Do you remember your handwriting?

I was reading an article in the New York Times about a new technology that allows you to deliver short music videos by mobile in an easy and inexpensive way (“Forgot to send a birthday card? Phone it in”) when I started thinking of how impersonal the communication is becoming and how much we type every day. Handwritten letters are substituted by emails (and sometimes faxes), greeting cards by e-cards, even postcards are now more and more virtual, since we like to share our digital photos via web. In the social media like Facebook, Twitter or blogs, we type again to have a chat conversation. Summing up, nowadays almost all the messages are typed.

In the past it was easy to spot your classmates’ handwriting in a note or in an essay, now you barely know your relatives’ handwriting. Even our own is disappearing day by day: during classes students take notes typing on a laptop, we text messages by mobile and with the new digital books like “Nook” and “Kindle” we probably won’t even handwrite any more notes on the paper. We have also developed some fonts that reproduce the handwriting in order to keep typing.

So far the signature still survives but sooner or later a “personal” logo will be developed in order to make it virtual too.

It is so nice to read a letter or a postcard, looking at the handwriting of the sender and sometimes feeling his emotions while he was writing it. The handwriting is a way to express our personality and, in my opinion, an enchanting world to study as it seems connected to our unconscious mind.

A friend of mine is now a certified handwriting expert in Italy but, while she was still studying for it, she asked me to provide her with a written page from somebody she didn’t know in order to practice what she was learning. It was an amazing surprise: from the space between the letters, the size of the words, the way some letters were written and many other small details, she “perfectly” described the writer’s personality (that was another close friend of mine).

There are many different schools which teach how to read and interpret a personal “handwriting” in order to get the personality of the writer. Four are the main approaches to study graphology: Integrative Graphology, Holistic Graphology, Symbolic Analysis and Underlying Movement.

In my opinion, without keeping handwriting alive, we are going in the direction of a more and more digital and impersonalized world. We should be able to use technology but leaving some “human” activities out of it.

We have inherited a lot of manuscripts from past writers that are wonderful priceless masterpieces. If we eliminate handwriting we will leave to our future generations only “digital codes” without any personality.

In this world where time flies and everything has to be fast, handwriting slows down our pace but it gives us the possibility to be human again.

ChatRoulette

I have recently heard about ChatRoulette, a new website that randomly pair strangers from all around the world for a chat conversation (video and text). It works like this: you just go to the site (www.chatroulette.com) with your webcam-equipped computer and find yourself connected face to face with a total stranger somewhere else in the world. You can either start a chat conversation or, if you don’t like the person you are connected to, you can easily click on “next” or “F9” and you will face another person. In YouTube I have found an interesting video that shows how this new social medium works (video).

The creator of ChatRoulette is Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17 years old Russian student with a passion for internet and coding (interview by the New York Times). He said that it developed the project for fun with no business goals, just to be randomly connected with different people all around the world. He didn’t expect such a great success: the web site had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of last February without any adverting campaign. It has already generated a great international press coverage: from the New York Times “The human shuffle” and “Hello, Stranger: The Ups and Downs of Chatroulette” to ABC news “Talking to strangers with Chatroulette” to all the main European newspapers and magazines. In the digital world, the blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its preferred site since YouTube and The Frisky, named it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.”

ChatRoulette, like other social media, has already invented new expressions to add to our “web vocabulary” like “to be nexted” with the meaning of “to be discarded, denied” and it happens “when a random stranger clicks the next button immediately after seeing what you look like” in a social media.

In my opinion Chatroulette will grow more and more. It doesn’t really use new tools as we already know Skype or Window Messenger (for chat conversations) and the graphic of the website is very easy and definitely not appealing (Mr. Ternovskiy said that he wants to keep everything minimalistic, even the advertising on the website). The great idea is, instead, that it creates “a digital blind date” with a stranger from all around the world, you can talk to somebody that probably you wouldn’t have ever met. It exploits feelings typical of the blind date like the curiosity and the excitement of grabbing the attention of a stranger, but this time you are safe, often at home, and if you don’t like the person you can easily change the connected partner.

