#overcommunication

[haliging-dilag]

Overcommunication

by AZIS

[kosmos-opensourcefashion]

Sometimes I just need to insert some blank space in your social media "life". #ecologyofimages #blank #freeyourself #overcommunication https://www.instagram.com/kosmos.opensourceclothing/p/BvJgBKCnRqp/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=gtc1zy2emcnz

[coriannemerit]

Whether we gain or not by this habit of profuse communication it is not for us to say.

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

[chairmeowww]

Why She Left

March 22nd, 2016

I am at a coffee shop in Houston called Siphon. . .and this is my first attempt to post to Tumblr as a matter of course, instead of in my journal.  I have mixed feelings about this idea. . .On one hand, the handwritten record - it’s so real, immediate, private --- it is truly a historical document, a relic of life as you live it and write it!  -- And yet simultaneously, I often find my diary impossible to read (can’t decipher my own scrawl!), and impossible to share.

But some things aren’t meant to be shared!  

I have to believe this -- some things are meant to happen just to you and be reported to the rest.  But I suppose. . .that’s sharing?  Oh what do I know? I think my point is not every thought has to be shared, but the danger is -- what if the world would be a better place if just one person’s thoughts were shared in full?

Mine?

All my actions heretofore judged by family and friends as mysterious and intolerable would suddenly have a paper trail ON THIS BLOG.  The underlying thought patterns contributing to any troubling course of behavior would be documented here.  

She rose abruptly from their conversation with a strange look on her face. The nice man, in the moment understandably surprised by the abruptness of her departure, would go to her MindBlog archive later and shake his head in dismay.  A beautiful lady; horrible diarrhea.  Of a type surpassing both explanation and hope for rescue.

On that note, folks, let’s put the Mex in Texas!  See ya in the ladies’ room!

Muah,

Chairmeowww

>^^<

[whatdesignis]

Why Branding?

The competition in the consumer market today is such that any enterprise will work only after they find a position in the market. The recognition of a brand has become much greater than the value of the product itself. It is all about how and when and where the product is being advertised. Advertising and marketing are the key concepts in a product life cycle that should start implementing right from the ideation part of the product/service. While designing the advertorial brief, market research is an important part which gives an insight into the requirements of the market. The psychology of the market is something that a brand needs to target. Saying the right things to the right person at the right time gets the bread home or more correctly, gets our bread in their fridge. Advertising and branding, though they are different concepts, go quite hand in hand. One cannot work without the other. If a good brand already has been established, it has to continue their good will through service of course, but also through clever advertising. An important point in advertising is the medium i.e. print media, visual media etc. Choosing the proper media is an art in itself. Before we go much into the advertising and branding step, we need to position the product/service in order for it to score high and emerge a success. Positioning is basically finding the gap in the existing market, where your product will get its true value. For example, if there are 10 brands providing similar features, I need to look out for a market where these features do not exist or are in lesser quantity. This gives the product a freedom to be the king in its kingdom, even if it’s a small kingdom. The following are some inputs from an excerpt of the book ‘Positioning’ by Al Ries and Jack Trout:

In our over communicated society, very little communication actually takes place. Rather, a company must create a "position" in the prospect's mind. A position that takes into consideration not only a company's own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors as well. To be a leader, you have to be one first to get into the mind of the prospect. And then follow the strategies for staying there. What works for a leader doesn't necessarily work for a follower. The leader must find a "creneau" or hole in the mind not occupied by someone else. Repositioning the Competition- If there are no "creneaus" left, you have to create one by repositioning the competition. Tylenol, for example, re-positioned aspirin. The most important marketing decision you can make is what to name the product. The name alone has enormous power in an overcommunicated society. Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society. Each year, we send more and receive less. Cosmetic changes are done for the purpose of securing a worthwhile position in the prospect's mind. The good old advertising days are gone forever and so are the words. Today you find comparatives, not superlatives. To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the reality that really counts is what's already in the prospect's mind. To be creative, to create something that doesn't already exist in the mind, is becoming more and more difficult, if not impossible. The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different. But to manipulate what's already up there in the mind. To retie the connections that already exist. Today's marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise. In our overcommunicated society, to talk about the impact of your advertising is to seriously overstate the potential effectiveness of your message. It's an egocentric view that bears no relationship to the realities of the marketplace. In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. The mind, as a defense against the volume of today's communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered in it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience. Once a mind is made up, it's almost impossible to change it, certainly not with a weak force like advertising. The average person can tolerate being told something which he or she knows nothing about (which is why "news" is an effective advertising approach). But the average person cannot tolerate being told he or she is wrong. Mind-changing is the road to advertising disaster. The best approach to take in our overcommunicated society is the oversimplified message. In communication, as in architecture, less is more. You have to sharpen your message to cut into the mind. You have to jettison the ambiguities, simplify the message, and then simplify it some more if you want to make a long-lasting impression. Truth is irrelevant. What matters are the perceptions that exist in the mind. In communication, more is less. Our extravagant use of communication to solve a host of business and social problems has so jammed our channels that only a tiny fraction of all messages actually get through. And not the most important ones either. Scientists have discovered that a person is capable of receiving only a limited amount of sensation. Beyond a certain point, the brain goes blank and refuses to function normally. Ironically, as the effectiveness of advertising goes down, the use of it goes up. Not just in volume, but in the number of users. In our overcommunicated society, the paradox is that nothing is more important than communication. With communication going for you, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is possible. No matter how talented and ambitious you may be. What's called luck is usually an outgrowth of successful communication. The chaos in the marketplace is a reflection of the fact that advertising just doesn't work the way it used to. But old traditional ways of doing things die hard.

[el-oh-el-oh-el]

Overcommunication

People, especially businesses, seem to really be intent on overcommunicating. I think that, as a society, we have conditioned ourselves to be inattentive. People don't pay attention. They don't read, they don't listen, they don't watch what's going on around them. And businesses now are compensating by trying to force our attention, even when they already have it. I'm a season plan holder for the Washington Nationals. I go to 20 games a season and every March when my plan's schedule comes out, I add all the games to my Google Calendar so I can know what days I have to go into the city after work. I get that not everyone does this, so it makes sense that those people could receive a reminder email before a game they have tickets to so that they know to go to it. But the rest of us would like to opt out and there's apparently no way to do that. And they send an email after every game I go to with a score and recap. Because apparently I wasn't expected to actually pay attention at the game so I might not know what happened? Again, there seems to be no way to opt out. And this overcommunication is an epidemic. OpenTable sends extra reminders after an initial reservation confirmation - yesterday, the restaurant I had a reservation at even called me. They must think so little of their customers they need to remind them three times to s how up. Honda used to send me dead trees reminding me not about an upcoming oil change, which might have made some sense, but to remind me that my car is equipped with a feature that will tell me when it's time to get my oil changed. It's hard to miss! It's right there in the dash, and always flips to the oil life view when you start the car and it's below 15%. I don't need mail every three months telling me the car has this feature. Once again, no way to opt out. AAA was one of the worst. They emailed, called, and sent dead tree mail, just to remind me that I was enrolled in their auto-renewal system. That's right, my bill would be paid automatically and I would continue to be a AAA member. I enrolled in that specifically so I wouldn't get constant reminders about renewing. AT&T was similar. They would send me a text when my bill was paid, which I had set up to do automatically. I knew it was paid every month - I got an email about it, too. The problem in this case is that a text alert feels much more urgent than an email. I don't text a lot and there are only a few people I text at all. So when I get that alert, I want it to be important and meaningful. And guess what? AT&T provided no way to opt out of that, either. They also insisted I shouldn't mind because it was a free text. Because apparently they don't realise people would have any other motivation than money for doing something. I don't get it. I mean, OK, I do get it - people are inattentive. But for the people who aren't, we should have a way of communicating that and letting businesses know they don't need to waste their time and ours telling us things we already know.

[diagas]

Attention people who date: don't follow each other's blogs

Just a little personal rant that's been brewing inside my mind. I'm actually interested about the topic of social media and dating, and might start building an outline to a bigger thesis about it. I got a bit of inspiration about my lecture tonight, where the teacher was talking about life in third world countries, and how less stressful it is... blah blah blah. ANYWAYS. This is just an opportunity to lay out an issue that I find is relevant to my followers on Tumblr. :)

I've observed many people who "follow" each other on Tumblr while they date (including myself a while back) and it always ends in shambles. There are few personality types that are non-private; most people need a way to vent, or have some form of independence to everything. Unless you're literally a picture reblogger, anything you post will be moderated to the letter by the person you date. Why? Because they're invested and interested in you, and want to be a big part of your life. It's only natural to be like that. Problem then? If you're dating, you're already Facebook friends. Why introduce another site to keep up with?

