Vertical histories

By | September 8, 2021
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How we shoot and watch video is changing, and with it the way we engage with the world

The two iconic images of the fall of Kabul involve a C-17 taking off from Hamid Karzai Airport. It’s as searing as the helicopter perched atop an apartment complex in Saigon, a stream of Vietnamese climbing the ladder to the roof in the hope of getting aboard:

Hubert Van Es / United Press International, the roof of 22 Gia Long Street, Saigon, April 29 1975
Hubert Van Es / United Press International, the roof of 22 Gia Long Street, Saigon, April 29 1975

In Kabul, 46 years later, we have something similar, but now the photographer is not a UPI photographer called Hubert Van Es, back at the office developing film:

If you looked north from the office balcony, toward the cathedral, about four blocks from us, on the corner of Tu Do and Gia Long, you could see a building called the Pittman Apartments, where we knew the C.I.A. station chief and many of his officers lived. Several weeks earlier the roof of the elevator shaft had been reinforced with steel plate so that it would be able to take the weight of a helicopter. A makeshift wooden ladder now ran from the lower roof to the top of the shaft. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, while I was working in the darkroom, I suddenly heard Bert Okuley shout, “Van Es, get out here, there’s a chopper on that roof!”

I grabbed my camera and the longest lens left in the office — it was only 300 millimeters, but it would have to do — and dashed to the balcony. Looking at the Pittman Apartments, I could see 20 or 30 people on the roof, climbing the ladder to an Air America Huey helicopter. At the top of the ladder stood an American in civilian clothes, pulling people up and shoving them inside.

After shooting about 10 frames, I went back to the darkroom to process the film and get a print ready for the regular 5 p.m. transmission to Tokyo from Saigon’s telegraph office. In those days, pictures were transmitted via radio signals, which at the receiving end were translated back into an image. A 5-inch-by-7-inch black-and-white print with a short caption took 12 minutes to send.

It’s beautifully framed, the chopper and the building, with its tiny shack on the roof, the empty space in the upper right of the screen, the eyes drawn up the rising tide of humanity towards the diplomat in his shirt sleeves, either reaching to help or reaching to hold back, we are unsure. We want to know what will happen — will they all make it? (No, Hubert says, this was the only chopper to land on this roof; those not able to get aboard waited for hours in vain.)

In the chaos that was Kabul Airport, 2021, it was ordinary Afghans shooting video, sometimes shortly before their own death, and that made the experience much more visceral. Part of the reason, I believe, is because the videos, like most mobile videos shot nowadays, were shot in vertical (‘portrait’) mode. (I don’t mean to demean the trauma of that situation, and what is still taking place in Afghanistan. I hope I can show that the format of such videos have helped shock us out of our torpor and, hopefully, made us empathise more with the many who either failed in their bids to leave, or died doing so.)

I was watching the key day unfold in real time on Twitter, so many of the videos lacked context, made me feel nauseous at the tragedy unfolding, and the inevitable deaths that would result. All of these moments were shot in portrait mode (I’m not going to be able to cite the sources of these videos, I’m afraid, but if anyone knows who to credit please let me know).

This first video was of young men chasing, and some clinging, to a C-17 as it gathered speed on the runway. One video, extraordinarily, was shot by one of the young men:

From another angle, back on the runway, shot by someone who didn’t make it or didn’t try, we look at the airplane gaining height:

Then another video, minutes later, shot from possibly the airport perimeter, shows the C-17 rising into blue sky, apparently an image of safety, of rescue:

Until we look closer, and realise that there are one, two specks falling from the airplane, and we realise they are the young men we had seen moments before.

For me these are the images that I will never forget, not least because they were shot by participants in the tragedy, a fumbled few seconds of footage, human beings drawn to document what they saw and what they were going through.

Then there’s the other iconic image, one perhaps more akin to Hubert’s Saigon picture: The distance shot of a C-17 making the necessarily steep climb out of Kabul:

A U.S military aircraft takes off from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon)
A U.S military aircraft takes off from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon)

This image is in some ways more memorable, more iconic. But I noticed that The New Yorker’s João Fazenda had chosen to recreate the image in a more vertical format, emphasising the incline of the plane, and what it had left behind:

João Fazenda, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine
João Fazenda, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine

I dwell on this because I’ve been exploring why most of us now so readily embrace vertically shot video, which, let’s face it, is lousy to watch except on a phone. But this isn’t 2012 anymore, when a faux public service video begging people not to record video in vertical format went viral. Since then we’ve, if not embraced the format, at least got used to it.

In fact, there’s an interesting body of academic and artistic work exploring the rise of vertical. Vertical Cinema as a genre had its own first premiere back in 2013 and has since had festivals and showings most years since. National Geographic released the final episode of its “One Strange Rock” documentary in 2018 in vertical format for Instagram (NatGeo has 183 million followers on Instagram and releases regular vertical versions of its programs.)

The literature points to the somewhat narrow way we look at what is an acceptable format. The reason we are used to landscape/horizontal/postbox views is because, back in 1930 the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science got together to create a standardised horizontal frame for showing in cinemas. The only ratios under consideration were 4:3, 4:5 and 4:6, and they rebuffed an argument put forward by Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian film-maker, to consider a square so as not to ignore the cinematic and creative potential of height as well as width. Instead they were more interested in making money, and a flatter, wider format suited the cinemas, theatres and dance halls of the day, where movies would be shown. So they agreed to keep the 4:3 format that most silent films had adopted. 1

There were two significant outcomes from this: the first was that henceforth the only discussion about extending the format was about width — think CinemaScope and Panavision in the 1950s — reemphasising the dominance of horizontalism. The second was that televisions would follow suit, adopting the same proportions so they could faithfully present movies when they were shown on TV.

