facebook high school

Facebook is by far the most successful social networking site to date. With so many of us new to social networking, we often find ourselves frustrated with our “friends’” updates, whether they are boring, politically-charged, overtly religious, or just flat-out inappropriate. So, to alleviate some of the pressure, we need to set some ground rules for appropriate behavior in an online social world. Or rather, we need a way to think about what’s appropriate to post or not.

Coming up with a guide isn’t easy. I first thought about making a list of dos and don’ts, but that seemed too inflexible and ridiculous. Instead, I offer a metaphor that allows you to reflect on your own behavior and those around you:

Facebook is a high school hallway during passing period.

Before you think me a fool, let me elaborate.

If you’re a social sort – Class lets out. You walk the hall, swing by your friends’ lockers, hear conversation, participate in quick conversation, maybe pass a note. Sometimes people are happy, sometimes sad, sometimes angry, and so on. On your way to your next class, you might say hi to someone or have another quick conversation.

If you’re not as social – Class lets out. You walk the hall, find a friend, hear conversation, maybe you respond, maybe you don’t, but you hear things and know what’s going on.

Taking the metaphor a bit further – Let’s say during those conversations you get to know someone a little better and then you hang out after school or on the weekends.

Now, none of this revolutionary. But what the metaphor implies as far as social norms go can resonate deeply. If your newsfeed is your facebook high school hallway, how would you behave in that situation? How would you want others to behave? Perhaps most importantly, would you want to be friends with you?

For example:

• If you are a religious person, that’s who you are and it’s cool. But if you post lots of religious stuff and it’s showing up all over your friends’ news feeds, you risk looking like the guy who hands out leaflets that say “Repent or Go to Hell”. If that’s what you want to do, more power to you. But don’t be surprised if you find you’re being ignored or are losing friends.

• If you are politically-inclined, OK. If you make an occasional comment about politics, that’s OK also. But remember, a 5-minute passing period is not the place to have a meaningful conversation. Most of the time, you will only make people mad because there’s no time to really discuss an issue. If you don’t care about discussion, cool. But don’t be surprised if you end up on the cutting room floor of my facebook friend list. Why? I can’t appropriately engage you in the hallway and don’t want to be beaten to death with one-sided arguments, no matter how true they are.

• If you like to be philosophical, I can dig it. But remember, this is a 5-minute passing period. If every time I see you, you are quoting the I Ching, Rumi, or even, say, Churchill, well, it begins to get preachy and overwhelming. You might be a great person to know, but I wouldn’t know because you’re always proselytizing. Ugh.

• If you occasionally post something about the food you ate for lunch, cool. But do that too much and I will probably not want to talk to you much or hang out with you outside of school. Why? You’re boring. Sorry, but you’re boring.

• If you are going through an emotional time and need to vent or let people know you are having a hard time, by all means, post away. But the school hallway is not the place to be breaking down all the time. Because honestly, if I see someone always posting emotionally-charged updates, I tend to think somebody is emotionally unhealthy and I want to stay away.

This can go on and on. The clever guy. The party girl. The jock. The point is: What you put out there isn’t just who you are, it’s what everyone around you has to deal with. There is an appropriate time and place for everything, but a 5-minute passing period between classes isn’t often one of them. So, be cool.

A Meditation on Michael Jackson

In any work of fiction, it’s imperative that the audience keep what is termed a “suspension of disbelief”. That is to say, an audience knows that what’s happening isn’t real, but the plot and elements of the story seem plausible within the context of the story. It doesn’t matter the genre—Fantasy, Science Fiction, general Fiction, Comic Books, etc.—what matters is we don’t get pulled out of the story because of something too unbelievable within the context of the story.

The case for suspending disbelief also applies to artists, especially performing artists. An artist’s persona and art is their story they use to connect with an audience, who then suspend their disbelief about the person behind the persona. Many times, we as audience members don’t want to know what lurks behind the surface, lest it ruin our enjoyment of the persona and the created artifact. But when the artifact created is deeply personal and empathetic to audience members (unlike, say, an abstract painting might be), the person and the persona collide into one amalgamated being. We begin to open ourselves up to the person, creating a trust that few artists are able to forge on any wide-scale basis.

