Last week (on June 9) Fred asked What drives consumer adoption of new technologies? He had been invited by a major media company to participate in a panel discussion set to start at 10 a.m. that day. Without further ado he gave his readers a couple of hours to talk about the topic. And, boy, did he get a lot of great feedback. The online conversation continued well past the real life meeting, too.

In his post he observed that:

…consumers are driven to new experiences that are simple and useful and/or entertaining. It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology. You have to be the first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.

I was struck by some of the themes that commenters developed in response to this observation, especially when I thought about them in relation to one another. It seems late in the day to add to the original post’s comments thread, so I’ll spin this out here, instead.

One commenter, Jennifer Johnson of  Hashtag Media alluded to Kathy Sierra when she mentioned that great consumer products create passionate users (a reference that was picked up by another commenter, John Lewis).

Cue Twitter.

Kathy Sierra became a Twitter user with some initial reluctance, for she recognized that Twitter is “a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines.” Intermittent variable reward works to keep users coming back again and again:

…behavior reinforced intermittently (as opposed to consistently) is the most difficult to extinguish. In other words, intermittent rewards beat predictable rewards. It’s the basis of most animal training, but applies to humans as well… which is why slot machines are so appealing, and one needn’t be addicted to feel it. (more…)

With applications like Twitter, your brain also gets extremely rapid hits – and they are variable: not every visit or scan of the tweets is rewarding every time. But you know the tweets keep coming, and you know that often enough they’re studded with “hits” that provide pleasure. Addictiveness – including relatively easy access to getting those hits and rewards – is probably an ingredient in making successful consumer technology, particularly if it’s social media. (Fred Wilson himself refers to his Twitter habit as snacking… like those potato chips no one can eat just one of? Busted!)

So what about widgets and gadgets and things, and how they’re designed? Consider addictive qualities or “brain-state qualities” in relation to a comment made by Jules Pieri, the founder and CEO of Daily Grommet. She commented from the perspective of an industrial designer:

Here is the core truth about simplicity. When a product is pleasing to approach (which is created by a lot of qualities, foremost of which is simplicity) people get a psychological response to “engage”. It’s simple but unconscious stuff. “Hmm. I think I can do this. This is friendly.” The interesting part is that if you can elicit that response through UI, form factor and sheer disciplined editing of functionality down to its core essence, people will actually dig deeper, spend more time, and uncover MORE functionality from a simple product than from a more fully featured one. So they get more feature usage from a product with, objectively, less functionality. Designers understand this. Engineers usually struggle with it. (But not the best ones.) (link)

Now think about those insights in relation to Kathy Sierra’s observation on addictiveness (the quality that keeps you coming back). If you can design a product or UI with Jules Pieri’s insights in mind, and simultaneously channel Kathy Sierra in order to bake in the qualities of addiction/ gratification/ rapid pleasure, your product has a head start for sure.

The design has to be friction-free and unobtrusive to the point of disappearing. But if the item delivers (provides pleasure) once the user starts working with it – as the iPhone’s interface and shape does, for example – then the user-experience that speaks directly to brain-state can take over. It’s all about the brain – we’re in the age of neuroscience after all.

But where is all this taking us, and do we really care? To the Lotus Eaters all leaves gleam like brand new Apples, and when we ingest them they release their magic right into the brain. We seem to get “more” – but “more what”? More self-expression? Self-revelation? More information, and still more information?

Here’s where it could get heavy, dear reader. It’s hardly possible to let 20th century theory constrain something as disruptive as the web-based and neuroscience-based revolution we’re living through now …but that’s not to say older theory doesn’t have some intriguing insights worth thinking about!

Sure enough, another commenter, Shana (no profile info available yet), responded to a comment by John Dodds (also no profile available – yet) by referencing Michel Foucault. Dodds had written that “simplicity and purpose” drive consumers to adopt new technologies. Later he added that he had written purpose rather than utility

because that Benthamite concept [utility] seems to have been corrupted into relating to commercial productivity. Originally it was much more to do with being worthwhile by whatever criteria one chose to expend one’s credit – be that cash or time. Something entirely frivolous and trivial can have utility if you value those traits.” (link)

It was the introduction of Jeremy Bentham (the reference to Benthamite concept) that prompted Shana to bring up Foucault, whose book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was inspired by Bentham’s Panopticon. Wikipedia’s definition of the Panopticon is nicely succinct: “The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the ’sentiment of an invisible omniscience.’” (source)

So Shana asked the following questions:

All of these products [consumer technologies] so far bring together community. A good number of them actually track behavior- should we be concerned? One thought that I have been having is that the power of searching leaves us vulnerable to the fact that we are currently in a system where we

a) are trying to attract the guard of the Panopticon’s attention
b) which leaves us vulnerable to the guy who isn’t. he can look on behalf on the guard, underneath, at our vulnerabilities.

