THE NETWORK OF ALL NETWORKS

 

The Web is old enough so that several generations have grown up with it at this point. For those of us who can recall that lonesome, crunchy ripple of dial-up, the wonder of Mosaic, the bustling of bulletin boards, and other artifacts of the early days of the World Wide Web, it may be hard to imagine the lives of young people who have never known what it is like to live without the Internet.

Its founding quietly took place back on October 29, 1969 with a message sent from UCLA to Stanford. According to Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, the purpose of building such a network at that time “was not to offer a particular set of information or services like news or weather to customers…but to connect anyone on the network to anyone else. It was up to the people connected to figure out why they wanted to be in touch in the first place; the network would simply carry data between the two points.” Without a large war chest, the academics and corporate researchers behind its original design couldn’t contemplate the creation of a global network. Now that this has occurred, it’s fascinating to see that its pervasive role in connecting people to brands and services is not that different from how it worked in its infancy.

The early days of its popular use ramped up back in 1995, when by the end of the year, it had grown to a robust 16 million users. The latest data shows that there are over two-and-a-quarter-billion global users today—or about a third of the world’s total population.

The impact of the mobile web, social media, and social TV that represent networks within a network have expanded its eco-system beyond the affinities, communities, and other nodes of specialized interest that grew out of the original capabilities of the Internet. The potential to knit together networks for brands and marketers presents a compelling, new non-linear business model.

It is so much a part of our lives that we sometimes forget that the Internet is a network of networks. Its use now extends across social networks, the mobile web, landing pages, and RSS broadcast (among others), and each new extension should remind us that the power of the Web lies not just in the common URL, but in the way that it radiates from site destination points to expansively "cast a net widely".

Network Conceptualization of Twitter - http://www.cytoscape.org

Directing eyeballs to a single web site is an expensive and consuming venture. While there are certain goliath brands like Amazon and eBay that have established themselves as islands in the data stream, we are moving back to the future in a sense, from the destination orientation of the web to a radial network model. What exactly does this mean for marketing?

When a client comes in and characteristically asks for “a new web site” that is blue and has flowers, what they may be really asking for is a functional hub inside a multi-channel, branded eco-system. This a hub is at the center of a hybrid digital and traditional media wheel that has multiple spokes (or channels) which expand on a conversational journey outward, around, and looping back. If effective, these pathways have the eventual effect of creating a dynamic platform by linking to various targeted nodes of influence and driving users, consumers—an audience—back to the mother lode at the web site home. With consumers favoring multiple media channels, it is important that brands reach out to them wherever they are and on whatever medium they favor. We are no longer living in a world where the all-too familiar address of www. has a lemming effect.

Social media blackbelt and integrated marketing strategy Technoratisaurus Rex, Liz Gebhardt, formulated a depiction of the multi-channel universe in a blog post written over three years ago about product modeling, which I affectionately have called "The Gebhardt Brand Mandala" ever since:

At the core of any network is the hub that establishes its identity and center of gravity. Gebhardt’s model is more relevant than ever—especially as video platforms converge with traditional broadcast and short-form content. Even so, mainstream television and cable broadcast networks have for years now had to rely on watermarks that float on the lower third of the screen in a feeble attempt to claw at some remaining identification. This is not easy when TV brands are whipped up and feature ever redundant programming in the 500+ channel universe blender. With the addition of Internet and mobile television to the mix as well as behavioral trends like social TV and the rise of “binge viewing” (see my next blog post), the whole concept of the video “broadcast network” is being reinvented and up for grabs.

If YouTube is any indication, today’s average web user is videocentric, searching for constant novelty with a cannibalistic fervor, and beset by a short attention span—two-minutes and forty-three seconds to be exact. It’s also a short-form video world after all on the Internet, with 55% of bandwidth being hogged globally by some form of video—at any given time, it’s 30% BitTorrent with YouTube playing catch-up at 25%. What does this volume mean for brands, services or products in search of an audience?

Primarily, it means that if the common language of the world is now visual, then you would be wise to “speak” video to get your message across. Back in the day, Yahoo had what they called the “Three-Second Rule”, which admonished internal developers to deliver on value within that time-frame or risk losing the user forever. This was a far more dire prospect than the days when the TV remote control ruled and broadcasts had to engage viewers or else—another network was only a click away. Today, we are overwhelmed with the choices that clicks can offer us, and the order of the day is to grab attention through immediacy, interactivity, personalization, community, freemium, and other methods of creating value for the end user. All of these elements should inform how a brand platform or network is created.

