Through the writings of technology journalists, word-of-mouth marketing proponents and authors such as Malcolm Gladwell, the traditional adoption curve now rests in the minds of many more than those in the advertising industry. We are told that trends start with one or two innovators, which then spread to early adopters, which then force the “tipping point” into the mainstream, where the trend distributes itself through a network of people in an exponential fashion, effectively saturating the majority of the market. Some sign on as late adopters, almost as the trend wanes; of course, some simply abandon the idea of trend-following at all, entirely apathetic to popular crazes for infinitely discrete reasons.

One book I’ve certainly been a late adopter to is Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style, a book on the commoditisation and value behind the aesthetics of an object. Postrel argues throughout the book that design does have economic value in itself, such values not being relegated only to the realm of function, which I’d certainly have to agree with as a working designer; thousands of us would be jobless if there was no monetary value involved in making things functional and beautiful. However interesting the point is, Postrel underscores a situation that many of us take as given yet rarely examine in detail: the true adoption curve behind aesthetic trends. Postrel’s example is dreadlocks:

“First adopted as an outré religious symbol… dreadlocks became over time an emblem of reggae music, Afrocentrism, or nonsectarian (as opposed to Rastafarian) spirituality. Over the past decade, the increasing popularity of dreadlocks has eroded even this symbolism.” (p. 97)

From an economic point of view, her point makes even more sense:

Consider the costs and benefits of adopting an unusual style. At first, someone who has no reason beyond taste to embrace a hitherto unpopular look won’t be likely to accept the risk of social ostracism (or the added expense.) Only those with a strong ideological or religious commitment — those who want to make a statement — will incur the cost.

Postrel continues, explaining that as the adoption curve of a specific style continues into the masses, it loses its original ideological meaning for the sake of an aesthetic that, in the end, is barely attached to the meaning it once had. As Postrel stated, in the case of dreadlocks, it went from the symbol of a fringe religion to eventually becoming a mainstream style; I’d agree that now, decades later, dreadlocks have become little more than a slightly nonconformist hairstyle for those who have hair that is easily moldable into true dreadlocks (as opposed to dreadlocks held together with hair adhesives or chemical processes.) For those who have hair naturally tending to dreadlocks, the hairstyle — cropped, long, and everywhere in between — is a full-blown trend, if not entirely on the downward slope of the late adoption curve.

Postrel’s argument, then, is split into two competing sections which revolve around the transfer of aesthetics and their attachment to the original symbolism involved with said aesthetic. At the transfer point, today’s critics go in two directions: that of the aesthetic theft and destruction of symbolism through trend adoption, and, on a different yet intersecting plane, the adoption of an aesthetic for the sake of pluralism and individual identity.

There is weight on both sides of the argument. It seems instinctive that, throughout the evolution of human societies, we have predominantly used aesthetic differentiation as a way of associating with certain social segments. When the aesthetics of social or cultural identity catch on in the mainstream, meaning is lost that ruins the original reason for that aesthetic development, an unintended cost on the true creators of the trend. In the case of dreadlocks, this was originally the Rastafari movement that lost the cultural symbol as it became further diluted.

From authenticity to artificiality

This social syncretism is evident in a case that is much less niche than dreadlocks, yet evolves in roughly the same geographic region as the hairstyle. Heavily influenced, once again, by the past aesthetic of African music as well as the Caribbean way of life, the world of Jamaican dancehall maintained a tradition of toasting, a rhythmic spoken word over an Afrocentric beat by a “Master of Ceremonies”. As these dancehall MCs, perhaps themselves influenced by African griots, interacted with African-American culture in New York City in the late seventies and early eighties; urban culture developed with the introduction of musical experimentation with sampling old records mixed with the novelty of electronic drum machines. Dancehall rhyming found its way over the broken beats of the greats of Motown and Southern jazz; coupled with the interest of others in the predominantly African-American community and the introduction and assimilation of African American Vernacular English into the rhyming patterns of dancehall MCs, hip-hop was born. Hip-hop formed the musical basis of a greater, expansive urban culture, with breakdancing and fashion following and evolving alongside the new musical experimentation. Hip-hop culture and its surrounding aesthetic became the voice of the people, its aesthetic confirming their group identity and acting as a method of solidarity for those sympathetic to the causes voiced by those in poverty-stricken urban areas.

It didn’t take long, however, for hip-hop to break into the mainstream. As advertisers began to recognise the buying power of those in urban culture, obsessed with the apparel that became a cultural identity, sportswear companies such as Nike and Reebok began to send their branding vanguard into the barred-window world of Harlem and Brooklyn, speaking with the youth involved at the forefront of hip-hop culture. Once big corporations were involved, with the distribution strength and advertising budgets of big record labels and apparel companies, corporations pitched the urban aesthetic to the mainstream. By that point, it was over; early hip-hop artists with their clean rhymes found a niche in the pop music sphere, with clean acts such as Christian minister (and Bay Area resident) MC Hammer writing raps that today sound like bubblegum pop. Inside, hip-hop culture revolted and emcees shifted toward the hardcore, gritty images of living on the urban streets; as West Coast artists such as NWA evolved with their kill-or-be-killed gangsta rap style, the image of hip-hop culture changed, but once again quickly bubbled to the mainstream. Hip-hop was cool and had hit popular culture with the force of a forty-five. Everyone, from the true inner-city youth to suburban gangsta wannabes was blasting Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.

By the 2000s, rap — mainstream, commercialised hip-hop — became the basis for nearly all pop music; charts were — and still are — dominated by the works of Timothy “Timbaland” Mosley, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Sean Combs, the rapper with the amorphous pseudonym currently known now as “Diddy”. Driving through any affluent suburb, the antithesis of the drug-addled and poverty-stricken ghettos that hip-hop came from, Caucasian teenagers in BMWs listen to the latest songs released by Akon’s Konvict Muzic label, wearing their New Era caps and clothes from urban-culture clothiers such as Akademiks and Ecko. 17-year-old, semi-rural high school football players, perhaps in emulation of their favourite athletes, drive around in their pickup trucks while rapping along with Flo Rida, talking about their “niggaz” and how they handle their Glock semi-automatic pistols, entirely ignoring the connotations of the word nigger and the dark history behind the slur. The dilution to the aesthetic has blatantly occurred at this point, and, to most of rap’s consumers, the original meaning of hip-hop culture is long-gone in the decadent, blingin’ world of rap.

