Last week, I had the honor of speaking to a distinguished senior anthropologist.  (I will name him, if he’ll let me.)  We talked about a lot of things, but we stopped a moment to mourn the rise of a post modern anthropology. 

Today, I came across these well chosen words in the Times Literary Supplement. 
Traditionalists who lament the decline of old crafts and media in Western art are mourning a loss not so much of sophistication as of innocence.  It is not nowadays enough just to depict things because you think they’re interesting to think about, or, God forbid, pleasing to look at.  The almost Maoist culture of self-examination, and critical engagement with this or that artistic tradition, which modern Western art schools enforce, give much contemporary art its force, but also contribute to one big weakness.  Much contemporary art is what an old-school aesthete would call mannerist – it’s art about art, not art about life.

Different field, same problem, apparently.  For many of my disciplinary brothers and sisters, anthropology is about anthropology, not about life.  It’s mannerist.

Now I would like to say that I refused mannerist anthropology, rising up to slay the postmodern dragon with the bright sword of my Chicago training.  But the fact of the matter is simpler and less noble.  I make my living as a practicing anthropologist and post modernist verities don’t serve me very well. 

This October I will have done projects for a new media firm, a Canadian telecom, a sporting equipment company, and a research firm, and I will have given presentations to designers, financial marketers, and people interested in trends.  Every report and presentation was designed to fit what I believed would serve my client, and never once did it seem to me they needed to hear choice words from Derrida or Lacan.   I need ideas I can use, because I make my living selling ideas that clients can use. 

But no, it’s probably not just pragmatism.  It’s not just the market imposing an intellectual discipline.  I am Scottish Canadian Presbyterian of middle age for whom the "plain style" is more or less built in.  (I had to get over the pretensions of my youth for these to become clear.)  Postmodernism is too slushy for me.  (It may herald an epistemological springtime, but this Canadian wants the bracing clarities of a winter’s day.)  I think best when using simple propositions, put as plainly as possible, with evidence and argument summoned as necessary (and no more), with a "garnish" of metaphor to make comprehension faster and more fun. 

Plain style anthropology comes with engineering specs on the outside.  You can see what the pieces (propositions) are and how the relationships (the argument) work.  You can see what the fault lies, and what needs fixing…when something needs fixing.  And yes I understand that I making old fashioned demands, and that these badly misunderstand the intellectual, political and epistemological challenges before us.  But hey, I have a problem to solve, a client to satisfy, a post to right, and I have, usually, 40 minutes to wrap things up.  You’ve noticed I expect that postmodernists have a way of making the same argument over and over again.  They are, after all, mannerists.  Anthropology is about anthropology and always, come to that, the same anthropology. 

References

Miller, Keith.  2007.  More whaling and shouting.  Times Literary Supplement.  October 19, 2007, p. 17. 

Gratuitous remarks

I have just started up reading TLS after years away from it, and I have to say what a pleasure it is.  It’s never very expensive and it would be good value at 4 times the cost. 

Apology

Sorry not to have been posting.  I am at a kind of brainstorming thing in Mexico and time and internet access are in short supply.

When BusinessWeek gets around to choosing the best innovation of 2007, Nike + will win going away.  It’s an astonishing development.

Here’s how it works: I put a chip in my (Nike) running shoe.  This broadcasts information to the iPod nano I carry with me on the run.  I come home from a run (more usually, a walk) and my iPod uploads my running information to the Nike website where it is aggregated with all the other running/walking data uploaded by all the other runners and walkers in America.

I know.  I know.  This is one of those classic innovation moments that makes you go, "Wait.  What?"  Actually, this is actually what I got engraved on my Nano.  There’s a good chance you will have to try this technology before it makes perfect sense.

See the image insert.  (Clicking on it will make it easier to read.)  This describes my walk for yesterday.  The line represents the moments I sped up and slowed down.  It appears that I came to a dead stop at one point.  I have no idea what happened there. Mooning over flowers, possibly?  You can see the overall distance. Along the top are my accumulated stats.  As I say, I am walking on most trips, so that’s why the mile per hour figure is so large. 

One way to understand this innovation is to look at the private and public value it creates.

Exercise is lonely, painful, and boring.  And this is enough to discourage most people from doing it faithfully (or at all).  Nike + can’t actually do anything about the painful part, but it gets at lonely and boring very effectively.  It allows everyone to devote their miles to challenges. 

This means, for instance, that everyone on the South side of Chicago can now use their miles to compete against everyone on the North side of Chicago.  The Nike + works as a vast spread sheet.  It sums all the runs.  At the end of every day, you can watch your run uploaded and you can see who’s winning the challenges you belong to. 

That’s an incentive that may launch a couch potato out of the house. If our runner is just running for himself, well, the temptation to remain housebound is strong.  But if he is now running for everyone on the South side of Chicago, and his team now happens to be just a few hundred miles from acing those North side numskulls, it’s a different proposition altogether.

The private value is that I exercise more.  The public value is that I now "belong" to and participate with collectivities that would otherwise not much interest me.  This is a kind of mechanized networking of the kind we see more and more of. 

Of course, these are early days.  I am using my accumulated miles to compete in a competition between my little town in Connecticut and Steam Boat Springs, Colorado.  It’s not going very well.  No one in Steam Boat Springs has picked up the challenge.  Or maybe that’s not so bad.  (We could take this one.)   My little town in Connecticut is not always the friendliest place in the world.  (That New England frostiness, you know.)  But I can see our competition with Steam Boat Sprngs changing changing that a little.   (I also issued an open challenge to all the towns smaller than 5 k in Connecticut, proving that I didn’t really get how challenges work.)  As I say, it’s early days.  This is one of those technologies that is going to find its own applications, and amaze us as it does.

I wonder if we are going to see that Nike miles "on the ground" will become anything like frequent-flyer miles "in the air."  We were all surprised to see the air miles became a measure for things other than travel and a currency in markets beyond the frequent-flyer one.  It’s not hard to imagine runners becoming "mile philanthropists," donating their miles to worthing causes, with brands other than Nike matching them mile for mile. 

But these are down stream effects.  In the meantime, the question is simply: did Nike accomplish something that is good for the brand.  Well, in my own experience, it just went from being another sports supplier to an enabler that has changed the way I think about exercise and the way I participate in it. More than that, Nike has found a way to amplify my accomplishments…and then broadcast them. 

Talk about engagement.  Talk about partnering with the consumer! Talk about brand and consumer cocreating.  Geez, Louise, this is good marketing.

post script

I am traveling most of tomorrow.  I will blog if I can but I will be most of the day in the plane.

post script 2

The partnership with iPod uses music in some interesting and useful ways.  I left out this part of the story to simplify the exposition.

References

The website for Nike + is here. 

One of the joys of teaching at the Harvard Business School was watching 80 students take on a problem, chew through the data, and work their way to clarity.

What would they do with "Everybody Sucks"?  This is an exquisitely interesting article in the current issue of New York Magazine.  It treats Gawker, the gossip column that has attracted so much attention recently on the web. 

I propose to treat "Everybody Sucks" as if it were a case study tossed into the Piranha-filled waters of HBS classroom.  I don’t say that I will do as good a job as 80 HBS students.  But I’m going to try. 

Extracting the issues

1. the tone of the article is agonized, and it doesn’t take long to see why.  The author, Vanessa Grigoriadis, is caught in a contradiction. She is a member of a journalist class that has long enjoyed the pleasure of playing the outsider, telling truth to power.  For someone who belongs to this class, Gawker comes as a nasty surprise.  It is a website that treats journalists as they treat the rest of New York. Gawker has scorned Grigoriadis herself, "dragging my family," she says, "into [a] foul, bloggy sewer…"

2. Grigoriadis’ discomfort is something more than a personal problem.  It is something more than a sociological switcheroo.  It is an technological and economic issue in so far as it represents the disintermediation of a marketplace.  The internet makes possible another lawyer of journalism, a new medium for public discourse, and the participation of a new generation of individuals, as a result of which journalists matter less than they used to.  They do not control our access to the news, as once they did.  They do not shape our understanding of the world, as once they did.  They do not play gatekeeper, as once they did.  This elite has lost power. (And this is a special injury for journalists.  Badly paid, and shabbily treated, power was the best of their compensations.)

3. How old is Gawker?  Not very.  (I can get away with this sort of thing on a blog.  In the HBS classroom, everyone would have extracted this from the article.  Ok, it was 2002.  I looked.)  In this brief history, Gawker has undergone a disintermediation of its own.  In the early days, comments on site were an "embarrassment," to use the language of Gawker owner Nick Denton.  But they are now, he says, a strength.  Post comments introduce what Denton calls an element of "anarchy" Gawker was beginning to lose.

4.  Here we could depend upon a student to observe the rise of "commenter value" and to say that even the disintermediators are now at risk of being disintermediated.  The Gawker bloggers who challenged New York journalists are now being challenged in their turn by Gawker commenters. 

5.  And this latter-day change suggests the possibility of another business model, which Grigoriadis sketches in the following way:

Gawker as an automated message board, with commenters generating exponentially greater numbers of page views as they click all over the site to see reactions to their comments, could be the dream.  There would then be no editors to pay…  (135)

This is extraordinary.  I am not sure we would want to call it an exercise in the wisdom of crowds.  It’s spleen soaked discourse, as if the body politic has lost all bladder control.  But the idea of journalist-free journalism, this is interesting.

6. Some debate would surely turn on how how very disagreeable Gawker is.  It is a "foul, bloggy sewer."  It specializes in the ad hominem attack. Indeed, it has turned this into the exclusive stuff of its "journalism."  We might argue, in its defense, that this is what we ask of journalism.  Doubting people’s motives, puncturing their pretensions, seeing past their self serving accounts of what they do, this is what the press is for.  But Gawker takes this to an extreme so loathsome, it diminishes the reader as much as the victim. 

Not a week goes by when I don’t want to quit this job, because staring at New York in this way makes me sick.  (Choire Sicha, Gawker managing editor, p. 42)

It is finally, I would guess, the person who works at Gawker who pays the highest price.  If you doubted and diminished motives 12 posts a day, surely an accumulated cynicism must eventually render you incapable of participating in contemporary culture in any other way

7. There is a larger way to make this argument and surely someone in the classroom can be relied upon to chime out this: Gawker is merely the latest symptom of a cultural decline, further proof that Western Civilization is going to hell in a handbasket, incontrovertible evidence that politesse is dying and civility is dead.

8. Another student else could be relied upon to respond that this is perhaps the essential truth of capitalism, that we live in a culture shaped by what people want, not what we think they should want.  The success of Gawker tells us that people want to read this stuff.  This doesn’t make Gawker right, or true, or just.  But it does mean that it has a constituency, that it represents a market. Finally, it’s not about us.  It’s about the reader.  And this, not to put too fine a point on it, is precisely what makes markets responsive, and, yes, unseemly.  But if you have to choose…and we do.

9.  There is an anthropological observation to make here, and this kind of thing is notoriously difficult to get into the HBS classroom and culture.  And that is that people have been declaring the decline of Western civilization for some hundreds of years.  And I think it’s fair to say that even by the most typical Victorian standard, even the most conservative among us looks slovenly and vulgar, a lawless wretch incapable of probity or finer feeling.  We are horrified by what we see there, but our children and our children’s children may will wonder what the issue was. 

10. We are reacting to the reformation of our culture and the not very dangerous decline of old sensitivities.  Most everything that has happened in the last 100 years tells us that these sensitivities may be "reset" without actually damaging the moral core on which restraint and civilization depend.  Western civ will survive even this.   (Why do we think it’s so delicate?) 

11. What we are hoping for is that someone has picked up a stray sentence buried in the middle of the article, dropped into the article by Grigoriadis without further comment. 

Denton…gives free reign to editors to attack anyone they’d like (only ex-employees get a free pass).  (43)

Case studies are sly creatures.  They hide the best things, the better to give the clever students a chance to identify themselves. 

12. Let’s begin with the disagreeable contradiction.  This "fearless journalism," "anti-media," "friend of the people" stuff only works when no one is protected.  The moment you exempt your own is the moment you become yet another special pleader, a vested interest, and a perfect scoundrel. 

13. But, hey, this is a case study…in a business school…searching out opportunity, and as opportunities go, this is an absolute beauty.  In my classroom, it would have been someone like Charles Hale, Yen Liow, Neil Houghton, students who would have surveyed the problem, spotted the opportunity, and schooled us with 40 well filled seconds of observation and a new map of the problem.

The moment Denton exempts his staff, he opens a competitive opportunity.  Why not a Gawker watcher website that catalogs the real and imagined life failings of people who once worked for Gawker? 

Let’s calculate the number of people Gawker has offended, the depth of the offense, and their wish for revenge.   Small number, big offense.  (What would these numbers look like?)

We want three things for this group:

1. we want them to come to our "Gawker watcher" website
2. we want them to supply content for the website by remarking on the lives of ex-Gawker employees
3. we want them to act as early adopters who spread the word of our website

Gawker victims have been deeply, publicly wounded.  The need for revenge must run deep.  And it is not as if they do not control the means of production.  They are talented writers equipped with research skills, and they occupy a proximate professional and social world. They know who the ex-Gawker writers are.  They know where they live.  Failing that, they know how to find them.  Failing that, they will feel themselves to have a license to just make stuff up, the more damaging the better.  We can rely on Gawker watcher to make up in creative writing anything it happens to lack in investigative reporting.

14. Classroom debate will  center on whether a little website like "Gawker watcher" could ever scale up.  If it remains a local New York enthusiasm written about a tiny world by a world that isn’t much bigger, I mean, really, who cares?  But that’s the point about small enterprise and the classic start up.  All you really need is the beachhead, the place from which to start.  Once that’s in place, we can add on additional content, new targets, bigger audiences.  We can bootstrap it upwards.  The question is this: is there enough here in the first instance to give us purchase in the marketplace, to carve out a little niche in a world where, frankly, Denton now controls the waterfront with the powers of a mob boss or a union head.

15. The business opportunity aside, I wonder if the presence of a Gawker watcher website would have a salutary effect on Gawker itself.  If I were a present Gawker writer, such a thing would give me pause.  The knowledge that my victim is now supplied with the opportunity to defame me, this might change what I say.  The Gawker proposition depends on the fact that it is the only credible player in the ad hominem game.  Surely, it is only a matter of time before the marketplace responds to evident demand with interesting supply, and it will be interesting to see what difference that difference makes.   

In any case, our case study turns on someone spotting the fact that Gawker has made a mistake.  Nick Denton has given someone an opening, a way to steal a march.  See the opportunity, take the opportunity, scale up the operation, make a name for yourself in the process, sell early, buy a house in the south of France.  It’s what an MBA is for.

References

Grigoriadis, Vanessa.  2007.  Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass.  New York Magazine.  October 22, 2007. 

Chris Anderson submitted a comment on my Friday post.  He quotes the offending passage from my blog and then expresses his displeasure.

"I guess we should be grateful that Penn is not offering up Chris Anderson’s "long tail" fallacy, the odd idea that because we have ceased to be a mass culture we are now an utterly particulated universe of ones."

Huh? "Universe of ones"? Are you confusing my book with "Bowling Alone"?

Grant, either you’ve never read my book or you’re willfully misrepresenting it. Which is it?

Chris, thanks for writing.  To answer your question: neither one.  Your options are confining and, if I may say, perhaps a little prosecutorial.   

In The Long Tail, you refer to

[the web as an] uncategorizable sea of a million destinations (page 2)

an infinite number of niche markets (p. 5)

the shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards (p. 5)

infinite slots (p.

an unlimited number of niche demi-elites (p. 35)

a million niches (p. 52)

interests splinter[ing] into narrower and narrower communities of affinity, going deeper and deeper into their chosen subject matter (p. 57)

When mass culture breaks apart, it doesn’t reform into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of micro-cultures, which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways.  (p. 183)

You can see where I might get the impression that you’re committed to a universe of ones, at least in the long term.  The terms infinite and unlimited keep cropping up.  An "infinite number of niche markets" is a universe of ones.  And if this universe is not there in the first place, we will get there eventually, as interests "splinter into narrower and narrower communities of affinity."  You have posited a disaggregating dynamic.  Interests that are ever narrower must necessarily become a niche per consumer…and a universe of ones.

You will complain that I am cherry picking phrases.  (This would be a more robust defense, if you hadn’t used these terms so often and enthusiastically.)  But even if we ignore "unlimited" and "infinite" as artifacts of the rhetorical heat of the moment, we still have a problem.  The word to which you return repeatedly is "millions," and this is, I think, much too high.  Millions of niches is many too many. Even if you are not headed for a "universe of ones," you are positing a very particulated marketplace.  Our spectacularly fecund culture/commerce of ours will never parse that finely.

Happily, it’s an empirical question.  The natural laboratory of contemporary culture will do it’s work.  One of us will be proven right, the other wrong.  Let’s call it a bet.  If you’re right, I’ll look forward to buying you a case of good Merlot and toasting your success. 

But there is a larger problem with The Long Tail.  I didn’t see it the first time through but it came charging off the page as I went looking for proof of Friday’s post. 

The Long Tail a thoroughly partial book.  As I read through a second time, I was struck by what is missing.  You give plenty of attention to aggregators like Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, eBay, and Google and pretty much ignore the rest of capitalism!  You have taken on one of the most explosive developments in contemporary capitalism…only to offer a partial view and a single solution.  It’s as if you declined the larger intellectual challenge. 

Readers who doubt this argument may wish to examine the index and see if they can find brand names that are not aggregator related.  What is missing in The Long Tail is the work horse of capitalism, the corporation, and the extraordinary challenges that now confronts its innovation, strategy and marketing functions.   As virtually everyone knows, the corporate world is scrambling to deal with the speed with which taste and preference now fragment and change.  In turns out, The Long Tail pipe has pretty much a single answer for exploding markets: big (or bigger) pipes.

There are two problems with this answer.  First, there can only be a few aggregators in the world, and this limits the usefulness of this book for the rest of the world.  Second, bigger pipes isn’t, in the larger order of things, really the most interesting, ambitious or canny solution. What the "aggregator answer" ignores are the real challenges that exist as a single corporation learns how to be many things to many people, how it makes the boundary of the corporation more porous, letting the world in and innovation out, how it escapes the inevitable gravitational field created by the corporate culture, how it accomplishes some kind of continuity in the face of its external and increasing internal discontinuity.  The scope of this book is smaller than I realized, in its ambition, in its  accomplishment, and in its usefulness.

A case in point: At the culture camp here today in Toronto, we were wondering if a corporation like say P&G or Kraft might ever solve the problem of dynamic culture and commerce by becoming more like a Hollywood studio, a pool of capital, intelligence and decision making that draws continually on an external world in order to create the stream of innovation that now appears to be necessary for a corporation to survive.  This is of the many things The Long Tail might have explored. 

Listen, I have to get ready for tomorrow, let me close with this.  It seems to be that The Long Tail treats an astonishing problem, with a narrow, partial, and one might even say provincial response.  I rest my case.