Hasta La Creative!

It’s not at all unexepected that Milo would eventually get kicked off twitter, we’ve already discussed the arbitrary approach to community moderation by the service in “The trouble with Twitter. Trolls, Verifications removed & Stock failing”. Twitter Verifications could seemingly be bought for $60,000 a year in advertising, unless of course you are a celebrity or a journalist at the right publication as they get verified for free – all depending on if anyone at Twitter knew who you were, of course. This explains why world famous bands would not be verified, while California indie bands and interns at Buzzfeed would be. Hollywood celebrities would be verified before they even signed up, while established journalists with several books authored, would never be verified. All of this is about to end, they say, as Twitter just announced a application process for verified accounts. This is how it used to work, almost ten years ago, but Twitter had to take down the application process then after overwhelming demand.

So, what happened? Milo wrote a review of Ghostbusters – the Cliff notes is “didn’t like it” – and this evolved into a twitter spat with Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. After enduring a day of harassing tweets – not from Milo – Leslie Jones left Twitter because of insults and racism. Leslie Jones has previously stated that she retweets dumb people, basically siccing her followers on them, but when Milo’s followers reply to her she “leaves Twitter with a sad heart.”

This is a problem for Twitter. There’s an actual method to their madness, when they Verify the hip kids they know, and celebrities of the selfie generation, they grew their user base. Now they’re trying to make money off this platform, and claim that new movie marketing research reveals Twitter Ads deliver increased ticket sales. If Twitter increases ticket sales whilst driving away movie stars who hear about bad reviews via their service…. Well, the solution is obviously to kick the reviewer off the system.

Whether it’s the first day of filming or the red carpet premiere, Twitter is now a key part of the marketing mix for movies. In 2015, there were more than 400 films with an official Twitter handle, from studio blockbusters like “The Martian” (@MartianMovie) to indie darlings like “The Danish Girl” (@DanishGirlMov). Even more eye-opening is the fact that in 2015 we saw over 165 million movie-related Tweets globally.

Using Ghostbusters as an example in their own post about this, Twitter clearly knows who is paying their rent. Hint: it’s not Milo.

Remember Twitter when it was lauded as a communications tool that helped the Arab spring and helped people spread news during natural disasters? Pepperidge Farm, er, I mean Wikilekas remembers, and they are not too happy about what they see as “Cyber feudalism.”
Cyber feudalism: @Twitter founder @Jack banned conservative gay libertarian @nero for speaking the ‘wrong’ way to actress @Lesdoggg— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 21, 2016

Twitter is a privately owned company though, a platform for communication where the providers of the service can say “no shirts, no shoes, and no right wing provocateurs” if they want to. After all, they banned Chuck C. Johnson over a year ago and the service is still ticking along, albeit with a stock down at 18.39USD (Price decrease 0.17 (0.92%). The problem is once again that by using a centralised service, said service will eventually wander down the advertising road. Twitter may be sued for letting ISIS use it for terrorist communication & propaganda, while also facing lawsuits for copyright infringement, but when stock prices keeps falling like lead ballons you know their main focus will be on keeping those potential advertisers happy. After all twitter’s stock value plunged $165 million at the start of the year, Twitter still needs to find a way to turn profit, and you dear users who hand your content away in the form of jokes, attention, chatter, and clicks are the product they’re selling.

Update – you’ll be pleased to know that, to quote Yahoo News, “Leslie Jones makes triumphant return to Twitter after vanquishing racist trolls”, where her most recent retweet is currently the quote “don’t try and explain yourself to idiots you’re not the fuckface whisperer.”

A storm is brewing online. The media house born from the blog revolution, Gawker, lost both audience and face when Hulk Hogan won his case about privacy infringement against them. An independent jury awarded Hogan huge damages, a large enough sum that could topple the entire Gawker media house. It turns out that clickbait based on peoples secretly filmed sex tapes can be really expensive in the long run.

Clickbaiting may have surfaced when bloggers appeared, but did not become a real pain until the social networks took over our lives and we could follow “live” how Gawker rallied up a Twitter mob to hunt down Justine Sacco. Everything from private Facebook comments to 140-character jokes from strangers can now become an entire series of articles. Media driven mobs drive Nobel laureates from their universities, and people from their jobs, powered by thousands of articles in hundreds of ‘news’ sites.

The social media and facebook algorithms make a certain type of headline viral. Upworthy proved to us all that we click on almost anything if the title is just right. Or worse, we spend a full day arguing with each other in the comments, without even having clicked.

Once it was Google that directed traffic, now it’s Twitter, Facebook and traffic-sellers like Taboola and Outbrain. It’s easy to customize junk sites to look legitimate, at least for a moment, and pull traffic to it with headlines that draw people in. Famous brands advertising is seen on fly-by-night pages, a site that appeared yesterday and is gone tomorrow can make a lot of money. Legitimate media houses and junk sites are vying for the same advertising coin. The recipe for holding the traffic up is to report on, join or create the social media mobs, armed with tar and feathers.

Readers tire, they outfit their computers and phones with Adblock. Upworthy headlines no longer appeal to people. What suffers is everything; from our ability to concentrate and read past the headline, to the craft of journalism itself.
It is simply not worth the trouble to make a quality product when a sarcastic review of someone’s sex tape scoops more traffic – and even sympathy from fellow journalists when they lose the privacy intrusion case.

In Resumé there’s “what’s hot / Not” list as well. My picks:

UP: Brave browser on the phone, Chrome is dead.

DOWN: Anyone who thinks they can control what @Notch says on Twitter. Just stop that.

Not everyone is impressed by Adblock Plus’s foray into the micropayment area, even though it’s not news. Eyeo has a minority ownership stake in Flattr and they’re been testing the waters for micropayments for some time, as well as explored the possibilities of acceptable ads, and substituting ads on websites directly, or at least allowing specific ads to come through. This feature was used by Amnesty International, where their ads only were allowed to penetrate the adblock on websites for a day. Fortune says that Flattr & Adblock Plus plan to generate $500M for publishers in 2017.

Publishers are wary of these ideas. With Adblock Plus doing this, it looks like a shakedown to some publishers. “Nice website you got there, would be a shame if nobody saw your ads”. Adblock Plus positioning themselves to take 10% of anything donated to the content producers via Flattr won’t settle that feeling. Meanwhile Telecoms are substituting ads on websites, as they literally own the road to the internet and can do this. Everyone wants a slice of the ad network revenue, for that is where the real money lies. When Brave browser appeared as a solution to clunky slow ad ridden browsers, the Newspaper Association of America sent a cease and desist letter to them, protesting what they saw as digital theft of their revenue.

Your plan to use our content to sell your advertising is indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website. Your public statements demonstrate
clearly that you intend to harness and exploit the content of all the publishers on the Web to sell your own advertising.

Brave fought back saying that the NAA has misunderstood, and misrepresented how a browser actually works. From their block post:

Furthermore, the NAA’s letter misconstrues how Web standards and browsers work by design: the Web is a system that allows users to consume content in any combination and presentation that user-chosen software can achieve. Browsers do not “republish”, copy, serve, syndicate, or distribute content across the Internet or to any computer other than the one on which they run.

With our ad-share model, the default money flow directs up to 70% of ad revenue to site publishers – far greater than the average percentage in the current programmatic display ad ecosystem. Brave keeps 15%, and allows the end-user to choose whether to donate or keep their 15% share. Keeping their share still results in 55% ad rev share to site owners – beating the current average of 45%. Take a look at our Brave User Paths from Browsing to Ad Rev sharing.

It’s not that the solutions are wrong in our micropayment and ad blocking browser ideas, it’s that the publications took a wrong turn 15 years ago when they put all of their eggs in the ad revenue basket. Micropayments have been discussed for over 20 years now, with Scott McCloud’s 2000 book ‘Reinventing Comics’ convincing many creative people that this was the future. It’s the publishers who were too slow to adapt, and without a central simple system, the micropayment clicks won’t be happening. Since credit cards and online banks also take a share of each action, a penny donated to a website results in the site getting a fraction of that penny. The biggest success of micro payments is iTunes that showed us we would buy a song for a dollar, and spawned several similar services.

