“Enough about me… what do you think about me?”

Second shadow: your personal information on display wherever you go. (Image from a survey conducted by Matthias Böhmer.)

People say we are self-involved (and who are we to disagree?)

Critics of social media have been lamenting about its narcissistic and self-referential nature. Blogging and micro-blogging is considered to be nothing more than a time consuming, data intensive exercise in self-broadcasting. The medium can be employed for a variety of different purposes (in the way Twitter was recently used by protesters in the Iranian elections), but for the majority of users it is still a channel to tell the world that you are stuck in traffic / watching re-runs of Prison Break / at some franchised coffee bar having the most fabulous latte known to man. Stephen Fry tweeted tonight:

“I have been most remiss, tweetwise. Apologies. Thissing and thatting, whiching and whatting – a walk here, a lunch there and now a dinner.”

Everyone’s at it.

Filed under: Social Media, Facebook, LinekdIn, Myspace, Twitter

What’s so funny?

Comic Sans font, definitely inappropriate on a prostitute's call card.

There is nothing funny about the recession, everyone is struggling. Print media, hard hit by a steep decline in advertising revenue and desperately involved in doing its own extinction management, is trying to get by in any way possible – short of prostituting itself. Which is just as well since not even sex is selling anymore. Walpaper magazine decided to embrace the state of affairs and commissioned designers to make typographic call-cards (like those pasted inside telephone booths) for their current issue.

Filed under: Design, Design, Fonts, Magazines

Rotten candy

There are some new kids on the block. A new wave of techno-savants are growing up and entering the workforce, interacting with technology as fluidly as with another human being. They lack the innate distrust of technology harboured by older generations, mainly due to growing up with computers. They multitask, attention spread across a variety of media streaming at the same time. Everything is instant, almost everything accessible. Traditional ideas on focus and attention span have all gone out the window. Interacting with technology on a continuous basis did not turn these kids into socially defunct, square-eyed blobs like our parents feared, but instead into highly efficient, inventive and communicative masters of media in the broadest sense.

So I was surprised at the buzz created around an article in the New Yorker on the Stanford Marshmallow Expriment.

Filed under: New Media, Techno-savants