What is it like being you right now?

Feeling a little cloudy? Of course you are. 

Because, I mean, to be fair, and let's be honest, you are a cloud.  You are an aggregation of interests, connections, and contacts, tagged in several ways, linked in all directions, changing in real time.  I mean your mental world.  It's all hints and hunches, guesses and glimpses, shifting perspectives, tumbling assumptions.  You take on clarity for clients.  Then you're all "let's get on with it" pragmatism.  But normally, and for most purposes, you're as cloudy as can be.

How do I know this?  Call me your consulting anthropologist. Anthropologists have an old question: how does a culture define the self and the group.   And they have a new question: what difference does it make to the self and the group that they are mediated by electronic connections (email, internet, SMS, IM, MMS, blogs, aggregators, shared search engines, p2p file sharing, online game play, etc.)

I think cloudiness might be an answer to the first question and especially to the second.  My guess is that new selves and groups are richly heterogeneous, loosely and variously boundaried, capable of expansion, contraction and sudden reorganization, not very well governed, but still quite navigable and quite mobile, and, in still other respects, dynamic in content, form and operation.2

I think cloudiness was an emerging property of selves and groups in the late 20th century, but that cloudiness was intensified by the new electronic technologies of the last 10 years.  So the third anthropological question is now, "Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?"  Or to put this in a more pressing form: how'd ja get so cloudy?

For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self.  Let's posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of the person as a

bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background. 

Wave goodbye.  That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account.  Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood...because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in. 

That was then.  This is now.  We are no longer "bounded," "integrated," "centered," "organized" or "contrasted."  We are now blurred, decentered, disorganized, and, well, a little vague.  We are, I would prefer to say, cloud-like.  (It's just so much more flattering.  No?  I mean otherwise we are merely the proverbial dog's breakfast.)

Ok, back to the third question: Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?" 

My father was a Geertzian man: centered, organized and contrasted, more or less.  His self was concentric rings: family, work, interests.  (Or maybe it was work, interests, family.)  His life stacked.  And it leaned.  Like all modernist families at midcentury, it leaned into the future, towards the good life, the next house, the next job, grown children.  His industry (printing) changed several times over his career, but I don't think he was ever obliged to ask, "ok, what's the business model?" or "ok, how does this industry work again?"   

There was lots of new in my father's life, but it was mostly shared new: space races, hi fidelity, cold wars, wreck rooms, status competition, new cars.  Even the marginal stuff tended to "clot."  Not everyone heard of Area 51, but those who had tended to agree on what it was. There weren't lots of options (no Areas 52, 53, or 54, at it were). Even in its feeling for novelty and its embrace of dynamism, there was something redundant and folded about this world.  (This held until the late 60s, when many assumptions now were brought to the surface and contested.  He hated this.)

For purposes of contrast, here is a brief diary of my last few days.  (I offer my own example here, but I expect the reader can supply better examples of the new cloudiness.)

Friday, I had a conversation with John Deighton in which we tried to puzzle out what is an enterprise is now.  (Specifically, who has to be included, in the performance of which functions, with revenue coming from what sources, driving by creativity and innovation of what kind, using what channels, anticipating what consumers, etc.)  This ends up being an impossibly philosophical guestion, and just the kind of conversation to which John quickens.  But it is now a standard kind of conversation now that the business world is changing so much.  (Deep reflection, not just for eggheads anymore!) 

It was a cloudy conversation because we were called upon to reach down to see if we were standing on an assumption that was itself in need of rethinking.  It was a cloudy conversation because we were called upon to reach up and ask what, finally, was the unit of analysis and the point of the exercise.  It wasn't ever clear what was fixed and what needed scrutiny.  Finally, it looked as if everything did.

Now John is a friend I have from the tradition networked world.  We knew one another from conferences.  Then we worked together.  It's always been a face to face relationship, one that uses the new technologies merely to "stay in touch."  But Friday, I also had occasion to see Tom Guarriello and Tom is someone I almost certainly would not know were we not fellow bloggers.  In other words, electronic mediation is the necessary condition of our relationship.  My relationship with John is precisely the kind that helped construct my father's social world.  My relationship with Tom is one he never would have had.  Assuming similar dispositions, my social world is at least one person larger because of electronic mediation.

