Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.
It’s a long-held dystopian idea that robots will take over the world and humans will become slaves to them. It’s an idea that Ray Kurzweil describes in his book, The Singularity is Near.
Some say, the way that humans are in constant eye contact with screens – often our relationship with our smartphone – we have already reached a point where we are slaves to technology. However, this isn’t what Kurzweil was describing; he was talking about technological intelligence.
What if it’s not that?
Back in 2013 I suggested in a piece for Imperica, called I’m not responsible that,
“…computers [won’t] become intelligent and sentient. I contest that it’s simpler than that: we will simply forget how to do the most practical of things and rely, instead, on a dumb machine to do things for us.”
And I wasn’t joking. Since then, much about our way of life is being outsourced. How far could this thought experiment go? What if we embrace the idea that every decision we need to make is based on what a computer tells us to do? While that might sound daft at first glance, consider the train driver who is told to continue on a green light. That’s a computer making that decision. Yet who’s culpable if the train crashes? What if we removed all trace of human error by taking away the responsibility to make that decision. Completely.
Many years ago, I spent time learning the art of making bread. While I never chose to take it up as a career back then, I got to do work experience at a laboratory that was – and probably still is – responsible for creating new products. One of those was Kingsmill bread. Recipes are carefully created, with ingredients measured to 0.01g. Scale that up, often with unskilled workers, and things go wrong.
In one such plant bakery, there were two jobs that required minimal skill. One was really banal: when this light comes on, hit this button. Every 30 minutes the operator was given a break, so mundane was the task that on the night shift people fell asleep and apple pies didn’t get any apple inside them.
We are seeing apps that tell parents when to put sunscreen on their children, the route they should drive, the photos they should take, the people they should meet, or marry, and a huge variety of other decisions that were once determined by humans. Our first instinct in any situation is to search on Google, ask Siri, or rely on a review on a website from someone we don’t know (and who may not actually exist). Bots are, some say, the new apps.
A new framework
How far could this go?
There appears to be no end in sight. User experience design is removing friction to the point that any element of decision making has been killed; why think about whether you want that pizza delivered in a Uber (or drone) and just press this button now so you can get on with whatever you were doing before hunger had the gall to interrupt you.
Maybe we’ll see Soylent-as-a-Service?
On a serious note, it’s not inconceivable that we’ll begin to see a defence in court come down to a decision that a jury can’t determine with reasonable doubt to have been premeditated or, to some extent, to have been made by a machine. How do you sentence a server to life? Can a datacentre be held to account for corporate manslaughter? To that end, jurors might be screened via an algorithm; heck, IBM’s Watson might be called to serve on a jury.
This is not in the realms of science fiction.
It’s clear we don’t have a legal system that’s set up to deal with the kind of technological leaps that we have made in the past 30 years. Yet, we have to collectively decide what to do next, as a global society.
As we begin to turn off low-level activities from our brains and allow a rack in a datacentre to decide things for us, where do we draw the line?
Is this the true singularity?
Decisions, decisions
Let’s just say that we outsource every decision. Every. Single. One.
Get up, breakfast is chosen for you based on nutrient intake so far that week. You’re routed to work via your phone, which could see you change trains five times, or be woken earlier (when there is congestion). Your TV shows you the most popular shows only, based on what your Facebook friends are watching, or talking about. Or how well you did at work.
There will be no way to opt out. This will be life.
And if you break a law by trying to get back to some level of self-determination, even a small one, what happens then? No need for a court system; you’ll have persistent cookies attached to you that prevent access to some email, or the ability to log on to your favourite porn site, or perhaps deciding yourself when the heating comes on because the temperature has dropped. Your door won’t unlock; your groceries are delivered but they only contain what the computer deems is suitable, given your criminal circumstances.
Ever tried to contact Google support? Good luck with proving your innocence. Right?
Hang on…
Oh, silly me. I forgot: culture.
Much has been made of this recently – it’s what makes us human, it separates us from our Neanderthal ancestors and, so the argument goes, certain religious factions. But even that is getting homogenised.
For example, right now I can pick up a guitar and create a song. I can write lyrics. Or stories. I can draw. And yet, much of the culture we see each day is created by a computer, or at the very least determined by one. The future will see each note I sing auto-tuned, the lyrics I write scrutinised for how well they test against hit singles of the past; my stories are shared, remixed and reposted until they are no longer mine, or any individual’s work – then they are translated by a machine and changed again.
The advertising I see – once a mirror for popular culture – is reflecting the decision of a computer as programmatic takes over. Each year, the same idea is regurgitated and shared again as if new. And we all get excited about it.
This is happening today. Right now. Mostly because we have this weird idea that the web contains the best of culture, so we’re glued to it. It’s where your average advertising creative goes for inspiration. We’re seeing memes used to sell confectionery, Instagram-style filters on travel programmes, listicles for game shows.
Add to this the stark fact that, as humans, we’re fairly terrible when it comes to verification – and when we are looking for it, we only care about the first page on a Google search. Or we ask a question via our favoured social network, or maybe on Quora so that the answer we like the most gets upvoted.
