by Nick Bilton
A concert featuring one of my favorite bands is another example of paying for the experience over the content. I could easily buy an album for $10 or stream the music for free on the Web. But it’s not just about the music—it’s about the entire experience. People will pay—sometimes huge sums of money—to see and hear artists perform in the flesh, to hear the music as it is performed, to have social interaction, maybe to dance, and certainly to be entertained. You’re paying for the entire experience, not just the music.
The same theory applies to books and other words on a page. Let’s take the “reading on a screen” versus “reading on paper” debate out of the equation for a moment and look at the experience surrounding a book. Books offer content and information, but they are also comforting experiences. When you’re reading, maybe you’re lying on the beach with your feet in the sand, engrossed in a story. Or maybe you’ve curled up by the fire with chocolate chip cookies and a hot cup of coffee. Or maybe you’re keeping yourself entertained on a plane. Are you buying just the words on the page? No. You’re buying a cover design, the layout, and the opportunity to be enlightened. You’re even buying the ability to discuss the book with your friends or coworkers or with a stranger at a cocktail party. Imagine if I said I would sell you this book on Post-it notes. Would you still want to read it? Probably not. The experience would be terrible to consume.
Taking this perhaps to the extreme, the words seem to be only a fraction of what you buy. Compare a hardcover book with the highly popular moleskin journals sold at the local bookstore. The book-sized versions of these journals cost $20—about the same as the price of many bestsellers—and the pages are blank. You aren’t going to take this blank notebook home, drop into a comfy chair, and just stare at three hundred sheets of stark white paper. But you feel a connection with it, and that expensive moleskin cover will make you feel that whatever you write or draw in that blank book will be much more special.
This illustrates a key reason why selling content online has been so difficult for so many media companies: The experiences that original books, newspapers, and CDs provide haven’t translated into something as meaningful in the digital realm for that me-in-the-center customer. Entertainment and content purveyors want the public to pay, but they have functionally stripped away most of the original experience that connects each individual to the product. Not surprisingly, you won’t pay anywhere near the same price for it. That would be like going to a local restaurant and hearing the chef tell you that she will charge regular prices, but she needs to use your stove, pots, pans, spices, plates, and silverware. Oh, by the way, you will have to wash your own dishes, too.
The people who sell entertainment and words and information for a living need to understand that they are selling much more than that. They need to adapt to sell new digital experiences and give people incentives to buy the whole package, not just the words or sounds. They need to convince young people who have grown accustomed to getting so much for free that these new experiences are truly worth paying for.
We’re selling to a new audience, and we need to talk to them differently.
I don’t want to sound like an alarmist here, but the big fundamental changes are yet to come. Yes, over the last ten years our culture has started to see some very remarkable transitions take place. But over the next five years we’re going to enter an even more extreme digital metamorphosis.
Although the Web is a little more than twenty years old, we still don’t have any pure digital natives in the workforce—that is, people who have grown up online. (Even nerds like me are older than the online world we know today.) When that group comes of age, it won’t remember going to the store to buy a book or having to rent a movie on a DVD. They won’t understand what it’s like to watch a TV at a certain time instead of replaying or downloading whatever they want at that moment.
Last year, in the research labs at the Times, a colleague was giving a tour of our offices to a friend who is an advertising executive. The executive had his three-year-old daughter with him. As she bounced around the office, touching and investigating everything in sight, my colleague asked if she knew what a newspaper was. The little girl paused as she examined an electronic gadget in her hands, looked up, and said, “I don’t know what a newspaper is, but I know my daddy gets one on his phone.”
To this little tyke, the concept of a thirty-minute TV show or a four-thousand-word magazine article won’t exist. She’ll consume in bytes, snacks, and meals on devices and screens we haven’t even heard of yet.
This dynamic and prodigious group of consumers, currently in middle school and high school (at best), will be your coworkers soon enough. They will bring to the office and the marketplace a set of ideals and preconceptions that are already drastically clashing with the current mentality and mind-set that we’ve been comfortable and familiar with for generations. If you also want them to be consumers of your print or film stories and your storytelling, you’ll have to give them an experience that is clearly worth paying for.
It’s in Your Pocket
To get a handle on what that special kind of experience might look, feel, or sound like for those at the center of the map, don’t look any further than your mobile phone.
As phones have gotten more sophisticated, offering quick and easy access to the Internet, your calendar and contact list, and all the gizmos and games you can dream up, they have become almost an extension of ourselves. People who swore by a paper calendar now can’t function without a phone. People are buying fewer watches and bypassing alarm clocks because the phone keeps time for them and wakes them up. More than a few people watch TV shows, listen to music, and read on their tiny little phones. When you’re in the center of the screen, the phone is also central to your life, work, and connection to friends, family, and coworkers.
