Rob Walker offered this trenchant observation on the weekend. 

Last April, New York Magazine revealed that the concept of the Generation Gap had just been "killed off." This was "unprecedented in human history," since there has always been a generation gap, but now there isn’t one anymore, given the music that young people listen to and how they dress, etc. The article was "an obituary for the generation gap."

This month, New York Magazine reveals: "It’s been a long time since there was a true generation gap, perhaps 50 years." But now there is one, and it turns on the way young people use the Internet and their attitudes about privacy, etc.

What is the correct answer? Generation gaps used to be a fundamental part of society, but now they’re gone? Or generation gaps disappeared ages ago, but now they’re back?

As Mr. Walker notes, there’s nothing like a NEW TREND to sell magazines.  But I wonder if the New York Magazine’s contradiction is not also a symptom of our present condition.

Pattern panic, it’s the next new thing!  It afflicts especially the chattering classes, the people charged with pattern recognition.  We are overwhelmed.  There are too many kinds of people engaged in too many disparate projects with too many odd and unpredictable outcomes.  Our patterns are failing us.  Run for the life boats.

A little case study:

One account of the music of the 1990s says that it was the result of the union of punk and heavy metal.  At the moment of their cohabitation, these two musical forms appeared, at least to the likes of this anthropologist, to occupy different, mutually inaccessible, parts of the musical universe.  Many futures were possible but not this.  Yes, if you listened to college radio in the late 1980s you saw it coming, and if you knew something about the worlds of the Pacific Northwest, you had greater warning still.  But if you were a clueless anthropologist who doesn’t get out much, 1991 came as a big surprise. 

And this is now the way of the world.  Things come sailing out of the blue.  The world proves opaque.  And sometimes it actually and actively resists comprehension.  Our response?  For many of us, it’s panic.  We begin hunting wildly for answers.  We begin multiplying our explanatory schemes.  "Yes, there is a generation gap!  No, there’s isn’t a generation gap! God, I hope no one’s keeping track."  (Damn you, Mr. Walker.)

More symptoms:

Trend books used to be one or two big trends (Lasch on a narcissistic culture, Baudrilliard on the simulacrum,), but now that our culture is a perfect storm of possibilities, this too looks like my father’s generation used to call a mug’s game.

The new books come loaded with lots and lots of trends. Salzman and Matathia recently graced us with a book that has 15 trends and they offer no indication of how these trends might interact.  It’s a smörgåsbord and the heavy lifting is left to the reader.  Sam Hill gives us 60 trends.  Ochoa and Corey give us 100 trends.  No one includes  "assembly instructions."  Sure, these trends are going to come together somehow, but how?  Well, don’t ask the experts…how would they know?  (I believe that Faith Popcorn was the first one to hunt the future with a shotgun.)  Make enough predictions and you’re going to hit something.

Lifestyle typologies used to come with 3 categories.  Then they grew to 6, then 9, and finally topped out at 12.  People have pretty much given up trying to create the typology that can contain us. Categorical inflation of this kind is a sure sign of alarm.  The typologists are now working to save the very idea of typology.  But if there is a "Dunbar number" for social networks (around 150), there has to be one for typology.  3 is good.  6 is ok. 9 is pushing it. 12 is a cry for help, a categorical admission that the world is too much for us. 

While the intellectuals panic, Hollywood and Burbank appear to be responding. I think we could see the new Jim Carrey picture, The Number 23, as a parable on pattern panic.  Here’s a man, Walter Sparrow, who believes that the number 23 has insinuated itself everywhere in his life.  He was born at 11:12. He was 23 when he met his wife.  The day they met was 9/14. The number 23 is in his driver’s license and social security number.  Of course, he’s wrong, but he is still illuminating.  This is Carrey scrutinizing pattern panic. 

I think we might even take the surprising success of the TV show Numbers as a case in point.  Sorry, that should be Numb3rs.  This show is a triumph against the odds.  Most Americans hate numbers.  They think of math as the torture they were glad to leave behind in high school or college.  (I wish someone would do the numbers on numbers, giving us a sense of how large is the community that gets numbers and how large the one that dislikes them.)  To think that we now watch a show about a mathematics of crime solving, well, here’s one trend that I, for one, would never have predicted.  Crime solving used to happen in the detective’s head.  Then it took place in the CSI laboratory.  Now it springs from an algorithm that comes from CalTech!.  Come on!  But I think we respond to this show perhaps because it promises a new means of pattern recognition when so many others are wearing out and breaking down. Apparently, pattern panic trumps math panic.   

Do I contradict myself?  Of course, I contradict myself.  To suggest that "pattern panic" is a new trend is to insist that some trend watching is still possible.  But this is perhaps the death throes of this intellectual instinct, the pattern recognition that acknowledges the decline and coming extinction of pattern recognition. 

But there is another possibility.  And this is: we have to start thinking about trends in new ways.  We have to start seeking patterns that are a lot less patterned and a good deal more fluid.  I’m just saying. 

References

Adams, Michael. 1997. Sex in the Snow. Toronto: Viking.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. translator Sheila F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

A Dunbar number is the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships" here. 

Hill, Sam.  2002.  Sixty Trends in Sixty Minutes.  New York: Wiley. 

Mitchell, Arnold. 1983. The Nine American Lifestyles: Who We Are and Where We’re Going. New York: Macmillan.

Nussbaum, Emily.  2007.  Say Everything.  New York Magazine.  February 12, 2007. here.

Ochoa, Goerge and Melinda Corey.  2005.  The 100 Best Trends, 2006: Emerging Developments You Can’t Afford to Ignore.  New York: Adams Media Corporation.

Salzman, Marian and Ira Matathia.  2006.  Next Now: Trends for the future.  New York: Palgrave. 
Sheehy, Gail. 1995. New Passages: Mapping your life across time. New York: Random House.

Sternbergh, Adam.  2006.  Up with Grups.  New York Magazine.  April 3, 2006. here.

Walker, Rob.  2007.  Note.  Murketing.com weekly email.  [you can sign up for this email here.] 

Washburn, Katharine, and John F. Thorton, editors. 1996. Dumbing Down: Essays on the strip-mining of American culture. New York: Norton.

Apologies

to Walt Whitman

Ning is a website designed to help us to build our own social networks.  It launches officially next week.  It’s the work of Marc Andreessen (pictured) and Gina Bianchini.

Ning looks promising on three dimensions:

1) the business model

Ning allows for "revenue access," let’s call it.  If we have basic membership, Ning will place ads on our sites and keep the revenue.  For a fee, we can run ads of our own and keep their revenue.  (MySpace has no revenue access opportunity.) 

Revenue access and revenue sharing are pressing issues, and this is the clearest leverage point that will supplant first generation social networks with subsequent ones. 

YouTube makes clear that consumers are happy to supply content for nothing.  They consider themselves well paid by the opportunity for exposure and the intrinsic pleasure of content creation. 
But this will not endure.  Eventually, the internet mediators are going to have to pay the content provider just as surely as the old mediators now do. 

Ning may eventually be obliged to compensate even those who use the basic package, but that remains to be seen.  We shall see where the YouTube experiment ends up on this one. 

The anthropological angle: when content providers have access to revenue, how will they use it?  There’s a good chance that some providers will hew to the middle of the market, in order to increase their revenues.  This will narrow the world that the internet represents.  But it is also true that some content providers will use the revenue to free themselves from their "day jobs" and pursue their innovations with new enthusiasm.  As a result, the internet will become more innovative and more various. 

2) the user model

The user model looks right as well.  Ning will allow user customization and control.  (And there is of course a powerful anthropological impulse at work here. The DIY movement is one of the great transformative trends of our times.)

Other social network sites ask you to join their world. We are about people creating their own worlds. (Gina Bianchini, Ning CEO)

But Ning doesn’t merely allow customization and control, it has the good sense to allow us to scale up into this customization and control. True there are some internet users like Steve Rubel who are just all over the technology and the opportunities this technology opens up. But most of us are more like me, poor schlups who are just one new feature away from a terrible headache and long term memory loss. 

For these people, "keeping it simple, stupid" is the order of the day.  Google gets this.  Marissa Mayer is the high priestess of simplicity and one of the reasons the Google search engine is a thing of beauty while Yahoo and eBay websites leave me with the strong feeling that a bomb must have just exploded in my dog’s breakfast. 

Ning has taken a page from the Google handbook:

The whole point of providing customization and freedom is that you want to give people something super simple at first but then, as they get more sophisticated, you want to give them the ability to get more creative. (Andreessen)

There is another way to put this.  All of us want all of the expressive and pragmatic advantages that come with all of the new technologies, but none of us has an additional ounce of intellectual processing power to spend on them.  It’s not actually that we’re stupid.  We’re overextended.

Starting simple removes every piece of extraneous intellectual effort. Small investments create returns.  And scaling up allows us to recoup that investment over and over.  Now we may use what we know to acquire new knowledge.  Most of the wayfaring, the pondering, the "how does this work, again?" has been removed.  The "fog of technology" has been made to lift.   

And once schlubs like me have access to the expressive potentialities of the new technology, we may expand the internet and the worlds now suspended from this internet to expand extraordinarily.  Once civilians can be as inventive as the experts…wow.  And this is what the the new technology does so well.  It creates solutions for one generation which it then learns to automate for the next generation.  Second Life has yet to make it easier for the novice to build on line.  Once it does so, that little world, already so stuffed with design experiment, will expand remarkably. 

So there is an anthropological angle here too.  Once Ning and other sites help to empower the ordinary user, the web will become still more fecund.   Andreessen has contemplated this future. 

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?

3) the cultural model

As it stands, social networking doesn’t actually sort very well.  And this means social networks on the web don’t make social connections very well.  (I have met lots of people through the web.  Some of them are now my friends.  But I have yet to make a friend thanks to a social network site.  How bout you?) 

This has got to be a temporary problem.  If there is something that the web should be good at, it is helping me to find all but only the people I find really interesting.  But really good networks, networks with very high "friend potential," are small networks, and small networks have hitherto failed to attract the resources to make them go.  Ning appears to change all that and we may now expect to see online networking take on new significance. . 

There is one further anthropological note to offer here.  When there is a network for each of my enthusiasms, what happens to those enthusiasms? I think it is probably true that each of them will broaden and deepen, and I think this tells us that each enthusiasm will make an even greater claim upon the self. 

Or, let’s put this another way.  Let’s say my self now consists of several quite distinct creatures.  At a minimum, there’s a blogger, the ethnographer, the consultant, the person interested in Elizabethan England, the anthropologist, movie buff, and so on.  Once there is a network for each of these selves, and once each of these selves becomes as a result more robust, I think the diversity of my selfhood multiplies and the absolute space of this selfhood expands.  We may expect better social networks to create cloudier selves.

Welcome, Ning.

References

Anonymous Reuters.  2007.  Ning allows DIY social networks.  PC Magazine. February 27, 2007. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  France after France.  This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  March 28, 2006. here.

Tischler, Linda.  2005.  The beauty of simplicity.  Fast Company.com.  Issue 100.  here. 

Steve Rubel here.   

Webb, Cynthia.  An interview with Marc Andreessen.  Washington Post.  June 10, 2004. here.

Whis is this man so very tedious.  It’s a puzzle.  You’ll have to solve it.  I can’t.

TV detectives were once paragons of manly competence.  Mannix, Peter Gunn, Kojak, all of these were masterful males.

Then came an interregnum.  In the 1970s and 80s, we saw a new crime solver: Magnum PI, Jim Rockford of the Rockford files, and Columbo.  All these characters practiced self deprecation.  They actually made jokes against themselves. Plots sometimes unfolded at their expense.  Occasionally, they were made to look foolish.

And now the present crew: Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon on NCIS), Horatio Caine (David Caruso on CSI: Miami), Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise on CSI: NY) and Gil Grissom (William Petersen of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) all of these characters appear to take us back to the old model. 

Grissom can be a little quirky and bookish.  Occasionally, Gibbs exhibits a sense of humor.  But Caine and Taylor are dour and melodramatic.  The idea of self deprecation!  Never!  Occasionally, these characters endure inner conflict, but this never rises to the level of real complexity and never ever are they allowed to get down off the high horse of steely competence and manly self control. 

Now, we know that the while these shows were taking shape, there were two crime dramas on cable, Homicide and The Wire, that were doing what cable is done so well elsewhere, opening things up for the mainstream players.   More recently, Monk and Psych have offered almost perfect inversions of the usual model.  So there was both precedent and inspiration for a more complicated view of the lead detective.

Furthermore, we know this character descends in part from Sherlock Holmes who was flawed and conflicted.  He also descends from the Noir detective that Humphrey Bogart captured so well and the Noire detective was nothing if not complicated clock work.

But most important, there was a brief moment in popular culture in which the detective took on a sense of humor. 

What happened?

The thesis: the world is cloudier

proposition 1: there are more people, objects and ideas

subproposition 1.3  there are more ideas

There are more ideas?  What a ludicrous proposition. 

For one thing, it’s impossible to test. Actually, it’s impossible to think. What is an idea? What’s an idea part, what’s an idea whole? How many “ideas” exist in Pirates of the Caribbean? How many ideas are there in the average email or telephone conversation? How would we count them even if we could identity them. It’s a completely jello-y problem, fraught with difficulty, and several times on the train back from Cambridge, I found myself thinking, "it’s a very bad idea to say that there are more ideas.How would we know?”

Intuitively, the idea holds some appeal. There appears to be absolutely and proportionally more art, music and film in the world. Books continue grow in number. The corporation is now committed to innovation as Job 1 and this makes it a fountain of ideation.  The internet is yet another fountain. Intuitively, it looks like there are more ideas. I found one hard number, and it was encouraging. International copyright applications from developing countries rose from 680 in 1997 to 5,359 in 2002.

Let’s begin. (I must ask the philosophically squeamish to look away. I would like to think that what follows is rough carpentry, crudely executed but not ill formed. But I know that no one with philosophical training will share this opinion.) Let’s begin by saying that by “idea” we mean an assertion that posits something technically intelligible and socially admissible. So, “Green ideas sleep sleep” fails the first test. “Green ideas sleep furiously” satisfies the first test (it’s intelligible) but fails the second (it’s not admissible). “Boston is wasted on the Bostonians” satisfied both. We might not “see” what it means but we recognize it as an assertion on which further scrutiny would probably not be wasted. (I realize my idea of “idea” begs many questions, but bear with me.)

It is not unusual for someone on the blogosphere to tell us “my car wouldn’t start this morning.” This is technically intelligible, socially admissible, but trivial. It might be true. It might be false. We don’t care. So by “idea” we mean an assertion that posits something technically intelligible, social admissible, and provocative of an interest in contestation. By this definition, “Raiders suck,” “Lost is a good TV show,” or “Dennis Kucinich is wrong for president,” are all ideas we care about.

Actually, we are looking not for any contestation; we are looking for rich contestation. “Raiders suck” invites “Forty-niners suck” (or “Bite me”) and that’s the end of the “conversation.” “Dennis Kucinich is wrong for president” can be answered with “bite me” but something more thoughtful is not inappropriate. Indeed, the relatively mild tone of the assertion calls for something more thoughtful. I’m not saying “Raiders suck” is not an idea. I am saying “Dennis Kucinich is wrong for president” is, for our purposes, more idea-ish. Ideas that invite detailed explication and rebuttal so qualify.

There’s one last condition. (Thank you for bearing with me this far. You qualify for hardship, if not danger, pay. Mrs. Burton will give you a voucher as you leave.) Ideas can be provocative without being illuminating. Chances are, ideas that merely provoke a reaction are more likely to confirm old ideas than introduce us to new ones.

Anna Nicole Smith embodied America. She embodied its bounty as well as its overabundance; its exploitability, and its propensity to exploit. She embodied, also, its litigiousness, its enterprise, its universal offer of the chance to remake oneself (Gatsby did it one way, Anna Nicole Smith did it another).

This is Tunku Varadarajan suggesting that some of the properties of a celebrity might be thought of as properties of the U.S. This is illuminating because it helps me see something I could not otherwise see: that Smith’s tragedy is an American story or that America is in some respects Smith-ish. (I understand that that this idea is strictly speaking a metaphor, an idea expressly designed to be illuminating. I mean to include also statements of fact, things like “the average American house went from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004” which illuminates both culture and commerce.)

Ok, so, by “idea” we mean an assertion that posits something technically intelligible, social admissible, provocative of an interest in contestation, and possessed of real candle power (illumination).  Again, I know I’ve made lots of perilous assumptions, but, hey, as long as it gets us over the ravine of ignorance, even a rickety bridge will do.  (I will ask readers to move in single file.  And, Steve, no swaying!) 

Ok, now we have an idea of what we mean in this case  by "idea."  But can we say there are more of these ideas?   A sensible man would go forth and begin counting "ideas" in public discourse.  But I am not a sensible man.  I am an anthropologist.  We do things the hard way.  In the famous words of Animal House and Ghost Busters, when the world needs a futile gesture, we’re the ones you call.  (Note to self: update movie references.)

I think we can know that there are more ideas without counting them because we know something about the nature of discourse on the internet.  We know that the act of blogging (to take merely one of the new idea fountains) requires that the blogger articulate what is probably otherwise inchoate.  To commit something to a blog, we are required to think it through to a new state of explicitness.  Here, before the idea has actually hit the airwaves, it is more idea-ish than it was before, even it is not quite sufficiently idea-ish to meet our definition.  But it is more explicit and this invites contestation, which is to say, our clear idea forces new clarity in the minds of the reader.  Acts of contestation, the back and forth of debate, idea-ates the ideas even more, not just for the participants but for lookers on. 

The world before and after the internet is a little like America before and after urbanization.  If I am a farmer working the fields, chances are the ideas in my head inchoate and not very idea-ish.  It’s only when I sit down to dinner with my family, or go to the diner in town, that there is even opportunity for articulation or contestation.  And chances are these domains, family and diner, are filled with people sufficiently like me that I am rarely required to roll my arguments out in very much detail.  (In the phrase of yesterday’s post, for my great great Scottish grandfather, "ay, football" spoke volumes and may well have exhausted the conversational work of an evening.)

It is when I move to the city, and find myself surrounded by lots of strange strangers, that I feel a new necessity to think out what I believe.  And when called upon to present these ideas to strangers, I am obliged to unearth and to state the assumptions on which they, the ideas, rest.  This rarely happened in the field or the diner.  And unearthing assumptions means that I can now see what I think in a way I never did before.  Now my ideas are more idea-ish and more likely to become new, different and more ideas in my head.  Once exposed to public scrutiny where they are likely to renew their generative effects in the heads of other people, as their responses will in mine. 

The internet is a new urbanization.  It changes what we think and multiplies the ideas with which we think.  Come to that the internet actually makes for a globalization.  Ready access to sites like Wikipedia and about.com allow us to deepen our understanding of any one of idea and to cast the net in search of new ideas.  Even as we become ever more urban, I can be more global, traversing intellectual continents, sailing opinion seas that would otherwise have taken more substantial investments of time and energy.  The internet makes me a citizen of worlds outside my own, and this too must multiply the ideas at my disposal.  At the very least, it will renew the urbanization effect by which I am exposed to more difference and obliged to offer more explicitness.  Access to people and difference of opinion forces me to be more explicit.  Access to more intellectual resources empowers my internal hedgehog to cultivate what I do know and it empowers my internal fox to find out things I don’t know, in both cases multiplying the ideas I call my own.  (Mrs. Burton has cold compresses for anyone who is suffering the effects of runaway metaphor, urban hedgehogs and global foxes, and all that.)

This is an unduly complicated way of making the argument that there are more ideas, and Mrs. Burton is deeply sorry.  But we are now, perhaps, in a position to reflect on new ideas as a cause of the cloudiness of the contemporary world.  More ideas create more ideas.  But more ideas also create new techniques of idea management.  We have to get better at pattern recognition, and this take ability to jump assumptions with new agility.  In a modernist time, I guess we thought that the intellectual world might look like Fuller’s geodesic dome, ideas fitting together harmoniously, each bearing the weight of others, a keystone principle used not once, but over and over again. 

But that’s not what our intellectual world looks like at all.  It is much more like an great house from the Elizabethan period, a structure with medieval origins that has been added to and reworked often since.  This metaphor captures the rambling, run-on quality of our intellectual worlds, but not the fact that the physics actually changed from wing to wing and room to room.  To entertain some ideas, we must posit one set of assumptions.  But to entertain another set of ideas, we must abandon the first set and embrace an entirely different set.  Simply to think about Microsoft as a corporate culture I must "configure my head" with one set of assumptions.  To think about Apple, I must use another.  And both of these creatures occupy a world that is constrained by the rules of commerce.  When it comes to cultural creatures, (the music of the 1960s vs. the music of the 1990s, say) the space between assumption sets can be much larger.   

But of course there is a simpler way to make this argument.  Forget intellectual adventuring. Merely to think well about the internet takes a lot of assumption jumping.  Each of the innovations now in place (email, websites, search engines, social networks, internet appliance, virtual worlds), the first time we heard of them we were obliged to struggle.  What is this?  What do we need to think to grasp it?  What assumptions does it challenge?  What new assumptions does it require?  How does this new understanding fit with the other things we think we know?  Perhaps it changes much of what we think we know…if only we could see how.

We have more ideas, with more space between them, and we cannot accommodate these ideas, let alone think them, unless we are prepared to treat with, engage in, endure, and if such a thing is possible, cultivate cloudiness in new ways. 

Summing up the last three posts, then, cloudiness comes from the fact that we now have more people, more objects, and more ideas.  Comes from and responds to.  If cloudiness is the new structure of the contemporary world, it is also perhaps a good way to respond to same, if only we understood it better. 

References for this post (and the last two)

Anonymous.  2007. China’s GDP grows 10.7 percent in 2006.  People’s Daily Online. here.   

Berlin, Isaiah.  1953.  The Hedgehog and the Fox.  Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Ehrlich, Paul.  1968.  The Population Bomb. here. 

Granovetter, Mark. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties.  American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 78.  Issue 6. May 1360-80.

Kelly, Kevin.  Help Wanted: How many objects. here. 

Surowiecki, James.  2004.  The Wisdom of Crowds.  New York:

Vanderbilt, Tom.  2005.  Self-Storage Nation.  Americans are storing more stuff than ever.  Slate. July 18, 2005. here. 

Varadarajan, Tunku. 2007. Anna Nicole Smith. Wall Street Journal. February 13, 2007. (with a hat tip to the Arts and Letters Daily here for the find)

Withers, Rachel.  2001.  Michael Landy: Break Down.  ArtForum.  May 2001. see the abstract here. 

FedEx package count is here. 

The eBay count comes from adding up the categories on the eBay overview here. 
(Thanks to Adam Dresner for the idea.  See his comment on Kelly’s post.)

The Wal-Mart sku count is here. 

The “grocery store” sku count for 1974 and 1997 is from the 25^th Anniversary Review of U.P.C. Impact.  All other stats from the very interesting article by Vanderbilt in Slate.

The thesis: the world is cloudier

proposition 1:
there are more people, objects, and ideas

yesterday:
subproposition 1.1: more people

today:
subproposition 1.2: more objects

Are there more objects in the world? Susan, a respondent of mine, took me to the verge of her family’s garage.  We stood there for a moment, contemplating the blizzard within: two aluminum ladders, a plastic Halloween jack o’ lantern, a series of nested woks, a whole slew of wicker baskets, a backup toaster, bags of kitty litter, folding chairs, shoe trees, paint cans, an ancient personal computer, a fencing helmet, several gardening trowels, a fondue pot, cardboard boxes, a basketball backboard, a pick nick hamper, paper towels in a Costco multipack, hockey sticks, lobster pots, a toboggan, and lots of transparent plastic boxes.  There is room for everything here except the cars which now sit in the driveway.  Susan made a funny sound in her throat. She seemed both happy and horrified.  “Welcome to my world,” she chuckled.

There’s a reason for all this stuff.  According to Morgan Stanley, the real cost of consumer goods went down, and spending, in the period 1996 to 2004, went up, increasing 4% a year.  Plus, Americans had steadily more to buy.  In 1974, the average grocery store had 9,000 kinds of goods (or “sku,” stock keeping unit). Twenty years later, this figure had grown to 30,000 skus.  These days the typical Wal-Mart Supercenter has 100,000 skus.  All those choices, all those factories in Cheng Du and Guangdong running day and night, all that Wal-Mart cost cutting, it ended up having an effect on Susan’s garage.  Well, and not just on her garage. The average American house went from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004. (Susan recently added 750 square feet.)  The expansion of the house happened during a contraction of the family. Homes got larger in part to make room for more stuff.

It is very hard to say how many discrete consumer objects there are in the U.S. at the moment, and even harder to know how many exist in the lives of any given American. Though, when the English artist, Michael Landry, decided to destroy his worldly possessions, strictly in the name of art, you understand, it took his team 2 full weeks.  It turned out that Mr. Landry owned over 7,000 things.  By this unreliable metric, there are now some 2,108,408,113,000 consumer-owned objects in the U.S. But even if we run this calculation at half-Landry (3,500 things), we would be a nation of 1,054,211,392,500 objects.  I feel certain there are this many things in Susan’s garage alone.

But we might get some sense of this universe by noting the disposition of objects outside the home.  FedEx makes 6 million shipments every day.  Self storage facilities amount to1,875 billion square feet in 40,000 facilities.  On Sunday, February 18, there were 15,502,667 things for sale on eBay alone.  (It would be grand if we had a figure for the entire American retail shelf.)  Objects in transit, objects in storage, objects for sale, the number of objects outside the home is fantastically large. One to two trillion.

What does this figure look like for the world outside the U.S.?  It is proportionally smaller to be sure.  But rising disposable incomes in countries like China and India must mean that the absolute number of consumer owned objects in the world is very, very large, and that it is now growing by leaps and bounds.

When numbers of this kind are usually contemplated, it is to show a) that Americans are using more than our share of natural resources, or b) that we live in a world with too much choice.  I expect the former is true and the latter is, well, both tedious and, from an anthropological and an economic point of view, irrelevant

We could paint Susan as a ravening monster, eating her way through the planet.  But that garage of hers may also be seen as a strategic resource with which she runs and serves her family.  My mother’s idea of preparing her 8 year old (me) for summer was to buy a bag of "runners."  These were Converse-like athletic shoes, made in Hong Kong, and sold by weight on the west coast of Canada in the 1960s.  I think there were 10 pairs to a bag and the question was always which would end first, the bag or the summer.  The bag usually won.  (But not always, which gave my mother the opportunity to say, "you’ve run out of runners.")

But Susan has a somewhat more sophisticated approach to provisioning her family.  She’s got kids in Karate camp.  She got kids who are interested in fencing.  She’s got a husband with several, sometimes fleeting enthusiasms.  She’s got a family that likes to stage amateur theatricals.  Susan is a bit like a supply sergeant and her family an enterprise that needs constant and complicated logistical enablement.  Actually, if we talk to Susan (instead of merely damning her from the ramparts of the ivory tower), she will tell us that it is up to her to stage any one of several activities at a moment’s notice.  This family is not just diverse and it is not just complicated.  It is extremely mobile, one might even say  capricious.  It can change it’s mind at the drop of a hat, and when this happens Mom must be ready. 

In sum, this is a cloudy family.  There may have been a time when athletics turned on baseball, rituals turned on Thanksgiving, a cuisine of monolithic choices supplied mostly by Kraft, and children could be equipped with "runners" and little else.  But those days have passed.  There are 4 other people in Susan’s family.  Each of them is very much a work in progress.  Susan, as parent, might once have served as the writer and the director of these lives.  Now, she is something more like a producer.  She serves their complexity, their cloudiness by acknowledging their complexity and cloudiness. 

What’s true for Susan is, I’m guessing, true for most of the rest of us.  Our "object worlds" are dense with things that reflect and enable our cloudiness.  Does it take 7,000 objects to equip our cloudiness?  Would staging personhood at half that number (at half-Landry tolerances) make us more cloudy or less?  We can at least say this.  Those bulging garages are perhaps less a symptom than a signature. 

References

forthcoming

Apologies

Yesterday’s post was, in the words of one reader, "dorked up" by some readers and aggregators.  Am working on the problem now. 

tomorrow: subproposition 1.3 more ideas

I rattled back to Connecticut from MIT on the train, struggling to think some more about the cloudiness notion.  

Here’s what I came up with as a first proposition. (There are three altogether. Watch this space.)

Cloudiness Proposition 1:

there are more people, objects and ideas in the world

1.1 There Are More People

That there are more people in the world is incontrovertible. In 1970, there were 3,969,000,000 of us on the planet. There are now 6,577,587,970.

We don’t care much about this fact these days. Ever since Erlhich’s “population bomb” failed to explode, we have concerned ourselves with other things. But I think “more people” has some interesting implications for the cloudiness proposition.

The good news is that even as the world gets larger, the mediating technologies grow apace, stretching further and sorting more nimbly. The world may be expanding but we remain the beneficiaries of what Granovetter calls the strong effects of weak ties. Cost-free communication and networking sites like LinkedIn let us navigate these expanding social worlds pretty well.

Still, even as the world gets cloudier in the good sense, it gets cloudier in the bad sense. That is to say, even as it gets larger and richer, it grows opaque and difficult to navigate.

Here’s how this works for me. (I am keenly interested in how it works for you.  Please do comment.) I have around 3000 names in my Outlook Contacts database. In a perfect world, these names would be the cloud would be a constant source of interest and utility. This would be the network I call upon to find someone to read a manuscript, answer a question, or rescue a niece stranded in Shanghai.

The trouble is some years ago my world lost its redundancy and it’s ability to stack. I have changed cities, countries, professions and industries often, and with each of these changes a section of my network goes dark. I am left staring at a card in Contacts that I can’t quite reconstruct the connection for.

Consider: Yoshimitsu Kaji.

Ok. Now, is this a guy I interviewed for an ethnography? Did he enroll as an executive at HBS? Did I meet him while consulting for Coke in Japan?  Did I correspond with him about some academic matter? Is he part of the museum world? Did he hire me for a speaking engagement? Is this some guy who offered to translate one of my books? Twelve years after the fact, it’s hard to be sure. Hard to be sure? Let’s be fair, I don’t have a clue. (For the record, my guess is that he worked for The Coca-Cola Company in Japan. Yoshimitsu, please, good sir, phone home.)

If I were a Korean teenager, this would not be a problem. Over the years, I would have sent Yoshimitsu a tiny bursts of information, mostly photos, that served a phatic purpose, that said, effectively: “I’m here, I’m fine,You’re it.” If I were a Korean teenager, Yoshimitsu would have visited my webpage on Cyworld, and he would have reciprocated with a flood of small communications of his own. The link between us would not be if not active, at least “lit.” Chances are, I would now remember who Yoshimitsu is.

But the problem is not just that I am not Korean. (Though this is a very real problem.) No, the problem is that my life is cloudy. It has reconfigured so many times that I no longer have data arrays that help to confirm one another in life and in memory. You know what I mean. Normally, we are surrounded by confirmatory events that return things from passive to active memory. We see a guy at Starbucks we went to school with, and he reminds us of 3 or 4 acquaintances who are once more make vivid.

The trouble is, and I am pretty sure this is not just my problem, there are several paradigmatic regimes, or let’s call them, cultural arrays, floating around in my life.  In each of these, things change: who I am to people, how and why I connect to people, how often and in what ways I connect to people, are different. This world is swirling and yes cloud like. I could have a conversation with someone from the museum world but it would take a moment to restore the underlying assumptions that museum people share. More to the point, it doesn’t matter how interesting or useful it would be to stay in touch with Lindsay Sharp and Charles Saumerez Smith, both of them forces in the English museum world, I am so utterly claimed by each stop along the biographical railroad that I don’t just fall “out of touch,” they actually (and utterly) fall out of sight.   I can’t stay in touch because I now live, or feel I live, in an entirely different world.

It’s a three-legged race. The world gets larger, technology unfurls to keep pace, but my biographical, um, churn destroys the possibility of network integrity. Sections fall dark. Nodes die. Links detach. A cloud of potential contacts occludes. The next generation of network technologies needs to make me a series of “flight simulators” from within which I can see all the parties to whom I was connected even as I am reminded of the topics, assumptions and interests we have in common. Periodically, I can climb into one of these simulators (acting now as the husk of a former self) and ask myself, “ok, who do I know that can help me solve the problem I have right now.” The simulator will actually help me negotiate the paradigmatic regimes or cultural arrays. It will help me traverse bodies of assumptions. It will build in a new mobility as I move between what Martin Jay called “scopic regimes.”

But this is merely the retrospective version of the management of cloudiness. Despite my dismal failure to manage my existing networks, I am still keen for these to grow. I am still keen on meeting new and interesting people. And I am, as we all are, in possession of pretty good linking skills. 

I am sure someone wishing to get to know my great great grandfather would have had to grow up in the same small town in Scotland, and even then it would take years of careful scrutiny, hours of careful silence, and several pints of bitter before even tiny revelations would be risked.  (“Ay, football”  that’s an entire conversation in some circles.)  We are all so good at cloudiness management, it takes us very little time to decide whether we want to make contact, what we have in common, and how to turn this commonality to mutual advantage in the ignition of a lively conversation and frank exchange of views. Indeed, in the 3 hours it takes to get from Stamford to Boston, I had a great conversation with an architect in which I learned something about parenting. Pretty personal, pretty complicated, pretty delicate. But for postmodern fellas like the two of us, pretty easy

Thanks to the new technologies, I have new and privileged access to what James Surowiecki calls the wisdom of crowds. Stumbleupon and Delicious are great way of putting to work the intelligence of strangers I will never know face to face, will never link up with in link in.  On a nearer horizon, I have access to the networking effects of what we might call the intellectual impresarios, Andrew Zolli, Piers Fawkes, Richard Saul Wurman, Russell Davies. 

What I don’t have access to someone who can do virtually all the sorting for me, rendering a connection to the 20 people in the world I just have to know.  No, not the most powerful people in the world.  The people who are for the own reasons and purposes, wrestling with the same processes.  The people with whom you can just sit down and start talking.  You know the sensation.  It’s like being airlifted into a world of perfect familiarity.  And it is fantastically productive.

Before his death, Hargurchet Bhabra electrified intellectual circles in Toronto by fashioning just these connections.  He created so much value for each of us in this homemake networks, handmade nodes, that it is a wonder that we didn’t pay him handsomely for his effort.  And we should have.  It was merely a failure of the imagination.  And of course he would have been embarrassed by the gesture.  But there is no calculating what this blog owes Bhabra’s example and intelligence.  Something more than my friendship should have gone his way.  The question is  when we will come to our senses and build the business model.  It’s a little like executive recruiting, for which there is a very clear business model. Except that the recruiter makes his or her choices for a client not a corporation. 

Enough, already.  The point I wish to make that when we are thinking about the cloudiness of contemporary selves, corporations, and networks, we must grapple with the fact that there are more people, more objects and more ideas.  I know this sounds simplistic but I trying to stick to elementary propositions and build up as I go. 

Tomorrow, I will contemplate the implications of the fact that there are more objects in the world. 

References

forthcoming.

Last note:

Please drop by LinkedIn and link up.

Does your pet have human-like personality traits?
Yes………………………………………………94%
No…………………………………………………6%

How likely are you to risk your own life for your pet?
Very likely……………………………………….56%
Somewhat likely………………………………..37%
Not at all likely…………………………………..7%

If you were deserted on an island and could have only one companion, which would you pick?
Human……………………………………………47%
Dog……………………………………………….40%
Cat………………………………………………..10%

Does you pet enjoy watching television?
Yes………………………………………………..36%
No………………………………………………….64%

Who listens to you best? 
Pet…………………………………………………45%
Spouse……………………………………. ……..30%
Friend……………………………………………..11%
Family member…………………………………11%

Do you spend more on your pet now than you did three years ago.
Yes, I spend more……………………………….53%
No, I spend less……………………………………5%
No, I spend the same…………………………..22%
I did not have my pet three years ago…….14%

How often do you think of your pet while you are away during the day?
All the time……………………………………….21%
Every hour…………………………………………7%
A few times per day……………………………..54%

Clearly, something is happening to the American pet.  They are moving ever closer to the hearth.  In the 18th century, animals earned their keep. Dogs protected humans and herded cattle.  Cats kept the barn clear of mice.  These animals might have been thought of fondly, but they existed to serve a purpose.  If they got sick, well, they got sick. There were always more cats where those cats come from.  These animals may or may not have been named.  If they were, in most cases, they had species-specific names (Duke, Rover, Fluffy, Boots) and not "Christian" names.  Cats and dogs may or may not have been allowed in the house. Chances are they were not allowed to sleep there. 

Now, these animals are "part of the family."  They have wormed their way to the very center of things.  They have taken on human qualities and human interests.  They have human names.  They serve as "good listeners." Americans believe their pets "know how I’m feeling."  Pets supply companionship and emotional support…even on a desert island.  They’re still working animals, I guess. They just work at new things.

And for this new status, they are showered with new considerations.  People will put themselves in harm’s way to protect a pet.  They bring them gifts when returning home from a holiday, and give them gifts at Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah.  Pets get a very high standard of nutrition and health care.  Funeral arrangements are ever more elaborate and expensive.  And of course, now, pets get decent human names.  No more "Fluffy."

Paul Mitchell, Omaha Steaks, Origins, Harley Davidson and Old Navy offers lines of pet products ranging from dog shampoo, pet attire, and name-brand toys to gourmet treats and food. Hotels are now pet friendly suppling oversized pet pillows, plush doggie robes, check-in gift packages: pet toy, dog treat, ID tag, bone and turn down treats.  At the far end, owners may now buy faux mink coats for cold weather outings, feathered French day beds for afternoon naps, designer bird cages, botanical fragrances and to top it all off, a rhinestone tiara!  The majority of pet owner buy gifts for the pets, spending on average $20 to do so. 

Last year, Americans spent $36 billion on their pets.  This year they will spend $38 billion.  Tell that to an 18th century farmer. 

The veterinary industry that benefits so massively from our "spare no expense" approach to pet care can see where this is all heading: the recalculation of the value of the pet, and the possibility of new lawsuits and new penalties. 

The American Animal Hospital Association recognizes and supports the legal concept of animals as property. However, AAHA recognizes that some animals have value to their owners that may exceed the animal’s market value. In determining the real monetary value of the animal, AAHA believes the purchase price, age and health of the animal, breeding status, pedigree, special training, veterinary expenses for the care of the animal’s injury or sickness related to the incident in question, and any particular economic utility the animal has to the owner should be considered. Any extension of available remedies beyond economic damages would be inappropriate and would ultimately jeopardize efficient and cost-effective health care delivery to animals. Therefore AAHA opposes the potential recovery of non-economic damages.

In other words, the association that supports the research reported here is careful to repudiate the findings in the fine print.  We may think of Rover or Fluffy as a member of the family.  The AAHA insists that his or her value be assessed by "purchase price… breeding status…and any particular economic utility."  Anything "beyond economic damages would be inappropriate…"  I believe this is another way of saying, "yes, we are happy to capture the new revenue opportunities and profit margins that come from the value you attach to your pet, but, no, you can’t sue us for this value."  At the intersection of anthropology and economics, we call this having your cake and eating it too.

But never mind.  What are we to make of the shift status of the animals in our midst?  There are some technical reason why pets serve so well as companions. They are good to touch and hold.  We believe them to be nonjudgmental.  In a technocratic society, we are subject to constant review.  Rex seems to love us just the way we are.  Pets are trusting and we are touched that this too appears to come unconditionally. They are always pleased to see us (dogs more than cats, perhaps).  They are often unpredictable and amusing.  They are easy to dote upon. 

Do they listen well? Do they appreciate the gifts we give them?  Do they care whether they are named Rex or Morgan?  Do they care that they are named at all?  Do they enjoy television?  Do we need to spend $38 billion a year on them.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  And no.  Do they have personalities? Well, kinda, sorta, not really.  All of this is an act of cultural attribution that would be a symptom of psychiatric difficulty if it were not the case that we all do it. 

Here’s how I think it works.  It’s a bargain, really.  As much as possible, my cat Molly (above, as kitten, with mouse) treats me as if I were another cat.  Often, I do things (showers, for instance) that are completely mystifying to her (she has to remark me), but generally speaking I am sufficiently "cat approximate" that it is possible for her to fashion a relationship she likes.  I return the favor.  As much as possible, I treat Molly as if she were a human. Much of what she does is not "human approximate."  Some of it’s downright mystifying.  But there is enough in her that I can recast as human to make the relationship work and work well.  (I don’t actually believe she’s a "good listener" but long ago I came to appreciate that she is a pretty good talker, gifted with a real command of English, and in operatic moments a language that is probably Italian.  I don’t know any, so I can’t be sure.)

Now, the big question is, why bother? I mean, we actually have creatures in our lives that are certifiably human.  (Please hold all jokes to the completion of this post.)  Why turn pets into humans?

[I will finish this post tomorrow.]

References

APPMA National Pet Owners Survey here. 

Noneconomic disclosure from the AAHANET here. 

AAHANET 2004 Pet Owner Survey here.   
[This is the source for the data with which the post opens. The sample for this study was well
distributed by age (though people over 55 were unrepresented.)  Women were over represented (80%).  Families with children under 18 were underrepresented.]

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  Pets are people.  The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  June 13, 2004. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2004.  Adorable or what?  The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  June 12, 2004. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2004.  Ordinary language philosophy and your dog.  The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  June 14, 2004.  here.

Nash, Holly.  n.d.  Pet Therapy: Animals as Co-therapists. here. 

Here are two puzzles for anyone interested in professional sport and popular culture. 

1) why did baseball lose it’s status as America’s game?

2) why has basketball not rise to take it’s place? 

The answer to both questions is of course football, but that’s another question, isn’t it?  Why football?

Formally, football is a tedious game, large men banging around in the mud and the cold.  Certainly, we have grown to love it.  We have come to find it fascinating.  And this is what cultures do certainly: collectively they make things matter that would otherwise be inconsiderable, mere and or mystifying.  (Before I get driven out of town on a rail, let me say that I played football, that I love to watch football.  I am making, or trying to make, a technical, anthropological assessment here.)

As George F. Will once said, football combines two of America’s worst faults: violence and committee meetings.  This game is punishing in ways we have yet fully to reckon with.  (Ted Johnson, formerly of the New England Patriots, today began a badly needed debate about head injuries.)  We take perfect athletes and put them into harm’s way.  For every Jerry Rice who appears to walk away unscathed, there are, what, a hundred former players who live with pain and disability. 

If it’s hell to play, it is, again formally, not that interesting to watch.  Football players are so obscured by their equipment, there is not much to see in the way of emotions, the joy of victory, or the agony of defeat. They might as well be bots out there.  For every Terrell Owen, there are a hundred of players who manage to make the big time, play for years, and still don’t rate a place in memory.  (Name the offensive line of your favorite team.  And last year?)

Baseball by comparison is cerebral and contemplative.  Basketball by comparison is vivid, fast, and out of control.  Now, to be fair, football is not as bad as soccer, and that’s because nothing is as bad as soccer.  But how can it have been good enough to have eclipsed baseball and preempted basketball?

I learned the answer while watching that exemplary program called Storytellers, on HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel last week.  And it’s a really great answer.  We love football because it was reinvented for us by a father and son.  Ed and Steve Sabol, working out of Philadelphia, starting in the early 1960s, almost when the NFL did, using early and awkward recording technologies, managed to capture an image of the game that changed the reality of the game. 

In the Real Sports interviews, Ed and Steve say they thought about football as something theatrical, perhaps even operatic, well, come to that, actually mythical.  They accomplish this effect with stirring music, slow motion athleticism, and a grand, booming narrative.  All that muddy mayhem turns out to be a perfect medium for narrative arcs, big emotions, heroic action and the stuff of almost complete absorption.  Talk about doing a lot with a little.  Talking about elevating the everyday and the ordinary into something larger than life.  Ed and Steve turned out to be master rhetoricians. 

But here’s the weird part.  The magic they worked on a screen they controlled managed somehow to find its way onto a field they did not. Their image reworked the reality.  I don’t doubt that there are other architects of this transformation.  Roone Arlidge would be one.  I guess Sports Illustrated, Monday Night Football and Real Sports would be others.  But the documentary left me with the feeling that the first act of reclamation was undertaken by the Sabol family.  They were the ones who found a way to turn thugs into thespians and an ordinary game into something so arresting that XLI Super Bowl drew 93 million people. 

References

Deford, Frank and Joe Perskie.  2007. Storytellers.  Episode 118.  Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.  January 22, 2007. here.   

See the HBO Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel website here. 

Is Second Life the future?  Or a cul de sac?  At this point, it’s hard to say. 

Clay Shirky put a cat among the pigeons when he asked whether the Second Life numbers were reliable.  The SL website now claims 3,350,286 residents with something like a third of these having actually made an appearance in the last 60 days.  Shirky called earlier estimates "methodologically worthless."  He figures 5 out of 6 new users abandon their accounts before the first month is up.  After 90 days, 9 of 10 "residents" have disappeared. 

Shirky’s skepticism forced a reframing of the question: "ok, if we can’t prove this argument by the numbers, is there another way to make the case?"

Shirky is skeptical here too.  He believes Second Life

will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it.  Such niches can be profitable…but they won’t, by definition, appeal to a broad cross-section of users. 

Both Henry Jenkins and Beth Coleman beg to differ.  Coleman says that SL gives us an important "amplification" of the virtual world possibility.  Whether SL is the virtual world that takes, there can’t be any doubt that some virtual world will. SL matters, she argues, because it represents a "tipping point" that releases virtual worlds from their niche status. 

Henry Jenkins calls SL is a "test bed for innovation" for business, government, education, civic, nonprofit, and amateur media makers.  He suggests SL offers virtual worlds a kind of "proof of concept" (my term, not his)  For all its failings, SL is perhaps good enough to help install the possibility (the idea and the potentiality) of virtual worlds in popular culture. 

It’s a niche play, Shirky says.  No, say Jenkins and Coleman, that’s precisely what it just ceased to be. Numbers aside, they say, SL just cleared the bar.  It is now part of our culture. 

I hear both arguments. 

an argument for Second Life

I agree with Jenkins and Coleman.  SL makes this much incontrovertible: it is now technologically possible for a very large number of people to gather and interact in a visually rich and responsive virtual space. Incontrovertible and astonishing.  It is hard to think of a real world correlate.  It’s as if another Disney empire (Disneyland, Disney World, Disney Resorts) just dropped from the sky. Um, that doesn’t go nearly far enough.  It’s as if a Scandinavian world was just lowered onto the planet.  At a minimum, we’re obliged to say our culture and our marketplace just got vastly larger.  We would be unwise to dismiss or diminish it.

We might also risk a bit of filmic wisdom: if you build it, they will come.  Whatever else they are, human beings are relentlessly curious.  Give them a social space to occupy it and they will fill it en masse.  And fill it they did, three million of them. 

But that’s the issue, isn’t it?  Yes, they came, but did they stay?  Are they "residents" as SL likes to call them, or the most capricious kind of tourist?  The fact of the matter is that SL churns like crazy.  This could be yet another technology that cannot find a problem to solve. Yet another hammer looking for a nail. Still, Coleman’s point is a good one. These are early days.  Indeed, television took several years to find a place in our lives.  Why should Second Life be any different? 

I have another colleague at MIT who believes he knows exactly what Second Life can be.  Ilya Vedrashko says it is, among other things, the new mall. All of us shop on line but we can’t drift from store to store, observe the shopping choices of other people, or enjoy the effects of serendipity.  (We didn’t know we wanted another gadget from Sharper Image the last time, but there it was…at the mall.)  Second Life can duplicate all of this even as it makes it possible to try things on without the privations or indignities of a changing room.  Click on something and look in the mirror.  (Vedrashko makes a larger, more interesting argument than I can here.  Catch it if you can.)

Second Life also has the potential to change tourism, working like a time machine in space, as it were.  Let’s suppose that someday, the virtual Lindentown will someday be as different from my usual virtual haunts, as Miami is from New York City.  If I wish to go to Miami, it will cost me money, time, effort, and inconvenience.  But an afternoon in Lindentown costs me nothing more than the click of a mouse.

Second Life could serve as a magnificent platform for the new global university or b-school.  Now all that fund raising would be about intellectual content and content providers, and hiring good teachers.  Not a penny need be spent on bricks and mortar.  Even the reunions can be held on line.

For all we know, Second Life might be the place that consumers go to help create the brands they care about.  It would be easy to create open air laboratories equipped with tools for developing concepts and changing prototypes.  And this will matter as marketing moves from "see" to "be."  (My "see to be" model: if you want me to see the marketing you will have to have given me a chance to be the marketing.  (But see my doubts noted yesterday. It is necessary that I had a chance to be it.) 

These are not small claims.  Changing the nature of retail, adding new terrains to the world of tourism, inventing the new university, creating the products and brands of the future, these would make Second Life something more than a cul de sac.  By this reckoning, SL not merely part of the future.  It will be one of the things that makes the future.

an argument against Second Life

I’ve done my due diligence as an anthropologist.  I signed up for Second Life. I spent some hours trooping around, poking my head in where it was not always welcome, pestering people with annoying questions.  And on balance I must hear agree with Shirky.  So far there is more smoke than fire.  When people bang the drum of enthusiasm for SL, they cannot be talking about the present SL.

For most of my visit, Second Life felt like a ghost ship.  I admired the ingenuity of the architecture, the skill of the coding, the homes on the water, the view from some properties.  But very often I found myself in a world without people. Lindentown is vaporville.  There are lots of buildings.  Just no people.  It’s a little like downtown Detroit on the weekend.  You can walk for miles and see not a soul. 

Then it dawns on you.  (It always takes the anthropologist longer.)  No one lives here.  It is fun to build these spaces but all appearances to the contrary, you can’t actually live in them.  No one goes to their Second Life pied-a-terre for the weekend.  (Pied-a-vapeur?)  No one rushes there to stage a dinner party, welcome the kids home for the weekend, or curl up in front of TV. 

This problem creates a problem.  Second Life is frequently a stage without actors. What is missing isthe small murmur of activity, the gentle dynamism that other people bring to our lives.  This may be what we mean by "perfect strangers." These are the people who create movement, visual stimulation, a steady current of minor commotion without actually ever impinging on our lives in any irritating way.  Second Life has no perfect strangers.

The absence of this dynamism means, among other things, that SL cannot create a new tourism.   The existing world of Second Life fails to capture us for the same reason that Celebration, Florida (the instant town build by Disney) originally disappointed.  The place was well appointed but it lacked perfect strangers.  There was a stillness to both places that made them unfit, or at least uninteresting, for human habitation.  I am told that Celebration addressed this problem. We shall see if SL can do the same. 

No people, no anthropology.  I ported to places where there are lots of people, to a dance party or a club.  Yikes!  I would end up talking to people who are so preoccupied by political power or sexual congress, so limited in their vocabulary, syntax, and dramaturgical interests, they might as well be bots. 

This is not a well world.  This is a deeply tedious world.  No wonder people sign up only then to wander away.  Sexual motives can create social universe, but finally, and I think I can risk this assertion, virtual sex is always going to be a pale imitation of real sex.  And conversation preoccupied with power, well, this is uninteresting in the real world.  And Second Life removes the contexts and consequences in which power plays out.  So who cares?

What I need to make SL interesting is a coffee shop or a restaurant where people just happen to congregate and just happen to give off those streams of sound and sight that make life interesting.  I need people to "happen" around me when I am in a virtual world.  (And I am perfectly happy to reciprocate by "happening" around them.)  The thing is I will never go to a virtual Starbucks for coffee.  I will never go take my wife out to dinner at a virtual restaurant.  I will go for person to person interaction and at the moment, this is just not very interesting. 

The other big hit against Second Life is that it sorts very badly.  I haven’t actually met anyone I find illuminating.  I am not asking that my SL network feed my real world network.  I am not as pragmatic as all that.  But I don’t want to step down my standards of conversation and curiosity just because I am on line.  That’s, surely, not what the virtual world is for.  If anything it should allow me to reach out to more people in the world and increase the chances that I will like the people I meet.  But this never seems to happen.  I would like to hear about this one from the SL supporters.  How many interesting people have you met in-world?

I did have one happy encounter.  I stumbled into a magic garden of some kind.  Eventually, I was approach by a rabbit who very kindly gave me a tour of the garden and an introduction to the actual and social physics of this world.  Blimey, now that’s the way to an anthropologist’s heart.  Here was a nascent culture, that might someday become something capable of supporting.  Who knows what might spring from these beginnings.  It might just be a Pookie festival, but what if Second Life were someday as productive as New York City in the 20th century?

Right now, Second Life is not helping me sort.  In fact, there is even less sorting in the virtual world than there is in the real world.  When someone presents themselves as flaming cloud or a bunnie, I have some measure of their imagination, but all other information is denied me. 

summing up

On balance, there is in Second Life lots to like and lots to loathe.  But I believe two things are clear.  We now have proof of concept.  And as Second Life supplies real opportunities for engagement and sorting, this social world will expand at pace, supplying in the longer term, every kind of cultural innovation and commercial opportunity. 

References

Anonymous. Economic Statistics.  Second Life.  Last Updated: Sunday, February 4, 2007. here. 

Coleman, Beth.  2007.  Second Life backlash: Clay Shirky blows up the spot.  Project Good Luck.  January 5, 2007.  here. 

Coleman, Beth.  2007.  Beyond Second Life Toward V-Economy.  Project Good Luck.  February 1. 2007. here.

Jenkins, Henry.  2007.  Second Thoughts on Second Life. Confessions of an Aca/Fan. here.   

Shirky, Clay.  2006.  Second Life: What are the real numbers?  Many2Many.  December 12, 2006. here. 

Shirky, Clay.  2007.  Second life, Games and Virtual Worlds.  Many 2 Many.  here

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Pat Crane for getting me started.