Posts filed under “Society / Politics”

Illinois Senate Parody Furniture Ad

Leather Creations Furniture - Selling furniture (and chuckles) to a cynical market via a quarter-page ad in the Chicago Tribune on Christmas Day.

This (sensationally titled) presentation is really interesting. The 34-Slide deck on Google was prepared by French consulting firm FaberNovel. It's worth a quick flip-through if you have any interest in the most powerful force online.

There's not much I like more than a good info graphic. I'm of the school that thinks design should primarily be used to convey information in a way that's fast and pleases the eye.  With words like "billions" & "trillions" crowding the headlines lately, I thought it was time to whip one up.

Pie charts are to scale. Click for full-size image.

Numbers pulled from this BoingBoing article.

Click to enlarge.

It's not very often that a design is so successful and original that it inspires hundreds of imitations. Shepard Fairey, of OBEY fame, achieved just that with his "HOPE" poster for Barack Obama. Whether you consider yourself Republican, Democrat, Independent, or even just apathetic, good design is still good design, and Fairey's poster is easily one of the most recognizable images of the year.

But now that the election thingy is finally over, we can focus on the more important question: is Sylar good or evil? For those who may not be familiar with Gabriel Gray, AKA Sylar, he's a character on NBC's "Heroes". Lets just say he's not someone you would want to upset.

This season of Heroes is titled "Villians" and we are seeing the duality of the characters on the show. Sylar has always been a pretty bad guy, but has he turned a new leaf? Decide for yourself, and let others know what side you're on by downloading a zip file with 11x17 300dpi printable versions here. (4.95mb .zip file)

The Yangtze River in China is the world's longest river to run through one country. Photographer Nadav Kander traveled its entire length; camera in hand. His photos tell the haunting story of a nation undergoing frenetic development pushing into, under and over one of the true wonders of nature.

Yangtze From East to West runs from October 24th - November 22nd 2008 at Flowers Contemporary Art in London. Prints and a high quality gallery of this collection are avilable here.

[via Don't Panic]

A US Army intelligence report has identified popular micro-blogging service, and web 2.0 darling, Twitter as a potential terrorist tool.

Full Size Image ( 237KB GIF - 5000x800 )

No other color in modern history has carried such gravitas when it comes to associations with masculinity, femininity and politics. The color pink is a vessel for weighty subject material, indeed. Especially when you consider the fact that it has only been around in its proper form for less than 500 years. Who knows what the future for this light shade of red will hold, but this info graphic covers the last hundred years of politics and pop culture in all things pink.

This image is published by Voltage Creative under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.

So... you're a copywriter, you've got to make a list of three things and you know that commas are going to be involved. The question is how many? Well, that all depends on how you view the Oxford comma. Yes: you.

You see the greatest thing about The English Language is probably also the worst thing. It's not like the romantic languages; there's no ruling body of stuffy academics assigned to keep things in shape. Proper grammar in The English Language is determined by popular use or "consensus." (That's why text messaging 'tweens have English professors running for their pitchforks and torches.) But I digress...

The serial comma (a.k.a. the Oxford or Harvard comma) is the comma used before a conjunction that comes before the last item in a list . Here's two examples:

"Tom, Dick, and Harry" is written with the serial or Oxford Comma.

"Tom, Dick and Harry" is written without it.

They both mean the same thing and neither is wrong. How you feel about the two uses is a product of your location and education. Most US authorities think the Oxford Comma is proper.

So who knows how many commas to use in your list? No one. No one knows. It's a matter of personal taste and, personally, I get the heebie jebbies when I run my eyes across a list without an Oxford Comma placed before the grammatical conjunction. You see, I was raised to believe in The Oxford Comma. Mrs. Shultz, my third grade teacher, struck fear into my heart over the issue. Which is why I can't see doing it any other way. Can you? Because it's an important distinction...

Who gives a **** about an Oxford comma?
I've seen those English dramas too
They're cruel
So if there's any other way
To spell the word
It's fine with me, with me

-Vampire Weekend

The Chronicle Review is running a fascinating deconstruction of the infamous 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles's War of The Worlds radio broadcast that should be required reading for anyone interested in word of mouth or viral marketing. The widely reported hysteria was pretty tame in reality, but it was spun into something greater by a self-important media in love with a story about the power it possessed.

So what accounts for the legend? First — and perhaps most important — the news media loved the story, and Welles loved the news media. The panic became a global story literally overnight. Even the Nazis could not resist commenting, noting the credulity of the American public. Americans certainly appeared gullible, but they were not alone. The news media, handed a sensational story of national scope, reported every detail (including fictional ones) about Welles, the program, and the reaction.

Welles's greatest performance that evening wasn't in the studio; it was in a hallway, at the improvised news conference, when he feigned a stunned, apologetic demeanor. In reality, as Paul Heyer notes in The Medium and the Magician, Welles carefully concealed his satisfaction with the hysteria while expressing concern over the rumors of deaths attributed to the program.

The only firsthand study of the event with any scientific credibility actually disproved then-present-day perceptions of mass-media's role in human psyche as some sort of great controller... It showed that people are not easily manipulated, at least not with predictable results.

The hypodermic model of media effects, which prevailed at the time, posited that the media injected ideas, more or less directly, into the consciousness of the audience. The book's data seriously undermined that model, demonstrating empirically that each member of the mass audience filters the media's messages through a matrix of personal variables (education, critical ability, class, etc.). Those data complicated media theory tremendously and intensified the research focus on the complexities of audience reception.

Lazarsfeld surprised many by concluding in The People's Choice, his classic study of the 1940 election, that the media's effects are, in general, much more selective and limited than we assume. Other forms of communication, from those in the education system to religious communication to interpersonal communication, were apparently more powerful. The mass media were but one part of a larger web of influence, and as one factor, their actual influence was mediated by several other variables. Thus, the media's ability to control us was far less pronounced than assumed.

That is the ultimate irony behind "The War of the Worlds." The discovery that the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political consciousness or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose, was an important one. It may seem like a counter intuitive discovery (especially considering its provenance), but ask yourself this: If we really know how to control people through the media, then why isn't every advertising campaign a success? Why do advertisements sometimes backfire? If persuasive technique can be scientifically devised, then why do political campaigns pursue different strategies? Why does the candidate with the most media access sometimes lose?

The answer is that humans are not automatons. We might scare easily, we might, at different times and in different places, be susceptible to persuasion, but our behavior remains structured by a complex and dynamic series of interacting factors.

Something to keep in mind next time you have big plans for your market.

The Hyped Panic Over 'War of the Worlds' - The Chronicle Review.

[Illustration by Doug Savage]

Someone got canned over this for sure. Bloomberg news sent a preliminary obituary of Steve Jobs out over their news wire yesterday. It was quickly retracted, but raised more than a few eyebrows, considering the pancreatic cancer rumors that have been swirling around the Apple icon lately. Gawker has the full obit, if you care to parse.