Archive for March, 2006
Pink and the Stupid Girls video
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In the Stupid Girls video from her latest album, Pink is supposed to have made fun of Paris Hilton, Mary Kate Olsen, Jessica Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan. When asked to explain, here’s what Pink had to say,
None of these girls are stupid. (sic) They have dumbed themselves down to be cute. I just feel like one image is being forced down people’s throats. There’s a lot of smart women. There’s a lot of smart girls. Who is representing them?
This is going to be an interesting cultural artifact in 100 years.
But why wait?
Here are 5 of the assumptions in evidence.
1) that these women have dumbed themselves down.
2) that "one image" is being "forced down people’s throats."
3) that smart women and girls need "representation."
4) that representation is the artist’s job.
5) that the way to represent smart women is to mock dumb women.
1) that these celebrities have dumbed themselves down.
I don’t know that this is so. Perhaps Pink has met the women in question. Perhaps they have revealed to her secret subtleties and depths. Maybe. Maybe there are what they seem to be, pretty ordinary except where blessed with beauty, talent, charisma and a fan base substantial enough to make a studio executive wet himself at lunch.
I prefer to think of celebrities as experimental vehicles. Experimental airplane are often named with an "X." (For instance, the "XF-92A" flew between 1948-1953, serving as a test for the delta-wing.) We could adopt this practice: Paris XHilton would signify that she is an experiment from whom we expect to learn something. In her case, we are looking at a girl who is well born, not quite with us (a little like Peter Sellers as Chauncy Saunders in Being There), inclined to sybaritic behavior and the scandalous, without a flicker of the lascivious or any apparent loss of status or celebrity. Now we know. It is not clear whether this is the triumph of self possession or the effect of watching too many Jerry Springer shows, but now we know that some people can do just about anything without cost. We also know, or more accurately we are inclined to suspect, that there is not the performance of stupidity. Paris XHilton has crafted herself in many ways but it is not clear that she dumbed herself down.
2) that one image is being forced down people’s throats.
This has got to be wrong. For every Paris XHilton, there is a Jody Foster. For every Jessica XSimpson, there is a Diane Sawyer. For every Lindsay Lohan, there’s an Ani DiFranco.
3) that smart girls and women need representation.
This is an ideological remainder from the 70s and the 80s. The cultural imaginary created for and by the media. We read these heavens to orient ourselves in physical and moral space. But because this imaginary has been crafted by and for special interests, some images are excluded. It is someone’s job to install these images in the heavens. Thus did the Mia Hamm and the US women’s soccer team of the 1990s help create big changes in the way in which young women thought about sports, competition, and soccer. For every Paris Hilton, there is a Madeline Albright. For every Jessica Simpson, there is a Condoleezza Rice. For every Olsen twin, there is is an Oprah Winfrey.
4) that representation is the artist’s job.
The avant garde are the keepers of culture. It is up to them to refashion our ideas. They do this by dint of their own courageous example. They will create new understandings of who and what we can be.
I think this is now the celebrity’s job. That’s the service they supply us when they act of experimental vehicles. The artist’s lost this assignment. Popular culture took it away from them.
Of course, Pink is a celebrity, and in that capacity she is
influential. But when she summons this explanation of her video, she is playing
the artist’s card, claiming the artist’s prerogative. And my argument here is simple: celebrities instruct by example, artists by instruction.
5) that the way to represent smart women is to mock dumb women.
This is a dubious strategy at the best of times. It is not clear that
anyone has rights of mockery. This right once did exist and it was routinely
exercised. Elites would commander the op-ed page and hold forth against "young
people today," "movies and TV," "professional athletes," or "wayward adults." We
have been hammering away at elites for so long, and they have been misbehaving
themselves so consistently, it is heard to see that they have much authority
left. Blessedly, we rarely hear from them. But Pink believes this authority still belongs to her
Pink is many things of course, but punk, or pop punk, is an important part of the
franchise. Punks defined themselves as the enemies of bourgeois hypocrisy. They
protested everything that was false, posturing and inauthentic about middle
class society. I am not sure but I think when punks are your moral arbiters,
things are going very badly indeed. If I must choose an exemplar, I have to choose Ron and Nancy over Syd and Nancy. I just have to.