Pluralism vs. pollution

Is this mainstream of the original meaning behind urban culture really dilution? Postrel’s primary argument does not seem to side with those arguing for the dilution of the aesthetic; instead, this mainstream dilution is in part praised for demonstrating modern society’s propensity toward aesthetic pluralism. While suburbanites have roughly accepted hip-hop clothing as merely a superficial style moreso than a group affiliation at this point, some of the affiliation still exists for many naïve to the mainstream: those dressed in urban clothing are still given a more suspicious eye by many in affluent suburban communities, the same eye a white-collar worker would be given in the urban community. There is no doubting that class division, regardless of the degree of aesthetic dilution, still exists. While many in the underground hip-hop culture revile rap music and the kids pretending to be “ghetto,” there are still many of those involved in today’s hip-hop culture that find the distribution of their music as a force uniting those outside of the urban plight to its condition, and with politically-charged messengers hitting the airwaves with their raps of the problems of America’s urban youth, there is an unmistakable advantage to having what little bit of authenticity is left in the mainstream. I have, in multiple occasions, found myself listening to local hip-hop mixtapes procured from the “hyphy” movement in San Jose and Oakland, either through friend with industry connections to big names such as E-40 and Mistah FAB to the purchases from aspiring rappers on street corners in the Bay Area. While mainstream rap may lose much of the authenticity, what little personal experience I have had with true urban culture, through MySpace, the tuner subculture, and the hyphy movement has been overwhelmingly positive. While the wealth of rappers seems absurd, many of the benefits given to those now long able to escape the urban life have, in many cases, caused greater sympathy for the urban cause and added to what little philanthropy the region receives. My research into urban culture is still fairly limited, so while I’m sure many disagree with me, I have found the urban world largely accepting of those sympathetic.

As for those that simply want the aesthetic, such as the semi-rural high schoolers, far detached from any true urban environment, it could be argued that this design pluralism is mutually beneficial. While in many cases the meaning has been lost at this point, the end economic point is feeding the machine that has made rap music popular. In this case, the pluralism attached with people taking the urban cultural aesthetic as part of their own identity — what Postrel refers to as the process I like that, an initial observation of an aesthetic by a so-called early adopter, and the transformation and personalisation of the aesthetic into I’m like that — is not the pollution of the existing urban culture. In this case, it is a personal growth and in some cases a sympathy with the group identity. As people drive themselves to aesthetic syncretism, in the beginning through the sympathy of early adopters tuned into the movement at a close level, there seems to be no intrinsic harm done to the “meaning” of the original aesthetic; while some dilution has evidently occurred as the early adopter is not in full urban uniform, there is still a reflection upon the initial meaning, whether or not the early adopter merely wants the aesthetic or a piece of the social identity.

Instead, there may be a crossover point at which the cost of the dilution outweighs the benefit, and this case is largely outside the realm of the early adopters. In many cases, the viral distribution curve we look at day to day has been simplified to a point where the discrete effects are no longer observational, although they are part of the greater model: the real argument of pluralism vs. pollution occurs at the network level, not the mass-market level. By the time the mass-market curve is applied to the adoption of an aesthetic, the pollution is most likely far too late, given Postrel’s cost/benefit analysis.

A basic model of adoption

To simplify the adoption of an aesthetic, let’s postulate that a man has inked his hand in a vivid fuchsia; it is sufficiently radical enough that most people would see these pink-handed citizens as a bit off if they were to visit other people outside of their social segments. This man has inked his hand pink because he is a citizen of Rhodamine, a mythical land where everything is pink. The original value of the meaning behind this aesthetic change is v = 100, since it has 100 percent of its original meaning, and this man, who we will name Peter, is node zero on a social network graph. As the other ten residents of Rhodamine back this idea to show group affiliation and pride that they live in Rhodamine, they, too, ink their hands. The meaning in this group affiliation is still v = 100, since the primary motive for these residents of Rhodamine is to show solidarity with their fellow residents.

Perhaps Peter has friends in San Francisco; when he visits his friends in the Marina District, he is laughed at by many that don’t know the original reason why Peter has inked his hand, although the cost of this district ostracism is far outweighed by the ideological purpose of the aesthetic. One of Peter’s friends, Sarah, sympathetic to Peter’s cause, also inks her hand in solidarity. At this point, Sarah has become the early adopter and is now the degree of separation between Rhodamine residents and the outer world. Because Sarah does not live in Rhodamine and cannot ever fully grasp the experience of someone that lives there, the value of the aesthetic meaning is decreased by 10 to v = 90.

This pattern increases as time progresses. As Sarah’s friends (as well as the friends of friends of other Rhodamine residents) catch onto the wave, eventually there is a point where, some degrees of separation down the line, the meaning of sympathy has long been eclipsed by those jumping on a bandwagon. While some of these adopters at separation degree n — the crossover point — still really do sympathise with the Rhodamine cause, and some even value the new aesthetic; however, it is those where the value of meaning v means next to nothing and the aesthetic is embraced due to the insecurities of the group that cause any aesthetic pollution whatsoever. It’s the point of mob think — where people aren’t inking their hands for their own sympathetic or even aesthetic pleasure, but rather because the cost of ostracism and not being “cool” far outweighs the aesthetic cost, where the cost of deviation, the original cause of the aesthetic, is too great. It’s this point where the aesthetic is destroyed, and this point is one that varies on the adoption curve depending upon the preferences and security of the aesthetic adoptee. I’d guess that it’s improbable that this is happening anywhere before the inflection point of the standard distribution curve, that is, the point at the standard deviation of the distribution.

A utilitarian counterpoint

Of course, the argument could be made that in the case of mob think even the adoption of the style is beneficial. Those fearing ostracism — the polar opposite of those starting the trends — are still gaining utility by mindlessly adopting the aesthetic trend, since in the state where they don’t adopt the style, their ostracism causes them negative economic utility, or psychological pain from ostracism for being “uncool”.

However, is this design pollution really that worthwhile? From the perspective of an existentialist, or perhaps simply that of a well-meaning guardian of the truth in subcultures from the aesthetic smog of the mainstream produced by the corporate machines in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, I’d argue that those sitting at point n and beyond would be better off trying to push themselves into a more individual understanding of the world around themselves. Given the absolute apathy that seems inherent in a fair amount of American culture, however, asking people to follow their individual likes and dislikes (and to seek the truth in these underlying aesthetics) is probably too much to ask.

Because of this, the economic rebuttal to this counterpoint would instead be that while yes, perhaps the mob would feel alright by adopting the style in the present, the mob would feel better by shifting into a state of thinking for themselves. Sadly, this is not the way the Nash equilibrium in this case trends. The final solution, instead, is suboptimal unless there is a greater shift in awareness, care, or other such increase in knowledge of the actual subculture behind a mainstream, commercialised aesthetic trend.

Scrubbing the smog

Of course, given the above information, nothing has really been gained aside from an establishment of where this aesthetic pollution may occur and that, most likely, correcting the situation causing said pollution is practically impossible given the current state of broadcast media and the adoption curves inherent in a top-down structure. There are currently many different ideas floating around with which to at least fight back against the problem, none of which I feel holds the answer.

The most hyped possible solution is the one I find myself most deeply involved in: social media. Many of the proponents of “Web 2.0″ and other social trends find that perhaps the democratic nature of the Web will eventually lead to a breaking down of a hierarchal, broadcast structure that currently generates demand for new products and instead places the control back in the hands of the consumer. In this way, it could be the individual that then becomes powerful again instead of the advertisers, as the individual, being unaffected by the same sources as the next given the specialised nature of online social networks, can make up his or her own mind as to what they wish to consume without being heavily influenced by a mass medium. However, the ochlocracy that occurs in the ways that we find social content simply shifts the authority to a different social group at the top of social, instead of broadcast, media’s long tail, which unless solved first seems to nullify the majority of the effects social media would have on breaking the adoption curve into something much less macro-scale.

Maybe the next solution isn’t to change the overall communicative model at all; instead, a small bit of demand from the market could spark greater change in the broadcast industry. This is already evident in ventures such as NBC’s Hulu or consumption-for-charity ventures such as (PRODUCT) RED, although the latter’s actual benefit has been criticised. Of course, all reasons for the broadcast to shift to a socially-responsible model are almost entirely financial, but regardless of the “patina of philanthropy” that appears out of this, even the most superficial of those on the aesthetic adoption curve are forced to think about a greater social cause than their own (relatively petty) social ostracism. Ironically, maybe our best shot at changing the increasingly anarchic, superficially hedonistic ways of American culture is through the very system that is causing the problem to begin with.

The last major solution worth outlining is a shift in American culture altogether. Given the media issues above, this seems absolutely unlikely. Instead of reinforcing the dichotomy between a socioeconomic elite and “everyone else”, a flattening of our perceptions of social structure would achieve the same goal: without people looking to those that may ostracise them from a popular social segment, instead they are free to draw their own conclusions. Unfortunately for the latter, the line between the elite and the masses is simply growing in the United States. The elite socialites of American culture want nothing more than to fortify their statuses although they would seem to suffer less at the hands of paparazzi if they did the opposite; meanwhile, those looking at the elite find themselves caring less about themselves and instead aspiring to unattainable images they see on television or Page Six. Considering social hierarchy has always existed, to magically hope it will go away is sadly worth less thinking about than which pair of shoes to wear out on the town on Friday night.

An inconclusive position

As for now, there appears little we can do other than attempt to stay objective. American culture appears to increasingly find masochistic solace in populism veiled as true pluralism, even in the wake of social media advances that allow for more diverse information consumption. We are sadly locked into an economic model that we as consumers have built for ourselves and will require true popular change to unravel, something which we have seen social media do to an extent. There does not seem to be an indicator that there will be a downfall of popular entertainment anytime soon, given that popular entertainment continues to find ways to either lobby itself into survival or adapt its traditional marketing business models to a world of social networking services and aggregated media consumption. Hopefully, as the innovators and early adopters that currently drive and feed a media revolution, we can maintain a truly pluralist perspective — if so, we may be of more benefit to society than the direct effects of our blogs, software and social actions. If we wish to succumb wholly to style, however, let the bacchanalia begin. Perhaps for our lifetimes America will be a riotous, hedonistic place, but for our children we will most likely leave a greater disaster than our worries over the latest crises in our favourite primetime shows.

However, Keepon is a perfect display of something more than just a cute novelty: it is a standing example of the human propensity to attach mammalian personality traits to entirely inanimate objects. The action is deeply embedded in language and history: large ships are given human names and referred to as “she”, we consider our computers and automobiles to be in bad moods when they break, and we constantly seem to attribute emotions of anger or other negativity to devices when they don’t function as planned. We place emotion in the personalities of devices with their personalities dictated by engineering error or physical malfunction, while we constantly design the outward appearance of our electronic devices to be increasingly clean, mechanical and otherwise futuristic. Within the sterility of our Macbooks and iPods, we place emotional tidbits and interfaces: we plaster our desktops with pictures of loved ones, we hold data dear to our human lives, and in some cases we build personalities for ourselves online in social networks or massively-multiplayer games. The personal in personal computer is not simply in the sense of it being built for one user as opposed to an enterprise; our computers and electronic lives are permanently bonded to our lifestyles and ways of being. They are a part of our real-life persona.

There is a point, however, at which it appears that we are not simply working with our devices as mechanical tools in our lives; we repeatedly attempt to attach greater emotive states to something that’s exceptionally emotionless. We name our computers human names or give them names we’d usually give our pets; we get frustrated and feel attacked when Word crashes, taking all of our work with it. While we superficially accept the mechanical nature of human creation, we secretly attach emotive states to it in a way to possibly somehow relate to the labyrinthine structures of silicon-based semiconductors. It appears that, in the end, we’re building devices, feeling unhappy with the interaction we have with them, and then actively searching to replace things with emotive states to make them more human-friendly, more organic. We want the mechanical æsthetic and the organic interaction.

What, however, is perpetuating this type of interaction? What emotive states are we actually seeking? No one would want a computer that was always ill-tempered or one that shared some other generally awkward human emotion (would you enjoy it if your MacBook Pro felt artificially sexually aroused?) There appears to be a point at which we stop the anthropomorphisation of the device underscored in pop culture: In Star Wars, thousands more are attracted to the naïve, traditionally cute demeanor of R2D2 than the rather obnoxious, worrysome one of C3PO. We find the cold mechanics of the liquid-metal T-1000 despicable while we exonerate the heroism of the older, more human-flawed Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. We hate the inhuman, machine-like coldness of the agents in The Matrix but enjoy the cozy sociability of The Oracle. While all of these juxtapositions are between fictional machines, we love the machines that are more like us: flawed, slow to evolve, and technologically able to express emotions of sympathy, happiness, and, in some cases, love.

Keeping it optimistic: positive interaction

Because of this, we seem to desire only positive emotive states from our machines, leaving out any type of despicable feelings such as anger or envy, although life would certainly be more interesting if Outlook really did hate you when it crashed. This quick display of happy emotion, although entirely contrived, makes us feel better when we interact with the machine. Such an emotive state is easily seen in Susan Kare’s anthropomorphic iconography for the classic Macintosh boot screen, aptly named Happy Mac and Sad Mac. In both cases, we get a quick, extremely human analogy to the way the computer is operating upon boot: in the case of the happy Mac, we know all is well with our machine; in the case of Sad Mac, we know that something needs to be done to “comfort” (i.e. repair) the machine to get the data we need.

Macintosh hardware takes this human feeling to extremes, as well: closing an iBook or other newer notebook and suspending its contents is referred to as “Sleep” mode both semantically and actively: the LED on the front of the computer slowly fades in and fades out, mimicking the patterns of slow human inhalation and exhalation during sleep cycles, although the LED’s smooth effect is entirely useless during the Mac’s sleep cycle. Meanwhile, however, as humans we notice this sleep effect much more intuitively than we would a little yellow light. It evokes an emotional response in us as we almost feel as if we should be keeping quiet as to not wake the computer.

In these two examples, we are seeking positive emotive states as an indicator to interaction and well-being in status through emotional expression from the machine, much as we would see from another human. We can tell if another human is happy or sad from the same gestures; we can tell a sleeping human from one that is actively awake by their breathing patterns. Building the emotional interactive state both links the computer’s state to an organic cognate as well as bonds us more emotionally with a rather cold object. In this case, we seek positive interaction from the machine; by having human characteristics, the machine, half-anthropomorphised, appears to really be more than a complex calculator. Considering the immense amount of trust we put in the machine’s ability to maintain our real-life information, the positive feelings we receive from having the machine appear sympathetic to the human condition comforts us and makes us place greater trust in an object that is really something neither to be trusted nor distrusted.

Staying optimistic: positive feedback

While the idea that we want “feel-good” computing is evident in status events like Happy Mac, we want positive feedback from our machines just as parents give children: we want some type of emotive state of approval from the device. Keepon, the robot described above, has this ability to show approval, and the emotive state of approval has appeared to have a great effect on children in an experimental setting. Of course, a robotic system isn’t required for this type of approval for us to recognise it as approval: instead, the pure illusion of attentiveness allows for us to feel this way about our machines. The response times of a machine when we perform tasks makes us feel as if those that are faster are not only helping our productivity, but also somehow make us feel emotionally reaffirmed that the machine is working with us, not against us.

The converse of this statement is what I had described above: when the machine fails, we emotionally tie this to negative feedback; the machine’s failure, in some way, is an insult to us, a program crash accusatory as if we could have somehow prevented it through our own interaction. Such an “emotive state” causes us to become further alienated from the device: we cross an invisible border in which we begin to recognise the machine as mechanical rather than emotional as we call out the machine’s subordinacy. In this case, we are offended much as if someone we thought was close to us somehow forgot our name: the impersonality of the machine gets underscored to a point at which the machine itself is responsible for rebuilding rapport with the user. The attentiveness and reliability of the machine is not simply something we wish for for the sake of our own productivity; they are the same qualities we look for in fellow humans.

Emotion isn’t technical

In terms of usability and interaction design, we are constantly bombarded with all of the things we should never do, an ever-expanding list of design abominations such as the use of <blink> and broken code that only works on one browser or another. People such as Jakob Nielsen make huge amounts of money simply telling us what it is that we’re doing wrong as interaction designers, however, the list we are given by usability experts is always a discrete set of things that went awry when we designed one page or another.

Ironically, however, as complex as we make interaction design, as complex as we make the design of our interfaces and scalable, degradeable code structures, the user really doesn’t care. What the user wants in the end is nothing more than a little love from the machine. In essence, we want to evoke positive emotions when using our interfaces, not negative ones. We simply want machines that seem to care. All of the discrete rules we’ve learned on top of this, from building accessible web pages to applications of Fitts’ Law, can almost always be distilled down to the emotive state.

Emotional users are passionate users

Meanwhile, those of us building software, making names for ourselves online, blogging, or otherwise publishing content to the Internet and greater technological sphere seem constantly interested in gaining that one next reader: we want the traffic for profit in the case of businesses; we want the traffic for personal gratification in the case of non-”pro” blogs such as this one. We are always looking for the best way to make our users passionate about our cause or follow our philosophies in hopes of getting them to return sometime, and we stop at nothing to try to improve both our own techniques as well as our properties and products to get to the point necessary to gain the next new consumers.

However, in all of our complexity, the issue is very simple in the end: a passionate user is simply an emotional one. The best user experiences are not modelled on mathematics or patterns; they seem to be, in some huge way, based upon that fuzzy logic of Stephen Colbert: the feeling of truthiness goes a long way in building rapport with users or readers. While in many cases we are able to model these gut instincts with formulas and interactive patterns, they’re not always perfect predictors. Sites like Hampsterdance [sic] have been largely successful in the past not because they had awesome design: instead, some emotion was evoked within its visitors. MySpace, while horribly ugly, offers a social portal to an array of tons of people and evokes all sorts of emotion in its users, drawing them closer to the site as they become more addicted to the emotional rollercoasters of human-human, not human-computer, interaction. The best design, then, really has nothing to do with our theory: instead, theory is just our guide to building something that is generally regarded as beautiful. The best design is simply emotional.

Perhaps the most socially malleable of our society exists as teenagers: at that time, we are in a constant state of testing, shaping life philosophies and self-images, experimenting with substances, society and sex, eventually — hopefully — finding who we are sometime through high school and the earliest years of college. Meanwhile, teenagers, pulled at from every direction by parents, friends and love interests, torn apart by their own psyche internally, are potentially the most fragile members of America.

It is within the teenage years that we generally gain the greater grasp of a worldly aesthetic: those not following the high-school social ideal are quickly ostracised into the strongest of social cliques; those plagued with little interest toward trends of teenage self-image become the persecuted, the dejected, those limited to a teenage social wasteland where the greatest, most aspirational positions go to those on top of the mainstream trend ladder: those at the top of the superficiality become the alphas of an already microscopic social hierarchy, the everything and nothing of high school, gaining not only the date to the high school prom, but the self-confidence that stays with them long after graduation day.

One of the biggest issues that plague adolescents is that of acne vulgaris, the rather harmless skin disease that does little but create an aesthetic nightmare. Acne causes a disastrous amount of stress for girls and boys alike; it is the quintessential uglifier in high school society aside from obesity. The blemishes caused by acne are a cultural disaster, evoking mental images of squalor and sub-standard social class, a stereotypical condition of the societal rejects in high school life. In the 1800s and early twentieth century, acne was considered the marque of a chronic masturbator, a sign of potential venereal disease and sexual promiscuity, signals that could ruin the image of a respectable girl and cause some ridicule (although much less in the time) to boys.

