The meaningless of ‘the line’ and what it’s got to do with Yoda
I once met a creative director from Australia. There were quite a few things she couldn’t work out about the British. She never understood our calm stoic attitude to orderly queuing, our deference to the monarchy and our suspicion of show-offs and over earnestness to name but a few. When it came to the industry we both worked in, she couldn’t get her head around our obsession with ‘lines’.
This was in the mid-nineties, when digital stuff meant getting to grips with emails. The line she was on about then was ‘above’ and ‘below’ the line. She couldn’t understand why the distinction between ‘above’ and ‘below’ the line content was if it was ‘paid for’ space, when the people it was aimed at never really made the distinction.They either thought the stuff was worth their attention and responded, or they didn’t.
This dividing line has become less distinct these days thanks to another she probably wouldn’t ‘get’either; the distinction that arose between ‘online’ and ‘offline’. That used to mean ‘online’ as anything you did on a computer while ‘offline’ was anything else.
That was maybe a little daft when this distinction arose, because, once again, people don’t really make that distinction, they’ll decide to ignore us or not (accepting that the web makes ignoring content a lot easier).
But now that digital (the new name for ‘online’ in case you’re not up to speed with the jargon), is sort of blurred into everything built not just into phones, tablets and music devices, but into products and environments making them both responsive and intelligent, when ‘screens’ and access to video is now portable and entertainment is moving to ‘on demand’ rather than ‘scheduled’, where we can not only download, but upload stuff anywhere anytime, where we can talk with as many people as we want any time we want, about what we want, the chasm between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ disappears in a puff of smoke. It becomes not only meaningless, it becomes unhelpful.
More and more, online is going through a metamorphosis, no longer a destination, something we ‘log onto’ or ‘visit’. There really isn’t any sort of line anymore, the distinction is meaningless. Digital stuff has cascaded into our ‘real’ daily lives. No longer a separate ‘place’ but woven into the fabric of our lives. To quote Yoda, ‘It surrounds us, it binds us, it penetrates us’. Yes, it’s like The Force.
That’s the increasing reality for real people, so maybe it should follow for marketingland too. My creative director friend would like that. Not the Yoda metaphor though, she hated Star Wars nearly a much as she hated queuing.