A cartoon about how we live & work in a digital world
It was the okay-est of times, it was the meh-est of times.
From the election of the first American social media president… to a nod to social media from the mainstreamiest of mainstream media (Oxford Dictionary, for god’s sake!)… it’s been a big, tumultuous sprawling toddler of a year, prone to tantrums and potty accidents but adorable nonetheless.
Here, then, is 2009 the way it was meant to be remembered… in doodles.
‘Tis the season and all that, and this time of year I find myself thinking a lot about my parents. This is exactly the sort of thing they’d have said (if my childhood had been, oh, 20 or 30 years later), and it would have driven me CRA-ZEE.
Funny thing: It’s also exactly the sort of thing I find myself saying to my own kids.
And speaking of ’tis the season, thanks and all the best to all of you who’ve read, tweeted, forwarded and commented on Noise to Signal this year. Have a great holiday if you’re celebrating, and just have a lovely week or two if you aren’t.
I’ll easily spend more time hunting for a discount code than I will thinking about the thing I’m actually buying.
The debate rages on over whether social networks (and Twitter, and YouTube, and, and, and) have any legitimacy in the workplace, fueled in no small part by people who sell tools to block them.
But employers who turn their noses up at Facebook et al. may well discover that their coveted Millennials (a.k.a. Generation Y, a.k.a. those damn kids who won’t get off your lawn) are happy to return the favour when recruiting time rolls around. Blocking access to Facebook looks a lot like those IT departments that wouldn’t install web browsers on your computer a decade ago… or external email access a few years earlier.
And like those tools before them, the social web today is increasingly being used by companies and organizations for productive, collaborative work. So it’s not just a question of denying your HR department a hiring pool of cool kids. Blocking social media from your company can mean cutting yourself off from an important potential source of productivity, innovation and increased efficiency.
Of course, that’s an argument I like to make to people who haven’t just received a dozen Farmville notifications.
Here’s one for all you holiday shoppers out there, fresh from ReadWriteWeb. I said over there that stores have good reason to worry about customers walking in clutching their iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys:
Which means customers are bringing the competition into the bricks-and-mortar stores with them — and they can switch allegiance as easily as point, click, swipe, call up the keyboard, tap tap tap, dammit, backspace, no, that wasn’t it, tap tap (repeat eight or nine times)… submit.
So maybe stores should think twice this holiday season about trying to trim costs by thinning their staff. Longer lineups don’t just discourage shoppers, they give them the means, motive and opportunity to shop elsewhere.
That said, just abandoning your cart would be kind of a dickish thing to do. Forcing those overworked staff to restock all the stuff you took off the shelves – that just isn’t in the Festivus spirit.
And since we’re in a retail frame of mind, for a limited time only, this cartoon comes FREE with a live video capture of its rendering:
…AND with the alternate version of the caption, which I just never did quite make work:
Do people actually do this in bars, and not just on TV?
This is the first cartoon posted on our sweet new webserver (all hail the mighty Linode!). I’m getting plenty of hand-holding on the sysadmin front, and wanted to mention: if you’re looking for top-flight folks in that department, you can’t go wrong with Mike Kelly and Natasha Scott. Xs and Os to ’em (we miss you at SoSi, Nat!).
And here’s the cartoon being drawnified: