox was a fiction, that families didn't gather around the TV and watch it anymore [...], and we looked up the BARB figures (about 5 years ago) were that 85% of programmes were watched live, by a family, on a sofa, when they went out. And I thought - god, I thought that was a vintage and antique thing. I am sure that is not true any more, and that must have changed really quickly, and I'm wondering whether the culture of comedy, where the demand is for things to hit straight away, whether people have quite caught up with the fact that people consume everything so differently now."

I'm really interested in changing TV viewing behaviour for all sorts of reasons, so I thought I'd take a look at whether this is true - what has changed in the last 5 years?

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Digital Media's Growing Pains

Its now about 11 and a half years since I thought it would be a good idea to work in the media industry for a year or so. I didn't quite understand how everything was on the internet for free but somehow companies like Google and Facebook were worth millions of dollars - but knew that it was something to do with advertising, and wanted to understand how that business worked a bit better.

As it turns out, the first thing I learnt which pretty much shaped the next decade of my career was that communications technology might be interesting, but the impact it has on people and their behaviour is far, far more interesting.

Something else I learnt, probably a few years later, was that the world of "digital" that was massively disrupting the advertising industry is only a subset of "marketing". The problem is that "best practice" for digital media/advertising isn't necessarily "best practice" for advertising in general.

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