IAIN TAIT
Digital may be everyday but it’s not effortless
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Pro-post-digital folks are often the ones knowing just enough to make everyone else’s lives a misery
This is my final column, so I guess from now on new media age is going to be ‘post me’. I’m fine with that; my work here will be done.
But if there’s one thing that isn’t over it’s digital, which is why I get grumpy when I hear people talking post-digital trash. I understand what they’re trying to say. Hell, some of my best friends are post-digital. They’re suggesting digital is everyday and normal, that it shouldn’t be treated as something special. That ordinary, real people don’t regard digital as something different or extraordinary. And that we should be looking beyond the technology and focusing on human fundamentals.
I have some sympathy for their point of view. It’d be fantastic if technology were an invisible layer of wonderful enablement. But creating digital is far from invisible and effortless, especially for clients and agencies, which still struggle to get their heads around the types of relationships and processes that produce outstanding work.
The post-digerati would, I’m sure, suggest this fine publication should no longer be called new media age. After all the medium is hardly new. But whether you call it new media, digital, interactive or clicky-clicky-magic, the reality is it continues to morph and change the world around it faster and with more impact than almost anything else in history.
To deny there’s an art and a specific skillset required to produce and execute great digital products or advertising is a huge, epic, ostrich-like mistake. To say that any individual or company can turn their hand to it is rubbish. To claim it’s something that can’t be learned or lucked-out by others is equally misguided. But to approach this new world with an ‘old rules still apply’ mentality is naive, shortsighted and foolhardy.
Pro-post-digital folks are often the ones who run around knowing just enough to make everyone else’s lives a misery. Adding just enough technical veneer to their banter to give their equally post-digital clients a sense of uneasy complacency. “Facebook Connect it. API it up. Yeah, it’s all just conversations, innit?” Yes, my friend, in your 20 seconds of easy-to-say, impossible-to-implement blathering you’ve just happily trashed the fundamental principles of the internet and created perhaps the worst, most pointless user-experience in the history of anything.
Of course we need to see beyond the code and emerge on the other side with an accessible human face. But we need to build emotion on top of ‘the digital stuff’ not instead of it. We have to understand the technology, the culture of networked societies, the changed nature of economics, and ignore user experience at our peril.
Let’s not kid ourselves, we’re all still sprinting crazily down a very steep, narrow, rocky path. And if you’re staring glassy-eyed at a double-rainbow on the post-digital horizon, you need to watch out for the big digital boulder or you’ll end up falling on your post-digital arse.
Readers' comments (7)
Nic Howell | Wed, 17 Nov 2010 2:24 pm
Wow Iain - sorry to hear that this is your last column for new media age, but at least you're going out in real style. This is a cogent, timely and thought-provoking riposte to the post-digital fallacy.
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Jamie Gavin | Wed, 17 Nov 2010 3:03 pm
I like what you've done here, very thought provoking...
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Fred Perkins | Wed, 17 Nov 2010 4:58 pm
I can't help but feel there's a good line somewhere about post-digital being like post-coital... but we Scots have no sense of humour.
Good words though, Iain.
Personally, I feel that "digital" has gotten into a bit of a mess by confusion between the technology (changing too fast for any of us to cope with) and the business models (desperately struggling to come to terms with all this stuff, and further confused by over-hyped technology).
For me, too much of the new "digital" world is technology for technology's sake, with so-called "research" (commissioned by the vested interests of the technologists) proclaiming the end of the world as we all knew it - but incapable of providing an answer to the simple "who pays?" conundrum, when so much of the new digital world is "demanded" by people who assume that everything is 'free'.
Let's pause for breath, have a cold shower, and ask ourselves how this Post-Digital Era (if we are really there) plans to sustain all its promises.
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Brett Macfarlane | Thu, 18 Nov 2010 5:06 pm
Post digital implies the war is over. I'm still trying to finish off the creative revolution. Mind you I came in late, it started 40 years before I got into advertising, but I am convinced genuine deep great creative will conclusively prevail over crap one day. It must. Our faith in humans as an intelligent being depends on it.
Digital is just the latest front in the creative revolution. A front coming from all angles. It needs special soldiers, who have been in the line of fire or new ones who are willing to do so. Not analysts sending PowerPoint bullet points from far behind the front lines. Nor generals trained to a different orthodox who cannot evolve their world view.
The nature of the revolution has changed, greatly, the methods, tools, propaganda, insurgent tactics and hearts and minds are not the same as when the creative revolution began. But the enemy is the same - crap.
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Ian Wright | Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:49 pm
Sorry to see you are moving on Iain, I have enjoyed reading your articles over time.
Today is a very good article and very thought provoking.
Generation 'free' is here to stay I am afraid especially as the digital juggernaut continues to plough on down the technology highway.
I agree though that everything is not free and it takes a great deal of time, commitment and actual investment to deliver an engaging experience within the online world.
However I hate to say it but given the austerity measures coming this generation 'free' momentum/psyche is only going to grow further in peoples mindsight.
After all its becoming human nature to the masses now as the global media tells us every single day to be prudent with money. Ironically via mostly free platforms!
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david | Wed, 8 Dec 2010 1:20 pm
the author is so close to 'digital' he's forgetting one important thing...
it is a corporate industry subject to the associated hierarchy of Boards and profits...
As long as companies like Google, Facebook and Apple can dominate using their infinite financial control, innovation will always be hindered by their obsession with money and consumerism...
This argument is almost paradoxical, as it's based on the sales of rubbish people generally don't need, backed by the firms who produce the rubbish and the agencies who peddle it in boring interactive smoke n mirror campaigns with the aim of maximising their profits…
People mostly use the web for talking to loved ones, porn, to save money from crazy High Street prices, pointless jokes and humour and finding out about stuff… But brands still try to produce branded content and interfere with peoples' use of the web everyday, the desperation has got to the stage of one-click 'Like' buttons in the hope of a pointless 'interaction'.
The web was dead as soon as it was commercialised. Long live human connections!
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Willem van der Horst | Wed, 8 Dec 2010 5:36 pm
Before reading your article and Russell's blog post, I hadn't heard a single person say 'post-digital'
I'm not sure if I'm out of touch or lucky I haven't had to deal with it so far. Or maybe I've stayed in Tanzania giving out footballs for a bit too long - where by the way I wouldn't say anyone over there is post-digital in any sense of the term.
The thought of being post-digital are probably the same kind of people I met in Africa who were trying to install computers for schools. In places where they have no running water, nor electricity, no resources for the school, no pens, etc. These people have great intentions, but it all looks a bit misplaced.
Thanks for the article, definitely right on the fact that digital work doesn't just happen and we're far from having a majority of people in businesses and agencies who understand it all. Still lots of work to be done educating everyone - myself included as it's all moving so fast, every time I think I understand something, I also realised there are loads more to learn.
Which is one reasons why I love working in this area.
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