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olivemeister · 3 years

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OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya’s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!

#neo twewy #neo twewy spoilers #this turned into a behemoth. im so sorry #I CHECKED AND IT'S OVER 11K WORDS #I'M SO FUCKING SORRY

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housmania · 6 years

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In Defense of TJLC

A response to this Slate podcast and to general misconceptions.

Hello! Call me soe. I like cats, BBC Sherlock, and friendly online communities. I hope you do too.

I also blog about TJLC. So, when a Slate podcast came out this week portraying TJLCers in a jarringly negative light, I was dismayed. What I heard was not the community I know.

This post’s aim is to tell the other side of the story. I’m writing both for people who support TJLC and were shocked to hear of the podcast, and for people outside TJLC whose initial impressions have been skewed by the podcast or other outside sources.

I’ll address four of the most common arguments against TJLC through the lens of the argument presented by Willa Paskin, the podcast’s creator:

TJLC, as a theory, is “far-fetched” and merits no serious consideration.

TJLCers are dogmatic, ideological, and close-minded.

TJLCers have hated on people outside of TJLC to an unusual and appalling extent.

TJLC has brought more harm into the world than good.

I intend to refute these points. In the process, I hope to represent your run-of-the-mill TJLCer: not a hateful extremist, but rather someone who supports a theory, enjoys discussing it, and is happy to let those who don’t live their happy lives.

It also means adhering to the standards of a good TJLC meta writer: going through the podcast thoroughly, addressing Ms. Paskin’s correct insights as well as her failings; reading and acknowledging critics and downright opponents; citing all sources; and remaining civil and open-minded. I wish Ms. Paskin had afforded us these privileges.

I genuinely believe that Ms. Paskin meant well. Nonetheless, the biases of her sources, combined with several misconceptions and imperfect research, result in a piece that portrays TJLC inaccurately.

To understand what the podcast got wrong, we first need to cover:

What is TJLC?

TJLC is the theory that the characters John Watson and Sherlock Holmes will end up in a canonical romantic relationship on the BBC show Sherlock. People who support this theory are called TJLCers. TJLCers write analyses of the show, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and numerous other sources known as “metas”.

TJLC is short for “The Johnlock Conspiracy.” I must immediately clarify that this name is a joke. It began humorously and is always, always used tongue-in-cheek. Keep this in mind: Many misconceptions about TJLC arise from the fact that we take very few things seriously, as I’ll discuss later.

What isn’t TJLC?

TJLC is not the same as Johnlock.

Johnlock refers just to shipping John/Sherlock—thinking they’d make a cute romantic couple, without necessarily having any expectation of that happening on the show.

More fundamentally: Johnlock is about creating transformative, creative content. It’s about making something new. In essence, it’s fiction.

TJLC is about analyzing evidence that’s already there. It’s nonfiction.

Ms. Paskin frequently blurs the lines between the two and mourns TJLC for not having the same level of creativity. She explains, for example, that fandom reads into tiny elements of a show to create a transformative space. But TJLC is not transformative. That’s Johnlock.

Neither is TJLC based on wanting the show to “bend to [our] desires”—i.e., Johnlock shippers projecting wishful thinking onto the show. I’m happy to serve as a counterexample for that! I actually didn’t ship Johnlock at all before discovering TJLC. Rather, I found the theories plausible and loved the idea that a show centered around deduction and analysis could also be the subject of deduction and analysis.

Of course, people who already ship Johnlock are more likely to be attracted to TJLC. But the basis of TJLC is not to “see in the story that you have, the story that you want” (46:40)—that’s shipping—but to analyze the story you already have.

I cannot stress this enough: TJLC is analysis, NOT shipping.

TJLC and the “Great Game”

As the podcast explains, TJLCers aren’t the first analyze Sherlock Holmes. Fans of the originals have been analyzing the stories since the 1880s. These early theorists actually gave the name to two kinds of fan analysis: Watsonian and Doylist.

Watsonian fans played the “Great Game,” treating the stories like a real world. Doyle didn’t exist, so every detail had to be explained in-universe rather than attributed to author techniques or error. They’re closer to your modern shippers, creating headcanons to fill in gaps.

Doylist fans acknowledged that (no duh) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a real person, and therefore analyzed the stories as works of literature. They are essentially literary analysts and critics, the kind that wind up on JSTOR.

TJLCers are Doylists. Obviously, someone made the show. That means we analyze character arcs, cinematographic techniques, and rhetorical devices in the dialogue like a researcher in film studies or literature would.

Ms. Paskin warns that in the Watsonian Great Game, people kept “tongues planted firmly in cheek; TJLCers, not so much.” And yet, that’s the point! You wouldn’t expect a literary analyst to go “lol maybe The Great Gatsby criticizes society but like who knows” any more than you’d want Watsonians to really believe that because John Watson’s wife called him James, his middle name is Hamish (Scottish for James) rather than acknowledging that Doyle just forgot. A ridiculous premise entails a humorous approach. A reasonable premise entails a rational one.

TJLC isn’t quite the same as highbrow analysis, however, for three reasons:

First, we use our analyses to speculate about the future of the show. We don’t have the privilege of analyzing a complete work. In that sense, the closest analogy I can think of is that of political analysts: examining what’s already been said and done to predict what will happen next.

Second, we evolved from a fandom space. That means that the barrier between TJLC and Johnlock, between nonfiction analysis and creative fiction, is never as solid as it would be in academia. Furthermore, a significant number of TJLC meta writers also engage in fictional fanworks, making it more difficult to distinguish where hard analysis ends and transformative work begins. I’ll go into some of the nuances of meta in a bit.

Third, the people in TJLC are generally queer women and often young. And we can’t discuss biases against fandom and TJLC without acknowledging sexism and homophobia. When a film critic writes a theory, it’s deep; when we do, it’s ludicrous. Paradise Lost is fanfiction just as much as AO3, but only the former is treated as legitimate literature. Theories about straight couples are plausible; ones about queer ones are suddenly delusional or fetishization. Adult fanboys are mature content creators; fangirls are hysterical.

Conversations about the implicit biases in media depictions of fandom aren’t my focus here. Nonetheless, it’s crucial to bear in mind that highbrow criticisms of fandom that focus only on its ill effects and ignore the complexity, depth, community bonding, and social change that fandom (analytical and transformative) creates often denigrate fans as immature and delusional without considering whether that accurately represents even a significant minority of a fandom. It’s a bias that we should all keep in check.

As progressive as Ms. Paskin may be, the podcast also falls into this trap. In particular, she emphasizes sensationalist depictions of TJLC theories—highlighting far-fetched theories and glossing over deeper points—and the contemptible actions of very few TJLCers while glossing over the far more plausible mainstream theories and kindness of nearly all TJLCers. As a result, we naturally look hysterical and delusional.

So let’s tackle each of those issues: TJLC as a theory and the behavior of the TJLC community.

TJLC as a Theory

If you don’t support TJLC, I’m not asking you to be convinced by a few paragraphs. The aim here is simply to explain why TJLC is plausible.

Ms. Paskin asserts that (1) TJLC is completely unsupported by the original Sherlock Holmes stories, (2) that romantic coding in the show is simply “a knowing wink,” and that (3) TJLC “is based on an unfalsifiable premise: that the creators are lying to you.” In fact:

1. TJLC is supported by the original stories.

The Sherlock Holmes canon contains significant, documented evidence of queer coding similar to other works of the same time period. It’s also reasonable to theorize, based on biographical data, that Doyle himself was bisexual.

The extent to which the stories were deliberately coded is a matter of debate. Yet Ms. Paskin simply asserts that “Conan Doyle wasn’t trying to create a homosexual subtext when he wrote the characters, but he did write a deep and committed friendship.” As @one-thousand-splendid-stars put it:

How on earth can anyone possibly know if the homoeroticism was intentional or not, when ACD could’ve been persecuted for admitting it, or making it more obvious?

Ms. Paskin’s assertion, which does not acknowledge any evidence to the contrary, again conflates Johnlock shippers with TJLCers. Johnlock is about transformative fiction; TJLC is about nonfiction analysis.

Ms. Paskin also suggests that TJLCers are “queering” the text, except that queering generally implies a queer theory approach to something that wasn’t queer to begin with. Our whole objective is to reveal that the text was originally queer.

2. The basis for TJLC is the show itself.

Ms. Paskin supposes that TJLC is “is based on an unfalsifiable premise: that the creators are lying to you.”

But TJLC isn’t based on anything the creators have said. It’s based on analysis of the show itself.

There’s a whole lot of analysis; good summaries are here and here. Essentially, we argue that given the level of coding on the show, the most probable outcome is that there is deliberate subtext meant to foreshadow that John and Sherlock will become a couple. Elements like Sherlock being indifferent to women, yet “romantic entanglement would complete [him] as a human being” suggest that the subtext isn’t just a “knowing wink,” as Ms. Paskin asserts: it would be poor writing (not to mention queerbaiting) to complete such a setup and not follow through.

3. The creators

Ms. Paskin finds it alarming that TJLCers believe Moffat and Gatiss are deliberately lying when they say that Johnlock will not become canon.

And normally, I would agree! Except that Moffat and Gatiss have a long history of lying through their teeth about plot developments. For example, they vehemently repeated that The Abominable Bride would be a stand-alone episode completely independent of the show, but it turned out to be a drugged Sherlock’s theorizing about Moriarty’s plan. And before Series 4, they said that Mary would become a long-running character, then killed her off in the next episode.

So it’s not a stretch to think that they could be lying about one more thing, particularly when TJLC relies on independent evidence from the show itself.

In fact, Paskin argues that TJLCers, like Watsonians playing the Great Game, base their theories on a “contradiction”: “On the one hand the author might as well not exist, but then on the other hand, this person who doesn’t exist has made this perfectly explicable logical thing.”

Except that unlike Watsonians, we do acknowledge that the creators exist. We analyze the show as a work of fiction, with narrative techniques that can be analyzed just as much as plot elements.

Furthermore, the fact that the creators lie constantly doesn’t mean we don’t pay attention to what they do say. They have large incentives to keep upcoming plot twists secret, but that doesn’t mean they can’t reveal their motivations and influences. A lawyer questioning a lying witness can still gain information from what they do say.

Take a closer example: Say I went back to 1897 and asked Bram Stoker if there’s queer coding in Dracula (which is now well-documented). He would probably respond along the lines of “I’m not a sodomite; also, what???” But he might wax poetic about homoeroticism in Walt Whitman’s poetry and mention that his charismatic but domineering idol Henry Irving was the basis for Dracula.

So no, there’s no contradiction between analyzing the show and the creators’ influences while still believing that they don’t want to reveal upcoming plot points.

The Behavior of the TJLC Community

How Theories Work

Ms. Paskin rattles off several far-fetched TJLC theories that make TJLC as a whole sound ridiculous. Furthermore, she implies that TJLC is a monolithic community with a “dogmatic” belief in all of these theories, such that criticism and discussion don’t exist.

Guess what? I’m in TJLC, and I don’t believe half the theories she mentioned. That’s because TJLC is much less uniform than its detractors would believe. Furthermore, the general level of confidence that people have in a given piece of evidence depends on its strength. In other words, the more evidence for something, the more likely that TJLCers agree on it. The less evidence for something, the more likely we are to treat it as just something cool that could turn out to be coincidence.

We can divide TJLC meta into five basic categories:

1. Foundational meta

These are well-respected analysis of character arcs, dialogue, and other clearly deliberate plot elements such as this one. Pretty much all TJLCers agree with them. These are your best-researched, most widespread meta; they form the true basis of TJLC. Here are some examples. And yet they hardly show up in Ms. Paskin’s discussion, because they don’t make TJLC sound too far-fetched.

2. Circumstantial evidence

TJLC can stand on foundational meta alone, but there’s also secondary evidence to support it. This includes the “drinks code” (the theory that beverages serve as symbols on the show, supported by subsequent creator remarks) and similar theories that can’t hold up TJLC by themselves, but do provide extra evidence and add nuance to theories about character arcs and plot development.

3. Accessory meta

These are analyses of elements that could well turn out to be coincidence due to scarce evidence. If true, they allow us to establish character arcs in greater depth, but it’s perfectly possible that any given one is coincidence. These include the theories on wallpaper and lighting that Ms. Paskin reports as though they were the pillars of TJLC. They’re theories that I read and go, “Hm, interesting; maybe.”

4. Spinoff theories

These are theories that deal with specific paths the show might take. They generally have groups of supporters within TJLC, but each spinoff theory usually only has a smaller group of supporters within the larger TJLC community.

It’s important to note that many major theories don’t have to do with Johnlock at all. Take M-theory, the idea that Mycroft and other characters are under Moriarty’s thumb, or EMP, the idea that some episodes take place in Sherlock’s mind palace. If, as Ms. Paskin asserts, TJLC is about wishful thinking and wanting Johnlock to be canon, what would be the point of these? Furthermore, if TJLC is monolithic and dogmatic, why do we constantly discuss and critique these theories in constructive discussions? I had to make a whole table of theories after Series 4 because everyone’s opinion was so different!

5. Crack theories

These are usually clearly labeled “crack” and are never meant to be taken seriously. Again, TJLC contains a lot of humor. So sometimes, we goof off and write theories like this one that are clearly ridiculous, usually with an exaggerated conspiratorial tone, to have fun in the spirit of the Watsonians. Unfortunately, some people outside TJLC think we actually take these theories seriously and accordingly treat us as crazy people. Guys… Ctrl+F “crack” first.

To summarize:

TJLC contains theories with varying levels of evidence that are treated with corresponding levels of seriousness.

TJLCers are far from dogmatic. Different people have different views, and that’s OK.

TJLC is founded on criticism and discussion (here’s an example). By disagreeing on meta, we gain better insight into the characters.

Addressing Ms. Paskin: The theories she dwells on are EMP and M-Theory (40:04 and 10:37), both spinoff theories. They do not form part of the main body of TJLC, and fans are far more flexible about that stuff because it’s not nearly as firmly supported as foundational meta. She cites a clip analyzing Mycroft’s theme in the score, which is accessory meta that could well turn out to be coincidence. (By the way, I have serious doubts about all three of these theories. And TJLC is perfectly accepting of that!)

She also talks about loudest-subtext’s meta on the 2009 BBC queer representation report, whose objective was to demonstrate that it was possible for TJLC to happen from a production/permission standpoint, not to prove that TJLC was happening on the show. In that sense, it’s closer to circumstantial evidence.

She also fears that TJLCers “try to find order and logic and reason in every detail.” Again, sane TJLCers treat less solid evidence as less likely to be true. Caveat: Some TJLCers do go overboard. But they do not represent the overwhelming, sane majority.

TJLC Culture

Confidence and Criticism

Ms. Paskin finds it alarming that many TJLCers regarded TJLC as far more well-supported, even certain, than “an opinion or a possibility” or “just one ship among many” (14:50).

And yet, in an academic setting, isn’t it normal to think that the theory you researched and support is correct? Again, we hit the boundary in how the public perceives highbrow research and fan analysis. TJLC was not “just one ship among many” because (again) it’s not a ship, it’s a theory based on research and analysis. So naturally, we had a higher level of confidence in TJLC becoming canon than a shipper with an unsupported ship would.

Ms. Paskin implies that this confidence led directly to TJLC being unable to take criticism and therefore hating on people outside the community, since “denying [TJLC] was denying the truth” (14:55). But—first off—confidence does not directly lead to thin skins. Again, we debate everything. If good meta writers couldn’t change their minds given new evidence, TJLC wouldn’t exist.

Yet even when some TJLCers were more certain about TJLC than could be reasonably expected, the overwhelming majority was perfectly nice. We can, in fact, agree to disagree with others.

But this brings us to the most painful part of the podcast:

Fandom Toxicity: The Broad Picture

The podcast, having painted TJLCers as delusional, dogmatic crusaders, goes on to argue that TJLCers hated on people outside TJLC to an unusual and deplorable amount, such that TJLC’s main effect was to increase toxicity in the Sherlock fandom.

For starters: Yes, a few TJLCers did fit this despicable mold. I universally condemn people who went out of their way to attack people outside or inside the community. They are an insult to TJLC’s values of inclusivity and rational debate. And my heart goes out to the people who suffered as a result of them.

But guess what? All the TJLCers I’ve talked to agree with that. Because the fact is that awful people form an incredibly small minority of TJLC.

