Imagine a system that immediately captures every bit of information about a trip, and stores it permanently in an accessible, portable format—and on top of that, has been designed to fit your routine, not the other way around.

My parents created that system in the early ’80s, and they did it with pen and paper: since the beginning of their collective travel experiences, my parents have been keeping a log of all their travels in a series of large-ish, ruled books.

The big travel book.

The book, marked to improve navigation.

My parents’ day on February 7, 2009 started in Arcata, at 8:42 AM. The wood show at the town hall in Fort Bragg was excellent. They drove around with the top down. Apparently they spoke to me…I was riding my bike along the lake in Chicago. Awesome data, right?

In the lower right-hand corner, you can see that Heaven’s Dog, on Mission & 7th in SF (YELP), was really, really good.

This is a recap of a couple days spent on the train. Click the picture to view larger.

This was Saturday, January 3. We went to the de Young museum; note the attachments on the left-hand side. We also “bookmarked” that we needed to look up 880 El Camino Del Mar, which had what we called a “Fuck You View”. If you like, I can elaborate on that in the comments.

The active book lives in the back seat of my parents’ traveling car, and the others are part of their permanent collection. At this point, there are four books, covering 30 years of travel, with entries capturing time, date, location, weather, car mileage, expenditures, activities and reviews. Further, there are attachments in the book from places along the way. Sometimes they’re taped in, other times they’re stickers from various places, and yet others just sit in the book, held by the tension of the pages. The three of us have shared entry duty as long as I can recall.

But this familiar thing became more interesting after I looked at it from a digital point of view, hoping to identify some core human behaviors that translate into the digital ones that some of us have adopted so readily.

In a way, my parents’ analog system makes Dopplr look like a royal pain in the ass, and a restrictive one at that. Certainly, the book system is far from perfect. It’s completely private: it doesn’t account for their nascent desire to share their travels with the world. But when it comes to logging and cataloging their trips, it’s pretty damn good. It’s simple, fast, and never fails due to lack of 3G service. As I stared at the books a little longer, everything started to look like well-formatted XML, with fields that would be easily parsable into useful data. [And in fact, my dad is going a little Feltron on the data right now, bringing the trips into Excel Workbooks so he can start to analyze the trends associated with our collective travels. Including, I hope, gas mileage. Their Volkswagen Cabrio (an adorable car) is a horrific gas-guzzler.]

This is where most of our trips started: Arcata, California.

While I can’t pretend that the my parents’ trip catalog is a definitive case study, I do know that it’s interesting/helpful: watching my parents’ behavior (after breakfast, the expenditure, location, and review went straight into the book) helped me solidify three positions from which I view “digital.”

1. While technologies are constantly changing, humans are the constant. Put more succinctly, none of this is new. While the technologies are new, and certainly the public-ness/immediacy of it all is something people are just starting to come to terms with, I’ve always been of the mind that the root, human drivers that power today’s interesting digital behaviors have been around for a long, long time.

I think my long-term internet friend and now-coworker (by the way, I forgot to write about that, ZOMG thanks Undercurrent for hiring my best internet friend) Johanna summed it up best:

“Motivations and behaviors across digital channels are examined and pontificated on as if they are completely new sets of behaviors that we have never seen before. In some ways, they are new, since new platforms are popping up every day that serve different purposes for different types of information and relationships between people. But the fundamentals of social behavior online shouldn’t be that surprising to us, because they are rooted in a long heritage (as in, centuries old) of group behaviors.”
Johanna Beyenbach, Cellar Door: “Social Behavior is not new”, February 17, 2010.

2. You can’t make people want to do something new, but you can make them do something that’s very similar to something else they’re already doing. It’s hard to get people to adopt a new behavior—say, logging their training on DailyMile—if they’ve never used a training log in their life. But for someone like me, who’s used training logs since I was very young (and even wrote my own little Access program to act as roll-my-own digital training log in 10th grade), DailyMile’s tracking functionality makes perfect sense, and I use it religiously after every workout. For my parents, who have been tracking every parameter of every trip they’ve ever been on, Flickr and Wordpress made perfect sense and were rapidly adopted by both of them.

Put both of these things together (as I’m sure you have) and you understand why digital is so fucking interesting. People are openly sharing/spreading the minutae of their behaviors and interests, and—holy shit—you can use that information to tailor experiences to things you know they’ll like. You can look at the psychology of the collective in a new, legitimate way, rather than working backward from individuals and models for behavior.