There should be some privacy left in our generation. I'm almost jealous of people who dated pre-cell phones, because they're free of that tether. The constant communication is really taking a toll of relationships, and is evolving the way we react and be with each other. I'm donning a new definitive word overcommunication, which is where people exhibit and experience exorbitant amounts of information about everyday, face-to-face persons.

Depending on how you use the extra medians available, you need to establish some boundaries. Do it for you, and explain that it's not anything negative or you hiding anything.. it's just if you are under constant communication with a person, you will start to bicker. Negativity will spew. Maybe even a bit of obsession? It won't be stated outwardly, but it will be stored internally to be used later. Having all of that information fester is like filling a negative balloon, and it will either be constantly be spewing out (which in that case, you're rehashing their 'e-day' to them, making it redundant) or even worse, it will burst, and a fight will erupt.

I'm being very general. Some people actually just use social media as a picture blog, or use Twitter is a way to track current events; I'm aware of that. A lot of the people I personally know in real life who use Tumblr use it as both a blog and a diary of sorts. If you're dating someone and you're their friend and follower on every blog or social media instance they own, you should take a step back and realize people need their space.

[machinicensemble]

In The Poisoned Soul, Bifo talks of "incommunicability" and its links to the assembly line, the Fordist factories where the noise of the machine makes communication impossible. Alienation, in the era of industrial capitalism, had to do with this halt in communication, where any organising, whether through unions or methods of protest such as absenteeism and striking, took on a mode of communication as its centrality, around which revolved the resistance. To be able to speak meant an active resistance. Now, in this digital era, over-communication has replaced incommunicability, where there are a thousand voices, all vying for attention. "Everywhere, attention is under siege" says Bifo. Like Huxley in Brave New World, Bifo draws attention to the overflow of information, making essential urgent communication meaningless. It is no longer that we are being deprived of information, or our mode and ability to communicate, but rather we are being barraged by too much information, which essentially achieves the same goal. 

A famous scene from Michelangelo Antonioni's 1962 film L'eclisse seems to portray both the incommunicability and over-communication. The Italian stockmarket is the setting and the characters Piero (Alain Delon) and Vittoria (Monica Vitti). The scene is chaotic, featuring frenetic movement and a constant din of voices. With an unflinching, almost documentarian eye, Antonioni surveys the stockmarket where the traders behave as if at a gambling arena. Piero overhears a whispers, amid all the noise and immediately runs to play it. In doing so, invites a dozen more people to play the same. Meanwhile Vittoria comes to visit Piero. And immediately, Antonioni places Vittoria on opposite sides to Piero. A huge column separates Piero and Vittoria into thirds of the frame, implying by mise-en-scene the essential communication that the two budding lovebirds are missing. The thousand voices, not much different from the din of the machine in the factory, functions as a machine in itself, drowning out voices and preventing the only communication that really matters, ie, the interplay between Piero and Vittoria. 

The only time there is a silence is when the traders are mourning the death of a colleague and even then, there is an insistent telephone, ringing in the background, a constant reminder of capital and its beckoning. It is only at this silence, brought on by such an extreme as death, that Piero and Vittoria are able to speak. The silence then, is not one of reverence, but one of impatience as when a bell, marks the end of the minute of silence, there is again an explosion of sound and movement. The bell, an earlier reminder of the beginning and end of the workday (and also the lunch break) marks the beginning and end of reverence. 

In Antonioni's stockmarket, overcommunication takes on a human form, as bodies and as voices. Antonioni subtly displays how overcommunication becomes incommunication through mise-en-scene. The scene, which began with Vittoria at its center, ends with Vittoria lost among the panic. Antonioni holds the shot even after Vittoria exits the stock market unable to speak properly with Piero. The center has changed, no longer is it Vittoria but the stockmarket that takes precedence, capital has displaced the actors. 

While Bifo seems to regard Antonioni's films as a marker of the 60s when a different form of capitalism was at work, I believe that Antonioni anticipates the overcommunication of the postindustrial age with L'eclisse and specifically the stockmarket scene. As Bifo says himself: "It is the third meaning of the term alienation that best describes our present times: an era marked by the submission of the soul, in which animated, creative, linguistic, emotional corporeality is subsumed and incorporated by the production of value" (109). This, I believe, is what is at the heart of Antonioni's film.