IMing recently on Yahoo Chat, I noticed the other-party-status-report telling me the person I was chatting with was “hammering out a wicked comeback.”
Usually, this small gray line of text just says the other person “is typing.”
I wasn’t sure how what I had written would merit “a wicked comeback.” I mentioned it to my conversation partner and found out that one of our IM clients had inserted this snarky turn of phrase into our interaction all by itself.
Doesn’t it make you wonder how often your virtual communication is being framed in a way of which you are unaware–and which may or may not have any real connection to
Don’t get me wrong–I like that companies are shooting for a more authentic and playful voice. But in this case, the locus of the voice was inappropriate.
Bill Breen wrote in Fast Company:
“Our sense of what’s “real” in this post-postmodern world takes on all kinds of strangely distorted shapes and guises, as if it’s reflected back at us from a swirl of fun-house mirrors.”
When a distinctive voice gets thrown into the mix in a way that makes it seem like part of someone’s personal communication, it’s really that person that’s getting branded, not the company. I don’t want the personality of my software superimposed on my communication.
When tools start speaking for the user, rather than the user speaking through the tools, it just makes communication more difficult.
Related posts:
Meet the New Authenticity
Mundane is the New Fun
Joan Acocella looks at a a few books about child-rearing
and explores the zeitgeist through the lens of our current parenting practices. The piece looks at the complex relationship between shifting behaviors, norms, and pressures, the products and services that emerge to serve them, and the medium- and long-term societal consequences. Fascinating stuff.
When the student goes off to college, overparenting need not stop. Many mothers and fathers, or their office assistants, edit their children’s term papers by e-mail. They also give them cell phones equipped with G.P.S. monitors, in order to track their movements. In Marano’s eyes, the cell phone, by allowing children to consult with their parents over any problem, any decision, any “flicker of experience,” has become the foremost technological adjunct of overparenting.
…
Students provided with such benefits may study harder and, upon graduation, land a fancy job. On the other hand, they may join the ranks of the “boomerang children,” who move straight back home. A recent survey found that fifty-five per cent of American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, and fourteen per cent between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, live with their parents. Among the reasons cited are the high cost of housing, heavy competition for good jobs, and the burden of repaying college loans, but another factor may be sheer habit, even desire. Marano and others believe that, while hovering parents say that their goal is to launch the child into the world successfully, the truth lies deeper, in some dark dependency, some transfer of the parent’s identity to the child.
Ranger station, Sabino Canyon, AZ, January 2009
Check out the fire danger indicator: the slider is a Smokey Bear head.
It’s a smart opportunity to build the visual aspects of their brand into a somewhat ordinary presentation, creating a bit more personality and engagement.
See also: Juice Is In The Details and What Is The Loon Smoking?
The language on the side of the label where it now says “Coke original formula” will change to say “Coke Classic original formula.” “Every place else in the world it is called Coca-Cola, except for in North America."
What is blendo? Michael Gosney, publisher/editor of Verbum, the Journal of Personal Computer Aesthetics, calls it "the parallel convergence of art forms" combining "anything and everything – type, bitmap paintings, vector graphics, scanned images, animation, 3-D…." School of Visual Arts academic Timothy Binkley describes computer art as the creation of "a prodigious menagerie of things" brought into being "merely by waving a magic wand." It's a fair characterization of the blendo approach. You take whatever elements are relevant (or irrelevant) to your purpose and put them into your picture.