Category Archives: Blog

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Because the word “addiction”…

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… is in no way devalued or debased in its colloquial usage by people without any experience of a genuine and debilitating addiction (as opposed to a strong preference for the presence of something rather than its absence, perhaps, or the sense of being accustomed to ready access to a tool which facilitates social exchange and other functions suited to an urban lifestyle), and because people never exaggerate in response to leading questions in surveys, we must presume – with great sadness and pity at the decline of humanity into mere flesh-blob slaves of their own technologies – that OFCOM have uncovered a great tragedy in the making.

In other news, huge swathes of the population are revealed to be “addicted” to shoes, motor vehicles and clean running water! THE END IS NIGH.

 

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Slogans and logos

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Via MindHacks, here’s Language Log dissecting some recent research into the persuasive power of logos and slogans.

A recent paper by Juliano Laran et al. (2011) suggests that resistance to persuasion can be triggered in a highly automatic and unconscious manner. The work builds on some interesting results involving commercial brands and implicit priming effects. For example, previous work has shown that subliminally flashing the Apple logo can spur study participants to think more creatively, and that presenting a Walmart logo can encourage frugal behavior whereas presenting a Nordstrom logo leads to greater indulgence. In other words, the brands activate a set of associations that in turn trigger certain cognitive or behavioral goals. Nifty results.

But brand names and logos, argue Laran and colleagues, are different from other commercial messages in that they’re not necessarily perceived as inherently persuasive—despite the fact that they’re often designed with great care, we may normally take them to be primarilyreferential, much as any proper name might be. Slogans (or, as they say in the industry, taglines) are transparently persuasive according to the authors. Perhaps people react to these latter messages in knee-jerk reverse-psychology manner by blocking and even countering the typical brand associations.

Laran et al. found that when they had people look at cost-conscious brand names like Walmart in an alleged memory study and then later take part in an imaginary shopping task, they were able to replicate the implicit priming effect: people were willing to spend quite a bit less than if they’d seen luxury-brand logos. But when subjects saw slogans (e.g. Save money. Live better.) instead of the brand names, there was a reverse priming effect: now, the luxury-brand slogans triggered more penny-pinching behavior than the economy-brand slogans.

Interesting; we’re more resistant to suggestion using language directly than we are to implicit suggestion encoded by association with images and/or designs.

Someone should do a spoof of They Live with this research rolled into it…

Blog

BERG’s Robot-Readable World

I was on a focus group panel last week, and had a real fanboy moment when I discovered that one of my fellow panellists was employed by the notorious polymathic design consultancy BERG. When I expressed a fascination with their output, I was assured that their studio – far from being the Wonka-esque factory of chaotic genius I liked to imagine – largely consisted of people sat staring at computer monitors. (I still think I was lied to, and they just do the magical stuff out back somewhere.)

Name-dropping anecdotes aside, there’s a more pertinent reason I mention BERG, and it’s this post by Matt Jones, titled “The Robot-Readable World”. It is long, and it is full of stuff; Jones collects a whole disparate bunch of thinkers and thoughts and synthesises it all into something coherent, compelling and challenging. It also pretty much sums up why I count myself as a BERG fanboy – even if all they do really is just stare at monitors a lot, if that results in this sort of output, then I can feel a lot better about my own working practices.

TL;DR: I’m a bit busy today, so go read something awesome someone else wrote. It’s about robots ‘n’ shit, yeah?

Blog

The Golden Age of Introversion

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Via Kottke, a piece at The Atlantic that offers up the internet as the best thing that ever happened to introverts:

For introverts like myself, it takes energy to engage with other people. Doing so requires thoughtfulness. It’s tiring. Expending energy, for us, isn’t energizing. Please note: we’re not talking about shyness, some character flaw. The problem isn’t with the introvert — it’s with the demands you make on the introvert. An introvert can’t force an extrovert to sit quietly in a room and read a book, but extroverts (and the stigmas they’ve inadvertently created) can impose social demands with ease…

Hmm. Speaking as an introvert, I can certainly see where the charmingly-named Mister Bump is going with this; asynchronous communications are vastly preferable to unexpected phonecalls (I could count the number of voice calls I’ve made or received from people outside my family in the last year on my fingers and still have some spare), and the ability to work effectively as part of a team without having to endure physical proximity – or the social-lubricant conversation that comes with it – is a great relief to me.

What I’m not so keen on is the air of oppressed superiority that exudes from Bump’s post as it continues; a smugness, a meek-are-inheriting-the-earthness. I also resent the portrayal of introverts as having to lie and deceive in order to avoid situations they find uncomfortable. Maybe in the world of business the face-to-face meeting is unavoidable, but what sort of idiotic statement is “[c]ars were invented, meaning you had no excuse for not traveling across town”? Did you need an excuse, other than “sorry, I’m doing something else then?” Why rely on this “illusion of busyness” that social media apparently allows you to construct so much more easily? Is American culture really so different to British that the notion of saying to someone “no, actually I just stayed at home and read books all weekend, it was lovely” is somehow a betrayal of your national values?

(If that really is the case, then stop the presses – I think I may have found one of the root causes of your current cultural malaise. This obsession with taking sides in a warring binary schism is clearly not limited to the political arena, and it’s going to tear your nation apart if you don’t let it go.)

As the old joke goes: there are two sorts of people in the world, those who divide the world into two sorts of people and those who don’t. Introverts aren’t better than extroverts, or vice versa; we’re just wired differently. OK, sure, perhaps network culture has brought introverts opportunities for fulfilling work and social lives that had been erased by industrialisation and urbanisation; that’s surely a fine thing, especially if you’re an introvert.

But if you are an introvert, you might want to consider that perhaps framing your introversion as some sort of cultural face-off with the other half of the population may be a more dominant cause of your sense of put-upon-ness than the extroverts themselves.

Just sayin’.

Blog

Stupid responses to wicked problems, part [x]

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Seems lots of people can see the potential long-term problems with the plans of Foxconn (and doubtless many others) to replace human manufacturing labour with robots. Sadly, that doesn’t preclude them coming up with the most myopic and reactionary response possible:

Despite my love of robots since childhood – as the high point of technology and for the technological challenges they present – we must remain vigilant about how they are helping us. If it turns out they are making our lives worse, I will be first in the luddite line with my sledgehammer.

Yes, Noel, yes! Because it’s the robots that are deciding the course of macroeconomics, isn’t it? Sneaky robots! Thank heavens for your vigilant sledgehammer; I shall sleep easier at night knowing you’re watching for that critical moment when a systemic drift manifests as an observable (if ill-defined) impact on our privileged Western lifestyles, ready and willing to destroy the tools of potential oppression, yet leaving the hands that would wield them unharmed!

Idiot. We cannot detach ourselves from our technologies; we are a cyborg species and always have been. Hairshirt back-to-basics primitivism is as unachievable and naive as Singularitarianism. Robots are tools, just like looms; why destroy a morally neutral tool when you could instead work on the systemic problems which make that tool into a vector of oppression?

Fight the fist, not the gauntlet.