Last night was the second U.S. Presidential Debate. One of my favorite new election-based interactive user experiences (in addition to CNN’s approval graphs and CNN’s magic wall) is Twitter’s election.twitter.com. Here’s a sample of what you would have seen during last night’s debate:

TechCrunch reviewed this site last week. Here’s their review in its entirety:

It sounds like a decent idea on paper: take every tweet about the candidates and stream them on a single, constantly updated site. Unfortunately, while it may be fun to look at for a few minutes, election.twitter.com is far too noisy to be worthwhile. There are no cohesive threads of arguments, and every quote that raises an eyebrow gets repeated ad nauseum. Verdict: Vetoed.

I completely disagree with TC’s analysis. It seems focused on extracting actionable, accurate, or even just coherent information. They’re disappointed in the quality of individual posts and the lack of consistent dialogue. It’s just “noise” to them.

Interestingly, the critique is identical to the initial criticism many people have of Twitter, before they actually try it and, hopefully, “get it”. They say it’s “just noise.” They say “who cares about everyone’s mundane, idle thoughts?”

Similarly, the nature and mechanism of election.twitter.com’s social function is, like Twitter itself, ‘ambient‘: It’s about getting an informal, general sense of what’s happening, not about following specific threads and individual thoughts. Just like with ambient music, you’re not supposed to actually listen to it in an attempt to extract something specific (for example a catchy melody, or a telling quote).

The “hot topics” keywords at the top of the page, extracted from the totality of the current twitterstream, are also extremely revealing. If you only look at that part of the page you’re already getting a real feel for the memes currently in circulation. Bite-sized but potent.

Bottom line: the site is not about finding content with immediate, actionable value. It’s about visiting repeatedly, or watching it flow by in your peripheral vision, without paying close attention. The goal is to synchronize with a certain public pulse.

(This is, coincidentally, what the New York Times home page does for me, albeit at a slower pace. I want to see what everyone is seeing and talking about today, and I trust that the Times home page will show that in a single page view, even if I don’t actually click through to any articles. It’s not about diving deep — it’s just about the broad overview of the zeitgeist.)

This new Twitter feature — this “topic-focused channel”, or whatever they call it — is a great new idea that I’d love to see extended to other areas and topics. It’s ideal for live events like debates, election night, live TV, sporting events, etc. Also for conferences, or even for private groups (a much-requested feature Twitter hasn’t yet delivered on). The idea is that you are really paying attention to something else — Twitter is just the back channel, the pulse of the topic. I can’t wait to see future implementations of this simple but powerful view.

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One thing that’s been fun about watching the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates on CNN is that you get to also watch a scrolling EKG-like graph of how viewers are actually responding to what is being shown.

The methodology appears to involve a live audience, selected by CNN, to manipulate some sort of control that indicates how much they agree with what they are seeing and hearing. When the audience agrees, the meters go up; when they disagree, they go down. It can get a little confusing when, for example, one candidate says “My opponent wants to eat babies!” and causes the meters to go up — does that men the audience approves of eating babies, or that they agree with the the candidate’s indignation? Generally, I think, it’s the latter.

I also can’t attest to the scientific validity of the graph — there are far too many variables in play to put much stock in them (for example, How did CNN pick the audience? How big is the audience sample?). Still, it’s fun to try to find patterns in the graphs, in particular to examine places where different audiences responded differently to the same statements — or when audiences didn’t respond at all.

For the Presidential debate, three different graph lines tracked Democratic, Republican, and Independent voters. For the most part, the red and blue party lines reflected which candidate was speaking, but there were many times when they converged indicating broader agreement with what the candidate was saying.

• Whenever McCain spoke in generic patriotic platitudes (America is the greatest country on earth, etc.) the Republican line shot through the roof and the Democratic graph barely notched above a flatline. Either Democrats aren’t patriotic and Republicans are, or Democrats don’t fall for that kind of rhetoric (and Republicans do). I think it’s a little of both — part of the appeal of Democratic and liberal politics is a sense of independence from systems of authority. Tellingly, Independents did not respond to overt appeals to patriotism.
• When McCain spoke of victory in Iraq, and criticized Obama for what he thinks is a plan for precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, the Independents in the audience barely responded at all. But when Obama spoke of leaving Iraq, the Independent numbers shot up. Republicans and Democrats generally followed their candidates on this question, but I think I remember observing that even the Republican line failed to reflect much enthusiasm for McCain’s emphatic case that we needed to pursue victory in Iraq. People want the next President to get America out of Iraq.
• Whenever either candidate attacked the other, particularly for some obscure or feeble inside-baseball political gaffe, the lines would split along party lines… but the Independent line would tumble. Independents do not want to hear political attacks.

