the art of conversation

Cloud Control

I had my first cloud computing dream last week. A vast cloud hovered over London and the Thames was filled with disused desktops. Londoners were frantically tapping on their keyboards uploading / downloading Tweets, Google Doc presentations, 12Second clips feeding the omnipotent cloud above. Imprinted into the nebula was 'Collective Conscious 2.0'. Then, the people stopped typing and the heavy cloud juddered and collapsed malnourished, crushing the city below.

Of course, just a bad dream; but the development of cloud computing, looks to be on the road towards high levels of adoption. Despite dreams of anxiety, the growth of clouds holds positive and potentially significant changes for our future online behaviour: having our data, software, hardware and processing power in a location far away from our home and offices does not seem an unlikely vision.

Just as millions of us are happily relinquishing ourselves to social networking clouds, so are the likes of General Electric and P&G to the business computing clouds - good evidence that big businesses are not such reluctant adopters. The Economist wrote recently about how different open-source, cloud developers are looking to migrate their clouds into a larger one to allow online software, tools and applications to be more compatible (imagine being able to migrate your Bebo account over to Facebook, for example).

'Body and Soul' in last Saturday's Times highlighted how the growth of our dependency in spending more time online via iPhones or Blackberrys is already changing our behaviours with our face to face personal relationships; being physically present yet mentally absent. Even our identities may well shift further away into a cloud.

It would seem then the dream was about being ready to relinquish control on a more profound scale in the future - something we (individuals, organisations, brands) may be hesitant to do (at least initially) to such large degrees. The prospect of centralisation of control indeed has its Orwellian overtones. 

Or, as Expedia would say, 'let yourself go' (symbolised by a cloud of course).

Bemoan it or embrace it, the forecast looks to be a cloudy one.

Simon

PICTURES AND MEANINGS

It's all Greg Rowland's fault. He uses cultural theory to analyse and develop brands. 

So when I saw this picture today, having met up with Greg at a conference recently, I was suddenly struck by something very odd about it. So I had to look into it. So, in this picture, do you see:

a) a tennis player modelling

b) a model playing tennis (and/or, a model who may actually play tennis)

c) a model modelling

Wimbledon is coming up of course and women tennis players are increasingly celebrated for their glamour and style. Her stance and grip are sort of about right (speaking as a tennis player). And yet...

... the overriding impression I got was not about tennis but about, um, modelling, coming from the overall treatment and 'look' (glossy/plastic, and the pose), the lack of muscle definition... and there is something very odd about the relative size of her and that racket. Is she just very petite, or is that racket an over-sized prop? Is it even a real tennis racket? And that's not really a tennis outfit. Is it?

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE: ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH REVEALED

Ethnographic research and qualitative research, what do they have in common, apart from too many syllables?

More than you might think, to judge from AQR's excellent conference, 'Ethnographic Research - lessons from the edge', held at the Russell Hotel on Thursday last week.

Caroline Hayter Whitehill introduced the conference with an expertly summarised view that many in our industry viewed ethnographic research as anything which is neither a focus group nor a survey. So, a video recorded retail exit interview is called 'ethnographic', which is surely stretching the term beyond recognition.

Ethnographic research is 'the naturalistic observation of people in their environment'. There are a range of methods, from complete observation, through combined observation and participation, to complete participation.

Many years ago I read Nigel Barley’s The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut (highly recommended). Some of the same issues arise when you observe and participate in a culture, even if the culture is the Smith household in Buckhurst Hill, rather than the Dowayo people in northern Cameroon.

Nobody knows this better than Siamack Salari of EverdayLives International (pictured), the conference’s main speaker and arguably the world's leading authority on commercial video ethnographic research. His website and his blog are well worth a look, to get a full understanding of how his ethnographic research methods have evolved.

Ethnographic research of the type Siamack practices is a fascinating branch of qualitative research, quite different to the interview-based methods that most of us are accustomed to. As different as growing fruit in a greenhouse is to picking wild fruit from the hedgerows, perhaps. But there are skills in common to both activities (eg patience, care, attention to detail) even if the activities look quite different.

Siamack was a product designer by training and one of his first forays into ethnographic research had him perched on a step ladder in an Esso forecourt shop filming people coming and going. He found that, rather than imitating a security camera, he did a much better job when he came down from the ladder, observed and filmed on the shop floor, on the same level as shoppers.