I initially loved this – effectively a popular historiography of the (Italian, mostly) Renaissance, exploring different perspectives and opinions and how these have evolved over time – while also providing overviews of some of the key events and personalities.
This is a wildly confusing period, so this approach actually works pretty well – highlighting who focused on what and offering multiple explanations as to why. Until about halfway through I loved it, and still remain convinced that looking at history by first looking at the lens of the historians and players who shaped that history is an approach more popular history books should take, rather than just run with a narrative.
But… “The Renaissance”, singular? This goes totally against the author’s core argument, which is all about how there are any number of ways of looking at this period (or even defining how long a period we’re talking about). Yet despite this we get surprisingly little about the Northern Renaissance, and almost every key figure called out was based in northern Italy – despite multiple references to Erasmus as a nexus of Renaissance correspondence, we get few investigations into how or whether what was happening in Italy was influenced by or influenced what was going on elsewhere (bar the frequent French invasions and other aspects of high politics).
Equally, about halfway through I started to find the whole thing a little overwhelming as we jump from overarching thesis (there’s no one right way of interpreting any of this) to detailed biography, so philosophical aside, to onrunning jokes. After a promising start, the structure starts to get lost, and it increasingly feels like a series of essays or blog posts loosely bound together.
The more this went on, the more I felt it could have been better if presented as essays rather than a whole – because after a while the running jokes (“Battle Pope”, “Abelarding”, references to Game of Thrones, etc etc) start to detract from rather than clarify the argument. This jokey style is one that’s been very popular the last decade or so, and can work – but in a book this long it can start to grate, even if you don’t object to it in principle, as some might.
Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of really good stuff in here. I learned a lot, and will want to go back and re-read various parts (as long as I can work out which with the jokey chapter titles) to refresh my memory – and eventually start to make a little more sense of a chaotic and challenging to understand period.
History is all about perspective, and perspectives. This history of England’s most turbulent century – a period I studied to postgrad level – is a welcome attempt to offer alternative views of events via the eyes of non-English observers. As we’re somehow still referring to the central event as the English Civil War – ignoring Scotland, Ireland and Wales – this is very much needed.
The introduction promised a lot, and got me genuinely excited to see how much this focus on foreign perspectives – and foreign policy – would shift my own understanding. But while there were some new things for me here, at its heart this was all rather familiar.
Then again, I’m not really the target audience. As well as having studied the period, I also spent some time plotting out a potential novel that hinged in part on the foreign policy of James VI/I and the (limited) British involvement in the Thirty Years War.
For anyone relatively new to the period, or looking for a refresher overview, this would be really rather good. Standard accounts do tend to focus almost exclusively on England, where here Scotland and Ireland (not so much Wales) do get their due. But more importantly, most accounts tend to obsess about the religious angle, the disputes over tax and revenue, the disputes about the limits to the power of the monarchy, the attempts by parliament to assert itself.
All those are present here too – but so too are explorations of the European horror at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots; the Spanish side of the Spanish Armada and the Spanish Match, as well as worries about the subsequent French marriage; general concern as the civil wars broke out and further horror at England’s execution of a second monarch in sixty-odd years; the Dutch rivalry and wars and invasion.
All this is necessary to a solid understanding of the era – but all too often is skipped over or sidelined. Here, while it’s still not foregrounded as much as I’d hoped – or as much as is promised in the introduction – it’s hard to avoid the fuller understand appreciation that England was not operating in isolation. That other countries existed even then, and that even the foreign relations were far more than just theoretical, largely religious concerns.
All that said, cutting this off with the Glorious Revolution (another bad name that’s stuck) makes zero sense from a non-English perspective (even if the epilogue continues the story through to George I). Logically, the cut off should be more like 1745 (that final Jacobite rising, in the midst of British involvement in the War of Austrian Succession) and the solidification of the Hanoverian dynasty, or even a century later with the death of the Young Pretender / Bonnie Prince Charlie. But I guess by that point Britain was so firmly involved in European and global affairs that the emphasis on non-English opinions about the English would hardly be surprising.
So, a good overview – even if sadly not as radical and overhaul of the period’s traditional narratives as I was hoping.
“While 82% of advertising executives believe Gen Z and millennial consumers feel positively about AI-generated ads, only 45% of these consumers actually feel that way”
But this is hardly a surprise. A couple of years back I referred to GenAI being at every stage of the Gartner hype cycle simultaneously, and that remains true today – it’s just that more people have passed over the peak of inflated expectations.
