As illustrated by the recent Mashable “pivot”, meaningful (i.e unbranded) contents appear to be the main casualty of new communication technologies. Hopefully (sic), bots may point to a more positive perspective, at least if their want for no no-nonsense gist is to be trusted.
The Mashable Pivot to “branded” Stories
Announcing Mashable recent pivot, Pete Cashmore (Mashable ‘s founder and CEO) was very candid about the motives:
“What our advertisers value most about Mashable is the same thing that our audience values: Our content. The world’s biggest brands come to us to tell stories of digital culture, innovation and technology in an optimistic and entertaining voice. As a result, branded content has become our fastest growing revenue stream over the past year. Content is now at the core of our ad offering and we plan to double down there.”
Also revealing was the semantic shift in a single paragraph: from “stories”, to “stories told with an optimistic and entertaining voice”, and finally to “branded stories”; as if there was some continuity between Homer’s Iliad and Outbrain’s gibberish.
Spinning Yarns
From Lacan to Seinfeld, it has often been said that stories are what props up our world. But that was before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others ruled over the waves and screens. Nowadays, under the combined assaults of smart dummies and instant messaging, stories have been forced to spin advertising schemes, and scripts replaced by subliminal cues entangled in webs of commercial hyperlinks. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, fictions may retrieve some traction (if not spirit) of their own, reprieved not so much by human cultural thirst as by smartphones’ hunger for fresh technological contraptions.
Apps: What You Show is What You Get
As far as users are concerned, apps often make phones too smart by half: with more than 100 billion of apps already downloaded, users face an embarrassment of riches compounded by the inherent limitations of packed visual interfaces. Enticed by constantly renewed flows of tokens with perfunctory guidelines, human handlers can hardly separate the wheat from the chaff and have to let their choices be driven by the hypothetical wisdom of the crowd. Whatever the outcomes (crowds may be right but often volatile), the selection process is both wasteful (choices are ephemera, many apps are abandoned after a single use, and most are sparely used), and hazardous (too many redundant dead-ends open doors to a wide array of fraudsters). That trend is rapidly facing the physical as well as business limits of a zero-sum playground: smarter phones appear to make for dumber users. One way out of the corner would be to encourage intelligent behaviors from both parties, humans as well as devices. And that’s something that bots could help to bring about.
Bots: What You Text Is What You Get
As software agents designed to help people find their ways online, bots can be differentiated from apps on two main aspects:
- They reside in the cloud, not on personal devices, which means that updates don’t have to be downloaded on smartphones but can be deployed uniformly and consistently. As a consequence, and contrary to apps, the evolution of bots can be managed independently of users’ whims, fostering the development of stable and reliable communication grammars.
- They rely on text messaging to communicate with users instead of graphical interfaces and visual symbols. Compared to icons, text put writing hands on driving wheels, leaving much less room for creative readings; given that bots are not to put up with mumbo jumbo, they will prompt users to mind their words as clearly and efficiently as possible.
Each aspect reinforces the other, making room for a non-zero playground: while the focus on well-formed expressions and unambiguous semantics is bots’ key characteristic, it could not be achieved without the benefits of stable and homogeneous distribution schemes. When both are combined they may reinstate written languages as the backbone of communication frameworks, even if it’s for the benefits of pidgin languages serving prosaic business needs.
A Literary Soup of Business Plots & Customers Narratives
Given their need for concise and unambiguous textual messages, the use of bots could bring back some literary considerations to a latent online wasteland. To be sure, those considerations are to be hard-headed, with scripts cut to the bone, plots driven by business happy ends, and narratives fitted to customers phantasms.
Nevertheless, good storytelling will always bring some selective edge to businesses competing for top tiers. So, and whatever the dearth of fictional depth, the spreading of bots scripts could make up some kind of primeval soup and stir the emergence of some literature untainted by its fouled nourishing earth.
Reblogged this on Caminao's Ways and commented:
Apple needs stories in order to bring about subscriptions