With the release of tretinoin cream, known to most with any dermatological exposure by its brand name of Retin-A, a miracle drug became available to the sufferers of acne and its associated stigma. Although expensive compared to non-prescription cosmetics, Retin-A offered the plagued teenager a new lease on a social life, gradually working to clear the skin of its users. Since the drug’s initial release in the 1967, tretinoin is still the standard for an array of skin issues. The New York Times devoted a whole column to sing its praises on 30 November 2006, describing its use as a skin rejuvenation tool for not only acne but for that other awful skin blemish: wrinkles.

The adolescent issue of tretinoin may seem trivial, but its creation and widespread use, as well as its extended use by those far outside its original generational use underscores the self-conscience that we maintain throughout our lives. The tretinoin example, although seemingly much more “medical” than other social improvements, really does nothing to help someone physically; the effects are almost entirely aesthetic.

However, the aesthetic obviously carries social consequences: with the person’s own aesthetics improved and some stigma set aside, their overall happiness increases. They are given more social opportunities than would have been previously attainable under the uglier model. Tretinoin is, in the end, a good whose sales are marketed by the cultural pressure of aesthetic improvement. It is, in essence, an item of design, not really changing any core part of the self directly, instead simply giving a superficial improvement to that self.

Of course, those superficial improvements mean everything to many, especially in a high-school environment. One high schooler I know is the owner of a perfect black iPod nano; this same student, however, has no access to the Internet — or even a computer at all — from his rural home. Instead, the nano is populated with hundreds of pirated music files on friends’ or relatives’ computers. Why, then, does the student own an iPod? Even in the most rural of American towns, where broadband infrastructure is largely non-existent, the iPod has become a symbol of social class. No portable CD player or alternative digital audio player will do.

Even the most trivial of things, such as owning a pair of the little white earbuds, mean everything to the social mobility of the teenager. The iPod — as well as other common devices such as the cameraphone — are requirements of life for the teenage socialite.

Like tretinoin, the iPod phenomenon spans more ranges than that of teenage angst. On campus and in the city, the white iPod earbuds are e-bling, declaring to the world that you’re hip. The iPod has positioned itself (rather inadvertently) as an aesthetic ornament first and audio player second. The exterior aesthetic of the device is as much for the enjoyment of others as it is for its owner, and its simple aesthetic is a primary factor in the user experience of the item. The iPod is the tretinoin of tech, an item that, while it has intrinsic utility, is leaps and bounds above a competitive user experience because others say so. To compete with iPod cool, you have to outdo it on the self-consciousness front.

The external user experience

Most geeks and technical reviewers wax poetic about iPod + iTunes, the simplicity of the iPod scroll wheel UI, and the great music store integration. The iPod really does offer a gold-standard user experience out of the box compared to the Sansa or Zune; however, these devices — sans the Zune’s initial product installation hurdles — have built devices that can compete with iPod on some level. Setting iPod’s market saturation and consequent DRM lock-in aside (both of which we will tackle to some degree later,) competing device hardware could technically stand a chance against the iPod.

Suppose, however, we were able to match the the iPod’s user experience exactly with a competing device. What if someone was able to build what effectively was an iPod clone with a different aesthetic? (Think Zune without its issues.) Then what? Chances are, even if the user experience between our iPod clone and the real iPod would still favour the iPod, it winning in the hearts and minds of users because of its trendiness. The iPod’s user experience comes with an easy-to-use device plus social fluidity and the idea that you’re “with it.” Apple’s pricing certainly reflects this to some extent.

In economics, this trend of buying things as status symbols is called conspicuous consumption and the idea of buying goods to increase social status is certainly nothing new; the original research into such patterns was done by economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899. If people buy iPods to succumb to fads instead of because they fit their utmost functional requirements, they’re effectively creating market distortions by pretending to be part of a higher socioeconomic class. The consumer is paying an extra “membership fee” to (temporarily) jump up the social ladder.

For the math geek This membership fee equates to economic rent, the price a consumer pays for an object that in this case forces them into a higher socioeconomic class perception over another device with the same functional purpose. In this case, this rent would be the price of an iPod minus the price that the user could’ve paid if working entirely toward the practical goal of satisfying functional requirements (without the status symbol, er, status.) Note that this is the rent that they have to pay to maintain that status perception at that time; if the iPod becomes obsolete or otherwise uncool, the rent must be paid again with another status symbol to regain that socioeconomic perception. This differs from consumption of people on that social class such that their consumption on those goods is not done for the purpose of “status symbols,” instead, it is done because it is the most efficient device within their income range.

This iconic status of the iPod is no doubt a large factor in its user experience today, and the extra benefit of this UX comes without any user interface design knowledge at all. Apple’s design team gave the iPod its base aesthetic, but in the end it was society that gave the iPod the popular cachet that it has today.

This utmost trendiness, where the iPod has become something of a materialist obligation, may certainly be part of the product scope that its competitors simply fail to recognise as an extant competitive hurdle, and unfortunately it is one that non-design-oriented electronic manufacturers may be entirely helpless against. It’s part of the brand scope that Zune hoped to fix with their device aesthetic, “cool” taglines and “social” device behaviour; it is the same cultural chic that Grey attacked in its failed iDon’t campaign. Any audio player manufacturer would fail in attempting to dethrone the iPod in a swift revolution. Instead, the competitive edge that would work in this instance would be to build great, beautiful hardware today to send the iPod to the guillotine tomorrow. In doing so, the device would need to match the existing iPod hardware on the core UI / hardware / software level (including Fairplay or maybe iTunes transparency via iPod emulation) as well as extra features like those found on the Zune. Even then, the lead time to start an MP3 player revolution would take a few years. All of iPod’s competitors to date have attempted to assassinate the king through clever marketing today, totally disregarding what could happen tomorrow.

Create today, attack tomorrow

You can’t make chic today; the failures of others have made that painfully evident. Traditional evidence, however, says that you can create chic tomorrow, thus blowing open the market for competitors now. Those marvelling at the iPod user experience — as well as engineers, marketers, and others at competing companies — should be examining their enemy today. Copy everything and improve on it. Build your own innovations into the standard iPod feature set. Test the prototype and return if you don’t end up with something slightly better than the current available products of today. If you don’t end up building it right, re-examine and go. In the process, the device developed is fundamentally superior to the iPod, yet is still inferior in the moment due to the brand cachet of the iPod.

In the iPod analogy, this is what Zune could have been. The device works, looks alright, and the on-device UI works great; however, its overall experience got killed by its just-oversized form factor and terrible desktop software. It isn’t fundamentally superior to the iPod and dies in the light of its rockstar competitor.

This working for tomorrow by solving today’s problems isn’t a random business idea from the mind of an admittedly business-naïve student; it has been fundamentally proven in multiple industries with multiple products. This process, ironically, was the same that Apple followed with the iPod.

Very few non-techies remember the Creative NOMAD Jukebox, the Discman-sized, hard-disk-based digital audio player released by Creative in 2000. The NOMAD Jukebox offered a then unheard-of five gigabytes of space, vastly over that of other flash-based devices of the time such as the Rio series by Diamond Multimedia, which had upper-end capacities of around 128MB. This extra storage capacity gave power users reason to buy the large blue box; those wanting portability sacrificed the enormous size for the flash-based players.

The market changed on October 23, 2001 with the release of Apple’s original iPod. Available in 5 or 10GB capacities, the iPod was a FireWire-based, Macintosh-only device in the days when OS X was just over 10.1 and OS 9 was still the primary operating system for Macintosh users. What did the iPod do? It built itself into a device that matched competitor strategies and outdid the current devices on the technical front. It built a solution for the day, a companion for Macs, and put a drastic amount of UI and industrial design behind their new venture, building an innovative navigation structure while making the hard-disk-based player drastically smaller than the NOMAD Jukebox. Meanwhile, given the iPod’s hacks-only support for Windows, the first-generation iPod was largely a geek’s toy.

The original iPod had no outward pretence of taking over a market dominated by flash players. In Mac and geek communities, the iPod’s first and second generations became that of a hot geek item over the course of two years, with Windows users confined to MusicMatch Jukebox, then the Windows standard. With the second-generation release in 2003, Apple wasn’t being forward-thinking or trying to capture tons of market share; competitors still couldn’t match the iPod’s aesthetics, and it was not really considered much of a threat to the flash-based dominance of the digital audio player market. Eventually, with the release of the third-generation iPod and subsequent release of iTunes for Windows in 28 April 2003 and 16 October 2003 respectively, the iPod began to catch the eyes of those not within the technology community. By the fourth generation in 2004 — nearly three years after the original iPod design — the iPod caught on and became a must-have fashion item throughout America. The white earbuds became ubiquitous. Those with other players were fashion-clueless. By October 2004, the iPod had seventy percent of the digital audio player market share.

Time-scaled user experience

The end result is that user experience matters on a device level, but the UX designer for a competing product needs to be looking at the tortoise pace. The object is to beat the device, not the craze, and the craze will eventually follow in the future. Set fashion aside and let the iPod win now; market the device, but not aggressively. Most of all, beat the iPod hardware every time on every front (yes, including iTunes.) The early adopters, not afraid to jump off of the bandwagon they once led, will follow the better product.

As for the insecure, the teenagers, the trendwhores and the conspicuous consumers, let them continue on the road of the competitor. It is that same person that misses the minute-improvement method in their own products, tretinoin, technology or otherwise. Those that do know better, however, are the ones that matter, and, in a few years, you may end up on top.

When an open-source library called libsecondlife hit the scene, few seemed to have taken notice. The library, reverse-engineered from Linden Lab’s proprietary client, seemed little more than a programmer’s novelty: incapable of rendering the complete SL world at first, libsecondlife was simply a hassle to anyone who wasn’t an alpha-geek. This perception soon changed; due to the freely-available source code, a developer’s utility called CopyBot made its way online in a modified form, leading to the mass protests against the libsecondlife team and Linden Lab.

CopyBot was originally a tool allowing Second Life developers to make local copies of any constructed in-game object, more for backup purposes than anything else, as most content created resides permanently on the Grid. A rather dubious developer, however, modified CopyBot to literally copy any and all Second Life objects without permission, regardless of protection status in the official client. With CopyBot, Second Life lost its primary intellectual property protection, forcing the Second Life digital content into the easily-traded sphere normally witnessed online.

User backlash was surprisingly fierce. Moopf Murray, an in-game vendor of, well, vending machines, sold his machines to a few profiteers who stacked the machines with links to download the cracked CopyBot. Although the Second Life interface distinguishes an object’s creator and owner, much as the distinction is made in real life, Murray was flooded with threats and angry IMs. One angry user had him reported to Linden Lab’s abuse department. When Linden Lab developers eventually congregated to make an official statement in-game, they were met with avatars wielding virtual pickets and floating billboard protesting the company. Linden Lab developers eventually banned many using the tool. The lead development team of libsecondlife also became a casualty of CopyBot, voluntarily resigning from their positions.

Shortly after the CopyBot scandal, I met Aimee Weber, known to her real-life colleagues as Alyssa LaRoche. Weber, a 26-year-old web consultant from the New York City area, left her day job at an undisclosed, large web consultancy to focus full-time on content creation. Now, as director of Aimee Weber Virtual Content Creation, which employs texture developers and SL script developers, Weber travels from corporation to corporation, helping trendy companies — or those who want to be trendy — in Second Life.

Weber is exactly the type of person that CopyBot threatened to hurt the most: with a company and livelihood resting upon the ability to sell goods (Weber’s *PREEN* clothing line is wildly popular with Second Life’s digital denizens,) an application that broke the copy protection rules could bring a real-world company into an equally real bankruptcy.

A winged avatar that looks like she’d belong more in a 90′s Manhattan nightclub dancing to DJ Keoki than an office, Weber is surprisingly professional. Weber toured me around her latest project for the NOAA (yes, a federal agency,) weeks before its actual release. As I stood on her interactive weather map, which displays polygonal clouds and rain over a picture of North America in real-time, Weber seemed less than scared about the dangers of CopyBot. “I am a little excited right now because in the New York [City] area, where I live, there is a tornado warning,” Weber said. “and I have scripted this map to make tornados!”

A little while later, after a trip to a tsunami exhibit and a ride on a virtual hurricane survey plane, I confronted Aimee on issues of IP and copy protection. What if someone could clone the NOAA’s expensive island elsewhere on the grid (which, although an impossibility with the original CopyBot version, could be eventually implemented?) What if all of her work could be instantly devalued by an open-source script?

“I think that is sure to happen,” Weber said. “It changes the way we do business.”

The viral time scale

Malcolm Gladwell’s 1997 essay The Coolhunt sparked a new wave of branding and research in the marketing world, turning the customer into creator, shotgunning products to people on the street rather than maintaining a statistical approach to doing business. In his essay, Gladwell follows two industry “coolhunters” — both inaccessibly cool in their own right — through the streets of Los Angeles and The Bronx in search of what they called innovators, those so far out of the trend landscape that they were setting the trends for everyone else. Underneath the innovators was a hierarchy of trend adoption: the early adopters, who caught on fast, the late adopters, who were only doing it after some considered it “uncool,” well into the mainstream. Meanwhile, some groups also lie outside of the trend structure: namely, the refuseniks, who absolutely refuse to join a trend even though they know of its existence, as well as the clueless, who, well, really don’t get it.