Daily Mail comments are a good indicator of that strategy.
It can’t all be bad, can it?
Sure, some good can come of this. Let’s flip it around, then.
If we remove human intervention and outsource not just our responsibility but also the decision-making that comes along with that, what do we get? Everyone has access to the same level of education, for free; there is no need for physical money, or cards (which results in a reduction in low-level crimes); there are no more road traffic accidents. Imagine it: arguments will be settled with the press of a button. You shrug and move on. The list is endless.
Life would be fairly bland and asinine, though. For the majority.
Modifications will be available, to those who can afford them. For example, you don’t want to ever see someone again? Digitally erase them and even if they’re standing next to you they’re invisible. They simply don’t show up on your radar. Access to an archive of human experiences from the early 21st century will keep us entertained. Same as it ever was.
Whichever the outcome is to be based on giving up our responsibility – and therefore the thing that, I would suggest, makes us human – it’s going to happen. As I said before, computers don’t get more intelligent, we as humans just get a little more stupid each passing year.
Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.
As agencies continue to struggle for margins, and remain unable to successfully cope with the ongoing march of software, why is technology seen as the only way forward for innovation? Are agencies being blind to other more lucrative areas, and are we about to witness a mass extinction in the agency world as more and more of the services they offer are given over to machines?
I was lucky enough to be invited to attend Big Brand Week in London and spent time at their recent innovation event. While it was genuinely fascinating to hear how agencies such as Karmarama, and organisations like the Unilever Foundry and Telefónica, are getting together with startups, accelerators, incubators and similar collectives, the only answer appeared to be turning to technology for innovation. And it’s the same message they’ve all been saying for at least 3 years.
Agencies, by their own admission, are failing to get to grips with this new era of computing. Continuing to use the label of digital isn’t helping – them or their clients – yet are they paying lip service to the Trojan horse that will be their ultimate undoing? I think so.
Technology has become a mask, a way for agencies to hide behind their lack of knowledge. And while it’s true there have always been people within agencies who have made their career on a stack of BS, it now feels like a phenomenon that has become a pandemic. Talk about viral.
Advertising hasn’t really got to grips with how technology is changing more than just media, or the channels and platforms through which they pipe their messages. I’m not sure anyone on the panel had a convincing argument. Although stories from Collider and Unilever appeared to demonstrate that in some areas things are improving, yet there was much debate around how startups need to change to accommodate global businesses – very little about how that should be working the other way around.
The shift needs to happen
For my piece in Rudy de Waele’s excellent book, Shift 2020, I posited that agencies would become extinct within 7 years. A lot of people took me to task for making that judgement. Yet, more and more I see consolidation happening as a way to remain relevant and to generate revenues. Technology is not turning the tide. It won’t, either.
The shift required is fundamental. Advertising is still living in a linear world, yet the changes around them are exponential. And until that changes, innovation remains something people on panels talk about, or apply to ideas that are anything but innovative.
In one of Tom Goodwin’s recent AdAge articles, Specialization Was a Mistake: How Agencies Can Restructure for the Future, he presents his future for agencies. It’s a smart idea, one that Tom has obviously been thinking about for some time. It’s well worth a read.
There is a kernel of what I think the advertising industry can do to prevent my premonition coming true within Tom’s piece. Agencies and their ilk need to turn their backs on technology as the saviour, and use it as a tool. It’s coming for the majority of their work, so all that’s left it to get better at the one thing technology can only facilitate rather than create: ideas.
I’m not talking about a 30-second spot, or an idea expressed as a print advertisement. I’m saying we need to think big, to take organising ideas, ones that can change the course of a business, or even a sector. These ideas should be a well from which the brand can continually drink, to express through services, ethics, products, channels, media, tactics, internal communications, hiring practices… It has to be something that can be the fuel, not the exhaust.
Technology isn’t that. Partnering with startups isn’t that. Not alone. It’s time agencies woke up to the exponential changes happening, otherwise they’ll be the communications equivalent of the internet fridge.
Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.
Bravery has come to mean something entirely different in the world of advertising. It’s not like rescuing a child from a burning building, or savings lives by delivering food to isolated villages in a war-torn country.
Yet, everyone wants to be brave. They aspire to do ‘brave’ work. They rarely do.
This is because ‘brave’ is a synonym for many other things in Adland. Mostly, it means good. Because those agencies that actually do brave work – or as the journalists will have you think, the brave clients that go along with an idea – care about the craft, they fight for the work, they spend hours outside of their allotted work-time, making sure that it’s better than ‘best’.
That’s not brave, that’s passion!
What about those brave clients I mentioned?
Clients, as most Adlandians will have you believe, are terrible. They like to cut away the best bits of the work, to scupper the beauty and deliver something that’s barely lowest common denominator. And the account teams and the creative and planners, they let this happen. They accept it. More often than not, the client won’t even see this kind of work.
“The client isn’t brave enough for this!”
