Archive for June, 2007
What’s the new Dunbar number?
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Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary biologist. In the early 1990s, he proposed that 150 was the maximum number of individuals with whom any of us can maintain a social relationship.
Personally, I think this number is high. Only the most gregarious of my friends seem to have anything like this number. For me, the number is closer to, say, 50.
But I can’t help noticing that I now have many more than on Facebook. Well, it would be wrong to call all these people "friends," but some of them will I think become friends, and some friends with whom I have lost touch will reappear here. One of them just signed on as a friend today. (Thank you, John.)
Gregarious people, well, God knows how many people they can keep track of with the new media. I mean, with cell phones, email, text message, networks on the internet, even a cave dweller with an attitude problem should be good for several hundred.
Your thoughts and ethnographic notes please. I figure LinkedIn and Facebook by themselves should expand my personal Dunbar number well past 150. How about you?
How networks work: FaceBook vs. LinkedIn
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I’ve been trying out Facebook. (Some of you have yet to accept my invitation…or make one of your own. This is so hurtful. Never mind. Let’s just move on. You will or you won’t. I can’t force you.)
Facework works well. Better, I think, than LinkedIn.
Take the case of Kevin Slavin. I heard Kevin speak in New York City in early March this year at PFSK. I was wowed by his presentation. I thought to myself this is one way to glimpse the future, listen to a real smart guy who has found a way to turn Manhattan into a large-scale, real-world game.
But it doesn’t really matter how I impressed I was. Four months later, Kevin was becoming an ever fainter memory. I’ve been pinballing around Europe and North America. And with a memory like mine, unless there is some kind of reinforcement, the node in memory slowly begins to…go…out. (I was in fact beginning to forget about Kevin altogether when the idea for this blog occurred to me. )
Now, take the case of Ed Tam. I meant Ed at Interesting2007, Russell Davies’ event in London last week. Smart guy, really impressive. I remember thinking, as we stood drinking at the bar, "geez, if ever there’s another Sir Martin Sorel, this could be the guy." As it turns out, Ed is in transition and will be relocating to Hong Kong. There’s a good chance I won’t ever see him again. (Unless again he turns out to be the next Sir Martin Sorel.) In fact, by October (4 months, from now) there’s a good chance that Ed will be a diminished and diminishing memory, too.
And this is where Facebook comes in. Ed is now one of my friends on Facebook, so I keep seeing his name there. And this is enough to persuade me (ok, I’m an idiot), that we are still in touch. Now, if Ed had a real picture of himself (he uses a Wii image), I would have a still more vivid sense of him. And if he posted his daily activities, as other friends do, I would have a really vivid sense. I would now his life as well as I do that of Charles Frith.
So, Facebook supplies the repetition and the additional details to allow the network and memory node to form. And it turns out that this works not only for new acquaintances, but also for quite good friends. Debbie Millman and I know one another quite well, but we travel in different orbits. Having her on my Facebook list makes her more vivid too.
Facebook is better than LinkedIn in another way. I’m persuaded that all this networking is going to pay off soon. We will see it help to sort the world, so that we end up knowing more people who share our interests, and more people who have the interests we need to make our own. As it stands, LinkedIn does not capture enough information to make this sorting possible. Facebook, plainly, does. See my StuffCloud for instance. This is a list of the things that interest me. One of these days it will be used to discover contacts in a way that LinkedIn, as it is now constituted, never can.
As it stands, the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook is a little like the difference between Microsoft and Apple. The first term in both cases is business like, narrow, not very imaginative, and it reduces our complexity so dramatically that it may record our social connections, but it is not likely to help us create them. The second term is, well, a little more lifelike. Like the networks we’re going to care about.
Cloudy Advertising, embracing the new complexity in brands, agencies and consumers
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Once upon a time, an ad was about a company’s unique selling position. But people can now accept more complex brands, and I thought we might be able to build a deeper relationship if we built on multiple fronts." Mike Hughes, president and creative director, The Martin Agency
Complexity used to be the signature of bad advertising. Now, it’s a competitive opportunity.
Hughes has run several campaigns running for GEICO at the same time:
1) The GEICO gecko.
(Too well known to need detailing.)
2) The "Good News" campaign.
(This is the campaign that features a faux news report and the punch line "But the good news is, I just saved a lot of money on my insurance.")
3) Cavemen
(Tischler describes them as "a clutch of metrosexual cavemen, having somehow eluded extinction while developing a taste for racquet sports, plasma TVs, and ‘duck with mango salsa.’")
4) Testimonials
(Customer endorsements with interpretations by celebrity pitchmen, Little Richard, Burt Bacharach, and Peter Graves.)
This is noisy advertising. There is no internal logic here, no secret strategy that makes all these campaigns go together. In fact, to grasp this work, we have to "shift frame" entirely, by which I mean, we have to give up the assumptions and the meanings cultivated by the last campaign to make sense of the present one.
This means the brand is now filling up with a certain internal inconsistency. And in the old days, this would have been grounds for shooting the creative director, and moving the account. What we need is a little research. It would be very interesting to see whether and how these campaigns interact with one another. It is almost as if The Martin Agency has undertaken a "transmedia" strategy within a single medium.
But I think it’s fair to say that consumers are amused and engaged by this approach. Our simplest guess might may that there are many messages for a rich and complicated marketplace. I mean, everyone buys car insurance, and these days "everyone" is a very diverse group. Perhaps this is a grab-bag approach. There are lots of creative strategies here, and maybe the idea is that GEICO has something for everyone.
On the other hand, we are learning, or should be learning, to segment each consumer as we once segmented the marketplace. We know that every consumer contains quite a lot of diversity, of noise, within. Perhaps consumers find in this GEICO advertising something that speaks to the world of complexity within themselves.