Another fundamental misunderstanding from the publishers, is that people think the ads are “bad” or uncreative in some way. While ads that pop-up, pop-under, asks us to punch a monkey or autoplay a video or sound are all examples of ad annoyances, it’s the privacy breach that bothers people. Not just the poor creative. Ad buyers are increasingly realising that digital paid media is a fraud, those 3-second rollovers on Facebook “count” as a view but nobody saw your ad. In the end, the annoyance stems from the same old thing – the path from reader and “payer” of content to creator & maker of content has too many people in the middle taking their percentages at every turn. The calls to third party venders violate both the readers and the publishers privacy, and people actually care about their privacy rights..

Edward is speaking of his students, as he has – along with so many other professors and mentors – discovered the snowflake-like diversity in skills in the new ad generation. The kids are directors/film makers/designers and planner/art directors. When it comes to the art side of things, I find it has always been extremely helpful to narrow it down, as there are “art directors” on movie sets and “art directors” in print magazines, these jobs are very different but they do have in common that you are responsible for the overall art vision, directing the art specialists such as designers, illustrators, costume designers and so on to the final coherent visual goal. Art directors direct the art.

With how media has fragmented into ever smaller niches now, it’s little wonder that people are beginning to flaunt their skill sets as hyphens on their titles. I find it extremely useful when a designer simply states web and print if they know both, which is common today but was a unicorn 20 years ago.
Edward finds that “this next generation of advertising creatives have both the desire and the skills to play in multiple sandboxes—with no interest in being confined to just one.” Funny, I don’t recall ever wanting to be confined either, as that freedom is at the very heart of being a creative. But the moment some agency discovered that I had a knack for the web, I had to fight an uphill battle to get to do anything else. Even my old portfolio school reborn, the SCA 2.0, do not confine the students, though there has always been teams leaving and teams are “writer + art”. It’s up to the team to decide who gets the last say on what.

Are the ad agencies finally catching on? Why are we even saying that some people are “creative technologists”, when we literally mean “an art director who understands the internet and social media”, and not “an art director who also knows some programming”? I know I am not on the extreme end of visual creatives when I literally build servers just to get my idea off the ground, as other Parsons graduates have built dot matrix bikes just to write messages on the ground.

I can’t recall any time where an art creative or designer wasn’t so much more than “just an illustrator” or “graphics guy”, their offshoot skills and nerdery highly individualized and driven by ideas. To add to that, pretty much every writer I was ever paired with has also been a drummer, with side-projects ranging from an actual touring band to several novels. This is why the creative department is like herding cats – none of us fit a mould. But our titles say who has the last say and the final responsibility of what. I’ve called dibs on the art. I recall someone that I Interviewed in Cannes, it suddenly dawned on him that I was an Art Director just like he was, stumped he blurted: “but… but… you write..?” He said it as if that was some sort of freakish mutation. Yes, I write, and I paint large walls, and I pick things apart just to see how they work.

Instead the N8tives will report directly to GCD Paul Vinod and CCO Toygar Bazarkaya, who conceived the idea. They’ll get access to the best briefs and an invitation to use their manifold skills to invent solutions.
“Kids come out of college today with a fiery creative spirit and a desire to create all the time,” says Vinod. “They are hybrids. Defining them would be putting them in a straitjacket.”
Other progressive agencies also claim to embrace the idea of hybrids and misfits. But for many it’s still business as usual. Teams may collectively have a broad set of skills but individuals still have to fit the old job descriptions.

I think “Invent solutions” is the key here. Advertising itself is a problem solving game. Everyone from the account exec to the myriad of planner, strategy, data-driven-marketing nerd are all trying to solve a problem for the client. The client might not even know what their problem is, all they really want is a better bottom line. That’s where all our of our skill sets come in, from number crunching to doodling pretty little pictures. This is why people say “everyone is a creative”, we are all being creative in our respective job descriptions.

Here’s the Twitter discussion that followed (and is still ongoing).

[View the story “What’s in a title? What should yours be?” on Storify]

So kids, when you graduate as art director/film maker/planner/writer I have but one piece of advice for you – show us this in your portfolio. You can write all the titles you want on your card, but if I don’t see it in your work, it won’t help you. Don’t be afraid to make a dot-matrix printer bike and bring the blueprint. And anyone out there who has “writer” in anything, you better have a lot of writing in your book. Too many writers these days have only a sparse tagline in their portfolio, and not one single writeup of the campaign goal, main idea, or strategy used. No radio scripts or TV scripts, and if they do exist it takes two minutes to read their 15 second script. You do realize that when you get to the office, writing those items will be your responsibility, yeah?