The Vice Presidential debate was even more fun, where CNN selected an audience of undecided voters in Ohio. In this case, the graph plotted only two lines: men and women. Presumably, because they are undecided, most of this audience was not partisan D or R. My observations from this round:

• Anytime either candidate mentioned the word “nuclear” (or, in Palin’s case, “nukular”), the line for men shot upwards — literally at the very moment the word was uttered, like some kind of magic button was pressed in their brains. Apparently men love them some nukes. Perhaps the graph is also something of a Geiger counter.
• Whenever Sarah Palin spoke about her track record and accomplishments in Alaska, both of the plot lines were flat. Apparently nobody gives a shit about her accomplishments in Alaska. Nobody gives a shit about Alaska. If this was intended to bolster her executive credentials, the CNN chart shows that it wasn’t working.
• When Palin spoke of representing “regular Joe Six Pack” Americans, the meters did go up. The back-slapping stuff works.
• When Palin spoke about Iran, she spoke forcefully and strongly, and had some scathing critique for Obama’s (frankly baffling to me) “no preconditions” position. But, interestingly, the audience meters didn’t go up for her. People don’t want to hear belligerence towards Iran.
• When the critical question was asked (one of Ifil’s only really good questions, I think) about how the candidates would handle ascending to the Oval Office if the President were to die, Palin’s chart was nearly flatline. This is one of the few moments in the debate where the audience was asked to seriously and realistically contemplate the possibility that Palin could be our President. Despite her likability, nobody wants to even think of a President Palin.
• When Biden spoke about the death of his wife and child, the graph surged. When he choked up, however, they dropped suddenly but rose back up again. It’s as if peoples’ bullshit detectors went off immediately, only to then declare a false alarm, that indeed his pain was real.
• When Biden went on the offensive against Palin, the numbers did not respond. Fortunately for him he rarely attacked Palin in the debate. Pundits on both sides criticized him for being too gentle, but the numbers, both on the graph and in the post-debate polls, speak for themselves. Biden’s no-attack “aikido” strategy was completely correct, and his self-discipline paid off.
• That said, when Biden went off on Dick Cheney, the women’s line on the meter went through the roof.
• When Palin said “Drill, baby, drill”, the women’s line dropped. Oops!
• Palin’s winking and cute you betchas and goshdarnits didn’t work, either. When she said she wasn’t going to answer the moderator’s questions, and when she joked that she was new to this campaign and hadn’t made many promises, both meter lines dropped. People may like her and may even strongly agree with some of her positions, but they don’t like Palin not taking things deadly seriously.
• When the candidates discussed kitchen-table economic issues, a clear gender gap emerged: Men gravitated very strongly to Palin’s championing of Republican platforms, tax cuts in particular; while women responded to Biden’s empathy for the effects of the economy on everyday budgetary challenges. My theory on this is simple: Men are idiots when it comes to practical money issues. Men have no idea how much consumer prices have gone up in the last year or two (grocery costs are up 10% this year); women know. Men think that they’re going to make over $250,000 next year; women know this is a delusion. Believe me, I fit both of these patterns.
• Overall, Biden seemed to have greater appeal to women than Palin did. His appeal to women often exceeded his appeal to men, too.

For both debates, the pundits rated the candidates’ performances roughly equally. And in both cases, the post-debate polls revealed commanding victory margins for the Democratic candidates. And, as should be clear from my analysis above, the CNN studio audiences were similarly less moved by the Republican arguments. Why the discrepancy between the pundits and the audience?

The GOP strategy seems to be to run the same campaign they’ve run for the last six elections. Normally this would work. But I think things are different now. The American people are different now.

The conclusion I get from these debates is the same as Bill Kristol’s: Americans simply aren’t buying what McCain is selling. It’s a different electoral zeitgeist than it was in 2000 (when America was complacent) or 2004 (when America was scared but cocky). Obama and Biden did not have to be circumspect about their positions (as, say, John Kerry felt obliged to be) because their positions are what the American people want right now. They don’t want America to be belligerent around the world. They’re okay with taxing the rich. They want something to be done about healthcare.