This thought brings me to Michael Jackson. As the 80s waned into the 90s, nearly everyone thought that Michael Jackson wasn’t exactly all there (and there were more than a few questions about his sexuality). But still, most of his fans either retained their suspension of disbelief about him (he oozed sex in everything he did) or they just didn’t care as long as he was the same performing badass we all grew up with. However, during this time, Michael Jackson was carefully converging his persona with Michael Jackson the person, creating an interesting mix of controversy and adoration.

In short order, Michael Jackson sang about women (The Way You Make Me Feel), creating understanding (Human Nature), eradicating famine (We Are The World), and uplifting yourself by uplifting others (Man in the Mirror). If we were to believe in the songs, we had to believe in the artist, and thus we ended up having to believe in the person behind it all. Michael Jackson seemed to be a genuinely good person underneath it all, making his personal pleas all the more palatable for the general public.

Then came the (first) molestation charge.

As great as so many of his songs are and as great of an entertainer, dancer, choreographer, and composer he was, upon the accusations of child molestation, his increasingly odd behavior, as well as revelations about his wildly extravagant lifestyle, he no longer had an artistic port to dock his boat of understanding, goodwill, uplifting others, and yes, sex. What could he possibly sing about that his would-be fans would not only support, but could also arm them to maintain their suspension of disbelief?

Even if the accusations of molestation weren’t true—he was left with nothing to write about, sing about, or dance about. There were too many holes in the story. Nothing was true anymore, either for the audience or for Michael Jackson.

At the end of it all, he produced nothing of consequence in the last 15 years—during what should have been the prime of his life. Instead, he ended up a grossly disfigured man, a shell of what he once was, hooked on painkillers, imprisoned by his now world-famous persona that he could never escape and yet had no outlet for. Right or wrong, good or bad, this was the tragedy of Michael Jackson, a man who was not only one of history’s greatest and most influential artists, but a man who needed to create, to entertain, to move people.

Upon his passing, we’ve seen millions upon millions of people coming out in support of him. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but I suspect that some of it is because the crushing weight of the Michael Jackson story has been lifted and we can now enjoy the artifacts from when the story was fun and the ending was surely going to be good.

An Election Result As Participatory Design

Is the result of an election a design?

I’ve been pondering this quite heavily for the past week or so since I took a couple days to travel to Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design graduate thesis presentations. What got me thinking about this was Kyle Vice’s thesis project where he created a website/program where people could vote on a series of posters and the winning poster was to be projected on a huge wall on campus. To achieve this, he designed and built software and various web applications for people to use to vote on the posters. Location-wise, he envisioned placing kiosks in public places as well as voting through a traditional website or iPhone app.

What this (very cool) project got me wondering is this: Is voting, and its ensuing results, a form of design? Specifically, is it participatory design? Now, in his project, the only thing people were voting on was a poster to be displayed, and no one person had any ability to massively affect the group’s collective choice outside of their own vote, but it begs the question: Does collective input equal “design”? Certainly each poster was designed, the software to manage the posters was designed, the interface and user experience was designed, even the physical means by which to vote was designed, but what about the process of choosing a design? Again, is that design?

Honestly, I’m not sure. Without getting into arguments about collective (un)consciousness, one could easily argue that we have elections all the time that hardly anyone would consider the outcome of as a “design”. However, in a sense, we are choosing a design in an election. How? In the case of a politician, he has ideas—or designs—on how best to run a community or society. A politician also has a carefully crafted persona that one could easily argue is a design. (It’s a design because there’s normally a carefully considered end-goal—no matter how unconscious—and measured actions to meet that end goal.) And then, voters vote based on that politician’s design of how to deal with various competing interests.

But, is the result of an election a design? Or is it the process that is designed to facilitate an acceptable outcome the “design”? Think of it this way: Is President Obama a design? Was President Bush? Clinton? Certainly their policies are designed and, in a sense, we choose a certain design to present ourselves both back to the U.S. and to the rest of world. But, we didn’t design them to do anything just like we wouldn’t say we designed a poster result through a blind voting process.

