Category Archives: Online Trends

Ex Machina’s Script for Our Future

One of the more interesting movies I’ve watched in the past year has been Ex Machina. Unlike the abysmally disappointing Transcendence (how can you screw up Kurzweil – for God’s sake), Ex Machina is a tightly directed, frighteningly claustrophobic sci-fi thriller that peels back the moral layers of artificial intelligence one by one.

If you haven’t seen it, do so. But until you do, here’s the basic set up. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer at a huge Internet search company called Blue Book (think Google). He wins a contest where the prize is a week spent with the CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) at his private retreat. Bateman’s character is best described as Larry Page meets Steve Jobs meets Larry Ellison meets Charlie Sheen – brilliant as hell but one messed up dude. It soon becomes apparent that the contest is a ruse and Smith is there to play the human in an elaborate Turing Test to determine if the robot Ava (Alicia Vikander) is capable of consciousness.

About half way through the movie, Bateman confesses to Smith the source of Ava’s intelligence “software.” It came from Blue Book’s own search data:

‘It was the weird thing about search engines. They were like striking oil in a world that hadn’t invented internal combustion. They gave too much raw material. No one knew what to do with it. My competitors were fixated on sucking it up, and trying to monetize via shopping and social media. They thought engines were a map of what people were thinking. But actually, they were a map of how people were thinking. Impulse, response. Fluid, imperfect. Patterned, chaotic.”

As a search behaviour guy – that sounded like more fact than fiction. I’ve always thought search data could reveal much about how we think. That’s why John Motavalli’s recent column, Google Looks Into Your Brain And Figures You Out, caught my eye. Here, it seemed, fiction was indeed becoming fact. And that fact is, when we use one source for a significant chunk of our online lives, we give that source the ability to capture a representative view of our related thinking. Google and our searching behaviors or Facebook and our social behaviors both come immediately to mind.

Motavalli’s reference to Dan Ariely’s post about micro-moments is just one example of how Google can peak under the hood of our noggins and start to suss out what’s happening in there. What makes this either interesting or scary as hell, depending on your philosophic bent, is that Ariely’s area of study is not our logical, carefully processed thoughts but our subconscious, irrational behaviors. And when we’re talking artificial intelligence, it’s that murky underbelly of cognition that is the toughest nut to crack.

I think Ex Machina’s writer/director Alex Garland may have tapped something fundamental in the little bit of dialogue quoted above. If the data we willingly give up in return for online functionality provides a blue print for understanding human thought, that’s a big deal. A very big deal. Ariely’s blog post talks about how a better understanding of micro-moments can lead to better ad targeting. To me, that’s kind of like using your new Maserati to drive across the street and visit your neighbor – it seems a total waste of horsepower. I’m sure there are higher things we can aspire to than figuring out a better way to deliver a hotels.com ad. Both Google and Facebook are full of really smart people. I’m pretty sure someone there is capable of connecting the dots between true artificial intelligence and their own brand of world domination.

At the very least, they could probably whip up a really sexy robot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Marketers Love Malcolm Gladwell … and Why They Shouldn’t

Marketers love Malcolm Gladwell. They love his pithy, reductionist approach to popular science – his tendency to sacrifice verity for the sake of a good “Just-so” story. And in doing this, what is Malcolm Gladwell but a marketer at heart? No wonder our industry is ga-ga over him. We love anyone who can oversimplify complexity down to the point where it can be appropriated as yet another marketing “angle”.

Take the entire influencer advertising business, for instance. Earlier this year, I saw an article saying more and more brands are expanding their influencer marketing programs. We are desperately searching for that holy nexus where social media and those super-connected “mavens” meet. While the idea of influencer marketing has been around for a while, it really gained steam with the release of Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” And that head of steam seems to have been building since the release of the book in 2000.

As others have pointed out, Gladwell has made a habit of taking one narrow perspective that promises to “play well” with the masses, supporting it with just enough science to make it seem plausible and then enshrining it as a “Law.”

Take “The Law of the Few”, for instance, from The Tipping Point: “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” You could literally hear the millions of ears attached to marketing heads “perk up” when they heard this. “All we have to do,” the reasoning went, “is reach these people, plant a favorable opinion of our product and give them the tools to spread the word. Then we just sit back and wait for the inevitable epidemic to sweep us to new heights of profitability.”

