Ours is a participatory world. Lots of people create culture.  Artists, musicians, film makers, writers.  Many of us do it for free.  I do. This blog, I do it for nothing.  (I know. I know.)

This means, we need day jobs, something to pay the bills.  There are lots of possibilities: waiter, high school teacher, bookstore owner, night watchman. 

May I suggest anthropologist?  That’s what I do. 

Here’s why anthropology is perfect for you.  As an artist, musician, film maker or writer, you know a world that interests the rest of the world.  Let’s say that you write Romance Fiction.  This is a lively world, filled with its own heaving developments, so to say.  P&G needs to know about what is happening in Romance Fiction because Romance Fiction is a window on the world of a very large group of consumers they care about. 

Am I asking you to peach?  That’s the English term.  Am I asking you to tell?   To give P&G insider information, things they should not know?

In the old days, when marketers when playing a game of trickery, you would well to be concerned.  But these days, there is no trickery about it.  These days P&G is just trying to stay in the same "head space" of the consumer.  Telling P&G about Romance Fiction is merely a matter of keeping them in the loop, in the cultural know. 

You will need to know some anthropology, of course.  But I can teach you that.  Er. Or someone can.  If you are part of the Cambridge university community, here’s the course I am doing with Joshua Green. 

This course will provide students with an introduction to qualitative research. Working in small teams, students will design and conduct a qualitative project designed to propose strategy for media and cultural organizations – an indicative project would look at ways to revitalize PBS to keep pace with participatory culture. Students will receive an intensive introduction to planning and conducting qualitative research including ethnographic and participant observation methods based on real world case studies.

How do you find your market.  Start a website.  Write a blog.  Speak at conferences.  They will come to you. 

Now, I get that many artists don’t want to know what other artists are doing.  They want to commune with their Gods and the less they know about the competition the better.  This option is not for you.  But for the rest it’s a good deal, an excellent add on.  And if you are a natural schmoozer, someone who loves to reach out to others and listen to what is going on, this is perfect. 

It’s a two way deal, finally.  What you give to marketing, you also give to anthropology.  When you record the world of Romance Fiction, you serve the Caesar of P&G and the Christ of anthropology.  (If that’s the right way of putting it.  Probably not.)  Anthropologists in a hundred years will read your blog.

Image explanation

The image above was captured in Toronto.  It is a relief from the building that used to be a post office (perhaps the main post office) downtown.  It is now the Raptors arena.  There are several reliefs, each of them showing a different form of transportation.  This one shows a ship, obviously.  If you click on the image, and look carefully, you will see a small figure on the bridge, presumably the captain.  That’s you. 

In my Toronto talk, I argued we’re changing heroes.

Specifically, we are moving from Raymond Loewy (above) to Rube Goldberg (below), from modernist stream lining to a world that is episodic, accidental, diverse in its composition, just barely interacting, always on the verge of stopping still, made from local materials, made from objects formed to another purpose, and inclined when they gain momentum to run like a river. 

Our world is less a beautiful idea that springs full formed from a design intelligence and more an order that emerges in the moment of interaction.  This is the wisdom of objects entering new, unexpected and "just barely" interactions.  This is the dynamic version of what Weinberger so winningly, brilliantly called "small pieces loosely joined."

So what’s my evidence?

There’s the wonderful Honda ad that sprang from the planning work of Russell Davies.  (In a sense we could argue that Russell’s Interesting 2007 was a network version of the Rube Goldberg cartoon, a place where unexpected, accidental contacts could and would be made.)

And yesterday, we got notice of an ad called Tipping Point for Guinness by Nicolai Fuglsig.  It is glorious.  Make that sublime.  See it here. 

Hail to Rube, visionary and man for our times.   

References

Weinberger, David.  2002.  Small Pieces Loosely Joined.  New York: Basic Books.

See the Honda version of a Rube Goldberg Machine here.

For more on Ruben Garret L. Goldberg, see the Wikipedia entry here.

Acknowledgments:

to the Very Short List for notice of the Guinness ad, here. 

Boomers have reached middle age, and they are well settled there.  The question is whether they will remain so.  Will Boomers breakout?

the run up to the present condition:

There are some 72 million "Baby Boomers," people born after World War II and before 1964.  Coming of age in the late 1960s, they were skeptical of their parent’s values.  Many of them engaged in political and cultural experiment.  They were egalitarian, cooperative, spiritually experimental, counter-cultural and restless.