So it’s not surprising we should be used to the format. And there are ergonomic arguments to be made for landscape mode too; we tend to see horizontally, using our peripheral vision which extends to the sides (what is called far peripheral), less to the top and bottom.2 But there are also lots of ways that we don’t think in landscape mode: we read most books in portrait mode, we often take photos of people in portrait mode (hence its, er, name) and some of us are known for tilting our monitors to better write and edit the documents we create that run top to bottom.

But there are other arguments why the vertical revolution has some staying power — and potential. One is simply practical: People hold their phones vertically 94% of the time. As long ago as 2016 90% of iOS apps were fixed in the vertical position. And that was all before TikTok. Now everyone, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube, offer a vertical mode of recording and watching videos.

What I didn’t find in the literature was much about how the vertical mode has shaped us and the way we use video. Rafe Clayton suggests that this is a ‘moving image revolution’ which is clawing back control of content from the likes of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue. I don’t quite buy that. Yes, this is a user-content generated shift, but that doesn’t mean the format and medium are not, or won’t be, co-opted — as can be seen by the development of ads and content by those self-same corporate types.

But I do think something is changing, and has changed. It’s not altogether desirable, but it’s definitely noteworthy. For one thing, the vertical format has changed the nature of the relationship with our devices. When the camera is on us, the relationship is altered. When we tilt the device to record ourselves in horizontal mode, it is a deliberate act of creating something for publication, broadcast; it has a self-reporting feel to it. When we keep the device in its normal position, we are adopting a more natural pose, less obviously self-conscious; more, I would argue, confessional. We are looking at ourselves (it takes a deliberate effort to look into the camera to hold the ‘audience’s’ gaze rather than look at ourselves) so we are, effectively, looking at ourselves in a mirror, and therefore everything we do after that — speaking, singing, dancing — we are at once doing for us: dancing as if there’s no-one else around, as it were. But we also know that the video is likely to be watched by someone else. So we have found an odd place for ourselves, like the tape-recordings of old that we’d make, diary entries that are self-conscious about who may see/read them, but also, inevitably, opening up.

The clearest example that springs to mind is Jennair Gerardot, the protagonist of the excellent podcast Bad Band Thing by Barbara Schroeder. Barbara explores some of the selfie videos that Jennair made ahead of the murder-suicide that is the subject of the series, when Jennair confesses her darkest thoughts and anger — we hear but of course don’t see some of the videos, but Barbara describes Jennair as looking intently at the camera, often crying and distraught, at other times practical, even as she tries to find a way to take her own life. All of this is hidden, for the most part, from her husband, as she plans her revenge with outward calm. This intimacy with the device, as if it were a friend, pet or priest who listens silently and sympathetically, suggests a deeper relationship with the camera and our phone than we may thus far have acknowledged.

Certainly there’s no shortage of selfie narcissism on display via this medium. People like joeybtoonz catalogues this on his Youtube channel, which has more than a half million subscribers, and you can’t help but look at some of his subjects and think they could do with some psychological help. But I think that’s too glib a conclusion to draw. We wouldn’t have considered writing a diary, or recording our days into a tape recorder as necessarily narcissistic. And while the visual aspect has definitely made us extremely self-conscious about how we look, to the detriment of other aspects of our lives, the portrait-mode self-video has also allowed us to communicate more intimately with those we want to communicate with, framing us and excluding the extraneous.

Where once we would record our self-videos in landscape to emphasise where we are, now many of us tighten the focus by keeping the device upright, pulling ourselves closer to the camera and breaking down the barrier between us and the viewer. Of course that also shuts us out from those around us, but there are two sides to everything. I think what we’re really seeing is what Neal Gabler has called the “mediated self”. The idea was conjured up in 1998, before the iPhone and indeed camera phones, but the idea is that we increasingly feel things don’t happen unless we record them. As Kathleen Ryan explains in applying Gabler’s idea to vertical video, we video in portrait mode because we derive pleasure from shooting video, and the device feels more comfortable vertically, more natural. “Horizontal shooting minimizes the seductive experience.” (The use of selfie-sticks, of course, is a thesis in itself.)

Go back to those days in Kabul and to the other side of the device. While it is sometimes frustrating to watch something in vertical mode, because we lack context, it also somehow and sometimes works better, pulling us into the immediacy and intimacy of the situation, where the screen is layered rather than sliced up. Here are some other examples from that week, showing the chaos around one of the gates, where those trying to get access to the airport were crammed between wall, open sewer and road (and where a suicide bomber struck). All are screen grabs from videos either circulating online or from the excellent Australian ABC documentary on the fall of Kabul:

Somehow the vertical frame makes these videos much more affecting, as if you yourself are there, just a few inches away. And each shot, by bringing the foreground so close, and adding the background, frames the scene in a way that a horizontal shot might not — or which our eyes, used to such framing, might feel less associated with. We are forced to focus on the subject, to feel their predicament. This is how Gabriel Menotti puts it:

Even in amateur videos, the portrait orientation never seems to result from the sheer negligence of the filmmaker. On the contrary, it conveys their effort to achieve the best visual composition possible given the recording situation. As the definitive fulfillment of handheld camerawork, the vertical video expresses not a disembodied, all-seeing eye, able to conform the world to the frame, but rather expresses the embodied filmmaker, placed within the same world that is being recorded, precariously handling the camera. Thus tailored for the depicted scene, the use of the vertical format is not wrong in itself.3

I can’t disagree with that. Even in such dreadful moments — possibly because of such dreadful moments — the phone becomes a device of record, shot in vertical mode because that’s the natural way to hold the device, and because after all, the shots are ultimately all of people — friends, family, a crowd, a shoe, a woman screaming behind a gate, a Talib firing into the air, a mother clutching her baby and crouching to avoid gunfire. Between them and us are only inches. We are there with them. And above us all, only sky.

  1. Clayton, Rafe. “The Context of Vertical Filmmaking Literature.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, January 21, 2021, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2021.1874853. ↩
  2. See Ryan, Kathleen M. “Vertical Video: Rupturing the Aesthetic Paradigm.” Visual Communication 17, no. 2 (May 2018): 245–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357217736660. ↩
  3. Menotti, Gabriel. “Proporção ‘Errada’ de Tela.,” no. 35 (n.d.): 20. ↩

beware the theatre of digital first

By | July 14, 2021
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Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow (an naxi, Flickr, public domain)

I’m a big fan of digital challengers to old technopolies — I’ve moved everything I can from big telco to MVNOs, big bank to neobank, cable TV to Netflix and its ilk, from big taxi to ride hailing. But there are plenty of challenges.

One of them is this, highlighted by Chris Skinner on his blog. He argues, rightly, that you need to build from a position of trust when it comes to banking. This is particularly acute because you’re talking about things like money. Yes, the old banks have been great at creating what we might call ‘trust theatre’ — big imposing granite pillars, people walking around in uniform, familiar logos everywhere, not a hipster in sight. And we know how quickly those granite pillars can seem like a bad joke. But at the end of the day we know they’re regulated, that there is at least some process behind the facade, and that our money is as safe there as anywhere else.

Wise, Revolut and others have charged in, and done very well by offering services we really should have seen a decade or more ago from our digital banks. With Revolut, for example, I can give my daughter a debit card and see what she’s spending, what she’s spending it on, and generally give her a better sense of what money is than I had at her age. And it works well.

But of course, I’m not going to put any real money in my Revolut or Wise account, not yet, anyway, because they have not won my trust. And that is a hard thing to do. It’s not that I trust Big Bank, anymore, but I trust the regulators enough to feel that that is a good enough brake on Big Bank from stealing more of my money than they do already with hidden charges. (Bitter? Moi?) And yes, Revolut and Wise are regulated too. But it hasn’t been tested. And the lesson we’ve learned from any startup with an app and money is that we’re still in the dark ages, where nothing is written in stone (or granite).

Some of us are still shaken by the demise of bike-sharing companies, one of which disappeared overnight with most of our deposits. If a firm like that can make $10 million disappear overnight, then couldn’t financial startups do the same thing? Probably not, but for many of us, one digital wallet in an app is the same as another, in terms of security, whether it’s a fly-by-night bike company or a Fintech company. Sad, but true.

So Chris is right in saying we need to start with trust first when it comes to digital finance companies. But it also applies to other kinds of digital first companies too. I have moved all my mobile phone accounts over to virtual operators (MVNOs, mobile virtual network operators, which are basically companies which buy capacity from a real telco, and then package it up under their brand.) I am tired of traditional telcos, and 24 month-plans, so for me anything is better than the old guard, especially ones that involve easy onboarding. but I can see problems, and smell a lot more.

For one thing, the urge is always to add more customers, and to try to slice and dice services until you get a compelling mix. By definition, then, you’re focusing more on new customers than traditional ones, and while that’s fine, you need to be sure that by adding new customers and services you’re not making things worse off — comparatively speaking — for existing customers. In my case, I was initially OK with having three separate accounts and to install separate apps on all devices (and move a SIM card for my mobile wifi dongle to a phone so I could install and maintain that account) but I did so because I was told that soon they would have family accounts, and that all this could be done under one roof. When that did happen, it turned out it only worked for new accounts (more or less) and so not only didn’t benefit me, but also disadvantaged me as an existing customer.

And that’s the thing. When you prioritise the new customer, you’ll inevitably lose some of your existing customers. That easy onboarding is also easy off boarding, and so I’m off to the next MVNO as soon as I can. Coupled with this is the other ‘theatre’, which is customer service. Customer Service Theatre is when it’s easy to talk via chat with a company, but where you’ll always get someone calls Brad, who is clearly copying and pasting template responses, where he’s totally focused on making me happier etc, but where there’s no substance behind it. Either Brad hasn’t been briefed, since he works 1,000+ km away, or is outsourced entirely, or he just lacks the authority to make decisions beyond the most basic. If you mistake that for customer service focused not on happiness but on fixing something that is broken, then you know you’ll have problems. Not in year 1, necessarily, but by year 3 or 4.

And so here’s the thing. Netflix is easy come, easy go. It’s pretty straightforward stuff, doesn’t require much customer support — I’ve not used it once in 6 or 7 years. But anything involving something more specialised, such as money, or internet access, or food, or any kind of specific item you’re purchasing, then you need to win over trust. And that means, depending on what you’re selling, having proper customer service with experienced handlers with access to engineers, and the ability to make decisions, and you need to keep a laser eye on your existing customers and to ensure that the quality and breadth of your service evolves to meet their evolving expectations. Don’t assume their goodwill is something that will last.

