Across the street from TED this year in Monterey, California will be a competing conference called BIL.

BIL stands for Beauty. Ingenious. Learning.  It is described as an

open self organizing, emergent,and anarchic science and technology conference. 

Nobody is in charge.

If you want to come, just show up.

If you have an idea to spread, start talking.

If someone is saying something interesting, stop and listen.

BIL is too kind hearted to say so, but the implication is that TED is part of the problem it means to solve.  TED is top down, centralized, hierarchical, elite driven, celebrity centered, and, at $6000 a ticket, really expensive. 

It would have been one thing if BIL merely existed in the world.  But to set up shop across the street from TED?  On the very two days that TED is running?  This is agit prop.  This is mischief.  BIL appears to be the idea jamboree it says it is.  But it is also very clearly means to make itself an opportunity for comparison. 

References

For more on the BIL conference here and here. 

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Thomas Hawk for the photo of Lady Birds convening.   

Shows like Law and Order are ubiquitous, our constant companions on air. This makes them hard to see, and therefore hard to reckon with.

It helps to take a look at the numbers.  Law and Order has been on the air since 1990 with over 400 episodes now “in the can.”  It has done well, averaging better than 10 million viewers an episode.  A rough calculation tells us that the original series has been seen 4,000,000,000 times, and many people will watch an episode more than once (wittingly or not). 

But saturation does not appear to have exhausted our appetite for the show.  New episodes continue to pour from NBC.  There are variations on the theme: Law and Order: Criminal Intent and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. New shows and reruns play on TNT, USA Network, Bravo!, and Turner Broadcasting.  On an ordinary day, there are  6 hours of Law and Order running on TV. 

If we take all three series together, there are 740 extant episodes of Law and Order.  This means that, if we wanted to, we could play a unique episode of Law and Order every hour of every day for a month.  All Law and Order all the time for a month.  Now that’s a marathon.

The answer to the popularity and staying power of this franchise must be known to its founder Dick Wolf.  The rest of us will have to resort to speculation.  My guess is that this show is a genre within a genre within a genre.  It is constrained by formula, right down to the wisecrack that ends the first segment, and the "chung CHUNG" signature sound that opens each scene.  There is something deeply comforting about a world as predictable as this.  To borrow a line from an old milk campaign in Canada, the fast the world gets, the more sense Law and Order makes. 

But this explanation surely is not robust enough to explain 740 episodes and 4 billion viewings.  It’s not enough to explain the deep familiarity with the show possessed even by those who claim "I never watch it."  Like the Antiques Road show I talked about last week, EVERYONE watches Law and Order.  A lot. 

It never fails to amaze me how often academics over sherry, after protesting the fact that they don’t have a TV, that they do have a TV but they don’t get cable, that they do get cable but they "never watch anything," eventually to demonstrate a Talmudic mastery of Law and Order trivia and compete with one another to demonstrate a superior grasp of the casting intricacies that characterized the early years of the show.   (Everyone, apparently, likes to be the first to note how much more interesting Ben Stone was as a character than Jack McCoy.)  It’s not long before the sherry has inspired a full account of every character and every actor.  Cast your eyes right and you will see a wonderful chart from Wikipedia.  Somehow it’s just not the same without the sherry, but here it is.  Every character in every role. 

Thoughts on the mysteries of Law and Order are most welcome. 

References

Law and Order on wikipedia here. 

Law and Order, the franchise on wikipedia here. 

Dick Wolf according to wikipedia here. 

Lee Goldberg on the improved state of the present season here. 

This is one of the mysteries of popular culture.  The Antiques Roadshow gets 10 – 11 million viewers a week.  This makes it the pride of the PBS fleet. 

Just to put this is proportion, let’s point out that network TV thinks 8 million viewers is a great showing.  Cable is impressed with 4 million.  Eleven million on education TV? Astonishing.   

And there more.  People call the Antique Roadshow a "guilty pleasure." And this means few people admit to watching it.  People don’t talk about it around the water cooler.  There is almost no "buzz."  This means AR got to it’s massive popularity with very little word of mouth.  And that makes it huger still.