Still and all, there is something interesting and worthy about the "Stupid Girls" video, and I have made the cardinal error of listening to what the artist’s says about her art, instead of looking at the art itself. It’s has a little too much of the burlesque about the video, but it takes up important issues and I am deeply glad Pink made it.
References
Collis, Clark. 2006. The Upside of Anger. EntertainmentWeekly. March 31, 2006. p. 35.
Pink. 2006. The Stupid Girls video on IFilms.com. See the video here.
Lifestyle design: a new profession
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We are running out of jobs. So says David Heuther in BusinessWeek.
Mr. Huether says manufacturing jobs are at their lowest level in the U.S. in 50 years. (This despite the fact that productivity is at an all time high.) And this is not only an American problem. The loss of manufacturing jobs is happening in 9 of 10 of the top economies (U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada and Mexico). Yes, even China is losing jobs, 4.5 million of them since 2000! I know.
Surely, some of the jobs have migrated to the non-manufacturing sectors. We would expect this in a service/knowledge/innovation economy. We would expect this in a marketplace where consumer tastes and preferences are fragmenting and long tail markets are expanding. But I would be very surprised if nonmanufacturing jobs were making up the difference. I suspect we’re still a couple of million jobs shy.
Structural unemployment is a fact of our world, and it is a problem that will get steadily worse.
So what to do? I think marketers have a role to play here. (I am stealing a page from Bruce Mau. When he wonders who’s going to solve the problems of the world, he says, "why not designers? We’ll do it." Pretty forthright for a Canadian. I look at the problem of lifelong unemployment, and think "why not marketers? Leave this to us.")
In fact, this might be a job for account planners, among other marketers, and so I will, without permission, think about this as an assignment for the Account Planning School of the Web, founded by Russell Davies. (With apologies to Mr. Davies for my presumption.)
The problem: many millions of people in First World societies will live entire lifetimes without "gainful employment."
The assignment: Create a lifestyle that makes possible gainful unemployment. Build a lifestyle that will involve, express, and otherwise engage someone who will never work.
Some considerations:
1. idleness is hell.
Lifestyle construction here is critical because idleness is hard on the soul. (I think George Bernard Shaw developed this argument.) And it’s not enough to say, "oh, just get a hobby." Lifestyles, well designed ones, are rich, interesting, various. They are not "a hobby."
2. meanings flow from what we do.
This is why job loss can be so cataclysmic. This is why so many people retire to bleakness and sometimes an early grave. In order to correct the effects of lifelong unemployment, we need to find other sources of meaning, purpose, identity. One way of getting into this would be to think about your own job, or someone else’s, and figure out what it supplies in the way of meaning, drama, engagement, concepts of self, concept of world, and so on. What are alternative events and activities and engagements from which we can source these things?
3. build in manageable difficulty.
when we are create, select and combine employment alternatives, it’s worth remembering that everyone wants "manageable difficulty." An engagement with the world should fall into the sweet spot that stands combines things we can go and things we can’t. This is to say, we should have the skills and talents to engage with it, but it should be larger than those skills and talents. In Halo II, the sweet spot for me is "Normal." "Easy" is way too easy. "Heroic" is way too hard. (To be honest, "Heroic" reduced me to tears of bitter recrimination.)
4. make the difficulty scalable.
As we get better at the engagement, it should reveal layers of difficulty we did not see before. We need a steady supply of challenges to which we can rise. Someday, I hope to advance to "Heroic." No, really.
5. look for mattering racks
We’re odd this way. We like building little mattering racks. They help us organize the world and enable desire. A good illustration here is the collector, for whom X is the great passion of his collecting activity, the thing he moves heaven and earth to get. Two months later, it is Y that has his attention. Yes, X is one of the jewels of his collection, but, no, he doesn’t really care about it. Y is interesting because it will move this coin collection away from antiquities to coins of the early modern Europe. Now an entire body of coins that never really mattered leaps suddenly into view. Now, these matter enough to keep a man awake at night, scheming and plotting for the day when he outranks, outweighs, eclipses every other coin collector in Cincinnati. Hah!