Since the beginning of our accelerated, social information age, many have questioned whether or not this trend structure can really hold true in any visible state. How can such a hierarchy be so obvious when information becomes more niche, more peer-to-peer? Is it even possible to find the innovators anymore as the Web’s signal-to-noise ratio plummets in the face of more content creators? Is it possible to discern early and late adopters from one another when adoption cycles can span hours or days instead of weeks or months?

When trend hierarchy is examined at such a level, the mathematics of defining the social strata of cool are expansive and uncertain. However complex, the hierarchy does hold on the macroscale: one just needs to look at the RIAA and MPAA’s refusenik policy toward single downloads, DRM, and Internet-as-viable-sales-medium issues from the original Napster to iTunes, or, on the other side of the trend spectrum, the innovation Jesse James Garrett called AJAX which took the web development world by storm.

While the coolhunt may seem to hold weight in these specific cases, the criticism of a viral trend’s inability to be accurately traced holds true. The YouTube, IM- and blog-backboned viral economy only highlights the innovator, be it Tom Dickson or Lasse Gjertsen, while video views and replies – in this case, the adoption of the content – skyrocket with broadband connectivity and cultural popularity. In 1997′s coolhunt, adoption happened at easily traceable rates, with fairly marked early/late adoption; in the case of an Internet-based meme, we only see the few stragglers showing up to the trend a few months (and few million views) late.

The viral qualities of online media are not responsible for destroying trend hierarchy; rather, the quick-publish, quick-access format makes older corporate bodies seem like refuseniks or the clueless. RIAA executives, ever fighting the trends of digital piracy and even digital music sales, seem like those just not in on this futuristic form of media distribution. The “they just don’t get it” philosophy – that is, labelling big business as the clueless – is an easy argument for the independent writers and developers used to thought at the speed of fibre optic cables. The piracy model has been common to all of us for years (anyone remember Scour Media Agent or Hotline?) The RIAA and huge mainstream media creators of all types, where trend analysis is relegated to the marketing division, have had much greater issues with adaptation due to bureaucracy and traditionalism than the innovators and early adopters have had. We call them the clueless, and refuseniks they certainly seem to be, but the seemingly stupid actions of big business have more to do with enterprise-level time scale disparities rather than any refusenik philosophy.

David versus Goliath

“It IS the way it is,” Weber emphasised as we stood on the digital tarmac of her NOAA plane. Weber, unlike the CEOs of yesteryear, worked in a vertical market where the time scale worked on production cycles of days, not months or years. Weber is, for our purposes, an innovator. Her understanding of the cutting edge digital industry has little to do with the technicalities of Second Life or even the Internet in general; instead, Weber is, at little more than an hour’s notice, ready to change absolutely everything her and her studio does as a small business — from operational systems all the way to culture — in the wake of an intellectual property disaster. It comes without excessive research and reports, investigation and refusenik philosophies to protect existing capital; Weber knows that the end result of failing to adapt fast enough will bring down the whole operation. The time scale of technology does not allow her to think for years in the event of a crisis; instead, all corporate inertia must be forced in another direction, the risk hopefully being hedged by immediate action in the short term. What could be a corporate doomsday is diverted by decisive (if not 100 percent profitable) action.

With the RIAA, for example, the problem lies less in their stubbornness to adapt to the nightmare they are presented with; rather, the problem lies in their inability to adapt fast enough. The RIAA is little more than an abstraction of already mammoth organisations into a larger organisation within itself, a representative, cartel-like group of megacorporations, an oligopoly where every corporation works with their own competitive strategies both with and against one another simultaneously. The RIAA has witnessed its doomsday with the rise of Napster in 2000, and their own doomsday clock is now some seven years past midnight.

What, however, could the RIAA possibly do? Being an organisation of organisations, the RIAA has little effective power over its sovereign members who view the association as a way to establish some, but not all, industry standards, of which the standards do not include DRM policies or legal frameworks for Internet music markets. From the perspective of big, bureaucratic music operations such as Bertelsmann Music Group or Warner Music Group, the costs of fighting online piracy and locking digital rights down into an increasingly user-oppressive format are drastically lower than the retooling of their industry philosophy to accept piracy as a fact of life. Because of this, losses to piracy be damned, it’s profitable for the music industry to lobby and litigate. In the trend hierarchy, it’s the big media companies that are pushing the RIAA in its current legal direction, the major players of the industry actively choosing the refusenik role as it is the best course of action that they can see financially. It has very little to do with this blogger-conceived notion that the RIAA and its member groups are somehow clueless.

Aimee Weber, on the other hand, the small content creator who caters to big corporations (and, ironically, has Warner Music Group as a customer,) has a much different tactic since choosing to refuse is financial suicide. The market, too vertical to withstand a serious intellectual property disaster, would utterly fail under the big-business model. Because of this, Weber, bloggers, and other indie developers — all the e-critics of big music business — are forced into adaptation if profitability means anything. It’s a way of life; it just makes sense to adapt and adapt quickly.

While the big four labels happily play refusenik, trying to retard the online distribution sphere with heavy DRM and lawsuits, independent labels have quickly changed their models to suit the industry force. eMusic, a subscription-based online music store, allows unrestricted MP3 downloads; nearly all of their content comes from independent labels as the big four actively refusing to do business with the company. eMusic’s figures are responding as well: they’re currently second in the digital sales hierarchy, beating out major-label-approved offerings such as Napster, which uses the same subscription model plus restrictive DRM. eMusic, with its array of independent labels, switched to a revolutionary business model to gain profitability and a competitive advantage, a power that their small business systems have over larger media institutions. eMusic is simply another living example that an independent production association, with time scales short and management systems lean, has a gigantic competitive leverage in the Internet market.

Turning back the doomsday clock

Big media corporations, be it the big four in music or a journalism conglomerate such as McClatchy, know that the small creator is succeeding. The corporate inertia held within the mass of an enterprise-class business takes too long to bleed off into the atmosphere as the nimble independents change direction.

Some of the big companies have already reached this goal. A fresh web team at NYTimes.com has changed the grey lady into one of the best news sources on the Web, leveraging the institutions traditional strengths of solid reporting, great writing, and reader trust/loyalty into a Web-savvy digital version backed by social media tools such as NYT blogs and RSS feeds. On a much larger scale, the massive NBC Universal signed a deal with YouTube after spending the beginning of 2006 slapping the video site with copyright infringement notices. Now, NBC’s content, reinforced with SNL hilarity and celebrity chic, has rocketed a video posted in late December to YouTube’s Most Viewed of All Time, taking back the eyes of viewers from restless amateurs. Mainstream media of all sorts is proving that its core deliverable content is far from obsolete in the Information Age.