How would they know if they aren’t prepared to even show the client?
Perhaps, it’s because work is done in isolation – client writes a brief and signs off a scope of work, then they are shown some hand-drawn ‘scamps’ along with loads of charts talking about mobile this and Facebook that. A deck, presented by someone who may have preconceived opinions of their own about how the client will respond.
“Clients find it hard to understand creatives,” we’re told.
I disagree.
As a creative, I’ve fought hard internally to work with clients, which has latterly led to me being called a strategist. But good work requires a creative to truly understand what’s driving the business decisions, why the client might say no to something – although I have found it usually leads to having a solid argument as to why it’s the right route to take. And if you can get collaboration – even once – you’ll often find the creative reins are loosened for the next brief. True bravery is rarely achieved by one person alone.
Of course, good work is always possible when the account person works with and for the agency, when they don’t refer to themselves as ‘the client in the building’ and always say yes without consultation. It should never be them and us. It’s bolder to behave as a ‘we’. This isn’t art, after all. They are not there to be a filter for what gets shown – that’s where the creative director comes in.
Clients have a real role to play here
It’s an important role they play.
It’s worth clients – as well as their chosen agency partners – remembering that good work doesn’t require bravery: it takes trust. If you’ve posed a question, be prepared for a brilliant agency to respond with something that provides the right answer. If it’s not necessarily the one you were thinking of, you’ve failed to exercise that trust. This will lead to mediocre and forgettable work that will ultimately fail.
Trust should drive your business relationship – the best agencies know this, which is why they mostly do good work (every agency has accounts that don’t rely on trust, let’s not pretend otherwise). A relationship built on trust will allow creative work to be different, to attempt things that haven’t been done before, to oppose conventional choices when it’s right to do so.
Postscript
Don’t do brave work. Just do good work. Not just for yourselves, but for your clients. Build that trust. Throw out the ego and work with everyone who has a vested interest whatever their job title or position in the agency hierarchy – a lesson I took a while to learn. It will probably be the bravest thing you’ll ever do in your creative life.
Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.
No, the title to this article is not link bait. It’s a fact. You’re probably in shock at that statement. Or angered by it. I understand that. Having spent the past 17 years or so being completely misunderstood by the creative industry, being told it’s time to throw away everything you’ve worked so hard to build might be a bitter pill to swallow. So ask yourself this: what does digital really mean in 2013? And when you say digital to someone, what do they think?
Do they say anything that’s on the internet? Or do they consider it to mean work that exists on the web? Possibly. But what if it isn’t, or you don’t work ‘online’? What if you work for a television company that delivers it’s content via fibre? What if you work for a newspaper that prints news but publishes to the web first?
Let’s step away for a second, and think about what digital actually is.
Digital is an adjective. Here’s the definition as we apply it today, although its etymology can be traced back to the 15th Century:
“1 Denoting a process or a device that operates by processing information that is supplied and stored in the form of a series of binary digits; 2 electronics denoting an electronic circuit that responds to and produces signals which at any given time are in one of two possible states.”
The lines between what we historically knew as the digital realm and what we considered to be old media, or analogue delivery, have well and truly blurred. Only a few industries cling on to the idea that there is an offline and an online state – and when applied to retail, for example, it’s to the consumer’s detriment that this concept persists. I even saw a company describe their software as available as a digital download. I haven’t ever seen an analogue one, have you?
More to the point, has anyone ever described themselves as an “analogue planner”, or “digital accountant”, or “old media mogul”?
No, because it sounds utterly ludicrous.
So why do we maintain that it should remain a prefix for job titles? Why is a digital copywriter a requirement, or my favourite piece of nonsense – a digital strategist? If you’re working in the creative industries and you describe yourself with a digital prefix then you’re a charlatan. Or a dinosaur. Possibly both.
When I’ve spoken to people about this, they often cite jobs that we know from online work as justification of a digital difference. UX is one such role. The idea that user experience is only something that requires thinking about for an online experience only needs to visit the Loch Ness Exhibition in the Scottish Highlands to know that’s not true.
There, the screen on which you watch videos related to a specific part of the exhibition is often in front of you. This causes people to immediately stop as they enter the room, while others back up behind them. The best exhibition rooms they offer have a screen that’s above the door you come in – people walk to the back of the room and turn, allowing others to come in.
Designers quite like to talk about using the word digital as a prefix. Does that mean they only design for screens? Or only for web-based work? I’m not convinced by their arguments that it helps with recruitment; the digital prefix needlessly pigeonholes.
Why are we wedded to the old way of talking about things?
The smartphone is driving the adoption of the always-on, hyper-connected consumer (or user, if you prefer). The concept of being offline dates your thinking; there is no place for people like you in this business anymore. Ditto brands.
Think about that for a second before you shout your expletives.
