When We Broke The Internet
Because colors added to the size of the download, we’d even strip out colors.
-Jonathan Nelson, (now CEO of Omnicom Digital) -from Digiday
October 27, 1994 is when it all went wrong.
The folks at Hotwired.com (which later became Wired) had recently realized that just like the print industry, online publishers would one day have to sell ads online. They wanted to be first.
They didn’t pause to consider the exponential power of the web and take the opportunity to devise a new format of non-linear and interactive brand communication that would elevate culture by connecting ideas. They did what magazines do. They stuck an ad on a page. It was an image, hard-coded into the top of their site, that linked out to a PDF. It was a bad ad, it was hard to read, it communicated nothing, but a great way to measure a click. The banner ad must have seemed like such a good idea at the time. But, like Bucky Balls, what seemed fun and meaningless at the time, would eventually eat us up from the inside out.
The banner ad didn’t evolve. It metastasized into the most distributed, omnipresent and destructive communication in history. And it has impacted our culture in huge ways by replacing the real choice and intelligent experience promised by the internet, with artificial ones that have the potential to destroy creativity as we know it.
We Work For the Robots
How did one little digital experiment in 1994 become such a big scary monster? Unlike other creative mediums, like literature where genres and styles can grow and fade, the ripples created by early technologies are amplified over time. Most of the digital tools we use today are “stacked platforms”. That means that a number of different tools work together to form the scaffolding that make some of our most basic interactive platforms possible. “Twitter” is a stack that uses GPS, SMS, satellite technology, the QWERTY keyboard, LCD screens not to mention all the various image sharing and creation tech that makes the whole thing run. Things like character limits, hashtags and its messaging interface are leftovers from an earlier era, but they have formed the bedrock of our culture and redefined the way we communicate. No one has ever clicked “Learn More” on a banner ad and learned anything. So, why do we keep writing it on all of our buttons?
A Call To Action
Modern advertising is a stacked platform, too. It’s no longer tied to a couple basic medium, it uses a wide array of tools and lets people define their own path through the stories we create for brands. This sounds cool, until you realize that our stack is built on the early ill-gotten “success” of the banner ad format. Choice implies agency, and empowerment, but the first “interactive” ads were built as a tool to track, measure and evaluate people, not a tool to create great experiences. We’ve built our stack on that model, without considering where it would lead. “Strip out the colors” became “limit the frames” which became “keep your posts short and publish often” which became “the first four seconds of any video is all that matters and don’t worry about sound”.
Professional creativity has adapted to measure eyeballs and shifted away from inspiring the minds behind those eyeballs.
In this world, there is no VW “Lemon” ad. There is no “1984” spot. The idea of a culture-shifting proclamation, an elegantly unfinished thought, a provocation, a “beautiful ad” that helps you understand what you feel in a whole new way has become totally unimportant because it’s not measurable by the machines we work hard to please.
Choose Different
But there’s always been a dream for a different type of internet. One that is focused on better experiences for humans. One that really listens. That changes based on how you use it. While our current internet uses data to efficiently reflect back to you what you already think, a reactive web built on hyperlinks with narratives designed for discovery could open up new worlds for us to explore.
Not a Dark Web to hide our secrets. Not a Narrow Web that uses algorithms to focus our gaze, but a Light and Airy Web with stories we can walk around in.
A human-focused internet isn’t a new idea.
But, first we need to re-think the way we create for the internet. In his way-too-short essay “Why Getting It Wrong Is The Future of Design” (in Wired by the way) Scott Dadich points out that freeing ourselves from best practices can help us “…create technology that is more than merely useful…” by breaking the rules, we can uncover the true power of the tools we have at our disposal. The tools we create are there to make us better communicators, to build richer worlds to explore to make better and cooler shit that transforms the medium and is additive to the lives of humans. We must lead the way by imagining worlds where participants are at the center of the story and the content we’re writing is actually penned by the experience of the human who was playing with the thing we made. With real interactivity, we should be generating new types of work and new ways of working.
If something is made for the internet it should not retain its shape. It should grow and change the longer it’s there. If we really use the power of the web, it won’t be just to more effectively target people, but to cede control of the stories we create and watch what happens when people co-create with brands.
The machines we rely on to tell us what success is are designed for ruthless efficiency. A pure definitive, reliably correct measurement. A Human, on the other hand, is entirely unreliable. We often analyze everything successfully, find the correct answer and do the entirely opposite thing, because it’s cool. Rather than asking a machine to measure success, we can use machines to inspire us by looking in places we can’t find and seeing relationships that are invisible to the Human eye. We designed communications on the internet based on an idea from the Industrial Age. What would happen if we started over and rebuilt the stack? We could use the web as a tool to create insane human connections instead of a tool for counting how many people weren’t bored during a :15 second ad.
At Technology, Humans And Taste, we’ve begun to build our stack from scratch. To organize our ethically-sourced data we use a machine. To create constant connection to real humans that are as different from us as possible, we throw a party every Friday and invite strangers.
And we don’t keep tabs on how many people show up.