But we can't proceed additively.  Because my connection to Tom leads to more connections, which connections make for still more cloudiness.  Friday, while talking to Tom, I had occasion to mention my long standing notion that pop music has crappy lyrics.  This is one of the little things that float in my cloud of opinions of the world.  It is almost always dormant, but talking to Tom, it lept into mind and speech

And this fleeting reconfiguration of mental world meant that I was primed to quicken to this line on an NPR website.

Meloy is known for using "10-dollar words" in his songs, and for "creating character studies that wouldn't sound out of place in a Victorian novel."

Hah, I thought, any artists who uses 10-dollar words must be departed from pop purility.  And this took me into an interview between NPR's Terry Gross and the Decemberists' Colin Meloy, the artist in question. 

But before we go there, it is worth pointing out that the NPR connection came to me because I was trying out my new Google Reader, a technology that winnows the world in a way my father could never have done.  My family read Time, Life, U.S. News and World Report, the standard package, I guess, for a middle class family.  The number of news sources at my disposal has multiplied extraordinarily and this has encouraged the invention of things like Google Reader, which is now capable of searching this world for things I know I care about, and then to return things I have to care about.

More specifically, I used Reader to search for subscriptions by searching for "culture." Hey, presto.  A conversation with Tom had set me up to zero in an passage returned by Reader.  This took me to the NPR website and the interview of Colin Meloy by Terry Gross. The cloud was multiplying.  A new contact activates an old interest which helps me acquire a new interest, and I would not be surprised if this in turn helps me acquire a new contact.  In a word, cloudy worlds get cloudier.  My world is not just one person larger than my father's because of electronic mediation.  Each new person can have a multiplicative effect.  Cloudy worlds get cloudier fast. 

Now this thought (and indeed this post) is encouraged by a Yi Tan conducted by Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn on Monday afternoon on the topic of social search.  (I recommend these "phonecasts" for people interested in technology and change.  They happen every Monday at 1:30 EST.)  I am not sure that I took anything in particular away from this conversation, except of course to note that Jerry is terrifyingly articulate, and that here is another topic about which thought is called for.  What kind of thought exactly?  Oh precisely, that now standard Deightonian reflection where all assumptions and all objectives are up for grabs.  In particular, this Yi Tan put an anthropologist on notice that social search will change the nature of the self and the group.

There is a double cloudiness. In one, let's call it, social cloudiness, more contacts and interests open up, and more contacts and interests are made possible.  And this in turn sets in train the other cloudiness, let's call it a conceptual cloudiness, in so far as expanding social network expose us to things like the Yi Tan contemplation of social search and the recognition that there are lots of new things the proper intellectual reckoning of which will likely take the substantial relocation and renovation of our existing conceptual categories. 

I don't think my father very often got news of Yi Tan kind, of the kind that said, ok, this innovation (social search) has emerged, it is changing, we are not sure exactly which of these changes will take, and we are not sure what difference the ones that do take will make.  My father wasn't confronted by cloudiness, except perhaps at the very end of his career, when computers began to change his printing presses.  (There is something magnificently literal about a mechanical press, and something equally mysterious about one that is computer based.)  Conceptual cloudiness of this order only happened once in his professional world (I think) and what was called in this circumstance was a period of contemplation that would reward him with a new clarity.  This moment of adjustment is precisely what is now missing.  There is no stop and go, now "ok, let's sort this out, and then get back to business as usual."  We are entering a world in which our moments of "clarificaton" are really only moments in which we are obliged to scrutinize assumptions below and objectives on high. 

Back to the interview between Gross and Meloy.  Part of the interview centered around a contest between Stephen Colbert and the Decemberists.  Both had asked people to complete the green screen of a video, and Colbert then has accused the Decemberists of stealing his idea.  The "conflict' resulted in a "guitar challenge" that brought together the Colbert, the Decemberist's Chris Funk, as contestants, Henry Kissenger, as a judge, Morley Safer, as the presiding 60 Minutes type host, and Peter Frampton as a ringer, filling in for the cowardly Colbert. 