Let’s be clear… I’m not saying that anyone who was an art director, planner, strategist, copywriter, designer, journalist, or art buyer in the days before the internet is redundant – their skills are just as useful now as they ever were. But the idea that art directing an email takes any more skill than it does for a 6-page roll fold, or that writing a campaign line that activates through Facebook is any different from writing a campaign line that is delivered on packaging, I’m sorry but your argument is invalid.
It’s the same when you just use the other side of that coin. I have previously described myself as being ‘digital’. It caused me more problems than it solved.
The rules haven’t changed, really. Yes, there has been a period of adaptation, but like an economic recession’s effect on businesses it’s weeded out the chaff from the wheat. And there’s a simple reason for this. Digital is not just about media: it’s a channel, it’s a platform, and it’s a system. Very few things prior to the early nineties could be considered to cross this many domains.
It’s this malleability that allows retailers to offer Software as a Service, search engines to disrupt the media environment, and social networks with no discernible business model float on the stock exchange at valuations that made those old school, vertically-siloed networks weep. And while they cried, the n00bs of the digital revolution came along and overtook them. In some cases, they bought them. What’s certain now is that they did more than disrupt. They laid waste.
I’m one of those old school people. I started in print. However, I adapted quickly. I saw the potential and was willing to go with it, despite being a second-class citizen to some of the above-the-line agencies that held the brand equity and saw the interactive, new media types as mere production agencies. But some of those agencies – as well as established businesses – along with many of their established models, were slow-footed and failed to grasp that digital was more than a single channel, that platforms and networks would ultimately prevail. Even the modern browser will seem antiquated within my lifetime, I’m fairly certain. And it’ll be a good thing when that happens.
Just like the printing press led to books, pamphlets, newspapers, and so forth, digital is sinking its fangs into every aspect of our lives and before long the old days of analogue will be a museum artefact that we view through a set of connected contact lenses.
That’s if we aren’t sitting at home, pushing a button when a light comes on and being entertained by videos of cats. Of course, that’d never happen.
Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.
Having put forward the idea that technology isn’t making us dumb, but our belief that technology intrinsically helps us be smarter and better at everything will bring about our cognitive demise, I’d like to offer a solution. We should learn to be curious again.
If only it was as easy as that, right? Like anything you want to get good at, curiosity doesn’t come easy. This isn’t just about clicking on any old link, or gluing your eyeballs to Twitter. You may well have to relearn this skill.
Schools like people to think the same, to have the same knowledge and be able to recite it at the drop of a hat. And, like a teacher’s salary, it’s not a good thing. We need people to have a range of skills, knowledge and ability to make this world we live in work best for all. Some kids will be able to code; some won’t. Some will speak more than one language; some won’t. Some kids will be able to code and speak another language; some won’t.
Here’s a scary thought for some: there will be kids who can’t do either, but will be good at pushing paint around a canvas and making an aesthetically pleasing thing. And, those same kids may well go on to do amazing things, simply because they’re curious. The same as the ones who can code, or can speak two languages, or more.
None of the scenarios above is wrong. Nor are any of them right.
It will come as no surprise that school and I didn’t get on, even though I was quite good at remembering things and regurgitating them at will. I just didn’t want to be like everyone else.
Now, just as it was then, I like to wander – in my mind as much as in the physical world. I tend to meander, to take the route I don’t know, just to find out where it goes. It’s caused me to be late to work, occasionally to find my car in a cul-de-sac, to be reading about non-lethal weapons when I’m supposed to be creating a creative idea for a best-selling car brand. But it’s always been useful. I’ve learned something.
And, by dint of trying something out, I’ve discovered things I might have missed if I hadn’t.
When I worked, for a very brief time, at a financial institution in the City of London, I spent a lot of my free time just walking about. Often this was to avoid the crowds of tourists, and because I was curious to know the intricate pathways that were rarely crowded a little better. Doing this led me past the spot where the world’s first postmarks were struck, among other things.
Now you can find me roaming around art galleries, chatting to the tech industry and asking questions (some of which are undoubtedly stupid, but so what!), buying electronic kits and building stuff, collecting memories, reading non-fiction, going to the theatre, reading poetry… I’m wandering.
I still can’t code. I barely get by with my terrible French when across the Channel. But, I recently used some of the knowledge I gained about London to good use for a client brief. I connected the dots I’d been collecting in my brain – something that brings me back to Dave Birss again (he’s writing a book on the subject, out soon) and this piece, What is Innovation? published on the Fast Company website, which talks about the same thing.
I’m doing what I can to wrestle back my responsibilities as a human being – responsibilities to myself as well as to others – by choosing to ignore the flashing light and the big button (which more often than not depicts a thumbs up symbol*). I’m staying curious, foolish as that may be, because I’m certain that those dots I’m collecting will be useful one day. Curiosity has also taught me how to connect them while not being afraid to try new combinations.
*Since writing this, the thumbs up symbol has been re-imagined as a button. The analogy remains true.
I think this is an example of what I’m talking about. In a broad sense.
