Russell Davies

in praise of idle

Sometimes I'm very proud to be British. This post-Christmas / New Year period has been one of those times. Because clearly, no-one can be arsed to go back to work. Most of the people at the coffee morning yesterday hadn't been back to work yet. The Guardian describe is as The Great British Skive with tons of businesses staying closed between Christmas and New Year and many not opening again until January 8th. (explanation of skive)

The Federation Of Small Businesses bleated that "The country will take some days to crank up again. We have stiff competition from China and India and if we are all away until the 8th there is an impact." Though if the competition is stiff enough to be impacted by our holidays then we're screwed already.

I was thinking about this myself this morning, wondering if I'd gone back to work yet. It's hard to know when you work for yourself and work from home. When do you go back to work? I've been answering emails and answering the phone the whole holidays, does that mean I've not stopped working yet? (I shall be listening to this to find out.)

I thought about it even more when I heard this extract from Tom Hodgkinson's How To Be Free. (The audio is only up for a week.) He pointed out that Merrie England was called that because it was a very merry place, he reads a list from Ronald Hutton's Rise and Fall of Merry England which makes it clear that before the reformation the whole year was chockful of feast days and holidays. Until the bloody puritans came along. And: "the tragedy of the 19th century was that Western man came to see himself, first and foremost, as a worker."

I think the Great British Skive isn't just a momentary aberration. I suspect it's part of a re-balancing going on in UK society, re-considering the relationship between work and life. This is partly because the economy is doing OK and we're, relatively, fat and happy at the moment. But I think it's a thing. Worth looking out for anyway.      

in praise of remote control

While I'm not a big fan of remote controls, I love the idea of remote control. Of pressing buttons and controling elaborate systems. Especially systems with a lot of autonomy. Maybe it started with The Beano. My favourite strip, by a long way, was General Jumbo. "Young Jumbo Johnson, from Dinchester, commands an army of wonderful radio controlled model soldiers, 'planes and tanks. Pressing buttons on his radio control-gadget, Jumbo put a brigade of models through manouvres in the local park". I was too young to worry about the miraculous  efficacy of his systems, it just seemed like the perfect super-powery thing. No radioactive spider nonsense. Or training long and hard in a cave. You just got a radio controlled army and started doing good.

You could take your ship out and get some fish.

Or help Mancaster Rovers prepare for a crucial European tie.

It then manifest itself in an affection for Meccano and Lego but they never really lived up to what General Jumbo promised. And they didn't offer the autonomy that I wanted from my systems. I wanted stuff that you could set up and leave running. I tinkered with BASIC in my Computer Studies O' level classes (which I had to drop because I wanted to do music) but computers didn't seem very connected to the real world at the time. I couldn't see the link between what computers could do and what General Jumbo did. What an idiot.

I suspect Arthur might have inherited a similar love for remotely controlled systems. We certainly found ourselves among like-minds at the London Transport Museum Acton Depot opening.

So, as I confessed here, I've constructed my own rather exciting Garden Railway layouts, with points and bridges, radio control and an elegant trapdoor that let me store my trains in the basement. (Partly inspired by the other ultimate moment of remote control and autonomy; the Roland Emett designed breakfast contraptions on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which for some reason doesn't seem to have been YouTubed). I've always assumed that building a huge train set in the garden was quite an untypical thing for me to do. But looking back now, it does seem part of a pattern. (And, when Anne and I ever discuss our 'starting a cafe' plan, I always fantasise about delivering the food with a model train.)

Living in a small flat rather screwed up my opportunties to construct large automated, remote-controlled systems. But then, in a garden centre, I saw Gardena's automated watering systems and I couldn't resist.

Clearly this is massive overkill for a few window boxes on a tiny balcony but I'm rather pleased with it. I'm obviously tempted by some sort of Water Computer, but Anne would definitely frown on the pointless expense of that. So I'm now starting to wonder if I can arrange some kind of liason between my Lego Mindstorms NXT and my Gardena.

This stuff'll all play nice with water and mud, don't you think?

I'm not sure why I tell you all this. But now I'm done.

new ideas

Richard, once again, is onto something.

archaeology of strategy

Gareth's found an old HHCL document which just reminds you how great and forward-thinking they were. This was written in 1994 and I remember it fondly.

As he says, they were one of the few places that made you excited about working in advertising. Richard describes this stuff as advertising archaeology which is a lovely idea. You can get a pdf here. Well worth reading. If someone started a company now with a manifesto like this they'd be more cutting edge than 99% of agencies in the world.

playing in second life

I've been mucking about a bit in Second Life recently, been exploring all the expected places. It's not been a duck to water experience, seems too hard and slightly pointless, but I think maybe I'm starting to get it.

And I was about to write a post about the Leo Burnett/BBH shenanigans and how so much of this feels like agencies early forays at interactive TV, agencies just posturing and dabbling, when I remembered this bit from Convergence Culture: "Play is one of the ways we learn, and during a period of reskilling reorientation, such play may be more important than it seems at first glance." And I decided not to be such an arse. Full marks to everyone who's playing in Second Life. Because playing is one of the ways we learn, and the more agencies that learn new stuff the better.

compression, spam, ricky martin

Jeffre and I have been talking about compression a lot recently. Thinking that there's a metaphor for brands in there - compression as an alternative to reduction. A good communication (or a good strategy) compresses a lot of information into a dense small package, rather than stripping it all out and making a thin, small package.