This activated my long standing interest consumer created content, not to mention a kind of (Henry) Jenkinsian transmediation.  But because neither of these "tokens" is a perfect illustration of the "type" into which I wish to put it, I was obliged to scrutinize the difference.  Was this is a useful difference (that is, something that marketing cocreation can learn from) or a trivial one.  Plus, I couldn't help but remark on that amazing little cloud of participants (Colbert, Funk, Kissinger, Safer and Frampton) and wonder: Was this one of those crazy constellations that the postmodernists say proves we are a culture in which the center does not hold.  Or, could the more sober minded anthropologist build a model that made it make more sense.  (Still thinking on both these questions.)

So that's: Tom + Google Reader gives stray return from NPR website gives evidence of music, activities and constellations, any one (or all) of which can serve as an opportunity to glimpse new things, or old things in a new way.  At a minimum, more social contacts leads to more interests which lead to more social contacts which lead to a cloudier self...all of which exposes us to the possibility that our categories and assumptions are up for grabs.  Clearly, this is the cloudiness that bothers me most, as more and more ponderables take on the status of imponderables as we attempt to use them to get some thinking done. 

If there is a takeaway here (besides a tearful descent into the accusation that the world is too much for us, I mean), it is perhaps the importance of that touchstone question.  It's good to have one.   

There is another takeaway.  Friday, I posted on the arrival of my new bright sticks.  These are wet erase markers that let us write on glass.  This post, it turns out, owes a lot to the fact that I got to scribbling on windows.   Getting things out of your head onto glass feels a little like the intellectual process of getting them out of their imponderable form into something more ponderable.  Sure, I frightened the neighbors, but here in Connecticut everything frightens the neighbors.  Plus, it's charming that something so low tech should be useful in dealing with a world so high tech.

Oh, and one last point, as I was scratching my ideas of a cloudy selves, groups, networks, and concepts in fluorescence onto windows, a client phoned.  He wanted to know "what is a group?"  (He is thinking about brand communities and how to build them.)  I am so glad you asked. 

Summing up.  The self and the group, when electronically mediated, reaches out in all directions, embracing more topics and contacts that it might reach out and embrace still more topics and contacts.  Selfhood is expanding outwards, and this be much more exciting and fun, if we did not finding ourselves expanding into a certain conceptual, categorical cloudiness and the task of thinking down to test our assumptions and up to query our purposes. 

Or perhaps this is wrong.  There may be a model out there that could give cloudiness a "house that Jack build" clarity.  Perhaps all these things do go together and we just need to build the model that shows us how.  When it works best, culture doesn't just make the world intelligible.  It gives the world a "just so" quality (and when it works really well it makes everything seems so just.)  Maybe there's a way to make this happen.  Maybe you, dear reader, can explain this to me.

Footnotes

1. This question used to send us to other cultures.  Now it makes us stay home.  Our culture is changing selves, groups, and the groupings of groups at light speed.

2. This is the recognition that sent the post-modernists screaming into the night, epistemologically speaking.  Or perhaps it was merely a culling exercise, a way to get the sheep away from the important questions.   Too bad they ended up so near the students.

References

More on the Yi-Tan here and here. 

The interview between Terry Gross and Colin Meloy of the Decemberists here. 

Acknowledgments

To Stefan Hellvkist for another magnificent cloud. 

To a cloud of friends and connections: John Deighton, Ton Guarriello, Leora Kornfeld, Pip Coburn, Jerry Michalski, Terry Gross, Colin Meloy, gugoda, and Peter all of whom over the last couple of days forced the issue or at least raised the question: what is a self and what is a group now that we are so electronically mediated.  Forgive the provincial anthropological phrasing.

What it’s like being you right now?

Feeling a little cloudy? Of course you are. 

Because, I mean, to be fair, and let’s be honest, you are a cloud.  You are an aggregation of interests, connections, and contacts, tagged in several ways, linked in all directions, changing in real time.  I mean your mental world.  It’s  all hints and hunches, guesses and glimpses, shifting perspectives, tumbling assumptions.  You take on clarity for clients. Then you’re all "let’s get on with it" pragmatism.  But normally, and for most purposes, you’re as cloudy as can be.

How do I know this?  Call me your consulting anthropologist.  (No, don’t call me.  Try a blog aggregator and call me in the morning.)   Anthropologists have an old question: how does a culture define the self and the group.1   And now they have a new question: what difference does it make to the self and the group that they are now mediated by electronic connections (email, internet, SMS, IM, MMS, blogs, aggregators, shared search engines, social networks, p2p file sharing, online game play, etc.)

I think cloudiness might be an answer to the first question and especially to the second.  My guess is that new selves and groups are richly heterogeneous, loosely and variously boundaried, capable of expansion, contraction and sudden reorganization, not very well governed, but still quite navigable and quite mobile, and, in still other respects, dynamic in content, form and operation.2

I think cloudiness was an emerging property of selves and groups in the late 20th century, but that cloudiness has been intensified by the new electronic technologies of the last 10 years.  So the third anthropological question is now, "Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?"  Or to put this in a more pressing form: how’d ja get so cloudy?

For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self.  Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of a person as a

bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background. 

Wave goodbye.  That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account.  Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie and being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in. 

That was then.  This is now.  We are no longer "bounded," "integrated," "centered," "organized" or "contrasted."  We are now blurred, decentered, disorganized, and, well, a little vague.  We are, I prefer to say, cloud-like.  (It’s just so much more flattering.  I mean otherwise we are the proverbial dog’s breakfast.)

Back to the third question: Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify?"

[ok, sorry, but I have run out of time, and I will have to finish up tomorrow.]

Footnotes

1 This question used to send us to other cultures.  Now it makes us stay home.  Our culture is changing selves, groups, and the groupings of groups at light speed.

2. This is the recognition that sent the post-modernists screaming into the night, epistemologically speaking.  Or perhaps it was merely a culling exercise, a way to get the sheep away from the important questions. Too bad they ended up so near the students.

Acknowledgments

Stefan Hellvkist here for the magnificent cloud.

To a cloud of friends and connections: John Deighton, Tom Guarriello, Leora Kornfeld, Pip Coburn, Jerry Michalski, and Terry Gross, all of whom over the last couple of days forced the issue or at least raised the question: what is a self and what is a group now that we are so electronically mediated?  Forgive the provincial anthropological phrasing.   

Sunday Morning Shootout (SMS) has become an unexpected pleasure of cable TV and Sunday morning.  It features Variety editor, Peter Bart, and producer Peter Guber, talking to one another each week about Hollywood.

Make that talkin. This is old friends schmoozing in a coffee shop.  Schmoozing qua schmoozing is not interesting, because it ‘s generally so forgiving of air puffed opinion, amateur dramatics and every kind of showing off.  But this schmoozing supplies depths of knowledge, a mutual respect/restraint, and conversation well stocked with insight and thoughtfulness. 

Once more, cable TV (in this case AMC) aces the networks.  More modest in its scale and budget than the TV tabloids, SMS still manages to tells us more about Hollywood.  By contrast, Mary Hart deafens with her carney shouting and show girl smile.

Of course, there are compromises.  When Peter and Peter really meet to talk, just the two of them, no cameras, no audience, things must be a bit speedier.  Surely, the baud rate goes up, assumptions can be made, codes evoked, problems dispatched, conclusions reached, disagreements lodged, all of this takes place at speed.  For the purposes of Sunday Morning Shootout, things are not so much broadband as DSL.  Peter and Peter are making an effort to let us keep up.

It is of course a delicate balance, and an historical one.  Hollywood triumphed as a cultural form precisely because it was inclusive…unlike the filmmakers of France who worked a different, more avant garde deal.  The Hollywood bargain has always been, roughly, establish a perfectly transparent proposition (Gidget goes to Rome, Debbie Does Dallas) and only then, if you dare, open the film to moments of subtlety that can engage the more sophisticated viewer.  It would be crazy to have a show about Hollywood to break with this bargain.  And Peter and Peter don’t.

Still, we’re talking about a contemporary culture that now moves not like tectonic plates creeping by the millimeter but like LA homes coursing down a hillside.  The Hollywood formula is being reworked, as movies get more difficult and viewers get more sophisticated.  (The "waste land" turned out to be fertile after all.)  So there is room to wonder if SMS has actually had the right balance and on one point I say, emphatically, and schmoozingly, no!

Yesterday, Peter Guber flew at Gil Cates, calling the Oscar’s the "march of the penguins," and demanding a reworking the Oscar formula.  The ensuing discussion broke out the problems that threatens the Oscars now.  I repeat them while initialing the originator. 

• 1) as the grandfather of award shows, it is committed to tradition (PB)
• 2) it is crowded by new competitors (GC)
• 3) it comes late in the award show cycle (GC)
• 4) by the time stars get to the Oscars, their acceptance speeches are sometimes over rehearsed (GC)
• 5) it is obliged to include categories and recipients that have no star power (PG)
• 6) the pictures that get awards are smaller and less crowd pleasing, (so, like Volver, fewer people have seen them and they have smaller stars to bring to the ceremony) (PB)
• 7) it is too freaking long (PG)

Finally, the debate seemed to come down to this: Bart’s and Cates’ belief that Hollywood has the right once a year to dress itself up in grandeur and take a well deserved bow, versus Guber’s contention that, no, Hollywood can’t cease to be entertaining and fun just because it’s handing out awards.

But on one point, everyone agreed.  The best moments on the Oscar were the moments of spontaneity, when stuff happens that plays against form, when actors play against type.  Suddenly, the ceremony comes to life.  Grandeur opens up and we fall right in.   

And this, ironically, proves to be the thing to say not only about the Oscars but about SMS as well.   The discussion with Cates was the most interesting segment in a long time, because Guber was shouting his unhappiness, Cates was deft and playful in his replies, and Barts was offering diplomatic intervention even as he smuggled in sotto voce comment.  Suddenly, an interesting show became a lively show.  We the audience went from looking in to being there.  Yes, SMS has got things right.  It represents a big advance over Mary Hartman and Entertainment Tonight.  But it is still too set piece, still too true to form, still too predictable.

So it turns out SMS is not just reporting the state of Hollywood it is ever so discretely contemplating it’s most fundamental problem: that the old forms of entertainment are too overformed to engage a culture that is moving a breakneck speed towards participation and spontaneity.  And this is odd because one of the real joys of schmoozing is the spontaneity.    

I watched Studio 60 reruns yesterday.  Sorkin’s dialog lives and breathes!  The West Wing sometimes felt like a large talent trapped in a small room, a cruel "no exit" for America’s most fecund dramatist. 

In episode 5, Martha O’Dell (Christine Lahti) is doing a story on head writer Matt Albie (Matthew Perry).

Matt Albie: You’ve covered presidential campaigns, you’ve covered presidents, you’ve covered wars, what are you writing about a TV show for?

Martha O’Dell: What are you writing a TV show for?

Matt Albie: I’m not. I’m watching you dust my office for prints.

Martha O’Dell: I am writing about it, because what’s happened here is important.  I think what’s happening here is important.  I think popular culture in general and this show in particular are important.

[a man in lobster suit enters Albie's office]

There is something a defensive about O’Dell’s remarks…as if Presidents and elections (even on TV) are manifestly more important than comedy shows and popular culture. Sorkin protests too much.

It’s odd that so agile a mind should miss so obvious an irony.  Sorkin is manifestly happier and more productive here.  How could a lesser world make him a greater writer?

The West Wing was popular culture dressed up in the grandeur of politics.  Perhaps Sorkin doubted that TV was worthy of his talent as a message (and not just a medium).  Or perhaps, having used popular culture to enliven the tone of the White House, he now felt obliged to use politics (lower case "p") to dignify SNL. 

In any case, the disdain and the dignity are now back to front. However important popular culture may be (and it is now so important, it’s time to remove the adjective), it never took itself seriously.  It never took on airs.  Thus did it conquer.  (Thus did the French cinema fail to colonize us.)

Traditionally, there was a bargain in place.  The creator may exercise an extraordinary intelligence in the creation of popular culture, but this intelligence should not be allowed to show.  It’s a little like special effects, the science and technology of which are now astonishingly sophisticated.  All we see, all we want to see, is the starship exploding. 

And Sorkin gets this, belatedly:

I get it when people write that there’s a smugness to the show, there’s an arrogance to the show.  I get it when people write that the characters on the show take doing the television show too seriously.  (in Wyatt, below)

But it’s not clear that NBC did.  The marketing for Studio 60 was presumptuous. It seemed to insist, "You will love this show.  It comes to you in triumph," as if NBC were eager finally to show us that (finally or again?) they were no longer schlock meisters.  Bad luck.  Bad marketing. The writer may get it, the studio does not. 

Still, it would be a pity if Sorkin dialed it back too much.  For the bargain is being rewritten with every episode of The Wire and The West Wing. Slowly but surely, dialog, acting and directing is getting better. Popular culture has been letting complexity and sophistication in. Terra is forming, as better culture cultivates a more sophisticated audience who support better culture.   (See Johnson, below.)

It would be tragic if Mr. Sorkin were shut out of the world he has helped create.   

References

Johnson, Steven.  2006.  Everything Bad is Good for You.  New York: Riverhead Trade. 

Sorkin, Aaron. 2006.The Long Lead story, episode 5. first aired October 16, 2006. here.

Wyatt, Edward.  2007.  Shaky ‘Studio 60′ Is Counting on Romance to Rouse Ratings.  The New York Times.  January 18, 2007. here.

Apologies

Sorry for the Sartre reference.  I mean, really, who cares?

Announcement

New episodes for Studio 60 begin tonight. 

It is an open question and a topical one: whether all cultures are equally endowed with the ability and inclination to embrace economic, political and cultural liberty. 

If you are an exceptionalist, you say, "no, this is a peculiarity of the West.  It does not occur indigenously and robustly in other cultures, and it’s not for exportation there.  If they don’t have it, they won’t ever get it. Don’t even think about forcing it.  Liberty will not take." 

If you are a generalist, you say, "nonsense, every member of the species yearns for freedom.  Give them an inch and, eventually, they’ll take a mile.  Liberty is inevitable.  Plant the seed in any soil.  A mighty oak will grow."

I’m torn.  Sometimes I’m an exceptionalist, sometimes a generalist.  But I found myself wondering the other day whether we shouldn’t treat "touchy selfhood" as a necessary (or at least generative) condition of liberty.

Consider the moment in which someone with standing (the superordinate party) asks anyone with less standing (the subordinate party) to do something.  Sometimes the subordinate party will bristle a little.  He might go further than this, and resist, performing the task but doing so "ungraciously."  He might actually refuse the task altogether.  In all cases, he is likely to make a show of his irritation with a standard nonverbal vocabulary. He will glare, grimace and/or glower.  Even when compliance is forthcoming, the superordinate party is sent a message.  The subordinate resented being asked and may in fact doubt the authority and even the standing of the superordinate party.

Harrumph! When the subordinate bristles, resists or refuses, the superordinate takes umbrage, too.   Other subordinates would perform this task willingly and with good grace.  What’s the matter with this guy?  Someone asks, "Don’t you find him a little prickly, difficult, contrary?"  The answer is resounding, "Oh, totally.  He’s touchy!"

This little status drama can be played out in any number of venues.  The classic locus for contemporary culture is the relationship between a parent and a teenager.  There is always a couple of "contested" years in which parents insist on an authority that teens are reluctant to accept.  When parents persist, teens respond with spectacular displays of touchiness, complete with phrases like, "you’re not the boss of me."   

When the West was more hierarchical, touchiness was the order of the day.  I’m reading a biography of Samuel Pepys, the 17th century diarist, and there is lots of contretempt between Pepys the master and Jane, the servant.  It surprises us to learn that Jane was Pepys’ sister.  But the problem was much bigger than servants.  Everyone in the hierarchical West was, with the exception of the monarch, subordinate to someone. Aristocratic touchiness was especially common when differences of rank were not clear, or when one party demanded too much deference or gave too little.  It is easy to find many instances of touchiness in the historical record and it looks as if the West has been vibrating with same for many hundreds of years.  Princes, punks and peddlers all have this in common.

Touchiness was (and remains) symptomatic of a certain status tenderness.  It tells us that there was some question about what is owed to whom.  Touchy selfhood is never quite certain what the boundaries of role and obligation are.  And this lack of clarity means that everyone is inclined to wear away at the wharf to which they are tethered.  Any liberty that is not nailed is snapped up.  Any liberty that is disputable is disputed.  Even when obligations are clear, they are still protested with a theater of gesture and attitude.  Westerners chaff.  What looked like bad manners or bloodymindedness is  actually a collective declaration that the present "liberty allowance" is  not enough, and that acts of compliance are offered under protest.

Now the question is this: is touchiness universal?  You’re asking me? My guess is that it isn’t it.  I would be surprised if touchiness were exclusively Western.  But I would also be surprised if touchiness were exhibited equally  by every culture.   I think there are some cultures that refuse touchiness.  And where touchiness is prevented, I think it’s probably true that liberties of every kind are harder to achieve.  It could be that economic, political, and cultural liberty sometimes starts as touchiness. 

In the long term, every culture must fight a war between two phrases: "don’t you know who I am?" and "who do you think you are?"  It may be that the latter wins, and liberty flourishes, more surely when selves are a little touchy. 

References

Tomalin.  Claire.  2003.  Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.  London: Penguin. 

Acknowledgments:

Mark Yellin

Thanks

For the image found at Fictional Cities: Florence, Venice, London here. 

Recently, Gawker took aim at blogger cliches. 

• Best ever!
• not so much
• OMG (Oh my God)
• I just threw up a little bit in my mouth
• yo!
• seriously?
• What’s next, x?
• um
• wait for it
• x made my eyes bleed
• x is the new y

I have used some of these myself.  And I am glad to be reminded that I’m using remaindered language, with "best used by" dates nearing expiry.

Gawker readers commented on the advisory.

Gina Tapani says,

Oh, crap.  This means I actually have to think of original things to say now."   

Fuzzy_Duffel_Bag says,

I think I just shit in my pants a little. 

MattGaymon says,

This post made me throw up all over myself. 

Twizzlers for President says that the "X is the new Y" formula is

fun to use nonsensically, as in ‘sweatpants are the new Kiera Knightley.’

What’s odd is that many of the 85 commentators exhibit a cliche of their own. Many of them use those kooky, little monikers that became so fashionable in the internet world in the 1990s.

Thus we get comments from Worker #3116 and Karen UhOh, RayGunn, Little Mintz Sunshine, girlgeorge, smashteroid, and supastah.  (Only 15 of the 90 comments use the most literal choice: the author’s name.) 

Here’s what makes an anthropologist nervous.  At the very moment these people gather to participate in Gawker’s snootiness, they expose themselves to snootiness.  (There is one magnificent exception, one that takes the smart-aleck formula and raises it to new heights: The Assimilated Negro.)

But how long can it be before Gawker blows the whistle on the banality of this naming convention?  When do they turn in their readers?  Would they dare?  Yo, just how much journalistic integrity does Gawker have?

Gawker.  2006.  Bad lingo: Blog-Media Cliches.  Gawker.com.  December 15, 2006.  here.

I didn’t catch much of the People’s Choice Awards on Tuesday, but I did see Vince Vaughn’s acceptance speech.  Unless my ears deceived me, I believe he actually called Jennifer Aniston "genuine."  I believe he said, "Jennifer Aniston [is] one of the  funniest, most genuine people I know." 

