tiny gigantic

Give this one a second to lure you in. Seems a little maudlin at first, but I was diggin it about half way in. Tho of course I am a sucker for street messages.

Deserted After Dark gives these details:

This short film, called “Mankind Is No Island” was shot completely on a cellphone by Jason van Genderen, and won top prize at the world’s largest short-film festival, Tropfest.

Thanks to Stephanie for the link!

Same keyword, same typeface (Gotham).

I’ve been seeing more and more Gotham, and tons of stuff that seems to be riding on Obama’s communications coat-tails in one way or another. I’m curious if you’ve noticed the same thing.

I imagine that in the case of the Camel ad above, it was a conscious maneuver, but I also have a hunch that a lot of people are doing it subconsciously. And that’s especially curious.

The Free Rice project is so fucking smart that I can’t help but want to copy it, or build on it, or evolve it, or something. I’m jealous. And also very grateful.

HumanKindMedia describes it nicely:

Head straight to Free Rice, play a vocab game, and for every right answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN. Don’t click if you don’t have a few minutes though — it’ll snare you! While you play this insanely addictive game, the advertisers at the bottom are sending bits of that excess American capital known as advertising revenue to countries that need food. If you can pull yourself away from the game for a second, take a look at their stats. They’ve gone from hundreds of grains of rice a day donated to millions a day in only a month. Isn’t it amazing what you can do to end poverty … in just a few clicks?

Link.

Nichelle Narcisi just busted out with ExceptYou, a bad-ass execution of reverse-psychology designed to get the young’uns to vote. Here’s the blurb:

I don’t care what you think of my writing or my message. You’re not included in what is going on here. Your opinion is worthless and everyone here knows it. Everyone else has something worthwhile to contribute, except you.

You’re the outcast. Everyone else has this figured out, except you. Everyone fits in, except you. Everyone, except you. Except you.

Exclusion is uncomfortable, isn’t it? So it’s surprising that so many of us 18-24 year olds have chosen to exclude ourselves by not voting.

If we’ve learned anything from MySpace and Facebook, it’s that my generation values being a part of the group and having a say. We’re mavericks of social networking, communication and internal organization. We become passionate about anything the peer consensus agrees to rally around, including skateboarding dogs. So why not focus that social muscle on something that really matters? Something like going to war. Or global warming. It’s obvious that we care about those things. Getting us to act is the hard part.

One reason we shy away from involvement may be that we’re actually too media savvy. We’ve spent our entire lives being bombarded by targeted advertising and we’re fully aware of it. We’ve become jaded and suspicious toward anyone who may try to persuade us, especially if it’s for our own good.

At the same time, all that marketing attention has fostered a feeling of entitlement. We want the messages we receive to be polished, entertaining and immediate, otherwise we can’t be bothered. The only thing we’re willing to invest time in is our social scene and the warm inclusive blankie that comes with having amassed a small army of MySpace friends.

So, how do you motivate us to vote? First you’ll have to jolt us out of that complacency. We want to be taken seriously, we hate being talked down to, and more than anything else, we’re afraid of being excluded. So make us feel awkward and uncomfortable. Make us the outsider and point your finger while you do it.

Thanks Shawn!

This morning we found this ad in The Onion. And it seems like the Vertical Response marketing team figured that since their ad was gonna run in The Onion, they should be funny and irreverent. That was a good impulse. But here’s the problem:

For adults, merely saying “balls” isn’t really that funny. Unless you’re drunk, or in conference room. For this ad to be successful the joke would have to: 1) be a real joke [as in funny] and 2) have something to do with what their audience would rather be doing at work.

And you can be damn sure that no wants to fuck their hand in a cubicle. At least not during work hours.

Right now I’m reading R.D.Laing’s The Politics of Experience, which is really fucking fascinating and rather challenging too. I just started it, and I’m still not quite sure what it’s about, but it’s got my attention, and I have a feeling it’s gonna fuck me up in a good way pretty soon.

Quick background context: Dr. Laing = a well regarded maverick psychiatrist who was doing his work in the 1960s and 70s [wiki]. What makes him so interesting to me is that he held the (unorthodox) view that craziness is connected to the structures, limits, and restrictions of communication.

Now, don’t get the idea that I know anything about psychology. I don’t. I found this guy through his poetry, specifically a collection of poems called Knots, which does an AMAZING job of showing how craziness comes from communication:

One is inside
then outside what one has been inside
One feels empty
because there is nothing inside oneself
One tries to get inside oneself
that inside of the outside
that one was once inside
once one tries to get oneself inside what
one is outside:
to eat and to be eaten
to have the outside inside and to be
inside the outside

But this is not enough. One is trying to get
the inside of what one is outside inside, and to
get inside the outside. But one does not get
inside the outside by getting the outside inside
for;
although one is full inside of the inside of the outside
one is on the outside of one’s own inside
and by getting inside the outside
one remains empty because
while one is on the inside
even the inside of the outside is outside
and inside oneself there is still nothing
There has never been anything else
and there never will be

Wow! That is some fearsomely glitchy shit. Have you ever read anything like that?

I’ve often been in meetings or work sessions with clients and collaborators, said the word “fuck” (or one of its many useful variations), and felt an almost imperceptible tremor crawl through the room. And it often happens that after the meeting—with the clients all happy and shook up—one of my collaborators will sidle up to me and say, “You were really amazing. Except for the swearing.”

Give me a fucking break.

See, there’s gratuitous swearing, and then there’s using powerful language for a purpose. There’s the the language of the establishment, and there’s the language of humans. You tell me: which one can be understood by everyone?

