That weird web thing

In a letter dated Monday, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) argued that PFC Bradley Manning, who has been held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico for the past five months, may be the victim of political retribution. The group also suggested that the psychological damage Manning may be suffering from spending 23 hours a day alone may ruin his bid for a fair trial.

I quite concur with the observation re: the inappropriateness of calling students, “digital natives.” It’s like calling someone who has grown up in and around automobiles an “automotive native” and expecting such to know the intricacies of driving, transportation, the ecology and economics of land taken for roads, and the social and cultural contexts of automobiles.

What kind of agencies should marketers be looking for to help them win in the post-digital world? Not ‘digital’ agencies. Not ‘creative’ agencies. Not networks or boutiques or platform-agnostic transmedia nodes. Just smart people who get it and who care about doing great work that makes a difference, regardless of medium. Crap advertising already spams up every available media channel like hair in the plughole – ugly, unwanted and irritating. Nobody needs or wants to ‘have a conversation’ with a dreadful piece of film, a dumb microsite, or an unwanted activation. As marketers and advertisers we should be making stuff that is useful, delightful and engaging. Not polluting the world with lame and embarrassing work.

ARGs and transmedia have so far mostly catered to a geek audience, but this is rapidly changing and it is starting to develop into something major. Transmedia storytelling, as far as Michel Reilhac is concerned, is about to cause a total revolution in storytelling and we haven’t even seen the beginning of it.

“It is impossible to disassociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based, the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind, and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.”

If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

I thought that if I follow my dream, my life will become easier. I’ve learned that I am more satisfied with my life when I do what I want, but things do not get any easier. In fact, I’ve found the more unique and different your ideas and methods, the greater the obstacles will be thrown at you. Things get harder, they really do. […] And in the end, the best thing you can do is enjoy the ride. Don’t wait for a time when everything doesn’t suck, because it will never happen. Instead, make identifying what sucks and dealing with it part of the reality of your process and not some uninvited imposter. And then ultimately, you’ll be more likely to enjoy it all.