Category Archives: Online User Experience

Trust No One, Trust Nothing

In just one day last week looking at the headlines on MediaPost – two different articles mentioned a lack of trust – a lack of trust in contextual ad placement and a lack of trust in audience measurement data. But our industries trust issues go far deeper than just those two instances. Article after article cite an erosion of trust and the spreading of relational fault lines in every aspect of the industry.

The question of the day is “Where did the trust go? The follow up question then becomes, “What do we mean by trust?”

That is a difficult question. Trust is a word with many, many meanings. Over 20 years ago, University of Minnesota business professors D. Harrison McKnight and Norman L. Chervany wrote an extensive review to answer just that question. In it, across the many constructs of trust, they identified four dimensions: benevolence, integrity, competence and predictability. But not all these dimensions are required in all applications of trust.

First of all, there are two broad categories of trust: structural trust – trust in a system – and interpersonal trust – trust in a person. In their analysis, McKnight and Chervany looked at six constructs of trust that can apply in different situations. For the sake of this discussion, let’s focus on two of these:

“System trust: the extent to which one believes that proper impersonal structures are in place to enable one to anticipate a successful future endeavor.”

And…

“Situational Trust – meaning that one has decided to trust without regard to the specific persons involved, because the benefits of trusting in this situation outweigh the possible negative outcomes of trusting.”

What trust that did exist in marketing what an outcome of these two constructs. Both tend to apply to the structure of marketing, not the people in marketing. The headlines I cited earlier both pointed to a breakdown of trust on the system level, not the personal level. Now, let’s look at those four dimensions as they apply to structural trust in marketing. No one has ever accused marketers of being overly benevolent, so let’s set that one aside. Also, I would argue – strenuously – that marketers today – including those at agencies – are more competent than ever before. They have been mostly successful at turning marketing from an arcane guessing game that paraded as art to an empirically backed science. So a lack of competency can’t be blamed for this trust breakdown. That leaves integrity and predictability. I suspect there’s a compound relationship between these two things.

The reason we’re losing structural trust is that marketing is no longer predictable. And this lack of predictability is triggering a suspicion that there has been a corresponding lack of integrity. But the unpredictability of marketing is no one’s fault.

Marketing today is analogous to physics at the turn of the last century. For 200 years the universe had been neatly ruled by Newton’s Laws. Then physicists started discovering things that couldn’t be so neatly explained and the Universe became a place of Uncertainty Principles, Schrödinger’s Cat and Strange Attractors. Everything we thought was predictable in all situations suddenly become part of a much bigger – and more complex – mystery.

Similarly, mass marketing could run by Newton-like laws because we were dealing with mass and weren’t looking too closely. Apply enough force to enough people with enough frequency and you could move the needle in what seemed like a predictable fashion. But today marketing is a vastly different beast. We market one-to-one and those “ones” are all inter-connected, which creates all types of feedback loops and network effects. This creates complexity – so predictability is as dead at the afore-mentioned Schrödinger’s Cat (or is it?)

I don’t think this comes as news to anyone reading this column. We all know we’re being disrupted. I think we’re all beginning to understand the challenges of complexity. So why don’t we just accept it as the new normal and continue to work together? Why are clients feeling personally betrayed by their agencies, market research firms and ad delivery platforms? It’s because our brains aren’t very nuanced when it comes to identifying trust and betrayal. Brains operate by the “when you’re a hammer – everything looks like a nail” principle.

Rationally, we understand the different between interpersonal trust and situational trust, but we have to remember that our rationality is reinforced by emotional rewards and cautions. When we’re in a trusting relationship – or system – our ventrial striatum, medial prefrontal cortex and caudate nucleus all perk happily along, priming our brains with oxytocin and pushing all the right reward buttons. But whether it’s a person or a situation that betrays our trust, the same neural mechanisms fire – the insula and amygdala – creating feelings of frustration, fear, anger and resentment.

Now, none of this is the fault of anyone in marketing. But humans work on cause and effect. If our marketing is not working, it’s easier to assign a human cause. And it’s much easier to feel betrayed by a human than by a system.

 

Together We Lie

Humans are social animals. We’ve become this way because – evolutionarily speaking – we do better as a group than individually. But there’s a caveat here. If you get a group of usually honest people together, they’re more likely to lie. Why is this?

Martin Kocher and his colleagues from LMU in Munich set up a study where participants had to watch a video of a single roll of a die and then report on the number that came up. Depending on what they reported, there was a payoff. Researchers asked both individuals and small groups who had the opportunity to chat anonymously with each other before reporting. The result,

“Our findings are unequivocal: People are less likely to lie if they decide on their own.”

Even individuals who answered honestly independently started lying when they got in a group.

