We have a generation that is growing up with modern computing interfaces. Instead of creating new tools for education, we are still pushing the “classic” models onto them. Why?
Om Malik, from his blog article The Paradigm Shift
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Educating Obsolescence
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That Ivory Orbit
The Authenticity of ‘Got Milk’
Back in 1993, the California Milk Processor Board needed a fix. The problem? Improve milk sales. Dairy was in a slump. Focus groups conducted by Jon Steel — a partner at advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners — painted a fevered picture of an emotional connection to milk in its absence. Testimonials gave pitch and tenor to this portraiture. Milk was a ‘thing’ and if it wasn’t sitting in the fridge, was breakfast (never mind cereal) even an option?
Steel walked his findings back to the advertising group, reporting that the problem was “about running out of milk”. Jeff Goodby, another partner, casually mentioned
Why don’t we call it ‘Got Milk’ with a question mark?
That’s the part of the story people focus on — that simple, concentrated beam of inspiration wherein two words define a campaign and that campaign scrawls an indelible scar across the collective cultural face. ‘What was in his head when inspiration struck,’ is the cat call of countless advertising students. Or at least, those who were around in 1993 or studied the campaign’s impact in higher ed. It’s all romance and theater.
Yet the invisible part of the story is that milk is not essential to our diet. Calcium, sure. But calcium comes in numerous shapes and sizes, you can get it (as you could in 1993) as a supplement. So the advertising firm couldn’t exactly claim calcium essential nutrition like vitamins A or B.
Instead, the bright folks at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners decided to hit you in the heart. Everyone can relate to the classic milk mustache you had as a kid after taking a swig in the morning, before social niceties interfered with the great, big morning gulp. ‘Got Milk’ takes us back to the simple days of childhood, illustrated by this celebrity on this month, that celebrity the next. It gently tugs on your childhood memories while altering to the celebrity du jour, showing just how malleable a brand can be when it wants to be, when it needs to be.
Almost three decades later, ‘Got Milk’ still defines what an authentic approach to brand is while cat calling from the red seats, ‘you have to be flexible, you have to be supple’.
Most importantly, you have to be honest.
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The Cost of Narrative
In 2004, HBO aired a series called Deadwood, a Western-style show by creator David Milch. Milch’s vision of Deadwood trafficked in all the traditional tropes of the Wild West, but applied contemporary sensibilities to its numerous subplots, making for a compelling narrative.
At the time, HBO was well on its way to transforming into a premium programming channel with the help of shows like The Sopranos, David Chase’s crime masterpiece about family, money, and trust. The Sopranos changed the way American audiences viewed television, leveraging long-form narratives in ways that echoed prior network shows like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue 1 yet reflected contemporary social dilemmas viewers could relate to.
As a result, The Sopranos won numerous Emmy and Peabody awards, combining razor-sharp writing with excellent casting and direction. Deadwood, gritty, dusty, followed in those same footsteps, redefining the Western and capturing award after award.
Then, after three seasons, it ended2.
Brian Boone, writing for Looper, offers a litany of reasons for Deadwood’s cancellation: expense, lower viewership numbers, corporate infighting, managerial chaos.
The unseen bruise, purple and malformed, is trust in the HBO brand. Premium narratives require conjunct faith: if you’re going to be dignified in your storytelling, if you’re going to maintain intricate plot structures and characterization (such as The Wire 3), viewers need assurances the show is going to breathe until its story is finished. After all, audiences are committing the time of their lives — the only real currency in the world — to these stories.
1 NYPD Blue was also created by David Milch and garnered much acclaim for its gritty portrayal of the life of New York City police officers, both professionally and privately.
2 Not terribly surprising, shows end all the time. The challenge with Deadwood stems from its then popularity, launching the careers of Timothy Olyphant and Ian McShane. One could make numerous parallels with shows such as Arrested Development, a postmodernist comedy about a dysfunctional family in real estate, or even Firefly, a space Western about being on the wrong side of a war.
3 I’d argue that The Wire still remains the most elegantly crafted crime narrative on modern American television with a very close second going to Breaking Bad. It seems important to note that capitalism yields an unseemly hitchhiker called ‘brand’. Brand influence conflates truth with elements of fiction. Sadly, consumers are mostly untrained in filtering brand truthiness.
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Writing Meet Wall
“You’ve gotta see some of the new stuff we’ve got. Dustin, show him the wall. I’m just calling it the wall.”
– Mark Zuckerberg character as written by Aaron Sorkin in The Social NetworkKevin Roose’s new book, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation sits in that marketing sweet spot — compelling idea inoculated with just the right amount of fear to stimulate a purchase. After all, show of hands — who can relate to the fear of being replaced at your job by technology? One invisible challenge with living in a Technological Revolution is it’s hard to identify a Technological Revolution when you’re living through it. History is a better sleuth at that sort of thing.
One of the clearer insights in Futureproof: A.I. cannot replace mankind’s capacity for creativity. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are among this year’s buzzwords pulsing Vegas-like from Silicon Valley. But like Vegas, the promise of both is less relevant right now. Just take a look at Facebook’s failed efforts at relegating content moderation to algorithms rather than people. Turns out, people are better at editing, better at connecting socio-cultural contexts and content’s intertextuality.
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ProRAW
Kirk McElhearn has an excellent deconstruction of Apple’s new photographic format, ProRAW, which turns out to be mostly overzealous marketing lingo.
More, McElhearn comprehensively unpacks what RAW is, how it works, and how ProRAW differs from the more traditional RAW formats used in modern DLSRs and mirrorless cameras.
One of the key elements of raw files is that they are not demosaiced. Demoisaicing is when an algorithm interprets the colors of the various pixels according to how light is recorded after traversing color filters, applies white balance settings, and more. This is complex, and this article from the developers of the Halide camera app explains the process.
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Annihilation
Day 25: 16mm f/2 | ISO: 160 | SS: 8000 Backyard shot. Typeface test.
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The Foreboding Bench
Day 24: 16mm f/1.4 | ISO: 160 | SS: 2000 -
Among The Dead
Day 23: 16mm f/1.4 | ISO: 160 | SS: 2000