Whenever we have a new social media everybody wants to try it with many different purposes: just for fun, for curiosity, for showing off or even “dating”. It is a new experience that at the beginning is quite addictive and you can even get obsessed. The inventor said that most of users are from the United States, but I guess it will be accessed from more and more countries in few months.

In the long run, however, I think people will get tired of it as you can’t really establish new relationships, find friends or have a conversation (many people just have a quick look at you); after a while you are bored of nexting others or being nexted. Let’s travel and meet real people!!!

An Oscar winner for a bizarre ad

The new spoof video with Marion Cotillard, who won the Academy Award as best actress for 2007 movie La Vie en Rose, shows how men look at women (or better where they look) with the purpose of redirecting the male glaze from the chest to the eyes.

In the clip, you can see the beautiful actress while she is working in an office. Although she has magnetic blue eyes all men colleagues around her are more interested of another part of her body. At one point she said that “to get the respect of a man you have to make him look in your eyes” and the bizarre product is completed with “scientific lab tests” that prove its efficacy.

The clip is at the same time silly, provocative and funny and I guess it will become another viral video.

Ladies’ comments about the video on the web are generally good, and some women tell their story to confirm men’s behavior (the Sun). On the other hand, men just briefly comment on it, not really taking any position.

In my opinion, the idea is funny in the sense it is recorded as it reproduces a “cosmetic ad” where a beautiful top model presents a problem and then introduces to you the product to solve it, supported by scientific tests. If the goal of the video were just to make people smile, then it accomplishes it. On the other hand, if they really want to discuss about a general male behavior I don’t think this is the right way to follow, since in the end the actress looks pretty stupid; they should instead have made a more sophisticated video with a refined message. It seems to me that the clip is very simple and a low level mass product for this issue.

In my opinion, although it is true that men usually look at women’s chest, it is also relevant how the women dress up. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want women to wear “polo neck sweater”, but sometimes I can see some colleagues that wear exceptionally low-neck dress or shirt. By wearing them they not only attract male’s glazes but also women’s critics.

I don’t agree that in America women deal more than other countries with “sexual objectification wherever they go - especially on the workplace” (from the video). I think that is a general “issue” spread all around the world and, to be honest, in the US women’s right are generally more protective than other countries, thanks to some corrective actions like the sexual harassment provisions.

I have checked Marion Cotillard’s career and I saw that she actively participates in campaigns for environmental protection, for example she helped Greenpeace in different projects. I hope that this video won’t affect her good public profile in a negative way. People should think of her as Édith Piaf, the character of the famous movie La Vie en Rose, not as the attractive woman with “forehead tittaes”.

A lion for YouTube

The lion has always been a king of shows, not only in circuses, zoo but also in cinemas. The Lion King, a Walt Disney production, won some awards and became even a musical that has been going for some years. This animal arrived again on the big screen with Madagascar and all its series, a DreamWork production.

YouTube needed its lion too. In the Seventies two young men, Ace and John, bought at Harrods a lion cub – whom they named Christian - and raised him in London for a year. Then they figured it out that they could not keep him much longer and started the process of returning him to Africa. George Adamson, a famous wildlife conservationist know as "Baba ya Simba" ("Father of Lions" in Swahili) took care of rehabilitation of Christian to the wild.

Almost forty years later the clip, featuring the reunion in Africa between Christian and his previous human caretakers after one year of not seeing each other, was posted on YouTube.

The video became so popular that a new updated edition of the book, A lion called Christian, was published with the story of the lion. A lot of people saw the footage on YouTube and commented the clip on the web, even some incorrect detailed were published as always happens in the unregulated space of internet. Many people read the book and Christian became a world news since a lot of international television broadcasted it and even Hollywood turned out to be interested in the story. Someone decided to create a Facebook profile for the lion and he has now around 20,000 friends.

I would like to consider the video power, how it got all this popularity and success.

First of all the clip is very emotional and moving. The song “I will always love you” by Whitney Houston added to it, makes it even more touching. People like happy-end and a joyful reunion is always a good topic. On the Italian television there are shows dedicated only to reunions where people can meet friends or relatives that have not seen for many years.

Moreover, there is the theme of love and friendship between man and animals that targeted everybody but especially the people who support animal rights, as they can show that even a lion, the king of the savanna, can demonstrate some good emotions similar to the human. The video also brings with it the topic of captivity, the importance of rehabilitation and the conservation for protected species that are great themes to talk about and easy to spread out.

