The old paradigm in communication was that people generally revealed very little of their fears and doubts. They tried to present the image of themselves to other people as completely confident and knowledgeable. The goal was to make sure that you appeared like you were always in complete control. But this is shifting, in part, because of social media. The paradigm is now no longer to try to appear perfect, but to be more transparent with your thoughts and feelings, to reveal your humanness.

In a world where the vast majority of information we encounter comes from people we’ve never met, who no one we know has ever met, and who we will probably never meet – who, as far as we know, are just electrons – how do we determine humanness? We define ourselves by our differences from other things. We walk upright, we have opposable thumbs, we use tools, we think about ourselves and, most uniquely, we think about thinking about ourselves.

Before photography, painters would strive for realism. After photography - this. The human being, as a medium, is due for a similar fate.

So what happens when we create something that can think about thinking about itself? What happens when we create something that does it even better than we do?

Think about this: painters didn’t celebrate the medium of paint until photography was invented. The full potential of newspapers wasn’t appreciated until the Internet started putting them out of business. The true beauty of film wasn’t understood until everyone had gone digital. Hiking became a sport only after cars were invented.

While machines have taken over the laundry, the dishes, logo design, (just kidding guys, take the gun out of your mouth), and a million other things, we’ve made enormous strides in art, literature, caring for one another, and, well, making machines that are even better at doing everything for us. And the more we create machines to do things for us, the better we get at the things that are left, that only we can do.

When we’ve finally made ourselves completely obsolete, that’s when we’ll know what it really is to be human.

If you have about half an hour, I strongly encourage you to watch this talk by Jesse Schell. It’s fun. (Also, embedded at the bottom of this post.)

But if you don’t have half an hour, let me sum it up for you:

Games are spilling into reality, and reality is becoming more like a game. More and more actions in your daily life are rewarding you with experience points.

It basically ends there, with a nice note about how your grand kids will be able to find out just exactly how much of a loser you were, because your entire life is being recorded.

I don’t think Mr. Schell went far enough. What happens when people realize they can trade points for real things? What happens when the guy who sucked at regular, money-earning jobs finds out he’s really, really good at getting points for stuff he was already doing anyway?

What happens when we realize we no longer need money?

What are the implications of a currency that, instead of being printed in limited supply by the government, is infinite and generated by our own actions as individuals?

Just some thoughts.

Fortunately communications can be consolidated. But not with email. (I don’t think I can explain why email sucks better than Naomi Dunford at IttyBiz did, so just go to the link.) One great way to tell everyone who could possibly care that you are away/sick/available for coffee at so-and-so time, is by tweeting it. Yes, that’s right. Microblogging can help kill email. For more complicated things like sharing ideas: regular blogging.

This all seems pretty obvious after actually typing it out. So where does it go? That’s the interesting part.

We may be doomed to live in a world, from here on out, where we never really connect with anyone. All our blog comments just get lost in a sea of other people’s blog comments and none of them get read ever.

Or we have to think of it like advertising. We see a billion or something ads every day. How many do we notice? Like one? Two maybe if we’re still big enough suckers to own a TV? Point is, the ones that get noticed usually get noticed because they put a ton of effort into getting noticed by 1) being relevant and 2) being rewarding in some way. It seems silly to have to think it out like this for basic human-to-human interactions, but with a billion or something of us all communicating all the time, something has to be done. Either make yourself interesting and relevant, or keep hoping for an apocalypse.

Also, contemplate this: with constant updates, geo-tagging and all that crap, I could just be like, “Well guys I’m heading over to Cafe Whatever, anyone into whatever it is I feel like talking about today can show up.” Or with augmented reality, I could just kick back and turn my real-life chat settings to “available” when I’m out, and meet people that way. In the real world. Where stuff is actually manageable.

And I might get free coffee.

But will it replace fireworks? NEVER.