In the 1978 film Animal House John Belushi seized the guitar held by a folkie Stephen Bishop and smashed it against the wall.  This felt to some like
a final repudiation of the values of the 60s.  Boomers were primed for a new stylistic signature. 

By mid-decade they were calling themselves "preppies" and "yuppies." Now defined by a more conventional frame of mind, boomers embraced an aggressive individualism, upward mobility, career orientation, status competition, all of this given the patina of an "old money" symbolism.

The Preppie-Yuppie arc took roughly 10 years.  Tom Wolfe was there at the beginning with The Right Stuff, a book that restored certain values.  And he was there at the end, with the publication of The Bonfires of the Vanities, a novel that declared the bankruptcy of the trend.

1978  Animal House
1979  The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
1980  The Preppy Handbook, Lisa Birnbach
1880  Free To Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman
1982  Family Ties and the unexpected celebrity of Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton
1982  In search of excellence, Tom Peters
1987  Wall Street
1987  The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

The Preppie-Yuppie trend may have come and gone, but it left a lasting impression on Boomers.  The rest of the world might move on to new cultural developments (alternative music, rave cultures, digital communities), but boomers, apparently, were set for life.  They would wear those Polo ponies to the grave.

The Boomer aesthetic was old money, as served up by the likes of Ralph Lauren, Restoration Hardware, BMW, Land’s End, Rolex, Cole Hahn.  Boomers had a fashion. Just as plainly, the fashion had them.  Together, the demographic group and their cultural envelope were mutually presupposing.  Boomers were fixed in place.

Or are they?  I guess the developmental literature says that the older someone is, the less likely they are to embrace any kind of change, social or stylistic.  If we were in a cynical frame of mind, we might resort to the old chestnut that says "prisoners learn to love their cells."  And this psychological truism is accompanied by a sociological one that say that the public world has a way of acting upon us, so that eventually choices take on the weight of necessity.  Anthropologists might say that as we age, we loose our cultural elasticity.  It just gets harder to imagine alternatives, and harder still to act on them.  In any case, the social sciences, I think, agree.  As we age, rigidity overtakes us.  Familiarity grows more important.  Stasis wins out.  (Perhaps that’s stasis will  out.)

But boomers are famous for making their own way.  Once the stereotypes of age begin to interfere with their self regard and social mobility, they can be relied to react badly.  The spirit of contrariness will galvanize them and they will insist once more on their much prized rights of self authorship. 

Are there stirrings?  Yes, there are stirrings.  The Bobo phenomenon spotted by David Brooks shows a certain restlessness, a willingness perhaps to participate in the 1990s moment, or just to throw off the deep conventionality of Yuppie orthodoxy.  There are Pirate watches.  There are BMW with their new wicked styling.  There are hints.  But every signal is surrounded by noise, and we would be wrong to take noise as evidence of a new signal in the works.  It’s just noise!

So, here we are.  Boomers, will they were embrace their preppie/yuppie bourgeois concept indefinitely? Or is there one more stylistic (and some other) revolt waiting in the wings?

References

Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in Paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. New York: Simon & Schuster.

A last note on FoE conference at C3 at MIT.

The fan is a big topic at MIT.  Henry Jenkins discovered early that this creature is active, interested, engaged in ways that no one had recognized.  We are all now trying to figure out who this fan is and how to take advantage of his or her passionate engagement.  Narratives and brands will flourish or fail according to the way they address this problem.

Practically speaking, the fan is a blessing and a curse.  Passionately interested and attentive to a show or a brand, they become its emissaries, evangelists, apostles, actually.  Fans will go out and build an audience one conversation at a time. 

But there is a darker side to the fan.  This weekend, Heroes‘ Jesse Alexander implied that the Heroes team is sometimes haunted by the participative fan.  Fans take ownership of the narrative and woe betide the writers who betray their trust.  Stray even a little from the "canon" and the fans will make you pay.

The problem is the way fans build their identities as fans and the way they build the community of fans.  How do fans prove their status as fans? How do they discriminate themselves from mere viewers?  How do they sort themselves into a hierarchy? 

