Insights,
As a service planner, while designing push policies, analyzing funnels to grasp inflow and churn, or designing an organic viral-loop flow, I found many insights I consider truly essential in the interview material at the back of the book. I've brought them to the blog and added a few thoughts alongside.
In Saint-Exupéry's <The Little Prince>, the fox asks the little prince to always come at the same time.
The fox wanted the little prince's visits to become a ritual. The fox explained to the little prince what a ritual is. Just as there is a dwelling within space, there are rituals within time. Rituals make time something you can enter and leave like a house. Rituals tidy and order time. As a result, time feels meaningful. Today, time has no firm structure. Time is not a house but an unstable flow.
The disappearance of rituals does not simply mean we are becoming ever more free. The radical fluidization of life comes with loss. Rituals do not merely restrict freedom. Rituals structure and stabilize life. Rituals anchor in the body the values and symbolic orders that create community. In rituals, we experience community — the closeness of community — with our bodies. Digitalization, by contrast, disembodies the world. On top of that, a pandemic has now struck. This pandemic deepens the loss of bodily community experience.
You asked, 'Can't we anchor ourselves in life alone?' Today, we reject every ritual as pretense, as formality — in short, as lacking authenticity. The very source of the authenticity culture centered on the self is neoliberalism. A culture of authenticity breeds distrust of ritualized forms of interaction. Only spontaneous fluctuations of feeling — in other words, subjective states — are considered authentic. Formal behavior is eliminated on the grounds that it is not authentic or is just pretense. Politeness, for example. The narcissistic worship of authenticity is one of the causes deepening the barbarization of society.
In my book I defend, against the cult of authenticity, the ethics of beautiful forms. Polite forms are not mere pretense. The French philosopher Alain says the power of polite gestures over our thoughts is strong. Mimicking kindness, benevolence, and joy with gestures — bowing slightly and performing the accompanying movements — not only helps improve bad moods but also helps soothe stomachaches. Clinging to the inner is often less effective than the outer. Pascal said that when you despair of having no faith, rather than despairing, go to Mass, join in the prayers and songs and all the rituals — that is, imitate them. Through that imitation, he said, faith will return. The external changes the internal and creates a new state. This is the power of ritual.
And today, our consciousness is no longer anchored in things. Things as external can stabilize consciousness very effectively. Information, by contrast, is very difficult to stabilize consciousness with, because information is fleeting and has a very short period of currency.
The Disappearance of Rituals
Background of this posting,
Building a bug-free app or web service without legal issues is relatively easy. It's a matter of time and cost. But making and using are different matters. And in the process of trying to minimize that gap, one ends up more interested in problem definition than problem solving. And in order to carry that process out through the participation and feedback of internal customers (who are members of the process), users who hope to use it, or external customers currently experiencing inconvenience — rather than through some specific expert — we end up using methodologies like Scrum or Agile.
Even so, to understand the issues that aren't resolved, I also pay attention to interpretations from sociology or philosophy social psychology and their shifts. Just as there is a self-reflective design ethic that no longer designing things may be a path to saving the earth, I personally have a conviction that those building services also need an ethical consciousness.
As a rookie in the IT industry working at agencies and SIs, I watched with much irony and regret the subsequent trajectories of services built with so much time, money, and effort. To overcome this, I started with a primer on HCI, then design and human psychology, user research, UX, service design, UX writing (microcopy), growth hacking, funnel analysis, Agile, .. and on to psychology and philosophy. Recently, my interest has been expanding beyond individual psychology to social psychology and sociology.
No matter how famous a service is, no matter whether it belongs to Naver–Kakao–Line–Coupang–Baemin–Danggeun–Toss–Jigbang–Yanolja–Musinsa–Zigbang–Centum(네카라쿠배당토직야몰두센).. like certain dairy brands, detergent makers, or humidifier-related companies, a service may produce fatal harm to some. We saw such cases without much difficulty in just the past year alone. The backdrop: as the mobile market expanded, IT experts carried out in-depth research on UX. In the process, they analyzed and came to understand human psychology. And the individual psychology thus grasped was used for corporate profit rather than for the improvement of individual lives.
To design (plan) a service scenario and implement it as a product, and in the hope that that scenario can fit not only the market but also the user, I continue to keep an eye on sociology and philosophy. That way, I can avoid building a service where respect for the individual collapses for the sake of corporate profit, and I can minimize the sort of diligent-failure case in which the service is good but the company closes because it can't make money. To avoid standing at these two extremes, regardless of tech specialization, any member participating in the service — not only those who plan services or manage products — needs sustained interest in the market they're in, the society they belong to, and its members. Whether through interviews or books.