If I had to boil it all down, I’d say: If anything you’re doing smacks of Theatre, then fix it. Or those people who arrived first may leave first. Noisily.

why big-name apps are stuck in the core

By | May 18, 2021
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photo by Walter Smith, 2004 (flickr, CC)
photo by Walter Smith, 2004 (flickr, CC)

There’s a graveyard somewhere with the word Core on it. Relying on a core function is a killer. Think Dropbox. Twitter. Whatsapp. Evernote. All apps heading for Core Graveyard.

Here’s the thing.

In the old days the way to get your app noticed was to offer something no one else did, or did as well/cheaply. This was what everyone told you to do, right back to the idea of the mousetrap. But these days, because business models mostly revolve around freemium and subscriptions, this doesn’t work anymore. And it’s killing a lot of good products because they can’t navigate beyond from their core function without damaging the very thing that people like them for.

Take Evernote. The name is a great name because it describes what people like it for. You can take a note and save it forever. Or you could think of it as a verb, be forever taking notes. But to get people to take notes forever, or keep them forever, you need to offer it for free because there are, at least now, so many other players offering the same thing. So the story of Evernote is one of a company desperately looking to add some additional value to the product to justify charging for it.

The result: they have destroyed what drew users to it in the first place (I’ve been a user since at least 2005.) Evernote has added pretty much everything it can to the core functionality, including physical notebooks you supposedly scan (offering very little you couldn’t do manually as well if not better), but nearly every new feature gnawed away at the core, making the app less efficient at doing what made it appealing in the first place. If your unique selling point is being able to take notes easily, quickly and retrievably, then logically it follows that everything you add to the process actually detracts from its value.

Evernote is now a shadow of its former self. (Check out this Reddit thread for some of the recent pains expressed by users.) But you could have chosen any such thread from the past eight years or so and seen the same problems.

The same story can be repeated with many other apps and services.

Dropbox was once literally that, a digital box you could drop things in to share with others. Now it’s a bloated mishmash of features including an editor, a password vault, eSignatures and a file browser, but doesn’t do the basic syncing thing half as well as other tools, or as it used to. (It’s frustration with Dropbox that is prompting me to write this note.) Dropbox was once the obvious choice for anyone wanted to share files or sync files between computers.

And indeed, here’s the rub. It’s obvious these companies have determined, probably with the help of consultants (yes, I know, I’m one) to try to map out greater territory by defining the function of the app within a broader space. So Dropbox has persuaded itself no longer to focus on the rather prosaic process of sharing files and folders, but on ‘collaboration’. Evernote, similarly, tries to emphasise its place within collaboration, by encouraging users to create and edit files with others inside its (wait for it) ecosystem.

Collaboration is fine, but you need to make sure you’re doing the basics first. Collaboration is not why people use, or used to use, these products. Users wanted to do something quite specific, and were drawn to the app to do that specific thing. They’re not (necessarily) interested in the broader scope, indeed it’s likely they’re already doing that via other apps, but want another product to do some aspect of it that isn’t working well, or at all. But by imposing these new features on the user, they degrade the (wait for it) experience, and make the user less likely to stick with the product if one with a better functionality comes along.

Indeed, the reasons why the likes of Telegram, Quip, Slack and Zoom have all made inroads is that they do one key thing better than what exists: chat, writing documents, team chat and video calls/conferencing. It’s not that these functions weren’t available before these players appeared, it was that no-one did them well. They were either part of a separate suite, or there were things wrong with them because the developer wasn’t laser-focused on how well the tools worked. Quip did a better job than Google Docs; Slack did a better job than the likes of Yammer; Zoom did a better job than Skype.

Let’s all play

You can play this game with more or less every app you come across that isn’t focused in its approach. Twitter is now offering Twitter Blue, a subscription based service which, among other things, allows you to (drum roll) undo a tweet! Yes, if you pay you can actually ‘undo’ a tweet (I understand that this likely means not deleting a tweet, but of delaying the posting of a tweet). Great, so now you basically have to pay to think twice about dashing off a tweet.

Twitter’s appeal was a way to communicate one to several (ok, eventually many) with as little friction as possible. Coupled with that was the ability to see easily, with as little friction as possible, what others were saying — to everyone. Indeed, Twitter is a great example of how an app/service/product is moulded, not by the developers, but by the users. Much of what we think of its core functionality — hashtags, direct messages etc — were added by users, which were eventually adopted by the developers. Twitter has ever since tried to tinker with that model to generate revenue: the default view of tweets now is actually not whom you’re following, or at least not just whom, but tweets that algorithms think you’d be interested in. You have to alter the default to get a chronological list of tweets from people you’re following. Choose that and you’ll notice, from time to time, that Twitter will switch back to the default. In other words, the core function of Twitter has already been undermined in the interests of the company.

Whatsapp is another case in point. Whatsapp enjoyed massive adoption because it provided a useful service — free or cheap SMSs, if you want to put it bluntly. Whatsapp denied that at the time — I interviewed the CEO in 2012, and they were quite upset that this was the thrust of the resulting piece — but I know, I was there, or rather my Indonesian friends were, one of the first countries to really adopt the service. At the time Whatsapp hoped to make money by charging for it, via a subscription at a very cheap price ($1), in the second year. The number of users would have easily given them enough to keep the service going. Of course it didn’t turn out like that, and we’ve seen Facebook crawl through a number of hoops to find ways to monetize the service (by mining the data within.)