Once the big media corporation can stop their bureaucratic freight train of suit-and-tie traditionalism (a period that takes months, if not years,) it seems that their doomsday can quickly be diverted. Their adaptability, although slow on the independent’s time scale, can put them into the Internet’s cultural influence and content innovation. Of course, once the mainstream gets involved in the activities of the independent, a social content free-for-all occurs as the mainstream swats at the fast-reacting independents while simultaneously competing against other big media corporations. This positive feedback loop of competition can, in the end, improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the social media site: most likely, the best content — as well as most of the upper part of the content distribution tail — will be from popular sources committed to good content due to competition. Yes, having the big corporations in the mix may actually help social media.

For a few of the media giants, it’s five minutes to midnight again. For everyone else, maybe it’s time that corporate shareholders and boards of directors start taking a cue from the independent: it’s time to “lean out” that bureaucracy and build a quicker, faster conglomerate. Currently, the big four (as well as many movie houses) are still barreling into refusenik territory to defend profitability instead of capturing what may be possible online, some 122,000 revolutions of the doomsday clock ahead. Maybe, in the case of these corporations, an entirely different sort of revolution is necessary.

Well, I wasn’t the only one that was Person of the Year. I found out that I shared the title with quite a few other people, including… I guess I should refrain from naming the rest of the six billion people that Time gave this year’s Person of the Year award to. That’s right. The winner of this year’s Person of the Year award is you, too. Time took what used to be a prestigious award and diluted the quality of it to the point that everyone involved in some way with the information age. I feel truly sorry for the previous winners of the award.

What was Time thinking?

While I was watching CNN Headline News on this, one of their user comments was by far a better analogy than one I could come up with: “Congratulations Time. You were asked to pick your favourite color and you chose clear.” Naming everybody Person of the Year doesn’t simply make it appear to the world that you’re sitting this one out; it simply makes you appear as if any shred of journalistic reputability is flying out the window in hopes of appealing to the Internet.

It’s more than a simple self-mockery of traditional journalism; it’s practically suicide. Time might as well just concede defeat of the media to the end user, pack up their bags, and go home. I love Time, but I really don’t love what this is all about. If you’ve so much as touched MySpace, YouTube, or the blogosphere, congratulations, you’re everything Time thinks is right with the world. That sphere includes the murderers of MySpace user Ashley Marie Scott and a 20-year-old named Andrew Jude Thompson, who purportedly stabbed his father to death.

All of this social media glory from Time really makes me wonder: Is the world that bad? Is there really no one out there worth giving the Person of the Year Award to? If Time can’t find someone to give their award to, I can’t wait to see who the next set of Nobel Laureates will be.

The media hysteria

While it’s easy to point fingers at Time for making such a stupid error, maybe the real issue isn’t Time or the casual users of YouTube or MySpace it holds in such high regard; maybe the real issue is us, the people working to build new technologies, the people with ties to Silicon Valley digerati that influence the old media and venture capitalists alike. All of us authoring, researching, or promoting these tools have helped feed the flames of “Web 2.0″ hype, and in some way we are all simply cheerleaders of what we do. We preach the productivity increases in new collaborative software, cheer on the long tail, and slam mainstream media as slow, stubborn, and stupid.

What we’ve got in return is what seems to be a desperate attempt by the mainstream media to show that they’re listening to these things we’re building, too, even though they’re only seeing the mainstream part of it. We’ve built some type of peculiar Stockholm syndrome into the mainstream where we constantly attack them for being almost neo-Luddite in their ways, and in turn the result seems to be that while many still act as stubborn, a select few have decided to love the Web 2.0 world unconditionally. Time spoke of “Web 2.0″ in their article as if it was something new, stating that “Silicon Valley consultants call it ‘Web 2.0′, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”

Where the hell has Time been? The first of Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conferences was in October 2004, over two years ago. This is practically a century in terms of the Web, especially with the rate at which information changes hands in the social media sphere that Web 2.0 helped create. If Time is just jumping on the “Web 2.0″ bandwagon which has become so painfully mainstream that all of us trying to work on the bleeding edge of it are well beyond it. A lot of us are already hearing talks of the cringe-worthy term Web 3.0. If any revolution has occurred, it started way back with the pioneering social network Friendster was created in 2002. You could argue that the social revolution had a lot of its roots in the pre-90s Free Software movement and BBS systems, and the only real difference now is that we’ve added AJAX, Web standards, and some mainstream accessibility to the mix.

With this lack of hindsight, Time seems just as far out of the social media loop as industry technologists like to say that they are; the only difference is that their friends are now using YouTube and think it’s great. There’s no feeling of history, no legacy in the way that they’ve portrayed the new Web, and their account of what the social media revolution is is so superficial that it reeks of nothing but absorption of Silicon Valley hype. They’ve taken a social revolution that has been baking in the dot-com underground for years, maybe even decades now and looked at it on a level that is entirely unfitting of a professional magazine. I cannot reiterate enough that the latest generation of Web tools is not something that’s been built overnight; it has been merely an exponential explosion of an underground Internet culture that finally broke the threshold into the mainstream due to easy-to-understand user interfaces and mainstream saturation of communicative infrastructures such as broadband. “Web 2.0″ is just something that’s been given a name to appeal to tech-hungry Valley venture capitalists. The term is nothing more than marketing hype.

Have your award back, Time.

Well, Time, being Person of the Year for being a heavy social media participant is nice and all, but unfortunately I have to decline this award. Receiving it feels shallow and misguided; I am receiving an award based not on any true benefit to the world or to society, but rather based upon the hype that makes you believe that “Web 2.0″ is really such a benefit to humanity and culture.

Instead, it is not the catchphrase of an Internet technology fad that should be the focus of Person of the Year. It is not technological mega-sites like YouTube and MySpace which harness the power of millions creating amateur content for the entertainment of other amateurs; it is not the person uploading that to said mega-sites. If Time wants to give the award to an abstraction of humanity, an altruistic drive in all of us, then it should simply give its award not to everyone and, rather, not to anyone at all. It should be redefined as an award to the spirit of human creativity. It is the creative forces in all of us that drive us to create, remix and mashup, regardless of skill or social class. It is the creative want to build something new, something different, and something that others will like that really is the driving force behind the new Web, not venture capital or marketing buzzwords. The Person of the Year, it seems, should not be a person at all.