Tag: Facebook

Categories
Innovation Social media

Why Instagram is Art

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[audio:https://kontrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/instagram.mp3|titles=Why Instagram is Art]

I love Instagram.

It gives me a great deal of pleasure.

I’m not kidding.

Ryan and I had a big argument about this. He said he felt like a lot of people were on Instagram – including himself – to satiate the human desire to fit in and not be left out. I said it’s because Instagram is art.

Creating is fundamentally part of the human experience. Construction workers report high levels of satisfaction at their jobs (if the project is on time), because they can step back and look and see what they’ve done at the end of the day. And damn, that’s satisfying.

In contrast, a lonely knowledge worker has little to show for herself. Unless you’re a developer, we don’t create much anymore, and we certainly don’t create much with meaning.

But Instagram lets you make art. It’s different, because unlike Facebook or even Flickr where you can mass upload your life, Instagram forces you to make choices, filter, edit. Not all, but most times it makes ugly pretty and pretty ugly. It creates interest and intent.

You make many of the same choices you would in a darkroom. Should you edit the photo? Do you want to crop it? How will you adjust the coloring, the lighting? Do you want to overexpose it? All the principles of art still stand – proportion, balance, rhythm, pattern – you still need those to make a compelling photograph. But Instagram allows you to do so by elevating ordinary life while providing a mechanism to examine life. It accomplishes what street art tried, but never quite achieved: art for the masses.

Instagram helps to define how you see the world, how you move through the world. You begin to realize you have a certain way of seeing and experiencing day-to-day. You develop and refine that. Your collection is there for a reason, to tell a story, a viewpoint, a life.

Art is translating your experience to the world. Instagram is shared experiences. Instagram is art.

It is visceral and short of being there side-by-side with someone it allows you to experience what they experience. This breeds empathy, joy, understanding.

And for those reasons and more, it’s important to note that Instagram’s billion dollar sale to Facebook is not just an investment in a thirty-million person community, but an investment in art. Forget that we may or may not be in a bubble and Instagram has no revenue stream. Forget that everyone thinks Facebook will ruin it. This is a billion investment in our generation’s creative renaissance, plain and simple.

The pictures don’t lie.

Categories
Start-ups

Solving the Gen Y Woman’s Career Problem

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[audio:https://kontrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/LevoLeagueReview.mp3|titles=Solving the Gen Y Woman’s Career Problem]

Levo League launched last week by founders Caroline Ghosn and Amanda Pouchot. It’s a professional social network for Gen Y women, and is funded to the tune of $1.25 million by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Ning founder Gina Biancihini, and Gilt Groupe’s Susan Lyne among others.

Oh, and it sucks.

Big connections mean big expectations and I’d say with the exception of some fantastic and probably un-deserved PR (Can you say privilege? Co-founder Caroline Ghosn is the daughter of Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn), the launch has fallen spectacularly flat.

The site is confusing and manages to mash up bad and outdated UI simultaneously, while not making it clear that you need to be “accepted” to use the site. And let’s stop right there and point out that applying to be accepted flies in the face of Generation Y’s most basic principles, the team-building generation that gives everyone a trophy. We like to flatten hierarchy, not build it. While I understand the tactic is more about marketing, creating false scarcity around a demographic that puts inclusion first is lame.

After sign up, you are dumped into an environment with limited content – although what content is there is solid – a teeny tiny job board, a deserted community “lounge” (already?), and a directory of companies with no job openings.

Except, wait, the joke is on you. When you are accepted into Levo League, the content and pages on the site? Exactly the same.

Totally bizarre, to say the least. Let’s not forget, similar, if not identical sites have tried and failed. Damsels in Success, also described as a social network for professional women, launched back when I was a wee beginner of a blogger. Founder Harleen Kahloon also had major connections, lots of press, and good content. And yet, the site no longer exists.

Safe to say, the future of women and careers online is not a directory of companies, job listings, and a social network tacked on. It’s almost as if Levo League should have launched in the late nineties along with Careerbuilder and Monster. But these days, those guys are failing. Monster recently laid off 400 people and just last week, put itself up for sale.

(Sidebar and disclosure: Ryan’s company was also a professional social network for Gen Y at one point. And it too failed. I’ve watched the painful progression and pivots over three years to Brazen’s current, successful iteration that allows recruiters and job candidates to connect in a useful and innovative way.)

The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure Levo League’s founders know this too.  The number one thing you can do for career opportunities and advancement (read: dream jobs, meaningful work, more money, better titles) is to network, network, and network. Eighty percent of job openings are filled through networking (you know, actually talking to people), and certainly Ghosn and Pouchot are masters in this regard. These founders are exceptionally smart and likeable, and engaging to watch to boot.

But managing your career and building a start-up are different. At some point the relationships that give you money, press, and maybe even your first few thousand users will do nothing to retain your users, build loyalty and create rabid fans. PR is only an attention-based mechanism. It does nothing for engagement, retention or product strategy. It is one thing for friends to support you to your face, but it is quite another for them to use the product you’ve built and integrate it into their daily or weekly life. Friends aren’t users.

The Levo League site just isn’t set up to support networking and mentorship between ambitious women. There is an interesting opportunity there, however. Why not create a mentorship site that matches mentors like dating sites match mates? Or even simply match like-minded career women? That sort of algorithm would be awesome and totally useful.

I have no doubt Levo League will be successful, eventually. Their smarts, that kind of money, and their high-profile backers mean Ghosn and Pouchot will have the luxury to pivot, iterate and learn from their mistakes. Let’s just hope they fail fast. I’m ready to see what’s next.

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What do you need to succeed in your career? Networking, support, advice? What’s missing on career sites today? 

Categories
Paywalls

You Like Mainstream Media Now, Don’t You?

Osama Bin Laden was killed yesterday and the reactions ranged from revelry to relief to wondering why the New York Times didn’t take down their paywall. C.W. Anderson, an assistant professor of media culture at CUNY tweeted, “NYT has a public obligation to place articles out from behind paywall in cases like this.”

Why on earth would they?

The Times has ten-thousand employees, all of which I’m sure will work over-time this week. In any other industry, when workers do more work, when they do more quality work that is life and earth changing, we pay them overtime. We reward them. We give them a raise.

But journalists? We devalue.

I don’t know where you were getting your news all day, but I was getting mine on NYTimes.com.  And yes, in one day, I read through all twenty articles of my monthly limit.

The Nieman Journalism Lab reported that the New York Times has the ability to take down the paywall for breaking-news, must-read stories. But I imagine that would only be relevant for issues of public safety. “You should pull down your paywall when it will save lives,” argues Brian Boyer, an Editor at the Chicago Tribune. “If you pull it for big news, you’re missing the point, right?”

Right. I imagine that Anderson tweeted The Times should remove their paywall because he values the quality, in-depth and expert reporting that The Times provides and wishes that to be available to as many as possible. But there are already twenty free articles, and so those many aren’t going to be affected by the paywall on a day like today.

NYT readers are like adolescent children, wanting their freedom, ignoring the hand that feeds them at will, but come running back in a crisis. We may like our conversations and opinion on Twitter, Facebook and blogs every other day of the week, but when it comes to what’s important, we still turn to the big dogs. Twitter, Facebook and blogs don’t supplant mainstream media as the best source of news, they amplify it.

Which is why it’s ever more important to support the media as an institution, despite the power and meaning behind citizen journalism. If we don’t, the next time we want consistent, reliable and trustworthy news, we risk finding a site that has shut down. Ultimately we do need expert content.

It is not the New York Times’ public obligation to put their paywall down. It is the public’s obligation to ensure the paywall stays up.