This is news? “Clickbait” journalism in the digital-social age.

Where’s Mr. & Mrs. Waldo?

While reading the “newspaper” online I came across a couple stories that captured my attention. I clicked on them both not because they were newsworthy (they weren’t) but because they appealed to my socially & digitally trained brain. The same brain that grew up reading long form magazine pieces in The New Yorker and Field & Stream; not to mention spending hours slowly devouring the Sunday paper, digesting sections like a python moving rodents down its throat.

That was then.

These stories are classic examples of the sort of content we feed on now. Both are fairly meaningless by old-school journalism definitions. Nobody died or got hurt. Nothing really is at stake.

The story about vandals knocking over a sandstone goads us into clicking its link, pushing our buttons to judge and to vilify. In this way it is like those “news” stories about drunken beachgoers tormenting a baby dolphin. We have to see these cretins and pillory them. Seeing for ourselves is made possible by amateur video or photography.

The other story functions in the same way but by pushing completely different buttons. The author beseeches us to try and find the “mystery couple” from this “Instagram-worthy…magical photograph.” The picture is of a bride and groom posing on a pretty spot in Yosemite. They are not famous. The photographer is not important. The location is unquestionably on infinite tourist-y photo albums. The chance discovery and the chance to discover are what makes this story click-bait.

Not long ago neither piece would be considered news. Now they probably get more clicks aka readers aka viewers than headlines about bombs falling in Syria.

Putting digital in its place. People are and always will be analog.

Digital gone to far (image from Videodrome)

Every time I hear marketing people use the word “digital,” and indeed I use it myself, I keep going back to something Rishad Tobaccowala wrote in his excellent essay, Four Thoughts on the Future of Advertising: “The world might be digital but people are analog.”

He gives plenty of texture around the comment (how agencies overcompensate for various deficiencies by stressing digital, etc.) but one can take the comment at face value and still glean plenty, especially in the wake of Steve Jobs’ recent passing.

From day one, Jobs understood how much technology depended on the human touch, figuratively and literally. And that if there were a one-word catchall it wouldn’t be “digital” but rather “design.” And design, Jobs said, was not merely how good something looked but how well it worked.

To him (and for us), Digital was more than just tools but extensions of our limbs and imaginations. Not hardware and software. Lifeware. Sight, feel and now voice are the operating principles that drive Apple. Not “technology solutions,” a phrase, like the word digital, that couldn’t sound more inhuman if it tried.

Jobs introduces iPad. More than hardware and software…
Lifeware!

Oh, the irony! For the last decade or longer we marketing geniuses have gone great guns trying to bolster our digital creds, doing everything in our power to look savvy, often at the expense of working savvy. We learned the hard way that flashy microsites were likely meaningless to our client’s businesses. That hundreds of thousands of views on You Tube often meant winning a popularity contest without any prize. That brands aren’t social just because they’re on Facebook and Twitter. And so on…

The costs have been tremendous. To us and to our clients. But make no mistake clients are as culpable as we are. The clamoring for digital came from all corners. I’d argue that social media (another tetchy term) has exploded the myth of digital, reminding us Tweet by Tweet that people are and always will be living, breathing, human beings; in other words: analog.

However painful the learning curve, for Adland this is good news. Agencies are at their best when we put ideas before clients and, dare I say, technology.

The insect kingdom: Even nature has a digital vibe.

Firefly

Blackberry

I was sitting on my front porch this weekend, at twilight, smoking a cheap cigar and listening to the cicadas and crickets rev up for the evening. It’s a strange racket they make, when you sit back and think about it. Whirring, clicking and even beeping, they sound… almost digital. It was as if the sun went down and all our devices crawled outside and… Oh my God, it’s Night of the Living Blackberries!

It hit me how similar insects look and sound to the myriad devices we all harbor: hard, shiny skins, black or translucent or wild in color. The aforementioned noises some of them make. The way they move: click, click, click. Shining intermittently, fireflies (actually beetles) remind me of my Blackberry… Or is it the other way around?

Not many people know this about me but when I was a boy I had a thing for insects. I collected butterflies and moths, raising them from caterpillars to adults. Waking up to a giant Cecropia Moth crawling up my bookshelf is a sight not soon forgotten. I kept a box of crickets on the back porch, much to our cat’s delight. For a time I even had a pet Black Widow spider, much to my mom’s horror. I named her Killer Queen.

Cecropia Moth, surprisingly common in Chicago

The attraction was more than skin deep. I tore into books and movies about the insect kingdom. I must have read my Time Life book of Insects a million times. I learned about metamorphosis and exoskeletons and the differences between species and all their various idiosyncrasies. In college, I parlayed this knowledge into a minor in entomology. Needless to say, I probably know more about insects than any of you.

I know what you’re thinking: what a dork! Perhaps but I met my future wife showing her my collection of butterflies and moths.

And so I watch and listen to these amazing creatures, remembering a time before PC’s and smart phones, being a boy, an odd one at that, chasing fireflies and collecting moths by the porch light. And then my phone starts buzzing, like a June bug. Happy summer, everyone!

Ode to my laptop. More than a delivery system, she is my friend, confidant and co-conspirator.

I have a very special relationship with my laptop computer. For going on 15 years I’ve owned one, almost since Apple began making them. I hooked up with my first at Leo Burnett, where they doled out Macbooks to the copywriters and desktops for the art directors. I still think we writers got the better deal. Back then, few of us actually knew how to use a computer and so Leo Burnett provided mandatory lessons. A saucy blond woman taught me, which, at the time, may have been the biggest motivator to take the class. Like most creative people, I loathed tutorials, even when they were for my own good. Needless to say, I’m glad as hell I went. In retrospect, I should have been first in line.

My machine quickly smote me. You have to realize how exotic these svelte devices were, coming off an IBM Selectric or whatever the hell we’d been using. The IBM machine was swell…like your mother-in-law. Believe it or not, lots of writers still hacked away on manual typewriters or gave their copy to assistants to type. Sounds like ancient history but it isn’t. I’m talking 1996.

No love lost here.

Within a couple years we became inseparable, my laptop and I. Now it’s like we’re married, only without human frailty. She stays up with me at night telling me her secrets. In the morning I run to see what she’s saved for me. I take my laptop everywhere. She is way more than a tool. The Ipad or Iphone might be sexier but they do not seduce me. As a writer, I cannot ply my craft on those devices.

I realize the “life online” idea is nothing new. It’s so 1999. But that’s not what I’m talking about. My relationship with my computer is more involved than what teenagers have with smart phones or executives and their Blackberries. Those people can’t wait to get the new, new version of whatever their using. Me? I get attached to the hardware. I hold on until the bitter end. Though dead, I still have my 2004 G4. The dings on its silver shell are special to me. As is the backstage pass sticker from the 2005 Secret Machines concert I attended at Cabaret Metro.

Even though my new computer rocks, I can’t chuck the old one. I started this blog on that machine. I wrote the final draft of The Happy Soul Industry and Sweet by Design on it. It is also where I wrote my last TV commercial, for Cabot stains. Alas, my G4 died two years ago. Ironically, it now rests under the landline in my office, which I never use anymore either.

I bet many of you (writers especially) would have a hard time voluntarily getting rid of your old laptops if your company didn’t take them from you.

Is it old school to think of technology this way? I don’t know. Musicians fall in love with their instruments. Especially guitarists, right? When you use a machine to create stuff it takes some of the credit; it becomes a part of you. As awesome as the latest flat screen TV is, it’s still only a delivery system and, as such, the newer one is always better.