I said three positions, right? I’ll get to the third shortly.

From books to databases.
It’s funny now to look back at some of the work my dad does when searching down our ancestors; he’s big-time into genealogy and spends a lot of time in libraries, tracking down censuses, working his way through wills, public records, and other pieces of unstructured data to piece together the lives of those that came before us. My descendants will be able to look back through my parents’ travel books and will get a pretty good picture of their lives together—from Cadillac, Michigan, through Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Northern California and travel points between—including their penchant for thrift, good food, national parks, and leisurely routes.

This is James Monroe Watts’ last will and testament. These are the kinds of documents my dad has to hunt down to understand how my grandparents lived.

If you’re looking to find out what I’m interested in, and what I’m up to, it’s pretty easy; I’m contributing almost everything about what I do with my life to some queryable database. You can see where I go, when I go there, and who I went with, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

In the morning, I go to the coffee shop. I’ve been there 15 times before, and when I post that “I’m there” to Foursquare and Twitter, I’m reminded of this fact. The act of posting that location results in the creation of a set of database entries, not just on Foursquare’s servers, but also on Twitter’s. And on Twitter, that act captures not just that I was there at that moment in time, in a particular location, but also that I had 1,485 followers and that the colors on my profile were a particular set of hex values. Additionally, consider the transactional data that comes out of my coffee-shop visit, including what I purchased, how much I spent, and how much I decided to tip. Further, while I’m at the coffee shop, I’m reading a book on my Kindle, and Amazon knows what I bookmark, what I read and how quickly I read it. They know if I tend to purchase some books and not read them all the way through, and they know if I spend a lot of time on some pages of certain books. Further, there are photos that I took of my latte, which happen to be geotagged and contain megabytes of data that could be examined, including color and composition.

Brought together, all this data (much of it structured, meaning it’s parsable by computers…unlike photos, for example) would provide a pretty accurate picture of my life at a given moment. And that’s where we go from “nothing is new here” to “holy shit the world is changing.” And if you can’t see that it is, you need to wake up or retire.

As we’ve all seen, when you apply the rapidly changing set of digital technologies to a group of people—who ostensibly are just living out their lives—is that there is an ever-accumulating cloud of data exhaust that is a result of everyday behavior. And all of that exhaust translates into context surrounding my life, my identity, who I am (when you include all the “private” records) and who I fashion myself to be (those things that I choose to publicize). Which brings me to my third position:

3. As our lives move away from unstructured, unsearchable data, scrawled in books and archived in Tupperware containers, and move toward flowing, connected, open datasets, the ways we choose to live our lives will continue to change, and the impact of our choices will have a greater impact on the lives of others.

Consider Wal-Mart and their Retail Link software, recently covered in a special section of The Economist: it analyzes over one million transactons every hour, and gives suppliers real-time access to their products’ sales statistics, including the other products in each of their customers’ shopping carts.

It’s not too crazy to imagine a system that would take transactional data and combine it with relevant statistics regarding public social profiles to create an amazingly sophisticated CRM system. Or to imagine a system that allows governments to make better decisions based on real behavioral data, rather than on the stated desires of those who decide to vote. In the inverse, it’s easy to imagine a system that examines all of my purchases and gives me an environmental/cultural impact score, or a system that looks at my complete digital life (from transactions to relationships to email to photos) and recommends books, travel ideas, products, and even lifestyle changes that would help me live out an optimal life.

From data exhaust to identity.
That last bit, for me, is the most important to consider. If the collected data on human behavior can help me live a better (if different) life than the one I led before, my ability to construct an identity that makes me happy changes a bit. My access to desirable life patterns—those life stories that we can appropriate or toss aside, such as the narratives around “being a man” or “having a career” or “being an artist”  that provide context to my life—broadens significantly, and becomes infinitely more detailed.

Consider this thoughtful review of the thinking on identity done by John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873) and Charles Taylor (1931 - ), proposed by Kwame Anthony Appiah:

The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity is a good thing (if self-authorship is a good thing) but the identity must make some kind of sense. And for it to make sense, it must be an identity constructed in response to facts outside oneself, things that are beyond one’s own choices. […]

As Charles Taylor notes, ‘I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters.’ Let me propose a thought experiment that might dissuade those who speak of self-choice as the ultimate value. Suppose it were possible, through some sort of instantaneous genetic engineering,  to change any aspect of your nature, so that you could have any combination of capacities that has ever been within the range of human possibility: you could have Michael Jordan’s fade-away shot, Mozart’s musicality, Groucho Marx’s comic gifts, Proust’s delicate way with language. Suppose you could put these together with any desires you wanted—homo- or hetro-, a taste for Wagner or Eminem. (You might saunter into the metamorphosis chamber whistling the overture to Die Meistersinger and strut out murmuring ‘Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?’) Suppose, further, that there were no careers or professions in this world because all material needs and services were met by intelligent machines. Far from being a utopia, so it seems to me, this would be a kind of hell. There would be no reason to choose any of these options, because there would be no achievement in putting together a life.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity

It seems to me we’re marching ever closer to this scenario: imagine the scenarios I envisioned above (smarter governments, identities informed by the whole of human decision-making, marketing departments that know everything about how I’ve fashioned my life) and consider the following quote, pulled from a recent set of interviews by Henry Jenkins:

GOODPLAY: In the dialogues, we asked what the participants saw as acceptable, and what they viewed as the risks and benefits of experimenting with and exploring one’s identity online. Both adults and teens cited the ability to test out an “ideal self” as one of the primary benefits of online identity play. The two groups also identified common risks associated with identity play, such as not being true to yourself or becoming disconnected from your offline self. However, as you note, we did observe differences between adults and teens in their attitudes toward online identity play. In addition to testing out an ideal self, teens mentioned the opportunity to recreate themselves online. Adults, on the other hand, were more likely to celebrate the ability to accentuate existing aspects of their personality.
Henry Jenkins, Confessions of an Aca-Fan: “Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About Digital Ethics (Part One)”, February 26, 2010.

People are already using digital tools to fashion an identity that may be idealized or shifted from “reality”, just in the way a tilt-shift lens modifies a camera’s view of the world (as shown above). They’re using the reactions of their social graph to judge what features of their lives get to stay and which ones have to go. The internet is becoming the “metamorphosis chamber” from Appiah’s thought experiment; unlike Appiah, however, I don’t consider the future state of identity creation much of a dystopia, if only because much of the data that is created is done so without intent. Further, it’ll be a long time before all our physical/material needs are met by perfectly efficient machines; constraints on our ability to create identity will always exist.

But a world where data are used to make decisions within a deeper field of context feels like a better one to me, and it feels like a world with less advertising and more desirable information delivered efficiently to the people who desire it most.

And that’s not so bad. Please let me know if any of that made sense.

References:

• Johanna Beyenbach, Cellar Door: “Social Behavior is not new”, February 17, 2010.
• Marisa Zupan, Hello Mari.Stella: “Our digital stone age and why we need to trust our intuition”, February 9, 2010.
• Henry Jenkins, Confessions of an Aca-Fan: “Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Conversations About Digital Ethics (Part One)”, February 26, 2010.
• Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity. 2007, Princeton University Press.
• “Data, Data Everywhere” Special Report in The Economist. February 25, 2010.

May I offer another post?

• April 12, 2010 — Gaming FourSquare with Bill Brasky (4)
• March 10, 2010 — Redesigning Foursquare’s User Pages (1)
• March 3, 2010 — Data Overload – Economist (0)

It strikes me that, more and more, our digital lives are mirroring our real lives in ever more peculiar ways. From reflecting our everyday behaviors to forming new ones, the circles between “digital” and “real” are less a thoroughly overlapping Venn diagram and more a shared area. Which I hope for all of you is as fascinating as it is for me.

The nice thing is that it’s allowing more traditional fields of study to be assimilated into and affected by the things that happen online.

For me, one of the most interesting new overlaps is the one between international relations and digital social networks. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple years now, and I’ve been searching for a list of the major empires & superpowers through history. I finally found a list, and today whipped up the graphic at the top of the post. It’s by no means comprehensive, but it does serve to illustrate a point: the world tends to have a few major powers, and those powers tend to dominate for a while before they are surpassed by an up-and-coming state with greater resources and greater geographic focus.

Which seems pretty similar to how digital networks tend to come and go.

Which leads me to my conclusion:

Digital social networks are the new nation-states. Yeah, I said it. They share more with real nation-states than is immediately apparent. They have laws: the laws of each social network-state are those imposed by its creators or built by its population from terms and conditions, to user experience, to what things one user can see and that another cannot. Take, for example, the litany of Facebook T&C changes over the years, some of which caused uprisings among its population. Their developers’ decisions govern our experiences both with the site and with the rest of the people within the system. And while Facebook and Myspace and others are not sovereign in the way all true nation states are, it is conceivable that someday, there will be digital nationality to go along with or be codefined by “real” nationality.