And guess what? Although the price of technology generally has been going down, the amount people pay per month for phone service has been going up as they add minutes, texting fees, additional phones for the kids, and now data plans to their monthly bills.
People form incredibly strong bonds with their phones, so much so that even those who once swore that they would never read anything on a screen have slowly started to change some aspect of their reading habits. Even true believers in the print experience may see that a screen can provide just as strong an experience as a textured piece of paper.
Imagine you’re in a coffee shop, a park, or your office and I ask you to hand your jacket to a perfect stranger. I then ask the stranger to inspect the jacket. As you sit watching him touch and explore it, the experience may feel a little strange, and you probably will feel a slight twinge of anxiety and maybe curiosity. The overall experience may make you a little uncomfortable but probably won’t leave you excessively anxious (unless there is something you wouldn’t want someone else to discover).
Now, imagine that I ask you to take out your mobile phone and hand it to that same perfect stranger. As he takes your phone in his hand, pressing buttons and touching the screen, you may feel apprehensive even if the person can’t read your private messages or e-mails. I know I would. In fact, I know I have.
One reason we feel so connected to our phones is that we have them with us all the time. Our mobile phones are constantly just a reach away, connecting us to the fabric of the Internet. But more important, the deep connection with these devices comes from the association and bond they provide to the people we love, care about, and interact with on a daily basis. This device, a small chunk of metal and glass the size of a pack of cards, has become an extension of our relationships. Although the phones have not replaced the relationships, we can feel such an incredible bond with our mobiles that they can become a surrogate for those relationships.
How does that surrogate relationship work? Consider some early psychological research with monkeys. Obviously, although understanding the connection between people and their mobiles was not the goal of that research, it does help describe the interdependence a
nd emotional connection we have to our mobile phones—and why we feel this way.
In the late 1950s, psychologists debated the importance of “love” in society.8 Some leading psychologists believed that love was not imperative for survival even though it could be an important factor in living a good life. Food and water are integral to life, they argued, but love is not vitally important, just an added bonus.
Others, however, believed love was in fact an imperative part of life and survival, on a par with food and water; without love, they believed, people might not survive and society could fail.
At the forefront of this argument was a University of Wisconsin professor, Harry Harlow. Harlow believed people could not survive without love, and if they did, their lives seldom would be happy and their bodies would age more quickly because of this missing link. After years of research with neonatal monkeys, Harlow published a paper in 1958 titled “The Nature of Love,” providing evidence that love, or the connection to surrogate-like experiences, is in fact crucial to our survival.
Harlow followed sixty newborn monkeys. He removed the infants from their mothers a few hours after birth, and his lab assistants fed them through a bottle. The goal of the first experiments was to see how the monkeys grew up when raised without a mother. As Harlow suspected, when completely isolated, the monkeys did not do well. When isolated for long periods, he wrote, the monkeys went into “emotional shock” and in some instances refused to eat and died.
One curious part of the research, something Harlow didn’t expect, was that baby monkeys showed a strong connection to the cloth pads that lined their cages. He wrote: “The infants clung to these pads and engaged in violent temper tantrums when the pads were removed and replaced for sanitary reasons.”
This led his team to push the experiments further, and they began creating fake monkeys made of wire and cloth to see how the babies would interact with those surrogates.9 Then Harlow’s team performed a number of experiments around the need for love with infant monkeys and a mother.
In one of Harlow’s famous tests, the researchers created and placed two fake mothers, one made of wire and the other of cloth, in the cage with the newborns. The wire monkeys held a bottle of milk and helped feed the infants. The cloth monkeys couldn’t hold the bottle, but they were comforting to touch. The researchers found that although the infant monkeys would take the bottles from the wire monkeys, they spent almost eighteen hours a day attached to the cloth mothers.
As Harlow explained, the researchers didn’t expect such a dramatic attachment to the surrogates, but the theory led the way to more research in the area of love and survival.
Those findings also led psychologists to believe that connections to comforting objects can be as important as actual human physical contact. Just as the cloth monkeys became surrogates for the infants, our mobile phones become something like surrogates for our close relationships. As a result, we not only have a dependence on these mobiles but in some cases start developing an actual bond.
Even an older generation that didn’t grow up with these gadgets relies on them. My mobile phone is one of my cornerstone connection points to the world around me. Imagine, then, the depth of connection the next generation will have. That connection begins at an early age, deepens when people are teens, and turns them into “mobile natives.”
The mobile phone is also quickly becoming the first portable all-in-one device. We don’t use it just to talk to friends and family: We use it to check the news; update our status on a social network; take pictures; read books, magazines, and blog posts; and then share the content accordingly. At face value, the mobile phone becomes a hub of information, but its role is much more intense than that of just another screen on which to read and consume information.