Apparently, AR has arresting properties.  It’s just plain fascinating, in the words of one blogger, "compulsively watchable." 

But why?  On the face of it, this is "talking head" television of the worst kind.  And it’s about "old things."  Shot in a church basement or a high school gym, the production values are virtually nil.  There are no special effects.  No beautiful people.   No car chases.  No athletics.  No scandal.  No titillation.  No sex.  No sizzle of any kind.  It’s people talking about something carted out of a garage or an attic.  Very low amperage.  Under normal circumstances, this would be barely enough to sustain consciousness let alone a TV show. 

I clipped a couple of quotes from the blogosphere and these help.

1) There is a sense of demographic trespass. 

I don’t know what it is about that show but i watch it all the time…and i mean actually watch it, not that i just have it on as background noise. and i enjoy it. no…i’m not 70 years old.  (Amy)

2) some sense that this show can be joyful

I don’t actively seek this show out.  But if I turn the TV on, and PBS is Antiques Roadshowin’ it up, I CANNOT RESIST.  I must watch, and squee at the things that turn out to be worth huge sums of money.  And then!  The people are so happy!  And it makes me happy to see that.  A lady just brought in a painting she’d bought for $400 and had restored for $600-900.  AND IT TURNED OUT TO BE BY ONE OF THE FIRST HAWAIIAN ARTISTS TO PAINT IN A WESTERN STYLE, AND HE ONLY DID LIKE 5 OR 6 PAINTINGS.  AND THEN IT WAS WORTH $100,000-$150,000!  And it made me happy, and she cried, and I cried on the inside out of happiness for her. I’M WEIRD. (Joie)

3) some sense that the show can level those who are arrogant

the BEST part is when some uppity person comes in and they think they have something rare and valuable worth thousands of dollars and they give them the (incredibly polite) smackdown that its worth about $2.75.  (Steve Betz)

4) some sense that the show combines the everyday and the historical as well as the expert and the civilian. 

I think it is the fact that there is so much lost history that is rediscovered by everyday people.  (Cubsfan)

5) it sounds as if the show amuses when its  staid exterior is punctured by participant loss of control

I [...] take pleasure in watching people throw hissy fits because great grandma’s momma’s daddy’s pocketwatch was a fake and actually created in Japan about 1972.  (Grunt)

But surely this just begins to scratch the surface. 

References

Amy.  2006.  guilty pleasures.  Live Journal.  January 22, 2006. here. 

Bly, Jenn.  2007.  Naked Mole Rat.  Moonlight Masquerade.  December 03, 2007. here. 

Betz, Steve.  2007  Comment on Is This a Guilty Pleasure.  September 17, 2007.  here. 

CubsFan.  2008.  Treasure Found.  Cats, Cubs, Bears, Battlestar Galactica. here. 

Grunt.  2006.  Stop the Insanity.  Two Pink Flamingos and a Doubly-wide. here. 

Joie.  2007.  Is this a quilty pleasure.  Wish I was an English muffin.  Sept. 16. 2007.  here. 

Lana Swartz, a colleague at MIT, has an interesting response to the Things That Don’t Go Together game.  (see the post for Wednesday).  I was suggesting that Dave Eggers and Alan Alda were distant points on our culture map.  Lana disagreed. 

I don’t know, Grant…

My guess is that is goes a little something like this:

Eggers/McSweeneys is very NPR

NPR is very West Wing/Alda

Not too far a walk!

I like the idea of forge a path between points on the map, in this case between Dave Eggers and Alan Alda.  The point is to show that for all their disparity, these people occupy contiguous space. 

How about this? 
1) Alan Alda to Robert Altman
    (Mash is the connection. Altman directed the movie version, Alda acted in the TV version)
2) Robert Altman to Hal Hartley (a more alternative American director than Altman)
3) Hal Hartley to Jim Jarmusch
4) Jim Jarmusch to Douglas Coupland
5) Douglas Coupland to, say, Bill Buford (editor of Granta, author of Heat)
6) Bill Buford to [blank, help please]
7) [blank] to Dave Eggers

Ok, it’s not perfect.  Some of these links are not just a "stretch" but a leap.

