I recently read two articles that, when juxtaposed against each other, helps better explain my personal philosophy of how we use technology now. Ergo, I’d like to share my opinion on the benefits/pitfalls of the oft-discussed digital age in the context of these interesting articles.  

Do check out the articles for yourself, but here are the snippets that made the lightbulb above my head illuminate: 

News becomes a guiltless form of entertainment because we view news as weighty and worthy of attention. We get to have our chocolaty treat while arguing it is actually nutritious. But the ubiquity of the Cloud extends this beyond the six O’clock news. While the leading edge in the old media was entertainment masquerading as news, now we have entertainment masquerading as just about every component of our waking lives. 

So for all the apparent newness we have become a culture of the remix. We think that we are in a technological revolution, but what we really have is more of the same, just faster, ever-present, and in color. We are mistaking high resolution and portability as an advancement of culture. 
[Rick Bookstaber titled ‘Culture Grinds To A Halt In The Digital Age’]

But then there is another way to look at this:

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. 

A series of tests in recent years has shown that after spending time in quiet rural settings, people “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for. 
[Pico Iyer, ‘The Joy of Quiet’]

I agree with Bookstaber that news-as-entertainment-as-content-filler is what we are consuming presently. Of course there is a limit to how much useful information our brains can process and indeed, we are already way past that point in the current iteration of the web. 

However, to say that all we are doing is reproducing decades old culture and content is beyond the scope of the news-as-entertainment observation. At the very least it ignores what culture has been created by these new behaviors created by our technology advances. At the worst, it applies (possibly outdated) decades-old definitions of ‘culture’ and ‘art’. To say that because we haven’t witnessed advances in civilization is a failure of the digital age is wrong. 

Technology has no agency, good or bad. The discussion should actually be on how people are currently using all this new technology, and how they will use it next. The issue is simply that the digital age is very new; and too open for those of us used to restrictions. We have yet to understand what the limitations in the digital age really are. 

I believe that we will look back in 5-10 years at our current behavior as naive and juvenile. I mean come on, an ‘age’ by definition is viewed on a longscale. We have to get through this mess now to start making the really useful stuff.

And here is where Iyer’s article comes into play. It reminds us yet again to find balance between our connected and disconnected life. But what I found relevant to the discussion of the digital age is the author’s summarizing observation. In his experience, Iyer suspects that the next generation of digitally-native children are most likely way ahead of us “in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential” and how they balance consumption with reflection. 

Indeed, the digitally-native kids of today will probably be the ones to create new metaphors for us to parse and consume information with better clarity and attention. And they will be the ones that look back at our current slaving to 24hr connectivity as naive. They will view our feeble attempts to grapple with information overload as juvenile. 

Quite simply, we cannot pass judgement on the Digital Age just yet, its only gotten started. I can’t even imagine the final benefits society will realize from the potential unleashed by the technological revolution. 

When I say that I’m a brand and content strategist, I don’t offer the breadth or depth of expertise that a branding agency might. I feel like as long as I’m upfront with my clients about that, that’s usually appropriate for their needs on a particular project. Often times, clients might come in and say we’re a new company or we’re an existing company trying to relaunch our brand on the web so maybe they already have figured out how their brand works offline, but they need help translating it to a new medium or figuring out the voice and style and what that means for content types that they should be supporting. So I really practice brand strategy in the context of content strategy. I think that also speaks to my background – I have a BFA in design – so I have approached it from a visual and verbal angle, and I think it also more broadly speaks to the breadth of content strategy. We say that content strategy is a pretty broad umbrella in that there are people under it that focus more on metadata-driven content strategy and content models, and maybe other people that focus more on workflow and governance issues as they relate to content management and still other people that focus more on brand-driven content strategy. That’s really where I tend to work.

Early in my career, definitely. I learned a lot by working alongside those folks especially how they view the entire marketplace in which we were introducing a new brand. And I worked just as much with usability and user researchers, and that’s helpful to understand the audience that’s going to be engaging with the brand. Now that we’re focusing more and more on content strategy as it works in communities and social media and user generated content, we have to constantly balance the needs of the business and the needs of their target audience and kind of establish the goals and rhetorical arena that exists between the two.

At a semantic level, over the past year, I was seeing more and more how people within content marketing, SEO, and content strategy realms were kind of co-opting the term curation and using it interchangeably with aggregation and editing in some contexts. That bugged me because I knew that we were getting behind something as a buzz word without really understanding all of its implications. That’s why I wanted to reach out to the more traditional world of curating content – museums and exhibit designers – to find out more about when they use that term – what do they mean, what does it entail, and what are the implications and responsibilities that they have to convey.

That was the conversational milieu that I was responding to and then specifically on the web, when I was seeing content, it appeared like it was aggregated entirely by an automated engine without human oversight. That was really bugging me because I knew from a branding perspective that it was undermining what it was attempting to do. It was undermining the credibility and thought leadership of the brands that were producing it.

It’s definitely useful as an intermediary step in an internal process. I’m a big fan of automated curated solutions to sort of establish the scope and gather the things that a human curator can oversee and say ‘Okay, this obviously came in through the keywords and it came in through a Boolean search but it’s not right for our target audience, or it’s not right because it’s talking about an especially volatile political issue.’ There’s always got to be that person that steps in and until our so-called “curation solutions” get better at sentiment analysis and understanding nuance in the way that people do, it’s going to be very tough to replace what a human can do in that process.