6. build new kinds of capital, and systems for the exchange and accumulation of capital
That people are not gainfully employed gathering conventional capitals, does not mean they cannot be gainfully unemployed pursuing unconventional ones. Collectors do this of course. But it is also clear that one someone volunteers (geez, do something about this word and the odor of sanctimony that surrounds it, will ya!) for social service (phew!), the accululate various capitals, self esteem, social recognition, good will tokens. This capital can be traded on various exchanges, but that’s the bad news. You have to formalize these capitals, build new ones, and invent the exchanges. I would use hsx.com as an example. The trouble with hsx.com is that capital goes in but it never comes out. Another example here might be Second Life. In fact, someday I hope there will be Account Planning School of the Web on Second Life. I am there somewhere. My name is Moral DaSilva. I’m the one is the really stupid hat. Leave me a message.
7. enable plenitude (the invention of new kinds of social life) and transformation (opportunities to add new selves and transform existing ones)
This is a big industry waiting to happen. As it stands, we are doing things by implication. A good deal of branding is about identity creation and transformation. Someday, we will make it more explicit. When that day comes, and there is a real market for identity supply, the graduates of the Account Planning School of the Web, will rise to greatness, as surely as did those Silicon Valley software engineers in the 1990s.
8. create lifestyle constellations
One of the most difficult tasks here is going to be finding ways to draw together varieties of interest, activity and engagement into lifestyle constellations that can be lived, swapped in and out, retrofitted when necessary, and allowed multiply with the chaotic enthusiasm of an English garden. And that is another way to think of this exercise. That what you are doing is creating trellaces and other devices in which the inventive energies of the gainfully unemployed may run riot.
Please have your assignments in by tomorrow at noon. Quiz Friday next. Widmerpol, shut up.
References
Huether, David. 2006. The Case of the Missing Jobs. BusinessWeek. April 3, 2006.
For more on the Russell Davies’ Account Planning School of the Web, please go here.
Explanations
The image is a small part of the map of Elizabethan London by Hollar. I liked it because it shows habitable places for people in transit.
Mash up marketing: a new tactic for fragmented markets
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The Dr Pepper spots were created by Kinka Usher for Y&R New York. Usher mixed music from Kiss, Will Smith and Cyndi Lauper. The point of the exercise was, according to AdAge.com, to "play up the notion that Dr Pepper has 23 flavors that make up its unique taste."
France after France
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The protest continues today in France. The New York Times reports 450,000 people marching outside Paris and hundreds of thousands marching inside the city. A French union puts the figure at 3 million nation wide.
The problem is that there aren’t enough jobs for young people. This is why the state wants to change the law. This is why the protesters wish to keep the law unchanged.
Hmmm. Everyone wants more jobs for young people, but contestation turns on simple contradiction. More choice for companies! No, less choice for companies!
It’s a cultural problem. Anthropologists are supposed to search out the deepest assumptions on which beliefs and ideas are founded. (Every anthropology major knows the story of Milton Singer in the field. He was told that the universe rests on a turtle. When he asked was "under the turtle," there was a brief pause, and he was then informed that it was "turtles all the way down.")
The French appear to cling to the notion that the marketplace must do the bidding of the social good, that it may be constrained and coerced until, for instance, the job security of young people is assured. If we were to ask what’s under this "turtle," they would almost certainly tell us (or variously imply) that the world is a manageable, tractable place that responds to the administrative efforts of politicians, civil servants and other elites. There are lots of things that betray this French confidence in "order from on high." This little assumption (the "tractable world" assumption, let’s call it) funds a good deal of life in France.
Hah! Americans think otherwise. The tractable world idea has fled the land, even Iowa.
Dick Gephardt…ran in Iowa as an anti-dynamism candidate: Protect jobs, protect unions, put up tariffs and barriers, anti-immigration, anti-free-trade. He got his clock cleaned. I was born in Iowa, and if he can’t make that argument work in Iowa, it won’t work anywhere. (Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape)
Under many ideological notions in America, there is a single idea. This is that if we leave the marketplace to its own devices, wealth will be forthcoming and the social good will be served.
But in recent years, there is a still deeper turtle, one that has to do the sheer profusive creativity of the marketplace. I refer once more to the gospel according to Andreessen.
To get philosophical for a minute, I believe (as Milton Friedman says) that human wants and needs are infinite. There are no limits to the things and services that people want or need, so there are no limits to the number of new technologies, companies, and industries we can create. The questions are: how many people worldwide are able to contribute, how much capital is available to them, and how free are they to pursue new ideas?