There are value exchanges among people and people and between people and companies within this digital nation-state, laws can be broken and there are shared identities among the constituents of the state that can be defined against those of other, competing states. To wit, a significant body of work suggests that there are real differences between Myspace people and Facebook people. That these distinctions tend to fall along lines of economic class is no matter; it nevertheless suggests that despite the rise of Facebook, some people see their identities as being more correctly in line with one digital nation or the other.

So, what then? I suggest 5 key changes:

1. That we start thinking of digital social networks as a potential working model for the society of the future.
2. That instead of moving from one major network to another, we work to better a chosen digital nation state for the good of all its inhabitants.
3. That Facebook and others work to elect a governing party of super-users that can help shape its future.
4. That we recognize that each digital nation state should be unique, and that each has a value that may be unrelated to its size; we recognize the validity of the United States and that of the Principality of Liechtenstein.
5. That access to these digital states be regarded as a right, rather than a privilege.

I’ll keep pushing this if you will.

May I offer another post?

• February 9, 2010 — Facebook’s Top 100 Pages (6)
• August 5, 2009 — Annoyance ~ Frequency (7)
• June 1, 2009 — Wordpress P2: Twitter, Better (2)

You’re asking for a punch in the face with all that salesy crap.
I’ve been chatting a lot about social media and its implications with my HY homies of late, as many of them have hopped on to Twitter and started talking up a storm. This post is a follow-up to a lot of conversations with a lot of people, and it rambles a bit. But here goes…

I’ve noticed that a lot of folks in the marketing space are using social networking tools for personal marketing, to position themselves as a thought-leader, and to prove that they understand/can manipulate the tools themselves to the benefit of their clients.

And as I mentioned in my lunch-and-learn at Hoffman York/Milwaukee last week, I don’t know that this is an exceptionally sustainable use for these kinds of tools tools. While it certainly is possible to use them to successfully market a personal or corporate brand, there are significantly richer possibilities that become available if we don’t try to hijack these personal communications channels and turn them into broadcast media.

As always, try breaking these new channels down into familiar, old(er) pieces.

TV is a great, if impersonal medium that excels at getting a message out to a lot of people. The telephone is not. People fundamentally reject the idea of companies calling them to sell them stuff. Hence the “do not call” list, and why every once in a while, you get a fake number when you ask a girl out. Email is the same. If I give you my email address, I hope you’ll send me things that I will want to read. Kindly keep your pitch to yourself.

To extend the point, social media channels will not be relevant from a broadcast perspective in years to come. Instead, we’ll find that people will be happy to use the channels for personal communication, and those that violate that code will be struck down upon with great vengeance and furious anger. The caveat there, of course, is that people do sometimes want to receive messages (not messaging) from brands that they trust/have an existing relationship with. [See: Zappos]

So if we can’t (or shouldn’t) force our messages on people through social networks, what should we be doing?

Probably what the Account Planning department has been up to all along: watching, listening, and applying a little intellectual rigor to the things you observe.

A foray into Daytum.
I recently signed up for a beta-test account on Daytum, and a couple weeks after submitting my email to the service, I received an invite to log in and setup my account. I’m pretty excited about it; ever since looking rather enviously at the Feltron annual reports a couple years ago, I wanted to find an easy way of tracking all the miscellany in my life for future reference.

Daytum is just that service. It allows you to create personal data sets (which can be public or private) and then create different views of those data. For instance, I’ve set mine up to track a few different dimensions of my eating habits, not from a dietary perspective, but rather to illuminate things about my personal choices/consumption habits for later examination. I’m considering adding travel bits to the data I’ll track, but I want to start small and grow with it, rather than trying to track everything about my life right off the bat.

My first take? Daytum is data-blogging at its finest. Go sign-up if you’re interested in the idea, and for inspiration, go here to see some ideas on things to track.

At first blush, the idea of data-blogging (perhaps the purest form of web-log) seems a little self-centered and, well, weird.

Here’s why it’s not.