The fan solves these problems by mastering the narrative of the show and demonstrating this knowledge any time fans meet.  In sum, fans have a vested interested in getting to know the show in an almost obsessive way, and then protecting this investment, their badge of membership, by punishing producers for departing from the gospel.

What to do?  Alexander noted in passing that one of the ways Heroes builds the narrative is through a process of rapid prototyping.  This lets the writing team bring themes forward quickly and examine their options.  And I found myself thinking, "well, why not let the fans do this?"  First, they’d be really good at it.  They control the narrative.  Second, it would invite them to treat the narrative as something flexible instead of something written in stone, to see it under construction instead of something that appears only after the fact. 

Needham, the historian of science in China, said, the history of ideas is not the history of thought, it’s the history of men thinking.  Let us change the way we think about shows and brands in just this way. Let us make them not something that is finished and fired, but as something under construction and in process.  This is a way to reach out to our most devoted fans, our earliest adopters, our most passionate consumers.  It’s time to let them behind the curtain that once separated the cultural creation and the world.

I am at the Futures of Entertainment conference at C3 at MIT.  Last night, we listened to two of the guys who write and produce the TV show called Heroes, Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw. 

The revelation last night was to see how far the notion of "transmedia" has come. 

Transmedia is the term for storytelling across multiple forms of media.  Henry Jenkins, the author of the concept, uses The Matrix as a case in point.  The Matrix is a kind of matrix, the narrative now expressed in 3 films, a number of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories and several video games None of this is authoritative.  The Matrix is a transmedia property. 

Jenkins has been talking about this idea for some years.  Indeed this idea, as recently as a couple of years ago, existed chiefly in Jenkins’ head and his MIT ambit.  Fast forward to last night.  Transmedia is now a revenue stream and a business model at NBC.  It is in fact one of the things that makes Heroes possible and profitable.  (It was even hinted that transmedia properties help keep Heroes afloat when its audience numbers soften.)

This is one part of the future that distributed very quickly, from the realm of pure thought at MIT into the economy and an NBC spreadsheet at blinding speed.  Alexander pointed out that this ancillary revenue stream is vastly more interesting than the "merchandizing" that it now rivals as a revenue stream.  Merchandizing in my humble opinion actually manages to diminish  creative accomplishment whereas transmedia is a chance to build it. 

The revelation from this morning’s meeting, for me, was listening to Marc Davis.  Davis is the Social Media Guru at Yahoo.  Davis asked us to contemplate what happens when phones are not just spatially aware but socially aware.  As phone report where we are and what engages us, we have access to a record of attention.

It made me think of San Francisco.  Right now, if we were blimp born, we could tell what interests visits to San Francisco by noticing where the cluster.  We would see for instance that there is something fascinating about fisherman’s wharf. 

A record of attention spares us the blimp and gives us way more information.  Now, we know where people are clustered throughout SanFrancisco on a map with a memory, a selective memory.  Now when I come to this town, I can ask it to tell me where my best friends went, where my most media savvy friends went, where my most culturally savvy friends went.  Now, I know San Francisco through the shared intelligence of friends who got there first. 

Personal applications aside, it’s clear that these interest maps will be sources of social science data, a way to watch patterns forming and reforming as the world "votes with its feet."   The wisdom of crowds made visible.   

References

Jenkins, Henry.  2007.  Transmedia Storytelling 101. Confessions of an Aca-Fan.  The official weblog of Henry Jenkins.  here. 

Jenkins, Henry.  2006a.  Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide.  New York: New York University Press. 

Jenkins, Henry.  2006b.  Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.  New York: New York University Press. 

Transmedia entry at Wikipedia here.

Explanations

I took the picture above while in a museum in Oaxaca.  He is a MesoAmerican athlete who helped stage origin myths in another time.  And the sculpture isn’t actually sculpture.  As nearly as I can tell, it’s a man covered in clay.   Do I have a reason for using it?  Not that I can tell.   

Who is Michael Eisner?  We know this much: until recently he ran Walt Disney Co. 

But important particulars are unclear. 

If you read the press surrounding his last days at Disney and the treatment that appears in DisneyWar, you could be forgiven the impression that Eisner was punching above his weight.  You say to yourself, "Ok, not so smart."

