Seth Butler has put an exhibit on-line called Tattered.  It offers 51 photographs that investigate what Butler calls the "identity, misuse, commodification and desecration of the American flag."

The stars and stripes have ended up in some very strange places: eye glasses, coffee cups, lawn ornaments, pool filters, sports equipment, "I’m with stupid" t-shirts, wheel covers, beef jerky packages…it’s a long list. 

I understand Mr. Butler’s concern for desecration.  The rules of flag use are frequently abused in my little part of Connecticut.  Flags are allowed to fall into a state of disrepair. They are even allowed to fly in tatters.  They are flown at night without illumination.  They are allowed to touch the ground.  They are improperly folded and stored.  They are treated as boat house decorations.

I’m always appalled.  Even if we don’t care about the flag, the fact that it is something for which people have given their lives, leaves us with no choice.  We must treat it with respect.  And if we do revere the flag, well, maybe we can get off our butts and bring our flag in when it rains.  I’m just saying.

But indignation is not the presiding emotion with which I looked at Butler’s exhibit.  Eventually, I was filled with something more like astonishment.  The stars and stripes in Tattered can be read as American exuberance, ingenuity, imagination, and irreverence.  What can happen to the flag has happened to the flag.  I couldn’t help wondering whether Americans were ever more American than when taking their flag, um, lightly. 

Butler gives us an American flag not so much desecrated as busting out all over. Isn’t this apt?  What better way to give voice to a country that says tradition that must bend to the user, that even icons will be malleable, that even sacred things must enter the secular hurly burly of everyday life?  Reinvention, if there is a defining idea of and for American culture, I think this might be it. 

Disrepair and neglect, there is no defense for these.  But the rest, the hand warmers, book marks, and beach towels, we may think of these as the flag on shore-leave behaving  irrepressibly, irresistibly, irresponsibly and satisfyingly in-character.  Other nations insist on a more reverent approach, well, that’s their problem. 

References

The Seth Butler Tattered exhibit can be found here.

Acknowledgments

The image above is photograph number 28 in the Tattered exhibit.   I thank Seth Butler for permission to use an image from this wonderful exhibit.

Philosophy is famous for lively exam questions.  My favorite is:  "Does this count as a question?"  (One student answered, "Yes, if this counts as an answer.")

I don’t know that anthropology has a tradition of good exam questions.  We’re too earnest, too dutiful. 

But that can change.  In the present issue of New York Magazine, Jacob Rubin tells us about a wonderful experiment he did recently in Union Square.  He went up to strangers and asked a favor.  The object of the exercise: to see how forthcoming New Yorkers would be. 

One of the questions Rubin asked is:

"Would you watch my dog while I run into the health food store and buy yogurt?"

One New Yorker fell to bended knee, and exclaimed,

"Look at you, Mr. Doggy!  Aren’t you a doggy-woggy?"

So that’s my exam question. 

A man approaches a woman in Union Square and asks, "Would you watch my dog while I run into the health food store and buy yogurt?"   

She falls to her knees and says to the dog in question, "Look at you, Mr. Doggy!  Aren’t you a doggy-woggy?" 

Please unpack.

For non-anthropologists, "unpack" means supply the cultural assumptions that are (probably) at work here.  We would expect students to supply underlying cultural notions that would help a visitor from Indonesia (or Mars, for that matter) to grasp what happened in Union Square. 

I am hoping this wouldn’t be necessary but we could add questions like the following: 

Who is the speaker addressing?  Why the "Mr."?  What’s a "doggy-woggy"?  What’s with the honorific (Mr.) and the diminutive (doggy-woggy)? Conversations carry assumptions, and assumptions construct the people conversing.  How does this speech construct these speakers? 

Ok, here’s the deal.  In the spirit of Russell Davies’ I hereby post this question.  Submit your answer to me at grant27 [at] mit [dot] edu.  You answer should be less than 800 words.  The due date for answer is January 5, 2008.  (Thanks, Juri.)  I will prize answers that find a sweet spot between power and precision.  The winning answer will be posted at this website.    The prize will be a gift token from Amazon.com for $100.00 and something commemorative.  I might ask John Deighton to help judge the answers.  He’s especially good at this sort of thing.   Russell, too, if he’s willing.  Actually, come to think of it, I might post the best three answers and let This Blog Sits readers decide.  We shall see. 

You may pick up your pencils…wait for it…now! 

A man approaches a woman in Union Square and asks, "Would you watch my dog while I run into the health food store and buy yogurt?"

She falls to her knees and says to the dog in question, "Look at you, Mr. Doggy!  Aren’t you a doggy-woggy?" 

Please unpack.

Reference

Rubin, Jakob.  2007.  Because we’re not actually that rude.  New York Magazine.  December 24-31, 2007, p. 66.

When does the anthropologist know that the culture is question is really in question? 

When key players, players with incumbency and great advisers, throw up their hands and say, "I dunno.  Things are changing.  And we can’t say how."

I am no guarantee that a movie is going to be a success.  …  The audience has become smart about stars.  So it’s chaos out there now.  Nobody has any idea why people are going to see a movie.  Nobody knows what’s going to be a hit or what’s going go be irrelevant.  There are no new models.  The new paradigm in Hollywood is that there is no new paradigm.  (Tom Hanks in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly.)

Now, we could be listening to a celebrity who wants to express reticence or apology for the current project (in the case, Charlie Wilson’s War).  Or this may merely reflect Hollywood’s puzzlement over the failure of recent war movies (The Kingdom, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, A Mighty Heart). 

But if we are hearing a deep indeterminacy in the world of Hollywood, something remarkable is upon us.  After all, Hollywood is good at listening, good at responding to the moment, good at finding a way to speak to shifting taste and preference of Americans, whatever these tastes and preferences are.  If Hollywood has lost the thread, something’s up.

There are three possibilities:

1) tastes and preferences are in transition.  And, God knows, this happens.  Trends make their way through our culture.  One Easy Rider and all bets are off.

2) tastes and preferences are now indiscernible. They are out there.  But our powers of pattern recognition are modest and we can’t see them.

3) tastes and preferences are so disaggregated that a mass medium like film making can no longer count upon the mass audiences needed to manage an acceptable return on an investment of $ 100 million dollars.  (This is the average cost of a Hollywood film.  I’m sure Charlie Wilson’s War was much more.)

You choose.

References

Svetkey, Benjamin.  War Games.  Entertainment Weekly.  December 21, 2007.  pp. 29-37, p. 37.

This morning I found myself thinking about Fire Eagle, the new GPS status casting site coming this fall from Yahoo.  What, I wanted to know, is a "fire eagle"?

Then I start thinking about Firefox.  I remember the first time I heard this term, I thought "what?" and then it settled without further complaint into consciousness.  "Firefox."  I had no idea what it meant.  But I got finally that it meant something, and decided finally that it meant quite well.

And then "fire dogs."  This is an in-home technology advice service offered by Circuit City.  They are trying to catch up to Best Buy, and the spectacularly successful innovation created by Robert Stephens in 1994 called Geek Squad. 

Now, "fire dogs" is I think a metaphor from the fire house.  A fire dog is the Dalmatian that rides to the aid of humans in need.  As in "Sparky the fire dog."

But Firefox?  And Fire Eagle?   These might be a a nod in the direction of Joss Whedon and his TV series, the underground hit, called Firefly (Fox 2002).  Except that fireflies actually exists, we have seen them, we know exactly what they mean.  Or this may be an American construction lost on a Canadian anthropologist.

As a naming strategy, I think I see what’s happening here.  A Firefox and a Fire Eagle are counter intuitive in exactly the right proportions.  These names resist comprehension but only just.  They are counter intuitive, but not unintelligible.  In the first moment of exposure, we don’t quite get them…and this prevents them from washing over us and out into that sea of forgettable branding and marketing.  Comprehension is held up just long enough for the new name to lock into memory.  As branding becomes more subtle, we will see more and more of this. 

Firefox and Fire Eagle sound a little like mythical creatures, the sort of thing we might hear about from the mythic worlds of North American aboriginals, classical Greece, or ancient Scandinavia.   And this works too.  Natural creatures with supernatural powers, this makes sense.  Ordinary creatures with extraordinary powers.  Mythic creatures that make periodic appearances in the human world.   

Later in the morning, I read that NBC is returning some $10 million to advertisers, because it failed to make its audience numbers. 

CBS chief research officer David Poltrack says the four major broadcast networks have seen live viewing decline 8% for households and viewers. "Viewers currently are skipping about 60% of commercials during playback…"

Viewers choosing whether to watch ads?  A way of recording whether and when they do so?  A network giving money back?  Marketing being held to account?  Lord in heaven, our world is changing.  Many of the old bets are off. 

And the Fire-prefix came rushing back for an encore in consciousness.  Our world is quietly in crisis.  We are watch old institutions like advertisers and networks forced to change the very nature of how they do business.  We watching as the new media work their way through our customs and our culture.  It’s inexorable and sometimes devastating. 

Maybe this is why a mythological naming appeals to us.  It is a little as if we have been returned to a mythical world, or a human world shot through with mythical interventions.  As our world is turned upside down by the new technologies, it does begin to feel like a place occupied by creatures capricious and unpredictable, spectacular but often unintelligible, sometimes intervening on our behalf but just as often unkind to our kind.  If we were to put a face to the digital revolution, maybe this it: hybrid creatures with fantastic powers engaging in spectacular interventions in the human world, but rarely possessed of anything more than a casual interest in human welfare.  Yes, I believe that does resemble my world.  You? 

References

Anonymous.  2007.  NBC pays out to advertisers over ratings shortfall.  WARC.  December 14, 2007.

Status casting.  What a lovely term.  We know what it means at a glance.  It is process by which we let the world know of our existence, our condition, our location, our intentions.  Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Dopplr, MySpace, all of these allow us to status cast. 

I first heard this term from Marc Davis.  I heard Marc speak a couple of weeks ago at the MIT C3 "Futures of entertainment" conference.  This is one wonderfully smart, well informed fella, and I sat there thinking, why is this the first I am hearing of him?  At Jerry Michalski’s get-together, I heard a guy called Christian Crumlish, Yahoo’s "pattern detective," and thought the same thing. 

Is there something in Yahoo culture that insists on hiding its lights under a bushel?  Does this corporation work under deep cover?  If Yahoo is smart enough to hire people this talented, why isn’t it smart enough to publicize them?  They "add value" like crazy and some of the credit should go to the company that sustains them.

Forget Yahoo.  Doesn’t the world distribute more successfully than this?  Isn’t that the point of all these new networks?  Davis and Crumlish are exactly the guys the new technologies should help us find.  These are status-casts I would like to follow.  Apparently, our status-casting still has some considerable way to go. 

Anyhow, Marc says he heard "status casting" from Leonard Lin, the co-founder of Upcoming.org.  I sent Leonard an email asking where he heard it.  He’s now checking.  (Thank you, Christian for Leonard’s address.)  Here’s the latest as of December 19, 2007: Leonard and Edward Ho recall using the term "status casting" while working together in the summer of 07.  They make no claim to being the originators of the term, and suppose that it was in wide circulation. 

When we status-cast, we’re a little like animals.  As I argued in my post on the "puzzle of exhaust data" I suggested that one way to think about exhaust data was to treat it as phatic communication.  (In humans and other animals, phatic communication consists in non-verbal gestures and small, sub-linguistic noises.  Murmurs, shouts, groans, all of these are phatic.)  We can say that tiny posts on twitter are phatic, too. You may not care that I am "feeding my cat."  But knowing this tells you I exist, my location, my condition, my, er, status.  Twitter data are not "exhaust data" precisely because they serve this locational purpose. 

When we status-cast, we are also a little like machines, like those brave little Mars probes phoning home periodically before they eventually disappear from view.  It’s a good metaphor, I think, because we live in a world so reckless with risk and dynamism that it is probably wrong to assume that our friends and acquaintances are safe and sound.  Maybe it’s just me playing the fretful Canadian, but I worry about people. 

I mean, I haven’t talked to Tom Guarriello in a week or so.  How is he?  What about the Russell Davies who is, I believe, away and offline?  What about Jan Chipchase, the hardest working man in anthropology, the James Brown of the social sciences.  This guy is on the road almost all the time.  I am still not sure what happened to Geoffrey Frost, the man who saved Motorola, but I think it had something to do with the punishments of life of the road, life in a fast lane.  (There but for the grace of…)

But you don’t have to be on the road to be in harm’s way.  The subprime debacle puts us all at risk.  Any one of us could find our livelihoods disappearing out from under us.  In the old days, you could make assumptions about the persistence of someone’s good fortune.  In the old days, we could make some enduring assumptions about Buddy’s well being.  These days even Buddy’s career is the plaything of unpredictable events and global forces.

I like the idea of people throwing off signals, casting their status, phoning home.  I mean, it’s a cruel world out there.  There’s lots of chatter in our world about persistent virtual worlds.  At the moment, I’m more concerned with persistent friends. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  How Social Networks Work: The Puzzle of Exhaust Data.  The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  July 19, 2007.  here. 

CBS is planning to use Dexter to fill the programming hole left by the writers’ strike. (Dexter is a Showtime series now in its second season.)  The Parents Television Council thinks this is a bad idea, claiming CBS is driven by "corporate greed" and that Dexter turns a serial killer into a hero. 

This is the sort of thing that gives the Right a bad name.  Dexter is not a celebration of violence.  It does not encourage us to admire a serial killer. Only a knucklehead or an opportunist would suppose otherwise.

Dexter offers an absorbing what-if study.  What if, it asks, evil were domesticated for good.  It tells the story of a young man who kills animals without remorse.  His adoptive father, a policeman, understands that he has a choice: to turn his son in or put this pathology to a useful purpose.  He chooses the latter course, effectively creating a "secret weapon" in the war on crime.  His son is a monster who now kills monsters like himself.  His pathology is now a thing of discipline and purpose used against pathologies that have no discipline or purpose. 

So there is something sociologically interesting about Dexter. But it is also a chance for moral self scrutiny.  We are startled to find ourselves empathizing with a man who has no idea what empathy feels like.  We catch ourselves briefly rooting for a guy who is a monster, plain and simple.  Dexter is not a celebration of violence, but a chance for us to contemplate it and our response to it.  (The NBC’s series Life is a second opportunity of this kind.)  (Have another look at the poster for the show [above].  I believe that’s what they mean by the phrase, "dead hand of competence.")

Somehow one feels contemplation is not a strong suit at the Parents Television Council.  I wondered whether the people at Parents Television Council watch television.  Do they actually have a television?  Now that popular culture is our culture, and now that programs like Dexter and Life take on "big questions," it is time to treat the likes of Parents Television Council as they philistines they manifestly are. 

References

Hibberd, James.  2007.  Parents Television Council Denounces CBS’s ‘Dexter" Plan.  Ad Age.  December 5, 2007.  here.

Big news this morning for fans of good television.

The Hollywood Reporter reports "The Wire" is issuing 3 short films produced by creator David Simon.  These "prequels" are now available at Amazon.com.  They are free.  (Click here.)

Have we seen Amazon used as the delivery mechanism in this way before?  Another channel opens!  Have we seen prequels used in this way?  The transmedia project expands!

References

McCracken, Grant. 2004.  Complexity on TV.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  September 15, 2004.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  Pop Culture Lifts Off.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.   December 15, 2004.  here.

Wallenstein, Andrew.  2007. ‘Wire’ plus in VOD vignettes.  The Hollywood Reporter.  December 5, 2007

At Thanksgiving, my sister-in-law suggested that we all give to charity instead of giving to one another.  Some of us will use the new philanthropic technologies to do this: Donors Choose.com or one of the micro credit loaning sites. 

What has happened here?  Gift giving in North America is becoming more general and philanthropy elsewhere is becoming more specific.  What used to be really vague is now particular.  What used to be really particular is now quite vague.  We have relocated the particular, sent it off shore. 

Yesterday, I heard about something called micro arbitrage.  This is investment activity by people who detect a stock on the upswing.  They buy this stock and hold it for… a couple of seconds.  (That’s what the … signifies in this case.)  For them day trading is like an ice age. They make tiny fractions of time pay handsomely and they do. 

We have seen other instances of this hyper differentiation.  The death of mass culture and the rise of plenitude makes for lots of little social and cultural distinctions.  The possibility of niche marketing does something like the same.  Customization everywhere means that we now make distinctions where before we could or would not.  Some part of the world, the local world, is parsing ever more finely.   Blogging has replaced 10,000 journalists with 1,000,000 journalists. 

This is a kind of inversion.  At the top end of things, globalization collapses differences, making countries once very different from one another more and more alike.  And the bottom, finer distinctions become ever finer. 

I am not sure I am ready for this.  I am still working on the old typologies, trying to master the old architectures of knowledge.  If what we are saying is that we now will generalize where once we were particular and particularize where once we were general, well, I am not sure I’m following you. 

References

Wikipedia on microcredit here.