But there is a last point to make here: that GEICO complexity comes in part from the internal complexity of The Martin Agency. Mike Hughes decided some years ago to create multiple creative teams and to "turn them loose to tell multiple, distinct narratives designed to highlight various aspects of the brand." As Tischler puts it, Hughs has transformed Martin "into a confederation of mini agencies, rather than a single midsize one."
That makes three: the brand, the consumer and the agency, all with the same structural property. All are complex where once they were simple. All are noisy where once they were quiet. All are cloudy were once they were clear blue. Something is happening, and we’re not sure what it is.
References
Jenkins. Henry. 2007. Transmedia Storetelling 101. Confessions of an Aca-Fan. The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. March 22, 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Complexity on TV. This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. September 15, 2004. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2007. Gaga Over Geico. This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. March 08, 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2007. Noise. This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. March 06, 2007. here.
Tischler, Linda. 2007. Clan of the Caveman. Fast Company.com. Issue 116, June, p. 104. here.
Your invitation to happy hour
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This is an invitation to a "Happy Hour" being held today (Friday, June 22nd) from 6:00 onwards in New York City at Sweet & Vicious, 5 Spring Street, between Elizabeth and Bowery. (See the map here.)
The event is the brain child of Noah Brier, who suggested I might want to invite friends of my own. I thought of you.
I am not sure how Noah sees the event but I think of it as "smart mob" sociality, friends brought together without much notice at a public place to mingle with perfect strangers in a "buy your own drinks," "make your own fun," "bring your own friends" event.
The only guarantee is the presence of lots of interesting, talkative people. It would be great to see you there.
No need to RSVP. Just come it you feel like it!
Best,
Grant
Admirals Ries and Trout and the new positioning
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Positioning in marketing is a simple idea, really. It locates the brand relative to the competition. In a sense, positioning is a lot like retailing, it’s all about location, location, location. But this location exists not in the real world but in the structure of the marketplace.
Examples: Pepsi is positioned to be more current than Coke. Marlboro is positioned to be more masculine than Kools. BMW is positioned to be sportier than Mercedes.
The idea of positioning, attributed to Ries and Trout (pictured), helped marketers be more strategic. It encouraged us to parachute the brand into a marketplace at just the right place, where other brands had inadvertently opened a space and an opportunity.
But the world has changed. We now longer drop the brand into a fixed terrain. We drop it into turbulent markets that stream with change. The location we care about shifts constantly.
To steal a metaphor from the Tom Wolfe, positioning is a little like landing an F16 on an aircraft carrier. The carrier is steaming forward, a veritable moving target. In high seas, the carrier is also moving up and down and side to side. Finally, the landing zone is incredibly little and we are moving incredibly fast. Thank God for flight school.
But that’s the problem. Flight school is still manned by Admirals Ries and Trout, men who were raised in another tradition and a world much stiller than our own (note classical columns). The trick is to think about what happens to the art and science of positioning in a more dynamic world.
Let us use as our talking point, the case of Kathy Griffin, the comic who fought her way out of obscurity and onto the D list. She dated Quentin Tarantino and had a cameo on Pulp Fiction. As the moment, she has her own show on cable.
Griffin is all about positioning. She places herself as a struggling actress, someone on the verge of celebrity, someone trying to climb the slippery slope of fame. This is a great strategy. It make Griffin likable, approachable, relatable, close enough to celebrity to give us a closer view, but not so close to become a fixture in the world she likes to mock.
But Griffin has a dynamic positioning problem. The success of her TV show and stand-up tours pushes her relentlessly out of her present location. If she ever was D-list, she has enough momentum now to relocate her at C or B. Even if Griffin does nothing here present position will drift remarkably out of and away from her preferred location.
Now there are ways she can address the problem. She can work the resources at her disposal, using her TV show, for instance, to good effect. As when she is shown regaling someone in the street. As it turns out, they have no idea who she is. Good! And when she offers them free tickets to her show, they turn her down flat. Better! And then they look at her like she just asked them for money. Perfect! D-list status is renewed, at least for another show. It is entirely possible that Griffin is now excluding all the things captured by her reality TV show that make her look A list, and searching out material that helps renew her D-list status.
Let’s take another, more difficult example. The world of the medical drama in the early days was defined by shows like Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey. The doctor in question was an authoritative, paternal, wise and thoughtful male, always male, healer. St. Elsewhere open things up a little with doctors who were a little less God-like but still exemplary. The show Becker featured Ted Danson as a crank who relished his imperfections, scorned his patients, and smoked like a chimney. You could see the original TV genre building out with each successive position. Thus did the genre and the audience expand. Thus did TV adjust to a changing culture.
House, M.D., launched in 2004 on Fox, and pushed the envelope still further. Gregory House is contrary, willful, self centered, staff abusing, patient mocking, and drug addicted. Wow. If you had asked me before the fact whether such a show would work, I think I would have said "no." Wrong again. It worked brilliantly. House has won ratings and awards…and the genre and our culture took on new depth and complexity.
But here’s the problem. House is the kind of property that wears or wears out. I would be very surprised if there were any steady state at which the show can cost. Those who find House difficult are eventually going to find him impossible. Those who like him are eventually going to want him to ramp up the acerbicness. This is what marketing calls a rock and a hard place. And these are moving targets because different consumers are going through these arcs at different times. This is what marketing calls a dynamic problem set.
This is not a problem to be solved with a little Griffin-esque D list tinkering. This calls for producer Bryan Singer to work two very different signals into the same show and the same character. House must become both less redeemable and more redeemable not just once but for several audience as they migrate from present position to new positions. It’s a lovely problem because it’s an impossible problem. (Hey, but if anyone can do it, it’s Singer. He’s the guy who did The Usual Suspects.)
I have used TV examples here but I believe this problem presents itself in the world of product marketing, and that it will do so more and more as brands break out of their present addled geniality and take more marked and interesting positions in our culture.
In sum, positioning is newly challenge. It demands of us the ability to find a moving platform that consists of several audiences with disparate tolerances, moving at different rates in different directions. Back to flight school…for the flyers and the admirals.
References
Ries, Al and Jack Trout. 2000. Positioning: the battle for your mind. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Social networks: the next generation
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We used to build social networks laboriously, by hand, out of slender pieces of paper called business cards, and the occasional phone call.
Now machines do most of the work. The network, perhaps the most important form of association outside the family, has finally been automated.
So of course social networking is exploding. I belong to LinkedIn, and I can’t help noticing that some you have neglected to link with me. And I belong to Facebook (ditto), and several others (ditto, ditto, ditto). People!
I send invitations. I get invitations. It’s not always clear to me what my return on investment is here, but it’s clear that something is happening and that that something is good.
But there are some muddles in the models. CEO Dan Nye recently claimed that LinkedIn would "own" business networking and that it would do so because, among other things,
"people will build one profile for their personal life and another for their professional life"
There are several things wrong with this assertion, but’s here the chief thing. We will want many more than two networks.
In the real, non-virtual, electronically unmediated First Life world, we have lots of networks. If you are a hardworking housewife with a couple of kids, your list might include: childrearing advice, English crime novels, cheap fashion that doesn’t suck, buzz about Oprah and Rachael, anaphylaxis (allergy) management, how to run a soccer team, scrapbooking, Tudor monarchs, cuisine that dials down sugar, salt, and fat, pop culture chatter, and then there are all the residual connections generated by elementary and high school, college and grad school, to save nothing of neighborhoods, cities, states, countries and cultures to which you or your parents once belonged.
And that’s just a First Life list. I am just shepherding my new book to publication (out in the fall, God willing), and the proposition here is that all of us have embraced a certain personal multiplicity, that most people are now a crowded house of selves. Call it the post modern self, less interested in personal consistency and more interesting in consuming as much experience in and of the world has possible.
Multiple selves create multiple networks. Lots of lots of networks. What we are going to need is a way to add new networks and swim between them. And just yesterday, it finally occurred to me that this is what Ning does for us.
Ning is a site that helps people create and host their own social networks. When I first wrote about it, what caught my interest was how well it understood revenue sharing, customization, and especially the devotion to simplicity that helped bring Google to greatness.
I saw that Ning was designed to reflect Marc Andreessen’s belief in plenitude, that "there are no limits to the number of new technologies, companies and industries we can create." But I didn‘t see how well Ping was designed to enable this plenitude.
Ning is a kind of network of networks (a meta-network, I guess you’d say). You sign up, invite your friends to join you in Ning-space, and then as you join other networks, some of them will link up there was well. In a sense, the Ning meta-network works on a respiratory model. You exhale old friends into each of your new networks, and you inhale new friends therefrom into your Ning network.
Here’s an example. I noticed that a friend, Charles Frith belongs to something called Plannersphere. This is a network for planners created by Faris Yakob. (I am not strictly speaking a planner but planners are anthropological in their approach to things so there’s an affinity.) So I joined. I will take (exhale) existing friends into Plannersphere, and I will make (inhale) new friends there, who will then join me in my Ning meta-network. Multiplicity begets networks. Networks beget multiplicity.
Plannersphere will not be my most important network, and it is precisely because Ning diminishes the sign up and maintenance costs that I considered joining. (And no sooner did I join than I learned, thanks to Justin Kirby, of the Virtual Worlds Forum Europe 2007 to be held in England, "Europe’s first virtual worlds conference." Interesting, and a very C3 MIT kind of event. My new network membership has already delivered a return.)
As long as there were just a few networks available, Nye’s logic applied. One or two winners would take all. But with the advent of Web 2.0 (and other factors mysterious to me), the number of social networks multiplied and now the game changed entirely. Now, we were looking at the prospect of spending a little part of each week signing up for the latest network and then deciding which friends we would invite along for the ride. All of this with the uncomfortable feeling, that none of our investment of time and exposure here had really paid a dividend. (Especially when you invite your friends to yet another network, you can’t help wondering, "Does this make me look like a crackpot?")
David Bujnowski and I talked about this, and it was clear that, at some point, someone was going to have to redeem us with a network of networks that let us sign up once and deploy this membership many times. Now respiration could work in earnest. Now we could free up that small part of the week we spent signing up for the next new thing.
I noted with interest the arrival of MyLifeBrand. According to the press release, MyLifeBrand "lets users choose their social networks or services and seamlessly navigate among them. MyLifeBrand enables users to import multiple networks and their related friends into a browser-like site that wraps communities and services of choise in to one total social experience." I joined up and had a look and I have to say it was not clear to me MyLifeBrand actually enabled multiple membership…but then I am often puzzled by novelty and slow to seize its opportunities.
Culture and commerce are tag teaming again.
Culture has committed to plenitude and multiplicity. The self and every other kind of corporation is becoming more distributed and less well defined. Increasingly, we struggle to identify clear boundaries or contents. Increasingly, we find self and corporation scattered across networks like so many many points of light in a Greek star map (pictured). Who I am, that is somehow the sum of my membership in all the networks to which I belong.
Commerce responds with ways of managing our plenitude and multiplicity. But no sooner have the meta-networks made it easier to manage our multiplicity, it will enable this multiplicity.
We are still waiting to see what this social networking is "good for." In the meantime, we are changing at light speed. Wait till we figure out how to use these networks in earnest.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2007. Cloudiness: of selves, groups, networks and ideas. This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. January 31, 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2007. Ning: cultural implications of the new social networking. This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. February 27, 2007. here.
Ryan, Oliver. 2007. LinkedIn says it will own business networking. The Browser, Fortune Magazine. June 11, 2007. here. (Source for the quote from Nye.)
Schaeffer, Jason. 2007. LinkedIn vs. Facebook. Jason Schaeffer (v 1.3773). (With thanks for thoughts on illuminating thoughts on the costs of multiple memberships.) here.
Scherzer, Betsy. 2007. Your Life Online. Press release for MyLifeBrand. June 6, 2007.
(My Flickr Nugget key word at the moment: London)
Reinventing the conference, blogger and new media style
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This is Russell and Arthur Davies, father and son, outside Conway hall, site of Interesting2007. The quietly charismatic servant of ceremonies and his son, the latter in this picture graciously standing in for the rest of us, our hand in a bag of crisps, playing shyly to the camera, pleased to be included, living this brief moment in the protected space of a congenial world. (Russell will so hate this metaphor, more on that later.)
I participated with trepidation. Russell was clear. No talking, he said, about anthropology, economics, branding, marketing, blogging, creativity, culture, or commerce, and so removed all my usual crutches, obsessions, and the very parachute I like to wear while public speaking. Kindly, he suggested I talk instead about my Oprah episode and it turned out pretty well. Clever Russell.
My first guess on why Interesting2007 was going to work (if it worked) was that everyone in the room was drawn from one of the creative industries (design, planning, art, advertising, film making, and so on). This means that everyone in the room at Conway Hall was good at metaphor capture and pattern recognition.
So you could talk, as Adrian Gunn Wilson did, about how to cut wood, and the audience was bound to help themselves to that and much more. The details themselves turned out to be flat out interesting and the room fell into a state of silent absorption. And the metaphors were everywhere, including the very big piece of wood on which Adrian cuts wood. I forget what he called it, but it’s huge and well scored and serves as the platform for the undertaking. It stabilizes the piece of wood that’s being chopped. It absorbs the blow of the ax. It catches the ax as it completes its arc and especially when it misses its mark. This is what we used to call an "agency," I think. It is strange and horrible to look at. Yes, quite like an agency.
My second guess was we were looking at the reinvention of the conference. Many cultural artifacts that have been dislodged by our new world. Our world has been decentered, flattened, destabilized, distributed, and made participative, anarchical, elite indifferent, cloudily networked, self organizing, and concatenating. So it’s natural that we’re having to rethink entertainment, information, elites, experts and especially speakers. Who now wants to sit in a room and hear someone hold forth? Certainly, there are a couple of people who we would like to hear speak in this way. But how often do they turn up to the conferences we go too? Mostly what we get is two things: 1) badly concealed self advertisement, and 2) a view of the world that means to be comprehensive but proves to be alarmingly (and unwittingly) partial.
Conferences used to create value by giving us the benefits of a sorting exercise. The organizers would choose experts and the experts would choose topics and treatments. We the audience would undergo edification mixed with a couple of moments of epiphany (with the opportunity to build networks over drinks). The trouble is we are now fantastically good at sorting for ourselves. What we want from a conference is not a surrogate intelligence of a big name speaker. What we want is a tide that delivers new and interesting things that present themselves in fresh and unexpectedly formed ways. (Interestingly, some presentations were overformed by their very effort to be underformed. This happened when you could see that the presenter was deliberately casting a topic or treatment against mainstream type, as it were, the better to claim a quirkier credibility.)
Put us on the Kauffman continuum, the one that arrays the world between fixity at one end and chaos at the other, and it turns out that we most of us have paddled our way away from fixity towards chaos, and now tread water here in rougher, whiter waters with no discernible effort or difficulty. Experts be damned. We can read the world quite nicely on our own, thank you very much. It doesn’t have to be very fully formed for us to "get it." (It was fun listening to Johnnie Moore on this theme, and a pleasure to meet this fella in real space and time.)
Clever Russell. To forbid the recitation of what we think we know for things that are interesting, this is a good way to oxygenate an occasion with things that are less formed in just about the right measure. Less formed, and more charming. There is something "nice" about things that offer the world up all in the jumble and leave us to think what we will.
Now, someone is bound to say that this is merely the planning world, in the person of Russell Davies and conference attendees, discovered the well established truth of post modernism, that the world is now a thing of perfect incoherence, that the architectures of knowledge, the consistencies of culture, the thematicness of contemporary life, these have all collapsed, and that Interesting2007 was in fact merely an exploration and a demonstration of same.
Wrongo! What collapsed was mostly the intellectuals’ favorite interpretative frames. Naturally, this made it look like the sky was falling. Naturally, because they are intellectuals, they worked very hard to make their problem our problem. But the rest of us, those of us who actually make and manage meanings in the world know the truth of our present condition, and this is that if you have the right powers of metaphor capture and pattern recognition the world is still a relatively intelligible place. The things to remember is that the coherences are multiple, the interpretive frames many and conflicting, and the world changeable and fluid. And when all of this is true, then not only is the sky not falling, but Red Lions Square and Conway Hall when filled with speakers by Russell, is a very interesting place to be.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bowbrick for the photo. (More photos by Bowbrick here.) Thanks too for his support of Interesting2007
To Johnnie Moore for interesting thoughts. See Johnnie’s website here.
Flickr Nugget keyword of the moment: London.
The World is Sorting
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The world is sorting.
That’s the phrase that lept to mind last night, as I sat in a South bank cafe. I was sitting with a small group people gathered in the National Film Theatre cafe, one of those end-of-week drinking places that London does so well, people spilling out of doors (the liquor license, what liquor license?) into the street, in this case, a concrete plaza, drinking, talking, flirting, exclaiming, declaiming, carrying on, leaping from one story to the next, in breathtaking acts of barely managed continuity. The balance! The dexterity! The English, they sure can talk.
The world is sorting because this particular group of drinkers (Russell Davies, Mark McGuinness, Jennifer Lyon Bell, Tim Plester, Marcus Brown and Lauren Brown would not exist were it not for Interesting2007, and this would not exist were it not for the bloggable world.
I sat there at one moment thinking what it would cost me in time and effort to meet any of these people. Tons. Tons of time and effort. But these people have found one another, thanks to the internet, blogging and of course, the present master of ceremony, Russell Davies.
If we are not "on the same page" we found that page with a conversational short hand. And when compressed speech and nimble orientation failed us, we fashioned "same pages" in no time at all. It was wonderful to see how few questions any one of us had to ask to "place" the other.
We come from disparate parts of the world (planner, film maker, anthropologist, poet) and there are great pieces of each world were inscrutable or opaque. But a little scrambling about on a shared but unsuspected catwalk and people began to work out what the other meant, may have meant, or under the circumstances and given what the listener knew about proximate or equivalent parts of the world, almost certainly did mean (give or take).
The world is going in two directions. These differences are expanding. What counts in the world of poetry and film-making may not be so very different, but keeping in touch with the trends, inclinations and cultures that produce the people that produce the poetry or the films, that’s a different matter, and if once London nurtured a shared creative culture, now it encourages many hundreds of them. (Was there a big bang at some point in recent memory, our life times, that produced this expanding universe? No, this is one of those cultural things we (we, the West, we the species) have been working up to over thousands of years. It’s just the we can now see changes happening in real time.)
Good thing that cat walk is expanding. Good thing we all are pretty good at mobilizing our way out of our present world and transplanting, if only for a moment, into the world of someone else. Our cultural literacy has so expanded, it turns out that most of these differences are negotiable.
But what about traversing this expanding world not intellectually, but actually? What about actually finding somehow in these expanding galaxies. And this is where blogging comes in, as my table at the NFT cafe last night demonstrated so convincingly. What one needs to get a seat at this table is not any of the other gate negotiated affiliations: the right family, the right college, the right club. What one needs is a blog, a readable blog. By this means, we identify ourselves, and one another, as interesting and engaged, and eventually we find one another.
The world is sorting and the implications are, er, interesting. We can imagine a perfect world in which an invisible hand sorts the world so that each of us is put in contant all but only the people we find most interesting. What would happen to what we do, think, accomplish, create? Tons. But what about the collective effects? What happens to the social and cultural worlds are integrated, cross referenced, interpenetrating in this way. This is the $64,000 question, isn’t it, and the great challenge for the social sciences and especially anthropology. After all, anthropology was about two things: culture and kinship. Both of these are changed beyond recognition, but not beyond the possibility of anthropological investigation.
Which brings me to Lance Ulanoff and the column he posted in PC magazine on Wednesday. Lance thinks that the social networks are goners. MySpace, Second Life and Twitter are, he says, "doomed," symptoms of the hype that now surrounds Web 2.0. Lance, Lance, Lance. The social networking has only just began. None of these sites (or the others, Facebook, Dopplr, Jaidu, LinkedIn) has got it exactly right, but that can’t be for of. Most of us are still making connections by hand, using the bloggable world has our source and our quide. Once someone finds a way to industrialize this process, and harness the power of a machine to replace handcrafting, things will really get going. It may turn out that the ability to watch change happen in real time will be a brief episode that will end as it begins to happen so quickly it evades overwhelms our optic abilities.
References
Ulanoff, Lance. 2007. MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed: these overyped social networks will soon crumble under the weight of overhyped expectations. PC Magazine. June 13, 2007. here.
Postscript:
Oh, and the photo was taking last night about 9:00 and it captures a cloud showing off shamelessly, but quietly, in the sky above London, looking north from Pall Mall. North?
Interesting2007
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This is the view from my London hotel room. They look more like Thai buildings somehow than English ones but that’s one of the many things I forgot to ask when I booked the room. "And the view, any Thai looking buildings, would you say? How about Brazilian ones?"
I am here to participate in Russell Davies’ Interesting2007. It’s going to be really strange, this precipitation of a virtual world in a more actual one. Plus, we have been instructed not to talk about blogging. No, Russell says we have to be interesting. I ask you.
I could talk about the buildings I can see from my hotel room, but that doesn’t actually make much of a presentation. "They look kinda Thai. Good, night everyone. Drive safely!" On the other hand, you don’t know. It’s just possible that while I was winging my way across the Atlantic, there was a wee wobble in the space-time continuum, and Thai buildings just showed up. That would be interesting.
Blogger bags a big one! (I have been reading the Daily Mail over shoulders here and I am starting to think in punchy, big cap phrases.) But really, this is not the sort of thing that belongs to an anthropologist. I mean, this is why they have a Royal Family, to make calming announcements.
Peter Ackroyd changed London forever for me with that book about a malevolent church near Spitalfields. I am sorry, I can’t think of the name of it. This building might as well have slid down the space time continuum, relocating in this case from the 16th century to the present one. I build up a very clear idea of what this church must look like, and went to have a look when I was here a couple of years ago.
Oh, the cunning. This church does not glower. No, it’s entirely embarrassed by the whole thing. By the historical association. By the novel by Ackroyd. Very English, after all. No, this church caught Ackroyd’s eye, I am now guessing, not because it spoke in another tongue. It caught his eye because it is working so hard to conceal its historical truths, and the fact of its transplantation. How completely English.
And this makes me think of walking through a big cultural institution here in London in the 1980s, this was when I was still in the museum biz. I was walking with the director and we had been touring the institution, and I knew him pretty well, and I felt I could take the sort of liberty the English have come to expect of us (mix two parts resentment, 1 part condescending delight, and 1 part relief that somehow should be able to speak so candidly.) "Bill (not his real name)", I said, almost shouting, "You control the very image of the nation here. This is Plato’s cave. Change the image, you change the country!" He looked at me in horror and said, "Oh, dear, no. That is not the way we do things in England. What we do is make a big change and then paper it over so that it looks like it was always thus. That’s what this is for."
And that’s another way of saying, I think, that if Thai buildings were to show up here in London, the monuments commission would have little brass plagues up the very next day. What’s interesting about the English is their ability to pick up after themselves. To paper things over. To embrace ferocious change and wave the wand of sprezzatura. What’s interesting about the English is that they are so very good at dissembling on this point, at concealing the things that made them discontinuous. That’s what’s interesting, that they work so hard never to seem so.
Well, that’s what I have so far. … Good night, everyone. Drive safely.
P&G: best business school?
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Consultants know this truth: we can’t be better than our clients.
Clients create the eco-system in which our contributions develop, mature, and flourish. Bad clients diminish the world, scaling it back to match their own limitations. It doesn’t matter how good we are, their limitations become our limitations. Good clients are good to work for because they oxygenate the world with their own intelligence and creativity. We can do our best work and then some.
The present clients have been a special pleasure. I didn’t ever have to grit my teeth and worry whether an idea was too difficult or strange. I could work with the confidence that they were up for my best efforts, and the knowledge that my best efforts would be made better.
What I didn’t suspect that there is a hidden explanation here…not until the last hour of the last presentation (today). It turns out that several of my clients are ex-P&G. Hmm, I thought to myself, is it possible that all of my best clients have been ex-P&G? (I’ll have to go back and check.)
More generally, is it possible that P&G is the best marketing program for people interested in the intersection of anthropology and economics, in a cultural approach to marketing?
There was a time that Northwestern’s bschool was best. On the heritage created by Chicago advertising, strategy and research in general, and the particular accomplishments of Philip Kotler and Syd Levy in particular, the Kellogg ranked first in the BusinessWeek ratings for good reason. A knowledge of culture mattered here and it was built into the curriculum. But with the departure of Rob Kozinets and John Sherry, the school effectively turned its back on anything like an anthropological point of view. Canvassing the other top schools, there’s a person here and there. No program has made a thorough going commitment.
Is this event, the world of marketing should have been turning away from a cultural approach for some time now…and perhaps it has. But there are still lots of cultural sophisticated marketers out there…and now, I am beginning to wonder whether this might not be because P&G is a defacto marketing program that has produced many (hundreds? thousands?) of graduates who make up the deficit that business school programs now systematically create.
This is in fact a nice book opportunity here. Call it the P&G diaspora. We would want to capture what marketing is like at P&G now, and over the years, how it works as a bschool, how it improves on a bschool, how it embraces a culturally sophisticated point of view, how it kept the flame alive even as so many bschools have systematically sought to extinguish it.
But there is a more immediate benefit to this revelation (if it’s true): when students write us to ask which business school is best for marketing, we can say, "there’s a really good program in Cincinnati."
Oh Canada, Poor Canada V
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A think-tank has issued a report on Canada and the results are grim.
"Our culture is unwilling to accept the failures that are built into an environment that genuinely supports risk taking. Nor are we wholly comfortable with differentiation, success and excellence. This culture holds Canada back in entrepreneurial and technological innovation."
The Conference Board, the think-tank in question, says that it has discovered a "story of governments, businesses and people punching below their weight.
"[T]oo often we trail the pack. The failure to innovate is a large part of the explanation for our mediocrity — a mediocrity that is hampering what we can do and what we can be."
References
Viera, Paul. ‘Mediocrity’ threatens way of life: report card. National Post. June 13, 2007. here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mark Medley and National Post for the report card image.
To Leora Kornfeld for the head’s up.
Flickr Nugget: shares those images streaming in your head
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You know the way Rob Walker always tells you what he’s listening to? When he sends you his "Murketing Journal" I mean. (Add yourself to his mailing list here.)
This is the kind of thing he gives you:
[ ] Playlist:
"Hurricane," Dave "Baby" Cortez
"Leila au pays du carrousel, var," Anouar Brahem
"I’m Shakin’," Little Willie John
"(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea,"Elvis Costello & the Attractions
Music is good. I’m glad to know what Rob is listening to.
But what is he looking at?
I have a variation on the theme: letting people know your key word in Flickr Nugget, and the images streaming on your home page.
Now this presupposes you use iGoogle as your home page. If you don’t, it worth trying. (Go here.)
Once you get this installed, you can add the Flickr nugget. I put mine in the upper right hand corner of iGoogle, and it brings a stream of photos, one at a time, changing as often as you want.
Right now, my key word is "lodz" so I am getting images from this Polish city, and they are astonishingly good. The one above will serve as a case in point.
I’ve been using Flickr nugget for some time now. I started using Kalamalka as my key word. This is the name of the lake my family used to visit for vacation when I was a kid. I don’t have any pictures of this time, but it turns out that someone else’s photos do just as well. It’s a bit odd, a little Bladerunnerish, but, anyone’s memories of Kalamalka are better than none.
But it doesn’t seem to matter what you choose. The city and neighborhood you grew up in, your favorite vacation spot, someone else’s favorite vacation spot, ancestral cities, your favorite sport, your favorite type of pet (try "Siamese"). I haven’t tried "16th century," but there’s a good chance that’ll work.
But step 2 is then to share these key words when you are communicated with friends and strangers. There are particularly precious, indeed, magical key words out there, and we need to find them out.
Good hunting.
Oh Canada, Poor Canada IV
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Sometimes, culture is better the less you spend on it.
Not in Canada.
Christopher Hume says,
But $975 million is not the real cost. No, the real cost is much higher This is because when we fund culture this way, we actually diminish it. The opportunity cost is, in other words, phenomenal. I reckon this cost is roughly equal to
dynamism teaches us, that cultures are like marketplaces, the less you intercede the more they flourish, the more you intercede, the less they do.
Let’s take three of the big cultural inventions of the last 30 years: Punk, hip hop, alternative. All of these were invented in the US. (Evidence for my controversial first choice: The Stooges, VU, New York Dolls, your Honor!) All were invented without the benefit of state subvention. Together, expressed in music and in film, they pretty much underwrote the America’s continued, if wobbly, ascendancy in an emerging global culture.
I’m not saying that Canada could have established it’s own cultural ascendancy, if only the state had spent less. I am saying spending more virtually guaranteed its present obscurity on the world stage. (And before someone writes in to complain about all the great music coming out of Montreal, let me point out this was made without state subvention too.)
Armies fight the last war. States embrace the last idea. There was a time when the model of state sponsorship worked. My travels in Europe might as well have been a tour of opera houses, each more glorious than the last, extravagant evidence that cities and states tied their identities to the musical accomplishment of local sons and daughters. (The Paris house, I was interested to note, was funded by private subscription.)
But that model passed. Culture changed. Cultural changed itself. Creative technologies got cheap. Training distributed. Creative communities decentralized. Barriers to participation fell. A wish to participate rose. A willingness to defer to elite judgment disappeared. Hierarchy died, the world flattened. We might say that the culture funded by the state created a world that no longer needed the state. To persevere in this funding is to discourage the cultural trend that makes funding unnecessary (could this be the bureaucrat’s secret motive)?
Call it the Yankee revelation: however much you spend, you can’t buy yourself a World Series win. Canada can try to fund a culture to call its own, but there are no guarantees. The fact of the matter is that these cultures happen, if they happen, when the state gets out of the way, when it cedes control. The new idea is to turn culture over to people working in their spare time, off grant, off license, without control or supervision. This is where culture comes from now.
References
Cowen, Tyler. 2002. Creative Destruction. How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures. New York: Princeton University Press. here.
Hume, Christopher. 2007. What’s our role on the world’s culture stage? The Star. June 04, 2007. here.
Postrel, Virginia. 1998. The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. New York: Free Press. here.
Kathy Griffin
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Hello, New York, it’s me, what’s her face!
(Kathy Griffin, standing in front of Carnegie Hall)
I saw the opening of Season 3 of Kathy Griffin’s Life on the D List this week. Normally, I watch Griffin with discomfort. Do celebrities deserve the abuse she dishes out? (McCracken 2005, below)
But I think Poland changed me. I’m feeling less sentimental, less charitable, less nice than I used to. Crawling your way to stardom over the damaged careers of other stars, that now looks ok to me. (Apparently, it takes Poland to make a Canadian feel more American. Go figure.)
Is there a grammar to Kathy Griffin? Can we identify the meaning mechanics that brought her, trembling with gratitude, when not spitting invective, to the brink of stardom?
Well, we can try. Here’s what I have so far. Your comments, please.
KG is a composite of these celebrity precedents:
1. Bette Midler and the "niche audience" strategy
Midler started her career working in gay clubs, and this helped launch a broader stardom. KG is working this strategy. She refers often to "her gays" and claims to "speak gay."
The caveat: the present gay community is different from the one Midler connected with. I bet some gays resent a patronizing, "my gays" presumption of solidarity. And I think it’s unwise to think that sexual orientation guarantees any other commonality. But let’s say diffusion currents do still work to give some unity to gay diversity. What happens if the resentment of one group diffuses into the larger community? No doubt, Griffin expects to be well launched by this time. But if she isn’t well launched, she may be, well, fucked. (Forgive the language. I’m speaking Griffin.)
2. Roseann Barr, and the "talk about anything, and f*ck ‘em if they can’t take a joke" approach
Barr was one of the first inventions of feminism, a loud mouthed b*tch who took no prisoners, spared no sensibility. This came as a shock to the "white glove" feminists, who, unwittingly, sought the exportation of middle class values under the cover of a gender revolution. And it came as a special disappointment to the intellectuals who insisted that popular culture, and certainly something as pandering as comedy, must necessarily be tame and conformist. Barr was anything but.
The wonder is that after so many transgressive comedy (Richard Pryor, Sam Kineson, etc.), there is any powder left in the armory. The fact that her inquisition is directed against celebrities somehow makes it ok. They have raised themselves on high, the notion goes, and God choose an Irish Catholic from Chicago to bring them low. Joan of Art. The notion seems to be "well, they asked for it."
3. Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, and the anthropological approach
David and Seinfeld like to situate their comedy inside contemporary life. (Other comedians to hurl jokes from a safe distance, call this the catapult option.) Their comedy depends upon a kind of participant observation, an anthropologist’s connection to the culture at hand. Griffin isn’t just making fun of celebrities. She plays one on TV.
This makes for some good moments, some real insights, as when she asks the audience to notice when Oprah and Tyra Banks go from mainstream to ghetto. This is a kind of code shifting that is now common in the African American community. (I think of Will Smith as one of the most gifted, nuanced, code shifters in this community. See Men In Black especially.) Now, lots of people have noticed that "something’s going on here," but it takes a comedian like Griffin to make the thing plain. Ah, American culture is just a little more self comprehending.
But the problem here is that Griffin must occupy a sweet spot. She has to be close enough to celebrity to talk about it but not so consumed by it to become the creature she’s making fun of. This is where Life on the D List comes in. This gives us a semi-transparent, warts and all, portrait that helps keep Griffin in the world even as her celebrity accelerates. She is surely C at this point, and it looks like B standing is now perhaps inevitable and A not unthinkable. Hey, she’s already made The View.
The good thing about Griffin’s anthropology is that it is pattern seeking, but it does not insist that pattern detection must be taken as proof of the essential corruption of the people or culture involved. This was of course the fault of much of the media commentary of the 1990s and the thing that prevented it from rising to the level of something useful. And we were so close. Everyone was better at pattern detection, but something in the temper of the time demanded that conclusions could only be found at the end of a particular sheep run.
4. Joan Rivers, and the "can we talk" strategy
Griffin lodges her anthropological reports in a particularly potent rhetoric form. She dishes. She gossips. She is the outsider who is prepared to peach, to tell us what happened in the green room at Leno when Lindsay and Paris were…
This is powerful because it makes the listener an insider too. (Yes, it’s an illusion, but it’s a powerful one. Even ordinary moments of gossip build this bond.) I think Griffin is much better at this than Rivers was. The bond of complicity is tighter. Rivers seemed to loath herself a little for what she was doing. (She brayed because, you felt, she couldn’t do this in an ordinary voice.) There is no whiff of ambivalence when it comes to Griffin. She relishes the punishment she inflicts. I think she is nastier than Rivers. This is more personal. More mean. And we’re involved.
5. The "most mobile comedian" approach (not sure who deserves this designation, maybe it’s KG)
Griffin is very good at finding her way. At one moment, she is claiming she doesn’t know what interests kids these days. The next, she is throwing around the lingo like a champ. One moment, she’s the star on stage. The next, she is saying "I know" when the audience reacts, as if this were a personal conversation between KG and each and every member of the audience. One moment, she’s swearing like a sailor. The next, she’s talking about manners. But most of all, she is working that D-list sweet spot, and keeping herself suspended between big time celebrity and the rest of us. This is a shifting border and she works it brilliantly.
6. the trickster, punk, anarchist approach to comedy.
This is Leora Kornfeld territory and I hope she will forgive me if I offer a few thoughts. We can put Griffin in that tradition of anarchist comedians: Tom Green, Martin Short as Jiminy Glick, Sasha Baron Cohen. This is the comedian who says, in the spirit on Punk refusal, I am not buying any of this. This is the comedian that pierces the fictions so lovely crafted by the star machinery of Hollywood. However much we admire celebrities, and perhaps because we admire them so much at the moment, we need this sort of thing as a cultural corrective. But of course the celebs fight back and they do so with the artifice created in the 1990s, the one that said, "oh, sure, I’m prepared to make fun of myself." It’s just painful to watch them play along with this attack on their public image. I just end up hoping that no one’s packing. I mean, this could get really ugly.
Kathy Griffin is a rare cultural artifact. It takes bags of intelligence, cunning and talent to make this kind of celebrity work. And what’s really odd, there is no trace of the ambivalence that marks the careers of Roseann Barr, Joan Rivers, and Dave Chappelle. I am not crazy about the act, but I have to say she’s a better comedian than I am an anthropologist. Well, come to that, she might be a better anthropologist.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Celebrity Culture: muddles in the models. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. October 21, 2005. here.
Reprogramming CBS Evening News
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I give CBS a lot of credit for picking a woman. They just didn’t pick the right woman. (Marc Berman)
Katie Couric’s numbers are down again. After a promising start, she’s posting the smallest numbers CBS Evening News has seen in 20 years.
Personally, I think Couric’s an engaging newscaster. But Berman could be right. There might be a better choice out there. Let’s spin the wheel of pop culture and see.
Rosie O’Donnell? Kathy Griffin? Minnie Driver?
Any candidate, however odd, forces the issue. Why not? Exactly, I mean. Rosie O’Donnell. Why not?
Well, of course not. But for a moment we step out of conventional wisdom and wonder if "combative" could be the cardiac paddles newscasting needs.
Kathy Griffin? Campy, sardonic, candid (aka rude)? Well, of course not. But are we certain this sort of thing can’t be mixed into the signal?
Minnie Driver? Intelligent, charismatic, feeling, alert. Splendid. This could work. Holly Hunter, the woman who stole Timecode with a couple of scenes on one quarter of the screen. This could really work. Perhaps what we are looking for is the person who can do for the news what Nigella Lawson did the cooking show or Rachel Ray did for morning television.
At some point, we begin to close in on the strategic truth of the exercise. Newscasters play a part, the newscast is a performance. Perhaps it’s time to move away from the "journalism" model and start again. The anthropological approach says "audition" candidates until a new model merges.
Glenn Close? Sarah Silverman? Paula Abdul? Tim Gunn? The possibilities are endless.
References
Bauder, David. 2007. Ratings raise TV news sexism questions. Mercury News. June 3, 2007. here.
Shister, Gail. CBS news flash: Is Katie leaving? The Barre Montpelier Times Argus. April 24, 2007. here.
