the beauty of complexity

Were really facing a paradigm shift in the sense that trees are no longer able to acomodate the complexity of modern world... The network is an alternative concept of beauty.

Manuel Lima, from Visual Complexity

indie is dead. and it won.

"Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won. We won, but at the cost to many folks personally of suddenly becoming unnecessary. This was most visible in the last few years in the magazines like Punk Planet, Kitchen Sink, Clamor. But it’ll come for us all.

You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly replicate the indie production process – how could they seize the means of production? They already had it! And now the means of production has devolved yet farther down, past the indie publishers and indie record labels and pirate radio stations of yore.

This is not to say we’ve entered Nirvana. Just because we’d seized the means of production in the 1990’s didn’t mean that poverty had been eradicated, racism ended, and the intellectual property land grab thwarted. We all have to use the tools we’ve been given, find value in, rather than discard, the tools of the past, hold feet to the fire, undermine monopoly, and so on. All things we tried to do with the means of production we seized in the 90’s, we have to continue do with the means of production that technology has handed to us in the 21st century. Moore’s Law is value-neutral, apolitical, amoral, just like Gutenberg’s press. Its how we use it."

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tools vs. behaviors

Some posts come with very insightful comments as a bonus.

We need to be careful when we talk about digital media, that we don't get the tools mixed up with the behaviors. Obsessing over the significance of one site over another, or arguing the importance of participating on a site while not even considering what you're going to do when you get there or if it's even the right place, is a waste of time.

Facebook.com is not important. What's important is that more and more people are actively building and managing a personal network of relationships that can be accessed at any time via digital technology.

YouTube.com is not important. What's important is that more and more people are sharing original videos with other people all over the world at will.

Twitter.com is not important. What's important is that more and more people are developing a habit of broadcasting every experience and piece of information that they think might be of interest to their network.

As these tools evolve (and capabilities and uses merge), let's remember that the tools we use aren't as important as the behaviors they create.

Here are some excerpts of a comment left by Michael Maurillo:

What I have recently found so interesting about this (incredibly) important point is that there's a very large community in our industry that obsesses about user-behavior and how it affects their craft everyday. I'm talking about designers, YET when it comes to marketing it is something we so rarely think about. And if we do, it usually ends up in a tactic or two (if we're lucky), not in the core of the strategy.

Marketing insights have always been part of the process, but they typically only touch the surface of behavior and revolve around things like shopping habits or purchase behavior.

We all give the same reasons why "advertising is broken" based on how the user's behavior is changing, yet so many creative briefs I read still describe the "target" in terms of demographics with a smidge of pyschographics when it's more than likely that the designer down the hall from you has 5 distinct personas hung up on their wall representing the same audience. Strategists must start thinking like designers and leveraging their tools. It's not just about user-centered design, it's about user-centered marketing as well.

i know y'all are smart, but it doesn't hurt to remind you.

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unscientific yet accurate

from brainz: grey matter at its best

i follow them

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