Lifestreams, identity and data.
Over the past few years, I’ve passively left my mark online, using this blog, Twitter, Flickr, Google, last.fm, Delicious, Tumblr, Facebook and now Dopplr, Dailymile and Daytum. You’ll be able to see, eventually, every photo I’ve ever taken, every song I’ve ever listened to, the things that I’ve eaten, the workouts I did, the things I bookmarked, and all the little random utterings from my life. All of it contributed willingly, but without much thought as to the identity I’ve been creating. A lot of people are doing the same. And unlike the results of personality tests, which tend to be intentionally skewed by the test-taker, the data we’re logging says more about us than we could possibly say ourselves. I mean, if you really wanted to, you could find out almost anything about me. And that’s fine. Because I’m in passive control of what’s being said about me (if anything).

And if you take an especially shallow dive into the discussion, this all seems a little strange. It appears that a bunch of nerdy and/or self-centered folks are logging the minutiae of their lives with the hopes that some person (or ideally, some set of people) care about this information. And to that end, a lot of colleagues and clients alike are wondering why anyone would care what one of the people they “follow” (a creepy, loaded word) had for lunch.

Instead, they should be wondering why anyone wouldn’t care about the development of a massive, interconnected set of databases with rich historical information regarding the lives of millions upon millions of people (whoa). If you really stop and think about it, the topic of passive online identity creation is one of the most interesting phenomena going on today, especially if you’re a marketer.

I’m pretty sure that given some interest and good data analysis skills/tools, you could use that to do something interesting, if not something good.

Don’t you think?

May I offer another post?

• February 9, 2010 — Facebook’s Top 100 Pages (6)
• October 26, 2009 — On Digital Nation-States (1)
• August 5, 2009 — Annoyance ~ Frequency (7)

I just finished reading a phenomenal set of articles and comments regarding a recent speech by Roy F. Baumeister to the American Psychological Association last August. I highly recommend a full read of all of the following:

1. RF Baumeister’s full-text speech, “Is There Anything Good About Men”
2. John Tierney’s first post on the subject
3. John Tierney’s second post on the subject

Any Gen Gu-Ys out there, please, please comment on this and let me know what your feelings are. We all know that marketing to 18-34 year-old males is a goldmine and these articles give some pretty good, fresh insight into what we’re thinking. Because Lord (and any females in my life) knows I don’t know what I’m thinking half the time.
So here’s the insight that I found fascinating:

Several years ago my wife told me that her male students seemed surprised when she said something positive about men in a lecture. It wasn’t even all that positive — she simply said that men were not to blame for women’s eating disorders, as indicated by some research findings showing that women want to be much thinner than their boyfriends want them to be. Reflecting on the students’ reaction, she mused that the young men were already accustomed to being blamed for everything, both men’s faults and women’s problems to boot. I realized that most men below the age of 50 have never experienced masculinity as a positive thing, especially given the relentless stream of messages about male misbehavior and ostensible male oppression of women, plus the mass media depiction of men as villains and buffoons. When was the last time you heard a news story that depicted men, collectively, in a positive light? [3, above]

I mean, I feel pretty good about being a man. Seems at least easier than the alternative. But I definitely also feel a little shame about the things that I tend to do, that I tend to say, that I tend to gravitate toward. We as men are conditioned by society, culture and media to act a certain way, but also to feel bad about it at the same time. Even our conditioning has been conditioned. Which seems to be why this seems to work for me. I am man. I am incorrigible. I want burgers. Screw tofu.

[youtube]vGLHlvb8skQ[/youtube]

Whenever I see an ad that’s explicitly pro-guy, it makes me feel good, but guiltily. I don’t want to tell the women I know that I like ___ ad, because I worry that they’ll think I’m an ape. I’m not an ape. Just a normal guy with normal guy thoughts. And whenever we’re talking “normal guy thoughts”, we’ll inevitably end up on the topic of sex. Everywhere you look, men are characterized as thoughtless sex demons hell-bent on spreading their seed no matter the cost. Which may or may not be true. But Baumeister points to an interesting reason why us guys are so excited to reproduce.

It all comes down to the ratio of female to male ancestors. I was shocked to learn that over the course of human existence, 80% of women reproduced while only 40% of men ever successfully made mini versions of themselves. This basic, natural fact leads men to be more competitive, more improvisational, work harder, whatever:

For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.

