More On The New Aesthetic

Is Fashion Ready For A New Aesthetic?, Jay Owens via BOF

For the last few years, the stylistic purview of much of the creative class in places like Shoreditch in London, the borough of Brooklyn in New York, and Berlin’s Mitte district has been curiously backward-looking. Perhaps this retreat into retro nostalgia is a reaction to economic uncertainty and technological change. Maybe it’s a craving for what we imagine were simpler times or a search for authenticity in a world that is increasingly artificial. Whatever the reason, the backward-looking trend extends to fashion, as well. In fact, perhaps more than any other design discipline, fashion is engaged in an intense dialogue with the past. “There’s so little innovation in fashion in its current state,” Susanna Lau, widely known as Susie Bubble, told BoF. And indeed, from Belstaff to Moynat to Schiaparelli, reviving dusty heritage brands is undoubtedly the business model du jour.

But over the past year, a loose group of creatives in London’s East End have given birth to a counter-narrative to the growing tide of heritage and nostalgia, examining the reality of our increasingly artificial and technology-mediated world head-on. Known as “The New Aesthetic,” the movement was born last May with a blog post by London-based writer and technologist James Bridle, who began collecting found images at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com that dealt with the “eruption of the digital into the physical world” and the idea of “seeing like a machine” in an attempt to capture and communicate the possibilities for a more contemporary visual culture. Subjects included everything from glitches in Google Maps to photographs from military drones in Afghanistan and the techno-organic forms of contemporary architecture that betray traces of the computer-aided design (CAD) programmes used to create them.

The movement really struck a chord and came to wider attention at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference where Mr Bridle led a panel called “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices” and futurist Bruce Sterling asked what the New Aesthetic meant for fashion in his highly-anticipated closing address. “Although SXSW people do look chic, it’s a rather retro look,” he challenged the tech-savvy audience in attendance. “They don’t actually look very futuristic. I would suggest, when you come back next year…come back in robotvision glitchcore!”

[…]

“We need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder,” wrote James Bridle in his first essay on the New Aesthetic. Digital methods of image research, image editing and production have quickly become embedded in the fashion industry, but the possibilities for digital creativity have yet to be fully explored. “It’s still not something people are consciously thinking about,” said Ms Lau.

As a term, “The New Aesthetic” may be short-lived. Surprising many, James Bridle shut down the New Aesthetic Tumblr ten days ago, exactly one year after it was launched. But if the “New Aesthetic” movement is already dead, this is surely only the beginning of digital technologies impacting the way fashion creatives think, see and design. Indeed, the generation of students just starting to arrive in fashion schools have only ever known a world that’s mediated by digital technology and learnt to process visual culture through a ceaseless digital stream of appropriated and juxtaposed images.

Hmmm. Is The New Aesthetic dead, or has it just gone underground?

Google+ Is A Ghost Town

Google continues to say that others’ analysis of public use of Google+ is a distortion of actual use — since much of the use of G+ is supposedly private — but Google will not share the data:

Exclusive: New Google Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement - Austin Carr via Fast Company

This week, the data analytics firm [RJ Metrics] provided Fast Company with exclusive new insights on Google+. The findings paint a very poor picture of the search giant’s social network—a picture of waning interest, weak user engagement, and minimal social activity. Google calls the study flawed—we’ll explain why in a second—and has boasted that more than 170 million people have “upgraded” to the network. RJ Metrics’ report, on the other hand, is yet another indicator that Google+ might indeed just be a “virtual ghost town,” as some have argued.

Let’s start with the findings. For its study, RJ Metrics (RJM) selected a sample of 40,000 random Google+ users. RJM then downloaded and analyzed every sample users’ public timeline, which contains all publicly available activity. One important caveat: RJM was only able to look at public data, which as it points out, “is not necessarily reflective of the entire population of users,” since some users are private or at least have private activity. That said, the stats are eye-opening:

• According to RJM’s report, the average post on Google+ has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share
• Roughly 30% of users who make a public post never make a second one
• Even after making five public posts, there is a 15% chance that a user will not post publicly again
• Among users who make publicly viewable posts, there is an average of 12 days between each post
• After a member makes a public post, the average number of public posts they make in each subsequent month declines steadily, a trend that is not improving

[…]

Part of the reason there have been so many reports on the so-called Google+ “ghost town” is because Google has refused to provide clear figures and metrics for its social network’s active user base. The company has said there are 170 million people who have “upgraded” to Google+, which is just a confusing way to say that 170 million people have signed up for the service (which takes about a click or two if you are already a Gmail user).

The company has been asked repeatedly for monthly active users, and it’s repeatedly denied such requests, essentially calling them irrelevant. The closest we’ve seen of active usership was when the company explained how many Google+ users were engaging with Google Plus-enhanced or -related products. The problem is that Google Plus-enhanced products include YouTube and Google.com, meaning if you are engaging with basically any Google property (there are 120 Google+ integrations thus far) while signed up with Google+, Google is basically counting this as engagement with Google+, which is incredibly misleading, as some have argued. 

Google has continuously fudged its numbers and dodged specifics around Google+, as search guru Danny Sullivan has recorded in his brilliant rundown of Google’s lack of transparency on the subject. To confuse things all the more, Larry Page recently said in an earnings call that “there are 2 parts to the Google+ experience: the part that is the social spine, and the other part that’s the social destination part of Google+ exclusively. Both of these are growing fast, but the social destination part of Google+ is growing as a new product with very healthy growth.”

There’s a simple way to solve this problem: Just provide the number of active monthly users on Google+ (proper). Facebook does it. Google even does it with YouTube, which, as Larry Page boasted recently, has 800 million monthly users. But when I made a request for such figures, Google did not provide them.

They won’t provide them. It’s a Ponzi scheme: Google is hoping that somehow, someway Google+ will catch on and that they can use that success to render the horrible reality of today irrelevant. However, it is likely to fall to pieces.

Is Page concerned that this latest gamble in the social marketplace might be his last? After Wave, is Google+ his last chance?