Is the loudness of all the information of the internet getting in the way that someone with enough power can use it for harm?

Should we develop products that also encourage segmentation to amplify as well take away certain powers of the “Guard in the tower?”

Or in other words- should we develop products and systems on the internet that afford privacy as well as community at the same time? (link)

Great questions. As for answers – that’s a trickier proposition.

In an April 2004 post called C’mon, Confess about Foucault, art historians, and sex (not necessarily in that order), I wrote:

Understand this: whatever is translated into discourse is instrumentalized as social control. It is not the case that chatter about your sexuality or your neuroses or your deepest darkest secrets makes society a freer place. It instead makes it a more fully explored, more discursive place, which in turn contributes to mechanisms of control. People and their exposures are turning into social maps, we’re less multi-dimensional and increasingly flattened into a one-dimensional discursive space. At the same time, however, I would add an idealistic qualifier that probably wouldn’t sit too well with Foucault: while your confessions strengthen societal mapping (and hence control), there is the one-off/ one-in-a-million possibility that they just might liberate you, individually. It probably happens very rarely, but therein lies the dialectical rub. People might yet be capable of surprising others. (link)

That’s the Panopticon argument: everyone is watching everyone, which internalizes control even as individuals are free to reveal more about themselves than ever before.

I gave warning that this gets heavy, didn’t I? And I did wonder whether Foucault’s 20th century theory can be brought to bear (uncritically) on disruptive technologies such as the ones we’re seeing in the 21st century. And I’m much more critical these days of 20th century totalizing theories than I am of 21st century technology. Those theories still work insofar as we still worry about authenticity and about who we “really” are. So, if that’s a question you didn’t give up on when you turned 30 (or whatever), you’re in luck: there’s a massive body of theory to slake – but also feed – your anxieties. Measure your doses…

On the edge of “iffyness” we now have reality mining – which means there’s hardly anything that can’t become discursive, and if it’s discursive, it can become subject to Foucault’s critique. Reality mining is actually an interesting way to put it. In Pomo goes to market (December 2006) I wrote (again, apropos of Foucault):

The individual becomes the artist of his (her) own life, but the price is that we’re in charge of just a (relatively special) niche. Extinguishing the tutelage of authority in favor of a mastery of domain (the niche), we seem to have flattened the mountains and valleys of the past, exchanging them for a rupture-free landscape that somehow seems curiously the same, wherever we go. (link)

So is reality mining the strip mining of those mountains and valleys?

But all this “heaviness” aside, am I pessimistic? Not really. Either we are truly fucked or we’re living through an incredibly interesting revolution – and I’m hedging my bets that it’s the latter.

We’re learning so much about brain states and neurobiology – we might actually get a handle on addiction. If social media and new consumer technologies help us understand how that works, who’s to say that what they offer isn’t of great value? And is it any different than when people started using earlier (new) technologies to learn? People used to think books could be “harmful” because book-learnin’ was “unnatural” and a conduit for strange and dangerous ideas.

…Meanwhile, back once more to Fred Wilson’s post, to his blog and its amazing comments board. I’m going to suggest, cheekily, another analogy – one I hope Fred Wilson doesn’t mind, and which I make because of his ability to attract such an amazing community of users (that is, people who comment).

I’d suggest that his comments board itself becomes addictive, and that it actually shows the benefits of “addiction.” Users feel the need to check in frequently, to see who is adding to the conversation. The Disqus commenting system that avc.com uses has built-in features that enable tracking, as well as finding out more information about users, and that allows dissemination into other media like Twitter, Facebook, and so on. If you make a comment that someone else replies to, Disqus sends you a notification, so you feel compelled to go back, check again, read, think, perhaps respond. In this situation, you’re addicted to a conversation that enables the acquisition of more information, and also of learning.

And as to the title of this post, Fred Wilson Is:?  Listen again to Jules Pieri’s description of great industrial design:

When a product is pleasing to approach (which is created by a lot of qualities, foremost of which is simplicity) people get a psychological response to “engage”. It’s simple but unconscious stuff. “Hmm. I think I can do this. This is friendly.” The interesting part is that if you can elicit that response through UI, form factor and sheer disciplined editing of functionality down to its core essence, people will actually dig deeper…

What avc.com manages to achieve could be described as Fred Wilson Is: the friendly interface: deceptively “simple” (I mean that in the best sense) and usually laconic (which means cool, not hot). The coolness (vs a hotter, flame-ish environment) ensures that users/ readers aren’t intimidated, that they can participate freely. So Fred Wilson Is: cool, maybe even a cool brand, and, as Kathy Sierra might say, helps the user kick ass.

Here’s what happened: I had responded to a compliment regarding my past credentials in the comments board to this post by elaborating a bit on my background. It’s a device (narrative, personal history) I find myself interested in more and more, since I’m in a transition phase (again), without a clear path forward. (In a recent October blog post here I already broached this).

Then, some hours after leaving my comment, it hit me.

Even though I’m the first person in my family in my generation to go to university, to grad school, or to get post-graduate degrees (including that PhD in Art History from Harvard), I never found getting those credentials difficult. It was, if anything, easy to do research and to write and to think up new ideas. In fact, I earned my PhD in just five years, which in humanities is considered speedy – some of my fellow students were taking twice as long.

Why was it easy for me, why could I do it quickly? Because I was keen, sharp as a knife: I knew what I wanted. Cut right through the bullshit, barreled on, damn the torpedos.

It was a pleasure.

The difficult part wasn’t coming up with new insights, or synthesizing disparate pieces of information, finding patterns, developing a thesis, going where no grad student had gone before… The difficult part came later, once I started teaching and realized what academia was also about.

First, I have to admit one thing: massive stage fright. I had no idea that a big chunk of my job would entail performing in front of crowds. That threw me for a major loop – I wanted everything I did to be perfect, and I was so afraid of public speaking that I initially wrote out every single word of my lectures. It was Pure Agony. I told myself I didn’t have the “winning” personality – because I’m a critical bitch myself – to get my students to love me, and I was afraid, horribly afraid, that they would hate me instead. Besides, I had imposter syndrome, and I never wanted to be a teacher or a performer. I wanted to be a researcher, a writer, a synthesizer, a connector. An ideas person, but definitely someone who thinks stuff up behind the scenes, not out front like a show pony at the circus.

But here’s my epiphany: I really, really came to hate (yet mourn) academia when I understood that at some point you have to stop being an ideas person – at least for a good chunk of the time. Yes, you have to grind out your lecture courses; but once you have them “under your belt,” you can repeat them ad infinitum with minor tweaking for the next few decades. I saw many professors do this. The seminars were a different matter, but even these were often variations on a theme – and that’s what I now realize was so depressing.

My advisors and most of the humanities professors I knew were too often one-trick ponies, repeating the same things year after year after year. It mattered not whether it was their lectures, or their seminars, or the endless variations on their initial dissertation work – even their “new” research was somehow a variation of what they had already been doing for years. In fact, it was imperative that you milked your dissertation for all it was worth and for as long as you could. To me that prospect seemed frightful, phony – after successfully transforming my 1991 dissertation into a book four years later – published by Princeton University Press in 1995 – I didn’t really want to belabor the topic any longer. Big mistake. Exceptions aside, many academics go on to belabor the same topic, over and over again. If the material seems to run dry, the hacks among them just turn up the volume on the unintelligible language, on the verbiage and jargon that no normal human understands, until they can tell themselves that they’re so specialized that they’re an industry unto themselves.

What I couldn’t stand, truth be told, were the limitations of working for years on one idea, of having to take this one idea on a nation-wide road-show (to conferences, symposia, etc.) in an attempt to get as many additional gigs with which to pad the resume, and of then being branded as “that” guy or “that” girl.