And another example is in John Higgs’ excellent sci-fi satire, The First Church on the Moon. He creates a terrible time in human history. It’s a time in which we’ve uploaded everything to the ‘cloud’ and that the backing up of all human information is sub-contracted out so many times that when the inevitable collapse of the ‘cloud’ happens it turns out the final back up was – you’ve guessed it – in the ‘cloud’.
Every shred of human knowledge and history is lost, forever. Culturally, the human race changes in an instant.
Of course, it’s ludicrous, right?
So, let’s get back to non-fiction.
There is a important point to make here before you read any further: technology is not making us more stupid, which is the line most people trot out when they talk about the fundamental changes society is undergoing in the wake of recent technological evolutions. It’s deeper than that.
I had a conversation with Dave Birss about the idea that we’re outsourcing responsibility. I was quite passionate about it, even turning around from the front seat of the car transporting us from Bournemouth to London to talk to him. I think I may have started pointing my finger, even though he was receptive to the idea.
We’re outsourcing our responsibility – as humans, as parents, and as skilful, useful practitioners. The singularity says that computers become intelligent and sentient. I contest that it’s simpler than that: we will simply forget how to do the most practical of things and rely, instead, on a dumb machine to do things for us.
I know of people who can’t tell the time – analogue or digital; I know kids who don’t know where milk comes from, and other kids who have this weird concept that the apples they can buy at the supermarket aren’t the same as the apples that are grown on trees. I see people who can’t drive their car anywhere without putting the satellite navigation on, lest they get lost on the school run.
It’s not that we should consider keeping all learnings in our own brains, but we should be choosy about what we’re giving up.
Interacting as a parent can not be given over to an iPad or phone; being told what to think cannot be done by Twitter or Facebook – we must still retain the ability to make our own judgements and be prepared to go against the grain; we should remember creativity, exploration and what liminal states provide rather than accept that the internet contains the right answers every time.
We should take responsibility for our actions lest technology become something we’re dependent upon to such an extent that the best job we can do is push a button when a light comes on.
Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.
A near-perfect storm of a contemporary culture that revels in the past, combined with mass computing power and storage to record seemingly everything, has changed the way in which we view the one thing which is uniquely ours – our memory. The ever-fragile relationship between subjective and collective memory is being transformed through what, on the face of it, is an increasingly ironic world: where everything is personalised within the context of a global shared experience.
To discuss the past, present and future of memory, Imperica invited two leading thinkers – Simon White and Gregory Povey – to come together for a discussion. Projects from the participants include MemCode and My Earliest Memory.
What is memory?
GP: To me, it’s an intangible record of a thing. That sounds fairly vague, but I think that memories are vague. They become more solid the more you recall them, and add and subtract detail. Sometimes the record is deeply personal; sometimes it’s a collective ‘remembering’ more than an actual thing.
SW: To me, at it’s most infant, a memory is a moment in time, that compels an emotional response, that a person (or group of people) wants to hold on to, to archive or store and use later to tell a story about an experience. Even as I write that, I want to define it a million different ways.
GP: It’s interesting that Simon posits memory as a moment in time. I think that’s one of the strangest things about them. They’re pretty isolated: bits of your brain that have logged things, but there is a need for them to be ordered and contextualised to make any sense. Memories are essentially a tool for narrativising ourselves.
Are we increasingly guilty of surrendering memory – such as remembering phone numbers?
GP: I think it’s the other way around. People have been more guilty of holding onto memories. They create a personal story and a structured meaning of who they are through this process, and are often quite unwilling to let go of this construction. Holding onto memories, and maintaining the illusion of a meaningful narrative, keeps them locked in specific behaviours, routines, opinions. Worse, they become stuck in those moments in time like Ms. Havisham. Memories can stop us from moving on and progressing.
SW: Yes… and no. With the proliferation of technology that ‘remembers’ for us, we have no need to retain strings of numbers – or even names, something that may prove a killer technology in the future. However, emotional memories are still being retained in the brain – people’s first phone number, first kiss, first time riding a bike. These are inherently personal and therefore have an emotional attachment. For me, that’s the key: emotional.
GP: I’m pretty happy with surrendering some of my memory skills to exo-brains. I can outsource the boring bits of memory to a box of zeroes and ones. Why do we need to remember phone numbers, addresses or even where we left our phones, if it can be done by external agents? Maybe, and I’m going to indulge an unusually utopian view for a change, surrendering some of these things to the machines means we have more capacity to be human. We can use that extra capacity to remember more meaningful things, more emotional things. Feel more, experience more.
SW: Obviously, it depends on what the memory is, to an extent – even a phone number can add an emotional layer. Maybe it’s not that memory is emotional, but that it provokes an emotional response – which is, perhaps, why people continually draw certain memories forth because it makes them feel secure, happy as they were in a particular time of their life.
Image capture has a harder time documenting emotion for most people. Memories, being so personal, traverse this. As tech gets smarter, a layer of emotion may be added. Instagram, Hipstamatic, et al attempt to infuse photos with a nostalgic filter; in essence, they are trying to capture and document emotion. They only do half a job. The Disposable Memory Project is the closest I’ve seen to getting it right. Because there is no context added, it’s raw and there, and makes you think or feel something… like tech meets art. Emotive tech really interests me.