Meanwhile, the AI companies need to keep on trying to inflate those expectations further to keep the investment money coming in to allow them to build the infrastructure they need to keep delivering.
But we’re at a stage now where high level promises like those you get in an advert or keynote are hitting the law of diminishing returns. These companies are selling to an increasingly sceptical crowd – as a global society, we’re further down the funnel and are looking for more proof points before we buy in.
(This is part of why I’m convinced Elon Musk knew exactly what he was doing with his Grok porn bot – the uproar was great free publicity for Grok’s ability to create photorealistic images and video… PR can be cynical…)
Given this, is an old school Super bowl campaign really going to make any difference? or is this now just another old school brand awareness play, given Google seems to be on the verge of demolishing OpenAI’s previous lead?
Either way, we’re definitely entering a new phase in the AI play – and the emphasis is increasingly going to need to be on proof of impact, not just proof of concept. The narrative needs to shift.
The question of what AI does to publishing has much more to do with why people are reading than how you wrote. Do they care who you are? About your voice or your story? Or are they looking for a database output? Benedict Evans, on LinkedIn
Context is (usually) more important to the success of content than the content itself. And that context depends on the reader/viewer/listener.
It’s the classic journalistic questioning model, but about the audience, not the story:
Who are they?
What are they looking for?
Why are they looking for it?
Where are they looking for it?
When do they need it by?
How else could they get the same results?
Which options will best meet their needs?
Every one of these questions impacts that individual’s perceptions of what type of content will be most valuable to them, and therefore their choice of preferred format / platform for that specific moment in time. Sometimes they’ll want a snappy overview, other times a deep dive, yet other times to hear direct from or talk with an expert.
GenAI enables format flexibility, and chatbot interfaces encourage audience interaction through follow-up Q&As that can help make answers increasingly specific and relevant. This means it will have some pretty wide applications – but it still won’t be appropriate to every context / audience need state.
The real question is which audience needs can publishers – and human content creators – meet better than GenAI?
It’s easy to criticise “AI slop” – but the internet has been awash with utterly bland, characterless human-created slop for years. If GenAI forces those of us in the media to try a bit harder, then it’s all for the good.
The most surprising thing with this growing move away from social media advertising is that it has taken this long for brands to realise that they can’t control the context in which their adverts appear – and that context can change perception of their messaging.
The real lesson here is not that social media needs stricter controls (an ethical debate), it’s that in the classic Paid/Earned/Owned model, the *only* part brands can fully control is Owned. Many are only now beginning to wake up to the fact that their social accounts are not Owned platforms.
All this should have been obvious for years – every fresh story about an algorithm change destroying business models that were relying on social audiences has been an alarm bell. But perhaps now brands are finally realising that social isn’t as straightforward as they’ve long seemed to believe.
What does this mean for brands?
1) They need more robust, nuanced social strategies. Chucking money at paid posts and adverts doesn’t cut it. It never has.
2) The quality of their genuinely Owned platforms is becoming more important than ever. These are the only places they have complete control over the context and the message.
And it’s also notable that many brands joining the boycott have solid Owned strategies in place…
Ethos (basically the speaker’s credibility or brand)
Logos (the subject & style of the message)
Pathos (effectively the audience’s response)
Prioritising pathos
For an artist, novelist, or even journalist, the first two of these are almost always the most important, with a strong emphasis on the second. While most artists and writers *want* to have a positive audience response to their work, their primary goal is to get their idea out there. Their ethos / reputation may help them reach an audience, but this is secondary to the logos of the work they’re producing: the subject they want to convey, and the way they – the authors of the work – decide to shape it is both their focus, and the focus of their audience.
In short, for an artist or writer, often it is the act of creation itself that is the goal. Getting a positive audience response is merely a bonus – and being forced to chase an audience can stifle their creativity and lead to both stress and bad work. Hence the cliche of the difficult second album…
By contrast, for marketing it’s the last of Aristotle’s three concepts – pathos, the response of the audience – which is most important. Without the right kind of audience response, a marketer’s work will have failed. Hence the birth of focus groups, testing, and the often quite derivative nature of advertising, as “creatives” are forced to shape their work not around a great creative concept in itself, as an artist would, but how that creative concept is likely to resonate with their target audience – pushing them into creativity by committee (always a killer), and a constant recycling of ideas that are known to work.
This focus on the audience’s response is how we’ve end up jumping all the way from Aristotle to Roland Barthes, the notoriously difficult to read late-20th century French semiotician. (But still, at least he’s not Pierre Bourdieu, who I may get to in a later piece in this series…)
Everything is subjective
Barthes’ most famous idea is that of the death of the author – basically the idea that the authorial/creative intentions behind a work of art/literature don’t matter; all that is important is the response of the audience.
To understand this response, Barthes – building on some of the concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure that helped give birth to semiotics, the study of signs (combined with some of Jacques Lacan’s ideas on psychology) – began to re-conceptualise the way meaning is created in culture and society.
Where for Saussure, the importance of semiotics was to help understand the connection between a symbol/sign (the signifier) – be that a sound, a word, or an image – and the thing or concept that symbol/sign was intended to represent (the signified), Barthes effectively took this one logical step further by pointing out that this two-way connection still didn’t get to the heart of the *meaning* of that sign/symbol, because meaning is entirely a matter of interpretation. The connection between signifier and signified is entirely subjective.
Why? Well, because all of us have different knowledge, experience, ideas, attitudes, needs and expectations.
Emojis and meaning
Emojis are a good example. Take this one: Originally designed to represent a Chinese dumpling, the emoji’s creator specifically had dumplings in mind when she made it, arguing:
“The dumpling is actually universal. Georgia has khinkali. Japan has gyoza. Korea has mandoo. Italy has ravioli. Polish people have pierogi. Russian people have pelmeni. Argentians have empanadas. Jewish people have kreplachs. Chinese people have potstickers and various other dumplings. Tibet and Nepal have momos. Turkish people have manti.”
As emojis are intended as shorthand signs to speed up communication, arguing for a dumpling emoji based on that logic is pretty sound.
When I first saw it, I initially thought it was a Cornish pasty – a type of food I grew up on. This wasn’t explicitly included in the creator’s initial list – but it was there in the spirit.
In other words, a symbol that means one thing to one person could mean something very different to someone else. (A bit like when my mother kept on signing off text messages with “LOL”, meaning “Lots Of Love”, and I was reading it as “Laugh Out Loud” and wondering what was so funny.)
Back to Barthes and a multitude of meanings
Anyway, all this is to illustrate one of Barthes’ key points: Meaning isn’t as simple as there being a direct connection between a signifier (word/image/sign) and signified (thing/concept). Instead you also need to consider the interpretation of both.
This led to Barthes’ modification of Suassure’s bilateral signifier-signified relationship into a trilateral model:
Representamen: the signifier / sign / word / image / sound used to represent a concept or thing
Object: the signified / thing / concept being represented
Interpretant: the person decoding the meaning denoted by both Representamen and Object – a meaning that may vary wildly from interpretant to interpretant depending on their personal context
In other words, there is no single objective, definitive, “correct” interpretation of any given representamen, because the meaning of such signifiers (and even the objects/signifieds they are intended to represent) will constantly change according to context.
An alcoholic example
Take the phrase “I want some alcohol” to illustrate the point.
In one sense, “alcohol” always means the same thing – reading that word, you *think* you know what I mean by it in writing it down. But – as with the emoji example above – what kind of alcohol is, to you, representative? Beer? Whisky? Wine? Gin? A fancy cocktail with an umbrella in it?
In Japanese, the word for alcohol is sake – which is fairly familiar to English speakers as Japanese rice wine. Ask for sake in a Japanese bar (at least, if you’re obviously not Japanese, like me), and that’s what’ll be delivered, even though the word technically means all types of alcohol.
But what if you’re a surgeon, talking about medical alcohol to clean your scalpel? Or Muslim, and alcohol is forbidden by your religion? Or an alcoholic, and the very thought of it represents a constant temptation and potential relapse? Or, to a lesser degree, what if it’s nine o’clock on a Saturday morning and you’ve got a hangover?
And then there’s the time and place (kairos, for Aristotle). “I want some alcohol” if you’re the surgeon in the operating theatre above will be purposeful, urgent, obviously related to a specific medical need. Say it at the end of a long working day, it could be an sign that you’ve worked hard and deserve a reward, or that you’ve been worked *too* hard and are feeling depressed, or just that you’d like to spend some time with your colleagues in a social environment. Say it at seven o’clock in the morning, and it likely means you’re an alcoholic (unless you’ve been going all night, in which case it means you’re a bit of a party animal – unless you’ve been going all night and you’re in your forties, in which case it means you’re having a mid-life crisis, and probably a little bit sad).
Even if both you as author and interpretant as reader are agreed roughly on what specific type of alcohol you’re referring to, there are still additional contextual meanings that the interpretant will layer on top of your representamen, often subconsciously, that will trigger very different responses.
Again, Aristotle got in there first – because this is pretty much what he had in mind with the idea of pathos: the emotional response of the audience to the rhetorical approach you, as speaker, have taken.
It’s always about your audiences – plural
So, if everything is subjective, context is everything to interpretation, and the intended meaning and interpreted meaning can vary wildly from person to person and context to context, what does this mean for effective communication?
Well, it basically means that it’s very, very difficult to communicate effectively.
But there is hope – Barthes doesn’t go as far as his fellow postmodernist Jacques Derrida (of whom more another time, probably) and argue that all this means things are changing so much there is ultimately no such thing as meaning.
But what it does mean is that we shouldn’t make assumptions about how what we’re trying to say will be interpreted. We need to think more about principles of inclusive design when starting to craft our messages. We need to constantly self-criticise and consider the vast range of cultural, linguistic, social, educational, and personal experiences of our audiences. And to recognise that audiences are always plural – even if the audience is a single person, because their mindset and mood will vary depending on the context in which they encounter the thing it is they are interpreting.
To anticipate all these variants may well be impossible. But if your job is to convey meaning and to try to persuade – as it is for marketers and advertisers – then your job is to attempt to anticipate as many as possible.
Anticipating responses – and adapting accordingly
Which is why, to be a successful marketer, a basic understanding of the media, of creative techniques, of the product you’re marketing and the sector you’re in – the traditional needs of the industry – is not enough. To be effective needs a far broader understanding of the context in which your work will be interpreted by your target audiences. And these audiences are far more complex than can ever hope to be summed up on a PowerPoint slide as a “persona”. To try and anticipate their responses needs an awareness of a huge range of potential variables – far more than the simplistic, old-school advertising approach focusing on fairly simplistic demographics.
This is why, as I continue this series exploring the art of persuasion and the theories and best practices that underlie marketing, I’m going to continue to branch out into other areas – from semiotics to sociology to anthropology to literary criticism to linguistics to economics to psychology to philosophy to history and more. Because ultimately, the only way to get close to persuading is to try to understand and anticipate the vast range of ways what we, as creators, are doing can be interpreted, and construct our attempts at persuasion backwards from this knowledge.
Barthes never quite got to an all-encompassing theory of meaning to create a roadmap of how to do this, having died mid-flow at the age of 64 after being run over by a laundry van following a convivial lunch with future French President Francois Mitterand and the philosopher Michel Foucault (of whom, probably, more another time). I doubt I’ll be the one to pick up the baton. And it may well be impossible anyway – even tapping into the potential promise of AI to analyse vast datasets and interpret correlations and likely causations of meaning and influence.
I’m not normally one for posting random aphorisms of motivational/aspirational self-improvement (far too journalistically cynical), but this – from Francis Bacon’s Essays, written a good 400 years ago – strikes me as an ideal personal manifesto for someone in my line of business:
“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider… Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
Francis Bacon, Essays
At this time of deep confusion, frustration and rising anger, more reading, consideration, deliberation and self-reflection can only be a good thing.
Guess how I’ll be spending the weekend?
In fact, after an additional period of consideration since I first posted this on LinkedIn, this quote may even have inspired me to start blogging more regularly again. Because I always used to use my old blog – the once-popular, occasionally influential EUtopia – as a way to shape my ideas, and it was often therapeutic, and helpful.
By semi-regularly writing about things that caught my eye in the world of politics, I honed my thinking, identified interesting trends, and – for a period – became what would now be deemed an influencer in the relatively niche space of the Brussels Bubble.
Now, the world of politics is too depressing to tackle direct. But instead I’m increasingly interested in how ideas – and ideologies – are shaped. How different people see the world. How opinions are formed. How a sense of identity is shaped by both internal and external forces.
This is, of course, an extension of my old political blog’s founding aim – and even of its strapline (“In search of a European identity”).
But the new approach – if I stick with this – will be broader. More philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, semiological, theoretical and – with luck – also practical. At least when it comes to my marketing day job.
How are opinions and ideas shaped? How are minds influenced? Why do people believe what they believe?
At this time of widespread and outright denial of seemingly undeniable evidence and facts – the politicisation of actuality, if you will – much what we have assumed about the post-Enlightenment rise of rationality and evidence-led decision-making has been shown to have been mistaken.
Postmodernist concepts of meaning and reality have become the norm – ironically adopted and most successfully pushed by the right-wingers who have long argued against most postmodern conceptions of the world. Barthes’ idea of the death of the author has spread to the point that the *intention* behind any given statement is no longer seen as quite as important as the *interpretation* of that statement by any number of diverse audiences, creating outrage and confusion across the political spectrum.
Structuralism is similarly on the rise as a way of interpreting the world around us – most notably in a growing awareness of deep structural inequalities for women and minorities – leading to a renewed surge of Deconstructionism as these systems are analysed and explained in an effort to reshape society.
All this is reshaping the norms of how we see the world. Which means a return to the old texts of my university days seems overdue – and this time with more attention than I spent in the rapid skimming for essays on Barthes, Derrida, Saussure, Lacan and more during the theory part of my MA, now half-forgotten from some 20 years ago.
These ideas are complex – to unpack them requires heavy reliance on some of the most difficult theorists of the 20th century – so require a lot of the reading, weighing and considering that Bacon advocates.
And as I know from my past forays into blogging, to shape my currently half-formed ideas will also require more writing, *for myself* than I’ve done in a decade.
This is a start.
I’ll get much wrong along the way. Some of my ideas will seem naive to those who know more, wrong to those with different opinions, and pretentious to many (inevitable as soon as you start on theory).
But, for now, I’m not entirely sure what my opinions really are – except that I believe I need to read and write more to fully form them. And as this blog section of my old dust-covered personal site still exists – a legacy of my freelancing days that desperately needs a back- and front-end refresh – I may as well use it.
Should you find these musings, you’re welcome to read and comment as you see fit, but – just like in the early days of blogging – I’ll be writing here primarily for myself.
The author is one of those irritatingly lucky people who stumbles through life being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right people. Deep envy.
Some small oddnesses and cultural misunderstandings, though – such as a passage describing the interpretation of a painted scene. He reads the image from left to right (making it about the moment before glory) rather than right to left, as Japanese people would read it (making it about the transient nature of life and success, a much more Japanese concept). Small things like that make me wonder whether, despite the author’s long years living in Japan, and his close familiarity with many aspects of its culture and history, he really does understand the place.
But then, as he says, that’s the beauty of Japan – it can’t really be explained in words, it mostly has to be experienced. And, to be fair, he has a good stab of explaining it.
The book itself is an engaging overview of the crisis of cultural identity Japan’s still going through, though mostly from the boom years of the 60s to 80s. Makes a lot of the oddness of modern Japan make a lot more sense than most other books I’ve read on the place, and so well worth a read for anyone interested in trying to understand the place.
“what are the ethics of platform design? …When designers create a… news app, they aren’t just designing software. They are creating a platform that participates in constructing an *idea* of news.”
I usually hate tips for writers – writing, to me, should be a natural thing. But having seen a lot of very bad writing, more concerned with showing off the writer’s linguistic skill or subject-matter expertise than enlightening the reader, this approach strikes me as vital to keep in mind at all times:
Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else’s attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? “When you write,” Pinker says, “you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, and that you’re directing the attention of your reader to that thing.”
Perhaps this seems stupidly obvious. How else could anyone write? Yet much bad writing happens when people abandon this approach. Academics can be more concerned with showcasing their knowledge; bureaucrats can be more concerned with covering their backsides; journalists can be more concerned with breaking the news first, or making their readers angry. All interfere with “joint attention”, making writing less transparent.
This isn’t a “rule for writers”; it’s a perspective shift. It’s also an answer to an old question: should you write for yourself or for an audience? The answer is “for an audience”. But not to impress them. The idea is to help them discern something you know they’d be able to see, if only they were looking in the right place.
Notes and Essays
To help shape my thinking, I write essays and shorter notes examining the ideas and narratives that shape media, marketing, technology and culture.
A core focus: The way context and assumptions can radically change how ideas are interpreted. Much of modern business, marketing, and media thinking is built on other people's frameworks, models, theories, and received wisdom. This can help clarify complex problems – but as ideas travel between disciplines and organisations they are often simplified, misapplied or treated as universal truths. I'm digging into these, across the following categories - the first being a catch-all for shorter thoughts:
In Japanese, the word for alcohol is sake – which is fairly familiar to English speakers as Japanese rice wine. Ask for sake in a Japanese bar (at least, if you’re obviously not Japanese, like me), and that’s what’ll be delivered, even though the word technically means all types of alcohol.
4/5 stars