This evening, as I watched The Incredibles with my daughter, I was struck by the scene where Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible) is reprimanded by his boss, Mr. Huph. These few moments of dialogue characterize the ongoing struggle between corporations who have no desire to relinquish brand control and consumers who are simply taking more and more of it each and every time they jump online.

Below is the portion of the full-length transcript from imsdb. (©2004 Disney Enterprises, Inc./Pixar Animation Studios).

MR. HUPH
I’m not happy, Bob. Not happy. Ask me why.

BOB
Okay. Why?

MR. HUPH
Why what? Be specific, Bob.

BOB
Why are you unhappy?

MR. HUPH
Your customers make me unhappy.

BOB
What, you’ve gotten complaints?

MR. HUPH
Complaints I can handle. What I can’t handle is your customers’ inexplicable knowledge of lnsuricare’s inner workings! They’re
experts. Experts, Bob! Exploiting every loophole, dodging every obstacle! They’re penetrating the bureaucracy!

BOB
Did I do something illegal?

MR. HUPH
No.

BOB
Are you saying we shouldn’t help our customers?

MR. HUPH
The law requires that I answer no.

BOB
We’re supposed to help people.

MR. HUPH
We’re supposed to help our people! Starting with our stockholders, Bob. Who’s helping them out, huh? You know, Bob, a company…

BOB
Is like an enormous clock.

MR. HUPH
…is like an enormous clo–yes. Precisely. It only works if all the little cogs mesh together. Now, a clock needs to be cleaned,  well-lubricated and wound tight. The best clocks have jewel movements, cogs that fit, that cooperate by design. [chuckling] I’m being metaphorical, Bob. You know what I mean by cooperative cogs? Bob? Bob? Look at me when I’m talking to you, Parr!

I love funk, and I’m a bass player with two kids, which makes me an ideal target for Bootsy’s worthwhile mission: to put an instrument in the hands of every child.

In this particular instance, the long-standing Bootsy brand doesn’t instill confidence, nor does it groove in any way with the tone of the request.

Why not hang up your star glasses for 30 seconds and look me in the eye to make your case? I’m not saying lose your personality (that would be next to impossible), but make a little more of an effort.

Show me some other musicians who have donated. Show me some regular folks who have donated. Show me some kids who have already benefited. Show me that my money’s going directly to the kids, not to the Mothership.

What do you think?

In funk we trust.

I posted this article on facebook about the Tallahassee Democrat’s launch of paid online content, under which Larry posted this great response. It’s re-posted here with his permission. Thanks, Larry:

As someone who worked in newspapers for most of my career, with the latter part helping pioneer the online version of one of the country’s top newspaper sites, I can say (and have been saying) that this is a bad move. Half of the newspaper site’s traffic comes from google. A large portion comes from referral site links. They are effectively snipping off a majority of their traffic. I do wonder how the current web advertisers have reworked their deals to reflect the drastically reduced number of eyeballs that the democrat will provide.

This is not to mention the recent research that shows nearly 8 out of 10 adults said they will not pay for online news sites. That ad revenue (assuming it is significant) will not be recouped by online subscriptions. What they are doing is telling current print subscribers that their rate will double, but they’ll be getting an online sub. I know many subscribers who are dumping their subscription — and many others who will grumpily pay it, even though they never go online. The democrat will count those as online subscribers.

The real shame in all of this, to me, is that the Democrat is damaging their brand as a ubiquitous news leader in the capital region of one of the largest states.

The old newspaperfolk will cheer this move (and they have), but that only further proves that traditional newspaper companies fail to understand the Internet. They continue to slide down the slope created by underestimating eBay and craigslist and overestimating the value of their product. People don’t pay for news these days, and if you aks for money, most will turn away and find another source for news. What those people will find, much to traditional newspaperland’s disappointment, is that they can live perfectly fine without the daily newspaper. They will have more free time and their heads will be less cluttered by not having sensational headlines and non-news stories forced upon them. They will find much more relevance in their immediate world, the people they interact with each day.

If there is something newsworthy, the television stations or radio stations or magazines or other online news sites or even their friends and co-workers can fill them in.

Trust me. I know. I was a newspaperman through and through. Ink flowed through my veins. But I am sickened by how far newspapers have fallen, especially my hometown paper. I still have many friends in newspapers and I love and respect them dearly. I despise what their corporate leaders’ mismanagement has put them through the past few years. It’s been absolutely awful how their staffs and budgets have been shredded.

Maybe one day we will again have a truly local newspaper — locally owned and operated. That’s a paper I can support.

Today, Starbucks moves to free wi-fi while the Tallahassee Democrat moves to paid online content. More coffee and less reading may not be a great combination, but it just might be how most of Tallahassee will roll until the ruling is overturned.

Of course, that’s only a prediction. I’ve been wrong before — ask my wife.

Here’s another prediction: I give it less than 15 days before web traffic plummets, 60 days before online advertisers find new places to sink their still meager budgets, and 90 days before staff begin soiling their pants daily, bring a dry cleaner in house so they can remain moderately fresh, and reconsider jumping back on the free train.