Most of the TJLCers who listened to the podcast found this to be the most insulting and painful part. They’ve reiterated time and again that the community as a whole is not a toxic place. @artfulkindoforder put it best:

So many TJLCers were never mean to anybody.

You can think we’re unrealistic, immature, delusional—fine. But at the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of us stuck to our circles of courteous people and just had fun.

In broad terms, there were several inconsistencies between the podcast and what I found. First, the podcast attributes toxic behavior to large swathes of TJLC, when in fact it tended to be a small group of repeat offenders, many of whom would attack people inside TJLC as well as outside it. loudest-subtext, a longtime TJLC blogger, discussed this here.

Secondly, the podcast makes absolutely no mention of the hate that TJLCers—often perfectly civil ones—received, which makes it easier to paint TJLC as engaging in vicious, one-sided attack. TJLCers, especially at the beginning, received shocking quantities of anonymous hate. Like attacks on people outside TJLC, I’m sure that the attacks on TJLCers were also due to a tiny minority of toxic people. But to gloss over them entirely is to paint an incomplete and biased picture. As @one-thousand-splendid-stars put it:

I’m not going to pretend that there was never nasty behavior from TJLC, but I’m also not going to say her description of us was accurate. She presented the TJLC fandom like it was a toxic cult.... She talked about fandom bullying as though we were never on the receiving end of it, and weren’t ever ridiculed, or called stupid, or sent anon hate, or harassed. To imply that tjlcers were only dishing it out is just flat out inaccurate.

The anonymous attacks on TJLCers had several results. First, TJLC developed a culture that stresses avoiding confrontation with outsiders: leaving other shippers be, unless they seek out TJLC posts. For example, some of the first things I learned were to misspell other ship names on TJLC posts so they wouldn’t show up when people wanted content promoting that ship, and not to reblog posts from outside shippers’ blogs with TJLC-related comments. Far from attacking outsiders, the whole point is to let people who disagree with TJLC do their own thing.

Second, the vast majority of TJLCers despise anon hate because they receive it unusually often. I’ve never seen a community with so many posts reminding people never to resort to it because they’ve seen how it hurt TJLC bloggers.

Third, a handful of TJLCers who got repeated and unwarranted hate did get more combative. But when looking at their later behavior, it’s important to understand that many of them became less willing to compromise on TJLC because they’d seen toxic fans remain unwilling to compromise or debate with them. And most of the conflicts I’ve seen as a result came from anti-TJLC people coming specifically to comment on TJLCers’ posts, not from TJLCers going out of their way to fight non-TJLCers.

Specific Incidents

I didn’t want to rely on secondhand knowledge about hate to write this response. In the spirit of TJLC, I wanted to be fair and impartial. That meant looking through the blogs of people who had received hate inside and outside TJLC. So here’s what I found out:

First off, it was awful. I was looking 4-5 years back to find the worst instances of hate in the community, and I wasn’t used to it because the bloggers I interact with are universally inclusive and civil.

Ms. Paskin discussed three specific incidents on the podcast: top/bottomlock, the 2015 221BCon incident, and post-Series 4 anger.

When top/bottomlock came up, I was baffled. First off, that discussion is ancient. It’s so old that by the time I joined TJLC in late 2015, it had practically died out. More importantly, a “debate” that Ms. Paskin describes as “very specific and dogmatic fanon” was—as I’ve understood—never taken seriously. Again, TJLC is not a very serious place, and people outside it are bound to misinterpret inside jokes. 99% of TJLCers saw top/bottomlock as nothing more than fodder for crack theories, and yet Ms. Paskin’s sources on this issue—none of whom are actually in TJLC—describe it as a debate of monumental importance.

The 2015 221BCon, on the other hand, was a serious conflict. As far as I can tell, people like Emma genuinely suffered, and the fact that neutral fans received anonymous attacks is shameful. But the results of this stretched to TJLCers as well as people outside TJLC, something that the podcast conveniently neglects to mention.

The end of Series 4 disappointed people throughout the Sherlock fandom. I’m not talking about Johnlock: plot inconsistencies, weird characterizations, and plot pulled from a horror movie resulted in its lowest Rotten Tomatoes rating ever. TJLC is too small to have that kind of clout, so to say that TJLCers were the only ones disappointed is clearly inaccurate.

Ms. Paskin claims that Series 4 “seemed straighter, not gayer, than before” and yet John telling Sherlock that “romantic entanglement would complete you as a human being” is uh…pretty gay. For many TJLCers, the problem wasn’t that there wasn’t Johnlock; the problem was that the quality of the show seemed to have drastically decreased.

TJLC immediately split into two groups. One group left TJLC, believing that Moffat and Gatiss had been queerbaiting. Many of them began constructive anti-queerbaiting discussions. Unfortunately, a few took their anger out on the creators.

The resulting hateful messages do not represent the views of the vast majority of former TJLCers, let alone people who still support TJLC. The fact that Amanda Abbington received a death threat is disgusting; and yet in TJLC, she’s always been regarded as a sort of beloved “fandom aunt”. In addition, Ms. Paskin cites an article that claimed that fans “dampened [Martin Freeman’s] enthusiasm.” But that interview has already been revealed as a clickbait-seeking misinterpretation—by Freeman himself.

The second group—those remaining in TJLC—were a bit desperate, and I’ll be the first to admit that several theories with scanty factual basis became more popular then than they would have in calmer times. The Apple Tree Yard theory, for instance, is clearly ridiculous in retrospect. But even I was willing to consider it. (Not my finest moment.) As a side note, however: the far-fetched “China cancelled Johnlock” theory she mentioned is by someone who’s not only outside TJLC, but also notorious for hating it

But regardless of the quality of these theories, 99% of the remaining TJLCers were certainly not hating on people—because who was there to hate, if there was no queerbaiting?

Ultimately, the podcast’s descriptions of hate related to TJLC are one-sided, distorted, and do not reflect the conduct of the overwhelming majority of TJLCers.

Podcast-Specific Errors

There’s a reason why the podcast comes off so different from reality: its research is seriously flawed.

For a podcast about TJLC, Ms. Paskin interviewed a whopping one (1) actual current TJLCer, whom she apparently interviewed after building much of her argument. Every other interviewee was outside TJLC and specifically disliked it. That will hardly make for an unbiased final product.

As a result, she culminates with several remarks that are genuinely insulting. She likens TJLC to “any other standard conspiracy where you have a Judgment Day,” suggesting that we’re irrational and fanatical. She summarizes the entire community as “people being cruel to one another because they disagree about how a fictional TV relationship should turn out,” combining every misconception of (1) TJLC being a ship instead of hard analysis, (2) blaming every TJLCers for the actions of very few, (3) TJLC being a silly fan thing rather than a starting point for meaningful research into queer representation and literary analysis, and (4) ignoring TJLC’s vast contributions to TJLCers’ lives while overemphasizing those who were harmed by it. Both remarks are in keeping with standard media portrayals of fans as irrational and immature. I expected better of her.

Ms. Paskin says that she “had a dream about…digging deeper, talking to more people, ones who could perfectly explain the allure of TJLC to me.” She had the opportunity to interview more actual TJLCers, but didn’t take it.

But the offer still stands! Come talk to us! Learn about what we’re actually like! Criticize our theories, if you think we’re dogmatic. Ask us what we think of TJLC, if you think it ruined our lives. Our ask boxes are wide open!

What the Podcast Left Out

Swimming in descriptions of TJLC as a source of hatred, the podcast glosses over one tiny little detail: that TJLC genuinely improved the lives of the vast majority of TJLCers.

I came out because of TJLC. I learned how to analyze literature because of TJLC. I discovered new parts of history and the queer people who have always been part of it. I found a community of curious, passionate, funny, and kind people who I could talk to.

And I’m just one person. I know people who found lifelong friends because of TJLC, wrote books because of it, became students of gender and sexuality studies, found a community of support when they had mental health, financial, or other personal problems, and had a blast theorizing about the possibility of landmark LGBT representation. Heck, Rebekah of TJLC Explained filmed hours of people talking about how much the community meant to them. And I even know former TJLCers who, though disappointed with the show, still appreciate how much it taught them about queer theory, queer history, and themselves.

Evaluating TJLC as a whole, it’s not far-fetched, dogmatic, or primarily a source of “darkness.” It’s a legitimate theory, supported by debate and rational analysis, that improved the lives of far more people than it ever hurt.

You’ve read this. Now what?

If you’re in the media:

This Slate podcast is now the #1 result when I search The Johnlock Conspiracy. Thousands of kind and logical voices on Tumblr and other sites are immediately silenced by well-known publications. So yeah, I care what the media thinks. Few voices have widespread effects. I want people trying to find out about TJLC to get a well-researched, less biased view of it.

Please, take your research seriously when discussing fandom. Interview actual members of the community. Be aware of the public bias of fans as unworthy of serious attention and unable to construct rational, legitimate arguments. And fight against it.

If you’re inside TJLC:

Researching for this meant a trip into the darkest parts of TJLC. We need to acknowledge that not everyone in this community is nice to everyone all of the time, and this resulted in incidents that seriously hurt some people. Remaining civil, especially when faced with disagreement or outright malice, means we keep this community friendly for everyone.

If you’re outside TJLC:

Thank you for taking the time to learn about a topic from someone you don’t necessarily agree with. We need more of your open-mindedness in the world.

If you completely disagree with me, please don’t send me anon hate. Constructive criticism is cool. Anon hate is lame. Be cool. But I welcome questions, comments, and constructive debate. My ask box is always open.

Thank you for reading.

-soe

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@thesaltofcarthage @devoursjohnlock @waitedforgarridebs @one-thousand-splendid-stars @garkgatiss @shinka @witch-lock @jenna221b @sarahthecoat @inevitably-johnlocked @the-7-percent-solution @artfulkindoforder @warmth-and-constancy@marcespot@whtboutdeductions@tjlcisthenewsexy @bluebluenova @heimishtheidealhusband @tendergingergirl @sagestreet @ebaeschnbliah @221bloodnun @marcelock @watsonshoneybee @victorianfantasywatson

#tjlc #slate #johnlock #sherlock #bbc sherlock #soe #slate podcast

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anniversary-magazine · 6 years

Text

Q+A with Irina Boersma, the Photographer Capturing the Environments of Our Dreams

Irina Boersma is a product and interior photographer based in Copenhagen. While working on projects internationally, she captures the places and brands at the core of our aesthetic desires in a delicate and harmonious manner.

We recently took the time to ask her some questions to learn more about how she succeeds in creating the perfect scenography for each pictures; the one you wish you could spend your Sundays in.

EL: Can you tell us a little bit more about how you started as a photographer? When did you realize you wanted to pursue this path in your life?

IB: When I was studying at university, I was studying Film and Media, and though I loved the storytelling through audiovisual media, I wasn’t satisfied with the creative process of filmmaking. I found it too slow and heavy, and most of my energy ended up in managing and organizing details of film production, which in the end took space from my creative contribution to the process.

I changed course to photography, which had been present in my life on a hobby basis already, and went to an art photography school. At this point, it was quite clear to me that I wanted to work with photography as my primary medium. I had always been very creative as a child, painting and drawing a lot, and the artistic expression was very natural to me. At the Art Photography school, we learned to find our own visual language and photographic voice, working with exhibitions and book projects. Afterward, I assisted one of Denmark's prominent art photographers Nicolai Howalt, which gave me a good insight into the working life of an art photographer. I admired and loved his work but wanted to have an everyday life with more photographing and less gallery networking and fundraising for art projects. After all, what I loved to do was really the act of photographing.

So how could I have a working life shooting more images I thought… That would be to do more commercial photography work next to my art projects. And to become a better commercial photographer, I started assisting one of the best photographers in that field, Peter Krasilnikoff. This began an almost seven-year-long work relationship, first as his full-time assistant, then he hired me as a photographer to take on some of the clients and the last two years we have been business partners in the studio we shared. Now he has retired from the commercial work, and I am continuing the work with our old clients and a lot of new ones on my own.

Peter taught me a lot of technical knowledge about photography, how to give shape to objects with light, and also a lot of business knowledge on how to approach commercial clients and organize large-scale photoshoots with a lot of practical details. And throughout those years I have been behind the camera every day, which is what I wanted.

Now that I have worked with commercial projects for years, I am finding myself returning to the more artistic expression in photography. It is like closing a circle, really, combining the two worlds I have been trained in - commercial photography and art photography.

EL: Were you always more attracted by shooting spaces and objects rather than portraits? Why did you decide to take this direction?

IB: Throughout the many years of working with photography, I have been around a lot of different genres of the medium. I have worked with food photography, travel reportage, wedding photography, interior, and portraits. I have always liked portrait photography because of the connection you get with the subject in front of the camera, and the empathic process and psychological challenge to get the right emotional state out in the image. So this type of work has been present along the way. I have chosen not to focus on it because I prefer the creative process of creating a universe and atmosphere around objects. You start from scratch and build up a world around the story you want to tell, and for me, that is very gratifying and a great creative outlet.

I do shoot portraits sometimes, but I never show them anymore. Now I think about it, it is a different way to use the medium - instead of catching a moment unfolding naturally before your lens, I am creating the scene and atmosphere unfolding before the lens. It is still a vivid process and often with several other creatives involved, like stylists, art directors, etc. so the process is not 100 percent predictable, and never gets boring to me.

“Now I think about it, it is a different way to use the medium - instead of catching a moment unfolding naturally before your lens, I am creating the scene and atmosphere unfolding before the lens.”

— Irina Boersma

EL: There is a precise aesthetic direction surrounding your body of work. Is harmony something that is important to you? Why is that so?

IB: This is an excellent question, because I do believe visual harmony is essential, but I don’t think about it consciously all the time when I work. It happens intuitively somehow. I look at the image and arrange things in a way that they feel harmonious and leave nothing to disturb or distract the eye from the story I am telling.

I think it must be because I want to convey an emotion in the spectator when they look at the image, and I don’t wish distracting elements to lead them away from the atmosphere and feeling I am creating. It is not just a space with some pretty things put in there, I want the image to convey some kind of atmosphere or emotion, even if it is very subtle. It can also be so subtle that the spectator doesn’t notice that he is being told a story, there is just a feeling of a beautiful scene.

“It can even be so subtle that the spectator doesn’t notice that he is being told a story, there is just a feeling of a beautiful scene.”

— Irina Boersma

EL: Do you work differently when you are shooting personal and commercial work? How do you manage to bring that artistic touch to your commercial projects?

IB: The commercial work has a specific framework set up by the needs of the clients, whereas the artistic or editorial projects are freer. So the process changes a bit, but my approach to every kind of project is the same, very serious and professional and I’m always trying to push the situation to the best outcome possible. What I try to do with the commercial work is to push clients bit by bit to become braver and expand or move their framework to include some artistic expression. It has to be done respectfully because after all the images need to push their business, create income, and therefore also finance my work. I also think it is about finding the right clients that see some value in adding a little extra feeling into the marketing material they need to produce.

EL: What role do you think images play in the lifestyle industry?

IB: Today images have become such an integrated part of our life and perception of ourselves and the world we live in. Obviously for a lifestyle industry images are crucial to presenting a universe surrounding their products. It is a straightforward way to connect to the consumer especially because we all spend so much time every day looking at images on Instagram and other media.

Personally, I think the overconsumption of images today is working a bit against the creatives in my field, in the sense that people don’t take the time to observe and feel the work we are presenting. You look for two seconds in your Instagram feed, think “oh that’s beautiful,” put a like and on to the next images. The attention to the image, and therefore also the emotional response to it lasts for a very short period.

As a photographer, I will probably embrace the analog ways of showing images again at some point in my career. This could be exhibiting printed images, having editorial projects in biannual magazines and making book projects. Showing pictures to an audience that takes the time to actually look at them! This would lead me back to the starting point of my photographic career, art photography, and the circle has been completed once again. I’m not impatient to get there though, right now I love where I am and embrace all the challenges that come my way.

EL: What are your upcoming projects for 2019? What would you like to accomplish this year?

IB: For me, this year is really about integrating the artistic expression into the commercial work and having good working relations in both the commercial and editorial photography field. I will release several great editorial series that I am working on and still continue to work with my current and hopefully some new commercial clients.

This already has been my focus for a while, and I will continue working in this direction. Expanding my international network is also very important to me this year, as it gives me a lot of new inputs and inspirations for my work. I want my photographic work to develop continuously, so to expand my visual horizons I want to see some other colors and ways of doing things. That feeds the creative brain with inputs for new photographic projects in the future.

