Overton window (Ricky Weekly #41)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
I’m still only socializing from a distance, so it’s easy to take screenshots of my favorite moments like this one when everyone’s laughing.
Thing on my mind:
Since I’m working with audio to create new social experiences, I’ve been wondering why Americans don’t send voice messages to each other especially given that it’s quite popular in the rest of the world. I have some theories:
- Difficulty. When I first noticed this years ago in China I thought it was because typing in Chinese is harder, but I don’t think that’s right. You can get fast at typing Chinese, the language can be much more concise, and predictive text was already really good twenty years ago. Now I think it’s because Americans had a smoother tech adoption curve. We had desktops and learned QWERTY, and then we had dumb phones with T9, and then we had smart phones and learned thumb-QWERTY. At each phase we were able to get good at the input method fast enough that voice input is not much faster. The rest of the world mostly jumped straight to smart phones and never got a chance to get fast at typing, so voice messages are faster for them.
- Culture. Americans are individualistic and workaholics compared to the rest of the world. We’re also not very chatty. I remember getting coffee with locals in Taiwan thinking it was going to be an hour and ended up spending the entire afternoon together. There’s a Chinese dating app where the premise is you can get connected to someone to just chat on the phone at night and fall asleep together. I’ve seen people with 50 extended family members together in a WeChat group buzzing all the time with chatter.
- WeChat and WhatsApp. We don’t have a dominant messaging service in America like WeChat or WhatsApp that has a decent voice message functionality. The closest thing we all use is SMS, which is pretty shit and you can’t send voice between Android and Apple devices. Even within just blue bubble people, iMessage never had to compete on its own terms so it sucks. Maybe the new RCS protocol will change things?
On a separate note, I’m really enjoying the idea of the “Overton window.” I think I’ve heard of it before but I just learned it again this week from Trevor Noah. It means “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” Now I understand that protesting is an attempt to move ideas into the Overton window. Ideas like police reform wasn’t mainstream and safe for politicians to touch, but now it is. However, protests are short-term and takes a lot of activation energy. Moving minorities into the governing structure of America seems to be how you would shift what’s in the Overton window long-term. Seems like that’s what Canada and Singapore have done to create more racial harmony.
At the risk of butchering this idea, my friend said you can apply the “Overton window” to products. Businesses are ultimately asking us to pay attention to their products, but why would we even glance at a new product? There are lots of products that could be valuable to me, but you have to somehow put your product in the Overton window so not only is it not weird for me to try it, in fact I should feel a lot of FOMO for not trying it. There are a lot of tactics like waitlists, social proof, celebrity endorsements, etc. but it’s super hard to figure out.
Piece of content I recommend:
Modern Love on Amazon Prime Video.
Love stories based on real stories from the NYTimes column featuring a Star-studded cast. Standalone 20-min episodes so no binge risk. What more could you want!? Watch it with your honey 🤗.
The Case For Why I Should Pay Reparations by Garrett Neiman
My friend Garrett’s been working on racial justice forever. Now he’s writing a book to tackle reparations head on. I thought this was a very good personal essay that also highlighted some of the research he’s been doing.
We can't all be friends: crypto and the psychology of mass movements by Tony Sheng
I’ve brought up this essay probably more than a handful of times since I read it almost two years ago, and it just came up in my conversations twice this past week. It talks about how movements form, the players that are involved and the phases that it goes through. Scroll down to “The psychology of mass movements” section and read from there if you’re interested.
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My latest essay is called “From Socialcam to TikTok: How we figured out video social in a decade”