The researchers called this a “dishonesty shift.” They blame it on a shifting weight placed on the norm of honesty. Norms are those patterns we have that guide us in our behaviors and beliefs. But those norms may be different individually than they are when we’re part of a group.

“Feedback is the decisive factor. Group-based decision-making involves an exchange of views that may alter the relative weight assigned to the relevant norm.”

Let’s look at how this may play out. Individually, we may default to honesty. We do so because we’re unsure of the consequences of not being honest. But when we get in a group, we start talking to others and it’s easier to rationalize not being honest – “Well, if everyone’s going to lie, I might as well too.”

Why is this important? Because marketing is done in groups, by groups, to groups. The dynamics of group-based ethics are important for us to understand. It could help to explain the most egregious breaches of ethics we see becoming more and more commonplace, either in corporations or in governments.

Four of the seminal studies in psychology and sociology shed further light on why groups tend to shift towards dishonesty. Let’s look at them individually.

In 1955, Solomon Asch showed that even if individually we believe something to be incorrect, if enough people around us have a different option, we’ll go with the group consensus rather than risk being the odd person out. In his famous study, he would surround a subject with “plants” who, when shown cards with three black lines of obviously differing lengths on it, would insist that three lines were equal. The subjects were then asked their opinion. In 75% of the cases, they’d go with the group rather than risk disagreement. As Asch said in his paper – quoting sociologist Gabriel Tarde – “Social man in a somnambulist.” We have about as much independent will as your average sleepwalker.

Now, let’s continue with Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority study, perhaps the most controversial and frightening of the group. When confronted with an authoritative demeanor, a white coat and a clipboard, 63% of the subjects meekly followed directions and delivered what were supposed to be lethal levels of electrical shock to a hapless individual. The results were so disheartening that we’ve been trying to debunk them ever since. But a follow up study by Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo – where subjects were arbitrarily assigned roles as guards and inmates in a mock prison scenario – was even more shocking. We’re more likely to become monsters and abandon our personal ethics when we’re in a group than when we act alone. Whether it’s obedience to authority – as Milgram was trying to prove – or whether it’s social conformity taken to the extreme, we tend to do very bad things when we’re in bad company.

But how do we slip so far so quickly from our own personal ethical baseline? Here’s where the last study I’ll cite can shed a little light. Sociologist Mark Granovetter – famous for his Strength of Weak Ties study – also looked at the viral spreading of behaviors in groups. I’ve talked about this in a previous column, but here’s the short version: If we have the choice between two options, with accompanying social consequences, which option we choose may be driven by social conformity. If we see enough other people around us picking the more disruptive option (i.e. starting a riot) we may follow suit. Even if we all have different thresholds – which we do – the nature of a crowd is such that those with the lowest threshold will pick the disruption option, setting into effect a bandwagon effect that eventually tips the entire group over the threshold.

These were all studied in isolation, because that’s how science works. We study variables in isolation. But it’s when factors combine that we get the complexity that typifies the real world – and the real marketplace. And there’s where predictability goes out the window. The group dynamics in play can create behavioral patterns that make no sense to the average person with the average degree of morality. But it’s happened before, it’s happening now, and it’s sure to happen again.

 

 

Email Keeps Us Hanging On

Adobe just released their Consumer Email Survey Report. And one line from it immediately jumped out:

“We’ve seen a 28 percent decrease in consumers checking email messages from bed in the morning (though 26 percent still do it),”

Good for you, you 28 percent who have a life. I, unfortunately, fall into the pathetic 26 percent.

So, what is it about email that still makes it such a dominant part of our digital lives? It’s been 46 years since the first email was sent, from Ray Tomlinson to himself. Yet, it’s never gone out of vogue. In fact, according to this survey, the majority of us (about 85%) see our use of email staying the same or increasing over the next two years. Even the rebellious Generation Z – the post-Millenials who are rewriting the book on tech behaviors, color inside the lines when it comes to email. 41% of them predict their use of email will increase at work, and 30% of them foresee themselves using email more in their personal lives.

Email is the most commonly used communication channel for work – beating actually talking to other people by a full 11 points

What was interesting to me was when and where email was used:

adobe-consumer-email-survey-report-2017-27-1024

From Adobe’s Email Survey Report, used with permission

This suggests some interesting modality variations. I’ve talked about modality before, including a column a few weeks ago about devices. Personally, as a UX geek, I find the whole idea of modality fascinating. Here’s the best way I can think of to understand the importance of modality as it applies to behaviors. You have to stay late at work to fire an employee that has become a train wreck, becoming increasingly hostile to management and bullying her co-workers. It does not go well, but you get it done. Unfortunately it makes you late for your 10-year-old daughter’s birthday party. Consider the seismic shifting of mental frameworks required so you don’t permanently traumatize a roomful of giggling pre-teens. That’s modality in action. It becomes essential when we’re talking about technology because as we step into different roles to accomplish different objectives, it seems we have pre-determined technologies already assigned to the tasks required.

