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Welcome friends! Lovely to have you here. So where exactly is "here"? And what on earth is a ThinkerBelle? "Here" is a blog space on all things that interest this little strategist, namely design, social media and technology. I like to think that "ThinkerBelle" (my strategist persona) lives at the intersection of these three domains. I hope you enjoy this space, please comment and don't be a stranger. I appreciate you being here. Follow me in the tweetverse if you like @thaz7.
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Which came first the tool or the behavior?
Lame title. Deal. Sorry.
It’s funny, I spend a lot of time talking about how behaviors are what drive the development of new tools/technologies and are core to functionality and usefulness. Behaviors evolve over time and changing interactions, but I’ve always been of the mindset of that direction relative to causal influence. While I don’t believe it is wrong, I started thinking (selfishly) about how these “tools” have changed me and how I interact with the world around me. There are more and more examples of how the tool is shaping behaviors.
Instagram is quite an interesting example of this. Not only do I constantly need to check it (I love peeking into my friends’ lives and seeing what’s beautiful, funny, in their lives) but I realized something today: the days that I don’t have “something’ to instagram lately are typically a little underwhelming and maybe even a little depressing. Lead me to a question (terrifying self discovery): is a day that you don’t have anything to share, one that was worth living? That sounds way more dramatic than I mean it to, but broadly speaking, it reframes the way you can look at your day. Shouldn’t you strive to have a moment in your day (fleeting or not) that fills you with enough joy that you want to share it?
I think that’s a big part of the power and lure of an instagram or even Facebook. Making you think just a little more critically about the life you’re living. When you look back on the collective memories that you’ve shared (or not shared), is there a point in which you can actually see the unhappy breaks? Eras of joy/optimism hope? Maybe this could be a tool for therapy–tracking your visual history to see where things went “wrong” or “right”. I truly believe there’s an incredible intrinsic value to tracking memories and creating tangible “memory buckets”.
Regardless of where you stand on the issue, these personal logs create incredibly rich places and spaces as “marketing” folks to be able to mine for insights into the way people really live. Would be amazing to be able to look through someone’s FB or Instagram feed and juxtapose to the way that they answer questions in a focus group (on their will of course)…there are some things you just can’t “make up”…