For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky). [1, above]

Funny thing is, I feel like I’ll get negative responses from saying that men are more competitive, improvisational… hell, more anything than women. But hey, it helps explain this new Tom Ford cologne ad. I can see the strategy now: “Tom Ford Cologne gets you more…”

Ads like this work not just because they’re provocative, but because they help give men hope. Despite how crazy we all may be for sex, odds are we’re not going to have it. We need things like cologne to help us get noiced, to help increase our odds of scoring. We need ways to identify those GameKillers that may stand in our way of getting in the door, and we need help from things like the Philips Bodygroom to help seal the deal.

Come on, who’s going to argue with an optical inch?

In the end, though, Baumeister argues that culture uses men’s social — and biological — insecurity, “I have a 40% chance of being successful” to move forward. “Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values. They have to prevail over rivals and enemies in cultural competitions, which is probably why they aren’t as lovable as women,” he states. If we don’t produce, we don’t get to reproduce.

Sorry for wandering. Comments would be appreciated if you made it all the way through.

May I offer another post?

• February 9, 2010 — Old Spice Genius (1)
• October 17, 2007 — Oh, beautiful Ferrari (1)
• October 16, 2007 — Mmm. Targeting by BMW. (0)

Over the last week I was a little bored at night and this is the result. I tried to keep it clean and simple. Hope y’all like it.

It’s at http://exitcreative.net/.
Oh… and I turned 26 on Saturday.

May I offer another post?

• June 30, 2010 — Happy Birthday, exitcreative (4)
• March 10, 2010 — Redesigning Foursquare’s User Pages (1)
• February 26, 2010 — F*ck Yeah German Products! (7)

My grandpa would have been 90 today. His name was David Parker, and he was my mom’s dad. Not sure when this was taken but he was stylin, for dang sure. This is him on some Humboldt County beach, searching for agates. He used to make me laugh when he would magnify his eyes with his glasses.

May I offer another post?

• No Related Post

So… I just created a book of photos, ideas and some of my work to use as a resume.

Account Executives don’t usually have a book. But I’m not really a typical AE, as I’m sure you can tell if you’re a regular reader here. And I don’t like resumes, anyway. How could you possibly get your entire career, beliefs and feelings onto one page? Ha.

I would really appreciate your honest feedback about it. My mom HATES the image at the top of the post, and many of my friends have told me there’s too much BS in there and that I should get to the point. Johanna said she liked it though, so that’s a plus.

As a side note, I’m not really looking for a job, and am quite happy where I am. But I been wantin’ to make one of these for a while so I sat down with my three new buddies InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop and we had us a ball.

Look at my book by clicking here: Clay Parker Jones exitcreative resume. Enjoy, if you can.

May I offer another post?

• No Related Post

This is on Madison St. Not Madison Avenue, but just as nice. En route to Coffee, on foot.

Coffee and Croissant. Croissant: eh. Black Eye: mmmm.

Lauren of Breaking and Entering.

Chris and Natalie discuss.

Afterward. The snow prevented some from attending. Ahh, but it’s pretty!

Chicago Coffee Morning 2 happened in spite of the snowy conditions. Last night marked the first snow of the 2006-2007 Chicago winter season, and it came in with a bang. Supposed to drop several inches—even up to a foot in places—of snow over the next day.

Well, Natalie, Chris and Lauren showed up at our usual spot. Lauren was the first to arrive and was seated at the appropriate table.

Chris has no “current” blog and works in some capacity with finance. He’s apparently been through a couple blogs; I envisioned his use of blogs as somewhat like the way people use Moleskine notebooks…once they’re full, you move on to a new one when you’ve got a hankering to write or draw. I wonder if that would be an interesting way to approach blogging, with a finite number of posts. Perhaps this could be a new variant of Wordpress…It would force you to be a bit more deliberate, or could help you keep things separate as you might if you kept several notebooks going at once. I think a max of 100 posts should do it.

Lauren wants to be a planner and has interviewed at nearly every Chicagoland agency. She’s done the right thing by starting a blog at jrplanner.blogspot.com. Very appropriately named and I can’t believe she got that URL. She’s featured a nice PDF she put together on the comparison between Prefontaine and being a good planner. Find it in her sidebar, and wish her luck in finding a spot somewhere.

Natalie is a middleschool art teacher in Glencoe/Wilmette. She’s outside the blogosphere and thus provided a nice perspective on social networking and how it’s affecting the pre-teens of the nation. Or at least her neck of the woods.

