When multimedia makes your head explode

My husband and I attended a lecture recently about digital storytelling. (Having this sort of thing local almost makes dealing with Washington, DC traffic worth it.) The speakers represented two extraordinary storytelling organizations: National Public Radio and the National Geographic Society.

Honestly. If any two groups can do this stuff, it's got to be them. Right?

Well, yeah... kinda.

I typically walk out of these lectures a little disappointed. I don't think it's because I'm jaded... quite the opposite. I am an eternal optimist. I keep thinking surely someone has figured this stuff out so the rest of us don't have to just keep...

...guessing....

As of last night, nobody's got it figured out. These two groups have lucked into some success. I'd wager the success is based more on the brand awareness and audience built over decades than any social media effort to date. That said, it was a very interesting evening filled with beautiful pictures projected 20 feet high and some interesting thoughts and insights about how to use multimedia to tell a story.

The current model seems to be one key story complemented by side stories, using different kinds of multimedia, to either give broader context to the key story or to dive deeper into detail. By doing that, you can actually get enough value added to your storytelling to justify the effort.

There's a lot of effort involved.

Andrea Hsu is a producer for All Things Considered on NPR. She described how, on top of thinking about the details of getting the best possible audio for All Things Considered, she was now carrying around a camera and looking at her situation for opportunities to take good photos. Keith Jenkins, also of NPR, said that the photographers he manages are encouraged to learn about audio and collect that as well (though he didn't exactly say they are actually doing that on a daily basis).

So I'm thinking about this as I'm driving up 16th Street, avoiding the crazy cab drivers and random pedestrians walking in the middle of the street. So you've got people working at NPR who are very good at their jobs. People who are very good at their jobs keep a thousand details in their brains... that is what makes them so good. They've also got egos so they'll apply that level of detail to anything they do: writing the story, recording audio, and taking still photos and video.

At what point do their heads just explode?

I've worked in book publishing, print journalism, Web, and television production. Of all of those experiences, the only one that comes close to what it would take to create consistently focused, high quality, robust multimedia is television. Television production assumes a lot of teamwork: writers, graphics people, directors, producers, technicians of many kinds, and "talent".

Television production is ridiculously expensive. Information on the Web wants more and more to be free. Does anyone else see a fundamental problem here?

If nothing else, just figuring out how to make multimedia pay will make your head explode.

…And now for something completely different….

It’s not been the best of days so this diversion from the day (thanks to Lisa Gold: Research Maven) was a delight. The original of this delightful index of supernatural collective nouns is at Wondermark by David Malki and it inspired the poet in me.

Keeping Your Problems In Perspective

Should a dignity of dragons ever darken your door,
with a clangor of robots that crash in the night…

Should a fondle of unicorns find you famished
Or an opulence of succubi blot out the light….

Should a compass of cherubim sing loudly (off key)
Or a quiver of geniuses find themselves lacking…

Should an audacity of gargoyles go for a swim,
And send a gossip of mermaids angrily off packing….

Should a hustle of brownies, in childish malevolence
Bring out the badness of an indulgence of leprechauns…

Take a look at your problems, for what they are
They can’t be nearly as bad as a tangle of Gorgons.

A design for disaster

Take a look at this. Just let it soak in for a minute. How many ways could this little gadget get you into trouble?

Now I've run into doors, walls, cars, and other people just by walking while I check my phone for email. Imagine an office where people are zooming around on these little babies, eyes glued to their laptops, and (for good measure) earbuds probably stuck to their ears.

Don't get me wrong... it would be hysterical to watch (through a tempered glass window set into a cinder block wall), but I have to wonder what the designer was thinking when he or she came up with this.

Communicating H1N1

I've tried really, really hard to not react rashly to the information coming out of the CDC and national media about the H1N1 flu. It's hard since it's been kind of nonstop since last Spring. I understand the communications issues around talking about this kind of thing are complex, but this is getting out of hand.

I'd like to submit that sometimes -- when talking about something complicated and potentially dangerous -- the best thing to do is get the simple message out and then just stop talking.

I just ran across an Associated Press article about H1N1 risks for kids. Let me tell you what I -- as the mother of a young child -- got out of it.

1. H1N1 WILL KILL YOUR CHILD!
2. H1N1 probably won't kill your child... only maybe... most kids don't die but some do even without being sick otherwise... we don't really know why... but SHE MIGHT BE DEAD IN DAYS!
3. If your child is sick, freak out immediately.
4. Go to the emergency room BEFORE YOUR KID DIES.
5. Don't go to the emergency room because if she's not really dying, she'll be in the way of all of those car crash victims, heart attack victims, and other bleeding people who actually have medical emergencies.
6. Go to your child's doctor BEFORE YOUR KID DIES.
7. Don't go to your child's doctor since you and your child might get in the way of other kids who might actually be sick.

My favorite line in the article was

Alexander, the Chicago doctor, said he always tells parents, "Trust your instincts." Then, if it goes beyond the typical flu experience, seek help, he said.

OK... except that the article started out with the following story:

Max Gomez was a bright-eyed 5-year-old happy to have just started kindergarten when he developed sniffles and a fever. His mother figured it was only a cold. Three days later, the Antioch, Tenn., boy was dead, apparently from swine flu.

So the overall message I get out of this is: Trust your instincts... but don't guess wrong OR YOUR CHILD WILL DIE!

I went to journalism school. I know the importance of an attention-grabbing lead that pulls at a person's heart strings, but let's get real here -- it's a cheap trick to get people to read something important (ie., boring). I know the importance of a reporter asking all of the questions and then laying out the answers in an unbiased (all right... minimally biased) way so that people can come to their own conclusions but this stuff is important. Is it really helping the greater good to relentlessly highlight the fractional percentage of DEAD KIDS to get people to pay attention?

I'm sorry, but that's the only clear message coming through in this and many other news reports: YOUR CHILD WILL DIE FROM H1N1... so... you know... be vigilant.. and... ummm... get a shot... and... umm... have a nice day.

We are all intelligent people. None of us want our children to die. Is fear really the best way to communicate this stuff?

Twittering

I have spent the day eavesdropping on the NPR Think In session run by FrogDesign via Twitter. While I was frustrated at the lack of coverage of the breakout sessions, it was interesting to see what got picked up on and retweeted.

1. Katie Couric's salary.
2. The fact that NPR's iPhone app is successful.

Yeah. Those were the two big ones. For a while there, the Katie Couric thing was taking on a life of its own.

*sigh*

And those are the professionals.

Deep Thinking About Gathering Places

I've been messing around with an idea for a long time and it looks like the messing will continue. Thank you, dear readers, for indulging me in this. If I don't get this out of my head and on (virtual) paper, I might have to do something crazy....

Like blow my diet with a candy bar in the middle of the day or (heaven forbid) go shoe shopping.

*deep breath* OK. Here goes.

As information designers, we should be thinking about our information spaces in the same way that urban planners look at physical spaces. As web sites become less about content and more about human interaction, the parallels between the two disciplines become more pronounced.

Human communities tend to follow similar interaction patterns whether they are online or face to face. Different norms pop up, but the basic interactions are the same: we like to connect, we need to sell or shop, we learn.

I look around the small suburban community I live in and notice where people congregate. It's actually not an easy town to congregate in. It was built right after World War II and epitomizes the culture of the car. The arteries of the town are dangerous, heavily trafficked roads. The shopping is made of a seemingly endless series of strip malls, all with aprons of parking lots spread out before them.

You have to drive everywhere... and that's less about physical distance and more about avoiding becoming roadkill. That's what first got me thinking about physical and online environments. Moving fast to avoid becoming roadkill... well, that kind of resonated with how I look at the Web.

So I went looking for some information on urban planning.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote a book called Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was a big deal at the time, going against a lot of tightly held assumptions. Jacobs compared cities to living things that change over time as they interact with their environment. If the city is the organism, then the sidewalks, parks, streets and neighborhoods are the various systems, each with a different function but tightly and seamlessly integrated. By viewing cities in this way, planners can better understand their structure and make more efficacious recommendations.

Diverse shared areas are connected and then work together as a whole, creating efficient community. Makes total sense. Let's go another step.

So what would be a digital example of each? I'd argue that search engines are the streets -- maybe more like bridges over the rich, swampy, unorganized muck that is the World Wide Web. I know from my own research, as well as others', that most people start with a search engine (or bookmarks, RSS readers, or a single "portal" site). They start with a road.

That's sort of where I lose the parallels, though. We've got roads through the muck, but they are all individualized. In the physical world we share those roads and, because of that, interact with each other. The web isn't organized into neighborhoods that have some kind of underlying commonality about them that we must, as humans, acknowledge as unchangable... something like physical location. On the Web, an individual has to build his or her own digital neighborhoods (groups of web sites) based on a personal set of commonalities like taste, preferences, and beliefs. Some of those things are shared with others, but never in exactly the same way.

Basically, the roads are built for a single person, by a single person, and pretty much disappear without a trace as soon as the person travels it.

In a physical community, people are forced to share. We have to share physical spaces. We have to share services. Within that sharing comes a sense of community.

On the Web, we aren't forced to share anything.

I'm starting to think that I got this information spaces as physical spaces all wrong -- particularly around online community. While we want to come together on the Web, it is a completely different environment. Any attempt to mimic physical place on the Web is artificial. The same base rules simply don't apply.

It's like living on Mars... scratch that. It's more alien than that. It's like living on Jupiter and swirling around on the poisonous winds with 40 million other people in space suits... only able to communicate through radios and the rare, occasional wave.

How would you build a sense of community on Jupiter?

A mildly profane overview of social media

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

By Marta Kagan.

I really enjoyed this. It's a bit fluffy, but fun.