People can project their feelings in the reaction of Christian at the view of his caretakers and can also identify themselves with Ace and John, who are meeting their “grown cub” after such a long time.

In my opinion the clip demonstrate one more time the power of Internet and of the new social media that are even able to bring old stories alive again. Everything started from the posting on YouTube by a Californian student, now all around the world everybody knows a real story of a captive lion who was able to got rehabilitated to the wild but he is still grateful to his human caretakers for what they did for him.

The video will never be out-dated since it basically shows good human feelings and that there is a possibility of interrelationship of all living creatures in a peaceful way. I would like to conclude with consideration made by Ace and John in their last edition of the book “If all of us touched by Christian’s story came together to address some of the issue faced by the global community, what could we achieve together in the spirit of Christian’s love and love for life?”

The unfriending era

A friend has recently told me that she felt upset of being defriended from a colleague’s Facebook profile. She had a discussion with him and he, after a click, easily eliminated her name from his social media list.

Facebook does not send any notification when you unfriend somebody, leaving the members to find out later they have been defriended when they cannot access to someone’s profile. It can actually be a unpleasant experience considering that the same person either asked you for the “friendship” or accepted your request.

On the other hand, it is true that relationship can change, you could be annoyed by somebody who posts too many status updates or you want to limit your network to the closest people.

This new trend of cutting down people is more and more spread. The new Oxford American English even announced that the 2009 word of the year is “unfriend”, meaning “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site." In the ABC news I also found a debate on the usage of the verb “unfriend” or “defriend”.

Many online magazine and bloggers talk about the “defriending” process and some give you some advice (To De-Friend or Not to De-Friend); Cosmopolitan, for example, provides you “10 signs you should unfriend someone on Facebook”.

There is even a “Defriend Tracker”, an application that should show a list of the people who have defriended you on Facebook.

Regarding the unfriending trend, in the New York Times I found an article - “Friends until I delete you” - that mentions a particular adverting campaign run some months ago by Burger King, called “Whopper Sacrifice”. In few words, the global chain of fast food restaurants offered a free hamburger to anybody who could “sever the sacred bond with ten Facebook friends” (the New York Times). The “nicest part” was that Burger King was sending notifications to the unfriended people saying that they “were dropped for a free sandwich” (actually for a tenth of it!). It seems that more than 230,000 friends were damped. The fast food chain ended the program to fulfill Facebook’s policy.

Whopper Sacrifice is the first Facebook application I have known that, instead of creating connections (joining a group), asked you to decrease your network.

In my opinion this campaign was a success and a brilliant idea: being so bizarre it generated a lot of press coverage and it was so smart to take the advantage of a trendy process that has been arising all around the world. It basically provides you with an excuse to unfriend people! Even if it is not a nice feeling being unfriended for an hamburger, I think that people had fun with it and nobody was really offended. You could always re-friend them, maybe using some funny messages, like “Don’t worry I cannot eat anything else, I am full now”.

The unfriending era has just started.

Where the Hell is Matt?

More and more videos are shared thought internet every day. “Where the hell is Matt?” is a perfect example of a viral video, meaning a record that “becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing, typically through internet media sharing websites” (Wikipedia).

Matthew Harding was only a videogame designer, now he is an Internet star. He became famous because he did a funny dance all around the world and he posted the video on YouTube. He got sponsors and started dancing by himself in front of famous landmarks of the most well-known countries. Later on, he discovered that was much more interesting having local people dancing with him from all the different cities. He toured the world one more time to make another video. He had around 2,387 people dancing with him and about 30 million people have seen his videos. In a lecture he explains how he invented and achieved the project. NASA featured Matt’s video on their APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) website, titled "Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth".

In my opinion Matt’s video demonstrates the power of digital social media, in this case YouTube: it would have been almost impossible to have the same amount of people watching it if it had been an attachment to an email. He wouldn’t have probably got any sponsors and would have travelled the world at his own expenses. On TV the video would have probably been perceived as a kind of commercial and nobody would have paid too much attention.

When people saw his videos on YouTube, they started writing to invite him to go to their countries; thanks to them he was able to continue and organize more “dancing events”.

Matt’s dancing can be considered a sort of flash mob, meaning that people congregate and perform an unusual and odd act for a short time, then they go away. The flash mob wants to grab the attention in a different way and it is more and more used in advertising and in social events, some of the most famous examples are “Time Freezes in Central London” and “Students Unleash A Pillow Fight On Manhattan”.

Matt decided to go further and he developed a “hoax in a hoax”: he said that all his videos were a hoax made with Photoshop. Before doing it he met a friend who works in the communication field to get some advice. His friend recommended him to make up a ridiculous and totally absurd story in order to be sure people wouldn’t believe it. Matt decided to say that he was an actor hired by a marketing agency (with a funny-invented name) and that everything was fake; he used crazy proofs (the funniest part he said was that they created even robots to simulate people). Some internet blogs, websites and social media (like Twitter) did not get the joke and people started thinking that his video really wasn’t true.

“The fake hoax project” is a wonderful example of the digital communication power and the influence of the social media to change the perception about things. People still trust Internet news and sometimes they do not reflect on it. Just wonder why Matt said it was a hoax. The proofs he brings are pretty hilarious, especially the robots one. For him, it was absolutely obvious that it was a hoax, but it wasn’t perceived like this by many people.

In my opinion this joke is a little bit too risky to do as you can easily loose your credibility and even get in trouble with your sponsors. Matt should have made up a crazier story, having totally illogical and bizarre proofs as the ones he used were perceived as real.

I think that the power of social media and YouTube in particular is growing day by day. There are videos that exist only in this medium and that could not survive without it. It is important sharing stories but let’s keep the mind open to reflect on the message; do not be just astonished by their magical effects.

No personal advertising, please

Is it fair to advertise your personal emotions? Some weeks ago on Corriere della Sera, one of the main Italian newspapers, a particular “advertisement” was published (see the page): the entire page showed colored photos of a guy while he was having fun in some outdoor activities like parachuting and riding the bike. The “happiness” of the pictures clashed the writing “You will always be my angel, your dad” and some direction for the funeral ceremony. I found out that the man died in a car accident and his father decided to buy a full color newspaper page to commemorate him and “inform” about the funeral.

When I first saw this advertisement the emotions had the upper hand: you feel sorry that such a “joyful” young man died. After some minutes, I started thinking about it. Is it correct to give the possibility to buy a whole page in an important newspaper for such personal reason? I mean, many people died and the majority does not have the possibility of doing it. I don’t think other parents’ sorrow is less than this particular dad. Therefore, should we permit to do such a personal advertisement?

In my opinion, pain and sorrow are personal feelings that can be openly shared when the person involved is well known by everybody for the good he/she did. In general, I disagree with this kind of communication, it can be ethically difficult to determine whether such a type of advertisement should be published. What if the same advertisement would have been done by the son of a famous Nazis soldier to commemorate his dad? Or the son of a mafia man to honor his parent? They probably feel the same grief for their relatives.

Daniel Windels, former Senior Marketplace Planner at GSD&M Advertising in Chicago and current Visiting Professor at De Paul University, thinks that “the challenge when evaluating these type of personal advertising efforts is that the very definition of “ethical behavior” is hard to define. What one person finds socially acceptable, another person may find completely unacceptable”. He brings the example of someone who took out an ad for his personal marriage proposal on the side of a bus shelter. Is this acceptable? In his opinion “in the United States the issue typically breaks down along the lines of whether or not the content of the message itself is appropriate for audience”.

In my opinion advertising should be a way of communication, open to businesses, institutions and organizations in general, but not for private feelings. Only few wealthy people are able to access to the mass media and I don’t think it is correct to privilege the rich ones. Moreover, I am sorry for the dead guy but I still do not understand why they allowed to “advertise” it, the dad could have published a big obituary or something on the web.

I would like to recall what Seneca (4 -65 AD), a famous Roman Stoic philosopher thought about pain, probably we should pay more attention to the ideas of past theorists: “Est aliquis et dolendi decor, hic sapienti servandus est” (16 book, Epist. 99) – “Even through suffering, there is dignity and only wise people can hold it”.