Well, I think the idea with open access to information is half of the equation. We’re giving everyone access to all of this content with the assumption then that people will look through it and make their own decisions. That’s great and it works when you have a very focused, niche target audience and a narrow data set, but once you start saying, everybody jump into this, where this is a huge volume of content, then you have to wonder: are people looking through all of it? I look at the challenge of when the Huffington Post says ‘OK, the government just released all of this content and we need volunteers now to look through it to look at what’s important’ – they’re basically saying we need help curating.

Even if we just look at content online, there are billions of websites, millions of blogs, and more content goes up on YouTube every minute than anybody could ever look through in their entire lives, so that’s why we need ways to filter it ourselves. Of course, YouTube gives you ways to filter it by topic and keyword, and they also give you assistance in filtering by showing you related videos that are more like what you just saw and then they’re putting the tools of curation in part in the hands of the viewer, but also in the hands of the content publisher and the person that uploads that video and decides to tag it.

I think that raises a lot of difficult and uncomfortable issues. Siva Vaidhyanathan spoke recently at edUi. His talk was all around the power of Google and what we recognize as that curatorial power, and he also shared an example of two people conducting the same search with the same keywords but doing them on two different devices or from two different geographic locations and how the content that showed up on the search results was very different because Google was making certain assumptions and the algorithm was basing its results on the results of past searches and what those different users have previously chosen from different search results. It also raises some big challenges around the issues of the echo chamber within our news environment. That more and more we self-polarize and tend to seek out news sources and support viewpoints that we already have – that’s really not that different from going to the search engine, having it either be cookied or that you log in to use it, and it says, ‘Oh, you again and I know the type of content you like and let me show you more of that’ because we’re getting more content within that echo chamber that supports our existing beliefs and our existing knowledge.

If we go back to one of the core working definitions of content strategy, it’s that it’s fighting for the creation, aggregation, governance, and expiration of content in an experience. I think it’s easy to focus on the first two parts of it – on the creation and aggregation of content. What are we getting, where are we getting it from, that type of thing. But I think the ethical issues around curation especially focused on governance and expiration are important – you wouldn’t bring content into an experience if you were an exhibit designer and say “Okay, well we’re going to include this particular painting but we won’t think about how to get it back to its original owner after the exhibit is over” or “We’re not going to think about where it needs to go back in our own collection if we pulled it from our own archives.” Or, if content is no longer relevant to an experience – maybe an exhibit has been designed to speak to a particular current hot button topic in the news – the exhibit designer is not just going to abdicate the responsibility of maintaining it and making sure that it’s still relevant to that topic and current. Online, I think we face similar challenges. If we’re bringing content into an experience, whether by linking to it on someone else’s website or maybe introducing a blog post about it, we can’t then abdicate the responsibility of continuing that conversation. That’s why we say content strategy is a committeemen, not just a campaign.

I think the challenge that we face then is how do we link to something faithfully – link to the original source material or give credit to the original copyright and follow whatever rules for that particular originator are. How do we make sure the links aren’t broken over time? Or, if we’re introducing a concept or linking out to a particular item on a website or writing a brief blog post about it, what are we doing to moderate the comments on that blog post? How are we remaining faithful to the content that we’re curating, and how are we remaining true to the target audience so that we’re then bringing them into the experience and then allowing them to interact with that content?

Some of it is about the logistics of it – like making sure links aren’t broken. But then there are the other issues of what’s our governance plans. Or we’re writing this number of blog posts this week, so what’s our plan to engage in the comments of those blog posts? If we’re making the commitment to start to start engaging as a brand on Twitter, how frequently will be tweeting and listening to what’s going on there and reading tweets from others so we’re staying abreast of the conversation?

I think there are still a lot of challenges around curation especially as that’s becoming more mainstream. Can I bring in some automated curated solution and check it off and say ‘Okay, I’m done with curation.’ We want to work with people to make sure they understand the implications. I think that closely ties to issues of sustainability and our love affairs with tools in the content management world as well. Where in many organizations, content management is still a problem that IT owns and choosing the new CMS is something that comes out of the IT department. They choose them based on features rather than workflow, and they don’t look at content management as a cultural issue that relates to their organization’s publishing culture. I see that as a challenge frequently with my clients, to encourage them to look at content management as everybody’s problem – that often times has cultural roots, not just technical roots. I guess those two are big for me.

I think more and more, we’re seeing the opportunities and challenges that responsive design and design for multiple devices can pose. The opportunities there are tremendous. How can we tailor our content for different devices for different screens and in multiple contexts, and how do we make sure that we have the information to do that in an appropriate and useful way, not in an annoying way. That’s an interesting challenge for us. Fortunately, there are a lot of opportunities and the beginnings of solutions out there through smart, structured content and metadata.

It’s called Content Strategy at Work because one of the things that I think we’re always crying out for in our profession are more case studies, more discussion around the ROI of content strategy, and more war stories about things that go well and things that don’t and what we can learn from them. Over the course of the book, I met with brand managers, content strategists, project managers, IAs, and social media consultants in a wide range of agencies, large and small, digital agencies as well as more traditional marketing and advertising agencies, corporations, non-profits and government agencies to talk about their approaches to content strategy on different initiatives. We got some really good discussion and case studies, and we approached it from perspectives outside content strategy.

That’s another thing. As content strategists, we have our conferences, we meet with each other, we drink with each other, and those are all fabulous things and I’m thrilled to be able to contribute to that. I want to open the door a little bit and invite some other folks into our party and say if you’re a designer, an IA, a UX person, an SEO person, a social media strategist, a salesperson focused on business development – what do you need to know about content strategy? How can you bring it into your own practice, partner with a content strategist, or take a look at what they’re doing and incorporate it into your own work? That’s it in a nutshell.