Certainly commercial viral cascades do happen. They happen all the time. And, in hindsight, if you look long and hard enough, you’ll probably find what appears to be a “maven” near ground-zero. From this perspective, Gladwell’s “Law of the Few” seems to hold water. But that’s exactly the type of seductive reasoning that makes “Just So” stories so misleading. You mistakenly believe that because it happened once, you can predict when it’s going to happen again. Gladwell’s indiscriminate use of the term “Law” contributes to this common deceit. A law is something that is universally applicable and constant. When a law governs something, it plays out the same way, every time. And this is certainly not the case in social epidemics.

duncan-watts

Duncan Watts

If Malcolm Gladwell’s books have become marketing and pop-culture bibles, the same, sadly, cannot be said for Duncan Watts’ books. I’m guessing almost everyone reading this column has heard of Malcolm Gladwell. I further guess that almost none of you have heard of Duncan Watts. And that’s a shame. But it’s completely understandable.

Duncan Watts describes his work as determining the “role that network structure plays in determining or constraining system behavior, focusing on a few broad problem areas in social science such as information contagion, financial risk management, and organizational design.”

You started nodding off halfway through that sentence, didn’t you?

As Watts shows in his books, “Firms spent great effort trying to find “connectors” and “mavens” and to buy the influence of the biggest influencers, even though there was never causal evidence that this would work.” But the work required to get to this point is not trivial. While he certainly aims at a broad audience, Watts does not read like Gladwell. His answers are not self-evident. There is no pithy “bon mot” that causes our neural tumblers to satisfyingly click into place. Watts’ explanations are complex, counter-intuitive, occasionally ambiguous and often non-conclusive – just like the world around us. As he explains his book “Everything is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer”, it’s easy to look backwards to find causality. But it’s not always right.

Marketers love simplicity. We love laws. We love predictability. That’s why we love Gladwell. But in following this path of least resistance, we’re straying further and further from the real world.

How We Might Search (On the Go)

As I mentioned in last week’s column – Mediative has just released a new eyetracking study on mobile devices. And it appears that we’re still conditioned to look for the number one organic result before clicking on our preferred destination.

But…

It appears that things might be in the process of changing. This makes sense. Searching on a mobile device is – and should be – significantly different from searching on a desktop. We have different intents. We are interacting with a different platform. Even the way we search is different.

Searching on a desktop is all about consideration. It’s about filtering and shortlisting multiple options to find the best one. Our search strategies are still carrying a significant amount of baggage from what search was – an often imperfect way to find the best place to get more information about something. That’s why we still look for the top organic listing. For some reason we still subconsciously consider this the gold standard of informational relevancy. We measure all other results against it. That’s why we make sure we reserve one slot from the three to five available in our working memory (I have found that the average person considers about 4 results at a time) for its evaluation.

But searching on a mobile device isn’t about filtering content. For one thing, it’s absolutely the wrong platform to do this with. The real estate is too limited. For another, it’s probably not what we want to spend our time doing. We’re on the go and trying to get stuff done. This is not the time for pausing and reflecting. This is the time to find what I’m looking for and use it to take action.

This all makes sense but the fact remains that the way we search is a product of habit. It’s a conditioned subconscious strategy that was largely formed on the desktop. Most of us haven’t done enough searching on mobile devices yet to abandon our desktop-derived strategies and create new mobile specific ones. So, our subconscious starts playing out the desktop script and only varies from it when it looks like it’s not going to deliver acceptable results. That’s why we’re still looking for that number one organic listing to benchmark against

There were a few findings in the Mediative study that indicate that our desktop habits may be starting to slip on mobile devices. But before we review them, let’s do a quick review of how habits play out. Habits are the brains way of cutting down on thinking. If we do something over and over again and get acceptable results, we store that behavior as a habit. The brain goes on autopilot so we don’t have to think our way through a task with predictable outcomes.

If, however, things change, either in the way the task plays out or in the outcomes we get, the brain reluctantly takes control again and starts thinking its way through the task. I believe this is exactly what’s happening with our mobile searches. The brain desperately wants to use its desktop habits, but the results are falling below our threshold of acceptability. That means we’re all somewhere in the process of rebuilding a search strategy more suitable for a mobile device.

Mediative’s study shows me a brain that’s caught between the desktop searches we’ve always done and the mobile searches we’d like to do. We still feel we should scroll to see at least the top organic result, but as mobile search results become more aligned with our intent, which is typically to take action right away, we are being side tracked from our habitual behaviors and kicking our brains into gear to take control. The result is that when Google shows search elements that are probably more aligned with our intent – either local results, knowledge graphs or even highly relevant ads with logical ad extensions (such as a “call” link) – we lose confidence in our habits. We still scroll down to check out the organic result but we probably scroll back up and click on the more relevant result.

All this switching back and forth from habitual to engaged interaction with the results ends up exacting a cost in terms of efficiency. We take longer to conduct searches on a mobile device, especially if that search shows other types of results near the top. In the study, participants spent an extra 2 seconds or so scrolling between the presented results (7.15 seconds for varied results vs. 4.95 seconds for organic only results). And even though they spent more time scrolling, more participants ended up clicking on the mobile relevant results they saw right at the top.

The trends I’m describing here are subtle – often playing out in a couple seconds or less. And you might say that it’s no big deal. But habits are always a big deal. The fact that we’re still relying on desktop habits that were laid down over the past two decades show how persistent then can be. If I’m right and we’re finally building new habits specific to mobile devices, those habits could dictate our search behaviors for a long time to come.

In Search- Even in Mobile – Organic Still Matters

I told someone recently that I feel like Rick Astley. You know, the guy that had the monster hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” in 1987 and is still trading on it almost 30 years later? He even enjoyed a brief resurgence of viral fame in 2007 when the world discovered what it meant to be “Rickrolled”

google-golden-triangle-eye-trackingFor me, my “Never Gonna Give You Up” is the Golden Triangle eye tracking study we released in 2005. It’s my one hit wonder (to be fair to Astley, he did have a couple other hits, but you get the idea). And yes, I’m still talking about it.

The Golden Triangle as we identified it existed because people were drawn to look at the number one organic listing. That’s an important thing to keep in mind. In today’s world of ad blockers and teeth gnashing about the future of advertising, there is probably no purer or more controllable environment than the search results page. Creativity is stripped to the bare minimum. Ads have to be highly relevant and non-promotional in nature. Interaction is restricted to the few seconds required to scan and click. If there was anywhere where ads might be tolerated, its on the search results page

But…

If we fully trusted ads – especially those as benign as those that show up on search results – there would have be no Golden Triangle. It only existed because we needed to see that top Organic result and dragging our eyes down to it formed one side of the triangle.

eyetracking2014Fast forward almost 10 years. Mediative, which is the current incarnation of my old company, released a follow up two years ago. While the Golden Triangle had definitely morphed into a more linear scan, the motivation remained – people wanted to scan down to see at least one organic listing. They didn’t trust ads then. They don’t trust ads now.

Google has used this need to anchor our scanning with the top organic listing to introduce a greater variety of results into the top “hot zone” – where scanning is the greatest. Now, depending on the search, there is likely to be at least a full screen of various results – including ads, local listings, reviews or news items – before your eyes hit that top organic web result. Yet, we seem to be persistent in our need to see it. Most people still make the effort to scroll down, find it and assess its relevance.

It should be noted that all of the above refers to desktop search. But almost a year ago, Google announced that – for the first time ever – more searches happened on a mobile device than on a desktop.

eyetracking mobile.pngMediative just released a new eye-tracking study (Note: I was not involved at all with this one). This time, they dove into scan patterns on mobile devices. Given the limited real estate and the fact that for many popular searches, you would have to consciously scroll down at least a couple times to see the first organic result, did users become more accepting of ads?

Nope. They just scanned further down!

The study’s first finding was that the #1 organic listing still captures the most click activity, but it takes users almost twice as long to find it compared to a desktop.

The study’s second finding was that even though organic is still important, position matters more than ever. Users will make the effort to find the top organic result and, once they do, they’ll generally scan the top 4 results, but if they find nothing relevant, they probably won’t scan much further. In the study, 92.6% of the clicks happened above the 4th organic listing. On a desktop, 84% of the clicks happened above the number 4 listing.

