Things of note for the week ending Sunday Jan 22nd, 2017.
Lol.
It’s been a while.
How you doing? Nice weekend? Shall we crack on with the things?
1. SCREENTIME GUIDELINES: EVIDENCE VS HYPE
I have young children and I live my life staring at screens. While I’ve made certain digital footprint decisions for my young’uns (as in, it’ll be their choice when they’ll have one – not mine) when it comes to screen time my rules are a little more fluid.
Moral panic about the impact of new technologies on our behaviour and development is not new. Socrates railed against the dangers of writing for fear that it would nurture “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.†One source of contemporary anxiety is “screen timeâ€. Recently, a letter signed by a group of writers, psychologists and charity heads raised concerns that childhood health and wellbeing in the UK is declining, in part due to “increasingly screen-based lifestyles.†The signatories argued that the policy response to these concerns, first raised over a decade ago, has been half-hearted and ineffective.
While I do have a viewpoint about its limitations, I also think that the type of screen time is hugely overlooked. It seems I am not alone.
There is little evidence looking at the impact of the context of screen use, and the contentthat children encounter when using digital technologies – factors that may have a much greater impact than sheer quantity alone.
The two quotes are from an open letter than appeared in the Guardian recently and was signed by several global doctors and professors in everything from psychology to neuroscience.
Even if you don’t have kids yourself, this is definitely worth a read.
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2. GOODBYE, TWITTER LEAD GEN CARDS
These words you’re reading right now appear in two main formats. First as a blog post on whatleydude.com – aka ‘my happy place’ – and second, as a newsletter that gets sent out shortly after the former is published.
That second part is where most of my readers are (hello!) – and there are just shy of 1000 of you who get this newsletter every week. 900 of you subscribed via Twitter. Specifically Twitter’s lead generation card.
Something like this:
And now Twitter is shutting them down. Weird. But who knows why Twitter does what it does. Maybe it, like Facebook, has decided to pivot around (and go all in on) video. We shall see.
Shame though, I even wrote a handy guide on how to set them up, way back when.
Dead useful.
Now just dead.
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3. POKEMON [STILL] GO[ING]
About two or three months before Marshall and I published our annual digital trend report, I was asked to put together a preview for an internal event at Ogilvy Towers. You must understand that at this point, Marshall and I had barely had our first lunch on the topic let alone put anything down on PowerPoint. So, instead of just trying to make up a bunch of stuff in time, I took the brief and changed it.
On the day, I presented this deck – ‘Key Digital Things That We Really Didn’t Spot Coming But Wish We Did‘. The content of which is fairly predictable (but by all means go and read it) however one of the points that I wanted to land in the talk was that while the world went nuts for Pokemon Go over the summer, and that that madness has seemingly since subsided, it was still walking around with about 25m monthly active users – and that should not be ignored.
Interestingly, at the turn of the year, these revenue charts appeared that backed that up.
This thing is (still) making a LOT of cash.
Not bad for a flash in the pan.
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4. BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES
I’ve wanged on before about how amazing this show is/was. And I’m not wrong.
Well, as it turns out, this was no accident.
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5. LONDON UNDERGROUND STATIONS BY IG TAGS
I love this.
via #TagsintheCity (other cities also available).
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Bonuses –
- Reminder: the outgoing POTUS digital transition team totally bossed it.
- Fact-checking Tweets in the Tweets themselves.
- Hacking the attention economy.
And that’s me – I need some sleep.
Whatley out.
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