It’s true that Whatsapp has evolved hugely since the early days, but in the exact same trajectory SMS did, indicating it is still really just an SMS killer: think groups, think multimedia messages, think desktop app for composing and reading messages, think company communications with users etc. The bottom line: Every effort to move Whatsapp out of its core functionality and more into a data lake or part of a (wait for it) ‘family’ of apps are steps that undermine its core value.

Beware Superappitis

So what does this mean for the future?

Well, to me it’s clear that anything that can be defined as a single, important function that is not already part of a broader app or service should be marketed that way, priced on the assumption that it brings immediate value to the user, and should not be allowed to have extra ‘value’ bolted on to it.

There is a corollary to this. If you think you can add extra substantial value then do it, but don’t ever let it compromise the core. So Dropbox can offer editing services so long as there’s no extra steps, no larger download, no nagging windows to your app’s core value.

And if you’re offering, say, a banking function (transfers) then it makes sense to offer other banking services atop that once you have that core function working well, and that you make sure it’s always easily done, with minimal steps. TransferWise, now Wise, is adding features while at the same time ensuring transferring money is still as easy and cheap as pie.

But don’t let those new functions get in the way. A good example of this failure is Grab, a Southeast Asian ‘superapp’ (be scared whenever you see that word) which started out as offering easier ways to order taxis (it was originally called GrabTaxi.) It now offers all sorts of bells and whistles, and ordering a car, its core business is now a slower, more cumbersome process than it was. Even the map showing where you or your car is is largely covered by an ad, offering insurance for greater peace of mind. The service itself is still good, but the experience of ordering it is not.

Economic imperatives underline these moves. But they needn’t. Such distractions arise from a failure to define the purpose of the app or service. What itch is it, exactly, that you wanted to scratch with this? Failure to frame the USP in this way will always lead to tears or (eventual) bankruptcy.

The world of software is full of small, modestly successful apps that deliver individual functions that make paying for them worthwhile. I’m writing this on Drafts, an excellent app that does one thing: lets you compose stuff and then send it to pretty much every place you want (email it, add it to a calendar, tweet it, save it to Dropbox etc.) Yes, other apps let you do this, but this what the app focuses on doing, and doing it easily and well. The name captures the purpose of the app, and that’s all you need to know.

Single-celled future

I am a big user of apps. My instinct, honed by decades in front of computers, is that there are some things that an app can do better. Screenshot? There’s an app for that which does a better job of the purpose I’ve defined. I want an app to remember everything I’ve browsed for the past month, quarter or whatever, whichever browser I use. The answer: HistoryHound. Does it all, for a few bucks. An app which lets me save everything simply and in a way that makes it easy for me to find. The answer to this used to be Evernote, but not anymore, it’s (at least for Mac users) DEVONthink. What changed? Well DEVONthink just kept going trying to figure out how to make the process as effective as possible. Evernote meanwhile added too many bells and whistles, complicated and inconsistent changes to the interface, many of which got in the way of users. DEVONthink isn’t particularly user friendly, but it is effective and efficient. I now have sent to DEVONthink in four years of use about 10 times the stuff I sent to Evernote in 10 years of using it.

But who wants all these itty bitty apps that only do one thing? True. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But the big underlying shift, and a reason why I think the future is in small, single-cell apps is because they can be connected to each other via APIs, application programming interfaces, that essentially allow the apps to talk to each other. Drafts allows you to export your writing to other apps, but it also connects you to WordPress, or Dropbox, and to tweak that connectivity. If two apps or services you like don’t directly connect to each other, you can use third party services like Zapier. The only limit is your willingness to tweak a little, and your imagination.

But I also think it’s telling that there are still a lot of artisanal developers still around, still producing these apps. And app stores like Apple’s make it much easier to find them. And then there are players like Setapp, a sort of app aggregator for iOS and the Mac, which consciously tries to gather together a suite of apps that fit most of the niches that you as a user might need, via a $10 monthly subscription, irrespective of how many you use. I asked them why some apps disappear from their list: they told me some go because they are sometimes abandoned or the vendor parts ways. But then Setapp tries to go find a similar one. It’s not for everyone but to me it’s a godsend. Often I’ll find one of their apps does exactly what I’m looking for (Prizmo, for example, lets me capture some text on screen and copies it as text, even if it’s in an image, Permute lets me convert any multimedia file to another format, World Clock Pro shows me times in other timezones whatever the time is at home, Dropshare lets me share individual files with other people much more intuitively and quickly than Dropbox.)

Apps for every occasion

You could argue these are all esoteric functions that not everyone wants. That’s true. But this is how every app and service starts. The usefulness of Twitter wasn’t all that evident to those of us who first saw it. Whatsapp made sense to people living in places where SMSs were a significant expense. Dropbox came into being because people had trouble sharing files. The point is not that the function is esoteric. It’s whether the app or service or product can be defined as fulfilling a purpose. If you can define that and define it clearly, then you’re halfway there. It could be backing up your files. Or being able to walk along looking at your phone and seeing ahead via a transparent background using your back-facing camera. Or an app that tells you when your friends have been vaccinated and so are safe to have dinner with. Or an app that can tell you what lightbulbs you’re using, whether they’re about to break, and what is the cheapest way to replace them. Or an app that identifies whether the snake on your balcony is poisonous or not. Or an app that can tell you when you’ve given too many examples in a piece and how many readers have likely stopped reading. You get the idea.

