At our New Year’s eve dinner, my wife’s cousin Izzy was taking photo after photo with her new camera. They were awful photos: she had no sense of composition, no consideration of the effects candlelight would have on her subjects, and no mastery of the camera settings that would help overcome them.
Why does this new ability to learn and share affect us as copywriters and web editors?
When I wrote my first marketing copy in 2002, I was writing for an audience who had never written anything themselves – or at any rate never anything for public consumption. I had stats to tell me what was working; I had colleagues to point out how I could improve; I went on courses. I was a professional writer, my audience weren’t even amateurs.
In 2012, Facebook will gain its billionth user. A sixth of the population of the world will be writing stuff for people to consume. And because of that mechanism of Likes and Shares, people get feedback on what they’ve written: they will be learning, something that was previously reserved only for people who wrote for a public audience (copywriters, marketers, novelists, academics and a handful of others).
Of course, not everyone who writes on Facebook becomes a better writer, but a lot of people will:
While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
That hard work, dedication and timely help is now available to anyone who posts their thoughts on a blog or social network. As a result, the barrier between the professional copywriter and the gifted amateur has shrunk to almost nothing. And where once upon a time, gifted amateurs were rare, because they had to struggle to find time for their thankless hobby, today they are everywhere, blogging, tweeting, commenting and debating.
The power to self-publish is creating a generation of educated readers. And because they are the readers most likely to share your work, they are the audience you have to appeal to.
What’s the difference between content created for amateurs, and content created for experts? Compare and contrast this Dixons advertisement from the days when it ruled the high street:
With the modern, web-only version of the brand:
The first advert is all exclamations: ‘Amazing! Free! Deal of the Year!’ The second is entirely style: it’s designed to appeal to a reader who understands and appreciates good writing. A slogan like ‘The last place you want to go’ would have been anathema to mass-market copywriters not so many years ago: flashy, self-referential advertising that impresses people in the industry, but doesn’t sell anything. Now, however, we know that our readers will get the joke.
It’s a tough time to be a copywriter, but a really exciting one. We can no longer get away with lazily flashing a special offer at people. For our new, educated audience, we need to write real content with real flair.
“Let us say that making a lolcat is the stupidest possible creative act….Yet anyone seeing a lolcat gets a second message: You can play this game too… The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about the iPad that bugs me so much. Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus has finally shown me what is wrong with it: it’s incredibly difficult to make a lolcat on an iPad. Cognitive Surplus is a book about the joy of the ‘Publish’ button, the story how the internet has given hundreds of millions of people both the opportunity and the incentive to become creative. It’s the story of the coming victory of active, sharing media over passive, solitary ones.
Courtesy of *right-click* *save image as* (and Helge.at)
But the iPad transforms the web into a passive medium –you can consume video, pictures, sounds and words on it, but it’s extremely difficult to create anything. Even sending a Tweet on an iPad takes three times as long as it does on a Blackberry. Compared to a laptop or a netbook, it’s agonisingly slow to use.
There are two things that an iPad is amazing at:
1) Looking at stuff. It is absolutely the best device in its weight class for watching Youtube videos, or flicking through photos.
2) Symbolising its owner’s wealth and importance.
For anything else, it’s full of barriers: there’s no right-click, which means no ‘view source’, no ‘image info’, no ‘save target as’, none of those essential tools for a blogger to get the stuff they need; there’s no really accurate pointer, which means copy-paste takes nine times longer than it should; even typing is a chore. Worse still, in exchange for the hermetically sealed world of gimmicky junk in the App Store, you’ve closed down the infinite possibilities of the open source world. No GIMP, no WinAmp, no OpenOffice, let alone Drupal, Apache or PHP. Instead of Googling your kitten, copy-pasting it into GIMP, clicking the text tool, and writing a few rofltastic words, you have an endless fiddle with Apps, fat fingers and the iPad’s broken file management system. And if you can’t make a lolcat, the ‘stupidest possible creative act’, you can’t do anything.
Apple market themselves as enabling creativity, and perhaps once that was true. Apple gave non-technical people tools that were once available only to geeks, breaking down barriers in editing films and photos, and producing music. But The iPad is a sad pacifier, as destructive to creativity as the television. If you truly embody the values Apple claims to promote – artistic, sociable, inspiring – you need to bin your glowing rectangular status symbol.
Because if they did an ‘I am a netbook, I am an iPad’ advert, the netbook would be Che Guevara, constantly on the move, stirring up a revolution, while the iPad would be a morbidly obese child, endlessly hitting a single button in order to watch yet another 3-second Youtube clip.
In the early days, the Internet was for reading and writing. Images took forever to load, and the nature of HTML meant accuracy was a necessity for putting anything online. As a result, the words on the web were often rather well written. Even the flame wars were in properly punctuated sentences.
Things changed: ecommerce brought people online to shop; YouTube gave the goggle-eyed TV-viewing masses to Google; finally, social networks made it easy for everyone to spew their most trivial thoughts into the cloud. Over time, search engine optimisation and the exigencies of linkbait culture have driven ‘style’ to the digital margins, a minor consideration against the all-important secret sauce of killer content and a great keyword-packed headline.
Here, then, are a few choice delicacies for anyone out there who still loves the baroque, the discursive and the prolix. Make yourself comfortable (and don’t click these links if your lunchbreak ends in 5 minutes):
Dangerous Minds, by Malcolm Gladwell
From the New Yorker, the spiritual home of long-form journalism, a perfect twisty-turny Malcolm Gladwell analysis
The Women’s Crusade, by Sheryl WuDunn
Is there any major UK newspaper or website that would publish and promote a 7-page argument for the role women’s rights play in international development?