GP: That’s an interesting point. Filters in Hipstamatic/Instagram are a massive part of an active narrativisation of memories. People are making a decision that this, this is how this moment was. They are deliberately, and justifiably, skewing their own memories by tweaking the tone of them when they’re shared. I’m a massive fan of Instagram for its ability to have properly harnessed that concept of the meaningful throwaway. Passing memories, moments.
SW: I spent ages trying to create empathetic bots on Weavrs, but virtual memories are often about facts: particularly visual-virtual ones. Words, however, are more often about emotion – or creating an emotional response. Look at We Feel Fine. Actually, Jonathan Harris is doing great work in making tech more emotional – or at least its output more emotive. The same goes with companies like Mudlark, Made By Many, BERG and a whole slew of others.
How can digital media help to enhance memories, and to enhance stories around collective and individual memory?
SW: I believe that finding a way to add a person’s emotional response to something will take digital archiving to the next level. Think how photography began and how fact-based it was. Only later did it capture emotional response to situations. Digital media is at the same early stage and once the emotional layer is (more) easily added – not just a set of offered filters someone else has decided represents your emotion – will it start to enhance memories and help create better, richer stories with deeper meaning.
Maybe digital will show itself to be as good at archiving emotions as it is at capturing facts.
GP: What we’re really asking is whether people will use digital in ways that will do this. Whether anything can actually ‘enhance’ memories is a different question. There’s a bit in Lost Highway that has always stuck with me as Bill Pullman’s character explains why he doesn’t like video cameras:
“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.”
I think the best memories have a level of ambiguity to them, that perhaps too much information can erode. It’s the uncertainty in memories that enable you to embellish your stories, play around with what did or didn’t happen. There’s a fine-line between not having enough information to form a memory and having too much information that it becomes a sort of self-evident truth that is known to all.
What we will struggle with is the inherited knowledge of existing art forms and media. As Simon notes, film started as documents, then moved slowly into capturing more intangible things such as emotions. Whilst this digital stuff seems new, our understanding of how to use new technology is not. Like I said in my previous answer, there is a lot more manipulation of the truth and ownership of how people present themselves now. There’s an innate knowledge of what a lens means, what a filter presents, even which pose is correct for your identity, at a very young age. I wonder how much of these documents will actually provoke emotional responses when revisited.
SW: Ambiguity is important to making shared memories personal rather than seeing it through other people’s eyes. And, as Greg points out, the whole notes in the margin analogy makes personal memories different, even for the person who experienced them. They can be changed, moulded somehow… whether that’s through criticism, a LOL, an affirmation; commenting on an individual’s memory somehow diminishes it. But, again – as I keep saying – invariably these notes are factual and rarely emotional, or they are banal and add nothing but noise, obscuring things. In a way, this is like censorship through deflecting attention away from the original capture. The element of competition that comments can adopt, further diminishes the importance of the original memory. There is a place for it, yes, but maybe we should be choosy – especially with the important stuff. Nobody likes someone who interrupts a story without adding context in a seamless way.
Does a collective sharing of memory reduce or enhance subjectivity?
SW: The more granular stories or memories become, the more the hierarchy of truth gets distorted. Just look at the fights that break out on Wikipedia. Nothing is accepted as truth in the digital world, unlike the way oral histories were accepted. That’s not to say mistruths didn’t exist then, it’s just our perception and associated trust in what we’re told has changed.
Knowledge used to mean power, now the playing field has been levelled the power has shifted. I think we’re unsure what to do with this new-found freedom. It’s disorientating for many. That’s why structure and form in services like Facebook are popular. People like knowing the boundaries – and having them. Humans like order; perhaps a Victorian hangover? Will we see Phylum and Species – or some other new taxonomy – of memory in the future?
GP: It’s a tricky ground, really. As we all share memories, documents and records of the time we live in, we’re probably enhancing access to subjectivity, but historical records are about organising collective stories into cohesive narratives. Without being too much of a Marxist (or worse, Adam Curtis) about the whole thing, subjectivity has always been everywhere but the reportage of it will always be informed by the dominant politics. We have always adhered to the concept of history being written by the victors, those that control the means of dissemination of ‘truth’.
With the current technologies available, pretty much everyone’s record of what happened is now documented. It doesn’t mean that there is any less or any more subjectivity, but it does mean that it’s harder to write the Grand Narrative from one perspective. That’s why, as Simon has noted and James Bridle spent some time exploring, Wikipedia edit arguments are very important barometers of the time. The subjectivity is in the side-debates, not the article’s content.
If digital storage preserves our memories (Facebook updates, Tweets et al), then how does digital media affect our view of these memories? Are photos which we publish to Facebook different to photos that we don’t publish to Facebook?