We took a wrong turn when startups were encouraged to ‘growth hack’ and focus only on number of users, not whether the functionality matched the needs of those users. Sure, we all want to build the next viral sensation, but there’s a lot of other things we use our devices for, and someone needs to build for them.

OK my focus and word-counting apps are telling me to finish this. So I will.

can i be the first to report that social media is dead?

By | February 25, 2021
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Social media, I can confidently assert, is dead. We’ve just got to wait for the 4.2 billion people or so using it to realise it and leave, preferably helping with the washing up as they do.

OK, so it’s not exactly dead, but at least it’s dead as a term. It’s only been around since 2009, but if we look closely it has long stopped meaning what we meant it to mean. Originally we talked about Web 2.0, which most of us old enough to remember it defined as anything that shed the old paradigm of static web pages, the dot.com world dominated by blow-out companies, and instead focused on user-generated content — meaning helpful blogs, videos, forums and chitchat.

Social media was initially a subset of Web 2.0, insofar as any of us ever thought about it; it meant those parts of the web where the focus was on individuals sharing updates with each other, of making the flatter but still somewhat static blog world more interactive, collaborative. (Twitter is still sometimes called a microblog, which gives you and idea of the connective tissue between blogging and what we now think of as social media. And in some ways the growing passion for threads is an indication of that relationship.)

But when Google, and later Facebook, needed to monetise themselves, Web 2.0 pivoted from being a largely profit-free environment to being a mercenary one, where users’ personal data became the fungible asset, converted by the platforms into money by leasing highly targeted space for ads.

We all know the story of that, and what happened next: social media platforms grew impressively. But what we perhaps don’t fully understand yet is that in so doing, they are no longer ‘social’ or ‘media’. Since the requirement from a monetary point of view is to hold the attention of the user for as long as possible — so they can see as many ads as possible — the goal is not to create ‘media’ that is ‘social’, but to create a highly personal experience, one that is hard to let go of. This used to mean just stuff that was interesting. Now that is seen as rather quaint.

It’s now about triggering whatever desires, impulses, fears we have and latching on to those. In the words of Charlie Brooker, it’s a place where emotions are heightened. But (and these are my words) where those emotions are never quite resolved. It’s no good creating a feeling where the user is happy enough, satisfied, because then they’ll put their phone down, walk away and do something else. The goal, as Adam Curtis explains in his latest series of films, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, is to foster anxiety, that something’s not right, unsettled, because that will keep the user hooked.

Facebook (and the others, though nearly half of interactions on mobile were on Facebook and Google properties five years ago (PDF).) also don’t want you clicking on links and going away from the site to read something because chances are you won’t come back. Endless, infinite scroll, is the goal. (Infinite scroll is now 15 years old, which gives you some idea of how long we’ve been on the hamster wheel. Its inventor, Aza Raskin, has since disowned the technology, describing it and similar approaches as ‘behavioural cocaine.’

There’s another element, also identified by Charlie Brooker: it’s the idea of social media as performance. Part of the strategy behind social sites is to make you feel somewhat inadequate, to create a sense of dissatisfaction, as part of that addictive anxiety — what we often hear called Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO. Sure, there are lots of smileys, hugs, kisses on there, but I don’t need to tell you these are not real. What is real, though, is the desire to get approval.

On social media there’s no point in telling people what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, or where you are if none of those are particularly interesting or exciting. Mundanity doesn’t cut it on social media. So you need to perform, to present the most entertaining or interesting side of yourself, however fleeting and inauthentic that is: most of the time this means finding that rare moment when your family’s not fighting or the kids are not ripping down the curtains to post a portrait of domestic bliss. Or add a filter or two to make you, or your background, look better.

This is not performance art, it’s performance anxiety. You need to project an exaggerated, or even opposite, version of yourself — happy usually, but it can be sad if the emotion is one to which others can respond — because this is what social media demands. And that’s the way to get likes. Which means being noticed. Social media has made us believe that only if we get likes and comments on our posts do we exist. ‘Social’ here means that we have to be social beings, because the alternative — not posting, or posting and not attracting likes — is anti-social, or social failure.

And that brings us to another aspect, that I am brazenly lifting from Charlie Brooker: because of this need to perform on Twitter (and Facebook for that matter), are games. He describes Twitter thus: a “multiplayer online game in which you choose an avatar and role-play a persona loosely based on your own, attempting to accrue followers by pressing lettered buttons to form interesting sentences”.

The same is true of Facebook, in slightly different ways. The platforms are designed in the same way: “There’s a clear gameplay loop where, the more you engage, the less you want to put it down. If Twitter didn’t already exist, you could launch it today on the Steam game store as an RPG.”

He’s absolutely right. Social media is no longer a way to share and interact with your friends or connection in a cozy, caring environment — if it ever was. It’s a game, a competition. Even if you don’t think it is, it is. Even if you’re not actually contributing, just reading it is. It is because if you don’t participate and just scroll, you quickly develop a sense of unease, a sort of dystopian trance, where you’re consciously or subconsciously comparing your own life, or your own intelligence, with those you’re reading or flicking through. The political upheavals of the past few years have only made this worse — what has become called ‘doom scrolling.’