Researchers recently explored the phone as a way for parents and teens to feel a connection as teens become more independent and set out on their own paths. The psychologists found that as teenagers start to leave the house without their parents and start to engage with friends and discover their independence, both the teenagers and the guardians feel a sense of relief when they leave the nest with a mobile phone.
The researchers believe the mobile phone becomes a “transitional object,” a psychological term originally applied to toddlers’ teddy bears and blankets.10 Transitional objects create familiarity and comfort and also help develop connections and bonds. The authors also see the mobile phone as a strange object that crosses the line between a commercialized product and a childhood connection. It thereby becomes an important bond between parents and children.
Marshall McLuhan, the renowned media theorist who explained the cultural importance of television, believed the objects we surround ourselves with become an extension of ourselves. McLuhan said the car is an extension of our feet and that our clothes are an extension of our bodies. McLuhan also believed that media are an extension of our ability and need to communicate.
Given the extraordinary developments in what phones can do, it’s possible that over the next five years the mobile phone will become the single most important device in our lives. These phones, our constant companions, connect us to any morsel of information and, most important, connect us to people. In turn the mobile phone becomes an extension of relationships. Although the mobile phone does not replace our bonds with people, it extends and perpetuates them. Paper, radio, television, and even the standard telephone all allowed conversation and communication, but our mobile devices are highly personalized and instantaneous.
In numerous interviews, university-based human-computer interaction specialists and media theorists unanimously agreed that these minicomputers in our pockets are changing the way we interact with people and content.11
BJ Fogg, from Stanford University, explained that the mobile phone will replace so many objects in our lives that it will become the hub for everything we do. He said, “Just think about the connection we have with our phones now. We personalize them, plastering our photos on the home screens, changing the color of the fonts, and then we use them to send text messages to our friends and update our social networks. We are completely dependent on these phones and feel an extremely strong connection to them.”
Another professor, Dan Siewiorek who is the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Buhl University, explained that our connection to the mobile phone has gone beyond basic phone calls and connecting with people; mobile phones are also an object to consume information, much as newspapers and magazines were in the past.
The phone is becoming the device we use to read news and check up on the things we find interesting. And because we use a single device for these activities, we are becoming increasingly reliant on it as a main connection point to the world around us.
When we talk about switching from print to pixels, from paper to screens, we tend to fall into theoretical discussions about the connection we have with paper, from the smell of the glue that binds the book to the rough texture of the book jacket. But for digital natives and many immigrants, screens are beginning to play a similar role. Their experiences and relationships with their phones are becoming more meaningful and more important. And as we will see in the next two chapters, it is precisely those kinds of significant and powerful individual experiences that will compete for our attention and drive the successful media and the technologies of the future.
7
warning: danger zone ahead
multiple multitasking multitaskers
The statement “one cannot do two tasks at once” depends on what is meant by “task.”
–Donald Broadbent
Warning: Distraction Zone Ahead
It’s clear that our brains interact in a new way when we’re online. As the Semel Institute’s research (see this page) shows, some areas of the brain can be stimulated differently when one is reading a book or static print narrative compared with the Web, which in contrast affords a type of multitasking storytelling. But this assumption brings with it a new set of
warnings and conjecture: Some say the Internet and multitasking with media are making our brains into one big distraction zone incapable of handling complex ideas or long-form narrative. I don’t agree.
I’ve heard similar comments since I was a little kid. Over and over, they showed up on my report cards: “Nick doesn’t pay attention in school.” “Nick is too easily distracted.” “Nick’s mind wanders too much. He needs to focus.” You might think, Hey, nice guy, but he can’t get much done. Too bad—he seems to have a lot of potential.
My troubles focusing and the conclusion that I had a problem weren’t just a childhood phase but a fact of my life. The label stuck all the way through middle school, high school, and college and still applies in my professional career. My mind still wanders, and I have trouble concentrating on one thing at a time.
You’re probably thinking, Oh, that’s easy: He’s got attention deficit disorder.
Whether that’s the case or not, if you give me a pile of random tasks to get through, I can happily execute my assignment and accomplish quite a lot. My style of operating is what I call ricochet working. And I’d argue that it isn’t really a dysfunction, merely a different kind of functioning and one that we’ll see more and more. The way my brain works is similar, I think, to the brain wiring of kids today who are growing up in the online world. They’re “digital wanderers,” popping between all different types of media, content, and experiences, and of course they are “easily distracted.” They will also probably be successful ricochet workers.
Some minds work in a partial ricochet fashion because of the type of content they consume and the devices they use to consume it. Some of this is due to the way computers evolved.