GP: I’m not sure that these tools are quite there with regards to preserving our memories. Certainly not Twitter, as (with the exception of things like Twitshift and maybe Stellar), they’re quite disposable and ephemeral. Twitter’s own records don’t go that far back, so it’s a bit tricky to revisit three or four years ago easily.
Facebook and Path 2.0 are certainly taking dead aim on the whole idea of logging memories into a meaningful timeline of ‘life events’, but they will always be subject to how people choose to interact with them.
There’s definitely a selectivity in the things people choose to share, and how they share them. I don’t think there’s a lot of tenderness in public statuses, and that’s a major thing that people recall. I find my younger Facebook friends to be more in control of the things they share. They may post a lot more, but they’re definitely directing their identity through it. It’s far more performative than how my older contacts use it — oversharing, dumb videos, chain letter-style status updates — and as such it’s difficult to understand what that memory will be in the future. When they learnt how to do a duck-face pout? It’s important not to confuse ‘document’ for ‘memory’.
SW: Reasons for sharing and what is being shared are as personal as memories themselves. I can’t speak for the masses. The way I see it is, these aren’t memories, but – as Greg points out – more of a slideshow, a way to express a memory (or memories) so others’ understand it. The closer we get to computers that mimic brain activity and neuron development, the closer digital will get to becoming a memory bank.
As for Facebook et al, I don’t think people ‘consider’ what they’re posting – it’s as if, unsure of what they want to remember, people are uploading anything and everything. It’s become more of a document management system with a broadcast mechanism layered on top. Memories aren’t a collection of everything you’ve done. The brave person deletes it, choosing to archive important things. I think Greg nails it with the statement that we should not confuse ‘document’ for ‘memory’. And age plays a huge part in getting this right.
However, Facebook does allow people to access their memories through their photographs. It provides that access, as all photos and diaries do. They help release emotions, the true source of memories. And with emotion it becomes easier to create memories rather than document your day or life choices.
Why should, and are, we submissively surrendering our memories to private companies? Will ‘the future’ be about collective struggles to re-acquire our memories while companies fuck with them for commercial gain?
GP: This is a concept we’ve been mucking about with a bit at Mudlark. In the late summer, Richard and I started this light-touch thing called MemCode. It is playing about with the idea of memory harvesting, sharing and distribution, but it’s essentially a little publishing project. How much – and what level of intimacy – are you willing to surrender to a faceless organisation?
The idea behind MemCode is essentially to collect memories, real or imagined, from people as well as create a few of our own, before sharing them in different ways further down the line. We’ve posted one so far, and the next might be in three weeks, six months, a year. Hopefully, they will come out of the blue and nudge people into some form of memory. It’s supposed to inspire real memories in the user, not foist them on them. Again, it’s important that there is ambiguity and slippiness in the memories, so that they’re loose enough to be anyone’s. I find the practice of cold reading quite fascinating, in this respect, and that’s something I’d like us to play about with. Companies don’t need our actual memories to fuck with them, not whilst there is a consensus on what ‘our’ collective past is as told through I ? 19** clipshows and the never ending retro-revisionism.
SW: I have already interacted with MemCode. What I liked most about it was that the memory was completely out of context and without context – context was what I added to the memory when I read it. I can understand what Greg means when he says that they are so loose they could belong to anyone. Also – and maybe this is important – the MemCode memory unlocked a similar memory of my own, allowing me to ‘own’ someone else’s experience. In that way it had more in common with art than anything else… particularly advertising and its way of distorting memories for its own ends.
Think Blue Symphony for Volkswagen. 515 Milan, 2011
SW: Yes, we are surrendering our memories – and I’m actively asking people to do this. But it need not be about money, although that’s usually most people’s end goal. Greg says it best here: people are keen to share. I’m genuinely surprised by the level of trust people have afforded me with My Earliest Memory – and that to date only three have asked to remain anonymous.
I wonder about the trading of emotion, though. That surely has a part to play here. Is that even possible, to pass my emotion on to someone else? I think it is – if something made me sad or happy and I shared that in an emotional sense, that could make someone else feel the exact same way. And while I agree with Greg about memories being sullied through association – mostly in advertising and something I’m therefore guilty of – it’s the easiest way to add emotion to the (some would say) clinical nature of buying and selling stuff.
What is the relationship between memory and shared experience? Is it meshing or fragmenting?
GP: There is a possible division between the personal and the public, here. It’s meshed in Grand Narratives, but fragmented on a personal level. I’ve seen it many times, and often experienced it, where a person’s memory or experience of an event shifts markedly when retelling that, or frothing it, with others who have experienced the same, with different views. Eventually there becomes an agreed reality of What Actually Happened, but privately there is still fragmented perceptions and memories. It’s when the public, shared ‘experience’ overlaps and influences the personal memories that’s interesting.
This is something that is as old as time. The idea of a shared experience is about identity and being part of something – whether it’s a nation, a religion, a gang or a company. The stories we tell each other and ourselves to prove we exist, exist as part of something greater than just us, the development of an ethos through repetition of stories, memories and experiences. It’s why nations go to war, it’s why old punks hate emokids, it’s why I have a strange affinity to Scandinavia: we have a sense of ‘hereditary memory’ from these cultural, shared experiences. If a story is told enough times, it becomes a memory, true or not.
