Week Notes w/c 18th November
i.
This week, Raymond Loewy’s concept of Most Advanced Yet Acceptable (MAYA) has been playing on my mind. MAYA sits at the heart of Derek Thompson’s book Hit Makers. It suggests that new ideas become successful because they strike just the right balance of novelty and familiarity. Ideas which fail to take hold fail to strike the correct balance. Too much familiarity and a new concept will not capture attention. Too much novelty will cause alienation or be off putting.
A second question of interest is the way in which this principle applies to ‘existing ideas’ (objects, media, brands, products) that are in need of modernisation or renovation. Does the same principle apply or does the ‘ideal balance’ of novelty and familiarity change in this instance? Does familiarity become more important, for instance? And from whos perspective should you asses this balance - from the perspective of the existing user or client base or the new, desired target user?
ii.
It’s nice to see Bluesky growing in popularity. Elon’s role in the re-election of Trump seems to have been the catalyst for a new swathe of users joining the platform. Along with Post and Mastodon, I joined Bluesky when Musk took ownership of Twitter. The benefit of that early adoption is that I managed to snag a good username, free of numbers or special characters. I’m not convinced I have the time or energy to lean into it properly - though it’s been good to start seeing familiar faces from Twitter start to post more frequently and access to news and perhaps more importantly - links to content off platform - seems to be, at least for the time being, a thing again.
This is important. Bluesky - which I believe is currently funded by VC money - will, at some point have to try and iron out the wrinkle of it’s economic model. Mastodon employs a de-centralised, crowd-funded model. It’s nice, but a bit weird and I can’t get my head round the server system which seems to segregate users and makes finding people quite hard.
Readwise adoption has been brilliant for me and my reading - the use of RSS feeds enables me to stay up to date with bloggers, journalists and writers that I like following. It became a necessity when Twitter stopped making content off-site so visible and my experiences with Linkedin suggest it is doing the same too. From a user perspective - it might be best for Bluesky to charge a subscription fee. I think most people - at least those currently revelling in just how nice and pre-late-stage Twitter it all seems would probably seriously consider this in a way which might have been unthinkable not so long-ago. This would free it of the need to game-attention and engagement in the way that typically ruins most social networking platforms as they seek to scale and monetise.
Reading
Have really started to get into Ali Smith’s Gliff - hard to describe. Wouldn’t feel out of place as one of Charlie Brooker’s more serious installments of Black Mirror
Reading Orlando Reade’s What in me is Dark alongside it. Essentially a history of Paradise Lost told through the lens of it’s most famous readers and chronicling how Milton’s epic poem affected them
Started to plough through Gonzalo’s annual trends folder . The annual ‘trend deck’ hunt will no doubt be made infinitely more easy with the adoption and application of LLMs and custom projects or GPTs.
Watching
Started Say Nothing on Disney+
Allowing Sky’s The Day of the Jackal on the basis that it’s incredibly unchallenging and the equivalent of some kind of visual valium.
Slow slow slow on the TV front, which is no bad thing.
Doing
Storm Bert has battered us this weekend so have been largely sedentary outside of work. Need to find time pre Christmas to get to the Francis Bacon exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery. Didn’t make it up to the Mr Doodle mural in Camden with P as planned this weekend. Golf was windy, but avoided the rain.
Run into Christmas break feels like it is approaching at speed. The need to finish several key projects at work is growing ever more pressing - the on-going dialogue with ‘future Tom’ is becoming more and more heated, too. He typically tends to lose out in these sort of situations.
Will have been in the new job six months come the start of the new year. Time flies, etc. Have learnt alot, produced alot and it’s been a welcome change from what came before.
The newsletter I write with Matt turns one on the 12th December. I think we’re pretty pleased with the body of work that it represents - and we have started to collate a database of the brands, advertisers and campaigns that have been featured.