Email seems closely linked as a communication channel perfect for certain behavioral modes: If you want a quick update on a project, are delivering feedback or asking a brief question, email is the preferred communication channel. But for anything that requires more social finesse – asking for help, pitching a new idea, letting your boss know about an issue or even calling it quits – there’s no substitute for face to face.

Here we see why email has not faded in popularity – it’s Occam’s Razor of factual communication. It does just what it needs to do, without unnecessary complication. It allows both the sender and receiver to communication on their timelines, without disruption. It provides an archival record of communication. And it’s already integrated into all our task flows – no extra steps are required. Many start-ups have promised to abolish the in-box. So far, none have succeeded.

What Email doesn’t do very well is convey emotion. Emails have a habit of blowing up in our faces in delicate situations, for all the same reasons as stated above. But that’s okay. We know that. That’s why most of us don’t use it for that purpose. (Note – even for delicate situations, email is still usually the next most popular choice after face to face. 11% of survey respondents would still choose email to tell their bosses to take a flying leap).

As email approached it’s half-century birthday, logic tells us that someday it will become obsolete. But it’s outlasted VCRs, fax machines, 8 tracks and a veritable junk heap of other discarded technologies. In fact, it’s hard to think of one other thing that has changed so little over the decades and is still such an integral part of our lives. Say what you want about email – it does appear to have legs.

Addicted to Tech

A few columns ago, I mentioned one of the aspects that is troubling me about technology – the shallowness of social media. I had mentioned at the time that there were other aspects that were equally troubling. Here’s one:

Technology is addictive – and it’s addictive by design.

Let’s begin by looking at the definition of addiction:

Persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful

So, let’s break it down. I don’t think you can quibble with the persistent, compulsive use part. When’s the last time you had your iPhone in your hand? We can simply swap out “substance” for “device” or “technology” So that leaves with the last qualifier “known by the user to be harmful” – and there’s two parts to this – is it harmful and does the user know it’s harmful?

First, let’s look at the neurobiology of addiction. What causes us to use something persistently and compulsively? Here, dopamine is the culprit. Our reward center uses dopamine and the pleasurable sensation it produces as a positive reinforcement to cause us to pursue activities which over many hundreds of generations have proven to be evolutionarily advantageous. But Dr. Gary Small, from the UCLA Brain Research Institute, warns us that this time could be different:

“The same neural pathways in the brain that reinforce dependence on substances can reinforce compulsive technology behaviors that are just as addictive and potentially destructive.”

We like to think of big tobacco as the most evil of all evil empires – guilty of promoting addiction to a harmful substance – but is there a lot separating them from the purveyors of tech – Facebook or Google, for instance? According to Tristan Harris, there may be a very slippery slope between the two. I’ve written about Tristan before. He’s the former Google Product Manager who’s launched the Time Well Spent non-profit, devoted to stopping “tech companies from hijacking our minds.” Harris points the finger squarely at the big Internet platforms for creating platforms that are intentionally designed to suck as much of our time as possible. There’s empirical evidence to back up Harris’s accusations. Researchers at Michigan State University and from two universities in the Netherlands found that even seeing the Facebook logo can trigger a conditioned response in a social media user that starts the dopamine cycle spinning. We start jonesing for a social media fix.

So, what if our smart phones and social media platforms seduce us into using them compulsively? What’s the harm, as long as it’s not hurting us? That’s the second part of the addiction equation – is whatever we’re using harmful? After all, it’s not like tobacco, where it was proven to cause lung cancer.

Ah, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? We were smoking cigarettes for almost a hundred years before we finally found out they were bad for us. Sometimes it takes awhile for the harmful effects of addiction to appear. The same could be true for our tech habit.

Tech addiction plays out at many different levels of cognition. This could potentially be much more sinister than just the simple waste of time that Tristan Harris is worried about. There’s mounting evidence that overuse of tech could dramatically alter our ability to socialize effectively with other humans. The debate, which I’ve talked about before, comes when we substitute screen-to-screen interaction for face-to-face. The supporters say that this is simply another type of social bonding – one that comes with additional benefits. The naysayers worry that we’re just not built to communicate through screen and that – sooner or later – there will be a price to be paid for our obsessive use of digital platforms.

Dr. Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, researches generational differences in behavior. It’s here where the full impact of the introduction of a disruptive environmental factor can be found. She found a seismic shift in behaviors between Millennials and the generation that followed them. It was a profound difference in how these generations viewed the world and where they spent their time. And it started in 2012 – the year when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent. She sums up her concern in unequivocal terms:

“The twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.”

Not only are we less happy, we may be becoming less smart. As we become more reliant on technology, we do something called cognitive off-loading. We rely on Google rather than our memories to retrieve facts. We trust our GPS more than our own wayfinding strategies to get us home. Cognitive off loading is a way to move beyond the limits of our own minds, but there may an unacceptable trade off here. Brains are like muscles – if we stop using them they begin to atrophy.

Let’s go back to that original definition and the three qualifying criteria:

  • Persistent, compulsive use
  • Harmful
  • We know it’s harmful

In the case of tech, let’s not wait a hundred years to put check marks after all of these.

 

 

To Buy or Not to Buy: The Touchy Subject of Mobile ECommerce

A recent report from Akamai indicates that users have little patience when it comes to making purchases on a mobile device. Here are just a few of the stats:

  • While almost half of all consumers browse via their phones, only 1 in 5 complete transactions on mobile
  • Optimal load times for peak conversions ranged from 1.8 to 2.7 seconds across device types
  • Just a 100-millisecond delay in load time hurt conversion rates by up to 7%
  • Bounce rates were highest among mobile shoppers and lowest among those using tablets

But there may be more behind this than just slow load times. We also have to consider what modes we’re in when we’re interacting with our mobile device.

In 2010, Microsoft did a fascinating research project that looked at how user behaviors varied from desktop to tablet to smart phone. The research was headed by Jacquelyn Krones, who was a Search Product Manager at the time. Search was the primary activity examined, but there was a larger behavioral context that was explored. While the study is 7 years old, I think the core findings are still relevant. The researchers found that we tend to have three large buckets of behaviors: missions, explorations and excavations. Missions were focused tasks that were usually looking for a specific piece of information – i.e. looking for an address or phone number. Explorations where more open ended and less focused on a given destination – i.e. seeing if there was any thing you wanted to do this Friday night. Excavations typically involved multiple tasks within an overarching master task – i.e. researching an article. In an interview with me, Krones outlined their findings:

“There’s clearly a different profile of these activities on the different platforms. On desktops and laptops, people do all three of the activities – they conduct missions and excavations and explorations.

“On their phones we expected to see lots of missions – usually when you use your mobile phone and you’re conducting a search, whatever you’re doing in terms of searching is less important than what’s going on with you in the real world – you’re trying to get somewhere, you’re having a discussion with somebody and you want to look something up quick or you’re trying to make a decision about where to go for dinner.

“But we were surprised to find that people are using their mobile phones for exploration. But once we saw the context, it made sense – people have a low tolerance for boredom. Their phone is actually pretty entertaining, much more entertaining than just looking at the head in front of you while you’re waiting in line. You can go check a sports score, read a story, or look at some viral video and have a more engaged experience.

“On tablets, we found that people are pretty much only using them for exploration today. I had expected to see more missions on tablets, and I think that that will happen in the future, but today people perceive their mobile phone as always with them, very personal, always on, and incredibly efficient for getting information when they’re in mission mode.”

Another study, coming out The University of British Columbia Okanagan, also saw a significant difference in behavioral modality when it came to interacting with touch screens. Assistant Professor Ying Zhu was the principal author:

“The playful and fun nature of the touchscreen enhances consumers’ favour of hedonic products; while the logical and functional nature of a desktop endorses the consumers’ preference for utilitarian products,” explains Zhu.

“Zhu’s study also found that participants using touchscreen technology scored significantly higher on experiential thinking than those using desktop computers. However, those on desktops scored significantly higher on rational thinking.”

I think what we have here is an example of thinking: fast and slow. I suspect we’re compartmentalizing our activities, subconsciously setting some aside for completion on the desktop. I would suspect utilitarian type purchasing would fall into this category. I know that’s certainly true in my case. As Dr. Zhu noted, we have a very right brain relationship with touchscreens, while desktops tend to bring out our left-brain. I have always been amazed at how our brains subconsciously prime us based on anticipating an operating environment. Chances are, we don’t even realize how much our behaviors change when we move from a smart phone to a tablet to a desktop. But I’d be willing to place a significant wager that it’s this subconscious techno-priming that’s causing some of these behavioural divides between devices.

Slow load times are never a good thing, on any device, but while they certainly don’t help with conversions, they may not be the only culprit sitting between a user and a purchase. The device itself could also be to blame.

Is Google Slipping, Or Is It Just Our Imagination?

Recently, I’ve noticed a few articles speculating about whether Google might be slipping:

Last month, the American Customer Satisfaction Index notified us that our confidence in search is on the decline. Google’s score dropped 2% to 82. The culprit was the amount of advertising found on the search results page. To be fair, both Google and search in general have had lower scores. Back in 2015, Google scored a 77%, it’s lowest score ever.

This erosion of customer satisfaction may be leading to a drop in advertising ROI. According to a recent report from Analytic Partners, the return on investment from paid search dropped 27% from 2010 to 2016. Search wasn’t alone. All digital ROI seems to be in decline. Analytic’s VP of Marketing, Joe LaSala, predicts that ROI from digital will continue to decline until it converges with ROI from traditional media.

In April of this year, Forbes ran an article asking the question: “Is Google’s Search Quality Starting to Decline?” Contributors to this decline, according to the article, included the introduction of rich snippets and featured news, including popularity as a ranking factor and ongoing black hat SEO manipulation.

But the biggest factor in the drop of Google’s perceived quality was actually in the perception itself. As the Forbes article’s author, Jayson DeMers, stated;

It’s important to realize just how sophisticated Google is, and how far it’s come from its early stages, as well as the impossibility of having a “perfect” search platform. Humans are flawed creatures, and our actions are what are dictating the shape of search.

Google is almost 20 years old. The domain Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. Given that 20 years is an eternity in internet years, it’s actually amazing that it’s stood up as well as it has for the past two decades. Whether Google’s naysayers care to admit it or not, that’s due to Google’s almost religious devotion to the quality of their search results. That devotion extends to advertising. The balance between user experience and monetization has always been one that Google has paid a lot of attention too.

But it’s not the presence of ads that has led to this perceived decline of quality. It’s a change in our expectations of what a search experience should be. I would argue that for any given search, using objective measures of result relevance, the results Google shows today are far more relevant than the results they showed in 2008, the year it got it’s highest customer satisfaction score (86%). Since then, Google has made great strides in deciphering user intent and providing a results page that’s a good match for that intent. Sometimes it will get it wrong, but when it gets it right, it puts together a page that’s a huge improvement over the vanilla, one size fits all results page of 2008.

The biggest thing that’s changed in the past 10 years is the context from which we’re launching those searches. In 2008, it was almost always the desktop. But today, chances are we’re searching from a mobile device – or our car – or our home through Amazon Echo. This has changed our expectations of search. We are task focused, rather than “browsing” for information. This creates an entirely different mental framework within which we receive the results. We apply a new yardstick of acceptable relevance. Here, we’re not looking for a list of 20 possible answers – we’re looking for one answer. And it had better be the right one. Context based search must be hyper-relevant.

Compounding this trend is the increasing number of circumstances where search is going “under the hood” – something I’ve been forecasting for a long time now. For example, if you use Siri to launch a search through your CarPlay connected device when you’re driving, the results are actually coming from Bing but they’re stripped of the context of the Bing search results page. Here, the presentation of search results is just one step in a multi-step task flow. It’s important that the result that is on top is the one you’re probably looking for.

Unfortunately for Google – and the other search providers – this expectation stays in place even when the context shifts. When we launch a search from our desktop, we are increasingly intolerant of results that are even a little off base from our intent. Ads become the most easily identified culprit. A results set that would have seemed almost frighteningly prescient even a few years ago now seems sub par. Google has come a long way in the past 20 years but it’s still losing ground to our expectations.

 

 

Curmudgeon, Chicken Little or Cognoscenti?

Apparently I’m old and out of step. Curmudgeonly, even. And this is from people of my own generation. My previous column about the potential shallowness encouraged by social media drew a few comments that indicated I was just being a grumpy old man. One was from an old industry friend – Brett Tabke:

“The rest of the article is like out of the 70’s in that it is devoid of the reality that is the uber-me generation. The selfie is only a reflection of their inward focus.”

The other was from Monica Emrich, whom I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting:

” ’Social Media Is Barely Skin-Deep.’ ho hum. History shows: when new medium hits, civilization as we know it is over.”

These comments seem to telling me, “Relax. You just don’t understand because you’re too old. Everything will be great.” And, if that’s true, I’d be okay with that. I’m more than willing to be proven a doddering old fool if it means technology is ushering us into a new era of human greatness.

But what if this time is different? What if Monica’s facetious comment actually nailed it? Maybe civilization as we know it will be over. The important part of this is “as we know it.” Every technological disruption unleashes a wave of creative destruction that pushes civilization in a new direction. We seem to blindly assume it will always go in the right direction. And it is true that technology has generally elevated the human race. But not uniformly – and not consistently. What if this shift is different? What if we become less than what we were? It can happen. Brexit – Xenophobia – Trump – Populism, all these things are surfing on the tides of new technology.