SW: Memory and shared experience are both fragmenting and meshing – depending on what the shared experience is and the memories being created through that shared experience.
What’s interesting here is the point Greg makes about how memories can be falsified through their continual telling and re-telling. Many religious tomes and urban myths are perfect examples of that.
I’m particularly intrigued by Oliver Sacks’ work on memory – especially as he is now suffering from a neurological disorder that will see his memories lost – and fictional titles like The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey and Even The Dogs by Jon McGregor. The former deals with the nature of memory and what is actually remembered and what is borrowed; the latter is about the memories of others that, together, give the shape of a person’s life.
Emotional memories will always be shared among small or niche groups; the rest is history and is, at best, an attempt to capture a collective memory and can’t come close to achieving the former. Digital will enable us (humans) to capture more about ourselves like never before. What we choose to accept and ignore will be the history of the future.
Gregory Povey was a Producer at Mudlark. He has a Tumblr at Mount Analogue, and is @topfife on Twitter.
Simon White is a senior creative in advertising. He had a Posterous, and is on Twitter at @purplesime.
Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.
Around 10 days ago, I was sat at home with a glass of red wine in my hand. And I had a thought. Inevitably, in this day and age, I shared it on Twitter first.
Within half an hour, I had bought a domain, set up an email account, a Tumblr page and began what is now known as My Earliest Memory.
I then tweeted about it again…
Almost instantly, I had a submission. It was then I knew I might be on to something interesting, so I blogged about it.
For those readers who prefer to stay on the page, here’s a bit of background:
“It was Sunday. I’d been to visit my Dad. When we arrived at my Dad’s house we discovered a bag of old photos. We plundered it. And the reason we plundered it was because my daughter has no recollection of meeting her Nana, my mother. So we looked at photos of her. And my daughter asked me about what her Nana was like.
So, I told her some stories.
Each of these stories was based around a photograph we were looking at. That was easy. Then my daughter floored me with a question: what is your earliest memory of Nana?”
So now you know. That’s the project’s raison d’être.
Stories or archives?
At this point, the idea got me thinking about memories. And that got me thinking about stories. The two are, I believe, intertwined; stories create memories and memories can create stories. And telling stories is something, as a writer, I’m interested in.
The project is a lot of different things to different people. It could be art to some; it could be a digital library or online museum of memories to others. Any label you care to put to it. And none of them are wrong. Or right. To me, it’s about collecting memories, having them lead readers into a story of their own creation (one reason behind The Rules of the project); it’s also about digital archiving.
And it’s that second point which is becoming a focus for me: the ideas behind the latest digital capturing happening via Memolane, Facebook Timeline, or other similar services. But how are we capturing the older memories, the analogue?
I spend a lot of time with digital services that attempt to trap, capture and index the ideas that already exist, human – or mostly, individual’s – knowledge. The big players are Google and Facebook. But they are only the now and, possibly the future.
So, perhaps we should include Flickr and Picasa as players in this game. That’s Google (again) and Yahoo!. Yes, we should, but they are slow to catch up with the ‘before’ and the ‘now’ is deemed more interesting. And they are looking at the bigger picture.
I think there is a lot of room for niche players in this ‘capturing’ market. And when it comes to the visual side of things, platforms such as Instagram are starting to emerge and lead the way. By making its focus on words, the niche market is certainly where My Earliest Memory fits in. It’s an attempt to document personal, biased experiences that are first person. There is no corroboration, as happens with commenting on photos, etc. Context is left, more often than not, completely to readers’ imagination.
No one knows this memory except the person who is sharing it. It’s utterly unique. And in the world of digital effluent, My Earliest Memory feels sufficiently different. If it achieves nothing else, that alone will be more than enough for me. Just for the record, I’m not about to suggest it’s as important as Instagram, Facebook or Google.
The future for past memories
For me, the My Earliest Memory project is emotional, emotive, real – and already unreal, with just a dozen posts at time of writing. And it’s just the start: for this project and the many others that exist – those I’ve touched upon, and new ones yet envisioned.
There are already services springing up capturing the everyday, the languages that are dying out, the stories that history determines aren’t big enough to write about, yet are those which add emotion and dispense with fact. And there are people looking at the future of memories – as well as memories that are yet to be created, that can only be guessed at, such as MemCode plc.
I think the future of My Earliest Memory is not necessarily the words submitted, but about the reactions and stories created by the people who engage with the project as a reader. And if people begin to augment their submissions through other platforms – GoogleMaps, FourSquare, Broadcastr, a geo-located tweet, or whatever may be to come – it could become something that the digital archaeologists of the future delve into, centuries from now.
Even if it achieves none (or all) of these ambitions, it will become a memory, archived digitally. And it will be full of emotions, not definite, corroborated facts. And the digitized world should be as emotional as the analogue one that came before.
