OUGD601 - Facebook Transcription

I was given the chance to visit the Facebook + Instagram HQ in London throughout the Christmas break. This was very advantageous as these are the two dominating social medias in contemporary culture and I was able to gain a window into how the services operate, and the ethos of the designers that work for the company. The company was very professional, requiring an officer to escort me to the floor I was meeting the employee on, and requiring a search before I was able to enter the premises. It felt almost clinical and secretive, something that contradicts the ethos of Mark Zuckerberg, complete transparency.

Below is the transcription between me and the employee:

C: So just to tell you what I’m writing about at the moment, in more detail so you know what I’m talking about, it’s about the influence of technology and its’ influence on western culture as well as its influence on design culture, specifically. 

N: Yeah.

C: So, just to start, how do you feel social media in general has affected our culture, for good or worse? In terms of like, social etiquette, transparency, that kind of thing.

N: Considering where I work, I’d like to say it’s connecting the world. That is this places’ mission. There are also downsides to it, erm, I think the positives definitely outweigh the negatives but we still don’t know where it’s going, I think in a hundred years we’ll be like “Crap! We were just, like, taking in so much information on a daily basis; more than our brain can handle” and now we’re so hyper-connected to one another, we’re more anxious, we feel more, when someone dies that we don’t even know, like “damn so and so celebrity died!” A hundred years ago no one cared about that because you never found out about it. Erm, but at the same time, looking at where the world has come in 2016 with all the segregation and politics and arm, stuff that Trump’s doing, the Internet is a great way of changing peoples’ perceptions. Those closed-net narrow minded communities, that only see one type of opinion, can now have access to other types of news although there is a kind of echo chamber, but that’s always been down to the media in general.

C: Yeah, how do you feel it’s affected recent events, such as the U.S Election, general politics, that kind of thing?

N: I think that’s all B.S that’s been created by the media, because if it’s a fake news thing, the people that spoke about ‘fake news’ the most are the Daily Mail, other tabloids who have made a life.. their whole business is based on fake news. So it’s kind of ironic, them accusing new-age media of creating fake news.

C: It’s kind of just exacerbating the problem.

N: And the people that post the fake news are people like the Daily Mail.

C: Yeah. For Sure.

N: (laughs) 

C: Kinda just, hypocrisy.

N: Yeah, its just a full circle of hypocrisy all around. But I think.. it’s good that is being addressed now. That being flagged up meant certain validations have to be made from now on. There has to be a UN type of thing validating news articles. So it’s definitely going to challenge people’s perceptions of the media. 

C: There’s actually websites now that use machine learning to write their articles, they’ll have these web crawlers that scan articles and be able to publish an article within seconds without any moderation. I think that’s a part of being in the infancy of the Internet, though. 

N: Yeah, and if you look at sites like Yahoo News, they take articles from every other website and they’ll just add credit to them at the bottom. That can easily be replicated by a bot, and that’s what people are doing just for the sake of hits. The way  web journalism has changed from longford editorial newspapers to now like, top 10 shots of Kim Kardashian’s booty!

C: Yeah.

N: Complex dot com and Buzzfeed, Buzzfeed’s great because they have a point of view, whereas some others are just clickbait nonsense.

C: Just trying to get your click.

N: Yeah.

C: So, I actually wrote about Facebook in my essay, because it’s quite a big part of Web 2.0, and I thought it was good and bad at the lengths Facebook want to go to hold people accountable for what they want to do. So what’s your personal view, distancing yourself from Facebook a bit, on anonymity vs. accountability, so, how much of yourself you put on the internet and etc.

