by Rob Cottingham | Dec 18, 2012 | Everything Else, Social Signal
The debate simmering over Instagram’s pending terms-of-service changes shouldn’t come as a surprise. These days, changes to a site’s or app’s terms of service get a lot more scrutiny than they used to.
True, most of us just grumble a little at the inconvenience of a nag screen popping up, then click through without reading. (And who can blame us?) But with a growing awareness of issues ranging from online privacy to usage rights, more and more people give amended user agreements a good hard look.
And when they find something they don’t like, there’s a receptive audience of users ready to spread the word, often on those same platforms. Sometimes those concerns arise from overblown, out-of-context misinterpretations of legal language. Other times, they’re just plain delusional – and if you posted one of those Facebook-is-now-a-publicly-traded-company disclaimers, you probably got an earful from your friends to that effect. (I suspect the issue around Instagram using photos in advertising has less to do with conscripting your next coffee photo as a Starbucks billboard, and more with serving “Rob Cottingham also followed [insert brand here]”-style “social ads”.)
Yet many user agreements really are downright abusive. They’re drafted by the company running the service, and are pretty much always skewed in their favour. Reading them, it’s hard not to think that the company’s legal department drafted them with one mandate: “whatever we can get away with.” The site Terms of Service; Didn’t Read documents the ways a range of services put users at a disadvantage (along with a handful that actually do a pretty good job of balancing conflicting interests).
The issues are real. But when people complain about changes to user agreements, as many are doing about Instagram today (the EFF outlines its concerns here), there’s often a backlash. They’re accused of whining about the free service they’re receiving, trying to prevent the company running it from making a profit, and having way too high an opinion of their content’s value. (If you’re looking for a post that hits the trifecta, with a trollish dollop of sneering, try this one.)
To take the first two arguments on quickly:
- It’s a free service: Yes, a service like Instagram doesn’t charge a fee. You don’t pay in money. Instead, you pay in time, creative effort and attention. And that, in turn, creates the community without which the service would be worth far, far less. (See “Just because there’s no price tag doesn’t mean you aren’t paying for it,” a post I wrote three years ago.)
- Companies need to make money, you commie freak: Of course they do. Even the most co-operatively-owned company needs to bring in enough income to keep the lights on. (Unless it realizes an indirect return for its owners in some other way, an idea we’ll set that aside for another day.) But one-sided exploitation isn’t the only business model out there (and in the participation business, it’s a risky one). Companies and individuals strike mutually advantageous arrangements every day; Flickr’s deal with Getty images treats its users as partners.
But it’s that third “Get over yourself and your crappy pictures of food” argument that I find especially toxic. (This is apart from the objection that, if the content users are generating have no value, why put the rights to use it commercially on the table at all?) The backlash against user advocacy plays into the idea that all that time and creative energy we’re pouring into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Cheezburger, Flickr and the many other services out there, and all of the images, videos and stories we’re sharing are worthless.
Sure, a lot of the content being shared is frivolous and silly, or executed with little thought and effort. So is a lot of human conversation and activity; we’re playful by nature, and we’ll sometimes dabble at things without ever being good at it. (Also, if you ever have a look at some of the drek that often gets pawned off as children’s entertainment, you’ll look at LOLcats and Twitter memes with a whole new level of respect.)
And all that light conversation keeps the channels open for the more significant stuff. I discover deeply moving personal stories, glimpses of awesome beauty, laugh-out-loud humour and unexpected insights through my social networks every day. They come from people who don’t always have the talent and experience to craft a polished, professional piece, but whose distinctive perspectives and voices outweigh those deficiencies.
One of the most powerful things about the social media revolution has been to give those voices an audience. And whether that audience is a small circle of friends and family or a network of hundreds of thousands, it has opened up the world of creative self-expression to hundreds of millions of people, drastically lowering the barriers to participation.
One barrier remains, of course: creating something and sharing it with the world is still an act of courage, especially with the “so… what do you think?” of a comment field or a Like button. There are still many out there who delight in running down things other people have created, and still plenty of opportunity for a first-time creator to experience shame and embarrassment for caring about what they’ve created. Easier and safer, then, to do that ourselves pre-emptively, to be the first to describe our content as trivial.
But we sell ourselves short, and lie to ourselves, when we dismiss what we’re creating and sharing as worthless – and shrug off our rights as creators as being just as unimportant. Which is why it’s deeply gratifying to see the protests that arise over terms-of-service changes: we’re starting to take our time and self-expression a little more seriously.
And just as important is the way that the platforms themselves are responding. While I was writing this post, Instagram published one of its own, featuring – among other points – an overdue explanation of the most contentious terms-of-service change, governing the use of photos in advertising and promising clearer language on that point.
Instagram’s owners clearly understand and respect that, clever and innovative as their technology may be, it’s the community and the content they create that gives Instagram most of its value. We should show our time and creativity at least as much respect as they do.
by Rob Cottingham | Nov 5, 2012 | Everything Else, Social Signal
Across the social web, organizations are discovering the power that the right image – including an apt cartoon – can lend to your content. And there’s never been a better time to not be able to draw.
Okay, let me back up. It’s not that it doesn’t matter how well something is drawn, or how visually attractive it is. If you’re great at drawing, or you have a good eye for color and composition, you’re way ahead of the game — all other things being equal.