Our conversation was mostly about social networking via blogs, Myspace, Friendster and Facebook, and the different ways that “real” human relationships are manifested online. I suppose, in my mind, we concluded with an idea that it’s like the difference between analog and digital pictures. For a more concrete examination of this, I recommend you check out Russell’s recent post about his use of a pinhole Polaroid camera to capture his meetings/work environments. Truly fascinating stuff.

We were talking for a bit about the differences between online and real relationships, and whether an online representation is inherently less “real” than the impression you get of an individual when you meet them in person. But Natalie brought up an interesting point… our online choices — how you lay out a Myspace page, what you include in your blog or your Flickr or your Facebook — can be just as superficial and manufactured as the way you dress, fix your hair, or style your interpersonal interactions. I, somewhat tangentially, brought up this post I wrote about identity. No need to click through… I’ll put the important part below:

I’m currently reading The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah. I was first introduced to Appiah, I think, by Prof. Movindry Reddy of Occidental College. The book was published in 2005. Appiah is professor at Princeton and is a leading thinker in the identity arena.

One of the notions that sticks out is the idea of identification and identity. “Once labels are applied to people,” Appiah writes, “ideas about people who fit the label come to have social and psychological effects. In particular, these ideas shape the ways people conceive of themselves and their projects” (Appiah, 66).

In support of this notion, or rather, to introduce it, Appiah mentions the Robbers Cave experiment of 1953, where two groups of young boys were taken to a camp in the Sans Bois Mountains of Oklahoma. The boys were from a generally homogenous white background and were settled in separate camps in the deep woods. Once each group of boys had set up camp, they were told of the presence of the opposing settlement. In a rather Lord of the Flies style, they competed against each other in a variety of physical battles including baseball and tug-of-war.

In a matter of four days, each camp (on their own!) developed an identity: one named themselves the Rattlers and the other the Eagles. The Rattlers, fittingly were the tough ones (swearing, fighting…the whole ‘tough guy’ bit) while the Eagles maintained a stoic, gentlemanly air. The really interesting part: “The groups did not arrive with these names; nor did it occur to group members that they needed a name, until they learned about the presence of another group on the campgrounds” (Appiah, 63). Somehow, within the span of four days, these kids–out of thin air–developed distinct identities.

The juncture between this idea and the online social net is that our understanding of others’ superficial identities is manufactured artificially, either intentionally or without conscious thought. It doesn’t matter anymore whether we’re talking about online or real-life identity, because both are so easy to manipulate. Chris, Natalie and Lauren, please feel free to elaborate on our discussions in the comments. This is a fascinating topic and I’m glad y’all came down to chat.

The next Chicago Coffee Morning (ed. 3) will be December 15, and then we’ll be off for the rest of 2006. So you better show up.

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The following quote is from January 12, 1999 (replayed on September 22, 2006), and is an excerpt from a discussion between WHYY’s Terry Gross and Actor James Woods, most recently of Shark, the CBS weekly legal drama. It discusses the real motivations behind many “charming” people. I certainly wouldn’t want this to be misconstrued as an indictment of all charming people, but it’s interesting nonetheless. It gets down to a very interesting point (in the second graph) that I’ve been pretty fascinated with in my own life (that is to say, my life outside of work) for quite some time. It’s really amazing to me — and not only in a bad way — the duality that almost every person struggles with, silently, on a daily basis. From the most insignificant activities (people who sing in the shower but never in front of other people) to downright lies (take Mark Foley for example), this dilemma is everywhere and affect everyone. Please don’t kid yourself by saying in your mind, “Well, sure, but not me!” Anyhow, take a moment and read the following quote:

“I have found in my rather voracious reading about many criminal types, whether they be in politics or the world of petty crime, that oftentimes, very charming people are in fact highly sociopathic. They use charm as a kind of negotiating ploy to lure people into their lives and into their circles and then “vampire-ize” them for their own ends. We see it the highest level of politics and the lowest level of street crime. Very charming people find a way to enlist compatriots in their worlds of crime.

“I believe that people, by and large, are engaged in a chronic, manic denial over who they really are… so they’re always rationalizing or defending a position that is in fact usually the opposite to how they truly behave behind closed doors, or in moments when they don’t feel they’re being observed.”

Again, I’m not saying that you’re a criminal if you can be charming, or have many friends, or can be manipulating at times. Certainly there are many people out there that have these characteristics that don’t engage people in a malevolent/misanthropic way. But it’s certainly something to think about, and perhaps a nice place from which to jump into a fit of self-improvement.

So… since this is a blog about brands and advertising, Mr. Woods’ quote serves to bring up a great point. There’s a huge number of “charming” companies out there. Tobacco companies come quickly to mind, but there are many more that escape immediate recognition.

Obviously, you don’t want to be one of these charming, vampire-like people. And I’m sure it brings no satisfaction to kind-hearted people to work on a brand that is two-faced. But you might be living this lie without even knowing it. I was really worried over the past few months that I could be one of these people, that I was charming people into friendship and using them for my personal gain. This is one of my most significant insecurities (why am I blogging about it?!) and I’ve thought a great deal about how to approach changing such a personality characteristic. The keys are listed below. I’ve written them from the perspective a human being, rather than a brand. But the lessons apply to communications as well.

1. Honesty

This is the hardest step, and could possibly ruin you. If you’ve acted in a sociopathic, charming sort of way, it’s probably about time to stop messing around and be real about who you are. Some people that are used to the earlier version of yourself will probably reject the new version, but that’s to be expected. These people will quickly drop out of your circle of friends, possibly say mean things about you, or cause you some harm. But that’s OK, because you met and befriended these people under false pretenses. They (1) have a right to be mad and (b) you probably shouldn’t have been hanging out with them in the first place. In the end, all will be better, and your remaining friends will like you better for your recent change. They may even buy you a beer.

2. No, really. Honesty.

As heart-rending as the first step was, after a few months have passed, you need to re-assess how truly honest you are being. You’ll find that you’ve slipped in some places, which, again, is to be expected. If you’ve been living a lie for a really long time, you may have just reverted back to your old charming, seductive self. It’s time to try again, and really scrutinize all your relationships. The affects (both good and not-as-good) will be the same as you encountered in step 1.

3. Focus on who you are, not what you do.

People that are really charming do well in life because of the things they do, not because of who they are on the inside. They are probably attractive, are good conversationalists, and pick up the tab for their friends at the bar. They are probably generous to a point, good/capable dressers and are likely very street-smart. But they probably also have enormous egos and are disingenuous about the very fiber of their existence. So the key to shedding all of these fun characteristics (the ones listed above) is to focus on who you are on the inside. Get spiritual, do some yoga, maybe work out more, drink more water/less alcohol and take vitamins. Become clean of body and of mind by sitting back and taking inventory of your life’s decisions. This may take some time; set aside an hour per day for introspection. In the end you’ll find yourself a kinder, gentler, more Mother Theresa-like human (I hope!). Or seek professional help.

4. Give up all manufactured appearances.

Stop worrying about your hair, your skin, weight, beard, clothes etc. Good, real friends/lovers/acquaintances/colleagues don’t really care about this stuff. Anyone who really, actually cares about the aforementioned characteristics (unless in regard to your physical/mental health) is not a real friend. And as for the “quality” of the friends you keep… re-assess your criteria for your friends. I know this has been mentioned before but it bears bringing up again.

Now what?

So, ad-folk, I challenge y’all to apply this to your brands/companies, and see where you end up. This is a really entertaining exercise, and is probably best undertaken by people who are very secure in their jobs. This applies to agencies as well. Clients are probably not going to be all that stoked to hear the results of this survey, unless they are “cool clients” or you’ve got a great relationship with them. Or, alternatively, you can take a look at your brand from a “charming” perspective and not tell anyone about it — just do it for your own good. In the end, you should end up in a place that is very “customer-centric” or, rather, you’ll end up building great relationships with the customers/clients that you have.

But, come on, a little white lie never hurt anyone, right? …

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The whole St. Elsewhere CD is about figuring out who you are (as far as I can tell). Here’s some lyrics that are illustrative of a point I was making in a comment response to my friend Terra Tolley:

You see everybody is somebody
But nobody wants to be themselves
And if I ever wanted to understand me
I’d have to talk someone else
But every little bit helps

Terra put it quite clearly:

“Our concept of our own identities (whether in marketing or by individuals) are completely distorted from other people’s ideas of what our identies are. Perceived identities are often the projections of the observer’s own insecurites or proud attributes. Don’t people become attracted to those that represent what they either are (and enjoy the narcissism attached) or what they are lacking? Have a an acquaintance, a family member, and old friend and yourself write down ten characteristics of your identity. Are they truly about you or what the people writing admire or lack?”

Just an interesting sidebar to a discussion from earlier in the week.

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