The pundits will continue to equivocate about the candidates’ performances in the debates, and will give McCain’s platform credence from a rhetorical perspective. But the American people are already giving plenty of indicators that they’re just not buying it.

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Barack Obama’s speech was tremendous. He was strong, forceful, and honest while fighting tooth and nail for most of the fundamentally liberal ideals that I share — arguing them openly instead of filtering or even hiding them as most liberal Democratic candidates have in the past. And in the several places where he strayed from liberal orthodoxy, there were three or four times where I actually found myself changing my mind a little bit.

The most interesting example was his statement about the right to bear arms. He said:

The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.

My reaction was, hey, you know, I think I now realize that I don’t give a fuck if people in the sticks shoot the hell out of each other — as long as I can be damn sure that handguns are 1000% illegal here in New York City, I’ll feel safe enough.

Obama let me imagine a future where the Second Amendment isn’t a national issue at all except to the extent that localities are permitted the right to choose their own paths.

The idea that an adult in Montana should be forbidden from carrying a gun in their pocket just so I can feel safe walking home in Red Hook, Brooklyn now seems like more than just idealism or even ideology — it now feels like a kind of petty pedantry.

This is, of course, something enshrined in the United States Constitution, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t find a middle ground where Brooklyn and Montana can still have different rules. The Second Amendment’s words are, in fact, ambiguous enough (notoriously so) for both approaches to be able to survive simultaneously in the same nation’s legal landscape.

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”… Flexibility is strength. Is it my deep concern for the safety of Montanans living in a gun-saturated state that made me so uncompromising about the 2nd Amendment? Or was it really just my own desire that I and my loved ones can feel safe in a crowded city with a history of staggering crime? I have no doubt it’s the latter.

(I know this issue is more complex than I make it seem — the lax legality of guns in one state may of course negatively affect crime in a neighboring state where they are contraband… and of course if I had a relative in Montana I would be less flippant about their safety.)

Fight for the Future

Obama also brought the campaign fight back up to a respectable level (if only for the next 24 hours until the Republican campaign starts slinging the mud again). He was harsh in his attacks on McCain, but he explicitly asked us to judge John McCain not based on the consistency or inconsistency of his ideas, nor on whether his policies are driven by sincere conviction or crass political expediency, but rather to debate him and judge him based on on what his policies actually are right now. To do any less would be undignified and cowardly.

(What’s more this argument undermines the misguided faith many independent voters seem to have that McCain is secretly less conservative than he says he is. The reality is that there is no secret maverick freethinking post-partisan John McCain hiding under his sleazy Bush-style right-wing campaign — the election is for the kooky throwback ultra-right-winger he says he is right now and that he says he will be as president.)

Obama threw down the gauntlet and made this campaign about what happens next, what happens tomorrow. The future.

After the first day’s speakers, Democratic talking heads Paul Begala and James Carville thought this convention desperately lacked a single, simple message. They compared it to the 2004 GOP convention where the formulation “Bush is Strong, Kerry is Weak” was the resounding theme. But in my mind, all throughout the convention a theme was emerging: “Obama is the Future, McCain is the past”.

So in the spirit of that future, I include above this iPhone screenshot in which an Obamabot summons me to help the campaign via a pre-speech SMS text message, and wherein I respond immediately after the real Obama’s closing words. And wouldn’t you know, the SMS conversation resembles a traditional call-and-response sermon, from the lectern to a rapt hall, where the speaker’s call to action is echoed by the audience uttering a single simple cheer in response: Yes We Can! VOL [NAME] [TOWN]!

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Newstand by Berenice Abbott, 1935

In print design, the expression “above the fold” dates from an era where broadsheet newspapers were folded in half and piled up in stacks in front of newsstands, showing only the upper-half of the front page to potential customers. If an article or a picture did not appear “above the fold” on the paper, it might as well have been invisible to potential customers. Putting a sexy photo or a gripping headline “above the fold” was a way to drive up sales.

From the very earliest days of web design, that old term “above the fold” was appropriated to allow designers to discuss which page elements would be visible to users without their having to scroll the page. You see, way back in the 1990s it was generally accepted as fact that many everyday web users rarely used their browser’s scrollbar — it was even thought that some users didn’t even know how to scroll at all!

These days it seems hard to imagine millions of helpless computer novices wondering why so many articles on the web seem to end abruptly halfway through, especially now that everyone and their grandmother uses the web (well, except, apparently, John McCain). But things were different a decade ago. Many users had only owned computers for a few years. Few people had ever bought anything online or posted a comment to a message board.