Name plaque image from Zazzle where you make name plaques.

At the time, it seemed like a non-story, and it kept spinning online as if it was only a personal drama. So much so, that many journalists simply missed the boat.
I couldn’t do much more than point to the things that were happening, and hear my colleagues dismiss these events with “this, again?” every time I brought something up. I’m not the editor in chief of anyone I know, and if they didn’t fancy chasing down a story with the excuse “I’m not a gamer”, that’s their prerogative.

A year later, almost to the day, the Society of Professional Journalists held a panel & day discussion in Miami, regarding how to cover online events, such as the one now known as “#gamergate”. It was the regional director for the Society of Professional Journalists, Michael Koretzky, who had arranged this airplay event, explaining on its homepage why this topic was chosen: “Since it’s rare for non-journalists (or even journalists, for that matter) to mention journalism ethics, AirPlay aims to figure it out”. If you would try to search for news about Gamergate on google, the first news result that would hit you is that the ‘movement’ is misogynistic, probably racist too, and most definitely right wing, oh, and they try to BOMB people. As Miami News said in a breaking news article “Bomb threats closed down a debate on the controversial topic of women’s representation in video games at a Society of Professional Journalists event in Miami on Saturday. “. Also, check out this tweet from Tampa Bay Times assistant metro editor, Michael Van Sickler.

These gamers are out of control. #gamergate terror at SPJ.— Michael Van Sickler (@mikevansickler) August 15, 2015

Oh, hang on, *puts hand to ear-pierce*, we’ve just heard that there’s no evidence that anyone associated with the group labelled “Gamergate” has phoned in any bomb threats, anywhere. And the event that SPJ arranged was discussing ethics in modern journalism. Michael Van Sickler was at the SPJ event, and @Gamediviner explained what was going on, soon Van Sickler let twitter know he was all caught up. (His phone probably vibrated out of his pocket due to all the twitter replies).

.@Gamediviner has just explained what’s going on with #gamergate at spjairplay. I was totally wrong. Lesson learned.— Michael Van Sickler (@mikevansickler) August 15, 2015

As for his original tweet, that’s how easy one can propagate a narrative, whether by design, a poor choice of words, or ignorance. Essentially, this is how the gamergate saga began, panelists argued at SPJ. Gamers protesting bad journalism was covered by bad journalists. SPJ wanted to discuss how journalists can cover online movements, a difficult task, using this online movement as an example. In the era of hashtag activism, there’s plenty of leaderless movements that need to be covered – #Blacklivesmatter has been US national news. Occupy Wall Street journalists at least had a physical location to go to where they could interview people. With Gamergate, some journalists are simply lost between the chans, twitter, and subreddits in how to find people.
There’s a transcript of the SPJ airplay morning panel here, (also a video), and the afternoon panel can be viewed here. Derek Smart, a game developer, was on the “not gamergate” panel and he has shared his thoughts here. The morning panel kicked off with an “Explain Like I’m Five” Q&A session of what gamergate was actually about, and despite failing to sum it up succinctly the panelists agreed that it was an illuminating discussion. Lynn Walsh, the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Expert, and Executive Producer at the investigative team at the NBC station in San Diego found that there had indeed been ethical breaches in game-reporting, such as journalists reporting on roommates projects without disclosing their relationship. Ms Walsh pointed out that in the SPJ Code of Ethics any conflict of interest “real or perceived” had to be avoided. “…I think that is so important because while you may not see it as a conflict of interest, the fact that someone else could or possibly could is huge too. Because if the public perceives it, then the reality of the world is it will become a conflict of interest in the public’s state of mind. And then there goes your story.” Now, it’s not just conflicts of interest that are dogging gamergate, as with my examples above the narrative “sexism in video games” and “women harassed in video games” are sticky, so much so that an event discussing journalism is labelled a discussion about sexism.

The afternoon panel didn’t go quite so well, as the panelists and the moderator seem to have vastly different ideas of what the topic of discussion was. Koretzky kept asking the panel how to cover these types of topics in the future, but both panels already know basic “get both sides of the story” journalism. On SPJAirplay Koretzky describes the bomb threats that interrupted the afternoon panel as a “mercy killing,” but as I was watching the session live streamed I felt that the panels had just found equilibrium in their discussion and might have reached some very interesting end points had it continued undisturbed. While discussing how to get a story that lives on the internet, and how to show several sides to a story a la journalism 101 is perfectly valid topic at a professional event for journalists, I wished the discussion had looked at how the internet is changing journalism. While the panel may have laughed at Gawker, the vast reach of their clickbait effects how stories are reported, and not just in other outlets that might quote or link them. We have hashtag activism, and we have journalist activists today. Twitter was hailed as a hero tool during the Arab Spring, but also brings us #Cancelcolbert, and #hasJustinelandedyet. We have scientists like Tim Hunt being shamed into resigning over a joke that was misrepresented by someone attending. A twitter storm & certain press vilified Tim Hunt, while readers and former undergrads defended him. Offline, we have Rolling Stone magazine running a feature story about a horrific rape on campus, without speaking to any of the accused, which it later retracted. But not before the damage was done.

Ms. Walsh spoke of allowing the journalists to take the time they need to get the story right, but let’s be honest, when being the top hit in Google depends on being the first one with the story, too many news outlets online rush in, only to issue corrections later. The promised “democratisation” that the internet brought us as individuals’ voices could reach everywhere, also made us all our own editors, forced to sort the wheat from the chaff in the cacophony that follows. The internet, and the easily shared links on social media, mutated the yellow journalism of yore into a sharable beast. Sites supported by ever dwindling banner ad incomes fall into the trap of inventing the story, rather than reporting it. If I had attended this event, I would have wanted to discuss this, and how journalism can evolve in a connected world where nobody wants to pay for the news.

Disclosure: I was asked if I could attend by people on twitter, to replace a panelist who had decided to not go. While I would have been very interested in this, it was suggested very late, and I never spoke to Koretzky.

All hell broke lose when Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, posted the above photo to their facebook page announcing that you could “channel your inner Camille #Monet and try on a replica of the kimono she’s wearing in “La Japonaise.” Every Wednesday night June 24-July 29″. Of course they also had a hastag, #mfaBoston, which quickly devolved into a stream of protests, accusations of orientalism and extra-tagged with #whitesupremacykills.

Here are a few tweets showing protesters silently holding signs, as art students are sketching a live model, challenging themselves to be as good as Monet with the opportunity of seeing the same red silk as the one that inspired Monet. I bet that was an awkward hour of sketching. I wonder if any of the students captured the whole scene? That might make a good painting and social commentary on 2015.

People gathered to sketch the model and painting. This fascination is orientalism! #mfaboston #whitesupremacykills pic.twitter.com/WV35hfp2k9— Amber Ying (@diabola) July 1, 2015

.@mfaboston redo the placards: own the orientalism, own the looting bc #whitesupremacykills #mfaboston pic.twitter.com/Nj9MwX4eXO— Loreto Paz Ansaldo (@lpansaldo) July 1, 2015

.@mfaboston Engage the public in critical dialogue on #orientalism instead #mfaboston #whitesupremacykills pic.twitter.com/sZt0DcFl9h— Pampi (@thirdeyefell) July 1, 2015

So after all these protests, the MFA recasts kimono idea, just days after the twitter & facebook storm erupted. The MFA issued this statement:

When the MFA’s painting, La Japonaise by Claude Monet, travelled throughout Japan for an exhibition, historically accurate reproduction kimonos were made for visitors to try on. When the painting returned to Boston and a similar program was introduced at the MFA, we heard concerns from some members of our community, and as a result, we’ve decided to change our programming. The kimonos will now be on display in the Impressionist gallery every Wednesday evening in July for visitors to touch and engage with, but not to try on. This allows the MFA to continue to achieve the program’s goal of offering an interactive experience with the kimonos—understanding their weight and size, and appreciating the embroidery, material, and narrative composition. We will also increase the number of Spotlight Talks presented by MFA educators, to take place every Wednesday evening in July in conjunction with the display of the kimonos. The talks provide context on French Impressionism, “japonisme,” and the historical background of the painting, as well as an opportunity to engage in culturally sensitive discourse. We apologize for offending any visitors, and welcome everyone to participate in these programs on Wednesday evenings, when Museum admission is free. We look forward to continuing the Museum’s long-standing dialogue about the art, culture and influence of Japan.