This argument says that the marketplace should be left relatively unconstrained not just because it is the fount of wealth, but because it is a fount of human invention, creativity and culture.
Now, I do not doubt that there are many French men and women who are now migrating from "order from on high" to "plenitude from below." But, as I think Mark Twain once said, it’s awfully hard to change turtles in the middle of the stream. The special problem for the French is that so much Frenchess assumes the "order from on high" notion. French culture now looks like the Vista programming at Microsoft. We can change some of the fundamental notions, but then we’d have to rewrite most of the code that produces social life. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be pretty. Gasp, it wouldn’t be elegant!
Of course, the French can do it. They have produced some of the great minds in the social sciences. They are effortlessly good at conceptualizing. The intellectual world is a spectator sport, so mass engagement is not a problem. Naturally, they will undertake this surrender to individualism in their best collectivist spirit. They will think their way forward to new ideas, they will work their way from new ideas to all the tiny implications they hold for daily life. They will manage to rewrite the 47 million lines of code that make up La France.
And there will come a moment of drama that will simultaneously thrill and appall them. Eventually, it will be necessary to stop conceptualizing…and launch. And this will have to be the moment when, by agreement, the collectivist approach stops, when the elites desist, and all agreement ends. (All the big stuff, anyhow.) All at once, order will give way to disorder, elegance will give way to profusion, and La France will become lots of experiments in Frenchness, unFrenchness, anti-Frenchness, post-Frenchness, and hybrid-Frenchness.
Brrr.
References
Anon. 2004. Outsourcing Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game. BusinessWeek. March 1, 2004. (source for first Andreessen quote). here.
Bortin, Meg and Katrin Bennhold. 2006. Hundreds of Thousands Protest French Labor Law. New York Times. March 28, 2006.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Precarity. The Blog Sits At … (a couple of days ago)
Webb, Cynthia. An interview with Marc Andreessen. Washington Post. June 10, 2004. (source for second Andreessen quote). here.
Explanations
The photo shows messenger pidgeons taking flight from their carrier in World War I France. I’ve always wanted an excuse to use it.
The better image would have been Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void
From Yves Klein, Prometheus and Empedocles, by Wolf-Gunter Thiel as it
appeared in Flash Art, March 1995
1998 © all rights belong to the artist estate and Harry Schunk who took the photograph
(and thanks to Dave Dyment of Mercer Union
who reminded me of artist and title. )
What’s It Like Being 18?
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What’s it like being 18?
like shaking hands with a hurricane?
I was wondering over the weekend what it’s like to be 18. This is not because I want to be 18 again. I am deeply grateful to have escaped my youth, a time that now looks to me like Eastern Europe before the collapse of the Soviet, a time defined by arbitary restrictions, ideological immobility, and terrible shortages (in my case, sex, sense and sensibility).
If you are 18 right now, you were born around 1987. You began to move out of the parental orbit around 1997 (when you were 10-ish). Your head began to clear around 2002 (when you were 16-ish).
In 1997, a boy band (Hanson) and a girl band (The Spice Girls) ruled the world. Notorious B.I.G. died that year and hip hop began to splinter and reinvent itself. Around 45% of American homes had a computer and around 40-50 million Americans and Canadians used the internet. Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on TV introducing a new concept: witty television. In the next few years, you will see the installation of the tech industry as the heart of American commerce. It will look like a gold rush, and it will fail like a gold rush.
In 2002, boy and girl bands were not just a thing of your past, they were a
cultural antique. We were one year away from a violent contraction caused by
9/11, but the music scene was still continuing to fragment in all directions,
with pop punk, indie, alternative, emo, hip hop, (to name a few), with critical
favorites, The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Vines resurrecting the Velvet Underground. A couple of years before, another TV
show, The Gilmore Girls, had introduced another bold new idea for TV: articulate
television. In any case, you are now spending a big chunk of your disposable
time on the computer, a medium that was reinventing itself substantially every 3 months.
If you are now 18, (and I am now guessing, because I haven’t done the ethnography), you live in a world that is noisy with novelty, restless with innovation, giddy with the good natured froth of a pop culture, lively with a new order of intelligence, and swirling with menace and difficulty.
Of course, all of us live in this world (or something like it). But my boomer generation boarded dynamism. We did not have it thrust upon us.
