Pixels and Place

by Kate O'Neill

  It also raises questions about what it means to be human in the midst of all this digital infrastructure. Every moment of our online lives is immortalized in ever-expanding metadata.

  What does it mean to be so well-documented? How does our long digital shadow affect the light we choose to shine on ourselves?

  If we’ve created a connected consciousness by turning our devices into data paparazzi, we may need a moment to fix our collective hair. It’s not idle talk when marketers say businesses need strategy for social media; it’s because that kind of spotlight invites empty vamping for the camera. If you don’t set your intentions in advance, you’ll struggle to follow through, and your missteps will echo throughout dimensions of data and be etched in archives.

  Part of the human experience is to be self-aware and socially aware. Self-awareness grows from recognizing when you don’t live up to your intentions. Social awareness grows from understanding your impact on others. We have the means to measure, by some proxy, how we live up to our intentions, and how we impact others. The strategy we set today provides the framework for improvement tomorrow. You can measure almost anything; it’s all being tracked. You just need to decide what’s meaningful to pay attention to.

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  If we focus instead on the potential for delight, we can imagine how to design the experiences on behalf of corporations, organizations, institutions, and entities to maximize the richness of what the overlay of digital and physical can accomplish. We seek out where and how our digital selves transcend our physical limitations, where we have the limitlessness of global knowledge and resources at our fingertips and it adapts to our contextual needs, making our lives a little richer, a little less frustrating, a little more delightful, a little more satisfying. Or even sometimes a lot more delightful.

  Our Digital Selves

  Clearly digital culture has gone well beyond status updates. We’ve progressed beyond pictures of coffee and cats. From what a person posts, shares, likes, and clicks, you could form a pretty interesting sketch-level avatar of who they are: including the quotes, jokes, memes, news stories, feel-good viral videos, selfies, and rants. What they find funny, what they value, what news stories engage them, whom they want to impress, what kind of content makes them linger long enough to read an article or watch a video all the way through.

  Fear of Missing Out Versus Fear of Not Sharing

  Pundits in the past few years have written a lot about FOMO, or the “fear of missing out,” which is the sense of anxiety that if you’re offline or not following your social feeds, you’re missing out on what everyone else might be sharing. But I think there’s a correlating anxiety that’s less discussed: about missing out on sharing what you experience. Fear of Not Sharing, or something like that. Because more and more, I get the sense that our experiences don’t feel real or valid to us until we’ve shared them with our followers and gotten a few likes on them. Preferably a whole lot of likes, and a few re-shares.

  I took this photo in June 2016 of tourists posing for pictures on the pedestals at the Louvre museum in Paris. Were you really at the Louvre if you didn’t take a selfie in front of the pyramid?

  It may seem like vanity or insecurity that drives us to do this, but I suspect it’s more nuanced than that. I suspect it’s because we actually live our online lives in ways we don’t fully understand yet and can’t yet articulate well. We create an aspirational avatar of our selves with every bit of content we share.

  We create an aspirational avatar of our selves with every bit of content we share.

  Our Digital Selves Are Our Aspirational Selves

  Years ago, I took on a project at Magazines.com to understand what a forward-looking brand promise could be for an online aggregator of print magazine subscriptions. What it led to was an understanding that people have a different relationship to magazines than they have to other media they consume, and that their magazine subscriptions, taken as a set, represent an aspirational view of themselves. People who may never play guitar on stage subscribe to Performer Magazine, and there is no requirement for a tidy home before subscribing to Better Homes and Gardens. (In fact, the word better in that magazine’s title is a real clue, isn’t it?)

  While that may not seem like an earth-shattering insight, it was indeed a focusing one for a company that wasn’t really sure what it would have to offer its customers in an increasingly digital-content-oriented future.

  In the meantime, even more than we knew at the time, social media and everything else has given the content we consume a hard shake, like a snow globe dispersing tiny glittering flecks of content everywhere. Now our aspirational selves can be understood in dramatically greater detail by analyzing the patterns of the shiny content flecks that capture our attention for brief moments in fleeting ways every day online.

  Because of that, our digital selves now more fully represent our most aspirational selves in a far more nuanced way than any of our traditional offline media or brand affinities have ever done. Our digital selves contain so much inherent information about what moves us to act and what we feel compelled to say and with whom we seek to connect. They are a composite of what we search for and what we ultimately buy. They contain a map of what we think is important enough and aligned enough with who we feel we are in that moment to share with our friends. Also included in our digital selves is our medical history, our academic record, our late-night searches for old lovers, our location-tagged vacation photographs. In an aggregate sense, they are truly the abstractions of everything we want, everything we love, everything we say we need—and yet often what we habitually do in spite of all that.

  Yet as we engage online, we keep getting admonished to put down our phones and join the “real world.” But our virtual presence is real to us, too, and the interactions we have with other people online are often dimensionally more connected to our aspirational selves than the ones we are able to have in person. If you’re a teenager surrounded by your family—whom you did not choose to be with—but you can interact virtually with people who genuinely share an interest of yours, it can be difficult to pull yourself from that virtual realm and focus on the people and the world around you.

  The data that connects the people and those moments is all out there, being mined for insights every day by a wide variety of entities. The motive is profit, generally speaking, but if our digital selves are really who we aspire to be, we are also duty bound to show our digital selves respect.

  If our digital selves are really who we aspire to be, we are also duty bound to show our digital selves respect.

  On the other hand, maybe some of that content is just sparkly fake snow. For all the admonitions to be “authentic” online, we don’t yet have a useful framework for understanding how weaving elements of fakeness into our virtual identities—carefully staging Instagram photos, posting lighthearted status updates while we’re bored and depressed at home—might play into our aspirational understanding of ourselves. Which person are you, really: the one you’ve always been, or the one you’re someday hoping to be?

  And Beyond: Virtual Identities

  If our digital selves represent our aspirational selves, then who are we when we adopt virtual identities? Do we create the self we wish we were, the self we wish others could see, the self best suited to the game or the context, or some other version of self? Like digital selves, virtual selves are often experimental selves: the versions of our identities we’d like to try on, to see what fits.

  But in as much as our digital selves are our aspirational selves, our physical selves are the more sensory and sensual selves. And senses play into meaning. Part of acknowledging the importance of place—physical place—is a form of showing respect to our physical selves, too.

  Until virtual experiences can engage our physical forms and senses as fully as purely physical experiences do, they’ll need to be supplemented with physical experiences. And since physical experiences can rarely engage our minds and imagination as fully as purel
y digital experiences, they benefit from supplementation with digital experiences, too.

  Ultimately, the convergence of physical and digital experiences, if we do it right, can be the pinnacle of meaningful experience, engaging our senses, engaging our bodies, engaging our minds, and engaging our projected, aspirational selves.

  Beyond Personal Brand

  All of this is why the popular notion of “personal brand” is so stilted, artificial, and even arbitrary. Yes, we do have the opportunity to be intentional about the self we reinforce. But human beings are not businesses with a singular focus and mission; we grow, our identities are fluid, and eventually, if we’re lucky to survive long enough to become a little enlightened, we evolve. Our old aspirational selves are no longer aspirational then; they’re our past aspirational selves, the empty shells of who we once wanted to be. But like empty shells sometimes do, they may provide useful temporary housing for some other being that comes along after us, sharing our old content as their own revelation.

  Meanwhile, we move forward, creating new dimensions of our selves with every interaction, dragging our digital detritus behind us.

  Bearing all this in mind, in our roles as creators and designers of the experiences that adapt to the contours of others’ digital selves, we have an exciting opportunity and a great responsibility. We get to dream up interactions that more fully integrate our fellow humans’ physical surroundings and beings with their digital selves and lives, just as other creators and designers are shaping the experiences we will encounter. It’s easy to think of “big data” or even your own customer data in an abstract way, and develop interactions that manipulate or exploit the vulnerability of the people whose data you have access to. But remembering that the data is someone’s digital self, just as your data is your digital self, may encourage us to have a little healthy respect for the power and identity of that data. Since each of us is increasingly vulnerable to the whims of algorithmic influence, once again, the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—has a powerful place in respectful data-guided marketing and experience design.

  People, Community, and Connection to Place

  If people and their data are the connective layer between the physical world and the digital world, then it also stands to reason that community is yet another dimension of that connectivity. Community develops offline in relation to places all the time: in neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, and so on. But even in those places the communities aren’t just about the places: they’re also about shared ideas and identity even in subgroups. The online versions of community often take similar shapes: around a place, like a social platform, but clustered around subcultural identities.

  It’s also interesting how technologies that purport in some way to bridge the physical and digital worlds bring people together or don’t. Think of Foursquare, and what at least initially was the promise of using Foursquare check-ins. It seemed that it could have been a seamless log of our movements, the places we have seen and visited and experienced, a way to connect with friends who are in our path, and a serendipity engine for meeting new people along the way.