Further, because of the sheer numbers of PhD candidates admitted annually, everyone tries to get as specialized as possible – but without taking full account of how they’re already a “product” of the advisor machine. Student X of Professor Z will work on Xz – or maybe it’s Zx. Student X still has to differentiate him- or herself from Prof. Z enough to have some sort of identity. And so, if Prof. Z was working on the signifiers of female clothing in pre-Revolutionary French painting, Student X might “specialize” by focusing on a niche subject – like undergarments, or the transference of petticoat signifiers to colonial revolutionary settings. I’m making this up of course, but only slightly.

In short, the stuff gets stale, stale, stale – like underwear that hasn’t been changed in a generation.

I mourned the loss of academia: it had seemed like an ideal world for a while, like some kind of “Annie Hall” fantasy, lah-dee-dah. I have beaten myself up repeatedly for losing it, but I only have to read a few paragraphs in my discipline’s trade journals to be reminded of its worst aspects: irrelevance, staleness.

And so, although I’m against New Year’s Resolutions, perhaps I should make a note to myself to craft a New Year’s Mantra: I want freshness to guide me.

That said, I now face the real problem of location and wonder whether Victoria is the right place for me.

A man I know quite well wrote a letter to our weekly “alt” <kof> paper, Monday Magazine, and it was published in the current edition, here. He tries to construct some sort of metaphor based on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, with urban development functioning as the evil towers of bad ol’ Saruman/ Sauron. In a misplaced effort to invest himself with authority, he references the fact that his great-grandfather was the Bishop of BC, as if that contributed anything to the issue at hand.  (And incidentally: In his letter, he writes that his grandfather was Bishop, yet that’s completely untrue. Fantasy worlds do tend to warp the time-space continuum a bit, I suppose…)

He then mentions me by name, and references an article I wrote last April for Focus magazine (and which is available online via Scribd, here).  He writes: “Yule Heibel in Focus magazine talks about having View Towers declared a heritage site. Has Ms. Heibel actually been in View Towers?”

Well, let me answer that last question first: yes, I have. Admittedly, it was a long time ago (the early 70s), but one of my good friends from high school lived in View Towers with her family. There were nice people living in the building, believe it or not, despite the fact that today many (myself included) think it looks like typical “commie block” architecture.

As to the letter writer’s first assertion, I didn’t talk about “having View Towers declared a heritage site.” I was writing about our attitude toward blight, and how we too easily get caught up in aesthetics, instead of focusing on real human needs and usages.  View Towers, importantly, continues to fulfill a crucial role in Victoria by providing much-needed affordable housing to many people.

Here’s what I actually wrote:

Centennial Square replaced an area labeled “blight” by 60s-era planners.  Its decrepit buildings looked awful.  The area was economically depressed, aspersion cast on its social networks and human uses associated with them.  Because they looked “slummy” and undesirable, the assumption was that anyone associated with those spaces was probably undesirable, too.  Whatever embodied energy those spaces contained was deemed less meaningful than a clean slate.

I’m reminded again of the BC Historical Federation symposium last May, “Heritage & Tourism – Compatibility or Conflict?”  A woman in the audience spoke up to say that defining heritage only as “valuable” architecture is far too limiting, since this elides what buildings actually embody.  Stripped of embodied heritage energy, buildings are just containers; but if we consider how they’re used, another real dimension snaps into focus.

The woman’s husband had grown up in Eastern Europe, in a building we’d probably dismiss as a “Commie block” tower.  Yet for him, that “ugly” building was his history and personal heritage.   He’s hardly alone.  In Berlin, there’s a nostalgic and carefully cultivated revival of  “Commie block” style, indulged by middle-aged people for whom those buildings represent their pre-1989 youth: the bars and eateries, the apartments, the cheap concrete — all of it literally embodies their coming of age, before the Wall came down.

And so, consider View Towers.  I’d argue it has a richer history of use than Centennial Square: its embodied energy is tremendous, particularly compared to the square’s suburban one-dimensionality.

Would we endorse knocking View Towers down just because we don’t like its looks?  Or because we (mistakenly) believe it might house dodgy people?  I wouldn’t.  If anything, I’d encourage increasing the density around View Towers with equally imposing (if differently styled) multi-use buildings, to balance its sometimes oppressive and lonely formal energy.

What might this perspective mean for “real” (read: historically and aesthetically more significant) urban heritage?  It again comes back to uses, and the energies embodied in them.  Heritage buildings need to live, which means they need to be used.

In cities, buildings can’t afford to be museum pieces unless they actually are museums – in which case they need to be paid for and maintained by some foundation with really deep pockets.  Otherwise, they have to earn their keep.  This means that buildings have to be adaptable to other uses over time.

In other words, I don’t say anywhere that this building should be declared a “heritage site.”

The author of the letter gives kudos to one of Monday’s writers whose hobby-horse is development-bashing. This staff writer likes to cloak himself in a green and socially-conscious mantle, all the while espousing the “values” of suburban sprawl: the single-family home with a lawn out front and a nice picket fence, set in low-density zoning.

Folks, that’s not a city.

And it’s not environmentally responsible, either.

But here’s the crux. This letter-writer, who has already given himself a false lineage to claim an authority that escapes him, exposes himself further as a lover of fakery:

My grandfather [sic, see above] was Bishop of B.C. and oversaw the construction of Christ Church Cathedral and I never fail to marvel at those sere towers and magnificent flying buttresses. I suggest City Council are flying, that this mania is akin to the worst of manic highs and that we are going to regret this period of growth when the distinct seven villages in town are no more. One only has to view the gaping hole where the Oak Bay Beach Hotel was to experience an ineffable sense of loss and now I hear that Anne Hathaway’s cottage is slated for demolition. (more)

Note the bolded part: after castigating View Towers, which at least and to its credit is an honest building, built in an age when concrete slab apartment towers were all the rage in Soviet lands as well as their meteorological kin (i.e., the colder parts of Canada), expressing nothing but their own truth (utility and the belief that you could safely warehouse people – which of course you can’t), he exalts two structures that embody all the fakery of “olde Englande” heritage, often known as mock Tudorbethan.

Admittedly, after enough time has passed even Tudorbethan might become “authentic,” providing it can be maintained (which requires deep pockets and a sense of economics).

But authenticity will forever elude people who live only in the past, rely on false authority, create fantasy worlds that don’t even function as thoughtful prototypes for imaginative action – in short,  people who really should move out of the city.

Admittedly, I was really surprised to see @timescolonist show up on such a site.  Not only that, but its editor-in-chief, Lucinda Chodan, also tweets: @lchodan.

I had a conversation with someone about this; he claimed that CanWest will lose brand identity by letting its newspapers and editors and reporters twitter, and that it shows they’re out of touch, not least because there’s no revenue in it for them.  His argument around losing brand identity was based on his idea that by tweeting, the papers were becoming just like you or me — like anybody who can type.

But that’s so wrong!  It made me wonder whether he understands social media.  For example, tweets by @timescolonist have actually prompted me to click through to articles, since the tweets started to include URLs to the stories.  In other words, @timescolonist’s function is to drive traffic to articles.

Paradoxically, by tweeting stories that seem to have regional and local relevance, @timescolonist is actually able to restore some measure of local relevance.  And I can tweet back at them, as I did for example when last night @timescolonist live-tweeted a local town hall federal election candidates meeting, and I twittered my appreciation of this.  Today there’s a story in the paper about this meeting, but @timescolonist’s live-tweet last night (without URLs, as the story wasn’t yet online or in the paper) helped build a kind of loyalty to (and interest in) the paper with me, who has been a harsh critic of the paper in the past (and often still is).

The other thing is that newspapers might, just might, start to understand that it’s no longer just a broadcast market, but a niche market.

The niche was derided as small potatoes for too long, but in actuality (actualite – currently, current affairs), niche markets might well be the new gold mine.

By tweeting, @timescolonist (and even @lchodan, whose tweets are rare, but very interesting when they do come) can possibly change minds and potentially win allies.  By twittering, they’re almost humanizing themselves in my eyes.  If I were cynical, I’d say, What a snow job.  But I’m not that cynical, and so I’m intrigued.  There are real people behind this after all.

And every person is a niche.

That’s savvy marketing and it might just work.  Why?  Because it’s two-way.  It’s not a one-way operation, where they work on me,  Jane Customer.  They will be transformed, too, because they won’t hold my interest with a voice that’s just another suit.  Twitter (i.e., social media, real inter-action) might just make them interesting enough to pay attention to once more.