Since then, however, it has become clear that people do, in fact, scroll their web windows quite a bit. Usability tests of all kinds have shown this. Our old fears of content below the fold being lost forever are no longer valid.

This does not mean, however, that “above the fold” is obsolete. It has just become a little more nuanced.

For one thing, despite the fact that users can and do scroll web pages, the first impression a web page gives a user is still critical. Before the user can actually get around to scrolling a page, they are already getting a instantaneous impression of what they see. This instant is dominated by the above-the-fold design elements. If you want something to grab your user’s attention, even on a subconscious level, it obviously helps to put it above the fold.

Also, when you are talking about those specific page design elements that appear on every page in a site — navigation, cross-promotions, related items links, etc — these items will appear repeatedly to the user every time they go to a new page. Again, being above the fold makes those elements more prominent in the user’s mind.

That being said, I still don’t see the fold as the critical factor in designing for web page prioritization. The underlying objectives of these two examples (to expose users to important content and features) is entirely achievable through other, traditional graphic design techniques other than simply placing things “above the fold”. Size, color, positioning, typography — there are ways of calling something out besides putting it at the top.

In fact, we should start thinking of “the fold” as something other than a hard line with an “above” and “below” portion, and we should stop thinking of the vertical positioning on a page as equivalent to priority. Scrolling up and down through a web page is a fundamental aspect of the web user experience, and there is much more to it than simply seeing what’s on top and then gradually seeing everything else.

When scrolling the New York Times web site, for example, the above-the-fold content (here shown as Zone 1) certainly contains many of the page’s most critical elements. But as you scroll through the page, the landscape changes. It’s not just a stack of elements of gradually-decreasing importance. Instead, the scrolling experience is punctuated by elements of clear high-importance: the video in Zone 2, the belt of featured stories in Zone 3. Even Zone 4, the page’s “links ghetto” has a distinct identity of its own.

Scrolling down the page, then, is an opportunity to view the page as an unfolding temporal event, not as a static snapshot.

I’ll often find myself in design meetings where someone says they want Element X to appear “above the fold”. Some designers may wince at the expression, but in reality the client is saying something fairly straightforward: They want Element X to be prominently displayed to the user. If the holistic page design can make an element stand out on the page while the user is scrolling the page, even if it is below the fold the design can succeed in that goal.

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UX Social is Olga Howard’s new initiative to investigate connections between user experience design and public policy. Recently Olga has been interviewing information architects about their views about IA in the public sector. She interviewed quite a few of us at last month’s IA Summit in sunny Miami.

Her interview with me is now posted for your enjoyment. While I’ve done no real professional work in the public sector (unless you count the Smithsonian), I did have some ideas, namely: The government is something we interact with inwardly and outwardly. We expect to receive some kinds of information from the government (I discuss New York’s awesome 311 service) and we we give other kinds of information to the government (such as census data).

On a personal note, listening to myself speak — much less viewing my own smirking face — isn’t always easy for me to bear. My “ums-per-minute” drops significantly after the first few minutes, thankfully. I hope you enjoy it!

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The One Laptop Per Child, officially known as XO, is now appearing in people’s mailboxes. The unboxing photos are up on flickr. The OLPC buzz is hot!

But I’m a little sour about it. It feels like I have read nothing but breathless praise for the design and implementation of the devices, both the hardware and the software. Mixed with the kudos there have been some critiques of the methodology and pedagogy behind the whole project, questioning the idea of giving laptops to third-world kids in the first place and criticizing the designers for arrogantly avoiding user research and for not testing the device with real third-world kids. But even the harshest critics of the project seem to have nothing but praise for the design and even for the usability of the devices.

So why am I not excited? Well, to put it bluntly, I find the positive reviews of the UI design extremely hard to believe. From what I’ve seen, the UI bears all the hallmarks of a user interface disaster, a case study in designer-driven design. I don’t understand why the whole UX world isn’t awash in skepticism over an OS that looks all the world like a Microsoft BOB for the Wallpaper* set.

At some level I suspect there is a certain degree of reluctance on the part of user experience critics to stand up and say something bad about a project whose objectives seem so noble and generous. Maybe it’s a “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” thing.

So I have a challenge for UX pundits and professionals who are also proud new owners of the XO: Say something nice about the Sugar UI. Or say something critical. But talk about the user interface for real, in detail, and don’t hold back.