The third listing shows an interesting paradox that’s emerging on mobile devices: we’re carrying our search habits from the desktop over with us – especially our need to see at least one organic listing. The average time to scan the top sponsored listing was only 0.36 seconds, meaning that people checked it out immediately after orienting themselves to the mobile results page, but for those that clicked the listing, the average time to click was 5.95 seconds. That’s almost 50% longer than the average time to click on a desktop search. When organic results are pushed down the page because of other content, it’s taking us longer before we feel confident enough to make our choice. We still need to anchor our relevancy assessment with that top organic result and that’s causing us to be less efficient in our mobile searches than we are on the desktop.

The study also indicated that these behaviors could be in flux. We may be adapted our search strategies for mobile devices, but we’re just not quite there yet. I’ll touch on this in next week’s column.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The World in Bite Sized Pieces

It’s hard to see the big picture when your perspective is limited to 160 characters.

Or when we keep getting distracted from said big picture by that other picture that always seems to be lurking over there on the right side of our screen – the one of Kate Upton tilting forward wearing a wet bikini.

Two things are at work here obscuring our view of the whole: Our preoccupation with the attention economy and a frantic scrambling for a new revenue model. The net result is that we’re being spoon-fed stuff that’s way too easy to digest. We’re being pandered to in the worst possible way. The world is becoming a staircase of really small steps, each of which has a bright shiny object on it urging us to scale just a little bit higher. And we, like idiots, stumble our way up the stairs.

This cannot be good for us. We become better people when we have to chew through some gristle. Or when we’re forced to eat our broccoli. The world should not be the cognitive equivalent of Captain Crunch cereal.

It’s here where human nature gets the best of us. We’re wired to prefer scintillation to substance. Our intellectual laziness and willingness to follow whatever herd seems to be heading in our direction have conspired to create a world where Donald Trump can be a viable candidate for president of the United States – where our attention span is measured in fractions of a second – where the content we consume is dictated by a popularity contest.

Our news is increasingly coming to us in smaller and smaller chunks. The exploding complexity of our world, which begs to be understood in depth, is increasingly parceled out to us in pre-digested little tidbits, pushed to our smartphone. We spend scant seconds scanning headlines to stay “up to date.” And an algorithm that is trying to understand where our interests lie usually determines the stories we see.

This algorithmic curation creates both “Filter” and “Agreement” Bubbles. The homogeneity of our social network leads to a homogeneity of content. But if we spend our entire time with others that think like us, we end up with an intellectually polarized society in which the factions that sit at opposite ends of any given spectrum are openly hostile to each other. The gaps between our respective ideas of what is right are simply too big and no one has any interest in building a bridge across them. We’re losing our ideological interface areas, those opportunities to encounter ideas that force us to rethink and reframe, broadening our worldview in the process. We sacrifice empathy and we look for news that “sounds right” to us, not matter what “right” might be.

This is a crying shame, because there is more thought provoking, intellectually rich content than ever before being produced. But there is also more sugar coated crap who’s sole purpose is to get us to click.

I’ve often talked about the elimination of friction. Usually, I think this is a good thing. Bob Garfield, in a column a few months ago, called for a whoop-ass can of WD 40 to remove all transactional friction. But if we make things too easy to access, will we also remove those cognitive barriers that force us to slow down and think, giving our rationality a change to catch up with impulse? And it’s not just on the consumption side where a little bit of friction might bring benefits. The upside of production friction was that it did slow down streams of content just long enough to introduce an editorial voice. Someone somewhere had to give some thought as to what might actually be good for us.

In other words, it was someone’s job to make sure we ate our vegetables.

The Collateral Damage of Disruption

Not all the stories of disruption are of the “David vs. Goliath” variety. Sometimes they are more of the “David vs. Goliath vs. Innocent Bystanders” ilk.

Stewart Wills reminded me of this last week when I was writing about Alexandra Elbakyan and the Elsevier vs. Sci-Hub case. It’s easy to take aim at Elsevier. After all, they’re a very big 4.2 billion dollar target. It’s just too easy to demonize them. But they’re not the only academic publisher in the world.

“Siding with this particular self-styled “Robin Hood” may seem like a no-brainer (and a good, easy-to-tell story), but everyone seems so interested in focusing on big bad Elsevier that they miss a lot of important other affected parties in the picture.”