Via Singularity Hub, who thinks this might replace fireworks. They are wrong. Nothing is as awesome as fireworks.

Thea’s friend: “Something Economist something writing an article for some client something.”

Thea: “Wait, so, The Economist is writing content for the client’s website?”

Thea’s friend: “No. It’s an advertorial that runs in the print edition.”

Thea: “Oh. How awesome would it be though if you could get The Economist to provide content for your brand’s website? Like if your target market was into that stuff?”

Thea’s friend: “You know what, I’ve got, um, a… plane. To catch. I’ll facebook you or something.”

Three days later the idea still seemed sort of valid, so stick with me here. Brands need content that’s going to be valuable to their customers. Magazines need someone to actually pay money for their content. So, brands commission trusted publications to create content that’s relevant to their customers. Journalists keep their jobs, brands get some trustworthiness and interestingness rubbed off on them, and consumers get to enjoy not having to flip through crappy advertorials or skim over boring corporate blogs. Everyone wins! (Except me. I’m a content writer. So I would lose. It’s ok, I’ll always have the novel…)

Anyone heard of this being done already? Would there be some kind of code of journalism that this would break? (Ha! “Code of journalism.” As if.) How would you price something like that? Is the shift from branded content to contented brand really practical? What do you think?

Artists in LA apparently have to buy ad space just get anyone to look at their work.

How Many Billboards is a project in LA replacing billboards with commissioned artworks. The philosophy: “art should occupy a visible position in the cacophony of mediated images in the city, and it should do so without merely adding to the visual noise.”

Funny. That’s exactly what we’ve been saying about advertising for years.

According to director Kimberli Meyer, “Commercial messaging tells you to buy; artistic messaging encourages you to look and to think.” Wrong. Great artistic messaging encourages you to look and think. Great commercial messaging also encourages you to look and think. Both are tragically rare, and frankly I’m not seeing either represented in this project.

To artists:

Stop. Making. Meaningless. Crap. The world is full of people with no artistic ability who are desperately trying to make the world a better place. Use some of your unique, bountiful skills to help them communicate in beautiful and interesting ways.

To advertisers:

Every media buy is a potential work of art. Stop making boring, ugly crap and use the talents of real artists to make your communication beautiful and interesting. It’ll be good for business and it’ll keep LA just slightly less horrible.

(Of course, there’s always a place for creative work that’s not traditionally meaningful or traditionally artistic.)

Obviously it’s a great tool for telling how fast some guy pacing around in your office is going. Also, robot armor and smart windshield HUDs. But what else could this possibly be used for?

1. AR racing games. With actual racing! My Hotwheels versus your Hotwheels. Cat versus dog. Little Timmy versus the lawnmower. Anything can now be raced with accurate 3rd party judging right on your mobile phone, including the mobile phone itself!

2. An app that knows when it’s raining and tells you the closest place to buy an umbrella. This sounds boring and lame compared to the others, but next time it starts raining on you, you’ll wish you had this. You know it’s true.

3. An app that knows when you’re running and shows you the best place to catch a cab, buy pepper spray, or take cover in a gunfight.

4. An app that alerts you when cars/bullets/freakishly fast zombies/dinosaurs are coming at you. The alert would have to be sort of urgent for this to be effective. Maybe an electric shock?

5. Gambling. Mobile radar generates another set of statistics on the world around you. What else do non-marketing people use statistics for, really?

6. Outdoorsy stuff. You’re in a forest. There’s obviously tons of animals around, (duh, it’s a forest,) but where the eff are they? Mobile radar will show you! You might even find Bigfoot.

When the copywriter and the art director finally started working together, from concept to execution, suddenly the industry changed. We got this:

The art director/copywriter team is now standard practice in the ad industry. When a project requires two kinds of expertise, you want both of those experts communicating as much as possible. Not only do they create a more cohesive finished product – they come up with ideas together that neither of them would have come up with on their own.