Boomers could see things getting smaller, faster, more hectic. The intellectuals told us so. We could see popular culture and culture drawing together, the sheer liveliness of one now joined to the intelligence of the other. We didn’t have an easy transition, but it was a transition. However we did it (using a bestseller or amnesia as our launch), we were able to pull up beside the new culture and get on. ("Jump, Spot, jump!")
Sure, there were unhappy moments, near misses, terrible spills, hard landings. Not everyone’s dock-siders had quite enough adhesion. Not everyone was quite nimble enough to decide which assumptions were now called for, and which were to be left behind. (There are several million of my generation that are still standing on that ever distant shore, insisting on opera tickets and "civilized discourse," before taking solace in American Idol.) But the rest of us packed our bags and booked passage for the new land of plenty. (Los Lobos/Latin Playboys was my Ellis Island, Ani DiFranco my Lady Liberty.)
If you are 18, it’s not clear to me when you ever had a moment to "get your
feet," as the phrase has it. The deck is always wet with something. You go away one
summer vacation and "cirque de soleil" becomes the new Vegas. You go away another, and "cage fighting" supplants boxing there. Not, of course, that you
care about Vegas very much.
No, what you care about is going to college, and if ever there was an institution like the old Vegas, this is it. The old headliners, aging songsters who are still crooning tunes that haven’t changed for ages. And why change when fan loyalty (aka tenure) protects them for having to rewrite a line? A great buffet is there for the asking, and it is filling, but it’s not long before you begin to wonder if you can ever eat again. Choices, you must make choices! Look, here’s a building that looks like ancient Rome. Here’s another that looks like Tuscany. So life-like, so pleasant, and so utterly implausible as a simulation of any actual Italy, past or present.
Here’s what I was really wondering on the weekend. What if the world
has got suddenly smarter? The evidence is everywhere. People thinking
without silos, with newly versatile interpretive frames, with newly assimilative
powers of survey, with newly rapid and penetrating powers of pattern
recognition. And who is it that got smarter? Not me, I can tell you…or don’t have to tell you. Not my cohort companions who continue to pour themselves into well marked forms, the ones that wick away intelligence and culture mobility, their price for this creature’s comfort. No, I think it’s "kids today." (As a concrete test, compare the television created by David Kelley and the television created by Mitch Hurwitz.)
I think this is what happens when you grow up in a world that’s never still. To think at all, you must think well. (Well, not everyone. There’s a "far shore" here too.) But it doesn’t look comfortable. No, it makes me think of a cat leaping up to a counter and landing on a tea towel. He digs in for purchase, only to pull the towel out from under himself…and digs in for purchase, only to…
I leave the rest to Bloc Party and the lyrics of a track called Pioneers.
We will not be the first, we won’t
You said you were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beast
We promised the world, we’d tame it, what were we hoping for?
Breath in, breath out
So here we are reinventing the wheel
I’m shaking hands with a hurricane
It’s a colour that I can’t describe,
It’s a language I can’t understand
Trend watching: 10 rules
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Trend watching is a pressing business. And we now have an increasingly crowded marketplace of suppliers.
In these early days, there are many models and extravagantly different standards. Here are some of the rules with which we can separate the sheep from the goats.
1. the Oracle is dead.
Unless you are Malcolm Gladwell or Tom Wolfe, you can’t do good trend watching by yourself. Trends once ran through our culture and economy like big, slow breakers off the coast of Hawaii but now they tend to come at us more like a perfect storm. Almost certainly, a single individual is insufficiently multiple to capture the sheer range and contradiction of our present creativity. As Hillary might put it, it takes a village.
2. The trend team must be quick about it.
The first value ad here is picking things up early. The more notice we have the more thoroughly and intelligently we can prepare ourselves. Early notice is the difference between responding with tactics and responding with strategy. And we want to be strategic.
3. The trend team may not "name it and claim it."
Everyone dreams of being the intellectual equivalent of the European explorer, the first one to see a new continent, the first one to plant the flag. But this is a temptation that we must learn to resist.
As I have complained before on this blog, the people at trendwatching.com are inclined to come up with their own lingo for trends: inspirence, gravanity, maturialism. This does not help bring order a problem set that now howls with complexity and uncertainty.