All images by Irina Boersma

#Irina Boersma #Photographer #Copenhagen #Architecture #Design #Lifestyle #Featured

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rhetorician-meeks-blog · 6 years

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*Kanye’s Narrative*

Photo source: https://variety.com/2016/music/news/kanye-west-grammys-rant-twitter-1201713892/

Palczewski claims that “Narratives have great power to create understanding and knowledge,” but only when that power is articulated correctly. I will be examining the questions: What narratives does this artifact tell? What truths does it promote, limit, or ignore? Overall, is this narrative positive or negative for society?

In order to properly interrogate these questions, I will be using one of Kanye West’s public speeches/rants on Twitter. Feeling major negative feedback from recent public events, Kanye West’s narrative to his Twitter followers includes telling his audience to be whomever they want, he paints a picture of media being robotic propaganda, but is overall a positive narrative to introduce to society.

Prior to Kanye West posting this video of himself on Twitter, West had been dealing with mental illness in previous months to this narrative. However, he felt that his diagnosis was wrong. Shortly after, Kanye was featured on SNL and received negative feedback because of his support for Trump. This speech that West gives seems like an attempt to get his power back from media.In the video, West uses rhetoric to try to get his audience to not only understand how feels, but to emphasize that he is allowed to feel that way. West approaches this several different ways.

While narratives are not referential, they are based off of one’s telling of events. Kanye attempts to tell multiple narratives that are regarded are rhetoric because of the bias or perspectives he tells of the event. One of the first truths that Kanye’s narrative attempts to declare is the truth that the media is controlling our minds. In fact, Kanye not states that the media controls his mind and made him out to be someone he was not. He begins his narrative with examples of wrongness in the news media,stating that the media was wrong about the 2016 election. He then moves to apply those events to his specific instance. For example, one of the lines of his speech says that media posts “to make me look like I’m crazy to you. I am not crazy” (as cited in Meara, 2018). In this specific instance, West uses narrative to show his followers that he is not “crazy” no matter what any doctor, person, or media says. He uses examples of media being wrong to further prove they are wrong about him. West’s logic is that the media may say false things about you, but we have to look past that and just love. This brings us into another truth told through West’s narrative: we should love ourselves for who we are. This could also be seen as the end point to Kanye’s narrative about the media. Kanye West emphasizes the importance of ignoring what others say so we can be ourselves. In an attempt to emotionally engage his audience, he makes arguments using deeply touching phrases and sayings such as “the beauty you have is inside you. It’s not based on how many records you sell” (as cited in Meara, 2018). Every audience loves a good story about the protagonist who overcomes his rival’s opinions of him, and that is exactly what Kanye West gave them. He attempts to pull at their heart-strings by using deeply profound sayings.

One of the most crucial aspects to Kanye’s narrative being successful rhetoric is his persistence that the media that consumes our lives in the United States. In fact, West actually begins his taped speech with the words “I just want to talk about mind control” (Meara 2018). He then goes on to use the phrases “mind control” and “programmed robot” repeatedly throughout his video. West’s narrative is that the media has control of our mind and everyday lives. Palczewski also discusses this narrative of the media when they state “Newspapers, news shows, Internet sites are filled with narratives about the issues and personalities of the day,” referring to celebrities on the latter. The news media forms their own narrative of Kanye and his life, and the rest of the world is influenced by those news sites. Kanye is trying to go against this narrative. He uses these heavily connotative words regularly because they will stick in the minds of his audience. Mind control is scary to the average person, while programmed robots are sought to be the opposite of human autonomy. West also does this through saying things such as the media is “trying to control you based off of incentivising you” through determining status through how many ‘likes’ or ‘followers’ one has. Along with the implication of control, West also claims that people (he never specificies who) attempt to destroy creativity on a regular occurance. According to Kanye’s narrative, people try to hold him back from “posting something that is like positive on Instagram,” because they want him,“to not express [him]self” (Meara 2018). This also supports Kanye’s claim about the media’s narrative of him. Even when he tries to show “our heart and our spirit,” Kanye’s posts can be removed by any social media platform if it does not go with the “big agenda” (Meara 2018). Kanye’s narrative tells of a controlling, news-dominated United States that steps on one’s creativity. Through the narration of these events, his goal is for his audience to see the broader perspective of social media, and try to direct his audience’s attention to the control social/news media has over the United States. Kanye’s narrative is an attempt to open people’s eyes to the control and agenda the media (in any form ) has over most of the population. When assessing whether West’s narrative is a positive or negative narrative for society, there are many factors that come into play. As quoted in the first sentence of this analysis, narratives have the potential to have a big impact on society. According to Palczeski, “narratives can and should be judged on several levels: aesthetics, authorial intent, empirical truth, and social truth” (129). Kanye lacks aesthetic in his narrative, mainly because he is sharing experiences that are related rather than telling a specific story that has characters and a plot. Authorial truth evaluates “whether the rhetoric intends to make factual claims” (Palczewski). This is a hard judgement to make, especially because it revolves around something that is so large and institutionalized in America (social media platforms). However, Kanye’s narrative seems to be mostly events, reactions, and opinions. But when speaking about empirical truth, all of the events in Kanye’s narrative “reports the events as accurately as possible” (Palczewski). The last judgement to consider is social truth. Whether or not this is an objective reality and that society has all come to this moment/event/realization together. This is the driving force behind Kanye’s narrative. He wants people to see how media has progressed so negatively in our lives. Evidence leads that Kanye West’s narrative does not harm or hurt society in any way, but he does try to help society positively realize this. Kanye’s words are not full of hate or lies, but instead he gives his followers insight that could lead to a more positive future.

One of the biggest disadvantages of analyzing narratives is knowing what is actually the truth. Many people cannot even define what is true, so how are we supposed to know what is and isn’t truthful? This is one question that will prevent any ‘real’ truth from being known. We have to base that truth off of evidence like documentation or fossils in a sense. On the other hand, the advantage of assessing West’s narrative in this manner is that it allows us to see the direct viewpoint of Kanye. Essentially, we see his reactions and hear his thoughts and feelings. This is an opportunity that the media often takes away from him. It is easier to have a deep understanding of a problem when an audience hears two perspectives. In the United States, we are constantly hearing about Kanye West’s life. But did we ever stop to consider that the instances we hear about are only one side of the story? This is why analyzing rhetoric as narratives helps fill the gaps of truth that the media intentionally left out.

John Rodden can also speak to the advantages of narratives. Rodden states that instead of the physically provable pieces of evidence we normally see, we see a “more full-bodied and even impassioned” story that is “rational, but also emotive and ethical” (2008). Rodden brings to the table a very feasible argument. As (normal functioning) humans, we can all use our senses to help us see, hear, smell, feel, or taste things so that there is tangible evidence. But what evidence fails to consider is the other half of humanity. That other half is filled with emotions and mental feelings and reactions. Since every person (again, assumably normal) experiences emotions daily, it should not be used as a disadvantage to rhetoric as narratives.

Narratives play a powerful role when studying rhetoricism. Presumably, any credible narrative contains empirical and social truths that are told through the narrator’s perspective on those events. Since it is a personal recalling of the events/experience, it is easy to introduce bias into the story subconsciously, so we typically discount narratives. However, narratives are crucial to getting the full scope of things. When negative feedback came back to Kanye more than once, he decided to tell his narrative. Kanye West’s narrative to his Twitter followers includes painting the picture of media as robotic propaganda, and embracing themselves for whoever they may be. Overall, this is a positive narrative that would have positive effects on society.

References:

Meara, P. (2018, October 14). Kanye West Goes On Another Rant To Declare He's Not Crazy. Retrieved from https://www.bet.com/music/2018/10/13/kanye-west-rant.html

Palczewski, C. H., Ice, R., Fritch, J. (2012). Narratives. In Rhetoric in civic life (pp. 117-146). State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc.

Rodden, J. (2008). How Do Stories Convince Us? Notes Towards a Rhetoric of Narrative. College Literature, 35(1), 148–173. Retrieved from http://fulla.augustana.edu:2056/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=28047161&site=ehost-live

#kanye west #rant #rhetoric #analysis #narrative

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devontaemasteryblog · 3 years

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Why IPR is Crucial to PR Professionals

Innovative Public Relations Resources and Tools gave me a lot of insight about the power of social media in this day and age, and how to use these free platforms to build my brand! In the past, public relations practitioners distributed messages through one-way communication tactics. Nowadays, public relations practitioners also strategically communicate with their audience, and in return, the audience is able to communicate with practitioners and their organizations directly.

Honestly, the online course description does not give IPR its just due! Prior to taking this course, three of my original goals in this course were to learn definitions and utilize RSS feeds and HTML format, create and curate content, and apply SMART goals to my personal life.

I began this course unsure if I knew about or was being capable of completing future assignments because of the description. To my surprise, I had already performed some of these tactics before!

For instance, I was already familiar with using WordPress, so I knew how to create a website from scratch and publish original blog posts. When it came to curating content, my journalistic instincts set in; to speculate and create conversations about relevant topics with my peers!

During Week 4, an online reading briefly discussed using SMART goals to create a social media strategy. Before taking this class, I wanted to take initiative and create SMART goals and apply them to my personal life such as planning ahead, being more organized, and managing my time better. While I did successfully submit all but one assignment on time, I struggled with balancing school and work this month. I am happy that I reached out to Professor Foley for advice when I first began having issues instead of waiting for things to get worse.

What I actually learned in this course was how to take my professional brand to the next level by creating or revamping professional social media handles, creating a new professional media website, and schedule posts through social media management websites/applications!

Before starting IPR, I had existing professional Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. During this course, I created professional business Instagram and Facebook profiles. As Professor Foley discussed, it is important to establish yourself online as a public relations professional so that you are viewed as credible and respected. It is equally important to create posts that cater to your platform and your target audience.

Next, I learned how to create my own media website. This is something that I have been wanting to do for a while, but wanted to wait until “the right time” to do so. This class definitely gave me the push I needed to build my professional brand. My media site included a professional-looking selfie, an About Me, a YouTube brand video, examples of previous work, contact information, social media handles, and more!

Finally, I learned how to schedule posts through Hootsuite and Later. Before taking this course, I was already vaguely familiar with Hootsuite. However, I had never registered or schedule posts before. Later was new to me. The importance of scheduling posts is to reach my audience during times when they are most engaged. Although scheduling posts takes a lot of preparation and effort, it could make the difference in whether or not your business/brand succeeds.

One way that the information I learned in IPR will help my professional career as a public relations professional is by building a solid foundation for me to continue growing upon. Even though some information was not new to me, I had a better appreciation and understanding for the tools I used and their significance. I want to continue building my brand through social media so that by the time I graduate, it becomes second nature. In the meantime, Social Media Metrics and ROI, here I come!

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jackrgaines · 4 years

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How to promote your small business on Instagram: 10 simple steps

The post How to promote your small business on Instagram: 10 simple steps appeared first on HostGator Blog.

Own a small business and decided to promote it on Instagram? Well, congratulations! You chose the right platform. Don’t worry; you don’t have to be giant brands such as Nike or National Geographic to be successful and generate sales on Instagram. Added bonus? Instagram can help you to boost website traffic.

Using Instagram’s incredible features, you can apply many digital marketing techniques in order to attract Instagram followers for free, which will eventually turn to your potential customers.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through the best Instagram marketing practices for small businesses. I’ll talk about Instagram tips, tricks, and its wide range of free tools that can come handy for small business owners. So, buckle up and read this article carefully.

Why Use Instagram for Small Businesses?

First, I’m going to tell you why you should absolutely have zero doubt about using Instagram for your family-run business or any other type of small business. Instagram gained massive popularity in recent years and is now one of the leading social media platforms. Not only does Instagram help businesses to grow, but also it gave birth to many new companies that run entirely online on the platform.

Here’s a short list of reasons why you should invest your time and energy on Instagram marketing for your small business:

Instagrammers love business pages: about 80% of them follow a business on the platform.

Instagram is a more engaging platform: it has an outstanding median engagement rate of 1.6% (almost 33x higher than a Tweet and 17x higher than a Facebook post).

Instagram is free: you don’t have to pay anything to have a business page. Plus, you can access Instagram’s useful insights.

Instagram is user-friendly: needless to say, it’s pretty straightforward to use.

Instagram is a highly visual platform: perfect for showcasing your products or services.

How to Promote Your Small Business on Instagram in 10 Steps

Now that you’re convinced how much Instagram can be beneficial for you let’s go over the best promotion actions that you can take to be a winner in this crazy digital world. I’ll break them down into 10 simple steps.

Step 1- Connect Your Instagram to Your Website and other Social Media

Instagram allows you to add one external link to your bio; so, you have the opportunity to expose your website more to your followers. Actually, social media is one of the best tools that you can use to drive traffic to your website.

Source: Instagram – Go Get Em Tiger

Another way to use this “link in the bio” feature is to cross-promote all other of your social media. If most of your sales come from other social media or shopping platforms, you can simply add all your social media links to your Instagram bio.

And finally, if you’re doing an excellent job on other social media such as Twitter or Facebook, better to promote your Instagram page on them. These people are already familiar with your business and like to see what your business has to offer.

Source: Youtube – Verve Coffee

The important thing when cross-promoting on Instagram is paying attention to your content. If you use the same content on all of your social media, how do you expect people to follow you on the new platform?

Although keeping the same style and tone is essential to preserve brand consistency, you need to create different content types for each platform, considering that platform’s atmosphere.

For example, Twitter users are known to be young, educated, and willing to express their thoughts in a concise, witty way, whereas on Facebook, you can find more senior users. TikTok is filled with teenagers, and Instagram is perfect for those who love watching short videos and images.

Step 2- Use Instagram Management Apps

Let’s face the ugly truth: running an Instagram page is a full-time job. You can’t expect only to share one photo or video per week and get many followers. You need to continually interact with the Instagram community because the key to success on Instagram can be summarized in one single word: engagement. And the best way to reach this vital quality is by using Instagram manager apps.

Let me explain it further. If you’re already into Instagram, you probably know that the concept of engagement on Instagram has changed drastically over the few years. Those were old days when you could simply use bots or buy followers and likes to gain popularity on the platform. Thanks to the ever-changing Instagram algorithm, the only way to gain real followers and being successful on Instagram is engagement. The more engaged with the community you are, the more your chance of being visible and popular.

As mentioned earlier, achieving this level of engagement on Instagram requires hours of focused work. As a businessperson, you may not have enough time to deal with promoting your Instagram. One alternative option would be hiring an Instagram manager, which is not exactly a budget-friendly decision.

A better alternative is to use Instagram apps. Here’s why you should use them:

They’re way cheaper than other methods of Instagram marketing.

You can save time

Using manager apps, your Instagram growth is guaranteed.

They come with many other useful features.

Just be careful about choosing the best Instagram app; not all of them are equally valid.

Step 3- Optimize Instagram Username, Display Name, and Bio

As simple as it might sound, just like hashtags, Instagram username, display name, and bio play a crucial role in making you visible for those searching your services on the platform.

Make sure that your username and display name (the name that appears above your bio) includes your business’ main keyword, and your bio contains the secondary ones. What are your main and secondary keywords? Take a look at this restaurant Instagram page:

Source: Instagram – Nova Restaurant

As you can see, for a restaurant, the main keyword is obviously “restaurant,” which is included in both the username and the display name. Also, This restaurant serves Latin American food (secondary keyword); so, they’ve mentioned that in the bio.

Optimizing these parts for the Instagram search engine can make a huge difference. So, don’t overlook them.

Step 4- Consider Instagram Shoppable

You might have your website or other channels of sales that work perfectly for you. But on Instagram, people really love to buy stuff, even as a hobby. That’s why you should consider using the Instagram Shoppable feature. This tool allows your customers to pay for the items right on the app.

Source: Instagram -Boutique du Sorcier

To use this tool, you must have a business account connected to your Facebook catalogs. Also, Your account must be approved for Instagram Shopping. Then do these steps (from Instagram help center):

Go to your profile and tap

Tap Settings

Tap Business.

Tap Shopping. Note: The option to tap Shopping is only available to accounts that have been approved for Instagram Shopping.

Tap Continue

Select a product catalog to connect to your professional account.

Tap Done.

After a few days, your Instagram shop is ready to use!

Step 5- Make the Most of Instagram Story

Have I mentioned that Instagram engagement is vital for your success on Instagram? A very useful tool on Instagram, which skyrises your engagement is Instagram Story. There are so many reasons why you should use Instagram Story for your business. This part of the app gives you numerous opportunities to be creative.

Feel free to try all the amazing filters and stickers to entertain your followers. Poll, quiz, emoji slider, and the countdown (a great way of accounting for upcoming products) are only some of the few features of Instagram Story.

Source: Instagram – Allpress Espresso and Grind

Step 6- Use User-generated Content (UGC)

Using user-generated content is a fantastic way to gain your customer’s trust, along with their engagement. Don’t forget that although they might have a small audience, UGC works like a free advertisement for your business. When other followers see real and authentic content, it provides them a more tangible experience. Think about it; why would anyone advertise a product or service for free unless he or she absolutely loves it?

Source: Instagram – Chinatown Ice Cream Factory

Even major brands such as Coca Cola and Starbucks use UGC to enhance their engagement level on Instagram.

Source: Instagram – Starbucks

Step 7- Run an Influencer Campaign

Another great way to increase your visibility on Instagram is by running an Influencer campaign. No matter what your business is about, you can find perfect influencers to promote your page. Your budget might not allow you to work with macro-influencers (those who have 100K to 1M followers), but micro-influencers are better options.

Source: Giphy

Believe it or not, it’s better to partner up with Instagram micro-influencers as they produce more engagement compared to the more prominent names. As you run a small-sized business, it’s a good idea to contact a local influencer, especially if you have a store or office in the town.

Source: Instagram – Star Stranded

Step 8- Keep Eyes on The Competition

Unless your business is incredibly rare, you always have a handful of competitors on Instagram. Try to track and monitor at least your best five competitors on Instagram to see how they manage their accounts. Seek out for their weakness and learn from their mistakes to avoid them in the future. Also, get inspired by their best posts and try to create your own ideas based on them.

I’m not saying that you should copy the ideas, captions, or photos; that would be wrong and useless. What you should do is learn from them, as they are the best in your niche and then customize those ideas for your own business.

Step 9- Instagram Contests and Giveaways

People love getting free stuff. Who doesn’t? Well, you can get advantages of this spirit to promote your business on Instagram. Running an Instagram contest or giveaway is not a difficult task to do. Just define some simple rules such as “Like and share this post” or “Tag three of your friends to win” to persuade your followers to participate.

Source: Instagram – Spooksieboo

You can use one of your products or services (or a considerable discount) as a reward.

10- Use Instagram Ads

The last item on the list is not a free tool; however, it definitely worth trying. Instagram ads can make a sharp difference if you correctly apply them. The good thing about Instagram apps is that you can start with negligible amounts of money and see how they go. It pretty much works like Facebook ads, but make sure you know all things about Instagram ads for your business before launching a campaign.

Final Words

Just because your business is small does not mean your audience should be small too. Take the necessary steps that I’ve mentioned to build a whole new digital customer level on Instagram.

Find the post on the HostGator Blog

from HostGator Blog https://www.hostgator.com/blog/how-to-promote-your-small-business-on-instagram-10-simple-steps/

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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‘The Circle’ App Is Obviously Fake

It is increasingly rare to hear someone enthusiastically profess their love for a social media app. In the age of mass digital surveillance and brazen data profiteering, even a base level of trust can seem naive.

But on Netflix’s U.S. adaptation of the global reality show phenomenon The Circle, the titular application seems to perpetually amaze and delight its users. “Yo Circle, you are the shit!” one player exclaims in the first episode, a level of customer satisfaction that would make any UX designer weak. For a program that frequently features absurdist competitions involving cake decoration or hashtag generation, the “app” is the most glaringly inane part of an otherwise charmingly creepy show.

The premise of The Circle is simple, if strange: contestants are housed in discrete units within one apartment building, ostensibly living down the hall from each other while never meeting in person. Players instead communicate solely through a voice-activated app called The Circle, where they can update profiles with photos, relationship statuses, and insightful bios (“GOD knows my heart BUT the Devil knows my vocabulary!”).

The show allows players to “catfish” each other with fake names and photos, flirt with abandon, and otherwise manipulate fellow Circle users to claw their way to the top of the social food chain. In the process, the show attempts to raise questions brought on in a Web 2.0 world—What does digital authenticity look like? How do we understand nuance, humor, or sexual advances (eggplant emojis, of course) in the absence of in-person communication? And, perhaps most crucially, what is the proper length of a hashtag?

But unfortunately, whatever conclusions The Circle might draw about digital interactions are overshadowed by a spherically-shaped elephant in the room: the app is distractingly fake. It isn’t really the app’s interface—its generic icons and soft gradient backgrounds are ugly, sure, but no worse than your average B-round startup. What really grates at the very reality of this reality show is the basic believability of its central voice-recognition app.

Image: Netflix

LIke any B-round startup worth its weight in Soylent, The Circle’s developers Joi Palloi published a series of Medium articles outlining its strategy when building the application for the UK iteration of the show. Tellingly, the third proposed installment, “technical details behind the platform and the app,” is nowhere to be found. The first two posts detail the choices Joi Palloi made in developing the app’s interface, as well as designing a mobile app that accompanied the UK version of the show.

In the blogs, Joi Palloi outlined its approach to design—“we focused on creating a bespoke, secure application that felt very familiar to contestants and viewers, reflecting the conventions of social media experiences”—as well as third-party partnerships they used when building much of the technical functionality of the mobile app. Any discussion of the seemingly advanced voice recognition technology is conspicuously absent. In the first post, however, Joi Palloi hints at some off-screen TV magic: “We made sure that players could intuitively understand how to interact with the Circle while, behind the scenes, producers had access to robust functionality to allow them to manage players’ interactions.”

In case that wasn’t enough of a tip off that the show’s “artificial intelligence” is heavily augmented, The Circle’s creator Tim Harcourt told Vulture in a recent interview: “what we actually have is, when you talk to the Circle, there’s a producer who’s transcribing what you say. Instantly, that gets pushed to the next room. So there is some humanity in the app, and that’s a couple of producers whose job it is to take dictation from the players.” On the show, however, the players seem entirely bought in to The Circle’s innovative voice recognition technology.

Joi Palloi and Netflix did not respond to a request for comment.

To state the obvious: yes, reality shows are artifice. Storylines are concocted by producers, who feed it to the players, who are later edited for maximum drama in post-production. That’s why we love them! But for a competition that has been called “dystopic” and has garnered countless comparisons to shows like Black Mirror, basic technological plausibility is kind of the point. But instead, The Circle expects its “users” and viewers to suspend disbelief. In episode one, a contestant, Alana, asks, “Circle, can I see the photo of me with literally what I’m wearing right now?” Circle, observant and subservient, instantaneously pulls up a photo of Alana in the polka dot dress she is wearing. “Do we have emojis?” another contestant asks, mostly to herself, later in the episode. Without hesitation, Circle pulls up a list of emojis, then seemingly selects the perfect reaction face based on the prompt of “Can we put a wink or a side smile?”

What? Hasn’t the reliability of consumer-facing voice AI become its own punchline? Haven’t we given up on Siri’s ability to spell our names right, search for information on the internet, or even simply transcribe what we’re saying? We’re supposed to just sit there and believe that Circle can understand one character’s demand to “Take me to [the photo album] ‘GYM LIFE BRAH,’” or correctly add a crying-face emoji after another requests “that emoji that’s like ‘wahhh?"

Image: Netflix

Hoping to confirm that my cynicism was justified, I reached out to Eric Hall Schwartz, a reporter for the voice AI-centric tech blog VoiceBot.ai. But much to my dismay, he thinks that a decent chunk of Circle’s supposed intelligence is in the realm of plausibility. “The ability of AI to understand inflection and emotion is imperfect, but it's improving all the time.” However, he adds, “the tricky part is mostly that everyone speaks differently, so there's no generic way of programming.” The biases that plagues machine learning algorithms in other fields also impact voice AI as well—research shows that even the best speech recognition algorithms are significantly less accurate for women and people with regional dialects.

On a show with cast members hailing from regions as disparate as the Bronx and Dallas, it’s nearly impossible that an app like Circle would immediately be able to, for example, add implied periods and question marks based on vocal inflections immediately “out of the box.” And, judging by the various initial interactions players had with the circle (Alana tries to tap the mounted TV screen, to no avail), it seems unlikely that they had the prior trainings necessary for the app to understand that Joey pretty much always speaks in all caps.

As for the voice-based emoji dictation? According to Schwartz, “It's something that is possible but it's not something you can do with Siri automatically. If you're dictating a message through the iPhone and you say ‘heart emoji,’ it will literally type the words ‘heart emoji.’”

The image recognition based on vague descriptions was the least plausible (“there's certainly no prominent photo album searching at that level”), but gave Schwartz the most pause: “Someone could ask their device to pull up photos of you wearing certain outfits; they might be on your Facebook or pulling them from live camera feeds. The benign ways it's used in the show doesn't eliminate potential for misuse.”

Perhaps that’s the actual threat of The Circle: it almost certainly is centered on an app controlled by production assistants listening to commands off camera, a reminder that even the best Google AI is most likely repackaged human labor, but it normalizes the idea that a voice assistant knows everything about you. Even if voice-to-emoji technology isn’t perfected for another year or so, The Circle is already priming viewers for a world in which AI’s familiarity with our image and our voice is so assumed it becomes ingrained. In calling it a dystopia, we’ve accepted that The Circle is already some vision of some future. As long as future Siri gets my name right on the first try, I guess I’m okay with that.

‘The Circle’ App Is Obviously Fake syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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warmdevs · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://warmdevs.com/teenagers-ux-designing-for-teens.html

Teenager’s UX: Designing for Teens

Teens are wired. Technology is so integrated with teenagers’ lives that creating useful and usable websites and apps for them is more critical than ever. To succeed in a world where the next best thing is a click away and text message interruptions are the rule, not the exception, website and app creators must clearly understand what teens want and how to keep them on a site.

To understand the expectations of a generation that grew up with technology and the internet, we conducted qualitative usability studies with teenage participants to identify guidelines for how websites can be improved to match this age group’s’ abilities and preferences.

Our research refutes many stereotypes, including the following:

Mobile proficiency transfers across all devices

Teens just want to be entertained online with graphics and multimedia

Teens are tech-savvy

Teens want everything to be social

Teens are not technowizards who surf the web with abandon. And they don’t like sites laden with glitzy, blinking graphics. Letting stereotypes steer your design can lead to disastrous outcomes.

Teenagers use the internet on many devices in various environments. For our research, we focused on web and app usability for laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Although teens spend endless time texting and on social media, we didn’t focus on these activities because our goal was to derive design guidelines for mainstream websites and apps, not to help build the next Snapchat.

The Research

We derived 130 usability guidelines for engaging teens and keeping them on your site. These recommendations are based on observational studies using multiple methodologies. A total of 100 users between the ages of 13 and 17 participated in three rounds of research: 38 teens in the original study for the first edition of this report, 46 teens in the second study, and 16 in the most recent study. We triangulated findings across three methods:

Usability testing. We met with test participants one at a time and gave them tasks to perform, asking them to vocalize their thoughts as they attempted tasks. To keep the scenarios as authentic as possible, we matched the tasks with each teen’s actual interests and simulated real-world situations.

Field studies. We observed teenagers in their homes and at school. During these site visits, we didn’t give users tasks to perform, but simply watched as they used the web the way they normally would in these settings.

Interviews and focus groups. To gain further insight into their experiences and attitudes, we asked participants to offer stories and examples detailing how and when they used the web, and which sites they considered interesting and useful. We also solicited advice from teens on how to make websites appealing. Interviews were held before and after usability sessions, as well as during a focus group.

We conducted studies in the U.S., United Kingdom, and Australia, in cities and towns ranging from affluent suburbs to disadvantaged urban areas. We tested a roughly equivalent number of boys and girls on a total of 210 websites and 30 apps that covered a broad range of genres, including:

School resources (University of Nottingham, Central Bucks High School West, BBC Bitesize, Quizlet)

Tourism/Arts & Entertainment (Visit London, TripAdvisor, ExploreChicago.com)

Health (Australian Drug Foundation, TeensHealth, National Institute on Drug Abuse)

Informational/Reference (Nature, Food Network, Scientific American)

News (Buzzfeed, CNN, Weather.com, Daily Mail, The New York Times)

Entertainment and Games (Stack AR, YouTube, Playlist.com, Geometry Wars)

Ecommerce (Adidas, H&M, ASOS, Jabra)

Corporate sites (McCormick, Unilever, Pepsi-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Morton Salt)

Government (Gov.UK, Australian Government main portal, Pennsylvania’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the U.S. White House, NASA)

Nonprofits (Rotary International, Charity: Water, World Food Programme, National Wildlife Federation)

As these examples show, we tested both specialized sites that explicitly target teenagers and mainstream sites that include teens as part of a broad-target audience.

Teen Motivations for Using Websites

Teenagers access the web for myriad activities, including entertainment. Generally, they have a specific goal, even if that goal is just to keep themselves occupied for 10 minutes.

Although their specific tasks might differ from adults, teens are similar to adults in major ways: both groups expect websites to be easy to use and to let them accomplish their tasks. Like adults, teens are goal-oriented and don’t surf the web aimlessly; usability is thus as important for them as for any other user group.

Teens in our studies reported using the web or various apps for:

School assignments

Hobbies or other special interests (including learning new skills or finding fun activities)

Entertainment (including music, videos, and games)

News (including sports, current events, and entertainment)

Learning about new topics

Talking to friends

Shopping

Even when teens don’t make purchases on ecommerce websites, they do visit them to research products and build wish lists for the credit-card–carrying adults in their lives.

Changes Over Time: Good and Bad News

The good news: Teens are becoming more successful at navigating websites and finding what they need. At the time of the third study, the oldest participant was born in 2001 and the youngest was born in 2005; therefore, all participants in this study grew up with access to computers. Between all three studies conducted over the last 15 years for this report, the amount of time teenagers spend on computers and mobile devices has steadily increased. How effective teenagers are with technology is correlated with the amount of time using technology.

Are teens getting better or are websites getting better? Probably a bit of both. We observed many of the same bad user habits among teens in our last study as we saw in our first study, back in 2004. Thus, the improved performance obviously stems in part from improvements in website design. That said, even though teens in our original study were heavy web users, teenagers today have even greater access to the internet and spend more time using it. This generation grew up with technology and is much more effective at using it than the participants in our first study (in which the oldest participant was born in 1988 and the youngest in 1992).

The bad news: Teens are not as invincible as some people think. Although teens might feel confident online, they do make mistakes and often give up quickly. Fast-moving teens are also less cautious than adults and make snap judgments; these lead to fewer successfully completed tasks.

Teens perform worse than adults for three reasons:

Insufficient reading skills

Less sophisticated research strategies

Dramatically lower levels of patience

To improve your site’s usability among teens, you must consider all three factors. Also note that we have seen these factors in all our research with teenagers during a 15-year period, meaning that they are likely to continue to hold in the future, even if other teen habits may change as fads come and go.

Across different types of websites, teens had the most success on ecommerce websites, which often adhered to design standards and required little reading. Teens encountered the greatest challenges on large sites with dense content and poor navigation schemes. Government, nonprofit, and school sites were the biggest culprits of poor usability.

Despite usability improvements, we observed users struggling with the same issues as in previous years — as well as new issues created by emerging features and design approaches. Thus, both traditional and new guidelines must be considered as technology and people continually evolve; our new report contains 130 total guidelines, compared with 61 in the first edition and 111 in the second.

Many of the guidelines also apply to general audiences. For teens, however, these guidelines are even more important because the usability issues present bigger hurdles.

The Importance of Content and Layout

Write for impatient users. Nothing deters younger audiences more than a cluttered screen full of text. Teens can quickly become bored, distracted, and frustrated.

Teenagers don’t like to read a lot on the web. They get enough of that at school. Plus, their reading skills are not ideal — especially those of younger teens. Sites that were easy to scan or that illustrated concepts visually were strongly preferred to sites with dense text.

Applying proper web writing and formatting techniques is crucial in communicating with teens. Display content in small, meaningful chunks with plenty of white space. Small chunks help students retain information and pick up where they left off after the inevitable interruptions of text messages and phone calls.

Teenagers in our study were often overwhelmed with content on websites. To focus their attention on one area, we observed several teens highlighting text as they read down the page. These are some of their comments:

“Sometimes reading in black and white is hard. Highlight helps me read better.” – 16-year-old male

“I lost my train of thought, so I highlighted the text to focus more on it.” – 15-year-old female

Teens were overloaded with information on the screen. We observed multiple participants highlighting text on the page to help them focus — here, a teen highlighted the term bluegrass, as she wondered what type of music that was.

Help teens learn and stay focused by choosing your words wisely. Use words that teens understand. Write in short sentences and paragraphs. Format key points or steps of a process using bullet points. Teens generally have poorer reading and comprehension skills than adults. If your site targets a broad audience, aim to write at a 6th-grade reading level (or lower). Writing at this level will help audiences of all ages — young and old — quickly understand your content.

One surprising finding in this study: teenagers dislike tiny font sizes as much as adults do. We’ve often warned websites about using small text because of the negative implications for senior citizens (and even people in their late 40s, whose eyesight has begun to decline). We’ve always assumed that tiny text predominated because most web designers are young and still have perfect vision, so we were surprised that small type often caused problems or provoked negative comments from our study’s teen users. Even though this audience is sufficiently sharp-eyed, most teens move too quickly and are too easily distracted to attend to small text.

“You go to Music and it’s real tiny. … You look at this stuff and it’s hard to see. You have to squint. These are really small, and you can’t see. It needs to be a little bigger.” — 16-year-old female

Present Interesting Content Professionally and Clearly

Teens complained about sites they found boring. Dull content is the kiss of death if your goal is to keep teens on your site. However, not everything needs to be interactive and fancy. Although teens have a strong appreciation for aesthetics, they detest sites that appear cluttered and contain pointless multimedia.

Beware of overusing interactive features just because you design for younger audiences. Multimedia can engage or enrage teens, depending on its usefulness. The best online experiences for teens are those that teach them something new or keep them focused on a goal.

What’s good? The following interactive features all worked well because they let teens do things rather than simply sit and read:

Online quizzes

Forms for providing feedback or asking questions

Online voting

Games

Features for sharing pictures or stories

Features for creating and editing content

These interactive features let teenagers make their mark on the internet and express themselves in various ways — some small, some big.

The site type influences user expectations. For example, teens expect ecommerce and brand sites to look professional, and informational sites to look simple and polished. For the latter sites, presenting interesting content in a clear manner is much more attractive than experimenting with new sophisticated features. Teens can learn and feel engaged without the nonessential enhancements.

Speed Is Key

A slow-loading website is a deal-breaker. Whatever you do, make sure your site loads quickly. Slow, sluggish sites are frustrating to anybody, but they’re especially offensive to young audiences who expect instant gratification.

Think twice before you develop that super cool widget or include that 4K video. If it’s slow or buggy, forget it. Teens won’t have the patience for it. Because teens often work on older, second-hand devices — and sometimes have slow internet connections — fancy features and high-resolution multimedia might not work well.

“I hate this waiting. It’s very annoying … I usually wouldn’t wait this long for a page to load. I would go to a different site, I would go to the next one.” — 17-year-old male

Don’t Talk Down to Teens

Avoid anything that sounds condescending or babyish. The proper tone can make or break your site. Teens relate to content created by peers, so supplement your content with real stories, images, and examples from other teens.

Some websites in our study tried to serve both children and teens in a single area, usually titled Kids. A grave mistake: the word “kid” is a teen repellent. Teenagers are fiercely proud of their newly won status, and they don’t want overly childish content — one more reason to ease up on the heavy animations and garish color schemes that work for younger audiences. We recommend having separate sections for young children and teens, labeled Kids and Teens, respectively.

Let Teens Control the Social Aspects

Facilitate sharing but don’t force it. Teens rely on technology for social communication, but they don’t want to be social all the time. They want to control what they share and how they share it. Sites that force teens to register and then automatically make their profile public violate trust. Parents and teachers teach teens to protect their privacy at a young age, and one of the things teens learn early is to avoid nosey sites.

When offering sharing options, include a link to copy the web address, as teens are likely browsing on their phones and want to share it directly with a friend. Participants in our studies often preferred using social media apps, like Snapchat, to message friends, so providing a Copy Link option allows them to send a direct message to a friend on any platform. When this functionality isn’t available, they tended to take screenshots and share them with friends. Though this behavior reaches their goal, from a business perspective, it hinders other teens’ ability to easily visit the content.

Design for Mobile Viewing

All of the teenagers in our most recent study had mobile devices, but not all had laptops or computers. Therefore, teens are often viewing your content from the palm of their hand.

Complex mouse gestures often don’t translate well to mobile. The adoption of portable devices requires that you design a website so that it doesn’t compromise usability.

Teens often work on touch-enabled devices, making interactions that require precision — such as dropdown menus, drag-and-drop, and small buttons — difficult. Design elements such as rollover effects and small click zones are also problematic, if they’re usable at all. Small text sizes and dense text make reading difficult.

Media portrays teens as competent computer jockeys. In reality, teens’ overconfidence combined with their developing cognitive abilities means they often give up quickly and blame the website’s design. They don’t blame themselves, they blame you.

Age-Group Differences

The following table summarizes the main similarities and differences in web-design approaches for young children, teenagers, college students, and adults. (The findings about children are from our studies with 3–12-year-old users; the findings about college students are from our study with 18–25-year-old users.)

Children Teens College Students Adults Search Bigger reliance on bookmarks than search, but older kids do search Heavy reliance on search; some difficulty formulating search queries; click topmost results in SERP Heavy reliance on search; some difficulty formulating search queries; click topmost results in SERP Heavy reliance on search; some difficulty formulating search queries; click topmost results in SERP Scrolling Don’t scroll (younger); some scrolling (older) OK scrolling OK scrolling OK scrolling Animation and sound effects Attend to things that move and make sounds Might appreciate them to some extent, but overuse can be problematic. Dislike them; autoplay sound disruptive in dorms Dislike them; autoplay sound disruptive at work Patience Want instant gratification Hate waiting for things to load or having to close pop ups; easily distracted Want answers quickly; no patience for complicated interactions; easily distracted. Want answers quickly, but more likely to wait than college students Trust & credibility Want good initial reaction; Credibility less important because goal is mainly entertainment Difficulty judging credibility Very critical; quick to judge websites Less critical of websites than college students; still quick to judge Tabbed browsing Not used Used often; few tabs Used often; many tabs open at a time Commonly used; varies depending on technical comfort Disclosing private info Hesitant to enter information Hesitant to enter information Less ‘fear’ of technology and therefore (often recklessly) willing to give out personal info Often recklessly willing to give out personal info on sites they trust Advertising Difficulty distinguishing from real content Like discounts but hate popups Have a keen eye for ads and don’t like being tricked Mostly avoid ads but appreciate them when they are relevant and unobtrusive Age-targeted design & content Crucial, with very fine-grained distinctions between age groups Want age-appropriate content; prefer sites with neutral graphics rather than childish ones Want age-appropriate information, but don’t want everyone to sound ‘hip’ Less critical for most sites

Clearly, there are many differences between age groups. The highest usability level for teens comes from designs that are targeted specifically at their needs and behaviors, which differ from those of adults and young children. As the table shows, this is true both for interaction design and for more obvious factors, such as topics and content style.

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magzoso-tech · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/will-the-future-of-work-be-ethical-future-leader-perspectives/

Will the future of work be ethical? Future leader perspectives

Greg Epstein Contributor

Greg M. Epstein is the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Good Without God. Described as a “godfather to the [humanist] movement” by The New York Times Magazine in recognition of his efforts to build inclusive, inspiring, and ethical communities for the nonreligious and allies, Greg was also named “one of the top faith and moral leaders in the United States” by Faithful Internet, a project of the United Church of Christ and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

More posts by this contributor

Will the future of work be ethical? Future leader perspectives

Will the future of work be ethical? Perspectives from MIT Technology Review

In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT’s famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work.

Greg’s essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls “a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well.” In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy.

Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.

Below he speaks to two conference attendees who had crucial insights to share. Meili Gupta is a high school senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire; Gupta attended the EmTech Next conference with her mother and has attended with family in previous years as well; her voice and thoughts on privilege and inequality in education and technology are featured prominently in Greg’s essay. Walter Erike is a 31-year-old independent consultant and SAP Implementation Senior Manager. from Philadelphia. Between conference session, he and Greg talked about diversity and inclusion at tech conferences and beyond.

Meili Gupta is a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy. Image via Meili Gupta

Greg Epstein: How did you come to be at EmTech Next?

Meili Gupta: I am a rising high school senior at Phillips Exeter Academy; I’m one of the managing editors for my school’s science magazine called Matter Magazine.

I [also] attended the conference last year. My parents have come to these conferences before, and that gave me an opportunity to come. I am particularly interested in the MIT Technology Review because I’ve grown up reading it.

You are the Managing Editor of Matter, a magazine about STEM at your high school. What subjects that Matter covers are most interesting to you?

This year we published two issues. The first featured a lot of interviews from top AI professors like Professor Fei-Fei Li, at Stanford. We did a review for her and an interview with Professor Olga Russakovsky at Princeton. That was an AI special issue and, being at this conference you hear about how AI will transform industries.

The second issue coincided with Phillips Exeter Global Climate Action Day. We focused both on environmentalism clubs at Exeter and environmentalism efforts worldwide. I think Matter, as the only stem magazine on campus has a responsibility in doing that.

AI and climate: in a sense, you’ve already dealt with this new field people are calling the ethics of technology. When you hear that term, what comes to mind?

As a consumer of a lot of technology and as someone of the generation who has grown up with a phone in my hand, I’m aware my data is all over the internet. I’ve had conversations [with friends] about personal privacy and if I look around the classroom, most people have covers for the cameras on their computers. This generation is already aware [of] ethics whenever you’re talking about computing and the use of computers.

About AI specifically, as someone who’s interested in the field and has been privileged to be able to take courses and do research projects about that, I’m hearing a lot about ethics with algorithms, whether that’s fake news or bias or about applying algorithms for social good.

What are your biggest concerns about AI? What do you think needs to be addressed in order for us to feel more comfortable as a society with increased use of AI?

That’s not an easy answer; it’s something our society is going to be grappling with for years. From what I’ve learned at this conference, from what I’ve read and tried to understand, it’s a multidimensional solution. You’re going to need computer programmers to learn the technical skills to make their algorithms less biased. You’re going to need companies to hire those people and say, “This is our goal; we want to create an algorithm that’s fair and can do good.” You’re going to need the general society to ask for that standard. That’s my generation’s job, too. WikiLeaks, a couple of years ago, sparked the conversation about personal privacy and I think there’s going to be more sparks.

Seems like your high school is doing some interesting work in terms of incorporating both STEM and a deeper, more creative than usual focus on ethics and exploring the meaning of life. How would you say that Exeter in particular is trying to combine these issues?

I’ll give a couple of examples of my experience with that in my time at Exeter, and I’m very privileged to go to a school that has these opportunities and offerings for its students.

Don’t worry, that’s in my next question.

Absolutely. With the computer science curriculum, starting in my ninth grade they offered a computer science 590 about [introduction to] artificial intelligence. In the fall another 590 course was about self driving cars, and you saw the intersection between us working in our robotics lab and learning about computer vision algorithms. This past semester, a couple students, and I was involved, helped to set up a 999: an independent course which really dove deep into machine learning algorithms. In the fall, there’s another 590 I’ll be taking called social innovation through software engineering, which is specifically designed for each student to pick a local project and to apply software, coding or AI to a social good project.

I’ve spent 15 years working at Harvard and MIT. I’ve worked around a lot of smart and privileged people and I’ve supported them. I’m going to ask you a question about Exeter and about your experience as a privileged high school student who is getting a great education, but I don’t mean it from a perspective of it’s now me versus you.

Of course you’re not.

I’m trying to figure this out for myself as well. We live in a world where we’re becoming more prepared to talk about issues of fairness and justice. Yet by even just providing these extraordinary educational experiences to people like you and me and my students or whomever, we’re preparing some people for that world better than others. How do you feel about being so well prepared for this sort of world to come that it can actually be… I guess my question is, how do you relate to the idea that even the kinds of educational experiences that we’re talking about are themselves deepening the divide between haves and have nots?

I completely agree that the issue between haves and have nots needs to be talked about more, because inequality between the upper and the lower classes is growing every year. This morning, Mr. Isbell from Georgia Tech talk was really inspiring. For example, at Phillips Exeter, we have a social service club called ESA which houses more than 70 different social service clubs. One I’m involved with, junior computer programming, teaches programming to local middle school students. That’s the type of thing, at an individual level and smaller scale, that people can try to help out those who have not been privileged with opportunities to learn and get ahead with those skills.

What Mr. Isbell was talking about this morning was at a university level and also tying in corporations bridge that divide. I don’t think that the issue itself should necessarily scare us from pushing forward to the frontier to say, the possibility that everybody who does not have a computer science education in five years won’t have a job.

Today we had that debate about role or people’s jobs and robot taxes. That’s a very good debate to have, but it sometimes feeds a little bit into the AI hype and I think it may be a disgrace to society to try to pull back technology, which has been shown to have the power to save lives. It can be two transformations that are happening at the same time. One, that’s trying to bridge an inequality and is going to come in a lot of different and complicated solutions that happen at multiple levels and the second is allowing for a transformation in technology and AI.

What are you hoping to get out of this conference for yourself, as a student, as a journalist, or as somebody who’s going into the industry?

The theme for this conference is the future of the workforce. I’m a student. That means I’m going to be the future of the workforce. I was hoping to learn some insight about what I may want to study in college. After that, what type of jobs do I want to pursue that are going to exist and be in demand and really interesting, that have an impact on other people? Also, as a student, in particular that’s interested in majoring in computer science and artificial intelligence, I was hoping to learn about possible research projects that I could pursue in the fall with this 590 course.

Right now, I’m working on a research project with a Professor at the University of Maryland about eliminating bias in machine learning algorithms. What type of dataset do I want to apply that project to? Where is the need or the attention for correcting bias in the AI algorithms?

As a journalist, I would like to write a review summarizing what I’ve learned so other [Exeter students] can learn a little too.

What would be your biggest critique of the conference? What could be improved?

#Miscellaneous

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claennis · 8 years

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Back in December 9, 2009 in my pre-tumblr days (livejournal ya’ll), I was taking Media Theory and Criticism in university and for my final, wrote the following about the above. It’s 3,400 words long including endnotes and just manages to tentatively tickle away at postmodernist theory before descending into I-think-I-know-what-I’m-talking-about-collegiate-word-vomit. Also, why there are I’s and we’s dropped in at the end beats me (so nonacademic who let me get away with that?!). I remember I got away with an A on this but...could be written 10 million times better by somebody else frankly (see horribly cheesy, over the top dramatic conclusion).

Anywhere You Go Samsung Will Be There: Aesthetics of the Commercial Fictional Reality

From candy commercials to ones of drinks and snacks, Korea television advertisements’ are a series of visually engaging images, showcasing the hottest celebrities from the often juxtaposed film/television/music industry[i]; one shot strategically placed after another in a highly attractive and persuasive selling fashion. No other conglomerate than the Samsung Group knows how to dominate televisual marketing in this field. Within its many branches, Samsung Electronics established the Samsung Anycall mobile phone brand, a product that has been heavily advertised by celebrity spokesmen and spokeswomen. A giant number of domestic actors and actresses as well as pop group individuals have participated but one of the most famous has been mega pop icon, Lee Hyori, who signed a contract from 2005 to 2007 to produce “music video advertisements” for the Anycall phone. Such advertisements include high quality seven to nine minute music dramas, following a format of a short film plot and often including a specific track, written to promote the model of the phone. While Lee (and now world-renown pop star, Rain) have played a huge role in commercials of a massive scale of production, the one television advertisement that warrants more than a double take is Samsung Anycall’s 2007 “Anyband” campaign[ii].