N: On a personal level, I’m really open on the Internet, I always have been prior to even joining this place. I think that’s just the generation that I’ve grown up in. Some of my friends are the complete opposite, they don’t share anything. They share like, just the highlight reel. I kinda want to share everything from the lowlights to the highlights because that’s just me. You’ve gotta be real. I don’t want to just put a fake front on. Yeah I’m not gonna be “I smoke weed all the time” because I don’t, and even if you do, be a bit smarter than that. Five years down the line when anyone wants to hire you, they can just go down your feed and see. This year a friend of mine went on the X Factor and did horrifically bad. My first thing to him was “You know every employer is going to search your name and see that” (laughs) I think I’m going to loop back to the first question quickly, on the positive side, we’ve seen with this year with the stuff happening in Paris for example, we’ve seen a surge of movements like Pray for Paris, that started off with one illustration and that got shared millions, not billions but millions of times. Each person sharing their own interpretations of events. It’s just people coming together for a cause. Aleppo. 150 years ago or even 50 years ago, most people wouldn’t know about it, most people may not care about it but now people want to take action. Still don’t know what kind of action, there’s a lot of ‘slacktivism’, erm, but we know about it now. Most people who do a bit more reading into it realise it’s about oil, not actually about the people there.

C: Yeah, this might be slightly conspiracy speak, but I feel as if the government has less control over what the people are able to see. With the Internet, it’s free to be accessed from around the world. Would you agree?

N: Yeah, totally. There’s a great documentary on Freud, it was on Channel Four about fifteen years ago, I recommend you watch it. It tells you about the growth of P.R in corporations and it kinda went from power in the corporations and big TV to now the people. That’s what Social Media has done. It’s given them a platform to become the creators, to become voices. Before, only a handful like Martin Luther King and Gandhi would just create a following but now you can do that through sitting at home.

C: I actually wrote about that sort’ve thing last year, about how the consumer has begun to take power away from the producer and how there’s a power struggle going on with the introduction of new-age media. It’s interesting to see you agree with that.

N: Yeah, and modern day activism is much more accessible. Black Lives Matter, for example, was created purely through online. It’s become so big.

C: I don’t think it would’ve done that without the Internet. So, I also wrote about programs like Black Mirror that make comments on technology advancing faster than society, how do you feel that we could limit and regulate ourselves because there’s going to be virtual reality coming out soon, and there’s going to be automation, I mean, there’s already self-driving cars being trialled. How do you feel that we can regulate that, and make sure we’re in check?

N: I don’t even know where to start with that. I think this is probably a wider view and someone needs to go more in-depth, but I think someone needs to create a technology treaty to regulate us. People will use technology for the wrong reasons, just like when the inventor of AK-47s had no idea of the things it would end up being used for. There are evil people out there that will look to use A.I for military purposes and killing others. I don’t know if we can regulate it until something bad happens, that’s when people will realise we screwed up. Like, the Tesla self driving car, I think someone died last year, and that was due to a glare hitting the cameras on the car and that caused them to fix up. But that’s a really small small thing in the scale of things. With A.I and VR, it’s a completely different ball game. 

C: So something that’s just gonna develop over time.

N: Yeah, I think it’s like the Internet, there’s a lot more privacy and laws in place now, none of that existed in its’ creation. Just the last ten years when commerce became big. 

C: Erm, bit more Graphic Design related, with the saturation of designers coming into the industry and the notion of being able to become a designer from your bedroom, how do you see the industry going if this kind of growth continues, you see websites like PeoplePerHour promoting designers for five pounds an hour. It’s a bit crazy. I’ve seen that people have been undervaluing design as a whole, because there’s so many designers, you can get someone to do something for so cheap. People just see the physical element rather than the psychological element behind work. 