But all other things usually aren’t equal. (Try measuring them if you don’t believe me. I know of a rather good book on measuring things.) Exacting design standards can work against you if they keeps you from posting a less-than-perfect visual so long that the conversation has moved on to another topic by the time you hit “Publish”. And slick production values may not have the same impact as something that’s crudely drawn, but reflects an authentic voice conveying an important, resonant idea.
So here’s how you can add some visual cartoon-flavored impact to your story, blog post or report, even if you’ve never so much as doodled Snoopy on a high school notebook.
First, remember that the underlying content trumps everything else. What’s the message you want to convey, the story you want to tell, the fact you want to get across? What’s the emotional reaction you want your audience to have? What action do you want it to drive them to? Start by answering those questions, then start thinking about the visuals you want to create (and how you’ll make them). That can save you a lot of wasted effort, and you’ll avoid wasting your audience’s time and attention.
And tying for first, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t draw. Most of us actually can. We just have limits to what we can draw and how well, and beat ourselves up when we trip over them. But bumping up against our limits is how we learn to do better. And even if you never get to the point where gallery curators are banging on your door, there’s a lot more acceptance online of pretty rudimentary drawing skills… as long as they get across a great idea.
If you can draw two circles and make them overlap, you can make a Venn diagram. (If you can draw three circles, you can draw a more complex Venn diagram than most of the ones you’ll see out there.)
If you can draw a triangle on top of a square, and add a rectangle…
…then with a little practice, you can draw a house…
…and if you draw a line or two coming out of it, pointing to a few words (no shame in doing those with your computer, by the way!), you have a cartoon.
Two pointy lines, a circle, two dots and six straight lines,
… and you can make a cat…
…which, if you play your cards right, might volunteer to help you with fundraising.
The point isn’t to convince you that you can, in fact, draw Tippy the Turtle and should enroll now for an exciting career in illustration. It’s to say this: everyone has limits. See what you can do working within them, and every once in a while, press those boundaries gently and try to learn something new. Because those limits can bend and shift, and the more (and more often) you push against them, the more they’ll move.
(Bonus silver lining: Constraints in your drawing ability can force you into the kind of simplicity that focuses your message onto what really matters. If you can’t draw the cluttered, distracting background, you won’t.)
So that’s my pitch for learning to draw — or, more accurately, learning what you can draw now, and learning how to draw more down the road.
In the meantime…
Still can’t draw?* You can still create great pictures. Sites like Bitstrips.com and apps like Comic Life have amazingly simple interfaces that let you create comic strips and cartoon panels — and you’ll never have to draw so much as an eyebrow. Online charting and data visualization tools like Easel.ly are can let you pull together charts and info graphics quickly and easily.
Countless online meme-generating sites can let you whip up a sharable text-on-photo image in seconds; a mobile photo captioning app like Over for iOS lets you do it yourself right on your own device.
Or find some inspiration from the way webcomics like a) Dinosaur Comics, b) the profanity-laced Get Your War On and c) Wondermark use artwork created by others. Specifically, they use a) exactly the same clip-art in exactly the same positions in every single strip, adding dialogue; b) a very few different pieces of really awful clip-art, adding dialogue; and c) vintage public-domain 19th-century illustrations, adding dialogue. Just be sure you aren’t running afoul of anyone’s usage rights. (By the way, at least one of these artists actually can draw very, very well. So can Randall Munroe, who draws the stick-figure-centered, wildly-successful xkcd
* By “can’t draw”, I mean “Your drawing skills aren’t yet to the point where you feel comfortable sharing your creations with the world, but you’re working on them and any day now, you’re going to post that first doodle.”
If you don’t want to use a pen, you can still use a camera. Whether it’s a top-of-the-line DSLR or the nearest smartphone, a camera coupled with your imagination can take you a long way. Trying to dramatize the impact of overfishing and habitat degradation on wild salmon stocks? Get a few discarded fish bones from your local fish store, lay them on a sandy beach and (with a little chopping and arranging) set out the panels for a cartoon. Snap it, Photoshop in a few dialogue bubbles once you get home, and you have your cartoon.
You can do the same thing with all kinds of visual communication, of course. Those salmon bones could become a bar chart, tracking the decline in population. Or engage your inner pre-schooler to chart changes in education funding: make a line graph by gluing macaroni onto construction paper. Or if you want to draw attention to a word or phrase, write it in big letters on a blackboard or a lined flip chart, or draw it on a napkin — whatever context makes sense for the underlying idea. Take a picture of your creation, and you’re set.
In a bind? Let someone else do it. There’s the absolutely lovely way of paying a cartoonist to draw a custom cartoon (thanks, Beth!), or to license an existing one — but there’s also a trove of cartoons and illustrations out there available under a Creative Commons license. You can search for them on Flickr, or just Google “creative commons”, “cartoon” and various keywords. Or you can start bookmarking cartoonists you come across who post under an open license. (Modesty forbids suggesting a starting point.) Just be sure you respect the terms of that license, which may require attribution, using the image without modification, or using it in content that has a similar license.
Finally, keep working at it. Use your emerging skills — in drawing and in the alternatives — to create cartoons, but also to explore other ways to communicate visually. Try new things, see what works for you and for your audience… and keep learning. Read great books like Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin, and follow folks like Sunni Brown. Add Information is Beautiful and Sketchnote Army to your information diet. Watch Beth’s Pinterest board on visual marketing.
And please doodle. On your meeting notes, on your grocery list, on the draft annual report you’re editing… because sooner or later, you’re going to look at one of those doodles and see a cartoon — the kind you’d be proud to post, publish or share.
A version of this post originally appeared on Beth Kanter’s blog.
