communication. community. cognition.
Archive for July, 2010
Driven to Distraction
Jul 9th
The following post may make me extremely unpopular, but someone has to say it:
Keep your laws off my cell phone.
Texting While Driving
Several states and municipalities have instituted their driving-and-cell-phone laws, and are smugly sure they have now made life safe for everyone. I have a philosophical objection to the idea that you can now ban behavior based on the standard of a “distraction,” because once the precedent is established, anything could be added to that law. For instance, it may one day be illegal to transport young children in a vehicle that lacks a sound-proof divider to keep the driver from being distracted by the children.
You think I am joking? Maybe you do, so let’s look at those hard statistics that show cell phone use is killing people. More >
Running with Scissors
Jul 8th
There’s a business I wanted to help out once. For a long time, I thought they didn’t want my help; turns out, I didn’t know how to help them.
It’s a salon called “Hair Techniques,” and it’s just off the food court in the building a block away from my office. For months, I saw this sign as I ate lunch. (This picture was taken in April 2009, and has recently been added to @prblog’s wonderful “Signs of Social Media” project on Flickr.)
At the time, promoting a Twitter account was quite a novelty. The sign has been down for months now, and the @hairtechniques account is barren. Could be any number of reasons:
- Apathy
- Conscious decision
- Forgetfulness
- Employee with the password left
- Lack of return on investment
It’s probably several.
No Engagement – the Root Problem
Looking at the Tweets, you can see they are all one-way: More >
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Own Your Mistakes to be Re-Markable
Jul 7th
I was doing a storytelling presentation recently at a local elementary school, for its “Communication Celebration.” Instead of bringing in a PowerPoint, or showing them a bunch of web work, I decided to do a 30-minute workshop on what makes stories “work.”
The workshop is based on the idea that you start with a core – the essence of the story – and flesh it out from there.
- Tell a story in one sentence.
- Tell the same story in 30 seconds.
- Tell the same story in 90 seconds.
When I have done this workshop with other audiences where there’s been more time, a peculiar thing happens. People get the one-sentence and 30-second versions right, but they’re so fearful of not filling 90-seconds that they fail to come in under three minutes!
On this day, there wouldn’t be time to go with the full 90-seconds, but the principle was the same. More >
Bend it, don’t Break it
Jul 2nd
Let me start with something I wrote here almost three-and-a-half years ago about “Avatar, the Last Airbender:”
Suffice it to say, there is a very rich universe here to explore, and the internal mythology of this place is detailed, consistent, and engaging. It is truly epic in scope, and I don’t use that word lightly. (And the live-action motion picture has already been optioned by M. Night Shyamalan, I hope he doesn’t screw it up.)
The bad news is that my concern was valid. M. Night Shyamalan botched this movie horrible. I remain a huge fan of the series which aired for three seasons on Nickelodeon, and would rank in the top five TV shows of the last decade (alongside Lost and Battlestar Galactica.) I hoped the movie would be good enough to draw new viewers to the show. Now the opposite appears likely – people will avoid the show because the movie is just that bad.
The irony is that a show about “benders,” those who can shape the very elements through imagination and flexibility, gets horribly crammed into a movie format. More >
Deadly Silence
“Silent majorities that stay silent are doomed to become silent minorities.”