The brand network model should be customized, but its essential look is planetary with marketing channels orbiting like satellites around the brand hub:

In taking a non-linear approach, we are only mimicking nature, where radial models dominate and networks abound. Chinese Taoist philosophers called the rivers and waterways of earth its circulatory system and the planetary water cycle bears this analogy out as science. Theodor Schwenk’s Sensitive Chaos is a classic study of patterns in water flow that can be seen as inspiring the classic phrase that “water seeks its own level”—an adage that is also an apt description of social network behavior.

The idea of reoccurring patterns in nature, their evolution in time and their configuring and reconfiguring to enhance movement is the basis of a field called constructal law. One of the designs in nature that it studies is branching. Lightning, water, cardiovascular systems—all have evolved treelike architecture because it is a efficient way of moving currents. Constructal law also extends to organization in business, politics, science and other fields where hierarchy and flow create patterns. 

The brain is famously a neural network and the web of life can be seen as a vast set of nodes that are self-organizing. Why should its mirror in the Internet be any different? And the creation of a brand platform network is an organic expression of its capabilities.

The history of successful networks and cable channels is that they have been branded by a defining show or personality, which encapsulates a broadcast entity’s mission and identity. Early television networks ported over successful radio personalities as a way of not only bringing along their loyal audiences, but as a way of defining their program offerings—whether it was comedy, drama, soaps, game shows, and other familiar formats. Though it started in 1948, the ABC network really established itself in the 1970s as differentiated from its predecessors, CBS, and NBC, with the introduction of innovations like “Monday Night Football” and the Sunday Night “Movie of the Week”.

Later in 1986, when Fox arrived, it distinguished itself as the “18-34” demographic network through younger skewing, slightly more risqué shows like “The Simpsons” and “Married With Children” that took familiar formats to new extremes. MTV was not on the map until it broadcast “Remote Control”, its own version of a game show that turned a storied format on its head and broadcast to both audience and advertisers that this was not your parent’s network. Successful branding by Emeril Lagasse established the Food Network with a larger-than-life, chef character.

The idea of personalities defining networks is as old as Ed Sullivan, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather branding CBS, Johnny Carson and Bill Cosby branding NBC, and Roseanne and Barbara Walters branding ABC. Audiences like to identify with personalities and characters. A nascent network program development strategy should be informed by an active search for talent and defining show concepts that can attract viewers, differentiate its value proposition, and compel advertisers to invest.

The emergence of watermarks on broadcast and cable television during the 90’s was no accident. In a cluttered landscape of multiple brands with often-redundant program offerings, it became an essential feature to help audiences know what entity they were actually watching. Whether a new network undertakes long or short-form programming, it needs to be packaged in a way that is clearly branded. This is particularly the case for any web-related or mobile video. Current effective tactics for syndicated and seeded web video content branding include end plate, white-wrap, and vanity URL techniques to ensure tracking of traffic directly related to video campaigns.

The diversity of media choices to connect brands with consumers has never been greater. The challenge presented by this opportunity is how to integrate the real with the digital world, and to make a strategic assessment of which channels represent the optimal means of reaching audiences wherever they are. The media and marketing networks of the future will be integrated. Brands will all be broadcasters.

While it is still early—especially with networks and agencies learning the hard way about paid blogging and in-your-face tweeting—organic growth and behavioral change will fuel the eventual integration of platforms. Movies did not replace radio and either did TV. The Internet did not kill television, as many web evangelists in its late 90's go-go years predicted. Social media will not replace prime time programming. On the contrary, several IPTV startups are looking at permanent integration of Twitter. Putting chips down on all of these new marketing channel markers is strategic, but allocation of resources and investment needs to be measured, given that ROI, SROI, and analytic models are still evolving. Traffic is still a key indicator, but is no longer enough of a metric; measuring influence is another step in the right direction.

Every new medium defines its own market at the same time that it forces extant media to redefine their own market share. Survival depends on companies and creative talent being able to recognize and optimize the unique value that differentiates one from another, and to provide the appropriate content accordingly. The marketing networks of the future will identify the best means to reach their intended consumers to create value and an optimal, personalized experience with their respective brands and content. They will also ensure that consumers are empowered with information and enabled through the multiple channels they provide to be active participants in evolving brands to be better. 

In the future, brands should be more persuaded by the words of poets, than by marketers. Or in the words of Emily Dickinson: 

                                                    

                                                    Tell All The Truth

                                            

                                            Tell all the truth but tell it slant,

                                            Success in circuit lies,

                                            Too bright for our infirm delight

                                            The truth's superb surprise;

                                            As lightning to the children eased

                                            With explanation kind,

                                            The truth must dazzle gradually

                                            Or every man be blind.

We are all nodes on the network of all networks now. Or to let Shakespeare have the final word, "'Tis true, there is magic in the web of it." 

WHAT IS "SOCIAL"?

A more recent take on Andy Warhol’s famous dictum puts us in a future where we will all have 15 friends. If you Google the word “social”, you get over 2 billion results. But, what is this “social” which we all take for granted and of which we all so readily speak? The word appears in history prior to the year 1387 as sociale borrowed apparently from the Latin via the Middle French. Routed from the Roman mother tongue, it originally meant “united or living with others” and “companion.”

Looking just one step further into the wilderness of word origins, we find its root in the Latin sequi which means “to follow.” So, here in a nutshell is where the Twitter transitive verb, “to follow”, finds its first use. If we search still further, we come upon its link to the Old Icelandic seggr meaning “companion or man” and ultimately, to the mother lode in Sanskrit where, as sakha, it simply means “friend.”

Here, we arrive at root origin of the Facebook transitive verb, “to friend”, closing the loop of a word that we use everyday to describe the expanding communication ripples that bind, link, and otherwise connect us at a click. Or to paraphrase what Terence, the Roman philosopher might tweet, “Nothing social is foreign to me.”

WHAT HAS CHANGED? KEY TRANSFORMERS IN HUMAN AND MEDIA BEHAVIORS

Traditional media brands and networks are playing catch-up with trends that have been in effect as a result of the Internet for several decades now. In particular, four distinct shifts in audience and consumer behavior have resulted from the influence of the Web and each should guide our thinking about media, marketing, content, and new technologies. These are:

1) Interactivity—audience members and consumers are called “users” with good reason in this medium where the expected experience is no longer the “lean-back” one of the television living room, but the “lean-forward” engagement of a user who expects to have a say and the ability to interact and manipulate his “personal” media environment

2) Personalization—from MySpace to the iPhone, digital media is now super-charged with the capability of incorporating the individual and personal—from branding and iconography to collaborative filtering, choice, and having options are the way of the digital world

3) Immediacy—the web offers the kind of instant gratification that can be addictive from enhanced shopping experiences a la Amazon’s “one-click” buy button to the streaming media of sites like Netflix.com and Hulu.com

4) Community—arguably the most compelling transformation wrought by the Web, the specialization of human experience is now capable of being channeled into affinities of every special interest imaginable where, through the power of networking, like-minded individuals can find each other by just a click-through in a search window

This last transformation is critical because of the way that community has now extended to social media and thereby, changed the very nature of what networks can produce virally. The advent of distributed computing over ten years ago is a tribute to the accelerated power of the networked individual. As part of its value proposition, any new network would have to offer the capability of accommodating and encouraging user generated content and feedback.

Additionally, the community aspect of building network presence should not be restricted to creating Facebook and MySpace pages—several cable networks, for example, have made investments in acquiring several online newsletters to aggregate communities of special interest in the arts, music, and culture, and to create cross-promotional programming opportunities for web content to be broadcast on television and vice versa.

The introduction of time shifting behavior through the use of PVRs and TIVO as well as VOD are all reflections of personalization and the ability of the user to interact with media on demand.

All of the above transformations caused a sea change shift in the nature of media distribution. From peer-to-peer and social network sharing to crowdsourcing and user generated content, the inmates are now running the asylum and distribution that was once in the hands of media companies is now being given a run for the money by game-changing “user distributors”. The trend toward distributed authority of the flat organizational model where decision-making authority is at the edge is just one corporate reaction to this new empowerment of the individual and what Malcolm Gladwell calls “outliers.” Even savvy brands like Amazon have been caught up in the grassfire of a negative blogging campaign, hence, the evolution of the corporate blog as pre-emptive brand strategy.

While conventional wisdom proclaims that the dominant forces that will transform media will come from the introduction of new technologies and changes in the means of distribution, the most powerful transformative agent of change will be a coming generational shift. First signs of such a shift were evident in the advent of multi-tasking and new television formats such as MTV’s experiments with three ten-minute segments making up a half-hour show as well as Nickelodeon’s innovating a programming wheel of five cartoons within a half-hour block of a single show. The shift from the large plasma and HD screen digital surround sound of the home movie theater to the small screen and mp3 of the web and mobile phone are another sign of differing generational appetites in the consumption of media.