Notice that it was when the painting by Monet travelled throughout Japan that the historically accurate reproduction kimonos were made to be worn by visitors. It’s not racist or imperialist if someone outside of Boston engages with the artwork in a more tactile manner? Or is this perhaps a lesson in social media protests ability to disrupt pretty much anything, including a quiet Wednesday at the fine art museum.

.@mfaboston wonderful dialogue last Wed about why dressing Japonaise really shouldn’t be happening #mfaboston pic.twitter.com/Mex9pynILg— Pampi (@thirdeyefell) July 1, 2015

The tl;dr boils down to “stay away”, which is an assessment that I’ve previously agreed with, albeit from the polar opposite point of view. And I specifically said stay away from toxic websites that are not only contributing to the outrage culture online, but often were the catalyst of it. For example, when Sam Biddle at Gawker media ruined Ms Saccos life over a tweet joke, then Gawker tricked Coke’s twitter bot into tweeting “Mein Kampf”, and defended it. Mr Cooper correctly assumes that brands don’t want to court controversy – and most do not, though several underdogs have made their name doing just that, American Apparel, Protein World, PETA and Benetton come to mind. “It’s the kiss of death for brands” Cooper says – and it’s also how some brands are actually born. Brands aren’t busy measuring public opinion, brands know they can shape it – Bernbach himself told them so.

Mr Cooper furrows his brow when he addresses the “Corporate PR Departments”.

So let’s be real: I know that when you get hundreds of coordinated emails purportedly in favor of “ethics” and against “bullying,” your first instinct will be to give in immediately. Intel, Adobe, and Mercedes-Benz all folded before Gamergate, because it carries the hallmarks of a genuine consumer rights movement.

No, lets be really “real”, yo. This lazily penned post is a massive insult to anyone working in advertising and PR, assuming off the bat that public relations is all about waiting for fires to put out and that the default strategy for anything is to run away scared as soon as a million moms, little old ladies from Hastings, or people who associate with the hashtag “Gamergate” send in emails. But it gets better! The statement about bullying above, is just leading up to…..

To fold in the face of their demands is to lend credence to a movement widely regarded as despicable, and you will be attacked in the strongest terms by numerous writers, including this one, who work at outlets with far more influence over brand perception than Gamergate.

What is that? A threat? Is this writer deciding for all brands on the planet what they should be doing or else? That right there is exactly why I said check where your brand is, make your media buyers and PR people earn that paycheck. Do not let your ads be shotgunned all over the webs blog networks via a lazy Adwords approach when you quadruplecheck every single comma in every single social media post.

Here’s the thing, the democratisation of voices on the web by way of boards, forums, blogs and papers also mean that brands no longer have to turn to a media house to reach a target. Brands are well aware of the fact that they own their channels, places where they can produce content such as shows and articles related to their brand, places where you are already curating their own products into Pinterest boards* and where the soft-sell story of Barbie style has four hundred thousand more subscribers than the hard sell of Barbie. The Dot Com era is old enough to buy itself a drink in a US bar, PR managers have grown up with forums and cut their teeth on AOL keywords. Digital has matured, social is now ubiquitous, and the collected data can now pretty much tell us what people are considering to have for lunch by breakfast.

Meanwhile, “content” has been devalued since the first rallying cries against Metallica, and this attitude in turn has made everything from photography to anything written a free for all – ad-supported of course – starting with Metro in subways all around the world. As cheap as it is to get content for free, news sites still need to earn money, and they can only do that by advertising now, paywalls are shunned by the same writers who grab pitchforks just to get clicks. They’re desperate. They jumped on the free-content boat and now they’re hellbent on drowning in it, as newspapers & magazines pooled their images into Flickr, their clips to youtube, and their words to the ether – all while not reading the TOS on who is making money off their data or how that content is allowed to be used. Articles are written, copied, spread and to make a buck the originating site really needs your click, articles are rushed because first out with the headline is top search result in Google. Articles embed youtube videos because they’ll get traffic and ranking in return. Buzzfeed made an entire corporation based on scraping Reddit, tumblr & twitter for stuff they could cobble together into an easily shared clickworthy post.