  I even had that kind of scenario play out once. I’m notorious among my friends as an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person, but one night when I lived in Nashville I had visitors and I was showing them the honky-tonks on Broadway (as you do) when I checked in to one of them on Foursquare. Two of my friends saw me check into a bar at the unlikely hour of eleven p.m. on a weeknight, and they surprised me by showing up. It was spontaneous and fun, and I got to introduce them to my out-of-town friends. The whole experience was better and more delightful because of my ability to make my whereabouts incidentally visible to my friends and their ability to see it and act on it. (My real friends, mind you. Had these been more casual acquaintances, their sudden appearance might have been awkward. But it wasn’t, and it need not be.)

  What is available in that opportunity?

  If we want to borrow from the check-in model, we’d have to ask users to trade off some measures of privacy to make the most of this opportunity, but that can be done in levels. As a user, I may want to select layers of friends who can have visibility into my every move versus those who only see what I choose to share in review, versus the strangers who have chosen to allow some of their identity to be accessible because we’re in the same place. There are security measures to be taken here, but the opportunities are rich.

  In general, as we design for integrated experiences, it helps to be aware that the nature of community online, as offline, leans heavily on association with place, and the experience of connection within it.

  Some online experiences rely almost completely on how a community of users relates to some notion of place. Yelp without customer reviews would just be a searchable Yellow Pages (and a search feature does add value, but not nearly as much as wisdom-of-crowds18 reviews do).

  And yet most of what we experience online, we still experience while we are physically alone. Could it be that our online selves are connecting in community in ways we don’t yet have a framework and vocabulary for? The dynamics of community as they play out online are still forming and evolving.

  Yet digital culture is an observable phenomenon—different online spaces clearly have different cultures.

  As we sit alone in front of our computers, or detach from our physical companions to interact with our phones, we are connecting with virtual communities online and shaping those spaces.

  While human beings are physical and finite, our virtual selves are contextual essences, mixed and remixed in endless combinations.

  Selfies and Metadata Dimensionality

  Every time I visit the Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago (known affectionately as “The Bean”), I can’t help but notice that everyone is taking selfies. A great many of them are posted to Instagram and tagged with the location of the sculpture, but across several different tags and hashtags. Some of the variations may be unavoidable, and it may even add to the delight of the place that someone gets to choose whether they call it “Cloud Gate” or “The Bean.” But it also decouples the experiences for those two sets of visitors who choose differently. The variation makes it more difficult to analyze place data, whenever that is a meaningful task.

  Cloud Gate in Chicago, also known as “The Bean”

  Here’s an opportunity: If you are responsible for the place, you can combine the colloquial name for the place with the given name for the place. You can post it somewhere visible for people to use, and they can connect through time with other people who have shared their experience.

  I gave a talk on “The Meaning of Place” and was asked about how to create meaning for a place with social media. One suggestion I had was to embrace the noteworthiness of a place and make it easy for visitors to feel they were participating in the place’s legacy. They can’t do that if they can’t find the right location or if it doesn’t occur to them to use a certain hashtag, so you can make it easy by posting signs. It could be of value, if permission is granted or implied, to pop up a notice on someone’s phone or device to let them know they’re in a particular place of significance, and allow them to be part of the culture and community that have participated in its legacy. Some platforms and tools have features that function like this in limited ways: Yelp and Foursquare both send push notifications about nearby restaurants and other venues of interest, and Instagram places and Snapchat geo-filters both connect a person dimensionally with other people who have visited or participated in a place or place-centric event. That kind of push interaction is, of course, rife with privacy concerns and contrary user preferences, so the easiest way to promote that continuity is to use the physical surroundings to connect the visitors digitally.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Meaning of Place

  What is the meaning of place? In examining what we mean when we talk about place, we can deconstruct and reconstruct that understanding to be useful in dealing with digital experiences. There’s
a difference between knowing what place generally means and knowing what a place means, or what makes a place meaningful. Let’s examine that, too.

  What is “Place”? What Does Any Place Mean?

  What is place? What does place mean? What does a given place mean?

  What is the meaning of place? What makes a place meaningful?

  What does our understanding of place do for us?

  All of these questions yield potentially different answers.

  Let’s start with what place is. Obviously we tend think of place as our physical surroundings, but given our framework here, we’ll just say “surroundings” so that we can eventually include digital experiences. Part of what defines place for us is an identity relative to our experience of it, and a relative sense of how other people do or don’t affect the experience, whether through a sense of community or privacy. I don’t expect a sense of community in my backyard, for example, but perhaps part of what defines that space for me is that I do sense privacy when I’m there. Part of what defines that place is the relationship it has to people: as in, that there generally are none, unless I invite them.