Here’s the problem. There are some aspects of technology that we’ve never had to deal with before – at least, not at this scale. One these aspects (other aspects will no doubt be the topic of a future Media Insider) is that technology is now immersive and ubiquitous. It creates an alternate reality for us, and it has done in it in a few short decades. Why is this dangerous? It’s dangerous because evolution has not equipped us to deal with this new reality. In the past, when there has been a shift in our physical reality, it has taken place over several generations. Natural selection had the time to reshape the human genome to survive and eventually thrive in this new reality. Along the way, we acquired checks and balances that would allow us to deal with the potentially negative impacts of the environment.

But our new reality is different. It’s happen in the space of a single generation. There is no way we could have acquired natural defenses against it. We are operating in an environment we have been untested for. The consequences are yet to be discovered.

No, your response might be to say that, “Yes, evolution doesn’t move this quickly, but out brains can. They are elastic and malleable.” This is true, but there’s a big “but” that lies hidden in this approach. Our brains rewire to be a better match their environment. This is one of the things that humans excel at. But this rewiring happens on top of a primitive platform with some built in limitations. The assumption is that a better match with our environment provides a better chance for survival of the species.

But what if technology is throwing us a curve ball in this case? No matter what the environment we have adapted to, there has been one constant: The history of humans depends on our success in living together. We have evolved to be social animals but that evolution is predicated on the assumption that our socializing would take place face-to-face. Technology is artificially decoupling our social interactions from the very definition of society that we have evolved to be able to handle. A recent Wharton interview with Eden Collinsworth sounds the same alarm bells.

“The frontal lobes, which are the part of the brain that puts things in perspective and allows you to be empathetic, are constantly evolving. But it is less likely to evolve and develop those skills if you are in front of a screen. In other words, those skills come into play when you have a face-to-face interaction with someone. You can observe facial gestures. You can hear the intonation of a voice. You’re more likely to behave moderately in that exchange, unless it’s a just a knock-down, drag-out fight.”

Collinsworth’s premise – which is covered in her new book, Behaving Badly – is that this artificial reality is changing our concepts of morality and ethics. She reminds us the two are interlinked, but they are not the same thing. Morality is our own personal code of conduct. Ethics are a shared code that society depends on to instill a general sense of fairness. Collinsworth believes both are largely learned from the context of our culture. And she worries that a culture that is decoupled from the physical reality we have evolved to operate in may have dire consequences.

The fact is that if our morality and ethics are intended to keep us socially more cohesive, this works best in a face-to-face context. In an extreme example of this, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a former paratrooper and professor of psychology at West Point, showed how our resistance to killing another human in combat is inversely related to our physical distance from them. The closer we are to them, the more resistant we are to the idea of killing them. This makes sense in an evolutionary environment where all combat was hand-to-hand. But today, the killer could be in a drone flight control center thousands of miles from his or her intended target.

This evolved constraint on unethical behavior – the social check and balance of being physically close to the people we’re engaging with – is important. And while the application of the two examples I’ve cited; One – the self-absorbed behavior on social networks – and Two – the moral landscape of a drone strike operator, may seem magnitudes apart in terms of culpability, the underlying neural machinery is related. What we believe is right and wrong is determined by a moral compass set to the bearings of our environment. The fundamental workings of that compass assumed we would be face-to-face with the people we have to deal with. But thanks to technology, that’s no longer the case.

Maybe Brett and Monica are right. Maybe I’m just being alarmist. But if not, we’d better start paying more attention. Because civilization “as we know it” may be ending.

 

Live, From Inside the Gale of Creative Destruction

Talk about cognitive dissonance…

First, Mediapost’s Jack Loechner writes about a Forrester Report, The End of Advertising as We Know It, which was published earlier this year. Seeing as last week I starting ringing the death knell for advertising agencies, I though I should check the report out.

Problem One: The report was only available on Forrester if I was willing to plunk down $499. American. Which is – I don’t know – about 14 zillion Canadian. Much as I love and respect you, my readers, there’s no friggin’ way that’s going to happen. So, I go to Google to see if I can find a free source to get the highlights.

Problem Two: Everyone and Sergio Zyman’s dog has apparently decided to write a book or white paper entitled “The End of Advertising as We Know It.” Where to begin researching the end? Well, here’s one deliciously ironic option – one of those white papers was published by none other than WPP. You know I have to check that out! As it turns out – no surprise here – it’s a sales pitch for the leading edge cool stuff that one of WPP’s agencies, AKQA, can do for you. I tried to sift through the dense text but gave up after continually bumping into buzz-laden phrases like “365 ideas”, “Business Invention” and “People Stories.” I return to the search results page and follow a Forbes link that looks more promising.

Problem Three: Yep! This is it. It’s Forbes summation of the Forrester Report. I start reading and learning that the biggest problem with advertising is that we hate to be interrupted by advertising. Well, I could have told you that. Oh – wait – I did (for free, I might add). But here’s the cognitively dissonant part. As I’m trying to read the article, an autoplay video ad keeps playing on the Forbes page, interrupting me. And you know what? I hated it! The report was right. At least, I think it was, as I stopped reading the article.

I’m guessing you’re going through something similar right now. As you’re trying to glean my pearls of wisdom, you’re tiptoeing around advertising on the page. That’s not Mediapost’s fault. They have a business to run and right now, there’s no viable business model other than interruptive advertising to keep the lights on. So you have the uniquely dissonant experience of reading about the end of advertising while being subjected to advertising.

My experience – which is hardly unique – is a painful reminder about the inconvenient truth of innovative disruption: it’s messy in the middle of it. When Joseph Schumpeter called it a “gale of creative destruction” it made it sound revolutionary and noble in the way that the Ride of the Valkyries or the Starks retaking Winterfell is noble. But this stuff gets messy, especially if you’re trying to hang on to the things being destroyed when the gale hits in full force.

Here’s the problem, in a nutshell. The tension goes back to a comment made back in 1984 from Stewart Brand to Steve Wozniak:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

In publishing, we not only have the value of the information itself, but we have the cost of wrapping insight around that information. Forrester’s business is industry analysis. Someone has to do the analyzing and there are costs associated with that. So they charge $499 for a report on the end of advertising.

Which brings us to the second part of the tension. Because so much information is now free and Google gives me, the information consumer, the expectation that I can find it for free – or, at least, highlights of it for free – I expect all information to be free. I believe I have an alternative to paying Forrester. In today’s age, information tends to seep through the cracks in pay walls, as it did when Forbes and Mediapost published articles on the report. Forrester is okay with that, because it hopes it will make more people willing to pay $499 aware of the report.

For their part Forbes – or Mediapost – relies on advertising to keep the information available to you for free, matching our expectations. But they have their own expenses. Whether we like it or not, interruptive advertising is the only option currently available to them.

So there we have it, a very shaky house of cards built on a rapidly crumbling foundation. Welcome to the Edge of Chaos. A new model will be created from this destruction. That is inevitable. But in the meantime, there’s going to be a lot of pain and WTF moments. Just like the one I had this week.

Social Media is Barely Skin Deep

Here’s a troubling fact. According to a study from the Georgia Institute of Tech, half of all selfies taken have one purpose, to show how good the subject looks. They are intended to show the world how attractive we are: our makeup, our clothes, our shoes, our lips, our hair. The category accounts for more selfies than all other categories combined. More than selfies taken with people or pets we love, more than us doing the things we love, more than being in the places we love, more than eating the food we love. It appears that the one thing we love the most is ourselves. The selfies have spoken

In this study, the authors reference a 1956 work from sociologist Erving Goffman– The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman took Shakespeare’s line – “All the World is a Stage and all the men and women merely players” – quite literally. His theory was that we are all playing the part of whom we want to be perceived as. Our lives are divided up into two parts – the front, when we’re “on stage” and playing our part, and the “back” – when we prepare for our role. The roles we play depend on the context we’re in.

 

Goffman’s theory introduces an interesting variable into consideration. The way we play these roles and the importance we place on them will vary with the individual. For some of us, it will be all about the role and less about the actual person who inhabits that role. These people are obsessed about how they are perceived by others. They’re the ones snapping selfies of themselves to show the world just how marvelous they look.

For others, they care little about what the world thinks of them. They are internally centered and are focused on living their lives, rather than acting their way through their lives for the entertainment of – and validation from – others. In between the two extremes is the ubiquitous bell curve of normal distribution. Most of us live somewhere on that curve.

Goffman’s theory was created specifically to provide insight into face-to-face encounters. Technology has again throw a gigantic wrinkle into things – and that wrinkle may explain why we keep taking those narcissistic selfies.

Humans are pretty damned good at judging authenticity in a face-to-face setting. We pick up subtle cues from across a wide swath of interpersonal communication channels: vocal intonations, body language, eye-to-eye contact, micro-expressions. Together, these inputs give us a pretty accurate “bullshit detector.” If someone comes across as an inauthentic “phony” the majority of us will just roll our eyes and simply start avoiding the person. In face-to-face encounters there is a social feedback mechanism that keeps the “actors” amongst us at least somewhat honest in order to remain part of the social network that forms their audience.

But social media platforms provide the idea incubator for inauthentic presentation of our own personas. There are three factors in particular that allow shallow “actors” to flourish – even to the point of going viral.