Typical meetings (even the brainstorming kind) often spawn a near-comatose state and a reduced desire to participate. A stuffy, semi-gloss room, whiteboards with boring pie charts on them, powerpoint projections, a polycom, and an agenda: it’s no wonder people go numb.

But curse words signal to people that something different is happening, or is about to happen. They make people pay closer attention. They signal comfort and freedom of expression, which is what’s necessary to make others comfortable and more likely to say what they think.

From NYT:

…cursing calls on the thinking and feeling pathways of the brain in roughly equal measure and with handily assessable fervor…Other investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people’s arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal.

Curse words will always be some of language’s most powerful tools. So it makes sense to figure out how to use them to your advantage. This is not to say you should swear at people (though you might feel compelled to) simply because they’ve gone glassy-eyed and drooling while you talk. Instead, think about talking like a human, rather than a machine. Think about using curse words to get people engaged, and to add emphasis where it’s needed. And of course, make sure that what you’re saying really matters, with or without the swearing.

From Wikipedia:

Thieves’ cant was a secret language (or cryptolect) formerly used by thieves, beggars and hustlers of various kinds in Great Britain and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries. The classic, colorful argot is now mostly obsolete, and is largely relegated to the realm of literature and fantasy role-playing, although individual terms continue to be used in the criminal subcultures of both Britain and the U.S..

Here’s a sample:

Artichoke: hanged (see hearty choke)

Blue pigeons: thieves who steal lead off houses and other buildings

Charactered: to have your hand burnt as a punishment for theft

More here.

And this is by the Ad Council! For shame.
They shoulda told their interns to write it like this:

When I graduate, it’s like my mom graduates too.

The first big problem is the word ‘if’ because it implies that their target audience (presumably kids who may not graduate high school) actually may not graduate high school. If you’re trying to encourage kids to graduate, why would you promote the possibility that they won’t?

Then of course there’s a step missing in the idea that when a kid graduates, he “makes it” and because he’s made it, his mom (a part of his mom?) has made it too. Sure you can understand what it means if you sit with it for a while, but this is advertising on the side of a bus stop kiosk! It’s meant to be read by people driving by. It’s too clunky and unclear to give inspiration.

Often we run across astoundingly bad communications that somehow made it past the editors (if there were any) and out into the world. Some are confusing, some are too obvious, and some are just plain bad. From here on out, we’ll be intermittently posting photos of the offending communications and making suggestions for what they should have been. We’re calling it You shoulda hired us. This one seems to be the name of a band. Sorta clunky, if you ask me. Hell, even Underdog Uprising has better rhythm. Our suggestion:

Underdog Rising

Got any other good ideas?

“I need a pencil sharpener,” said Tom bluntly.

“I have a split personality,” said Tom, being frank.

“This must be an aerobics class,” Tom worked out.

“Your fly is undone,” was Tom’s zippy rejoinder.

“I only have diamonds, clubs and spades,” said Tom heartlessly.

“I haven’t had any tooth decay yet,” said Tom precariously.

This kind of construction, where the adverb modifying Tom’s speaking is a pun on what he says, is called a Tom Swifty. If you like this kind of wordplay, check this link.

We’ve been doing some research on graffiti, and we’ve found some interesting stuff about the origins of this mode of expression.

Turns out that the proliferation of tagging is widely attributed to Taki 183, a New York City tagger who became famous in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Taki was the nickname of a Greek-American foot messenger who lived on 183rd Street in Washington Heights. His job took him all over the city, and he wrote his nickname everywhere he went. Soon his tag was so pervasive that the New York Times was compelled to write an article about him. After that article was published, tagging became a widespread practice.

Tags, like names, carry little or no semantic meaning. They are not messages. But Taki the messenger did have a message for the city, whether he knew it or not. He showed New York that the city was a blank canvas, an empty page. The medium was his message.

Yup, this is a grammatically correct sentence. Wanna know how to make sense of it? Link.

Last night, our benevolent dictator delivered his annual status report to the people. It was, of course, more of the same war- and fear-mongering. It’s hard to get a sense of what past State of the Union speeches were like, but this site offers a visualization of the language of every SOTU speech ever. It makes it easy to see, for example, that the reading level of SOTU speeches today is much lower than than the speeches of yesteryear, and that recent SOTU speeches are often 2 or 3 times longer than the the speeches of yore. And the more you play with the visualized info, the more you find. Pretty fucking interesting.

The old saying goes “____ is the new black.” The implication being that black never goes out of style, so anything that achieves the status of black will, likewise, never go out of style. Over the years marketers and media have adopted this phrase to woo customers and clients, and to make broad cultural statements. Remember when Demi Moore started dating Ashton Kucher and 40 became the new 30, and your mom’s friends started wearing low-cut jeans and halter-tops? Exactly. The thing is, it isn’t that black never goes out of style, it’s that it’s always been in style. Not so with trends, products, and all the other things people want you to buy. They come in to style, and they go out. Not at all like black, actually.

There’s a really cool graph that documents the movement of this little, but ubiquitous, language construct. You can get a taste from the snapshot above. I’ll bet since this thing was created, there’s been a few more this-is-the-new-thats. Heard any?

Check out these instructions to make clothes with messages that layer. Link.

Via Neatorama

A few years ago I first encountered George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” and it changed my way of thinking about language. He wrote it in 1946, two years before he wrote 1984, and i think it’s fair to say that they are related like theory and practice. It’s filled with brilliant moments like this:

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one…

If you liked that, read the whole thing. You’ll find lots of helpful tips and powerful ways of thinking. Link.