Don’t just talk about how awesome the project itself is, about the great minds behind it, or about the clever hardware and the cool mesh network functionality. Talk about the usability of the software. Think of how the design might be different, how it might work better.

I’ve not actually used an OLPC yet (I hope to very soon). I have seen a lot of screenshots and videos, however, and have used the emulator a little bit. But even the screenshots give me a deep, gut feeling that something is very wrong with this user experience. To wit:

• The game-like and oft-abused spatial metaphor, suggesting that the relative positions on the screen are where other people actually are in the real world.
• The circular menu — a darling of academia, unproven in any real-world context. As with the spacial metaphor, I think this idea has promise, but seeing it on the XO tells me that the designers simply want to prove a point.
• The idealistic and haphazard usage of language-agnostic iconography, which falls apart at every turn whenever words become unavoidable, defeating the whole point of using icons.
• The frequent lapses into a menagerie of half-baked and crappy open source user interfaces.
• The exposure of hard-core programming tools to extreme novice users (especially the choice of the ubergeek language Python!).

And, oh, those icons!

I can’t get over the creepy similarity between the Sugar UI’s icon for a person and the internationally-familiar “skull and crossbones” symbol, in particular its incarnation as the icon for minefield warning signage. Wealthy first-worlders might not see it this way, but if you live somewhere where minefields actually exist, and where children have been injured and killed by them, this might not be such an extreme connection. Not to push this too far, but the military term for a minefield/landmine is “UXO” (unexploded ordinance).

I hate to come across as bitter or petty here — I am actually quite sympathetic to the idea that technology can play a big part in the education of kids living in poverty around the world. I actually hope to be able to read some convincing arguments that the Sugar UI is great. In particular I would love to hear that it can and does work well for third-world kids.

The key word here is “convincing”. So far, much of the design commentary has been praise based on the pedigree of the team behind it — MIT Media Lab, Pentagram, Fuse Project etc. I want to get beyond that and talk about the UI itself and how people use it. Of course, this may take a while to emerge as the devices make their ways into the hands of children around the world. This is obviously a developing story.

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Photo from A Typical Joe of some Georgia roadside signage. Why don’t I ever see anything like this in New York City?

The opening sentence in today’s Times Magazine cover story (about the state of political confusion in America’s Christian Right) depicts a phenomenon I’ve long wondered about:

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war.

Indeed, whenever I travel in Bible Belt country or in so-called “red states”, I am often struck by the absolute depravity and crass exploitation that I see all around me — in places where, as conventional wisdom would have it, the people are supposed to be the most morally upstanding Americans, especially when compared to people like me, an amoral atheist New Yorker.

New York City has its seedy side, of course, but what you see in the red states is way different. If you drive along the main highways of West Virginia, rural Pennsylvania, Texas, Indiana — almost anywhere, it seems — you are bound to pass long stretches of seedy strip clubs, quasi-legal gambling venues, drug and alcohol addiction centers, DUI lawyers, and corrupt check cashing places for miles and miles. You’ll even see billboards for abortion clinics.

But among these you will also find a seemingly equal number of churches and religious groups whose primary mission is to save local people from the very businesses that operate next door. Driving down the highway it’s a moral checkerboard: church, strip club, church, slot machines, church, payday loans, etc. These two opposing forces are literally positioned right next to each other, like opposing armies in WWI, entrenched a hundred feet apart. You get a distinct feeling that there is a war going on from door to door in thousands of American communities.

Maybe I just don’t notice it, but I can’t think of any part of New York City, or anywhere in New England, where you can find this kind of Sodom & Gomorrah right out in the open where families have to see it every single day. Which is why I’m often more than a little startled when I see gigantic billboards of ecstatic naked porn stars in exactly those parts of the country which are, by conventional wisdom, supposed to be the most righteous and moral places on Earth.

Can it really be that I have a puritanical streak in me? I personally don’t find the sex businesses offensive, exactly– at best they’re sad and stupid, and that’s enough for me to not really want to look at them — but IMHO the casinos and rip-off lenders are downright evil and thoroughly destructive to society.

All told, you can hardly blame red staters for thinking that America is in a culture war when their highways are already raging moral battlefields. But the war is not what the media or the leaders of the religious right would have you think it is. It’s not Blue States vs. Red States. I think the Times has it right: The front line is within the red states, where husbands are fighting wives, parents are fighting children, and neighbors are fighting neighbors.

Red staters, in turn, cannot blame New York and LA for their addictions to gambling, pornography, crystal meth, or easy credit. They should look to their own governments, Democrat and Republican, and into their own souls.

One might be tempted to attribute this phenomenon to simple moral hypocrisy, concluding that that the most religious people are, in fact, the most depraved (as seen in recent GOP scandals). But that’s just too simple. I think that people are driven to embrace religion, and then to back religious political movements, because of the moral corruption they feel directly threatens them and their families. But that meanwhile the broader culture, unanchored, confusedly drifts from one extreme to the other, from righteousness to sin, in the same town, the same family, and even in individual people.

The problem, I suspect, is that most of the leadership of the religious right is obsessed with political objectives that do not even attempt to address the real problems that people face and fear — poverty, addiction, teen pregnancy, ignorance — and instead they attack problems that have nothing to do with real-world core moral and social challenges. They want to lower taxes for the wealthy, make gay marriage illegal, prevent discussions of sex and contraception in school, roll back or oppose civil rights for immigrants, women, religious minorities. These issues are powerful for getting political backing and electoral popularity, but they do not help in the real battlefield where people’s lives are ruined by ignorance and addiction.

Until the religious right realizes that New York City is not Mordor projecting a beam of evil at them and tearing their families apart, and that the real problem is right in their own backyard, they, and we, will never be at peace.

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Al Gore and Iron Eyes Cody. Go check out the original TV ads: Canoe and Horseback

Whenever I am about to do something wasteful, like throwing a plastic bottle in the trash or turning the air conditioner on when it’s 74 degrees, my wife says these words to me: “Think of Al Gore.”

The phrase, like the Christian “WWJD?” (”What would Jesus do?”), makes you look at your own actions through the eyes of someone who is working tirelessly to make the world better. The perspective forces you to make a choice. Now I ask this question to myself, too. Al Gore has become a living reminder to us all that we should constantly think about the big picture, about how our actions and decisions contribute to climate change one way or the other.

In fact, in my own mind I take my wife’s advice a little further, making it into a more vivid and visual connection. You see, despite his 2007 triumphs (Oscar and Nobel), Al Gore is still, to me, a tragic figure, not just because of his 2000 election loss, but because of the sheer magnitude of the challenge he faces in fighting environmental catastrophe. Whenever I “think of Al Gore”, it’s hard for me not to imagine him shedding a tear for my careless or lazy behavior. It invariably makes me think of the classic 1970’s TV public service announcement featuring a Native American canoeing and riding his horse through a modern and thoroughly polluted America, having trash thrown at him from a speeding car, and ending with him shedding a single gut-wrenching tear at the sheer monstrosity and callousness of the American people.

Watching those ads in the 1970s, and seeing Al Gore today, I think about how being environmentally responsible isn’t difficult so much as it merely not being a lazy brutal bastard. You don’t have to spend every day on a soapbox spreading the word and rallying your neighbors to political action — Al Gore, and hundreds of thousands of others like him, are doing that for us already. Back in the 1970’s, it was barely even uncool to throw garbage out of your car window, much less illegal. But because of the pressure against such behavior, both social and legislative, tolerance for such barbarism is plummeting.

Doing the right thing is quite often simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing. Or to put it more simply, it usually simply means “Don’t be a dick.”

(I also suspect that many people have a visceral negative reaction to Al Gore specifically because he makes them feel like dicks for their irresponsible behavior.)

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The New York Times is ending their TimesSelect “service” as of tomorrow, September 19th. Despite my deep resentment of the whole TimesSelect idea in the first place, I applaud the Times’ decision to end it and to finally align themselves with the way the web’s culture of thought actually works.

During the 2004 election cycle, Times columnists like Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and the rest of the Op-Ed talking heads would regularly be part of my daily readings, and they were an important part of the national political dialogue. Countless blogs would link to them, quote them, and respond to their influential voices. But then when the Times instituted the TimesSelect paywall, all of these thought-provoking voices were silenced, almost overnight. They became invisible to me and literally millions of other regular and loyal readers.

Sure many of the Times’ paper subscribers (who get TimesSelect memberships as part of their subscription price) continued to read these columnists. But the rest of us, those who read the Times online only, pretty much lost contact with them completely. Bloggers ceased linking to them, and eventually they ceased even talking about them. They lost relevance, influence, and credibility. And, as a result, the Times did, too.

As I’ve said before, I have no idea if TimesSelect was a good business decision in 2005 or not. My gut tells me that, ultimately, it was not. It probably didn’t drive many additional subscriptions (people who want a paper delivered to their homes will subscribe anyway, regardless of online add-ons), and it’s hard to imagine that there are more than a few thousand people in the world who are willing to pay the annual fee for just web access to the TimesSelect content.

I’d guess that the total number of people who actually paid the annual fee was tiny in comparison to the number of people who simply stopped reading the Times as much as they used to. The lost revenue from advertising impressions and page views may have been comparable to the revenue gained from the small number of subscriptions and online memberships they gained.

But more importantly, the Times lost some of their their momentum in being an influential force in the blogosphere, and thus in the emerging zeitgeist of the political and cultural dialogues that occur increasingly online. They stopped investing in their own reputation and positioning in today’s networked conversations. And unfortunately, damage like this is hard to repair — it’s like spending two years without contributing to your 401k plan, missing out on two years of accrued credit and growth.

They’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but I for one will glady jump right back in. Welcome back to the interweb, Op-Ed columnists!

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In the future of Idiocracy, Carl’s Jr.’s slogan becomes “Fuck You, I’m Eating”… which isn’t really a stretch from the attitude expressed in their current ad campaign.

David Armano’s Logic+Emotion blog today discusses a tacky new ad from Hardees & Carl’s Junior, in which a pair of smarmy white high school kids rap about their stripper/teacher’s “flat buns”, intended to introduce the world to their new “Flat Bun Burger” product. The ad really is just too stupid to describe, and I won’t even bother put the video of the ad here, since David has already (and reluctantly, by his own admission) put the ad up on his own site for you to see.

The commercial seems like a scene right out of the excellent and wildly-underrated movie Idiocracy (directed by Mike Judge, of Office Space and Beavis and Butthead fame). In the not-so-distant future in which Idiocracy is set, Carl’s Jr. is one of the dozen or so corporations who essentially control a world populated entirely by people with below-50 IQs and whose culture has devolved into shameless gluttony, juvenile sexuality, and crass violence. A professional wrestler is President, law degrees are sold at Costco, slot machines are in hospitals, and lounge chairs have food-dispensing hoses and toilets built into them.

This ad only helps to cement the movie’s profound prescience about the reality of our rapidly-dumbing culture and the overall downward trajectory we often seem to be heading towards, often hand-in-hand with corporate consumer marketing. In fact, every day I see a dozen commercials or products that seem right out of the future world of Idiocracy — but I see them right here in 2007 America. The movie is a satire, of course, but as with all the best satire it frequently and repeatedly hits shockingly close to home. (Happily, you can go ahead and view lots of hilarious scenes from Idiocracy on YouTube right now.)

On Human Dignity

I work on interactive marketing for some major consumer brands, but I am perpetually grateful that I never have to work on ads like this. Behavior’s clients are almost exclusively blue-chip brands with deep respect for their customers, users, and audiences. But many designers are sometimes presented with the option of either doing something classy or doing something crass and degrading. We have a choice between treating the customer with respect and treating them with contempt. The makers of this ad are either morons (which I doubt) or people who think of their customers as moronic assholes ripe for exploitation.

In fact, in the comments on David’s blog there is much speculation about the creative meetings in which this ad was hatched. I can only say that if I were working at a company producing ads like this, I would fight hard to do something classier, or I would quit and go work for someone a little less cynical about respecting human dignity. I don’t want to be one of the architects of the Idiocracy future.

As designers of experiences and shapers of brands, we do have a choice in this matter, even when working for clients who may have an inclination to “go negative” and tap into this poisoned well. Even if you suspect that an ad like this would actually work, that it would actually succeed in bringing millions of people into Hardees/Carls Jr. to buy these flat bun burgers, you have a responsibility to the inherent dignity of the human race to NOT produce ads like this.

Note: It’s not the sexuality of the ad I object to. I still think Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” (the obvious inspiration for this spot) is cool. The music’s kinda catchy, too. There’s just something about the whole thing, maybe it’s the over-the-top glorification of juvenileness and stupidity, that makes me sad for everyone involved with this ad and the millions of other cultural products like it that crowd our media landscape more and more.

Do you work on marketing that relies on these themes of disrespect, selfishness, immaturity, and stupidity? If so, how do you justify it? Do you have a choice in the matter, or do you feel that you have a higher obligation to give your clients or your customers what they seem to crave?

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