Wow, I goggled, when was the last time I called anyone "genuine?"  Well?  When was the last time you called someone "genuine?"  If I were Malcolm Gladwell, and I curse the Gods each day that I am not, I would have several weeks to do the linguistic detective work: where is this term from, how has its meaning changed, where is it headed?  But no.  I am obliged to do what every blogger does, google the heck out of the term, and see where that takes me. (What we really need is a Bletchley Park, a place dedicated to breaking the codes of popular culture.)

Finding 1

Genuine is still big in the red states.  I think that’s because God and country still mean something, and sincerity, like one’s bond, is a measure of character and one of the most fungible of the capitals of social life.  This could be what Vince means, but I’d be very surprised if it were.  The guy is Hollywood through and through and Hollywood is a placed filled with actors who regard any manifestation of the genuine as a failure of talent.  More important, Vaughn’s on-screen persona makes fun of genuine through his special brand of faux sincerity.  (See for instance the Wedding Crashers.)   Furthermore, Vince came up on that coastal revival of the lounge guy with rat pack attitude.  (See for instance, Swingers.) When Vince calls Jen genuine, this is not the red states talking. 

Finding 2

Genuine is a term people use in personals, as in, "I am looking for genuine man with a college education, an interest in the arts, and who does not mind that I share my Upper West side one-bedroom apartment with 9 cats, and a dog called Rickey."  When you are looking for love in this very public way you expose yourself to people who may treat you lightly or badly.  Genuine, in this case, is a code word.  It sends a warning: do not trifle with my affections. Is genuine a tell tale that Vince uses the personals?  Er, no. 

Finding 3

The reason that genuine was strange to my ears, I think, is that it is losing ground to a new competitor, authenticity.   

Listen to this passage from the internet.  Genuine gets a bit part here, and no more. 

I have a good friend who is the most authentic person I know. People love being around her because she is so real, with no pretence. She makes everyone feel special, not in a phoney way; she makes them feel special because she is genuinely interested in them. She values people. She values relationships, knowing that even the most causal relationship, a moment with a stranger, has the potential to gift them and us in some way. And so she lives her life day-by-day, moment-by-moment, open, honest and receptive to others. It sounds simple but it’s actually revolutionary, given that most of us approach others with an agenda of our own.  The question you must ask yourself is do you value relationships? Are you willing to be authentic yourself in order to have authentic relationships?

We can see why authentic is overtaking genuine in these circles. Genuine is too often merely nice.  When we apply the term to something more than nice, we are usually giving praise for the extent to which the person so called has performed the social emotion in question in precisely the right way.  (He told me he was sorry my dog Rickey had died.  He seemed so genuine!)  Genuine is about being true to your responsibility to saying and doing and of course feeling the right thing.  Being genuine is distinctly not about being interesting, unexpected, spontaneous or unorthodox.  That’s authenticity’s job. 

Now we’re getting somewhere.  This notion of genuine does seem to correspond nicely with Jennifer Aniston’s public persona.  She plays characters who are good and true and kind and solicitous, and yes, sincere, and most of all, genuine.  We could call her authentic.  But there is no evidence that Jen is giving us the essential self, the real her.  It’s as if even her characters are playing a role. This is the path to becoming America’s sweetheart.  (And the road away from same, the one taken by Julia Roberts for instance, is always roles that forsake nice for something stranger, darker, more complex, or less rule bound.)  But the costs are high.  Signal clarity comes at the price of a certain narrowness and predictability.   

I do understand that Vaughn was laboring to find just the right word to acknowledge a person with whom he has been linked and then delinked in the public mind.  Perhaps "genuine" seemed a way of giving praise without signally affection.  But it does make you wonder, doesn’t it?  When Vince calls Jen calls genuine, he is giving us a teleology and the very arch of the relationship?

Well, that’s it from everyone here at Bletcheley Park.  Good night, every one.  Drive safely! 

References and acknowledgments

The quote on authenticity is from the website here. 

YouTube: Vince Vaughn accepting his People’s Choice Award here.

Trilling, Lionel.  1972. Sincerity and Authenticity.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  here. 
(I could hear myself reproducing Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity in some of this, and thought I had better give him this acknowledgment.)