The Great American Bubble Machine, by Matt Taibbi
“[Goldman Sachs is] a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Wow. Just wow.
Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, by Michael Lewis
The Liar’s Poker author has written an absolutely jaw-dropping dissection of the Greek financial crisis.
Know any great content that takes more than 10 minutes to read? Give me a few links in the comments below:
If, in your professional digital life, you are only looking at top-line stats like Visits, Pageviews and Conversions, then you are failing miserably at digital marketing. You urgently need to pay a visit to Occam’s Razor and learn how to genuinely judge your website’s performance.
If, however, the blog you write as a hobby has had an amazingly successful month on those top-line stats, and you decide to set up a few more sophisticated segments to see how many of these visitors from all over the world are actually engaging with your content, I would strongly recommend you think again. It can be a VERY depressing experience.
Professional wind-up merchant Brendan O’Neill, of Spiked (something he describes as an ‘independent online phenomenon’, though everyone else would call it a ‘shit blog’) has written an attack on Twitter in the Daily Telegraph:
Twitterers’ supposed passion for freedom of speech quickly shrivels up and evaporates if anyone dares to say something that goes against liberal orthodoxies. That is because, for all the claims that Twitter is an un-policeable, almost anarchic space in which law fears to tread, in truth it has created its own hierarchy and its own forms of conformism… The general political outlook of influential Twitterers is summed up in the fact that 76.1% of tweets about the AV referendum were pro-AV (and only 23.9% were anti), compared with 67.9% of the electorate that firmly said no to AV.
The liberal consensus, and its corresponding intolerance of consensus-breakers, has been fairly successfully transported into Twitter, making this social networking site a surprisingly conformist and uncritical arena.
This is the kind of tedious linkbait that wouldn’t normally be worthy of response – except that he happened to write it on the 10th anniversary of of Douglas Adams’ death, and Adams’ 1999 essay How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet provides the perfect riposte. I’ve swapped the words ‘Internet’ and ‘web’ for ‘Twitter’, but everything else is Douglas Adams’ own:
Because Twitter is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish on Twitter, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on Twitter. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone.
Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on Twitter anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’
What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on Twitter on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from Twitter is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Brendan O’Neill: a man so ignorant about the web that he can be torn apart by a someone who died in the days of dial-up.
I have noticed a DISTURBING TREND on the social web. Some people, some SO-CALLED friends of mine, some CLEVER, INFLUENTIAL people, seem to think that we no longer need capital letters. This is more than that tedious dotcom boom thing of ‘let’s put our logo in lower case to make it seem more ‘Internet’.’ This is a TERRIFYING attempt to remove one of our language’s most delightful nuances.
Great comedy is about many things. But for me, mostly, it is all about SHOUTING. So before the CAPS LOCK NAZIS come to LOCK UP my favourite key, here is the BEST SHOUTING ON THE INTERNET:
Youtube:
The BEARS are who we THOUGHT they were…
Oh, I’m sorry, what I said was HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO…
LEEEERROOOY Jenkins…
On Twitter:
Hard to explain @CaitlinMoran‘s appeal in one selected Tweet , but follow her and you’ll rapidly start to appreciate the power of the CAPS LOCK:
On Facebook:
There are many good jokes on Cage Against the Machine but the CONSTANT SHOUTING remains the best one.
In David Lodge’s effervescent farce Small World, the unspeakable Robin Dempsey gives northern author Ronald Frobisher a computerised analysis of his style.
The angry young novelist’s favourite adjectives, it turns out, are ‘grease’, ‘grime’ and ‘grey’; direct speech for male characters is signalled by a blunt ‘he said’, while women gasp, sigh, whisper urgently, or cry passionately; his female leads have biblical names beginning with the letter ‘R’; and so on. Crippled by this awareness of his own style, Frobisher endures six miserable years of writer’s block.
Small World was written in 1984. I dread to think what would happen to the poor bloke if he had the tools currently available.
Check out, for example, the terrifying Analyze Words, which takes your Twitter feed and tells you how cheery you are.
Might as well just change my handle to @miserableoldman.
There are the ever-present Wordles, which everyone seems to think are just the cutest thing. Except that if you actually wrote most of the copy for the website…
…you find yourself sitting there going ‘Underway? But that’s a horrible word. I can’t possibly be using it that much.” Then you look and you realise that it’s all over the internet, everywhere you’ve ever typed into a CMS.
There is a type of social commentator who lives off predicting that the internet - and especially Web 2.0 – is leading to a ‘lack of empathy’, and making people ‘more isolated’.
And who knows, perhaps there is something missing from online friendships for people like, for example, Americans, or women, who are quite capable of talking about their feelings (even when sober!), hugging each other without embarrassment and striking up friendships just by meeting people and chatting to them.
For us awkward British men, however, Web 2.0 has been a miracle of empathy and intimacy.
Just this last week, I’ve discovered that two old friends are also bloggers, writing the kind of witty, heartfelt and personal blogs that the medium was built for.
The strange thing about it is that, all three of us coming from the same middle-class English background, we’ve seldom talked in any kind of depth about anything that actually mattered… the odd manly arm around the shoulder if something dreadful happened, a couple of gruff, awkward questions, and then back to taking the piss out of each other and arguing about politics. God forbid we might actually talk about our emotions. What if it led to (shudder) an Uncomfortable Silence.
So to follow the progress of Ben’s alien, or to discover details of Behind Blue Eyes’ relationship with his father has been a real revelation. I feel closer to them, and, knowing I’ve read it, they hopefully feel a little closer to me.
Because no-one is ever obliged to read or respond when you blog (or Tweet, or post on Facebook), there’s no risk of the kind of awkwardness that takes place talking face to face or on the phone .
And for the uptight British male, that is a little social miracle.
