"The big scary eye is scaring me." WAS: unexpanded notes from Twice-Weekly Hack Hour, 2014-03-06

[Jonathan Dill]

May have something to do with evil eye lore, you might get away with
something that looks more like Hamsa or Eye of Horus which is supposed to
ward off the evil eye, but of course that will have new associations.
 Perhaps a blindfold or eye patch would be more apt?  There's also a symbol
from Moorish architecture of a hand reaching for a key can't remember what
that's called.  I suppose it's difficult to find symbols that are
culturally neutral without making things bland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_eye


On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 5:13 PM, <kpneal at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 12:37:38PM +0000, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn wrote:
> > .. -*- coding: utf-8-with-signature-unix; fill-column: 73;
> > indent-tabs-mode: nil -*-
> >
> > notes from LAFS Weekly Dev Chat 2014-03-06
> > ==========================================
>
> > * Oleksandr is in Kyiv; He is safe.
>
> Finally some good news from Ukraine.
>
> > * posters with pictures of eyeballs make people behave better (from
> > "Dragnet Nation"); non-eyeball-shaped cameras are the worst of both
> > worlds ; googleglass triggers the eyeball-response ; Facebook early-on
> > put images of the reader's faces (and eyes) right next to the
> > text-entry form.
>
> I have no idea what the context for this is, but...
>
> Be careful with how you use pictures of eyeballs when your target market
> spans the globe.
>
> Back in the late 90's when I was on the team building our corporate
> intranet
> (back when people use the term "intranet") we put on our top level page a
> picture of an eyeball at one point. There was also some kind of verbage
> to go along with it to make the eyeball make sense in a we're-on-your-side
> kind of way.
>
> Anyway, we got an email from an employee in I think it was Singapore. What
> he said was "The big scary eye is scaring me." It turns out that in that
> part of the world a picture of an eyeball has some sort of meaning that
> is much, much more intimidating than the simply neutral to Orwellian sense
> that it has here in the US.
>
> We changed the eyeball picture to a snowflake. Nobody said anything about
> the snowflake what with it being winter and all.
> --
> Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/
>
> "Nonbelievers found it difficult to defend their position in \
>     the presense of a working computer." -- a DEC Jensen paper
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