The power of web video is also a reflection of how different generations are utilizing media. Six billion videos were viewed on YouTube in January, 2009. Twenty hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Between 150,000 and 200,000 videos are uploaded daily. The growth of short-form video viewing answers a seemingly insatiable appetite among younger audiences for entertainment. The challenge facing traditional long-form and series is that the new viewer is a non-sequential consumer who is apparently less interested in these kind of formats than in instant gratification of what’s hot right now and it does not have to be scripted, professionally produced “broadcast quality”.

There is also a short-form video revolution going on. The single-most influential trend influencing the creation of content is the evolving short-form program format. If YouTube is any indicator, the audience of the future will prefer short attention span theater to the half-hour and hour formats that still dominate traditional broadcast. The average YouTube video is two-minutes and forty-six seconds in duration.

The growth of Twitter should be seen as another indicator for the coming power of snack size media. 70% of its current users joined in 2009 demonstrating a 1400% growth between February, 2008 and February, 2009. An average of twenty million tweets are sent every day with 3.8 billion sent to date.

Short-form program formats are not new and have been around since the 1970’s and 80’s when program insert series such as “This Day in Sports” and “Today in Music History” were successful informational commercials of sixty-seconds in length. But, these formats are a very distant cousin to webisodes and mobisodes that last only several minutes. ABC’s first online experiment in offering its primetime hours for download offers another illustration of how the offline and online worlds differ. As measured by Nielsen, there were some forty million downloads of which the average time viewed was two-minutes. Clearly, the remote control’s cousin is the click of a mouse away.

Social media can now be leveraged to reach target audiences in their native, online environments. The power of online video syndication is that it can reach beyond video networks such as YouTube and Facebook, and engage users through tactics such as community and blogger outreach, featured video portal placement, content seeding, social applications, game development, and other methods. The potential reach of video syndication networks like dailymotion.com, metacafe.com, vimeo.com is expansive.

Certain applications now offer the capability of identifying influencer activity on the Web. Usually, web site and blogs are ranked by popularity. Increasingly, tools like those provided by Buzzlogic and Visible Technologies offer the ability to actually reverse engineer networks of specialized interest. By identifying such nodes of audience concentration that appeal to a particular media brand’s core value proposition and program content, it would be possible to reverse engineer an online component to a vertically integrated network.

Mobile is the fastest growing channel in the world, offering new and exciting opportunities for marketing, advertising and content distribution. Mobile provides a conduit between media outlets, entertainment, e-commerce, and consumers. Mobile data capable phones reached a social tipping point with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

The market for mobile video content is growing at a rate of 20% a month. While they were only introduced a year ago, video ringtones and video screensavers account for approximately 10,000 downloads a month at a price point between $2.50 and $4 (on Tier 1 North American Carriers). Given consumer adoption rates for mobile data and the fact that the music download market still accounts for five million downloads per month (between $2-3), all next generation of handsets will support this type of content and will drive the expansion of this market. As such, the media network of the future will be well advised to create a mobile beach-head to take advantage of the platform for distribution of its content.

What kind of world is this transformative media environment creating? I have written before in this blog ("Is Personalization Really That Personal?", "National Nano Memory", "It's A Short Form World After All", "Why The Web Is Like A Time Machine") about the fact that there is no free lunch and that the allure of new technologies always carries a price, particularly in what may be lost as the result of supposed advantages in efficiency, ease of use, choice, and other features dangled like shiny carrots by new gadgetry. Automation and its impact on the declining of the Industrial Age workforce is one example of the trade-off in human terms that "better machines" have wrought. If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. Or as the Zen Buddhists would say, "Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise."

Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who coined the term “virtual reality”, has written a new manifesto which is essential reading called “You Are Not A Gadget”, which describes at length the perils invited by our increased love affair and reliance on technology, particularly the Internet and social media. Hardly a neo-Luddite, Lanier is not the kind of voice in the wilderness that one might expect to sound the Cassandra call to action and for conscious use of technology. Maybe that’s what makes his beautifully written argument so compelling. Or as Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs once so poetically put it, “I now pronounce you man and…machine.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, Rudolf Steiner predicted that by the end of the century a non-biological lifeform would develop in parallel through a parasitic relationship with biological life. I think that he was prescient in describing our present day silicon-based lifeforms. Anyone who has sat at a keyboard for hours or been pulled by the strange attractor of the Blackberry keypad or iPhone apps knows that feeling of losing control and all sense of time. We might ask in our spare time in between Facebook and texting, who is actually being served here? Are we the digital canaries in the proverbial silicon coal mine?

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the singularity theory (the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence), remembering that the HAL 9000 onboard computer was incapable of lying in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and that he failed when he became paranoid through cognitive dissonance when his instructions were compromised by conflicting instructions as supplied by the NSC and White House—“people who lie for a living”—according to the script in Arthur C. Clarke’s sequel, "2010: The Year We Make Contact."

Perhaps the singularity is not near as Ray Kurzweil has supposed in his recent tome, but is already here. At least, I think that HAL probably had wisdom beyond his circuits when he said, “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” ...OK, already. I hear you. So, why not get off my soap box and let’s just change the channel and see what else is on—after all, we have over five-hundred channels now on TV at least and we’re just getting started on the Web and mobile…

Special thanks for Liz Gebhardt—http://www.thinkingoutloud.com—for the YouTube and Twitter metrics.

IT'S LIKE, TRULY AWESOME, DUDE!

Maybe we should give the word “awesome” some rest. I mean, is there anyone else out there who thinks that the word “awesome” is becoming a tad overused? This was all brought into high relief during a recent visit to Starbucks. My tendering of exact change was met by a hearty “awesome!” from the barista. Shortly after, I heard about the first twitter from space—one of the astronauts simply messaged, “Launch was awesome!” Well, there are literally miles apart in the way that this exhausted exclamation was used in both cases and I think it’s probably quite telling.

Afterwards, I happened to be speaking with Peter Merlin, who is the base archivist at Edwards Air Force Base and works for NASA. I mentioned the launch tweet and said, “Now, you guys really do know the meaning of ‘awesome’—take those Hubble images peering back to the edge of time some 13.4 billion years and almost to the Big Bang—now that’s a truly awesome feat, dude.” He’d just seen the space shuttle take off from Edwards piggybacked on top of its tricked-out 747 ride, and for anyone who’s ever seen the shuttle take off or land—well, you know that it is an experience that dwarfs one’s self—and is truly an awesome sight to behold.

How did a surfer’s exclamation like “awesome” become today’s unequivocal, number one superlative? This is a word that was traditionally reserved for approximating the transcendental—historically, its use is far from common because it has been generally used as a description of the indescribable—the mystical, psychedelic experiences, seeing into other worlds, the streaking of a UFO over Roswell, New Mexico, the vast impact crater of a meteor near Winslow Arizona, the majestic heights of the Himalayas, perhaps the mile deep expanse of the Grand Canyon or merely the jaw-dropping sight of contemplating infinite space in the sprawl of stars in a clear night sky.

No matter, the adaptation and morphing of words into popular culture provides a fascinating window into the evolution of language, class structure, and the evolution or devolution of consciousness. Let’s not only take it out on poor “awesome.” There are some other offenders that are equally annoying--and revealing. Take for example, the word “like”, another vastly overused, overwrought word that now has multiple uses beyond its original sense and some that no longer mean anything at all. That’s where meaning gets really interesting for my money.

Casual eavesdropping at a high school, local mall or watching any reality or celebrity talk show will reveal the word “like” abounding, crashing into consciousness in wave upon wave onto the shore of one's mind until it makes you submit to white noise like a jargonaut jingle—“It’s just like, well it’s sort of like unbelievable, you know—I’m like, well, he said to me that he’s not like, in love with me—like, not at all! And I’m like, if it’s not like, ‘love’, then is it like, a deep feeling, at least? Like it really hurts, you know. Like, oh, whatever!”

How did a word that was once charmed lower class Elizabethan popular theater goers when utilized discretely by the likes of William Shakespeare become the province of the stoned-out, 50's beatnik or hippie, watered down, safe for 60's TV version of the Maynard G. Krebs character in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" or 70's version of Shaggy on "Scoobie Doo"?

In this latter usage, it has evolved into some kind of verbal placeholder to mark time while the speaker scrambles to find the words and articulate a response. No one is saying here that natural speech is the same as prepared remarks—we don’t expect that our daily conversations demonstrate the same stilted flow as those based on using handy teleprompters and speechwriters. As such, our everyday dialogues are filled with placeholders of one kind of another—“um” is probably most common example in the US and UK, and one that is profiled in the wonderful book, "Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean" by Michael Erard.

Prior use of the word “like” (before it was appropriated by today’s teenagers), was traditionally as a preposition or as a figure of speech. In this use, it is still known as a “simile” and seeks to compare two unlike things in the reader or listener’s mind. Shakespeare used one when he lamented of the dead Julius Caesar, “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”

Perhaps what we are seeing in its new usage is the sad result of the modern mind becoming less capable of holding two separate ideas simultaneously. I’ve written before about the losses that can be associated with technology and its influence on behavior such as personalization.

Multi-tasking, much ballyhooed as an emergent asset of so-called millennials and other techno-savvy youth, also must have a downside if it is just a downsizing of the attention span of the user. And it’s not just restricted to exuberant digerati. Studies of cell phone use among drivers have shown that accidents are far more likely when activities are combined—in the case of men, they are 40% more likely to have an accident, and women 60% more likely to have a mishap—one of the reasons that many states now have laws about texting and handheld calling while driving.

Shortly after beginning to write this post, I bumped into Barry Sanders, author of the classic popular study of literacy and media, "A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age". His book provides an in-depth look at what we are losing as a society as we struggle to extract ourselves from the La Brea Tar Pits of daily media immersion. I told Barry that I’d recently become obsessed with the “awesome” phenomenon and was busy exorcizing myself through a blog post. He cheerily replied, “Oh, ‘awesome’ is a word from my century—the 14th!”

Consideration of the word’s origin in the distant past does shed some light on how far we’ve come in the evolution of the word. Actually, the first historically referenced use is probably before 1300 in “Arthour and Merlin” which was developed from an earlier age, when it was used around 1250 in “The Story of Genesis and Exodus”. Apparently, it had been borrowed from the Scandinavian, aghe or the Old Icelandic agi, both meaning “fear”. Interestingly, the Greek achos is similar and means “distress and pain”. Discovering its etymology, I was beginning to lessen my angst by hearing of its reference to pain. By Barry’s era in the 1400's, the Middle English word had spawned “aweful”, meaning “to inspire fear and terror” and by 1598, we see the first use of “awesome.” I was finally feeling like I was getting home.

But in 1997, I left my home in Hollywood and started working for a Bay Area startup. It was then that I was introduced to another word I hadn’t heard since watching Kookie Burns on “77 Sunset Strip”—the word was “cool”. Again, it’s another superlative and like so many slang terms and phrases that jump into youth culture—again, superlatives like “dope”, “tight”, “fat”—it comes primarily from African American jazz diction, where it originally described a genre as well as a state of artistry that audiences tried to mimic. "Juba To Jive", a dictionary of African American slang indicates that it’s been in use from 1650 or so, derived originally from Mandingo and entering into popular usage in England as early as the 1590's. By the 1930's, American gangsters and tramps were using it to refer to killing someone, or someone who was "a stiff". It also came to refer to a person who displayed “great self control”.

As the opposite of “hot”, it grew in the 1940's as an adjective to mean someone who was aloof, detached, unflappable and unflustered, but also a hip cat or chick who was as fashionable as the cool jazz, martini soundtrack of the times—as in “Cool, Daddy-o!” During the hippie era, it came to mean, “I don’t have any dope on me, officer!” as in “”I’m cool” or in the way that the Dennis Hopper character tries to reassure Martin Sheen’s in "Apocalypse Now" that Col. Kurtz (as portrayed by Marlon Brando), is “cool” despite the fact that his jungle camp is festooned willy-nilly with decapitated bodies and chopped off heads.

Perhaps more telling than common superlatives is another word in the commons, particularly among teenage vocabulary—“whatever”. Kind of the contemporary version of what The Sex Pistols once described in the chorus of “God Save The Queen” as “No future”, it takes the placeholder status of “like” one step further and can be seen as the ultimate dodge of having an opinion one way or the other. Like the color black that is favored by punks and inspired by the same boutique as The Sex Pistols, it is an expression of no color or opinion. What we may be bearing witness to is a media saturated generation with expanded options, information overload served in snack size bytes, but having no real power of choice.

In a fascinating piece by media writer, Paul Parton called "The Consumer: Adjusting To Internet Time", which appeared in Mediapost in 2007, he points us to what may be the crux of the matter: “Now, with the Web, there’s often no lag time between stimulus and response…an entirely new dynamic with significant implications for the way we create marketing communications and build brands…It’s advertising’s ‘butterfly effect’.”

The point is that previously, short attention span was a bad thing for building connections or creating a “cultural bond” between brands and consumers. Now, with Amazon's one-click, instantaneous purchasing app, impulse buying—long the province of convenience store counters and infomercials only—is now the industry standard. So, if advertising traditionally relied on what Robert Heath wrote in "The Hidden Power of Advertising" as “implicit” or long term memory, where brand messages work over time in the subconscious—is advertising now dead? That may be a subject for debate or at least a future post, but in this case, what is important is that, if the loop is closed so tightly in time, what becomes of the decision process if there is no lag time between stimulus and response?

What you get is not only “cool”, but another phrase I first heard in Silicon Valley—“cool stuff”. What exactly is “stuff” anyway? It’s in common use as a sort of come-on—as in “and other cool stuff!” As such, it sounds somewhat similar to “whatever”—just more…things of some non-descript, description. “Stuff” originally meant the kind of quilted material that was placed underneath chain mail in the Middle Ages—hence, it’s slang use as someone who is described as a “stuffed shirt”.

In 2005, there were a number of results published by scientists for experiments that showed human beings were still evolving. In particular, genetic research has led to conclusions that homo sapiens' brains have added or “selected” versions of genes over time that may have influenced cognition, and therefore, changes in capability of making what Terence McKenna once called, “organized mouth noises” or language.

But, as Christine Kenneally says in “The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language,”: “Not all change is good. As much as language enables us to control nature and keep our environments stable, it also makes possible the dramatic altering of our environment in unexpected and dangerous ways. The same language skills that promote technological innovations like water irrigation, road building, and air conditioning also produce the ozone destroying pollution and countless other ecological dangers of the modern age. Any of these phenomena could result in a sharp left turn for the human genome. And perhaps the same linguistic skills that give us science and currently some control over DNA, will lead to our own extinction in less obvious ways. Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world’s population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogenous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem…for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct.”

Perhaps we are beginning to see this homogenization factor in language. Is understanding a brand logo the same as identifying with a clan symbol or totem? What is missing in the former is a connection to personal as opposed to corporate history. The latter fulfills the need for story in the myths of tribes and cultures. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that marketers have been speaking for the last several years about a brand telling a story and emphasizing narrative in testimonials and association with celebrities whose endorsements come with their own attendant PR mythologies.

We live in dangerous times for not only our environment, but language, too—when text becomes a verb as in “texting” and now ‘twitter”. The June 11 edition of Daily Finance, just announced that “Twitter Breaks the Verb Barrier”:

“It may be reducing us all to a bunch of semi-literate, hashtag-spewing teenagers, but Twitter's influence on the English language can't be ignored, in the view of the Associated Press. The microblogging service has reached a new milestone, earning a promotion from noun to verb in the new edition of the AP Stylebook.

That means AP writers (and others who observe the news collective's style guidelines) can now, without shame or censure, use the phrase "to Twitter" in place of the wordier "to post a Twitter update." Tweet, the preferred term for a Twitter post, also works as a verb, per AP. The timing is appropriate, coming a day after the Global Language Monitor declared "Web 2.0" the millionth word to enter the English language.

Think having your brand name recognized as a verb isn't a big deal? Tell that to Microsoft, which chose the name "Bing" for its revamped search engine in part because it thinks the moniker will "verb up" in the manner of Google.”

Is complexity of language a sign of evolution or devolution? Latin, a highly complex tongue, has long been considered a “dead language”. Many languages are going extinct as discussed in an earlier post. With some six thousand languages remaining on Earth, about half of the world’s population speaks only ten of them with English the most dominant one.

According to Kenneally, every two weeks, the world loses another language. She observes, “When a language dies, we lost the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo or Tyrannosaurus rex. Unfortunately, even if we, and our languages, are still evolving, we still don’t know where we’re heading.”

The retired professor of physics at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, Freeman Dyson, is more optimistic: “When teenagers become as fluent in the language of genomes as they are today in the language of blogs, they will be designing and growing all kinds of works for fun and profit.” Now, that's a scary notion which gets me right back to the original meaning of “awesome”—what a terror inspiring concept!

If we no longer know the origins of words that we are using continuously, almost automatically, is something already extinct in us? And do words lose their new meaning if they are beaten to death? If everything is “awesome”, then what words can we use to describe the truly awesome? But, things could be really bad—I mean, we could end up like the Hopi people who have no tenses because they have no word for the concept of "time". Does having a really short attention span lead to time travel or living in the moment of instant gratification?

Seriously though, the Hopi were onto something truly awesome in what the linguist Benjamin Whorf called “Hopi Time” as are the Inuit people who famously have scores of words to describe what we civilized folks shrink wrap to “snow”. Who are the primitives now? Are we downsizing not only our vocabularies, but our consciousness by shrink wrapping language for convenience sake? Where is the expansive, future hybrid lexicon of the youth tribes in "A Clockwork Orange" when you need it? Maybe a reference to this tribal linguistic superiority can motivate us to dig down into our own war chest and find some new superlatives or perhaps we can just go back to using the word “great” or some other expression of exclamation. Now that would be truly awesome, dude...

WHY THE WEB IS A TIME MACHINE

Have you ever noticed how your sense of time is affected when you are online? I remember when I first started exploring the Internet (in a bygone era when such activity was somewhat cutely described as “surfing the web”) and being interrupted by my wife at around 3 in the morning when she asked, “Do you know what time it is?”

I’d been online since early that evening and to tell the truth, I actually had absolutely no idea what time it was—or the hidden subtext buried in her question. When I contemplate how the Web has changed since then, one of the things that stands out is that the novelty of finding the new may have dissipated, but there is still a sense of being in a different time zone when online. Today, the so-called “three-second rule” which seems to rule a lot of web marketing and behavior dictates that a site’s “call to action” or “value proposition” must be readily placed in the upper right quadrant of the screen in order to capture the nano attention span of the current day web user.

So, in the 15 years or so since the first web browser, Mosaic, we seem to have narrowed our field of vision with an increased demand for instant gratification—the YouTube cannibalistic effect to see new video after new video as a contrast to appointment and series viewing habits that once dominated broadcast television—and now, out of the 11.8 billion web sites and blogs (as of 2005) to choose from, it’s given new meaning to the next channel is “just a click of the remote away”.

In this case, the next site is just a mouse click away and seems to be the result of a generational change as much as one directed by so much choice. This seeming infinite sprawl of sites called for an organizing principle much like a contemporary Alexandrian Library—just with all of its index cards thrown chaotically into virtual space—hence, the search engine appeared on the scene and now Google famously or infamously owns much of that universe.

Still, the one thing that infinity seems to belie is that we have a lot of time on our hands. I joke with some of my friends that they must have full-time staffs to manage their social media accounts. And Twitter is the most recent example of breaking down time into the nano. It appears that just like some virtual Alice, we are getting both smaller and longer in time through the Web. I still often forget how long I’ve been online—even if the time I spend “surfing” has been replaced by more targeted use. And when I think about where the time is going when I am online, I am often reminded of something that the Austrian Spiritual Scientist, Rudolf Steiner once said at the beginning of the 20th century.

In one of his more obscure papers, he predicted that by the end of the century, a new life-form would appear that was both non-biological and would grow in parallel with biological life-forms by using their energy to propagate itself. What if that’s where all the time is going? Sounds kind of creepy, but the reality is that the silicon-based life-forms have already arrived and may be thriving quite well on our backs.

In his 2007 book, New Theories of Everything, English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician, John D. Barrow , writes: “Today, a science fiction writer looking for a futuristic tale of silicon dominance would not pick upon the chemistry of silicon so much as the physics of silicon for his prognostications. But this form of silicon life could not have evolved spontaneously: it requires a carbon-based life-form to act as a catalyst. We are the catalyst. A future world of computer circuits, getting smaller and smaller yet faster and faster, is a plausible future “life-form”, more technically competent than our own.”

Barrow’s last statement certainly gives pause. First, it certainly gives new meaning to the notion that the Singularity is Here (see Ray Kurzweil's book and also . Additionally, any advanced extraterrestrial tourists cruising in our galactic neck of the woods and seeing just how little we have evolved since the Upper Paleolithic with wars and climate change ruling the day—not millennia—would give this small planet an “F” on its cosmic report card. So, perhaps it’s not a big stretch that machines can evolve as a “more technically competent” species than us. And maybe we should be more conscious where the time goes when we are in the virtual pipeline looking for that perfect, next breaker.

My son has a Time Machine book that came with a delightful pocket watch whose hands and numbers run backwards. I’m still trying to figure out how to wind it. But, it’s led me to ponder that it would be interesting if human life had its own version of a web “history” or back button that worked as well as it does for the new breed of silicon-based life-forms. If they should eventually ask us to join them, perhaps this would be a deciding factor in their favor. As Jorge Luis Borges once noted, “The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.” Maybe the best that our partnership with technology can do is to point us in time in the direction of the gaps as we surf between the waves of web pages and electricity. Or as Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs once said, “I now pronounce you Man and Machine.”