This game tests our knowledge of contemporary culture and it gives advantage to the  generalist.  We need more generalists.  (See the work of Eric Nehrlich, below, on this point).

Rules of the game:

a) People named in links don’t have to have a connection.  This is not a "6 degrees of separation" exercise.  They need only be proximate, i.e., within shouting distance of one another in cultural space.  (And in any case, we are not looking only for people, but also for institutions, events, movements and trends.)   

b) There is a sufficiency rule.  We must have at least 6 links.

c) There is a parsimony rule.  We mustn’t have more than 10 links.  (This is to discourage showing off and other trivial pursuits.)

d) There is a distribution rule.  Points have to be fairly spaced.  No bunching up where we know things and passing over where we don’t. 

e) We are allowed to leave blanks.  We are allowed to be hazy.  This is to give us a chance to admit the limits of our knowledge and seek help from others.

f)  We want to open our maps to the contribution of others.  Collaboration is encouraged, and indeed the only way to build good maps. 

This would make a dandy website.  Where we go show off our maps, post challenges, share knowledge, and otherwise refine the art of culture mapping.

We would hope to attract a variety of people the better to divide the labor. 

a) Those, say, who are good at identifying far flung points.  These tend to come up when you are thinking about other things.  Mr. Rogers and a Senate subcommittee, say.  The website would allow us to register these antimonies for others to "map."

b) Those specialists who are really good at tough links.  Leora Kornfeld comes to mind with her encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture.  Conspiring with the formidable Nardwar, the Human Serviette, she would be invisible. (Leora will have things to say about my Alda-Eggers map, I’m sure.) 

c) speed players who’s work is cheap, fast and out of control.

d) the deep thinkers who can be relied upon to dwell in encyclopedic space for long periods in their efforts to find the link juste. 

The long term effect of this sort of thing could be interesting.  One of these days we could bundle together all the good maps to create a cartography, a longitude and latitude of our culture now. 

References

Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist, here. 

The "Things That Don’t Go Together" Game, Installment 2.  This blog sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  February 18, 2008.  here.

I was looking at the Amazon.com entry for Dave Eggers’s book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Part way down the page, Amazon offered one of its "Best Value" recommendations.  (It’s one of those "buy this second book for a price reduction" kind of things.)  The second book was by Alan Alda’s Never Have your Dog Stuffed and Other Things I’ve Learned.  (Sorry this image is so little.  Clicking on it may help.)

If there are two things that don’t go together it’s Dave Eggers and Alan Alda. 

Eggers is a network of activities, large pieces loosely joined, and these include his fiction (most recently What is What), a publishing house (McSweeney’s), his non fiction (most recently, Surviving Justice), his literary journal (McSweeney’s), teaching (at 826 Valencia), screen writing, artwork (for Thrice), whistling (on Aimee Mann’s forthcoming album), and editing (see his The Best American Nonrequired Reading series). 

Alda is an actor and most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series Mash. He has won 5 Emmies, 6 Golden Globes and one academy award nomination. Alda was born Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo in the Bronx in 1936.  He survived Polio as a child, went to school in White Plains, graduated from Fordham, and served in Korea.  He was perhaps the most genial celebrity of the 1970s and 1980s, and he was for many a model of the new male when gender categories were really in flux. 

Clearly, they are both gifted players in the cultural domain.  But trying to think about them at the same time is hard.  Ok, it’s impossible. So of course we don’t.  We are dissonance shy.  Trying to think of Eggers and Alda in the same thought, it’s a good way to f*ck yourself up.

More grandly, it’s all very Foucault out of Borges.  Recall the encyclopedia taxonomy that caught their attention, the one that divides animals into the following categories: a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, … k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.  Foucault chuckled at this, asking us to consider the "sheer impossibility of thinking that." 

Eggers and Alda are only a taxonomy of two categories, but it still confronts us with the "sheer impossibility of thinking that."

