Laugh Like a Monkey. News on the Origins of Laughter

Wired writes that new research has discovered that the root of human laughter originates with primates. The research mapped the relationship of how human infants and baby primates laughed in response to tickling, finding that there is continuity in what apes do, and in what humans do. Essentially, laughter has been evolving for 16 million years. "Laughter serves as an emotional contagion,” said biologist Jared Taglialatela. “It serves as a way of getting everyone on the same page." The article goes on to talk about laughter as a way we socially interact as humans. A fun little fact: humans are 30 times more likely to laugh when in the company of other humans.

It makes sense why so many ads go for the funny bone with Superbowl, the one time when homosapiens gather and watch together. Where do we go to laugh in the social media space? YouTube obviously has lots of stuff that makes us laugh. FaceBook and Twitter not so much. Hm mm. Lately,we tend to talk about social media as one thing, lump it all in one bucket. But as I noodle this more, where we socialize online really does gives us very different emotional payoffs.

Source: www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/evolutionlaughter/

New media concept: Statusphere

Brian Sollis, Silicon Valley PR principal, believes media behaviors are being reshaped by the bit-sized, real time status updates of Twitter, Facebook et al. Statusphere (shorthanded from Status Update Sphere) is driving behavior that favors the micro response vs. long form conversation (i.e., blogs). I can relate! I haven't written my blog in days, yet I've been tweeting and updating my FaceBook status everyday! The impact of Twitter in particular is mind boggling. My colleague, Stephen Riley, attended this year's SXSWi and said it's amazing to stop and think that Twitter wasn't even talked up at the conference just the year before.

Sollis writes:

"As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) - an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next. We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities."

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/10/are-blogs-losing-their-authority-to-the-statusphere/

"Social Media Watchers Are Becoming Their Own Cliche"

This week's ad industry buzz about the Skittles.com foray into social media made me curious. I went to the site and low and behold, 2 of the 6 featured pix of "Skittle friends" were actually 2 of my FaceBook friends. It made me wonder, is there a secret algorithim that matched my FBook to Skittles FBook? My social network expert said, "not likely."

It just seems so improbable! Two of my friends pictured out of 600,000+ registered fans just when I choose to visit? These friends happen to be ad folk, which made me think: Are ad people, as social media watchers and chasers of all things cool, actually heightening Skittles' buzz? Then it hit me--ad agency folk have become the "chattering class" of social media. We are not only watchers, but participants and pushers. We are our own target.


Have we become our own cliche? That's the provocative question from the socialmediainsider @ Mediapost.com. In the write-up, "Hey Who Stole My Twittles? I Mean Skittles?" the author concludes that the chatter has been less about Skittles brand, and more about what their campaign signals for the future of social media. Did the client and agency team recognize that the chattering class of ad people could be relied on to "push" the buzz out to the non-ad world? Just how many ad folk are on FBook and Twitter anyway? (me thinks, a great percent).

So is the Skittles "spider" going to pick-up the conversation from this blog and add it to the evidence of buzz created? Today, you can call me "pusher."