Indeed, it prevents comparison and appears to be an attempt to persuade the client that trendwatching.com must be relied upon as a sole source. This is a kind of "winner take all" strategy and very high risk. If you win, you do sweep the marketplace. If you lose, the penalty is obscurity.
4. No cool hunting!
There is a terrible inclination only to report the things that are really, like, cool. But lots and lots of trends are not cool at all (a new building material, say). In my opinion, cool hunters are quilty of a fatal confusion between what they know about the world and what they wish to be true about themselves. They study novelty in order to make themselves more cool.
But frankly when you are acting as my trend watcher, I don’t care how cool you are. I just want you to be right. And the moment I suspect you are ignoring parts of the future because knowledge thereof does not augment your claims to cool, that’s when I ask for my money back.
This brings us to one of the problems with the business model. Some trendwatch enterprises depend upon free labor supplied by people who watch the world chiefly (and sometimes only) to augment their claims to cool. This builds the bias in. See if you can spot one here.
Join a Community of Trend Hunters – Do you crave cool? Do you live on the edge? Is your curiosity insatiable? If so, TREND HUNTER™ should become your new home on the web. There is no place more dedicated to the comprehensive discovery of cool. You can start Trend Hunting today. Engage your intellect with most dynamic individuals on the web.
There are lots and lots of edges in contemporary culture. When we pay attention only to the "edge" of music, and we do so because it makes us look cool, we have probably disqualified ourselves from supplying edge knowledge of many kinds. (Oh, here we go. Iif I were a real cool hunter, I would have by this time copyrighted KNOWL(EDGE).)
I have a cool hunter detection device. I ask the trend watcher if he or she can tell me anything about the "great room." Almost all of them stare at me blankly. This trend has transformed the middle and upper middle class American home. It is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure. And most cool hunters just missed it. (And this is because homes, suburbs, and families are, from the cool hunter’s point of view, not cool.)
5. The trend team must have an archeological instinct.
The team must be thinking about showing the trajectories of the new. It is not enough merely to trumpet the new. Any idiot can do that. In order to grasp the new, and especially to grasp its trajectory, we need to know where it comes from. As I was arguing in Atlanta this week (thank you, John Horton), the new symmetries in the relationships between doctors and patients have been in the works since deTocqueville.
6. The trend team must be interactive.
As it is, everyone doing trend watch appears to pitching what they have at the website, and rarely is there any evidence that they are interacting with one another. This team should be dividing the labor and then working with one another in order to spot the trends across trends. This is an enormous value ad. If we have the same trend at work in different sectors, we have the possibility of a systematic and more lasting shift.
7. The trend team should offer "big picture" observations.
As it is, we are getting a land slide of possibilities each day, which I have to say merely increases my conviction that the very possibility of pattern recognition has been elipsed. This is not helping! This is hurting! So we need something more than first order observations. We need something more thoughtful and aggregating. We need trend watchers talking to one another, and then we need a "meta-trend" team (sorry) aggegrating and a meta-meta-team agggregating still further. We need to give "observations" an opportunity to scale up to "insight" and insight an opportunity to scale up to "conclusion."
8. The trend team should be generative.
Piers Fawkes recently had a revelation at PSFK here. A piece of the future came winging its way out of all that trend watching, and he served it up. Now pattern recognition becomes idea generation. This turns out to be a really good idea, using the phone as a wand to direct media content to the nearest medium. Trend watchers should be trend generators.
9. The trend team should be making predictions.
The people in the capital markets routinely go back and try to determine where they went wrong. They scrutinize their assumptions. They ferret out the error. Unless we wish trend watching to be one big cocktail party in which everyone merely shouts opinions at one another, something more substantial is called for.
10. The trend team must be fully and soberingly disclosing of their talents.
As it is, the trend watching websites are shamelessly self promoting. Let’s be a little more like a great big consulting company. What I don’t want to read is something like this:
Michael Tchong’s father was born in Canton, China. His family name means “bell” in Chinese. No wonder Michael’s entire career has been focused on making things “clear as a bell.”
References
Trend Hunter here.
Michael Tchong here.
PSFK.com here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Saminather, Nichola. Moving Online: The New Trend in Trend Spotting. Columbia News Services and to PFSK for spotting and posting the article here.
Conflicts of interest
PSFK cross links to this blog.