The platforms encourage this, are, indeed, designed for this, because they need to trap you into a ‘state of emotional motion’, where you’re always restless, always uneasy, always thinking that perhaps one more post, one more status update by someone, will snap you out, lift you back up to a mental state to face the rest of the day. And if you’re posting stuff, or hoping to, then that existential unease is compounded, because you will now expect the platform — your friends, connections or whatever — to acknowledge your existence by adding likes. But how many is enough? And do you respond to the comments? The treadwheel is merciless.

Charlie Brooker is right. Social media has essentially been gamified. It has ended up meeting its arch enemy for attention — online games — in the middle. This is not surprising: games have always grabbed the most attention. (In 2019 69% of U.S. consumers said they would rather give up social media apps or TV than lose their favorite mobile games, according to a study by mobile ad firm Tapjoy.)

Online games have become social networks (think Roblox and Fortnite) while social networks have become games. Essentially they’re all the same thing. Whatever it takes to keep you hooked. A rhythmic flow of user-generated content lures us in, and hopes we will participate. But even if we just scroll, we’ll never reach the bottom. It will keep on going because to do anything else would be to lose us — possibly forever.

That, I suspect, is already happening. A detailed look at Facebook daily active users shows numbers in North America have largely been flat for the past year. Europe is little better. The only real growth is coming from APAC and the Rest of the World. And even there, data released today by comscore shows that social media usage fell relatively across most of APAC in 2020 vs 2019. (Entertainment, games, government and health were the biggest gainers, naturally enough, given COVID.)

comscore: Asia-pacific online trends: the year 2020 in numbers

It’s being supplanted by newcomers like TikTok, which are much more creative — and honest — in their approach towards hooking you. Post something short to drive likes and keep attention. There’s no pretence at building a social, and sociable, environment. Instead it’s about response and reward. Social media, in something like TikTok, has already demonstrated that it’s has moved on, and is much closer to gaming than it is to old fashioned social networking.

Meanwhile those tools that are purely focused on social networking — like Clubhouse, for example — are thriving. Yes, they still have strong elements of performance built in, but the content itself is a mostly collaborative one, by talking in a room, and do not appear at least on the surface to be designed to exploit feelings of unease, dissatisfaction, need for validation or a sense of inferiority.

So it’s not as if social media has actually died. What we think of as social media, the second tranche of sites like Facebook (the first were things like MySpace and Friendster) have morphed into games to retain attention. The result is that the most ‘social’ aspects of such sites, like Groups, have become separate islands in themselves. Indeed, the original principles and potential of social media has shifted back to the world that predated Web 2.0: instant messaging. This has been around since ICQ, launched in 1995, though messaging itself dates back to the early 1960s. Include teleprinters in that and we go back to the 1840s. WhatsApp helped popularise the concept on mobile, effectively killing off SMS (which has been in decline since 2012) and blurring the boundaries between computer-based messaging and mobile messaging. By March 2020 WhatsApp was not that far behind Facebook in terms of monthly active users — 2 billion vs Facebook’s 2.6 billion (when you take into account that. It’s no surprise, then, that Facebook has been forced to connect its messaging apps because of this shift: Facebook messenger has a paltry 1.3 billion users, and Instagram 1 billion. )

cross-plugging

Bottom line? A lot of attention has been given to the sharing of information, and misinformation, on social media. I would suggest looking beyond that, to look at why people post, or feel the need to post, and argue that it’s the inbuilt addictive, gamification-driven, intent of social media companies that is the larger problem. Simply put, the more time people spend on social media, the more likely they’re going to be emotionally unsettled, more susceptible to anti-social — for example fake, but also inciting — content. I don’t blame the social media companies entirely for this, but it’s tempting to conclude that if they were building systems that had a definite end-point: ‘OK, you’re up to date! Go outside and play with your kids!’ there would be a lot fewer of us stuck down rabbit holes. And social media wouldn’t have an expiry date on it.

sensing our way out of interaction impoverishment

By | January 12, 2021
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Interaction impoverishment: My pompous term for the things that we can’t do, and don’t seem able to imagine our way out of, when it comes to making our devices do what we want them to do. The key to all this — and where we might end up going — are down to those millimeter-dimension things we never see: sensors.

Don’t touch anything, Iris — George experiments with interfaces in Midnight Sky (Netflix)

I was speed-watching George Clooney’s Netflix movie The Midnight Sky the other day, which is set 28 years in the future, and they’re all (well not all, because most of the planet is dead) interacting with their computers in the same way — touch screen and voice (George at least can turn off an alarm by voice, while those in the spaceship have to get someone to manually stop the alarm, the sound of which would be recognisable to someone living 100 years ago). I feel that we’ve learned enough from Alexa and co to know that voice is a poor form of interaction with our devices. Our dinner-time conversation at home is usually punctuated by someone yelling “Alexa… Stop!” in response to some alarm or other, and then, back in a dinner party voice, murmuring to our guest, “sorry, you were saying?”

And don’t get me started on trying to get Alexa to remember things, or disremember things. Most trails usually end up with her asking, politely, for us to use the app, to which we usually reply, less politely, that if we have to do that, what exactly is the point of, well, her? And I have NEVER, ever, seen anyone interact in public with their phone by voice, except when they’re talking to an actual human. I think we can safely agree that particular line of device interaction is gone. Siri is, to me, nothing. Convince me otherwise.

Another thing: using a mobile device in the rain, or with fingers that are even slightly moist, is an exercise in frustration. Fingerprint scanner doesn’t work, fingers on screen don’t work,. Whether I’m washing up or trying to take videos of rainfall, I yearn for the days of a keyboard (or a smarter voice interface, or anything.)