Of course, if you are a post modernist, you confront this odd couple with the sure conviction that the epistemological sky is falling.  This is all very well for those snobs from the continent, the ones who are all too happy to dance on the grave of Western culture.  (And let us forget our suspicions of a hidden motive, specically that if the France and its intellectuals are not going direct Western culture, as appeared to be inevitable in the 19th century, damn it, then no one’s going to.)  But this won’t do for the hard working social scientist who has actually to account for his or her findings, and then press them into service in the world.

And it is precisely here that things that don’t go together make themselves useful.  They force us to put two pins at either ends of the map and to marvel at how much terrain there is between.  There are two possibilities.  One of them is a kind of Clay Shirky problem.  This one says what if we insist that this is a problem, how do we discover a hidden commonality.  What does this new category tell us about the world?  This is another way of reverse programming the Amazon pairing routine. 

The other is the more frankly anthropological problem.  In this case, we marvel out of different, how obviously anti-categorical these items are.  And now we really have our world cut out for us.  What if we had to give driving instructions to a Martian, so that it could traverse all that distance between Eggers and Alda. Where would we start?  What would we say? 

References

Dave Eggers according to Wikipedia here. 

Dave Eggers according to McSweeneys here. 

Alan Alda according to Wikipedia here. 

Foucault, Michel.  2001.  The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the human sciences.  New York: Routledge. 

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Mr. Rogers, the US Senate, Mary Baker Eddy, a sneaker sanctum: just another day in the neighborhood.  {installment 1 of the "things that don’t go together" game.]  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  February 1, 2008.  here. 

My Valentine gave me a book today called The Company of Strangers by Gus Powell.  Pam and I had seen Powell’s photographs at the Museum of the City of New York a couple of weeks ago and we were wowed by how very good his work is. 

This book demonstrates how much anthropological work there is to be done, and that it is open to anyone prepared to engage in simple acts of observation.  Clearly Powell is extravagantly talented as a photographer but some of the power of his work comes I think from a willingness to notice what the rest of us let slip by.  That is to say, there is a Pepysian project here that invites the participation not only of the likes of a Pepys or a Powell, but anyone prepared to pick up a camera or a pen.  Lunch hour anthropology is open to everyone.

And I particularly love the constraint Powell puts in place.  After his inspiration Frank O’Hara, he asks, "what can I see in an hour?"  A constraint of this kind prevents us from being overwhelmed by everything that needs noticing "out there."  A little act of discipline makes the project manageable and this in turns makes the project possible.  I’m going to try it today: one hour, one act of noticing, one act of noticing somehow recorded.   (As it turns out, it was fun, and I have posted the result at a Ning social networking page called "Lunch Hour Anthropology."  Link below)

Powell describes his lunch hour project in the Afterward to the Company of Strangers.  Here’s what he says. 

In the mid 1950′s Frank O’Hara wrote a book called Lunch Poems.  Each day he would step out of his mid-town office, walk his way to the Olivetti typewriter showroom, and band out a poem about "the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon."  For the past few years I have worked behind a desk not far from where O’Hara once sat.  After I was given O’Hara’s book my lunch breaks started to get longer.  Sliding out of the revolving door I found myself transformed into a hungry sailor with one hour of liberty from his ship.  Some days the sidewalk offered a dramatic or romantic one act play; a pedestrian might fall, a couple might kiss…but most of the time I was looking at people who walked towards and away from me.  The quiet gestures of strangers in daylight became significant, and these photographs became my lunch pictures. G.P.

References

For photographs from Powell’s Lunch Pictures, go to his website here. 

The Gus Powell exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York is up till March 16, 2008. 

Powell, Gus.  2007.  The Company of Strangers.  Atlanta: J & L Books.  This book may be purchased from the J and L Books website here.  It is also available from Amazon.com here.

The Ning Social Networking page for Lunch Hour Anthropology is here. 

Thanks to DVR, I am catching up with episodes of The Wire.  In what is I think the penultimate episode, there is a wonderfully cheeky moment in which The Wire plays us like a suburban Dad who happens to have wandered into the "wrong part of town."

Lester Freamon (Clark Peters) and Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) are installing a wire in a telephone exchange.  It looks complicated with a mess of wires running in all directions. 