In the digital world, it’s not so simple. You can’t just be a copywriter – you have to be a content writer, and content isn’t just clever copy. In the information age, a catchy headline doesn’t even come close to getting the job done.

Art direction isn’t enough either. Sorry, art directors. A website can’t just look pretty, because it’s not just an ad. It’s a tool. It’s an experience. It has to work, and it has to feel nice.

So we have interaction designers. And the interaction designers toil away with filler content, while the content writers try to come up with content that fits the specific character count required by the design. And this is how the vast majority of websites are made.

You may not have realized this, but the vast majority of websites suck.

This gets improved the moment we team up the person making the content with the person making the design that’s supposed to convey that content. That’s right: content writer/interaction designer teams. Or content strategist/user experience designer teams. Or gardener/architect teams. Any way you put it, good things will happen when you have these people working together from concept to execution.

What we’re trying to do with personalized advertising, essentially, is write a localized ad for a city we don’t live in. You’ve seen them – some ad that casually mentions something about your city, but just doesn’t ring true. Like the Chase ads all around San Francisco that had some line about “easy to find – even in this fog” or something. Someone failed to realize that for San Francisco, Chase ATMs still aren’t as convenient as BofA ATMs, no matter how much we may hate BofA. Everyone knows San Francisco is foggy. Only San Franciscans know that 6 blocks up Market Street does not equal convenient. Chase may as well have slapped up a really big logo everywhere and saved themselves the creative fee. Better yet, they should have slapped up the logo with “Up Yours Bank of America” in huge letters and saved the creative fee for the lawsuit. (Btw I have no idea who worked on that Chase campaign. If they are San Franciscans… I don’t really know what to say. You know what you did.)

If tailoring one campaign to multiple cities is hard enough, how do we target one campaign to every single potential customer?

We don’t. Instead, we let the customer target us. If you’re thinking this leaves traditional advertising on the side of a dark, lonely road crawling through the mud and grasping its side to keep its internal organs from falling out, you’re right. And you’ll find remarkably few people outside the industry who wouldn’t run that bum over.

The most successful advertising has never looked like advertising. The most successful advertising of the this decade won’t be advertising at all. It’ll be product. It’ll be conversation. It’ll be experiences. It’ll be engagement. It will be anything that we’d like to think people will go out of their way to find. It’ll be contented brands instead of branded content.

We’re not salesmen anymore. We’re gardeners.

Hopefully it doesn't all go horribly, horribly wrong.

We’ve all heard all the arguments against saying “%*#!” in a blog, so I’ll skip right to the defense.

Profanity is colloquial. I like to write the way people actually talk. I take a professional pride in it, in fact. This doesn’t mean I can’t write other ways – I also take pride in (and make money from) being able to use any tone or personality successfully. But the fact is, people use profanity and when I compromise realism for politeness it makes me feel cheap and icky.

Profanity is fun. Crap%*#!er. Just think about that word. Its hilarious! Come on.

Profanity creates a feeling of community. We use profanity with people we’re comfortable around. It feels nice knowing you can say, “%*#! those %*#!ing %*#!ers,” and have people love you all the more for it.

Profanity isn’t actually offensive. You want offensive? Watch the news. It offends me that anyone can claim to be offended by language of any kind.

And yet, I have lingering doubts. I heard somewhere that profanity hurts your search ranking. That’s %*#!ed up. A friend of mine said he doesn’t re-post Facebook links that have profanity. I guess he has kids or something.

Dammit, if Galactica can do it, I can do it.

So, after months of deliberation, I decided to adjust the profanity level on the blog. There is one reason for this and one reason only: my absolutely firm belief in the power of evolution and the necessity of mutations. Over the past few days I’ve been carefully dicing and splicing the DNA sequence of Transmogrifant to include fewer %*#!s, &^*%s and !@#$s. (I haven’t actually used “!@#$” yet, but I felt it needed representation before it got killed. It’s a good one.)