Two years ago, Samsung Anycall produced a nine-minute commercial mini-movie that replicates science-fiction attributes: portraying a dystopian society in an ambiguous, probably futuristic, timeframe and place. On giant television screens throughout the city, a masked figurehead (eerily reminiscent of both V for Vendetta’s state-run British Television Network’s giant headquarters screen and 1984’s Big Brother) dictates the rules (antithesis to Anycall’s catchphrase): “No talk, no play, no love.” The government’s police and security officials monitor citizens closely as they move in singular lines. But within this oppressive society exists a secret alliance between four individuals, four artists that Samsung brought together to create a band: internationally known Korean pop singer BoA; Xiah Junsu from boyband TVXQ/DBSK; Tablo from hip-hop group Epik High[iii]; and Jin Bora, a jazz pianist. Though isolated from each other, they operate under Samsung Anycall’s motto, “Talk, Play, Love” by communicating and recording songs through their “illegal” Anycall mobile phones. Clever and quick enough to escape from the disciplinary police on numerous accounts, Anyband is able to broadcast their theme song they recorded on their phones (named “TPL”) by infiltrating the system. At the end, they perform on skyscrapers, using their phones once again to stream their music live on the massive screens in the city. The masses connect to their message, retaliate, and the commercial ends on a happy note: oppression is defeated.

During the airing of the commercial, Samsung Anycall released Anyband’s debut single on November 8, 2007. On November 27, 2007, Samsung held an Anycall Concert, in which the fictional band made their debut on stage, performing their fictional tracks live with an additional cover of German trio, Monrose’ “Scream” under the title, “Daydream.” The individual artists (BoA) as well as their respective groups (Epik High and TVXQ) also gave solo performances, creating an intriguing combination of a simulated reality (a band that manifested inside the televisual world), adjacent to actual reality (artists and bands that have flourished in Korea’s music industry).

Anyband is not the first fictional band to grace the world of televisual consumption. The Beatles-esque Monkees from American 60s television serial, The Monkees, and the cartoon creation called The Archies from The Archie Show, both have esteemed as popular contemporary groups in the States decades ago. But the startling division that stands between the likes of The Archies and The Monkees, and Anyband is the fact that the latter came into existence through a massive commercial means on the behalf of a conglomerate as huge as General Electric.

The power of the advertising entity has created an imaginative unreal, an unreal that is so fascinating that Anyband, is now conceived as the real across viewing audiences. In this case, we turn to post-modernist thought in concern of the simulation effect. Along with the interchangeability between illusory and reality, another question arises in concern of the post-modernist belief that distinctions between high and low culture have vanished. But there is also the false reality to consider. The fictional dystopian universe is not only enhanced by the appearances of popular celebrities but it also places the seller (Samsung) in a position that is more associated with rebellion against a higher, oppressive power. Thus, we will have to turn to the Frankfurt School’s cultural theorization on hegemony’s relationship to its counterpart, dissent. Through the combined efforts of specific aspects from both the Frankfurt School and post-modernist thought, analysis of Anyband, the “band” and the advertisement itself, may widen not merely the preconception of what constitutes a commercial but also of the cultural and social atmosphere of advertising in our post-millennium world.

Postmodernism cannot be grounded to a single working definition for it varies from medium to medium. But what one can do is offer a series of aligning definitions. Jim Collins, essayist of “Television and Postmodernism” suggests a compilation of meanings that provides a sort of overarching, umbrella-like insight into the term. From “a distinctive style” (i.e. artistic, musical,) to “a condition…that typifies an entire set of socioeconomic factors” to “a specific mode of philosophical inquiry”, post-modernism can be any of the mentioned but it is crucial to indicate that it is “an emergent form of cultural analysis shaped by all of the above” (Allen, 327). This emergent form begins shaping itself in reaction to modernism, moving away from the “objective”, “realist representation” and turning to a more “subjective inward consciousness” and a more abstract, fragmented emphasis on human experience and society (328). From the firm grasp on progress, post-modernism uproots that concreteness of the past, present, and future. Within the cultural industry, a certain exhaustion takes place, in which the face of originality is now replaced by either repetition and recycling of old material or a continual quoting of what has already been stated. Amidst the wide range of postmodernist concepts and theorization, there is a specific concept called the “simulacrum”, which shall be further looked at through Mark Poster’s essay, “Baudrillard and TV Ads.”

The essay particularly studies the phenomenon of the TV commercial as a specific social event within a society where mode of information has replaced the mode of production. Poster first lays out something crucial to television advertisements, which is their lack of clarity between illusion and reality. Television advertisement are “invented models of reality which themselves contest the distinction between the real and the fictional” (57). In order to create that illusion of a reality, “the ad takes a signifier, a word that has no traditional relation with the object being promoted, and attaches it to that object…constitut[ing] a new linguistic and communications reality” (58). A new system of language presents itself and redefines the meaning of not only speech but also what associates with the product being sold. In terms of Anycall’s 2007 campaign, the words, “talk,” “play,” and “love” redefine the Anycall cell phone as a celebration of happiness and independence and as a device that aids the freedom-fighters (Anyband). The commercial further redefines Anycall’s favorite three words into a system of opposition: “no talk, no play, no love”, inventing another level of imaginary: this time, oppression, isolation, and lack of connection. Herein, the relations that link back to three simple words engage in the first step of constituting a commercialized reality.

As we look at the television advertisement, functioning with redefined signifiers, what Baudrillard calls “a simulation of a communication…which is more real than reality”, is established and the idea of the simulacrum comes forth (Poster, 63). The simulated effect, which is the commercial, turns into a hyper-reality. It takes what the viewer regards as magical and desirable, and heightens its attraction so that the viewer’s perception of what is real and what is not, becomes inter-exchanged. The fictional dimension becomes a hyperrealist dimension, an additional appendage to our already existing reality. In the case of Anyband (the group), their role as mere promoters of a phone outlives itself and proceeds to cross the line separating the simulated (the commercial) from the physical (sales of single and live concert). Samsung Anycall may not be aware of the coinciding effects of the simulacrum within their marketing strategy in 2007 but the utilization of a couple of famous faces and capitalizing off their success to invent a fictional group did not fail in grabbing the attention of millions of viewers. From natives to Korean pop enthusiasts around the world, this imagined band is merely another collaboration that places different artists on the same stage and takes the music scene to another exciting level.

Another point to consider within this ideological apparatus is the postmodernist approach towards culture capital. As essayist John Beverly states in “The Ideology of Postmodernist Music and Left Politics”, post-modernists imply that through “the traditional intellectual or aesthete in the face of the processes of transformation of culture into a commodity”, also known as “mass culture”, it leads to the “consequent collapse of the distinction between high and low culture” (sec. 2). The separation defining high art as its elevated form and containing low art in a subterranean level ceases to exist in the cultural industry today, argues the post-modernists. In regards to this hierarchal distinction, then there is something to be said in terms of Anycall’s commercial drama.

Within the context of the visual culture hierarchy, the televisual commercial occupy a considerable low rank. They hold no “aesthetic effects”, “little truth value”, and above all, they “fulfill no socially redeeming value” (Poster, 47). Above the television advertisement would probably be the music video, a phenomenon that can represent low form as well as high art, then working one’s way up to the short movie, and so forth. The hierarchal archetype then allows the viewer to differentiate between a short film or a music video and their respective attributes. But conventions and classifications can be blurred, redefined, and even broken. Samsung expands the idea of the conventional commercial with the airing of advertisements of considerable length and high quality. The Anyband campaign is filmed as an uncanny imitation of a music video. The nine-minute music-video-esque advertisement, in turn, imitates a short film drama. Like a short film, the plot unfolds; the protagonists represent concrete ideals; and the antagonistic force clearly represents an opposition that needs to be defeated. Hence, the commercial music drama manifests, complete with a narration, a paradigmatic contrast between protagonists and antagonist, a soundtrack that is not just catchy but also feeds into the Korean music scene[iv], and an underlying message. Techniques used in music videos transfer over to the commercial so that its aesthetic effect resembles more of a music video than a commercial. The object being sold is subtly placed in a specific role within the diegetic frame of narration so that the simulated reality is not interrupted.

Quality-wise and substance-wise, the Anyband commercial employs a higher form of symbols, images, and one can even argue, music, to sell a mobile phone. Such an advertisement further bridges the divide but it would not be considered as exemplary proof of the collapse of cultural differentiations. Instead, it cleverly utilizes borrowed techniques, increasing the “traffic between high and low culture” as Brian McHale states in his essay on “Science Fiction and Post Modernism” (236) to strengthen the idea of the invented reality. By transcending its categorical norms, a certain niche of the audience is convinced that this commercial is perhaps “better than a movie”[v]. What needs to be taken into consideration here is not precisely the statement itself (nor its level of ridiculousness to those who see through the illusion of Samsung’s commercial) but the experience behind the statement. A certain audience will not respond in such a way if they did not recognize the details and characteristics that often describe a different media form more than an advertisement.

Concurrently, the differentiations that elevate Samsung Anycall’s commercial to the next level does not completely redefine its category; it is still a commercial nonetheless. The symbols that are present, the signifiers, the words used, all come together in a presentable package to sell a product. The product itself represents a certain ideology, perhaps an ideology that also participates in the process of selling. Therefore, we need to further explore the combined efforts of message and motive within the false reality in the televisual advertisement. In doing so, the invented narration and ideologies present must be considered in regards to the relationship between seller and consumer and the role of music.

Rewinding back to a previous critical theory movement, the Frankfurt School, if not famous for names such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, approaches mass culture and societal formation with a critical theory more so than the critique of Marxist predecessors. Amongst studying numerous aspects of Western capitalist societies, “the Frankfurt School produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination” (Kellner, par.1). While observing and witnessing the rise of media industries, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School articulated the function of the cultural industry as an agent legitimizing the ideologies prescient in social life and integrating citizens into such ideologies through exposure to mass culture.

In 1947, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer collaborated together to write Dialectic in Enlightenment in which a segment was called “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Adorno and Horkheimer argue, “Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it” (p.3, par.1). In other words, rebellion, dissent, even reason merely pseudo-exist, for the act of incorporation will occur and they will be consumed by the larger hegemonic body. Though largely on the pessimistic side, this critical theorization of the cultural industry is an important part to investigate, especially in terms of commercial conceptualization.

By setting up easily recognized opposing forces (freedom-fighters versus totalitarian-like regime), Samsung makes their job easier when transforming the cell phone into a symbolic icon. The four rebels cannot communicate with each other but because of the Anycall cell phone, they are able to contact each other and fulfill their roles as emancipators. The motto, “Talk, Play, Love”, constantly re-emphasizes itself through its connection to the message. Because the Anycall cell phone has the ability to connect to other mediums (airings on the giant screens), the message becomes associated with the object. As we view this advertisement, we can deduce that the concept of the commercial is a means of promoting the cell phone as a unifying object. It is an object that provides, not only the necessary connection, but also an escape to leisure and fun.

Thus, because of the system of relationships that establishes itself within the advertisement, the viewer sees the cell phone as a resistance to the repressive regime. But the dominant ideology does not stay in power for long for the rebel movement, as symbolized through the phone, overthrows the current system and “No talk, no play, no love” is replaced by “Talk, Play, Love.” What we witness is Samsung’s role as a dominant force in economic and business reality, position itself as an anti-hegemonic force against the dominant ideology. Samsung Anycall plays the good guy in the story, mobilizing the resistant force. But at the same time, Samsung Anycall, in its physical reality, is a corporate branch, a capitalist group that thrives off the success of clever marketing techniques. The clever marketing technique at play here is what the Frankfurt School has noted about revolutionary thought: the commonly perceived image of the anti-mainstream and dissent will be absorbed by the dominant force, in this case, capitalism. By selling itself as one of us, an independent and critical body of thinkers, and not one of the evil overseers, we are persuaded into a mass following of not the anti-mainstream ideology, but one that has been swallowed up by Samsung’s corporate power.

From the Frankfurt School’s critical analyses, the Samsung Anycall campaign occupies numerous levels of deceit. But I would like to also explore a different path, maybe an idealistic one but one that considers something else. Walter Benjamin, a post-Marxist, at times linked to the Frankfurt School, introduces another take on the notion of the “aura” of art in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in which he argues the art-aura (the “presence of the original”, “the concept of authenticity”, the artwork’s “sensitive nucleus”, its “uniqueness”) does not exactly “wither in the age of mechanical reproduction” and against the idea that “the quality of its presence is always depreciated” (3). Instead, the act of “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual,” or what is known as the “location of its original use value” of merely the author (3). As a result, the art-aura moves towards the mass audience and a wider critical attitude.

If we are to perceive the Anycall cell phone, as advertised, similarly as to Benjamin’s attitude towards means of reproduction, then the mobile phone can be a means of democratization. Music is mobilized as an emancipator force through the mobile phone technology[vi]. Its purpose does not only serve art (the creation and publicizing of music) but also serves a greater purpose of enlightenment. The experience of transferring message through song, first by audio, then by visual and audio, can be argued as not a loss of art-aura, for the cell phone bridges the distance from the creators/rebels to the audience/receivers. In this case, Anycall’s commercial concept of viewing the cell phone as unification aligns with Benjamin’s approach towards mechanical reproduction and art.

By looking at this specific commercial of Samsung’s through the numerous eyeglasses of different points of theory, I hope to point out that the analyses explored are open for further speculation. Focusing on specific aspects of both post-modernist theory and the Frankfurt school testifies that no theory can be summed up, used, or to prove something else in its entirety. Within the several niches I have mentioned, we can see the different levels a single commercial can function and persist, complicating a phenomenon that is more scorned at than tolerated. I have also provided both sides to the argument of distrust and dismay towards the corporate, from a company that tricks and deceives to one that promotes an object in celebration of ideological benefit to the people.

In the end, it is difficult to call Samsung’s Anycall commercial music drama as a commercial because of its complexities. Given the growing complexities of advertisements in our world at this time, we will have to consider the fact of the matter: we as an audience are not passive consumers. To sell us a product, the company needs to consider a wide variety of marketing approaches that both complicates and hides their ulterior motive of selling a product and making profit. On the other hand, the company may not have to hide their motive for as Adorno and Horkheimer state, “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them” (p.7, par.10). The Anycall campaign may not convince everyone that the cell phone will bring unity or the concepts it preaches. But the illusory reality created, imitates high quality forms of art and pop culture so well, the skeptics can be intrigued by the product and even believe that the product is of high quality as well.

Samsung outdid themselves on this certain commercial and at the same time, built a reputation of advertising that is immense. While I hold no numbers in my hand to show how profitable they were from the Anyband campaign, there is the post-result of people around the world who still demand for more material from the group, Anyband. Recently this year, Samsung Anycall has created another fictional collaborative between four girls from four different bubble-pop groups called ‘4Tomorrow’. The truth of the matter is, strategy behind fictional bands and fictional reality works. Why else would a huge conglomerate recycle and reuse the same method again? And thus, the legacy of this commercial drama, as a singular entity and as an entire phenomenon, lives on.

Endnotes

[i] It is interesting to note that pop artists that thrive within the Korean music industry are not confined to the music industry but they also blatantly cross boundaries into other fields such as acting and modeling. Their popularity and success thrives on their ability to multi-task as much as possible. Xiah Junsu’s (guitarist and vocalist in Anyband) occupations on his Wikipedia page list the following: “singer, actor, model, songwriter, dancer, composer.”

[ii] The Anyband Campaign is considered to be the fourth installment of commercial music dramas. The first three star Lee Hyori and they are called, “Anymotion”, “Anyclub”, and “Anymotion.” This is the first time Samsung switches to another famous female figure, BoA, as their main model.

[iii] Tablo from Epik High often writes songs and lyrics that are highly critical of the mass consumerist/materialist culture as well as the ideological institutions in South Korea (education, religion, government). One could say that he was the face of rebellion, lashing against the hegemonic forces of the 21st century. Interesting enough, Samsung Anycall asked him to campaign in their advertisement, which makes one wonder about his “rebellious stance” against massive conglomerates (hence the utilization of past tense: “was”).

This is a personal blog article, with a lack of factual claim and citation, but the thoughts and ideas towards Tablo, his background, and his participation in Anycall should be considered: http://www.soompi.com/content/79916.

[iv] Many viewers of the advertisement constantly comment on the songs and how they highlight the artists’ skills and talent and how much they enjoy listening to them: http://www.channel-ai.com/blog/2007/11/08/anyband/

[v] The comment, “better than a movie” can be found as a personal opinion at this blog: http://spazzes.wordpress.com/2007/11/07/download-anyband-cf-talk-play-love/.

[vi] I did not want to go into the debate of whether Anyband’s music would be considered as “quality” music, or music that transcends beyond the electronic repetition and digitized vocals that are rampant in Korean pop. Instead, I wanted to take the term, music, and consider it on a broad, overarching sense as an art form.