N: Marketing techniques and such, yeah, so I think: several factors, some people just don’t get design. People will always undervalue it because they just don’t understand the process and they think design is just using Photoshop or even Word and writing something and printing it out. You’ll still get that with low-level clients. The high level clients, agencies and design studios will never go away. Like, you need people that understand the psychology of design like branding, identity, theme. But we do live in an age of mediocrity, and the Internet has been a part of this. Everyone can be a creator now, but that doesn’t mean everyone can be a good creator. It’s like, people think that just because they’ve got 20,000 Instagram followers they’re a photographer. Yeah they’ve got a certain eye for it, and they can produce some good work but it doesn’t mean you can go and shoot a campaign for an editorial on TIME magazine. You need some level of craft. I still believe, like, it’s going to increase the creative quality. There’s so much saturation now that it forces people to think out of the box even more, to stand out more. I actually shared something on my Instagram stories yesterday, a poster by Saul Bass. The quote says “I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” It kinda sums up out generation where we live now. It’s all about validation, like “can I create something so I can get it to 10,000 likes, or more followers?” Why aren’t we creating something just out of the love of it? Err, another great reference is six years ago another great documentary came out, I can’t believe it’s six years ago now, called Pause Press Play. It’s great, it touches on the subject of creativity being in the palm of your hands, before something like Photoshop. Making music was so high level for example, but now kids, Soulection is just a bunch of kids making music on Soundcloud. But it’s forced leaders to adapt and innovate. If you don’t adapt, you disappear. That’s why companies like Blockbuster failed to adapt, they failed to innovate and Netflix took over. I think a lot of brands don’t have the insight to innovate. Argos was one of the companies fading away because of Amazon and now they’ve clocked on that the Internet is way more important than they thought. They’ve now launched same-day delivery so I now look at both websites. 

C: Coming back to what you were saying, that the Internet is making us a bit more mediocre, do you feel that creativity is easier or harder to express now that there’s so much information out there that it’s hard not to be copying something accidentally. 

N: I think it’s easier to creatively express yourself, but to creatively express something original is a lot harder. I one hundred percent believe in you creating what you consume. So if you fill your brain with shit, you’re going to end up creating shit. I think that’s why the current design wave is so minimal, and it’s actually a bit boring now. I feel like, the opposite will happen next year. One of the trends will be messy, messy design coming back, because it’s just too clean right now. Minimalism has its place, but the trend is without form and function as its’ root. 

C: How do designers stay true to their ethics and morals, in this society where its hard to be an independent small studio that designs simply for clients they like? 

N: I think that comes back to the whole, personal work and doing work to pay the bills. It’s a very fine line, sometimes I make work I want and sometimes you just have to hit targets and pay bills. I don’t believe that small studios can’t function, I think small studios more than ever have the opportunity to change the way things are done. They can demonstrate their skill set in this sea of minimalism. Also, the agency model is changing. It needs to adapt. The whole paying an agency £1000 a day for someone as a day rate, and the designer gets like fifty quid. Paying an independent studio £1000 for a day will probably book the whole agency. A friend of mine runs Studio Koto, and Koto just did the rebrand for Gumtree, some Diet Coke stuff, they just launched the Airbnb’s experiences concept. They’re about 14 people in total. They launched two years ago with two people, so yeah I think it’s just about connections and who you know, and I know that every job I’ve ever got is through my connections and not from websites like LinkedIn. I’ve never actually applied for a job which sounds like me being boastful but it was from my portfolio, I started my blog because I was a bored kid in uni, and my best friend and me started it because we wanted to express what we liked. Five years on, I left two years ago but it was time to leave because the Internet was changing, and I wanted to work with new people so I wrote an e-mail to Levi’s and said “Hey, look, your Instagram is crap. Can I pitch as a freelancer to help run it?” I already had a connection to there from my blogging days and they told me they were struggling and they’d welcome my pitch. So I pitched and they said “Look, we’ve got X amount of thousands of pounds, if you can pitch well this is all yours”. Although at the time I was getting married, I couldn’t take the risk of quitting my day job to manage Facebook and Twitter. I didn’t really want to manage social media, I just wanted to create. I said no, and the next day I saw this job listed and I tweeted “Do I know anyone from Facebook and Instagram?” and I actually met my office manager at Facebook through that tweet. She put me in an interview and here I am.