Wills pointed me to a posting from Caldera Publishing Solutions, a consulting firm that caters to smaller academic publishers. This post refutes my statement of last week that Elsevier is the only one being harmed by the actions of pirates like Elbakyan. In fact, there is an extended chain of bystanders that threaten to be washed away by the tsunami of disruption that’s bearing down on the academic world. For example, there are “dozens and dozens” of society journals who use huge publishers like Elsevier as a clearinghouse. Behind much of the research in the Sci-Hub library, you’ll find non-profit societies, which means that this is “less of a story of Robin Hood robbing from the town’s greedy sheriff, and more a story of Robin Hood stealing from the town’s hospitals and charities.”

The post draws an analogy to a disruptive wave that first broke 17 years ago now: Napster and illegal file sharing. Given that we now have close to two decades of hindsight in this particular case, it might be useful to do a post-mortem on Napster’s impact on the music industry.

I’m not sure if you happened to watch the Grammys, but if you did, you saw Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, deliver a plea against streaming music services. The problem, said Mr. Portnow, is these services have commoditized music to the degree that royalties amount to fractions of a cent for each play of a song. That may be fine if you’re Rihanna or Sam Smith, but not great if you’re a struggling independent artist.

The problem with the plea is the same tactical error the Academy has made since the first such sermon, delivered by then president Michael Greene at the 2002 Grammies – it was delivered in the wrong church. It’s very hard to feel sorry for the music industry when the most obvious examples – the artists in the audience – are all multi-millionaires drowning under the weight of their own bling. Portnow might be right when he says music may no longer be a viable career, but it’s hard to swallow that message when delivered in the midst of such excess.

But did Napster, and the subsequent removal of friction from the music industry, truly wreak the damage that NARAS keeps warning us about? The fact is, we now have access to far more music than we did in 1990. We can discover new music more readily. Artists can now self produce and distribute. They can even use Songkick to launch their own tours, or Kickstarter to fund a new album. Will they all get rich? No. But they have a better chance than they did two decades ago, when the only path to stardom led directly through the big (and cutthroat) business of music publishing. Napster, and its technological descendants, did what disruption is supposed to do. They cleaned up the market, creating direction connections between the producers and the consumers.

As Stewart Wills reminded me, there are unintended consequences of disruption. One of them is that when the supply chain begins to be violently shaken from below, as was the case with the music industry, the earliest victims are typically small and fragile members of the ecosystem that depend on a bigger host. These tend to either fall of or become absorbed into the more robust survivors. That’s why you don’t find many corner record stores any more.

But then again, good blacksmiths or door-to-door milkmen are also damned hard to find.

 

 

 

The Face of Disruption

If you ask publishing giant Elsevier, Alexandra Elbakyan is a criminal – a pernicious pirate.

If you ask the Lifeboat Foundation, or blogger P.Z Myers, or millions of students around the world, Alexandra Elbakyan is a hero.

Labels can be tricky things, especially in a world of disruption.

ElboykanMs. Elbakyan certainly doesn’t look like a criminal. You would walk right past her on a campus quad and think nothing of it. She looks pretty much what you would expect a post-grad neuroscience student from Kazakhstan to look like.

But her face is the face of disruption. And she’s at the receiving end of a lawsuit launched by Elsevier that, if you were to take it seriously, would be worth several billion dollars.

Just over a year ago, I wrote a column about the academic journal racket. The work of thousands of researchers is published by Elsevier and others and remains locked behind hugely expensive pay walls. Elbakyan, as a post-grad research student at a university that couldn’t afford to pay the licensing fees to gain access to these journals, got frustrated. In a letter she wrote in response to the lawsuit, she elaborated on this frustration:

“When I was a student in Kazakhstan University, I did not have access to any research papers. These papers I needed for my research project. Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them.”

Elbaykan was not alone in this piracy.

“Later I found there are lots and lots of researchers (not even students, but university researchers) just like me, especially in developing countries. They created online communities (forums) to solve this problem.”