#university #papers written #kpop #post modernism #i prepared this post pre-going back to work

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koopatzi · 6 years

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SEO for Better and Faster 2019

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Having the page on the search motors my business is a excellent helper for that local business plus is an essential portion of Nearby SEO, and I think that will during 2018 it is heading to pass a value in order to the local SEO. Even though, it is touch time intensive to create the quality video, it is over worth it. Great for visitors and SEO as well. Technical SEO: Assuring all hyperlinks are up-to-date, performing keyword analysis, setting up redirects when web pages are moved, fixing errors, making use of proper markup, and so on. As there is usually with all sorts or advertising or advertising technique, there are proven, time examined guidelines that when implemented properly will help you immensely together with your Local SEO campaign. Top SEO businesses will even advice you within good time on the solutions and features that you require to increase traffic onto your own website within a more easy time frame. Here I have began my Post title with the target keyword SEO”. And, as this so happens, engagement with your own listing may have a beneficial impact on your rankings, therefore shock horror doing good advertising is also good for your own SEO. Yet, I'm quite sure by the particular end of 2020, voice research will be very common, plus there will be many discussions going on in the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION world on how to enhance the content for a tone of voice search, similar how it's right now about mobile. On-Page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION describes all the things that will you can do on your website in order to assist you rank higher, like as page titles, internal relating, Meta tags & descriptions, and so on. Success in SEO is usually the best content within the subject you picked and quality back links to it from other sources with high authority level. Voice technology plus digital assistants are paving the particular path for new and helpful ways to deliver content plus approach SEO. Reading more in our blog write-up: 5 reasons why User Encounter (UX) is important for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. I was initially concerned about ranking my websites and it was too very much to learn about SEO. Using rich pictures as an SEO strategy need to be a major focus within increasing your brand presence plus reach via content marketing within 2018. However, along with the advancement of technology plus Google latest updates you may improve rankings by adopting tone of voice search, accelerated mobile pages, content material marketing, mobile optimization, user-experience marketing, long-tail keywords, local SEO, Search engines Quick Answer Box, Microformat plus Artificial Intelligence inside your SEO technique 2018. As a result, it is extremely essential with regard to businesses to take note associated with SEO and make sure that will their websites are properly listed by search engines.

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sevmeyinkimseyifazla-blog · 6 years

Text

The Best SEO to 2019

Search engine optimization, usually known as SEO, can be utilized within blogging and in other web marketing techniques to drive visitors to any website of your own choice, whether it is the blog, Squidoo lens or the traditional website page. This totally changes black head wear SEO tactics to gain relevance for various searches by making pages that are individually designed for different keywords. S. S Please note that SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques works on the vast majority of websites. SEO agencies offer providers that differ from writing next text messages to giving advice on the particular subject of the website, plus choosing the best directories which usually the website can be authorized at. A few unethical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agencies have given the market a bad name through intense marketing strategies and attempts upon gaining ranks in unfair methods. These 8 On-Page SEO methods are simply some of the particular ways to increase organic lookup traffic. Off page SEO signifies search engine that how the particular particular website is being recognized by other website and customers. Most associated with respondents gave thumbs up in order to Mobile SEO and AMP implemented by featured snippets and lengthy tail keywords. A report published by World Journal of Advanced Research Basis states that India is established to see the incredible development of digital marketing industry due to the fact of growing acceptance of ecommerce and online businesses; and, I actually expect the same for the particular career of content writers or even SEO copy writers. Gaining higher ranks within the search results to make leads and thus generate on the web revenue from organic marketing strategies is how you rock the particular SEO domain. Despite the ancient usage, Backlinks are nevertheless the most powerful facet associated with the latest SEO trends plus techniques. I discussed this idea within my last post here upon Moz — Get SEO 2019 PDF up, SEOs : the NEW New Google will be Here — so I will not repeat myself, but I perform suggest you decide to move read it (again). Also, with just how SEO works today, just spamming keywords isn't going to assist you at all. All SEO specialists will give more emphasis in order to content marketing and social mass media in 2018. Currently, 76% marketers use Social Mass media to support and boost SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, cites an article published from In 2017, marketers will perform everything possible to make their particular Facebook posts or tweets position higher on the SERPs. As SEO is right now moving towards providing personalized encounter thus, UX will play the huge role in maintaining the particular search traffic. Therefore in addition to creating high quality backlinks, building a strong interpersonal media presence and posting your own web-links on directories, one associated with the latest SEO technique employed for off-page optimization is to type strategic relations with similar companies and promote your website via their work. Finally, those nine useful SEO ranking factors possess been revealed. SEMRush - Another great tool for SEO evaluation, particularly where it concerns company intelligence, SEMRush allows you in order to identify and analyze the key phrases that your competitors are making use of. Optimizing with regard to artificial intelligence (AI): With the particular rollout of Google RankBrain's AI technology, our team at C-K published a SEO for RankBrain POV a couple of many years back that speaks to common optimization considerations. Incorporating SEO into your marketing and advertising strategy has become crucial to the particular success of your website plus business. Hence, the particular business owners need to concentrate on each new development plus understand its tweaks and improvements and its effects on the particular website rating to establish the particular right type of SEO technique that retains high rankings. In 2018, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies will be greatly inspired by voice search as the particular focus will be on long-tail search keywords. Digital co-workers like Siri and Alexa are usually now common in many houses and the way the unit make use of search engines is moving the particular goalposts for SEO marketers as soon as more. Very helpful information for me, thanks with regard to sharing with us, but i actually want to ask that We am doing seo for on-line magazine and which new methods i can value to obtain more traffic to our site. Most of the particular newbies in the digital advertising field are executing Gray Head wear SEO techniques. The SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION adage length is strength” has been supported by our industry research which found that longer articles has a tendency to position significantly higher on Google's very first page. Google Traffic is near to non and it's getting difficult to keep investing budget in SEO. I was initially concerned regarding ranking my sites and this was too hard to understand about SEO. Talk to your marketing group about how to include Tone of voice into your SEO plans. While SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION assists with driving traffic in order to your site, the designing component helps in grabbing the interest from the users. Today is the time to pay out more attention to long-tail key phrase phrases and to local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Therefore, the SEO's job nowadays much more than keywords plus backlinks. Sign up for our own weekly SEO and daily SearchCap newsletters with regard to a recap of all the particular latest SEO related news, suggestions and tactics from Search Motor Land and other sources almost all over the Web. When it comes to Search engines SEO, the rel=canonical link element has become VERY IMPORTANT over the years plus NEVER MORE SO. So taking time away to complete an SEO training program will only be beneficial regarding your business as it can help you stay ahead associated with your competitors. The team at MyTasker has modelled an infographic upon SEO Techniques and Strategies which supplies valuable insights that are essential with regard to driving targeted traffic to your own business website. Regardless of Google best effort, there's nevertheless a loophole and there's nevertheless more to do with regional search or hyperlocal SEO. This can help businesses set up a good SEO platform that is each user and SEO friendly. SEO is the method associated with increasing a website's visibility plus ranking on search results webpages. Staying on top of the particular changing trends in search motor optimization (SEO) is a need to if a website will probably be observed by targeted customers. SEO in 2018 will be giving us a brand brand-new concept: Instead of typing key phrases on the computer, consumers are usually asking questions. Since you may be able in order to guess from the name, WordTracker focuses in on one component of SEO: keyword research. Just like adding interlinks above, you should also include some external links to higher domain authority sites. ย This assists your WordPress SEO by allowing Google know that you are usually linking out to high-quality content material that is highly relevant in order to yoursย and improves the user encounter by giving them with extra information. Thus, SEO strategy can aim to develop a backlink user profile to avoid spamming in 2018 and yes, backlink will remain an important key to producing your business rank on best in search ranking. But it's perplexing why some businesses don't consider harder with analysis, revisions, plus new at ease with their own SEO marketing strategy. Blogs, guides, whitepapers, case studies, videos, and interpersonal posts all have to consist of the right keywords for interpersonal and SEO. In case RankBrain can be more and even more influential in rankings, that will be very likely, that means that will SEO's will begin optimizing even more and more for user knowledge instead of other factors. In today's internet age group, you must be careful along with conventional SEO standards like key phrases in content, leaving comments, plus even reusing content on several pages. Taking a few extra a few minutes to make sure your write-up is fully optimized will permit you to harness WordPress' incredible SEO and content marketing strength for your blog post's articles. Search Console (Webmaster tools) is usually one of the SEO fundamentals. With the increase of voice search, over fifty percent of Google searches coming through mobile devices, the impending mobile-first index, and mobile-friendliness as becoming a ranking factor, you merely can't afford to ignore cellular SEO anymore. When you create brand-new content based on your concern keywords, you have several benefits with an SEO online advertising strategy. On-site SEO can consist of tasks for example adding keywords in order to your titles, images, and web link, adding multi-media for example images plus videos throughout your content, inner linking, and updating your articles regularly with new information. To end up being able to use article marketing and advertising for SEO, authors aim in order to write useful articles which can be used by as several publishers as possible and produce many backlinks. 2. Writing Regarding the Audience - There provides been a major shift within SEO from writing for the particular search engines like google (Google), to writing for your readers. It will probably be one of the top SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends in 2018 because generally there will be a great focus on SEO according to visible content, since it is the more interactive approach. Knowing the above facts, Voice Research being on the uprising within forseeable future, SEO specialists have got to be more accurate regarding long tail keywords, schema, Search engines my business and FAQs web pages; as these pages would have an effect on the technicality of search outcomes tremendously. New School SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION has us searching for semantically related keywords and additional topical cream paragraphs we can add in order to a single long-form blog blog post. When you are wondering which procedures are tossed aside today plus which are important to make use of in your strategy, here will be the list of the greatest SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends of 2018. Some SEO professionals may guarantee getting top position; if an SEO firm provides a guarantee for top degree rankings, it may force all of them to use less ethical techniques, or black-hat methods, to accomplish those guarantees. However, 2018 is usually predicted to further prod SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technicians towards recognising that basically talking about a company is definitely enough to boost your ranks. The following user focused on-site SEO techniques may help you improve position and gain more traffic within 2017 and beyond. New web sites should start their SEO trip with local keywords. Local SEO will be a branch of SEO that will specifically deals with search motor optimisation for local businesses. Another technique gives a different page centered on whether the page is definitely being requested with a human being visitor or a search motor, a strategy known as cloaking Another category sometimes used is definitely grey hat SEO This is usually in between black hat plus white hat approaches, where the particular methods employed avoid the web site being penalized, but do not really act in producing the greatest content for users. They are the particular exact SEO strategies that have assisted to boost our organic lookup engine traffic (unique visitor) simply by 35. 36% in just thirty days. There exists a great deal of misinformation about what a good SEO campaign (company) can achieve with regards to organic lookup engine rankings. Of course, key phrase targeting still matters but since Google's A. I. becomes more efficient, SEOs and publishers need in order to think more on task conclusion — in which the job is the underlying intent associated with the keyword. The most critical step of most is to write a heading which will inspire people in order to share your post, and that will contains your SEO keyword. A lot of businesses have been tracked spending 80% of their marketing budget on Pay out Per Click Strategies (Search plus Social) and only 20% upon SEO. Investing in quality techniques which do take longer yet endure and are also all those which generate valuable traffic is usually the greatest way to invest your time on SEO. Furthermore, Google will always elevate the particular importance of usability and specialized SEO factors, such as web site security, page speed, mobile friendliness, and navigability. A professional SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION company will verify the nearby listing on Bing and Search engines. Like many things in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, you will need to begin with an extensive keyword study In order to rank for the Jesse Bowie question, you also desire to explore what else individuals ask. And remember, various other search engines like google this kind of as Bing and Yahoo depend sometimes even more on exactly what some may call outdated SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION practices. Google Webmaster Equipment is section of Google's best SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION websites package. If a person have a website that a person want to become easily discovered by a search engine, you should increase your site rank by means of SEO as well. Gowns what most of these SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tactics want to accomplish - increased rankings. This free ebook will teach you, step by step, how to transform your Local SEO so you can start generating more traffic and sales for the business. Not only internet lookup engine algorithm changes but furthermore the way people search will keep changing, therefore, taking into consideration the above ten SEO trends- digital marketers plus business owners can make the particular website ready for ranking higher in 2018. Matt Cutts (no longer along with Google) consistent SEO advice was in order to focus on a satisfying consumer experience. Finally, in case you don't have enough website visitors, knowing SEO can help a person figure out exactly why your own site lacks visibility and help you in taking steps in order to improve your rankings. It's not the perfect SEO page title since of the multiple distinct solutions, but the structure can supply rise to rankings for a few long-tail keyword phrases. The SEO fads keep developing with time and, hence the particular individuals and business organizations as well should get their act jointly to have effect on the particular Google algorithm. It will certainly serve one well to keep in mind that building great backlinks making use of link-building is a valuable search engine optimization tactic. Improvements in search algorithms and within people's searching patterns and the particular mobile over desktop preferences are usually changing the nature of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. However, cellular trends in SEO have turn out to be quite compelling. Focusing on user intent and attempting out these 19 SEO suggestions is a recipe for visitors success. Many marketers decided to go with to drive their modern marketing and advertising engine with the fuel associated with Video SEO in 2015. SEO will create sure you blogs get discovered and drive traffic. In 2018, SEO technique should consider how we eat visual content, and how research engines go beyond text in order to learn changing search habits. So, the bottom part line is that when a person want to pace with this SEO trends, you need in order to consider both keyword optimisation plus content relevancy. Well, the new SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Trends focus on more pictures, videos, links, social Medias, post listings, followed by widgets plus ads. Then read all about the particular 4 most important (technical) SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends for 2018. Because so much spreading now happens on major sociable media platforms, social signals might become as important to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION as time on page, content linking, and content quality. I know there's the entire idea of search experience optimization” and ensuring you are enhancing for platforms beyond search yet when it comes down in order to it, SEO is about becoming found in search engines. With the addition of Google's new lengthier meta description snippets, featured thoughts, knowledge panels, local packs plus much more, you've got your own SEO hands full! SEO specialists have to look for new tricks and techniques to promote a website due to the fact Google algorithms take into accounts not only keywords, but also context, and a lot more. The particular biggest SEO trend in 2018 is voice search queries. There is the blur line between mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and desktop search engine advertising. One of the particular trends I expect to discover in 2018, which will have got a significant impact on almost all aspects of SEO, may be the growing role of artificial intelligence. SEO is an Online marketing and advertising strategy that improves the visitors on your webpage or web site. Meaning by 2018, SEO based promotion strategy ought to concentrate on having long-verse content material for best ranking results. Previously we knew that SEO- Search engine optimization is just a technique in order to drive a large number associated with organic searches to our web sites but now its application is definitely beyond the conventional content optimisation strategies. Start using mobile SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION if you are thinking associated with keeping or raising your rates in 2018. Brian Dean, an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION expert recommends to even location your keyword at the starting of the title if achievable that will have more bodyweight in search engines. This new update has been obviously a sign that SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking had become based upon content and keywords. The convergence of articles and SEO presents a enormous opportunity for brands to evangelize organic search success and rip down the silos and stigma once associated with the darkish side from the industry. Content advertising will be the new SEO. I obtained Best off-page SEO strategies through this post it helps all of us a lot to build a lot more links. SEO offers you a shot at ranking intended for the terms which your clients use, so you can understand better business. When it arrives to on-page SEO, I'm particular you've heard enough about the particular meta tag and keyword thickness for one lifetime. Awesome article i don't understand about youtube SEO but right after reading this article i completely understand how to rank movie on youtube and google furthermore. Brand building is the particular new link building and off-page SEO strategy in digital marketing nowadays, given that when brands turn out to be true to their core ideals, messaging and personalities, it will be easy for them to sink into and dominate their target viewers. So what will be something the average joe may do to help boost their particular SEO rankings for a specific keyword? Placing hyperlinks for your other website web pages, is a great way associated with enhancing your site and utilized properly, internal links can end up being a useful weapon within your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION arsenal. Top SEO businesses will even advice you within good time on the solutions and features that you require to increase traffic onto your own website within a more hassle-free time frame. Here I have began my Post title with the target keyword SEO”. And, as this so happens, engagement with your own listing may have a good impact on your rankings, therefore shock horror doing good marketing and advertising is also good for your own SEO. Yet, I'm quite sure by the particular end of 2020, voice lookup will be very common, plus there will be many discussions going on in the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION world on how to boost the content for a tone of voice search, similar how it's today about mobile. On-Page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION describes all the things that will you can do on your website in order to assist you rank higher, like as page titles, internal relating, Meta tags & descriptions, and so on. Success in SEO is definitely the best content around the subject you picked and quality back links to it from other assets with high authority level. Many electronic natives and marketers alike are usually using SEO to its benefit by incorporating every keyword you can possibly imagine into the content they create. Now that a person understand the way to please your customers, how to satisfy search objective, and how to create content material, it's time to move on to Pillar #3 in this SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. As mentioned previously, businesses could not make the bigger mistake than thinking that will best SEO techniques only rely on content, because the most recent SEO techniques you need in order to adapt depend on more than simply content. Today that you're on top associated with these 6 SEO trends plus have an arsenal of ideas to manage your strategy, a person are well positioned for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and digital marketing in 2018. In order to obtain a featured snippet, content internet marketers must structure their articles in order to a number of factors, having SEO well beyond the existing competition to reach the number 1 spot on Google.

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gus-the-icreamman · 6 years

Text

The Best SEO to 2019

Search engine optimization, in any other case known as SEO, may be used within blogging and in other web marketing techniques to drive visitors to any web site of your own choice, whether it is the blog, Squidoo lens or the traditional website page. This totally changes black head wear SEO tactics to gain relevance for various searches by building pages that are individually designed for different keywords. G. S Please note that SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques works on the vast majority of websites. SEO agencies offer providers that change from writing next text messages to giving advice on the particular subject of the website, plus choosing the best directories which usually the website can be authorized at. A few unethical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agencies have given the business a bad name through intense marketing strategies and attempts upon gaining ranks in unfair methods. These 8 On-Page SEO strategies are simply some of the particular ways to increase organic research traffic. Off page SEO signifies search engine that how the particular particular website is being recognized by other website and customers. Most associated with respondents gave thumbs up in order to Mobile SEO and AMP adopted by featured snippets and lengthy tail keywords. A report published by World Journal of Advanced Research Base states that India is established to see the incredible development of digital marketing industry due to the fact of growing acceptance of ecommerce and online businesses; and, I actually expect the same for the particular career of content writers or even SEO copy writers. Gaining higher ranks within the search results to generate leads and thus generate on the internet revenue from organic marketing techniques is how you rock the particular SEO domain. Despite the ancient usage, Backlinks are nevertheless the most powerful facet associated with the latest SEO trends plus techniques. I discussed this idea within my last post here upon Moz — Get SEO 2019 Slide up, SEOs : the NEW New Google is definitely Here — so I is just not repeat myself, but I perform suggest you decide to move read it (again). Also, with just how SEO works today, just spamming keywords isn't going to assist you at all. All SEO professionals will give more emphasis in order to content marketing and social press in 2018. Currently, 76% marketers use Social Mass media to support and boost SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, cites an article published with In 2017, marketers will perform everything possible to make their own Facebook posts or tweets position higher on the SERPs. As SEO is today moving towards providing personalized knowledge thus, UX will play the huge role in maintaining the particular search traffic. Therefore in addition to creating high quality backlinks, building a strong interpersonal media presence and posting your own web-links on directories, one associated with the latest SEO technique employed for off-page optimization is to type strategic relations with similar companies and promote your website by means of their work. Finally, those nine useful SEO ranking factors possess been revealed. SEMRush - Another great tool for SEO evaluation, particularly where it concerns company intelligence, SEMRush allows you in order to identify and analyze the key phrases that your competitors are making use of. Optimizing with regard to artificial intelligence (AI): With the particular rollout of Google RankBrain's AI technology, our team at C-K published a SEO for RankBrain POV a couple of many years back that speaks to common optimization considerations. Incorporating SEO into your marketing and advertising strategy has become crucial to the particular success of your website plus business. Hence, the particular business owners need to concentrate on each new development plus understand its tweaks and up-dates and its effects on the particular website rating to establish the particular right type of SEO technique that retains high rankings. In 2018, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies will be greatly motivated by voice search as the particular focus will be on long-tail search keywords. Digital co-workers like Siri and Alexa are usually now common in many houses and the way the product make use of search engines is moving the particular goalposts for SEO marketers as soon as more. Very helpful information for me, thanks intended for sharing with us, but i actually want to ask that We am doing seo for on the web magazine and which new strategies i can value to obtain more traffic to our site. Most of the particular newbies in the digital advertising field are executing Gray Head wear SEO techniques. The SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION adage length is strength” had been supported by our industry research which found that longer articles has a tendency to position significantly higher on Google's 1st page. Google Traffic is near to non and it's getting difficult to keep investing budget in SEO. I was initially concerned regarding ranking my sites and this was too hard to understand about SEO. Talk to your marketing group about how to include Tone of voice into your SEO plans. While SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION assists with driving traffic in order to your site, the designing component helps in grabbing the interest from the users. Today is the time to pay out more attention to long-tail key word phrases and to local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Therefore, the SEO's job nowadays much more than keywords plus backlinks. Sign up for our own weekly SEO and daily SearchCap newsletters regarding a recap of all the particular latest SEO related news, ideas and tactics from Search Motor Land and other sources just about all over the Web. When it comes to Search engines SEO, the rel=canonical link element has become VERY IMPORTANT over the years plus NEVER MORE SO. So taking time out there to perform an SEO training training course will only be beneficial with regard to your business as it will certainly help you stay ahead associated with your competitors. The team at MyTasker has modelled an infographic upon SEO Techniques and Strategies which supplies valuable insights that are essential intended for driving targeted traffic to your own business website. Regardless of Google best effort, there's nevertheless a loophole and there's nevertheless more to do with nearby search or hyperlocal SEO. This will certainly help businesses set up a good SEO platform that is each user and SEO friendly. SEO is the method associated with increasing a website's visibility plus ranking on search results web pages. Staying on top of the particular changing trends in search motor optimization (SEO) is a have to if a website will probably be noticed by targeted customers. SEO in 2018 is definitely giving us a brand brand-new concept: Instead of typing key phrases on the computer, consumers are usually asking questions. Everybody knows that will SEO is an acronym that will represents Search Engine Optimization. The particular analytical area of the SEO is regarding tracking organic keyword positions, site traffic and its engagement online Analytics, Webmaster Tools and several other specialized tools. Staying on top of the particular changing trends in search motor optimization (SEO) is a should if a website will probably be noticed by targeted customers. Considering that Google processes more than 3. 5 billion searches for each day, the 30% increase within voice search in only the particular next two years translates straight into huge numbers and an actually bigger potential for optimizing your own SEO strategy to begin getting together with the demands of voice lookup now. It is usually true that constantly researching regarding SEO techniques is a tiresome and tiring process, but right now there is no silver bullet with regard to maintaining high ranking except adopting change. Thus, cellular friendliness serves as one associated with the major factor that may continue in 2018 as the particular trend in SEO. In today's internet age group, you must be careful along with conventional SEO standards like key phrases in content, leaving comments, plus even reusing content on several pages. Taking a few extra a few minutes to make sure your article is fully optimized will permit you to harness WordPress' incredible SEO and content marketing energy for your blog post's articles. Search Console (Webmaster tools) is usually one of the SEO essentials. With the increase of voice search, over fifty percent of Google searches coming through mobile devices, the impending mobile-first index, and mobile-friendliness as becoming a ranking factor, you merely can't afford to ignore cellular SEO anymore. When you create fresh content based on your concern keywords, you have several benefits with an SEO online advertising strategy. On-site SEO can consist of tasks like adding keywords in order to your titles, images, and web link, adding multi-media for example images plus videos throughout your content, inner linking, and updating your articles regularly with new information. To become able to use article advertising for SEO, authors aim in order to write useful articles which will certainly be used by as a lot of publishers as possible and create many backlinks. 2. Writing With regard to the Audience - There provides been a major shift within SEO from writing for the particular search engines like google (Google), to writing for your audience. It will probably be one of the top SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends in 2018 because presently there will be a great focus on SEO according to visible content, since it is the more interactive approach. Knowing the above facts, Voice Lookup being on the uprising within forseeable future, SEO specialists have got to be more accurate regarding long tail keywords, schema, Search engines my business and FAQs web pages; as these pages would have an effect on the technicality of search outcomes tremendously. New School SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION has us searching for semantically related keywords and additional topical ointment paragraphs we can add in order to a single long-form blog article. Internal linking is amongst the major aspects of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION as with the aid associated with it you can direct visitors to your other pages plus posts too. The thing regarding YouTube Google rankings since 04 2014 Google had a main update, many vseo have already been crying but the option would certainly be pretty simple. This particular may not sound like a good advanced SEO strategy, but you needed be surprised the number associated with websites are missing basic on-page SEO like page titles or even descriptions. But this has a nice SEO advantage to boot: multimedia helps a person boost those user-interaction signals that will Google continues to be having to pay more attention to. I feel wanting to rank with the key phrase online jobs but as the particular URL is long & the particular keyword is in the final associated with the URL, I am not really ranking on the first place even after my page and my SEO is more preferable than some other first 3 ranked sites. SEO is almost all about backlinks, right? They are the particular exact SEO strategies that have assisted to boost our organic lookup engine traffic (unique visitor) simply by 35. 36% in just thirty days. There exists a great deal of misinformation about what a good SEO campaign (company) can achieve with regards to organic research engine rankings. Of course, key phrase targeting still matters but since Google's A. I. becomes more efficient, SEOs and publishers need in order to think more on task conclusion — in which the job is the underlying intent associated with the keyword. The most critical step of most is to write a subject which will inspire people in order to share your post, and that will contains your SEO keyword. Numerous businesses have been tracked spending 80% of their marketing budget on Pay out Per Click Strategies (Search plus Social) and only 20% upon SEO. Investing in quality strategies which do take longer yet endure and are also individuals which generate valuable traffic will be the greatest way to invest your time on SEO. Furthermore, Google will still elevate the particular importance of usability and specialized SEO factors, such as web site security, page speed, mobile friendliness, and navigability. If you want to end up being visible to your target target audience and see the peak functionality of your website, then a person have to stay up in order to date with SEO (Search Motor Optimization). SEO experts manipulates a range of factors to provide your own site a boost to rise the very best of the particular search engines' list. As SEO heads towards even more relevant and personalized experiences, UX will be key to sustaining search traffic by creating a good engaged audience. The vast majority of the SEO trends with regard to 2018 are exactly as a person would expect, and show all of us where marketing is going -- mobilisation, artificial intelligence, localisation plus enhanced security. The SEO is usually evolving and now it's getting very dependent on your content material marketing strategy. Then, your blog post may require backlinks from other SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION blogs. Today, optimizing the particular SEO techniques for voice research is of utmost relevance mainly because, with the upgrading of tone of voice assistants, a large number associated with individuals as well as agencies are availing of voice lookup for prompt searching of queries. Away from page SEO refers to methods that can be used in order to increase the positioning of the website in the search motor results page (SERPs). Long gone are the times when keyword placement and back links guaranteed success in SEO. I think the particular #1 trend for 2018 within SEO is going to end up being Google Voice. Links and technical SEO are usually the largest bits of the quiche, but multimedia efforts such since video, photos, and podcasts may be the game changer plus differentiator in many competitive marketplaces. Back in the wild-west times of SEO, Google wasn't therefore great at identifying the partnership between semantic keywords. Changes searching algorithms and within people's search habits and the particular preferences of mobile over desktop computer are changing the world associated with SEO. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (Search Engine Optimization) has turn out to be the driving force behind effective web-based companies. Research engine optimization strategies and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION best practices that were as soon as effective this past year may not become useful today. People always attempt direct method but most associated with time these trick don't functions for SEO. A single of the biggest initiatives within SEO is creating quality content material. His expertise is within SEO, Paid Search & Content Marketing. Our goal with on-page SEO is to optimize a good article in a natural, yet smart way, so that lookup engines can easily choose the particular prospective keyword and bring the website targeted visitors. It can be helpful if you reveal some on-page SEO tips plus how to do a key word research. A number of non-SEO equipment still give you a great insight into keywords. The greatest SEO companies is going in order to do keyword research on your own company as well as your own industry to come up along with a list of terms which usually will yield the best outcomes for your website. Possibly, you heard about the phrase Google's Rank Brain, the latest synthetic intelligence & machine learning criteria that is considered as the particular supreme invention of SEO position till now. Traditional SEO is targeted upon building (keyword relevant) links plus (keyword relevant) content. The search engine search engine optimization (SEO) industry is still expanding in recognition and is worth a excellent $65 billion SEO helps shops rank in search engines such as Google. What's coming intended for search engine optimization (SEO) professionals within the coming year? In case you quality backlinks to your own blog post, you'll also much better search engine positions for the particular competitive terms like SEO Tips” with ease. SEO is the methodology that technically and topically aligns brand content and engagement along with searcher intent. SEOs are able to gain access to a lot more information compared to we ever could before straight from Google using Search Gaming console (like mobile friendliness of content material, and validation of structured data), and tools like the automatic assistant in the mobile Search engines Analytics app, which provides device learning insights to Google analytics data. A good SEO strategy in 2018 requirements to consider the way we all consume visual content and exactly how search engines now go over and above text to explore the altering habits of search. As a matter of reality, the strength of any website is situated in the DA. Domain Power is SEOmozs calculated metric with regard to how well a given site is likely to rank looking results. An SEO expert can tell you this single modification may not improve your web page rankings or authority very significantly, however it will get even more clicks. Off-page SEO very efficiently in advertising your business where social mass media, bookmarking sites, forums, blog directory site, Q&A, articles, videos, image plus infographic sharing, and document revealing play well. Even though AMP is not so very much a ranking signal for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, you can imagine that AMP's, when properly utilised, provide the broader visibility. The white hat SEO methods are good for future-proof SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION results Meanwhile, black hat ought to be avoided at all expenses as they strategies are the particular ones that Google and additional search engines are determined in order to root out. But as Dan Taylor described in a comprehensive look in RankBrain and SEO, there will be no set way to improve for RankBrain, although certain lookup practices are now more related than ever before. A lot associated with people see SEO or Lookup Engine Optimization as a unexplainable industry. Having the page on the search motors my business is a excellent helper for your local business plus is an essential portion of Nearby SEO, and I think that will during 2018 it is heading to pass a value in order to the local SEO. Even though, it is touch time intensive to create the quality video, it is over worth it. Great for visitors and SEO as well. Technical SEO: Assuring all hyperlinks are updated, performing keyword analysis, setting up redirects when webpages are moved, fixing errors, making use of proper markup, and so on. As there is definitely with all sorts or advertising or advertising technique, there are proven, time examined guidelines that when implemented properly will help you immensely along with your Local SEO campaign. Top SEO businesses will even advice you within good time on the providers and features that you require to increase traffic onto your own website within a more practical time frame. Here I have began my Post title with our target keyword SEO”. And, as this so happens, engagement with your own listing may have a beneficial impact on your rankings, therefore shock horror doing good marketing and advertising is also good for your own SEO. Yet, I'm quite sure by the particular end of 2020, voice lookup will be very common, plus there will be many discussions going on in the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION world on how to improve the content for a tone of voice search, similar how it's today about mobile. On-Page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION describes all the things that will you can do on your website in order to assist you rank higher, like as page titles, internal connecting, Meta tags & descriptions, and so on. Success in SEO is definitely the best content within the subject you picked and quality back links to it from other assets with high authority level. Voice technology plus digital assistants are paving the particular path for new and helpful ways to deliver content plus approach SEO. Learning much more in our blog write-up: 5 reasons why User Encounter (UX) is important for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. I was initially concerned about ranking my websites and it was too very much to learn about SEO. Using rich images as an SEO strategy need to be a major focus within increasing your brand presence plus reach via content marketing within 2018. However, along with the advancement of technology plus Google latest updates you may improve rankings by adopting tone of voice search, accelerated mobile pages, content material marketing, mobile optimization, user-experience search engine optimization, long-tail keywords, local SEO, Search engines Quick Answer Box, Microformat plus Artificial Intelligence inside your SEO technique 2018. As a result, it is extremely essential with regard to businesses to take note associated with SEO and make sure that will their websites are properly listed by search engines.

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