Writing about life and arts
What if the four distracted Beatles never looked up during the Abbey Road album shoot?
This cartoon presents a funny, modern-day interpretation of the iconic The Beatles Abbey Road album cover. The only thing missing, besides Paul McCartney’s shoes, is the Abbey Road zebra-crossing. Chances are the driver also works for Uber.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Apple lead designer office Jony Ive points to one of the technological conundrums of our time: balancing ease with excess.
“We have such a high-quality camera with us all the time. But it becomes irrelevant if you can’t actually enjoy the photographs you’ve taken. Even 30 years ago there was always a box somewhere containing hundreds and hundreds of photographs. So this isn’t a new problem. What is a new problem is the sheer degree, the colossal volume of memories that we have recorded, and as important as the recording is the way of enjoying what you’ve recorded, and I think that’s something that’s just an ongoing experiment, and it’s an ongoing creative project for us.”
Smartphones make it too easy to capture and even easier to consume photos. Given the profundity of images, we don’t spend enough time reviewing them.
To quote Om Malik: “We have come to a point in society where we are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at them.”
The age of abundance combined with undeterred distraction poses an interesting creative problem that’s more complicated than storing boxes of photos in the attic, never to be seen again.
gif via Mashable
Provocation is neither about engagement nor expression — it’s about likes and shares.
The lightning rod on Twitter will always outshine the passive inspirer, hiding from the market.
But it is the quality of interactions that deliver the message. Neither the loud nor the faint succeeds.
Speak softly and carry a big stick.
Conventional wisdom says that we should emphasize speed over power. After all, he who runs the fastest wins the race.
But life is a marathon, not a sprint.
“We need to be a little bit more tortoise-y and a little less hare-ish.”
Malcolm Gladwell
The era of ‘move fast and break things’ has led to a poor product. Once the darling of Silicon Valley, Facebook transformed a nemesis of democracy for permitting fake news to spread between echo chambers and the darkest of tribes.
What if instead of rushing to the finish and shipping clickbait disguised as a morally inferior product, we thought through the ramifications of greed-inspired releases. The reality is that a good consumer-friendly product takes time to build.
Testing and learning are indispensable. The extra time also allows ideas to simmer, attract feedback, and make revisions while moving forward in progression.
The principle of
The biggest threat to a virus is its own exhaustion. It wants to be said, repeated, and spread until it cements into a meme.
Words, ideas, and apps are all types of viruses. Pretty much anything that spreads. Most are benign of course but perhaps none is more pervasive and self-inflicted than the sickness of self-promotion.
The social media age is plagued with envy, where everyone tries to one-up each other with their next best post. The cycle of jealousy shatters reality into shards of half-truths.
The sharing virus constricts people to a 1080 x 1080 square. Meanwhile, portrait mode constrains satisfaction. Spiraling into overextension, overworked trends and habits start to leak.
We like to think we’re dabbling in the next niche before the entire market even knows it.
We demand privacy yet admit ourselves to the culture of exposure. But rather than celebrating our uniqueness, we publish the same things everybody else does: selfies, food porn, and bullet journal snapshots.
The one benefit to seeing other people’s stories is the reinforcement of FOMO (fear of missing out). The unlived life taunts one into action. In such a way, FOMO can represent a positive form of encouragement. It gets off our screens and into the real world.
Life’s richest data emerges from lived experiences rather than the pixels on a screen. Exposure carves us into beings rather than lemmings of technology’s manipulative desires.
Inspired by adventure, we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and explore more of the parts unknown.
There it was, crushing the human will. It was the antithesis to my Kindle Jenner, a screen of sanctity for focus and learning.
The lite brite is an attention thief. Like a fresh bag of Skittles, it begs you to consume your favorite colors first.
The rainbow hue of Instagram may be the shiniest of them all. Beautiful photos have a smell, as love does.
On the go or at home, there is no sanctuary. The barrage of dopamine erases all head consciousness. Enter wonderland.
The only escape is Gmail, that insignificant other who instills a feeling of control. Yet, it too is goose chase to unproductivity.
The internet never ends. Like a perpetual wave of Hokusai-like talons, buffering into the collective consciousness. Altered attention, altered thoughts, altered beliefs, forever planted at the altar of distraction.
The goal is to be good at more than one thing. Everyone should be versatile.
But sometimes it is better to narrow yourself to expand. Instead of doing everything, you focus on doing one thing well. And the rest gets better as a result.
Take social networking for example. It’s a misperception that one has to be on all networks, sharing all the time. So you take shortcuts. After publishing a new blog post, you automatically share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Google+.
Frictionless broadcasting may work for those who already have an acquired audience. But for the startup or entrepreneur — they will need to work harder to get attention. And the best way to do that is to pick one network and double-down.
Focusing on Twitter, for instance, may allow you to write concise tweets, insert captivating media, and include vanity links. Focusing on Instagram may allow you to include the niche hashtags related to the post that gives the image an extra boost.
Single-tasking on one marketing channel takes a strategy. Publishing is deliberate and methodical, the community engagement well-intentioned.
Less is more. The pattern of interactions will bleed into other outlets. Unlike the feather, you’ll be the wind directing all the controls.