Or would we?

You might be wondering why I’m even bringing this up if I am so unsure one way or another. (I wonder myself.) I bring it up because this debate is a possible line in the sand in the debate about what is design and what isn’t design. It seems to me that you can design for something—a process, service, information, persuasion, experience—all for a higher cause of enabling action, learning, belief, emotion, or thought, but the end result of these designs, is, in itself, not a design. It’s not a design in the same way that a car driver is not a design, he is merely enabled to make certain choices, have a feeling about a car, and live his life how he sees fit.

In short, there is no reflection and where there is no reflection, there is no design, there is merely action enabled.

But, going back to the poster voters: if you give those poster voters a voice, a means to organize and wage campaigns to influence what poster gets on the ballot, then that begins to bear the mark of design.

How so? In the happiest accident of feedback loops (and one I didn’t realize until I got here), where design is driven by audience, the audience demand drives new designs until they don’t have to reflect any more and are contentedly enabled again. And so, in some strange way, a result of an election seems to be a design. But only if we are allowed to participate in the feedback loop. Which sometimes happens. And sometimes doesn’t (which is both good and bad).

Weird. This brings up so many questions.

What is Design? (Not Again!)

In high school, when I would get in trouble for skipping class or being late for curfew or (gulp) was pulled over by the police while driving, I would design excuses to get out of the worst part of trouble. In this case, my close friend and I (whom I was often in these situations with), would think about what the discipliner was thinking, then we would think about how to shape the information, however truthful, to fit their worldview. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this was probably my first foray into the world of design, a talent that, given my various successes, I honed quite well.

Thinking about it this way, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that children design all the time. They spill their brother’s drink and, when confronted, will make up a story about how it happened. Whether or not it works is a different matter, but nonetheless, it’s still a design. The lack of sophistication in thought process is actually their undoing here, not their desire for a well-designed story. They simply don’t yet have the mental processes in place to make a story that fits their audience.

And so we come to the crux: What is (effective) design? (Not again!)

Quite simply it’s: You + Your Desired Outcome ≥ Your audience’s wants/needs.

Now, there are many ways to achieve this. The ways, shall we say, are mediums and actions being greater than or equal to your audience’s reaction. The medium is whatever form you choose: Web, Print, TV, Movie, Product, Software, Furniture, Writing, Architecture, and so on. The action is making in your chosen medium to be greater than or equal to your audience’s reaction.

With that, effective design is ≥ your audience’s reaction and desired action. Less effective or ineffective design is ≤ your audience’s reaction and desired action.

How so? Design is merely moving your audience to your chosen destination through a medium. Yes, this is dangerous to say because you can take this all the way to those in obstructive and destructive power, like Hitler. Hitler was a great designer for a certain audience. Not so much for another audience (or two or three). Still, he anticipated his audience’s wants/needs and formed an entire ethos around that to unspeakably destructive ends.

But there are also good designs, those that foster life and love, independence and life-easing dependence. But it’s always a question of “Who is my audience?” Your audience needn’t even be human. Heck, it needn’t even be animated objects. Your audience could be trees and you design a way for trees to flourish.

Where design differs from strictly art is that oftentimes, the artist’s audience is him/herself. It is the audience’s responsibility, then, to come to the artist, not the other way around: The artist to the audience. Now, the artist can create baselines, guidelines, for the world of design, like the Bauhaus art, craft, and design movement. They broke things down to their simplest element, lending designers a baseline idea ever since. In this way, you could say they were artists for designers.

And who is a designer? Anyone who projects an audience’s needs and takes actions for a desired audience reaction and action. To me, anyway, it’s really that simple.

It’s just that some of us are better at anticipation than others. And some of us have better mastery over the making aspect in certain mediums. And judging effective or ineffective design is an extremely qualitative process and subject, but like the Supreme Court once famously said about pornography: I know it when I see it.

No Tipping, Please. Our Service Is Free.