Since everything under a publication banner is now technically worthless, journalists are simply trying to carve out their new niche as outrage-directors. Like shock jock hosts of yore, but now in online publications and lacking the irreverent humor. If they can’t sell their words, perhaps they can sell their ability to rally the people™. Everything is entertainment now, everything is politicized. It’s all about traffic, and traffic moves in waves of outrage. The only way to make a coin is to earn it by celebrity, not by the content you create. So we can’t blame Cooper and pals, really, for running with “opinion pieces,” which as we all know, do not necessarily reflect those of the media company.

What Cooper may have missed is that the consumers are already way ahead of the media outlets. Twitter personas have been established for years, jumping in on any topic that a journalist will quote them on – like a_girl_irl (who by the way, was never a girl IRL). The most recent star is @GodfreyElfwick who appears regularly in mainstream articles. Cooper’s estimation of Gamergate being “a few hundred at most”, while linking a single Reddit board dedicated to Gamergate topics which has 42,530 members is being willfully ignorant. The few hundred people have created a website listing corrupted journalists, and the social reach of a single thunderclap about it went to 1,111,298 people. Brands want to sell product, and consumers buy products – regardless of how many “strong terms” are used by writers to “condemn” brands for trying to market their wares – which still actually make money, unlike most media outlets online.

(*seriously though, who the heck still does pinterest?)

Having cancelled my contract with one mobile phone operator and remaining undecided about who to sign up with next, I decided to go phoneless for 2 weeks. No calls, no apps, no data, no social media on the go. The first thing that hit me was what I like to call ‘Empty Pocket Syndrome’. You reach for your phone about 50 times per hour, but the reassuring slab of plastic is not to be found. You may feel a phantom vibration against your leg, while in reality there’s nothing there.

Empty Pocket Syndrome culminates in a constant feeling of nakedness and disconnection where your stomach lurches occasionally as you remember that all your friends are on WhatsApp right now. What are they saying? Which incredible events are you missing out on? Of course, it’s unlikely that you are missing anything of importance – but it feels that way, and it starts to annoy. You’re absolutely positive everyone is going to an amazing party and no one is telling you.

Tim Palmer, the Digital Creative Director of FCB Inferno London, writes: “I think we could all learn a bit from not having a phone in our pocket. It is nothing more than a comfort blanket for adults, and we should learn to use technology more responsibly, and possibly even keep humanity more alive.” Is he right? Not even close.

Technology connects people together, creating new, innovative and disruptive ways to improve society. The idea that we can become more ‘human’ by simply throwing our phones away, closing our social media accounts and logging out of the digital rat race is nothing more than an immature and unconsidered response.

What about the singletons falling in love (and lust) through Tinder, the stranded travellers ordering a UBER cab, the frustrated workers complaining on Vent, the tired commuters unwinding with Pet Rescue Saga. What about the amateur photographer able to bring up detailed and location-aware information on light conditions using Ephemeris. Has his humanity been degraded through his reliance on new technology? Of course not.

Just under half of mobile phone users (48%) say they download apps on their mobile phone (up from 37% in 2012). Smartphone users have an average of 23 apps on their phones, of which they say they use ten regularly.* It’s a clear and concise movement; society is becoming more technologically literate, and mobile phone use is driving this trend. One of the key takeaways from Ofcom’s most recent report is that there has been growth in take-up and media literacy in older people, across a range of devices.

There’s a certain type of undignified and often unnoticed hypocrisy in those making anti-technology videos, uploading to YouTube and promoting via their social media channels. Like and comment they say, jumping on the latest social bandwagon. Wouldn’t it be better if we put down our phones and truly connected, they remind us? Look at all these zombies, waiting for a bus, staring into black mirrors, electronic voids. Don’t use Google Maps, ask a fellow human for directions. Don’t use OKCupid, go out there and make a genuine human connection with a stranger in a bar.

It seems they never really consider why we use technology to connect; that perhaps on the other end of that jabbering box there’s another human being, an intercontinental lover brought closer via Skype. One activity is not mutually exclusive of another. We can connect with strangers and also love our smartphones. We can value our time while playing Candy Crush. We can retain our humanity, while embracing change.

Technology isn’t sterile; it reflects our emotions, concerns and priorities as humans.

And life itself is not a series of binary choices.

*Ofcom – Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report 2014