Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

ON HUMILITY -- AND NOT DRINKING THE KOOL-AID.

A couple of comments from two of my favorite thinkers -- and one from Tony Blair (LOL) -- got my neurons firing about the propensity of human beings to always drink the Kool-Aid.

First the comments:

Malcolm Gladwell on social media: "Excessive enthusiasm in a cause is not a bad thing but ... what amazes me is this notion that a technology should be good at everything. No technology is good at everything. So it's ludicrous for people, even if you're the biggest fan of Twitter, to pretend that Twitter is the first technology in the history of mankind that doesn't have a flaw."

Seth Godin on marketing: "I was talking to a colleague about all the noise out there in the world, all the messages, ads, announcements, pitches and friend requests. 'And you're sending even more every day into that maelstrom.' 'No we're not,' she said. 'Ours isn't noise.' Yes it is."

Tony Blair on politics: "After we suffered our fourth election defeat in a row in the Labour Party, a party member said to me 'The people have now voted against us four times. What is wrong with them?"

All three quotes demonstrate a failing or stubborness of ours, on a range of issues and in all arenas of ideas, in business and technology and politics and religion, to believe fervently in the infallibility of our cause, even in the face of evidence to the contrary and, worse still, to attack those who question our beliefs.

Gladwell frames what may be the core problem here brilliantly (as always) in discussing a recurring problem with capitalism -- though it could describe how we approach any of our belief systems:

"The reason why the history of capitalism is the history of successes failing is because ... at a certain point, success leads to a set of responses that are pathological -- overconfidence being one of them."

In other words, a little humility isn't a bad thing -- it may even be the thing that saves us, because it keeps us honest, if not with those around us, at least with ourselves.

 

FOLLOWING YOUR BLISS AT 26 -- AND ANY AGE.

This is simultaneously appearing as a guest post on my friend Anita Markert's site. Please visit and say hi.

When I was 26 I spent much of the year unemployed. I had come off of a year and a half as a journalist at a weekly newspaper in Montreal, then two years as a speechwriter and strategist for a provincial politician in Quebec -- and when he lost his bid for re-election, I lost my job.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I liked journalism a lot but I didn't want to go back to the weekly paper and its slave salary. I applied to Université de Montréal law school -- the only one I didn't need to take an LSAT for -- and got accepted. But in my heart I didn't really want to be a lawyer. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I was scared and depressed and lost. I was only 26 but I already felt like a failure.

I thought a lot about that time in my life today after a heart to heart talk with a friend of mine, also 26, who isn't quite sure where he's going with his career. He says he sees a lot of people around his age who seem to know what they want to do, and they're already making a lot of money and he's not. Another friend of mine, also 26 -- maybe 26 is a natural year of introspection -- also recently spoke to me about his dissatisfaction with his job. I feel for them both.

The good news is that, though they both feel a bit blind to what the future holds, they're both thinking about it. And that may be the most important first step. Because the truth is there are untold young people who aren't that self-aware, who are moving along zombie-like day to day in some crappy dead-end job without even considering the importance of evaluating what they're doing, without asking themselves and those around them hard questions and making a plan. And those are the folks who are in trouble over the long term, not my two 26-year-old friends.

One of my intellectual heroes, Joseph Campbell, spoke at great length about "following your bliss" and I think for both of them and anyone who is young -- or not so young -- unsure of where to turn and what to do next and for the rest of their lives, his words couldn't ring more true:

"...if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."

 

TURNING TWEETS INTO PEACE.

For those passionate about politics and social media, there were few things more exhilarating than what happened on Twitter following the stolen elections in Iran in the summer of 2009. Thousands of Iranians -- mostly youth -- and millions around the world connected on the chat service in what nearly became the first oppressive political regime brought down by the power of social media. Nearly. In the end, Iran's theocratic and military rulers were too powerful and the Twitter revolution failed.

Or did it?

While Ahmedinejad, the Mullahs and their goons are still in power (for now) the episode proved to a new generation -- one that didn't grow up watching the worldwide protests of the late 1960s or the people power that brought down the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain in 1989 -- that young, motivated, passionate people can use the power of communication to change the world. They won't always succeed of course but that's no reason not to try.

Which is why I was so excited to hear about the Mideast Youth iPhone app in Arianna Huffington's column this morning. As she describes it:

"[It's] a tool that promises to gather in one place what young people in the region are saying on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and a variety of popular websites. Among the features: a Middle East news feed, the latest tweets from the region, a Middle East youth podcast, and a list of human rights Facebook groups in the Middle East."

It's an initiative created by Esra’a Al Shafei, a young Bahraini digital activist who founded Mideast Youth in 2006 with a mission, as she puts it:

"to provide young people with the freedom and opportunity of expression, and promote a fierce but respectful dialogue among the highly diverse youth of all backgrounds. We use this freedom to create social change and to prove that the collaboration necessary for stability is possible. We risk our safety to do what we do because we believe that liberty and our right of free expression are worth fighting for."

I downloaded the app this morning and, though it still has some technical kinks, what I'm most heartened by is that it truly appears to be a youth network for everyone -- every country in the Middle East is represented, including Israel, so this isn't some farcical lopsided initiative like the Kadhafi International Prize for Human Rights or the United Nations' Durban II.

You can't find common ground if you're not talking and listening to each other. Mideast Youth has created what could be a perfect venue to right the wrongs that exist throughout the region.

 

FACEBOOK PROFILE PIC ETIQUETTE.

In an effort to milk this Facebook etiquette phenomenon for everything it's worth, here's a fun article from cnn.com about dos and don'ts for your Facebook profile pic. My favourite:

The "MySpace shot" -- in which men pose shirtless in front of their bathroom mirrors and women pout into their boobs. You think it makes you look sexy, but, truth be told, it makes you look like you have no friends. Which makes sense, considering the dudes are always hanging out shirtless in the bathroom and the chicks always look so freaking depressed.

Enjoy.

GOING VIRAL.

I don't wear mascara and cry for Britney. Or sneeze like a baby panda. I don't get high at the dentist, and I didn't have sex with Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton. But this week, I had my first taste of the online phenomenon known as going viral when two of my posts about Facebook etiquette spread like wildfire on the intertubes, generating 1,000 percent more visits to my site than usual over three days.

I try to be rational in the midst of irrational phenomena -- what is it Warren Buffett says about buying when everyone else is selling? Still, I found myself getting sucked up by the excitement of it all, checking my Typepad app every ten minutes to see how many more people had discovered my site and read my posts. And then today, on day four, I found myself disappointed that the visits had slowed, still more than usual, but nowhere near the 200 clicks I got in just one hour yesterday around noon.

My 15 minutes of viral fame flew by faster than a cat plays piano.

It was bound to happen. Because, though one hears a lot from the Cliff Clavins of marketing and advertising about creating viral campaigns, their song and dance is largely bogus. One is about as able to plan and create a true online (or offline) viral event as one is to create new life artificially in a lab. It's one thing to have all the theoretical constituent parts from the last viral episode but the spark, or the moment, or some other unknown or unknowable ingredient is usually missing.

Which is why I'm not holding my breath that I'll be able to create another viral post soon. But will I try? Damn right, or my name isn't Leeroy Jenkins!

NOT STARRING KEANU: 140 WORDS ON UNSTOPPABLE.

Calling Tony Scott's Unstoppable Speed on rails doesn't really do the movie justice. Both are high on tension-filled improbable plot, it's true, and weak in the character development department. However, Unstoppable doesn't feature Keanu Reeves's acting making it infinitely less painful to watch.

Unstoppable isn't high art, but it's not pretending to be. It's billed as 100 minutes of pure adrenaline rush and it delivers. You'll have a great ab workout by the end of it.

Speaking of which, if you and Zachary Quinto are hoping to get a glimpse of Chris Pine (a.k.a. Captain Kirk Deux) in his uber-stuffed skivvies (talk about special effects), this movie does not disappoint -- for about a minute, anyway.

9 FACEBOOK ETIQUETTE DOS AND DON'TS

Well, you folks won't notice the difference but this isn't just a sequel to my post yesterday about Facebook etiquette, it's a sequel to my sequel since I lost the original post to a freak crash.

So here goes.

De-friending friends isn't the only faux pas to keep in mind. Here's a compilation of 9 more dos and don'ts to keep in mind while navigating the friendly (and sometimes not so friendly) world of Facebook.

1. Poking. It annoys a lot of people. I find it cute and unobtrusive, to a point. Do feel free to poke a friend to say "hey." Do feel free to poke back. But that's where it ends. Beyond a poke and repoke, it just gets (two words) LA.ME. (And please, no poking in public -- that's just plain RU.DE.)
2. Friend requests. Do not send one unless you actually know the person or have been formally introduced to him in the real world. Unsolicited friend requests will be assumed to be part of a Nigerian bank scam. Introduce yourself first through a message, then unleash your scam.
3. De-friending. As previously mentioned, do not de-friend a Facebook friend unless you've had a fight, broken up or your former friend has joined the choir invisible. It's just not cool.
4. Unsolicited posts. Do not post on someone's wall without asking permission. It's like putting up a lawn sign in front of a person's house.
5. Reposting. Do feel free to repost a friend's post on your own wall. Anything posted is assumed to be in the public domain -- with one big exception:
6. Kids. Do not post or repost photos of your friend's children without asking first. While Facebook has radically changed the rules of privacy, some people are still a little squirrelly about broadcasting kids over the intertubes.
7. Tagging. While not entirely practical, consider asking your friends before you tag them in photos. My friend recently got into a little trouble with his boss after I tagged photos of our trip to New York. His boss apparently didn't know the real reason he had called in sick that week. *Cough*
8. Inappropriate comments. Do not comment on a friend's wall with private or embarrassing information. If I choose to post about an orgy, involvement in a gangland slaying or the time I slept in my own vomit, that's my prerogative, not yours. (Repeated violation may offer another legitimate reason to de-friend. See 3.)
9. Relationship status. Do not post your relationship status. No, really. Trust me on this one. Just hide the field entirely from your profile. There is nothing to be gained by promoting your relationship status with someone who didn't realize you were actually "in a relationship," nor is it pleasant to deal with 500 friends messaging you "OMG, what happened?!" Plus that broken heart icon is just plain sad.

Got anymore Facebook etiquette dos and don'ts? I'd love to hear them.

THE PERILS OF FACEBOOK ETIQUETTE.

It amazes me the speed at which culture adapts -- and sometimes doesn't adapt -- to new realities. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout persists, in spite of being a complete relic of the typewriter's mechanical limitations 100 years ago. Facebook on the other hand, in only six short years, has completely shifted the way we stay in touch, exchange information and relate to one another.

It seems that when that happens, when we make such a quick cultural shift, we sometimes find ourselves in unchartered waters, unsure of the proper way to act in the new medium -- transferring our old knowledge and habits wholesale only to get burned by others who find our behavior gauche, inappropriate or rude.

Here's an example: I have two friends -- let's call them J and L -- who have mostly gotten to know one another through me. (Seth Godin might refer to me, in this instance, as a linchpin friend.) L hung out several times at J's pool over the summer and I was happy to see that they were becoming closer. Then the unthinkable happened: L de-friended J on Facebook. J noticed it one day quite by accident and messaged L to explain. L didn't respond. That's when I was sucked into this Facebook faux pas vortex. J asked me to find out why L had de-friended him. I obliged. L's response was that he simply wasn't spending a lot of time with L anymore and had decided to scrub his Facebook list of friends he didn't really consider close.

My first reaction to all this friending/de-friending drama was that it felt like I was dealing with two 16-year-olds. In the grand scheme of things who cares? If someone doesn't want to be your friend, it's his loss, right? Let it go.

But this doesn't really happen in the real world. Imagine, growing distant from a friend over time and knocking on his door one day to ask for a gift you once gave him, or going through the trouble of cutting his face out your photo albums, simply because you're just not close anymore.

The problem here is mainly one of Facebook etiquette. Despite its newness in our lives, as a culture we have already established some clear rules about what's cool and what's not when it comes to Facebook interactions.

For starters, everyone knows that Facebook friends are not real friends. Real friends are simply a subset of that larger group. In other words, I don't have 500 close friends -- I have 500 friends, acquaintances and clients who I can now refer to shorthand as Facebook friends. So L's argument that he's just not close to J anymore rings false.

Second, actively not doing something is not the same as passively not doing something. Not holding the door open for someone behind me might be absent-minded but it's not malicious like, say, pulling the door so the next guy can't get in. In the case of Facebook, etiquette dictates that, unless you've had a fight with a person, broken up from a relationship or the person has died, you do not de-friend. It's just not cool. You may not actively kibitz on Facebook for months or years and that's fine. But the moment you make a point of de-friending them, you've crossed a line. You've pulled the door behind you and essentially given this person the Facebook finger.

Thirdly, your actions on Facebook do have repercussions in the real world. If you comment on a friend's Facebook page that he's an asshole, he will most certainly be offended the next time you see him at a bar. In the case of J and L, both of whom are my friends, I'm left holding the proverbial bag and it stinks. L's Facebook-inappropriate action now leaves me in the awkward position of having to hang out exclusively with one or the other.

So to summarize: be conscious of etiquette -- it does exist, even for something as new and seemingly trivial like Facebook. Or to paraphrase Reitman's hilarious ads: J - 1, L - zéro.

Any more examples of Facebook/social media etiquette offenses you'd like to share? You'll find more on Facebook etiquette here.

SETH MAKES ME FEEL GUILTY ABOUT MY NOVEL.

So that, ah, book, ah, isn't coming along.

It moves along in fits and starts. A few pages. I get all excited. Then nada for weeks or months on end. Now my latest excuse is that I've written 210 pages and it's too big to manage all the moving parts. True but still sort of an excuse. I need to get on it. I need to maybe take a writing course. I need to do something. I need to get through the hard parts.

At least, that's what my oracle tells me.

And, by the way, the 'Seth' in the title is meant to be Seth Godin, aforementioned oracle, but it might as well be Seth MacFarlane.

NYT REBLOG: THE 'WEB' AT 20.

From New York Times Magazine, November 14, 2010.

The origins of our Webified age were hardly auspicious. Two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory outside Geneva, was sketching out a global system for sharing information over the Internet. A March 1989 document that he drafted with the drab title “Information Management: A Proposal” had met with minimal internal interest. Berners-Lee’s group leader, Mike Sendall, was mildly intrigued and allowed him to keep tinkering on the project, calling it “vague, but exciting.”

On Nov. 12, 1990, Berners-Lee tried his hand at a new proposal, now collaborating with the Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau. As Berners-Lee would later recount in his memoir, “Weaving the Web,” he decided some rebranding was in order, and he ran through a number of potential names for the project. One idea was Mesh, “but it sounded a little too much like mess.” Mine of Information might seem “too egocentric” when treated as an acronym, MOI, French for “me.” The Information Mine could be seen as “even more egocentric” based on its acronym: TIM, Berners-Lee’s first name. “We had been trying to find a good name for the thing for a while,” Cailliau told me via e-mail. “CERN’s experiments and projects were usually given names of Greek or Egyptian mythological figures, and I specifically did not want that because I wanted something for the future and different. I had looked at Nordic mythology but not found anything suitable.”

Finally, Berners-Lee came up with a three-word name that suitably described the global reach of the system they were envisioning: World Wide Web. Cailliau recalls that Berners-Lee put forward the name “as a temporary measure.” They agreed to use it for their revamped proposal for CERN management, as the proposal could not be delayed any further. “If the proposal was accepted,” Cailliau said, “we would find a better name.”

They never did manage to replace that stopgap label, of course, and the 1990 proposal would forever change the English lexicon. In the original title, the three words were run together as WorldWideWeb, but Berners-Lee and Cailliau would soon separate it into World Wide Web (despite the fact that worldwide is best treated as a single word), underscoring the alliteration.

How to abbreviate the name was problematic from the beginning. “Friends at CERN gave me a hard time, saying it would never take off,” Berners-­Lee wrote in his memoir, “especially since it yielded an acronym that was nine syllables long when spoken”: double-u, double-u, double-u. Cailliau, who hailed from the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, told me that it was not so troublesome for him, because in Dutch and other Northern European languages WWW is simply pronounced weh-weh-weh.

Another possible abbreviation was W3, but that alphanumeric version never caught on, lingering only in W3C, the abbreviation for the World Wide Web Consortium, an international standards organization that Berners-Lee founded. A 1992 paper by Berners-Lee and Cailliau pointed the way to future usage: “The W3 worldview is of documents referring to each other by links,” they wrote. “For its likeness to a spider’s construction, this world is called the Web.”

That single spidery word, capitalized or uncapitalized, would bear countless offspring. The online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary catalogs some of the most common web compounds, like web address, web browser, webcam, webcast, web crawler, web developer, web design, webinar, weblog, webmaster, webmistress, web page, web publisher, web server, web site, web surfer and webzine. (The O.E.D. might have gone overboard by including a couple of iffy web-words: webliography, for a Web-based bibliography, and webmeister, a silly alternative to webmaster.)

But that’s not all: weblog, first used in 1997 on Jorn Barger’s “Robot Wisdom Weblog,” made lexical history two years later when Peter Merholz playfully shortened it to blog. Blog soon begat a whole new generation of techno-neologisms in the blogosphere, where bloggers compile blogrolls, celebrate blogiversaries and suffer from blogorrhea. The vowel of blog can mutate, as when law blogs are called blawgs or requests via blog posts are called blegs (combining blog and beg). The “b” in these words is all that remains from its ancestor, Berners-Lee’s Web, and even that slim vestige can be lost when blog blends with other words, as in vlog (a video blog) and splog (a spam blog).

Though the appearance of the phrase World Wide Web 20 years ago was surely a crucial linguistic milestone, Berners-Lee wasn’t the first to hit upon that happy collocation. It has long been a handy journalistic designation for international spy rings, as in the 1853 notice in the London-based Weekly News and Chronicle warning of “a world-wide web of espionage” conducted by Russia under Czar Nicholas or the sensational headline in The Boston Globe of November 1914, “World-Wide Web of German Spies.”

More pertinent, the phrase also has a history among writers imagining complex communication networks. In an 1867 lecture, the English clergyman and novelist Charles Kingsley warned that the scientific advances of the day could be abused in the service of centralized oppression. “I can conceive — may God avert the omen! — centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires — a world-spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web.”

Thankfully, the web of information that Berners-Lee and Cailliau first wove has developed in a highly decentralized fashion, with no “world-spider” in control of the whole thing. And that has allowed the language of the Web to flourish in ways that its innovators could never have foreseen, all derived from a name that was merely a “temporary measure.”

You can follow Mr. Zimmer on Twitter at twitter.com/OnLanguage.