So why George et al haven’t come up with a better way to interact with their computers, I would guess is because we’ve done a poor job of it thus far. Shouldn’t we by that point have honed our brain-computer interface? (A study by RAND last year said BCIs, as they’re called, are close.)

Indeed, there are some gleams of light, though I’m hesitant to call them more than that. Google has something called Motion Sense, which is a sort of radar — emitting electromagnetic waves and learning from their reflections — that improves, in theory, the relationship between you and your phone. Firstly, it can detect whether you’re nearby, and if you’re not, it will turn off the display (or keep it on if you are.) If it senses you’re reaching for it, it will turn off alarms and activate the face unlock sensors. It will also recognise a couple of gestures: a wave to dismiss calls or alarms, a swipe to move music forwards or backwards.

Sensing motion – Google/Infineon’s new chip (Google)

The jewel here is ‘presence detection’: Can a device be smarter about understanding what or who is around it, and behave accordingly? We’re used to this with motion sensors — lights coming on when we walk in a room, or alarms sounding when an intruder enters the house. But this is detection on a much smaller scale, requiring millimeter-wave frequencies by utilising the unlicensed V-band (57-64 Ghz) which makes measurements more precise and less likely to be interfered with by other systems. In short, Project Soli was enabled by a 9×12.5 mm chip produced in collaboration with Infineon, with a sensing range of 10 m and a range resolution of 2 cm (which can be reduced to sub-millimeter precision, allowing recognition of overlapping fingers. A paper published in 2019 concludes that accuracy of a ‘few micrometers’ (1,000 micrometers make up a millimeter) can be achieved with such sensors. This in theory would take accuracy of gesture down to a subtle eyebrow raise, or something even more inscrutable.

How this technology is used might not go in a straight line. Google introduced Motion Sense in its Pixel 4 smartphone, but removed it in the Pixel 5, mainly because of cost. There is solid speculation that the upcoming Nest Hub device has it. Kim Lee’s piece cited above from 2017 suggests it could be possible to control via finger-sized commands — pinching or snapping — and do away with visible controls altogether.

Of course other manufacturers are thinking along similar, or not so similar, lines. A concept phone (i.e. one that doesn’t actually exist) announced by OnePlus last December — the OnePlus 8T — included hand gesture interaction which included changing the colour of the device itself. (If you’re interested, this uses a ‘colour-changing film containing metal oxide in glass, where the state of the metal ions varies according to voltage.) What’s potentially interesting here is that OnePlus envisages the colour changing indicating incoming calls (etc — perhaps different shades, or flash rate, could indicate different things.) OnePlus also talk about using a mmWave chip to register a user’s breathing, which could then be synced with the colour changing. They call it a biofeedback device, though I’m still searching for the purpose behind this.

All this is welcome, but I do feel we could have gone further, faster. LG were touting gesture recognition in their devices at least 6 years ago (the LG G4, for example, recognised gestures in 2015 allowing you to take remote selfies etc), and we get occasional glimpses of what is possible with apps like ‘Look to Speak’, a Google app for Android that allows handicapped users who suffer from speech and motor disabilities to use eye movements to select the words and sentences they want from the screen, which are then spoken aloud by a digital voice. This requires some training however, and exaggerated movements.

Then there’s gesture control using ultrasound and light, something I wrote about for Reuters back in 2015. The idea is not to do away with our preferred way of interacting, by touch, but to bring the touch to the person using air, sound and light. A driver would not have to take his eye off the road to fumble for the controls, for example, but a virtual version of the controls would come to him, giving him haptic feedback through vibrations in the air.

To me this is a key part of any interface. Alexa will acknowledge an instruction, and our computing device will (usually) acknowledge in some way when we’ve entered a command or clicked on a button. But the touch is sometimes a better way to receive a response — it’s more private, for one thing. (My favourite example of this was a belt designed by a Japanese researcher which vibrated. Where the pulse was felt on the body determined the nature of the message. (Le Bureau des Légendes, an excellent French series on the DGSE, takes this a stage further where a CIA officer intimates that he gets alerts that his phone is being tampered with via a pacemaker.)

Sensors, ultimately, are the magic ingredient in this, but it’s also down to the execution. And if we’ve learned nothing else from the past 10 years, we’ve reluctantly acknowledged it’s usually Apple that brings these technologies home to us, at their pace. Apple thus far has gone with the LiDAR option — replacing the radio waves of radar with light — which, at least in the pro version of its recent iPhone and iPad releases, allows users to map a room or object in 3D, and then use it for design, decoration, etc.1 But it’s not like Apple to throw a technology into a device without a clear roadmap of either enhancing existing functions or adding new ones, so the most likely explanation is that LiDAR helps improve the quality of video and photos by tracking depth of field etc. But it almost certainly won’t stop there; Apple is betting hard on augmented reality, for which LiDAR is well suited, and a study of Apple’s patents by MaxVal suggests possible new directions: using LiDAR to generate a more realistic 3D image on the screen, for example, by better judging the position of the user’s head, say, or better Face ID.

I’m open to all that, but I really feel some of the basics need tweaking first. Ultimately it’s about our devices understanding us better, an area in which I feel they have some ways to go.

  1. Some Android phones like Samsung’s use LiDAR, but this version uses a single pulse of light to scan a space, vs the multiple pulses of Apple’s LiDAR ↩