Are you a digit? Do you do digital? Fred Schebesta from Freestyle Media, a wundekind of the digital space, likes to get to the root of the matter on "Uamby" when he comes to visit. Fred - Rico to the boyz - is a digit. And a good one.
He knows that a button is not a sales pitch. This
post is about the type of people you find in the digital technopolis.
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Are you a digit? Do you do digital?
Don’t be afraid to admit it. Some of my best friends are digital. Not terminally so. It will pass, but will they? I hope not.
My digits are nice people. The males are a random mixture of sensitive new age digitalis and modern insensitive macho cool. Metrosexuals, trans-decade dressers and slightly-better-than-billabong (Sydney skew). The femails are not gender-specific in their demeanour. They are postfeminist, ranging from retiring geekgrrls (with flashes of underlying supersanity) to high-confidence pixel maidens and neurosexual strategists, pioneers on the frontier of relationship simplicity seeking to offset the complexity of technopolis by connecting to blank emotional spaces that offer creative potential. They don’t want anyone or anything with a history.
I like all of them. I also like small, furry, poisonous animals. They have nothing in common.
Digitalia work in ‘spaces’, where I see only empty space. They are addicted to the cool, where I suspect fashion parading as business strategy. They appear self-satisfied, but I see only insecurity and bunker-bolstered bravado. They are good at what they do. But no one can tell if what they do is good to do. They (the clients) do it because others do it. They (my digits) feel misunderstood, but fail to understand that it is because they fail to understand the understanding of those from whom they want it (understanding, that is).
What they want is some good old-fashioned understanding, both personal and professional. They are invariably sensitive and searching. For each other, for respect, for answers. They suffer from a hunger they can never satiate – a lust for the new. Their dreams are forever on the bleeding edge, the blood being their clients’ (if they can get away with it.) Their hands are always full of communications devices that carry media. McLuhan was right – the medium has become the message. IPods, mobiles, PDAs, (here insert the latest splinter category of this genre)… all of which conspire to turn us into an autistic society. Self-contained and living in a bubble.
Despite this they are optimistic and garrulous. Confident of the future of technology, if nothing else. I look forward to the era a-comin’ when we will have lived out our digitalia nervosa and emerged from this fog of infatuation with platforms and bandwidth and applications.... and learned some basics of response dynamics.
A button is not a sales pitch, and a link is not an argument. A 'cool site' is a costly expense until it returns revenue at a better rate than all alternative uses of the funds. Digital media's legendary data capabilities is worthless if it only reports on the behaviour of anonymous visitors. Hits are little more value than TARPS. Track it to a sale to reveal cost per sales lead or don't capture it.
Live or die by the scoreboard.
Then there'll be less terror nervosa digitalia because you'll have something solid to stand on. Real sales data. That'll scare the client. (Being held accountable usually does.)  ¶ 5:19 AM