False Intimacy and Social Distance

In his blog on Psychology Today, counselor Michael Formica talks about two of these factors – social distance and false intimacy. I’ve talked about false intimacy before in another context – the “labelability” of celebrities. Social media removes the transactional costs of retaining a relationship. This has the unfortunate side effect of screwing up the brain’s natural defenses against inauthentic relationships. When we’re physically close to a person, there are no filters for the bad stuff. We get it all. Our brains have evolved to do a cost/benefit analysis of each relationship we have and decide whether it’s worth the effort to maintain it. This works well when we depend on physically proximate relationships for our own well-being.

But social media introduces a whole new context for maintaining social relationships. When the transactional costs are reduced to a scanning of a newsfeed and hitting the “Like” button, the brain says “What the hell, let’s add them to our mental friends list. It’s not costing me anything.” In evolutionary terms, intimacy is the highest status we can give to a relationship and it typically only comes with a thorough understanding of the good and the bad involved in that relationship by being close to the person – both physically and figuratively. With zero relational friction, we’re more apt to afford intimacy, whether or not it’s been earned.

The Illusion of Acceptance

The previous two factors perfectly set the “stage” for false personas to flourish, but it’s the third factor that allows them to go viral. Every actor craves acceptance from his or her audience. Social exclusion is the worst fate imaginable for them. In a face-to-face world, our mental cost/benefit algorithm quickly weeds out false relationships that are not worth the investment of our social resources. But that’s not true online. If it costs us nothing, we may be rolling our eyes – safely removed behind our screen – as we’re also hitting the “Like” button. And shallow people are quite content with shallow forms of acceptance. A Facebook like is more than sufficient to encourage them to continue their act. To make it even more seductive, social acceptance is now measurable – there are hard numbers assigned to popularity.

This is pure cat-nip to the socially needy. Their need to craft a popular – but entirely inauthentic – persona goes into overdrive. Their lives are not lived so much as manufactured to create a veneer just thick enough to capture a quick click of approval. Increasingly, they retreat to an online world that follows the script they’ve written for themselves.

Suddenly it makes sense why we keep taking all those selfies of ourselves. When all the world’s a stage, you need a good head shot.

The Medium is the Message, Mr. President

Every day that Barack Obama was in the White House, he read 10 letters. Why letters? Because form matters. There’s still something about a letter. It’s so intimate. It uses a tactile medium. Emotions seem to flow easier through the use of cursive loops and sound of pen on paper. They balance between raw and reflective. As such, they may be an unusually honest glimpse into the soul of the writer. Obama seemed to get that. There was an entire team of hundreds of people at the White House that reviewed 10,000 letters a day and chose the 10 that made it to Obama, but the intent was to give an unfiltered snapshot of the nation at any given time. It was a mosaic of personal stories that – together – created a much bigger narrative.

Donald Trump doesn’t read letters. He doesn’t read much of anything. The daily presidential briefing has been dumbed down to media more fitting of the President’s 140 character long attention span. Trump likes to be briefed with pictures and videos. His information medium of choice? Cable TV. He has turned Twitter into his official policy platform.

Today, technology has exponentially multiplied the number of communication media we have available to us. And in that multiplicativity, Marshall McLuhan’s 50-year-old trope about the medium being the message seems truer than ever. The channels we chose – whether we’re on the sending or receiving end – carry their own inherent message. They say who we are, what we value, how we think. They intertwine with the message, determining how it will be interpreted.

I’m sad that letter writing is a dying art, but I’m also contributing to its demise. It’s been years since I’ve written a letter. I do write this column, which is another medium. But even here I’m mislabeling it. Technically this is a blog post. A column is a concept embedded in the medium of print – with its accompanying physical restriction of column inches. But I like to call it a column, because in my mind that carries its own message. A column comes with an implicit promise between you – the readers – any myself, the author. Columns are meant to be regularly recurring statements of opinion. I have to respect the fact that I remain accountable for this Tuesday slot that MediaPost has graciously given me. Week after week, I try to present something that I hope you’ll find interesting and useful enough to keep reading. I feel I owe that to you. To me, a “post” feels more ethereal – with less of an ongoing commitment between author and reader. It’s more akin to a drive-by-writing.

So that brings me to one of the most interesting things about letters and President Obama’s respect for them. They are meant to be a thoughtful medium between two people. The thoughts captured within are important enough to the writer that they’re put in print but they are intended just for the recipient. They are one of the most effective media ever created to ask for empathetic understanding from one person in particular. And that’s how Obama’s Office of Presidential Correspondence treated them. Each letter represented a person who felt strongly enough about something that they wanted to share it with the President personally. Obama used to read his ten letters at the end of the day, when he had time to digest and reflect. He often made notations in the margins asking pointed questions of his staff or requesting more investigation into the circumstances chronicled in a letter. He chose to set aside a good portion of each day to read letters because he believed in the message carried by the medium: Individuals – no matter who they are – deserve to be heard.