“…to solve this problem.” There, in a nutshell, is the source of disruption. Elbakyan thought there had to be a more efficient way to facilitate this communal piracy and turned to technology, launching the Sci-Hub search portal in 2011. Depending on the donation of access keys from academics at institutions that had subscriptions to research publishers, Sci-Hub bypasses the paywall and locates the paper a researcher is looking for. It then delivers the paper and saves a copy for LibGen, a library of “pirated” papers that will continue to be freely available to future researchers. The LibGen database now has over 48 million papers available.

Is Elbaykan guilty of piracy? Absolutely – as it’s defined by the law. She makes no bones about the fact. She uses the term repeatedly in her own letter of defense.

But, in that letter, Alexandra Elbaykan also appeals to a higher law – the law of fairness. She is not stealing from the authors of that research, who receive no compensation for their work from the publisher. When Elsevier claims “irreparable harm” the only harm that can be identified is to their own business model. There is no harm to academics, who are becoming increasingly hostile to the business practices of publishers like Elsevier. There is certainly no harm to fellow researchers, who now have open access to knowledge, helping them in their own work. And there is no harm to the public, who can only benefit from the more open sharing of knowledge amongst academics. The only one hurt here is Elsevier.

According to RELX’s (the parent company of Elsevier) 2014 annual report, the company raked in £ 2,944 M ($4.23 billion US) from it’s various subscription businesses. The Scientific, Technical and Medical division (the same division that Elbaykan “irreparably harmed”) had revenues of £ 2,048 M ($2.94 B US) and a tidy little operating profit of £787 M ($ 1.13 B US).

Poor Elsevier.

The question that should be asked here is not whether Elsevier’s business model has been harmed, but rather, does it deserve to live? According to that same annual report, they “help scientists make new discoveries, lawyers win cases, doctors save lives and executives forge commercial relationships with their clients.”

Actually, no.

Elsevier does none of those things. The information they deal in does those things. And that same information is finding a way to be free, thanks to people like Alexandra Elbaykan. Elsevier is just the middleman who is being cut out of the supply chain through technology.

The American legal system will undoubtedly side with Elsevier. The law, as it is currently written, defends the right of a corporation to do business, whether or not people like you and me deem that business ethical. But ultimately, we rely on our laws to be fair, and what is fair depends on the context of our society. That context can be changed through the forces of disruption.

Sometimes, disruption comes in the guise of a young post grad student from Kazakhstan.

Is Amazon Creating a Personalized Store?

There was a brief Amazon-related flurry of speculation last week. Apparently, according to a podcast posted by Wharton, Amazon is planning on opening 300 to 400 bricks and mortar stores.

That’s right. Stores – actual buildings – with stuff in them.

What’s more, this has been “on the books” at Amazon for a while. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was asked by Charlie Rose in 2012 if they would every open physical stores. Bezos replied, ““We would love to, but only if we can have a truly differentiated idea,” he said. “We want to do something that is uniquely Amazon. We haven’t found it yet, but if we can find that idea … we would love to open physical stores.”

With that background, the speculation makes sense. If Amazon is pulling the trigger, they must have “found the idea.” So what might that idea be?

Amazon does have a test store in their own backyard of Seattle. What they have chosen to do there, in a footprint about the tenth of the size of the former Barnes and Noble store that was there, is present a “highly curated” store that caters to “local interests.”

Most of the speculation about the new Amazon experiment in “back-to-the-future” retail centers around potential new supply chain management technology or payment methods. But there was one quote from Amanda Nicholson, professor of retail practice at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, that caught my attention; “she said that space represents ‘a test’ to see if Amazon can create ‘a new kind of experience’ using data analytics about customers’ preferences.”

This becomes interesting if we spend some time thinking about the purchase journey we typically take. What Amazon had done online brilliantly is remove friction from two steps in that journey: filtering options and conducting the actual transaction. For certain kinds of purchases, this is all we need. If we’re buying a product that doesn’t rely on tactile feedback, like a digital file or a book, Amazon has connected all the dots required to take us from awareness to purchase.

But that certainly doesn’t represent all potential purchases. That could be the reason that online purchases only represent 9% of all retail. There are many products that require an “experience” between the filtering of options available to us and the actual purchase. These things still require the human “touch” – literally. Up to now, Amazon has remained emotionally distant from these types of purchases. But perhaps a new type of retail location could change that.

Let me give you an example. If you’re a cyclist (like me) you probably have a favorite bike shop. Bike stores are not simply retail outlets. They are temples of bike worship. Bike shops are usually an independent business run by people who love to talk about their favorite rides, the latest bikes or pretty much anything to do with cycling. Going to a bike store is an experience.

But Trek, one of the largest bike manufacturers in the world, also recognized the efficiency of the online model. In 2015, they announced the introduction of Trek Connect, their attempt to find a happy middle ground between practical efficiency and emotional experience. Through Trek Connect, you can configure and order your bike online, but pick it up and have it serviced at your local bike shop.

However, what Amazon may be proposing is not simply about the tactile requirements of certain types of purchases. What if Amazon could create a personalized real world shopping experience?

Right now, there is a gap between our online research and filtering activity and our real world experiential activity. Typically, we shortlist our candidates, gather required information, often in the form of a page printed off from a website, and head down to the nearest retail location. There, the hand off typically leaves a lot to be desired. We have to navigate a store layout that was certainly not designed with our immediate needs in mind. We have to explain what we want to a floor clerk who seems to have at least a thousand other things they’d rather be doing. And we are not guaranteed that what we’re looking for will even be in stock.

But what if Amazon could make the transition seamless? What if they could pick up all the signals from our online activity and create a physical “experiential bubble” for us when we visited the nearest Amazon retail outlet?

Let me go back to my bike purchasing analogy in way of an example. Let’s say I need a new bike because I’m taking up triathlons. Amazon knows this because my online activity has flagged me as an aspiring triathlete. They know where I live and they have a rich data set on my other interests, which includes my favored travel destinations. Amazon could take this data and, under the pretext of my picking up my bike, create a personalized in store experience for me, including a rich selection of potential add-on sales. With Amazon’s inventory and fulfillment prowess, it would be possible to merchandise a store especially for me.

I have no idea if this is what Amazon has “in store” for the future, but the possibility is tantalizing.

It may even make me like shopping.

 

 

 

The “Get It” Gap

Netflix and Chill…

It sounds innocent enough – a night of curling up on the couch in a Snuggie with no plan other than some Orange is the New Black and Häagen Dazs binging. And that’s how it started out. Innocent. Then those damned kids got hold of it, and its present meaning ended up in a place quite removed from its origin.

Unfortunately, my wife didn’t know that when she used the phrase in a Facebook post for her gift basket company. That is, until one of our daughters walked in the door and before her bags hit the floor yelled from the entryway, “Mom, you have to change your post – right now!”

“What post?”

“The Netflix and Chill one…”

“Why?”

“Unless your basket contains lubricants and condoms, I don’t think your post means what you think it means”

But how is a middle-aged parent to know? The subversion of this particular phrase has just happened in the last year. It takes me the better part of a year to remember that it’s no longer 2015 when I sign a check. There’s no way a middle-aged brain could possibly keep up with the ongoing bastardization of the English language. The threshold for “getting it” keeps getting higher, driven by the acceleration of memes through social media.

getitgapParents were never intended to “get it.” That’s the whole point. Kids want to speak their own language and have their own cultural reference points. We were no different when we were kids. Neither were our parents.

And kids always “get it.” It’s like a rite of passage. Memes propagate through social networks and when you’re 18, your social network is the most important thing in your life. New memes spread like wildfire and part of belonging to this culture depends on “getting it.” The faster things spread, the more likely it is that you can increase the “Get It” gap between you and your parents. It’s a control thing. If the parents call all the shots about everything in your life, at least you can have this one thing to call your own.

As you start to gain control, the Gap becomes less important. Our daughters are now becoming adults, so they now act as “Get It” translators and, in cases like the one above, Urban Slang enforcement officers. When we transgress, they attempt to bridge the gap.

As you get older, the “stuff” of life gets in the way of continuing to “get it.” Buying a house, getting a job and changing diapers leaves little time left over to Snapchat about Scumbag Steve or tweet “Hell yea finna get crunk!” to your Hommie gee funk-a-nator on a Friday night.

The danger comes when parents unilaterally try to cross over the gap and attempt to tap into the zeitgeist of urban slang. This is always doomed to failure. There are no exceptions. It’s like tiptoeing through a minefield with snowshoes on.

At the very least, run it past your kids before you post anything. Better yet – look it up in Urban Dictionary. Kids can’t be trusted.

“Hotchkiss – Ouuuttt!” (Mic drop here)

We’re Informed. But Are We Thoughtful?

I’m a bit of a jerk when I write. I lock myself behind closed doors in my home office. In the summer, I retreat to the most remote reaches of the back yard. The reason? I don’t want to be interrupted with human contact. If I am interrupted, I stare daggers through the interrupter and answer in short, clipped sentences. The house has to be silent. If conditions are less than ideal, my irritation is palpable. My family knows this. The warning signal is “Dad is writing.” This can be roughly translated as “Dad is currently an asshole.” The more I try to be thoughtful, the bigger the ass I am.

I suspect Henry David Thoreau was the same.  He went even further than my own backyard exile. He camped out alone for two years in Ralph Waldo Emersen’s cabin on Walden Pond. He said things like,

“I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

But Thoreau but was also a pretty thoughtful guy, who advised us that,

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

But, I ask, how can we be thoughtful when we are constantly distracted by information? Our mental lives are full of single footsteps. Even if we intend to cover the same path more than once, there are a thousand beeps, alerts, messages, prompts, pokes and flags that are beckoning us to start down a new path, in a different direction. We probably cover more ground, but I suspect we barely disturb the fallen leaves on the paths we take.

I happen to do all my reading on a tablet. I do this for three reasons; first, I always have my entire library with me and I usually have four books on the go at the same time (currently 1491, Reclaiming Conversation, Flash Boys and 50 Places to Bike Before You Die) – secondly, I like to read before I go to sleep and I don’t need to keep a light on that keeps my wife awake – and thirdly, I like to highlight passages and make notes. But there’s a trade-off I’ve had to make. I don’t read as thoughtfully as I used to. I can’t “escape” with a book anymore. I am often tempted to check email, play a quick game of 2048 or search for something on Google. Maybe the fact that my attention is always divided amongst four books is part of the problem. Or maybe it’s that I’m more attention deficit than I used to be.

There is a big difference between being informed and being thoughtful. And our connected world definitely puts the bias on the importance of information. Being connected is all about being informed. But being thoughtful requires us to remove distraction. It’s the deep paths that Thoreau was referring too. And it requires a very different mindset. Our brains are a single-purpose engine. We can either be informed or be thoughtful. We can’t be both at the same time.

090313-RatMaze

At the University of California, San Francisco, Mattiass Karlsson and Loren Frank found that rats need two very different types of cognitive activity when mastering a maze. First, when they explore a maze, certain parts of their brain are active as they’re being “informed” about their new environment. But they don’t master the maze unless they’re allowed downtime to consolidate the information into new persistent memories. Different parts of the brain are engaged, including the hippocampus. They need time to be thoughtful and create a “deep path.”

In this instance, we’re not all that different than rats. In his research, MIT’s Alex “Sandy” Pentland found that effective teams tend to cycle through two very different phases: First, they explore, gathering new information. Then, just like the thoughtful rats, they engage as a group, taking that information, digesting it and synthesizing it for future execution. Pentland found that while both are necessary, they don’t exist at the same time,

“Exploration and engagement, while both good, don’t easily coexist, because they require that the energy of team members be put to two different uses. Energy is a finite resource.”

Ironically, research is increasingly showing that are previous definitions of cognitive activity may have been off-the mark. We always assumed that “mind-wandering” or “day-dreaming” was a non-productive activity. But we’re finding out that it’s an essential part of being thoughtful. We’re actually not “wandering.” It’s just the brain’s way of synthesizing and consolidating information. We’re wearing deeper paths in the by-ways of our mind. But a constant flow of new information, delivered through digital channels, keeps us from synthesizing the information we already have. Our brain is too busy being informed to be able to make the switch to thoughtfulness. We don’t have enough cognitive energy to do both.

What price might we pay for being “informed” at the expense of being “thoughtful?” It appears that it might be significant. Technology distraction in the classroom could lower grades by close to 20 percent. And you don’t even have to be the one using the device. Just having an open screen in the vicinity might distract you enough to drop your report card from a “B” to a “C.”

Having read this, you now have two choices. You could click off to the next bit of information. Or, you could stare into space for a few minutes and be lost in your thoughts.

Chose wisely.