For the past two-and-a-half months, I’ve been working part-time at a popular full-service restaurant for myriad reasons—social, financial, to gain new experiences, and sometimes, just to keep busy. As a 32-year old who had his first job at thirteen (caddying) and worked many traditional service jobs throughout high school and college, I hadn’t worked in a restaurant since I was nineteen. Needless to say, after 7 years (and counting) in corporate America, it’s a bit of culture shock to work primarily with 20 – 25 year olds scraping by while they figure out what they want to do with their lives, others working two or three jobs, some with kids, and some just college kids trying to work their way through school. However, the real culture shock has been the nature of how the restaurant model works and what it says about America’s values.

In many ways, working at a restaurant is a true meritocracy: Serve well, get better tips, prove your long-term worth and in return, you get the more lucrative shifts, which gets you more money and if you like, more responsibility. This is a nice cycle of positive reinforcement in a job you can leave at the door at the end of each day.

The other edge of this sword, though, is this: Serve poorly, make less money, get less responsibility, and find yourself looking for work elsewhere. Quickly.

In this time of a down economy, there’s a seemingly-unending supply of workers. Here in Indiana, the unemployment rate is about 10%. (Captain Obvious: That’s a lot of people who need work and are ready to fill the payroll sheets). The benefit to customers who can afford to dine out is that they can expect exemplary service. Why? It’s not just because restaurants are trying to make the customer happy at all costs to keep revenue up, it’s because workers are fighting to keep their jobs at ever-increasing rates. And if not, there are more waiting at the door. This keeps the quality of service high, because the best workers stay… while the lesser workers go.

This is the part that can rub workers the wrong way. Basically, the ball is in the restaurant’s court. In a strong economy, a restaurant may be loathe to get rid of average workers because there just isn’t a strong pool of candidates. But in a weak economy, the restaurant can be more footloose and fancy-free with their workers. Granted, the restaurant can’t be completely inhuman, but it can be choosy, make very stringent rules, and with high employee turnover rates at restaurants, the ability for workers to organize into a cohesive force to fight this is practically nil.

I’m not saying the solution to this is the unionization of restaurant workers, not with restaurants working on a razor-thin margins that sees long-term failure as the rule, not the exception. What I’m getting at is that the entire system for restaurant service in America is generally whacked.

At base, restaurants compete on two things: 1) Price, and 2) Service. To accomplish lower food prices, restaurants pay a pittance to their front-of-house staff: Servers make $2.13 an hour, while hosts might make $5.00 an hour plus a small tip-share. Lowering the up-front costs to the customer places a keen focus on service. How? It makes servers work hard for their money. So hard for it, honey. This leaves the restaurant to manage overhead, food prices, menu items, marketing, employees, and other issues involved in running a restaurant.

In this way, you could say that the restaurant is the medium and the servers are the message.

But what this arrangement does is place the up-front financial risk firmly in the server’s hands. How? Everything could go right with a customer’s meal, but then the customer doesn’t tip well and everyone has made money besides the server busting their butt all over the restaurant. All of which hardly seems fair.

It isn’t like this in other countries. In those countries, the server’s wage is included in the price of the meal. And maybe that’s why service can be notoriously bad in some of those places. However, this arrangement also protects the worker. I wonder what would happen if an American restaurant chain bucked the low-wage + work-for-tips custom? What if customers had to pay an extra 15%-20% premium on their food and drink, but didn’t need to leave a tip? Would Americans go for that if it was understood up front that the business model at so-and-so restaurant was “No Tipping, Please. Our Service is Free.”

What the current American set-up reveals is two-fold: 1) Americans like to reward hard work, using a system that creates up-front stress to produce back-end results; and 2) We don’t value the service worker nearly enough. We tend to think of service jobs as “starter jobs”, as merely one point in a long line of other jobs the server is (hopefully) working up to. Whether we like it or not, the current system may be set up to reward hard work, but it ultimately sends the message that servers are only worth $2.13 an hour and whatever somebody else has the good graces to give you. Which, frankly, never stops stinging.

Addendum: Many restaurants show their appreciation to servers with free food, compensation cards, rewards, parties, and other “treats”, but it never is lost on the server that an empty section or poor tips means they’re up the creek, no matter what they do. What if the service model was different? What if?