But here's another laboured attempt at a compression-related analogy.

Alex Ross has been writing about compression in music, it's a technique audio engineers use to give particular tracks, or elements of sound a bit of a kick, a bit of oomph, to make them stand out a little. (He explains it much better than I can. And there are great links in there. Especially this one.) The problem of course is, that everyone is starting to do it all the time. The chart above, for instance, shows you the dynamics (the highs and lows) in Ricky Martin's eponymous 1999 album  i.e. there aren't any. It's all loud. And when everything's loud radio starts sounding unbearable and everyone switches off.

Sound familiar? This is precisely the same arms-race that so much marketing communications is in. We're constantly looking for new ways to shout, new places to shout. We're in an attention arms-race and no-one can win that. Too much clever urban spam will make the average street look like that Ricky Martin chart. And that would be bad.

little ideas

Trevor made great points today about the value of little thinking. Kind of like the tyranny of the big idea but better expressed, with more jokes. He stressed the importance of thousands of little ideas in building decent brands, not one big one. (Someone will have taken better notes than me and will write it up, I'm sure.)

But I found these illustrations last night while grabbing the stuff off YouTube to make my presentation:  iSquint has these great error messages.

I suspect proper interaction designers will hate them because they're a little confusing, but I think they're, well, charmingly confusing. They suggest there's a person back there writing stuff, a person with a sense of humour. And, actually it doesn't matter much if they're a bit confusing because all you're doing really is making the pop-up go away. But these are exactly the signs of humanity that get scrubbed out when 'professionals' and 'grown-ups' get involved.

(This is when you cancel an operation and it reverts to not doing anything)

generation blind

I've been doing a lot of stuff recently about computing. PCs, PDAs, music stuff, thinking about why more  people, especially young people, aren't more excited about the possiblities of the web etc. And I've been  trying to make the point that for many (especially younger people outside the US) the phone is actually the device that offers access and technology liberation. Not the PC.  And then, as I was re-reading the magical Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, I found the stuff below. Which just put it way better than I could.

(Cory Doctorow's ability to illuminate the present via his science fiction is well worth checking out. I've  always thought that his idea of whuffie - from Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom - would be a good way to think about brand reputations; if more brands thought of themselves as continually assessed like that, and were societally encouraged to do things that were creative and useful, many more of them would be any good.)

Anyway, the phone bit is from a sequence where a young alternative journalist questions the point of a couple of guys who are installing a free wifi mesh all over town, he suggests that a cellphone already does everything they're trying to introduce.

“Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other – even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in fifteen minutes in front of their presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corrupt hearings."

“And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there’s always some old pecksniff primly telling us all that our phones don’t give us real democracy. It’s so much bullshit."

“Look, I’m not trying to be cruel here, but you’re generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it’s not the last great thing we’ll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You’re a PC guy so you think my phone is a toy.”

“Yes, in this abstract sense, there are bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I’m talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for free. I can talk to everyone with it. I can say anything I want. I can use it anywhere. Sure the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can’t invent the Web for my phone or make free long-distance calls I’m being censored?"

Brilliant.

intellectual property on holiday

Imagine being an Intellectual Property lawyer on holiday. Especially if you like fairgrounds. You'd never be able to switch off. Everywhere you turned would be somebody else (probably, presumably) infringing the copyright of someone you represent.

It must be especially tough if you work for Disney.

It's a shame, the way a generation of fairground owners have just festooned their rides with knocked-off cartoon imagery. It can be visually striking and the badness of the knock-offs is sometimes funny.

But there's something really original and thrilling about some of the original fairground graphics. This sort of stuff. But I suspect we won't see much of this preserved in real world commercial fairgrounds. It's not exciting enough for the kids. It doesn't work when the rides are all called things like Neutron and Terminator.

You get the sense though that change might be in the air, and that a number of artists who learned their trade doing graffiti are finding their way into fairground art, creating a new graphic language for a new generation of rides. That'll be an exciting combination.

There are some great round-ups of British fairground art here and here.

newspaper giveaways

Various people have been predicting the death of newspapers recently. Or at least their rapid decline.  And they've been citing British newspapers reliance on giveaways to drive circulation as one sign of the end. (Apparently more DVDs were given away than British newspapers this year than have been sold by the movie industry.) The Guardian's had huge success with their posters. And we loved The Telegraph's Famous Five CDs. And people love to mock them, point at the cost and claim they're the beginning of the end for newspapers. But aren't they really just the beginning of a new beginning? 

Because, apart from  your actual news journalism,  what newspapers are really good at is creating coherent bundles of opinion. They create interesting and useful edits of the cultural world; at the moment mostly through criticism and reviews, but the posters and DVDs could be seen as their first forays into distributing the actual stuff, not just pointing to it. I could imagine subscribing to a Guardian film-club curated by their reviewers.

Of course, the papers that have a less defined cultural perspective will struggle here. The Indepedent's differentation always seem to be based on adolescent politics to me, so I'm not sure what cultural thing I'd like them to guide me through. Maybe puzzles.