If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you know that I often post one word status updates. I started doing this last year out of complete boredom. For a period that lasted six months, I would only post a single word.
Of course something very interesting happened—with learnings to be had.
There’s a scene from Sam Shepard’s 1978 play Curse of the Starving Class that has stuck with me for many years. Characters randomly open the refrigerator door and blankly stare at the contents, only to close the door after a moment without removing anything. We’re not really hungry—we just look to see if there’s anything in the fridge that might interest us, even if we looked just ten minutes before. I believe there’s a entirely new digital form of this now, something which I refer to as empty pixel grazing.
The lifeblood of social media is human interaction, thoughts and emotions. Forever trying to understand the importance of it on a need level, I like thinking in terms of how all of it fits into the realm of philosophy and human understanding. Doesn’t every tweet come down to this: I matter. With each post, we leave behind digital proof of our existence. Digital has made posting as instantaneous as thinking. How many of us feel that if we stop tweeting, posting,…>>
I originally wrote and published this post way back in March, before the Translator site had even launched. Subsequently, it never got tweeted or spread, because we were busy writing new stuff that got sent out into the digital ether. But this being the first day of school, I thought it would be a good time to give this story its due. The post is about my memorable experience at Milwaukee College Preparatory School as a guest speaker during career day.
It’s interesting to see what has changed in the last five months. The iPad isn’t new, and is beginning to show up in schools. In fact, my alma mater Racine St. Catherine’s (yeah, St. Kate’s) is using them this fall. I’ve also seen some of the wonderful things Spreenkler and Romke de haan have done to foster community development, getting kids involved in digital projects.
Of course, the one thing that hasn’t changed is change: the constant, daily evolution and increasing pervasiveness of digital. It’s an ever-expanding, never-ending story. For all of us working in the business, that makes every day the first day of school.
Sean Duffy wrote a provocative post recently on TalentZoo.com titled “Advertising Agencies: Kiss Your Creative Teams Goodbye.” He contends that to maximize the potential of digital media, traditional agencies must be willing to restructure the venerated copywriter/art director team. As you might imagine, the eye-popping title of the post led to a flurry of emotionally-charged user comments. Ah, digital. How do we love thee? Let us count the ways.
Reactions fell neatly into Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Let’s examine reactions to the post through the lens of each of these stages. When assembled, the individual responses paint a great picture of the psychological and emotional transition the advertising industry as a whole is currently experiencing. C’mon it’ll be fun, I promise.
Just Sayin' is where we take what's in our head and put it into words. And pixels. While we know it would be far more interesting to have these discussions with us in person over a pot of Translator XD coffee, this is the best that current technology allows for. Patience. We're working on it.
Just Sayin' Feed
We develop user-centric strategy in order to create unique digital experiences, platforms, content and products that bring online and offline together.
Services include:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
8am - 10am
The Space
415 E Menomonee St.
Milwaukee, WI 53202
We make really strong coffee (yeah, in that Chemex thing you see to your right). We talk about ideas. Your ideas. Our ideas. Someone else's ideas. Smart people show up. You can join us, no invite required. Read what @raffel has to say about it here:
