Perry

Hewitt

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  • Death in the social era

    Today marks the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Antietam, whose 23,000 casualties marked the bloodiest single day in American military history. The American Experience film on Death and the Civil War (based on Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering) focuses on the scale of the death, and the corresponding lack of societal structures to manage death logistics and communications. It seems hard to believe but before the Civil War, there was no national cemetery system, no federally recognized system for identifying the dead, and no means of informing family members. The federal government would, by the end of the war, have constructed “a new bureaucracy of death.”

    A then-emerging new technology played a part in people’s perception of death. Mathew Brady’s October 1862 photography exposition in New York shocked viewers with what was for many the first graphic photography of death. While it’s unlikely viewers in New York would have known the subjects, it brought home an understanding of the loss in a way that both augmented and circumvented newspaper accounts.

    The public photography in the Brady show marked a paradigmatic change. Over the next century and a half the death business gets routinized and bureaucratized, with funeral homes, death notices, $25 caskets, and online guest books. In the late 2000s, widespread adoption of social media immeasurably quickens and widens the notification process. Like its disruptive effects in other industries, social media “debureaucratizes” death communications in a new and interesting way.

    The public nature of the way we broadcast our lives through social networks today necessarily transforms how we communicate death. New technology enables us to share the mundane to an astonishing level, with applications like Instagram transforming the way we experience the mid-day meals of others. Documenting the birth and times of our babies is so ubiquitous that if you want to block those images, there’s an app for that. But there are few apps, and no established social protocols for announcing death through social media. Twitter is rife with death rumors for public figures, but what are the rights and responsibilities of next-of-kin of a regular person, suddenly deceased?

    A terse Wikipedia entry of “death and the Internet” tells you the facts: Gmail will pass on your email to next of kin while Yahoo declines; Facebook will, with proper documentation, allow you to create a memorial for the deceased. Last month an app called If I die launched aimed at the pre-dead — it allows people to leave video and text messages in the event of their own sudden demise. There’s a growing need, but the both the structures (what happens to email accounts?) and the practices (how do I announce a death on Facebook?) are not yet mature.

    150 years after Antietam, the military’s notification teams are skilled in the delivery of bad news and corresponding support structures — but now struggle to stay ahead of social networks to inform families. Even without a sudden catalytic event of a war destroying 2% of the population to prompt the shift, social norms around online communication are forced to adapt for death as they have for life.

  • Forget luck — focus on the final 10%

    Digital projects, like all software endeavors, are easily derailed. Developing a site or application is initially seductive — the discovery phase presents a green field where all frustrations about your existing or missing capabilities can be magically erased by the New Thing. The early vision is grand — the stakeholders are picturing the end result not against a platform or service they have seen, but against a perfect unicorn. Spirits are high; people are engaged.

    Requirements are the painful beginning of a process of understanding what’s possible. There’s what’s technically possible, and what’s possible given business owners’ goals, budget, and realistic maintenance capability. Tough compromises are made — in a best case scenario, rapid prototyping can improve the result. Content strategy may or may not come up, and let’s hope it does. It’s a discipline helpful for curtailing impassioned pleas for six-minute welcome videos and for preventing people without the bandwidth to update a Twitter feed from signing on for weekly 500-word blog posts.

    Then a full design phase kicks in, and stakeholder engage fully in imagery, color palettes, and line leading. Hopes are once again high, and PhotoShop goes a long way to erase the sting of features lost in the requirements phase. The joy of the Bright and Shiny Object is in full effect.

    During the build, compromises are made; inevitably, some degree of requirements shifts. The technology supports the main use cases, but developers managing cross-platform delivery may have to make hard decisions about the fringe. Even in an eight-week sprint influenced by Agile, stakeholders are exhausted.

    Enter the final 10%. The final 10% is what separates a just-OK user experience from a terrific one. It’s closely related to the effort Ben Lerer pointed to in the NYT yesterday. The final 10% means making sure you’ve taken care of the tedious details that ensure your project has meaningful search results; delivers analytics to inform future iterations (and not just fill inboxes); plays well with social media; and that content syndicates neatly where it’s supposed to.

    The final 10% isn’t sexy — it’s stuff like delivering small fixes to the administrative interface that will cumulatively make the difference between adoption and rejection, or checking that the adaptive design is breaking just right in the 84,563 flavors of Android. The final 10% isn’t capital-V Vision like the discovery phase or beauty like the design phase, but it’s a big predictor of digital project success.

  • Why 90% is not enough

    Don’t do something 90 percent well and hope that it’ll slide through. Don’t rely on luck. You have to make your own luck. The only thing you can do is try your absolute best to do the right thing. And then if it doesn’t work out, you know there’s nothing else you can do

    –New York Times interview with Thrillist’s Ben Lerer

  • Quick takes: Apple vs. Samsung

    Round up of interesting opinions on last Friday’s decisive victory (see this comprehensive count-by-count summary in the Wall Street Journal) for Apple in the patent wars:

    Unsurprisingly, Apple’s Tim Cook circulated a memo proclaiming that “Today, values have won and I hope the whole world listens.” Samsung is working on appeals while messaging that this is a loss for the average consumer, and took a 6.9% beating in the market, the largest drop since October 2008.

    Graphic: Infomous-generated cloud of Apple Samsung topics in the news 08.26.2012

  • Is that social account legit?

    The GSA announced the launch of an official registry of government social media accounts.  Their goals were to help users understand which accounts are legitimate in an era of phishing; offer a series of APIs for agencies to pull data back out of these burgeoning social accounts; and make the registry itself available to agencies, reducing duplication and error.

    We launched a modest version of this directory idea at Harvard back in 2011 — a manually created directory of “official” social accounts at Harvard. Tweets had already been cleverly aggregated by David Malan and his CS50 crew, but there’s the problem of account creep and authentication. Is someone producing a HarvardTweet as a current faculty member or student? What happens when students graduate? When staff leave? How loose or tight should the definition of a HarvardTweet be?

    Social media policies at most institutions address egregious misuse of accounts — sharing confidential information or harassment — but the question of affiliation is murkier, especially in an academic institution with 375,000 alumni worldwide. Perhaps the best approach is to divide into “endorsed” (departments, schools) versus “affiliated” (alumni, past and present staff) — and create useful APIs for both.

  • Closing statement in the trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot

    It is the entire state system of the Russian Federation which is on trial and which, unfortunately for itself, thoroughly enjoys quoting its cruelty towards human beings, its indifference to their honour and dignity, the very worst that has happened in Russian history to date.

    Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s closing statement in the trial of Russian punk band Pussy Riot

  • Down and out (of access) in Paris and London

    Was lucky enough to get a little time away this summer — never enough — and sneak off to  London and Paris. Managed to avoid the Jubilee and the Olympics for the former, and all the Parisians (and, regrettably, their best boulangeries) for the latter.

    It was eye-opening to me how much more digital and mobile London felt. Everything from finding location-aware Tube maps to evaluating museum passes to seeing what’s on around town at a glance on an iPad was easy and optimized for information on the go. Paris felt almost like the opposite — nothing seemed to render well for mobile and sites were organized more bureaucratically than with the user in mind.

    End result: easier to find and buy via mobile in London. Wired cities may begin to see investment in digital as more than streamlining infrastructure and engaging citizenry in governance, but as a key to unlocking tourism dollars via mobile commerce.

  • Personas for a 21st century media environment

    Conjure me up a guy who talks science winningly, who shows you that everything is transparent, and does it in a self-help-y spirit,” [Gitlin] said. “In our age, a guy who looks cute and wonky is better positioned to get away with this than others.

    Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, said in an interview that not only had Mr. Lehrer carved out a career in the popular niche of brain science, but he had created a persona that is perfectly suited to a 21st-century media environment. (The New York Times)

  • Weekend reading: Just My Type & my fascination with fonts

    Ignore the chick lit title — Just My Type is a wonderfully informative and gossipy exploration of fonts (thanks, Cesar). If you’re eager to learn why Garamond left an indelible mark on 16th century Paris, how Caslon cut the finest ampersand, or which master of the sans serif had a taste for ceaseless sexual experimentation, give it a go.

    I started my career in textbook publishing at Houghton Mifflin, a company which back in the late eighties had a management approach oddly similar to Dunder Mifflin today. What it did have in its favor was passionate editors, mostly highly educated women who cared not only about the pedagogical value of the content but also about the painstaking review of page proofs. The editors led endless page reviews to ensure the accuracy of the fonts, point sizes, and line leading — and the absence of widows and orphans. For better or worse, I had a knack for spotting a stray serif, and gained a love for fonts just before an embarrassment of them appeared on all our dropdown menus.

    Fast forward to Harvard in 2010, and to leading an effort to bring consistency to the University’s infamously decentralized visual identity. For the Harvard wordmark, the team settled on a modified version of Anziano Pro — striking a balance between Roman tradition and modern sensibility. It’s gratifying to see use of the wordmark spread as new digital properties are developed. Its success is partly driven by the desire for increased consistency, given the stark juxtapositions created by digital communications, and partly the recognition that fonts can reflect and amplify the nature of a message. It only takes one glimpse of Comic Sans on the side of an ambulance to understand the importance the right font.

  • Is technology ruining language?

    Many a linguistic commentator would have us (misleadingly) believe that technology is ruining language. Every mangled text message and misspelled Facebook status update, they cry, is a dagger through the heart of proper usage. But such grousing ignores increasingly symbiotic ties between linguistics and technology: Some of the most exciting developments in the use and exploration of language have been occurring this year on the front lines of technology.

    Voicing Concerns, The Economist