It looks complicated and it sounds complicated.  Lester gives one of his professorial accounts, but Jimmy isn’t sure he gets it.  He says something like "I think I’m a pretty smart guy, but you’re going to have to run that one past me again." 

And at this, every viewer, or at least this viewer, gives a sigh of relief.  We didn’t get it either, and we are grateful that one of the characters are giving to step out of scene and almost out of character to explain it to us.  This is what Mike Myers calls an appearance of Dr. Exposition, after than Bond character who comes in and explains everything.  (Let’s be honest, even Shakespeare will do this sort of thing.  That would be Sir Exposition.)

But no!  This is The Wire.  And of course it never breaks from scene or character.  It’s so deep in, so committed to its moment, it will never stop to give us the 411.  Ever.  So just is just The Wire f*cking with us, in the manner of a little moment of police humor.  Lester explains himself, but the explanation is way more complicated and mystifying than the original.  The Wire treats the series as another participant in the neighborhoods and networks of Baltimore.  There are some things you get.  There are some things you don’t.  Just because you’re watching TV doesn’t give us a privileged point of view.

Take that, you craven, pop culture, have it your way, consumer of the televisual.  The Wire and David Simon stop for no man.  But it’s not above scorning us for wishing that it would.  Just to remind us how good and necessary The Wire has become as a precursor of the new popular culture.

I was talking to Mary Walker, a Silicon Valley-based anthropologist, about the proposed (now improbable) deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, and we were wondering how such a deal would work itself out. 

Mergers and acquisitions are fraught with difficulty and Mary was pointing out that the failure rate is sometimes as high as 60%.  And this is after tough minded MBAs have examined the deal with their own particularly sophisticated, sighted, numerate version of due diligence.

When things go bad in a merger or an acquisition, the problem is sometimes not with the mechanics, not with the infrastructure of the deal.  The problem is with the superstructure of the deal, the ideas, practices and cultures that must now be brought together for things to work.  We are still inclined to suppose that mergers and acquisitions are straight forward, that the individuals who must now work together need merely resort to an instrumental logic to find common cause and a shared modus operandi. 

But of course the truth is often otherwise.  Corporations are cultural, drawing their answer to the Levittian question (what business are we in), and the Druckerian one (what customer are we for) from the vision of the founder, the history of the enterprise, the region of the country.  Even the business school that supplies the C suite can make a difference here.  I think it’s safe to say Microsoft and Yahoo see the world differently and that a rapprochement would have been challenging. 

The business to business relationship is always richer and more complicated than the transactional model we have of it.  But the business in business relationship is still more challenging.  Now a start-up must figure out a way to fit itself into the massive processes that organize and run the larger corporation.  For someone who is accustomed to creating policy and building consensus over beers after work, the ways of the acquiring corporation can seem mysterious indeed.  Mysterious and deeply gratuitous.  Process run wild.  System for the sake of system.

But the problem is not just large acquiring small.  The merger of two roughly comparable operations will be tricky.  Much of what makes the corporation make sense and run smoothly resides in a shared set of assumptions and because these are assumptions they are most submerged.  They operate a lot like the rules of language. They operate more powerfully for the fact that they operate invisibly. The company that has to sit down and negotiate its assumptions each day would end up looking quite a lot like an undergraduate philosophy class and it would be out of business by the end of the quarter. 

But submerged assumptions are hard to detect or communicate.  This means that those who will be absorbed by the merger or acquisition have no clear play book to follow.  They are obliged at first to guess at the new culture.  Their best hope finally is to reverse engineer from the behavior they encounter on the job, and build up the assumptions that must be operating in other heads.  One thing they CAN take for granted, that no one in the acquiring corporation is going to do the same for them.

This is, finally, not a very complicated anthropological problem.  But for some reason it appears to be a very real M&A one.  Hmmm.  Now I wonder if this could be a merger opportunity. 

References

Walker, Mary.  2008.  Mergers and acquisitions: when corporate cultures collide.  Open range anthropologist.  February 11, 2008.  here. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Richard C. Moeur for the image which comes from his Manual of Traffic Signs at www.trafficsign.us.