But hey, maybe the mother ship, Gannett, have convinced Dorsey and Gabordi that they’ve got this in the bag. Maybe they conducted their research and are just waiting to uncork champagne bottles and break them on the heads of us skeptics. Maybe they’ve gazed into their crystal balls and released of purple flying subscription monkeys knowing they’ll return with the wallets of eager local readers. (If that turns out to be true, expect to see a few dead purple monkeys strewn about town (How’d that be for a lead story?).)

Who knows what will happen starting tomorrow, but we’ll find out soon enough.

It’s an awesome phenomenon, and a playing-field-leveling reality, and it’s something you’ve heard time and again: big concepts don’t need big budgets to come alive and pull viewers. Everybody can think. Everybody can produce. But seldom do people get both things right.

Today, Calvin Lee retweeted a message from Chris Brogan who retweeted a message sent to him by Matt Holt. They were sharing the link to the video below. It’s just one of a million examples of something any of us could have done, but misheardlyricsguy did it first (mind you the video was posted 2 years ago and it’s still being “discovered” after more than 3,000,000 hits).

It made me laugh out loud. It was hi-fi thinking executed in a lo-fi manner.

By professional design standards, the graphics are cheesy and show no aesthetic taste whatsoever. But they’re perfect. What they show are a personal point of view, solid thinking, and a sense of humor — not to mention the simple that mishearing lyrics (and mis-singing them) is a universally shared and sometimes embarrassing experience.

There will always be a need for designers and writers and photographers and directors and so on, but I’m happy folks like misheardlyricsguy have sprouted from technology’s lo-fi loins.

I’ve been talking about needing a program like this for a long long time. Fortunately, Jesse Grosjean from HogBay Software developed it. It’s called Write Room — a writing program that harkens back to the days when you could just open Word Perfect on DOS, put your head down, type, and finish a project all in one sitting. Of course, back then the only distractions available were other mesmerizing DOS applications, generating silly ASCII drawings of Christmas trees, and wondering how it was possible to get all that a couple of megabytes onto a 5.25” floppy disc (at least I did).

Today, the distractions are too many and multiplying. Too many widgets, too many apps, too many icons. All filling our screens and cluttering our vision, begging for just a little attention, and then a little more.

Look! A Twitter update!

Is that Simon Cowell in a thong?! Hmmm… wonder if he’s got an ass double.

Squirrel!

Write Room obliterates these and any other distractions from your line of vision and lets you focus on the writing at hand. It’s dead simple to use and offers a few customization options. Sure, it’s not nearly as robust as Microsoft Word, but robustness isn’t the reason you’d use WriteRoom.

Simplicity is. And focus is. And finishing the damn piece you’ve been working on for five days is.

Write Room allows you to do one thing without distraction: write.

If you want to use Write Room, you’ll need a Mac running OS X 10.4 or later. There’s a 30 day free trial available, after which you’ll gladly pay $24.95 to continue using it. There’s even a handy dandy iPhone app available for $4.99 so you can create and edit documents on the go.

Happy writing. Well, at least happier writing.

We just have to realize that some customers will never be good customers.

They take advantage of our generosity because hey, times are tough, and we’re supposed to bend over backwards for the sale because then, if we do, they’ll tell people how much we did and wasn’t that sooooo nice of us? And besides, don’t we always talk about how social media is about generosity? About giving of yourself to the community? And about how generosity itself is a business model?

Yes, we will go out of our way for you. Yes, we hope you like what we do for you so much that you’ll tell people about what we can do for them. And yes, it is about generosity.

But it should work both ways. Aren’t our customers part of that community too?

So when we’re generous with you, we expect a little generosity in return. At the very least a little fairness.

Is that too much to ask? What do you think?

On Thursday evening, during Jane Campion’s new film, Bright Star, cell phones glowed in the foreground throughout the film like cicada-sized fireflies. On, off. On, off. Check here. Check there.

The next day, a guest at Conversation Friday explained how her daughter and her daughter’s friends sometimes interact — how they have conversations with friends standing right in front of them while their heads point down, waiting for something to happen on their cell phones.

Another guest followed, telling us how their son reacted when he and his wife took his cell phone away for 24 hours. His son’s physical reponse fell just short of hyperventilation, which led to the comment: “You can’t! It’s my life!”

Have we arrived at tech-co-dependency? Can we not disengage for the duration of a movie? A meeting? A conversation? Is the presence of another human being no longer enough to hold our attention?

While I certainly engage on Facebook and twitter quite frequently, I’m not referring to the frequency or intensity of participation, but rather, to the ability to disconnect when necessary, appropriate, and respectful. In an effort to curb my own use during such instances, I’ve resorted to leaving my cell phone in the car when out to dinner, leaving it at my desk during meetings, and plugging it in to charge in a different room while I’m doing puzzles with my daughter. Despite the efforts, I’d still plead guilty to many incidents of attention deficit in the presence of others.

So, how do we turn this around for ourselves and our children? How do we remind ourselves and educate our children that engaging in the moment with the people right in front of our eyes is more important than virtual engagement with the people we’re connected with through a mobile device? That giving our undivided attention these days is more valuable a gift than it has ever been?

Thoughts? Opinions? Leave a comment. Better yet, why not forget the computer altogether and write me a letter? Or call me to chat about it. Yeah, sure, fine. On the phone.

Photo Credit: compujeramey