Essays

Life lived online can become anti-life. For young people especially, who have known nothing else, it has turned many friendships and relationships from the quality-made, user-serviceable, lifetime-use model, into the low-quality, break it and replace it model, and we see its wreckage everywhere.

Why go through the needlessly arduous task of actually asking other people their opinion or the reasoning behind their beliefs, if you can simply claim to know what they are?

The joy of connection is the biggest payday a human can have. And we quickly unravel without it.

When you reach the point where the guiding principle for your goals is solely to be in opposition to the other side’s goals, it guarantees a shrinking future.

Plausible deniability is a term well known around Washington, DC. Much bad behavior escapes ramification because of plausible deniability. Often part of the planning process for scurrilous activity is how responsibility for the actions will be subsequently skirted, if and when the piper starts playing.

When rigidly formed emotions exist, the people holding them are easy prey for a proliferation of increasingly sophisticated manipulations via social media and self-selected “news” outlets.

When people get combative in communications, it is often as a counter-punch to imagined slights and opinion. These unspoken, unchallenged and too-often inaccurate self-generated “truths” dictate way more of our interactions than most of us are aware. Which is why it's important to steer clear of conversations about "right and wrong" in communication campaigns, since that is likely to engender reflexive opposition.

We need to be vigilant about jumping to conclusions and then unconsciously self-selecting research that only supports that conclusion. When we stop asking questions, we become very manipulable.

The decision to be “funny” or “provocative” in an ad should only come from the pursuit of the most effective message. When this priority is flipped in social marketing campaigns, the under-represented party ends up paying the price because the focus ends up in the wrong place.

I always saw branding and strategic communications as being protected against outsourcing or automation. But, a couple of years ago, while basking in the knowledge of my irreplaceability, it occurred to me that my obdurate certainty was based on a fast-disappearing future: that people would get to make up their own minds.