How social media is changing design

In praise of Draplin Design upping the ante

There is a lot going here. It starts with a man-made disaster. It’s followed by a ridiculous round of sloppy PR messaging and then inter-company in-fighting and finger pointing to try to assign blame. Now include the multiple failed attempts to stop the flow of oil from the sea bed and you have the makings of a social media disaster. No wonder BP was brandjacked. Here’s a typical tweet from the brandjacked BP Twitter account – “If you’ve ever wanted to take a dump in the ocean, now is your chance. #whynot? #bpcares”

And now our friends across the river in Portland, Draplin Design Company, decide it’s time for BP to have an updated logo. Nicely done, Draplin and Co.

There’s another logo here. And Justin Spohn from Fight has a good take on the BP social media train wreck.

Facebook and your privacy – part 2 or How To Be Alone

“Privacy, privacy, the new American obsession: espoused as the most fundemental of rights, marketed as the most desirable of commodities, and pronounced dead twice a week.” – Jonathan Frantzen, 2002.

What does it mean to be “private?”

What follows is from Wikipedia and I believe it sums up neatly what the average person [i.e. not a lawyer,] might consider what privacy means:

Privacy [from the Latin privatus 'separated from the rest, deprived of something, esp. office, participation in the government', from privo 'to deprive'] is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively. The boundaries and content of what is considered private differ among cultures and individuals, but share basic common themes. Privacy is sometimes related to anonymity, the wish to remain unnoticed or unidentified in the public realm. When something is private to a person, it usually means there is something within them that is considered inherently special or personally sensitive. The degree to which private information is exposed therefore depends on how the public will receive this information, which differs between places and over time. Privacy is broader than security and includes the concepts of appropriate use and protection of information.

The bold highlights are mine as I feel the words and sentences that I picked out are at the core of the debate about Facebook and privacy because of this – “Data privacy refers to the evolving relationship between technology and the legal right to, or public expectation of privacy in the collection and sharing of data about one’s self.”

In 2010 our ideas of privacy today versus the same ideas when considered in Latin now rest on that sentence – “the legal right to, or public expectation of privacy in the collection and sharing of data about one’s self.” Technology fractures the relationship between public and private information and creates a moral and ethical debate, now being aired in public, over how that information is used.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sparked this debate when he rather foolishly said “the age of privacy is over…” I say foolishly because I think his intentions were not to fan the flames of discontent that were already smoldering around privacy issues [see Google Buzz,] but to try and get ahead of his competitors by attempting to embrace what he considered a societal shift toward more openness wherein he misconstrued openness as a willingness for people to share everything in public. He was very wrong.

He was wrong because in Western society, many people especially in the USA, consider privacy in many different ways. Here’s how Jonathan Frantzen considers his own privacy from his book of essays ‘How To Be Alone‘ – “…the local particulars of content matter less to me than the underlying investigation in all these essays: the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone.
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RiP: A Remix Manifesto – Girl Talk – copyright infringement – piracy or art?

The web has created a huge challenge for creators and copyright holders, a challenge that has created some ridiculous scenarios; take the case of the band Death Cab For Cutie being sent a takedown notice from their own record label, for posting a video, funded by said label, to the band’s own web site.

The real issues are further muddied when words such as “pirated,” “stolen,” “infringers” etc are used. The bottom line really, is that our current copyright laws need to be updated to take into account how artists are creating new works by mashing up disparate works and then invariably posting those works to the web.

In his film RiP: A Remix Manifesto [which you can watch for free here,] Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores the issue of copyright in the information age, and the tension that is created between the producers and users of their work. So, is it piracy or art?

From the film web site:

“The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy?

Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.”