But the interview in today’s Ad Age gives a different impression.  Eisner is smart and penetrating.  You can hear the snap of intelligence, the power of a mind that goes right at things.  You say, "Ah, sighted!" (This intersection in the Venn diagram is underpopulated.  "Real smart" plus "real worldly" is rare.)

Now the question is this: does Michael Eisner know the market place?   More particularly, does he know the cultural aspects of the marketplace?  Ad Age’s Claude Brodesser-Akner’s raises the question.

Ad Age: One of the ironies of spending two decades as the head of a big media conglomerate is that you’re paid to have your finger on the pulse of what’s cool and where popular culture is going, but the job almost makes you the most isolated person on the planet. How does a 65-year-old multimillionaire stay connected to what’s cool these days so that he knows he’s headed in the right direction?

Eisner replies:

Well, we’re all much more connected now by new media, so you’d have to be pretty much brain-dead not to be connected. I have the benefit of being in the baby-boom generation, which was always the largest part of the population. I never spent any time thinking about popular entertainment: I just lived it. And I don’t think about it now. You’re informed by the very nature of being alive. A good story is still a good story.

Eisner says he stays in touch with culture because:

1. he is part of the biggest cohort in our culture, boomers. 

2. he lives his life, and this life is, as all lives are, soaked through by the media streams.

3.The growth of new media, and faster access to old media, gives him access to the information he needs. 

Well, let’s have a look at each of these.

1. Yes, Mr. Eisner is a boomer.  Does this mean he knows about culture. Well, I guess it means he knows about boomer culture.  But are we not obliged to acknowledge that boomers are moving away from contemporary culture at speed.  Symptoms?  They don’t quite get The Simpsons, not to mention Family Guy or American Dad.  In sum, being a boomer means a person is out of touch with contemporary culture.  Chances are the counter culture of the 90s was a mystery. Chances the social networking and new media are a bit of a blur.

2. Yes, everyone’s life is soaked through with media content.  But when I turn on the radio when driving to the store here in Connecticut, what I hear is Van Halen and Kenny Loggins.  "Soaked through," yes.  "In touch with," no. Now, as the former CEO of Disney, Eisner had a seat at a very interested window, to say nothing of access to the best consulting advice money can by.  And this no doubt gives him a deeper knowledge than most of us.  But, notice, he is not claiming this as his defense.

3. Fair enough, the new media give us extraordinary opportunities to stay in touch, from YouTube as the raw feed of contemporary culture, to the many critics and commentators who work these turbulent waters. Maybe he "hooked up" here in ways that make him knowledgeable and prescient. 

So, one of Eisner’s arguments appear patently wrong (perhaps even self incriminatingly so), one of them appears unlikely, and only one appears possible.  Frankly, we would expect an answer more robust. 

What’s troubling is that line, "I don’t think about [culture] now. You’re informed by the very nature of being alive."  As long as there were three networks, a handful of influential newspapers and magazines, with New York and Los Angeles the ports through which innovation had to pass to find its way to the mainsteam, this might work.  But as we know too well, cultural innovation has exploded.  If we want to stay in touch, we have to think about culture now. 

Of course, it’s not clear that Eisner is very different from the average senior manager or CEO.  Cultural competence is not being cultivated by the American corporation.  But now that it’s (belatedly) clear that Eisner is one of the smart ones, one of the decision makers who will insist on depth and clarity, one of the captains of industry who owe their position to special stores of knowledge, well, we want a better answer to Brodesser-Akner’s  question. 

We only need to add a circle to the Venn diagram to see why.  Real advantage will go to those who are real smart, real worldly, and well informed. 

Reference

Brodesser-Akner, Claude.  2007. Eisner on Dentists, Topps and ‘Foolish" Writers Strike.  Ad Age. November 12, 2007.  here.

Stewart, James.  2005.  Disney War.  New York: Simon and Schuster.

Last Note:

Do I need to justify the question asked by Brodesser-Akner?  Here goes. 

Brodesser-Akner’s question is important for the following reasons:

1. culture supplies the foundations & architecture of consumer taste & preference
2. cultural trends help churn consumer taste & preference
3. cultural basics and trends both now change more, more often & less predictably
4. we have to know about culture to be Michael Eisner