Archive for April, 2008
Transformations
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It’s out! I’m not sure when it hits bookstores. But Transformations can now be ordered from Amazon.com. No kidding. No waiting. Hurray.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2008. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. At Amazon here.
James Twitchell, plagiarist
Posted by: | CommentsHere are two passages. See if you notice a similarity.
Passage 1:
This essay begins with Diderot sitting in his study bemused and melancholic. Somehow this study has undergone a transformation. It was once crowded, humble, chaotic and happy. It is now elegant, organized, beautifully appointed, and a little grim. Diderot suspects the cause of the transformation is his new dressing gown. (McCracken, 1988)
Passage 2:
As he looked from his desk and glanced around his study, Diderot noticed that it had been transformed by mysterious forces. It was once crowded, humble, chaotic, and happy. Now it was elegant, organized, and a little grim. What happened? [new para.] Diderdot suspected that the cause of the transformation was right before his eyes. It was a new dressing gown. (Twitchell, 2002)
James Twitchell is a professor of literature at the University of Florida. He is a prolific author. He is also a plagiarist.
The revelation of this behavior begins with Roy Rivenburg, former Los Angeles Times reporter. Rivenburg discovered Twitchell had used his, Rivenburg’s, work as his own.
A reporter for the Gainsville Sun, Jack Stripling picked up the story, and the results appeared Friday.
It appears Twitchell has stolen widely and I am in distinguished company, including Rivenburg, Leslie Earnest, Peter Van Ham, Lance Morrow, Joseph Pine and Virginia Postrel. (See Virginia’s post on this topic below.)
Twitchell claimed that passages borrowed for his book Shopping For God (2007) were only "little snippets" confined to a single chapter, the result of mere "sloppiness."
But "snippets" also appear in his 2002 book, Living It Up where he appears to have borrowed from a Harvard Business Review article by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, and a Reason article by Virginia Postrel. Branded Nation (2004) has some too. (Stripling has a good review. Link below.)
This was witting behavior. Twitchell sent Postrel the manuscript of Living It Up to ask for a blurp. She noticed Twitchell’s use of the Diderot Effect and asked him to acknowledge me. Twitchell did not. According to Stripling, Twitchell claims that Diderot Effect "has become such common parlance in his area of study that he wasn’t even sure who coined it." Really? But his use of my exact words tells us he was acquainted with its origin.
According to Stripling, the University of Florida did not act with dispatch.
After Rivenburg made contact with Twitchell, Twitchell told his department chair about the problem. But Pamela Gilbert, the chairwoman, did not forward along the allegations to UF’s Office of Research to begin a misconduct investigation.
Simon & Schuster is not pulling books from the shelf, as they have done in other cases. Adam Rothberg, spokesperson for Simon & Schuster, is promising correction for "the paperback edition." I wonder if the threat of legal action by the offended authors might concentrate the editorial mind?
References
McCracken, Grant. 1988. Diderot Unities and the Diderot Effective. In Culture and Consumption I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 118-129.
Postrel, Virginia. 2008. If You’re Going to Steal My Prose, At Least Keep My Facts. Dynamist Blog. April 27, 2008. here.
Stripling, Jack. UF professor Twitchell admits he plagiarized in several of his books. Gainsville Sun. April 25, 2008. here.
Grand Larceny II
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Thanks to a shout out from 2Blowhards, the post several days ago on “stealing movies” is getting some attention online. (The question was, “Who has stolen the most movie with the smallest part?”)
I am grateful for this attention, and it occurs to me that the comments for the piece open up the opportunity for further comment.
Here’s is the whole list, grouping suggestions from the post with suggestions from the comments.
Holly Hunter in Time Code
Steve Zahn in Out of Sight
Selma Blair in Cruel Intentions
Siobhan Fallon in Men in Black
Brad Pit in Thelma & Louise (Rick Liebling)
Brad Pit in True Romance (Keven Lofty)
Joan Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank (Keven Lofty)
Blutto (Ole)
Mickey Rourke in Body Heat (Communicatrix)
Chris Rock in I’m Going to Git You Sucka (Communicatrix)
Meryl Streep in Manhattan (Communicatrix)
Bill Murray in Tootsie (Mike Madison)
Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles (Mike Madison)
Joan Cusack in Working Girl (Mike Madison)
Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross (Bryan)
R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket (Bryan)
J.K. Simmons in Spider-Man (Bryan)
Don Cheadle in Devil with a Blue Dress on (MHB)
Sharon Stone in Total Recall (SRP)
Steve Buscemi in Miller’s Crossing (Virtual Memories)
Steve Buscemi in Billy Madison (James)
Brad Pitt in True Romance (JewishAtheist)
If we squint our eyes (essential to all acts of analysis) and ask ourselves what these movies have in common, one answer is this: they are all good movies.
This suggests the possibility that it is easier to steal a good movie than a bad one. And this implies that a movie stealer is well served when he or she is working with other great actors in the larger parts.
(Let’s assume that there is no selection process at work here, one that says we don’t look at bad movies for issues of this kind.)
I think the sensible assumption is that it should be easy to steal bad movies. Less competition. But it may be that the bad actors who staff the big parts in bad movies will not let this happen. They watch great performances with envy, suffer a terrible insecurity, and prevail upon the director to fire the offending player.
Great actors are bigger than this. They believe, perhaps, that brilliant performances in small parts do not diminish their contributions but instead augment the movie’s hope of success. All boat rise with the tide, as it were.
This would mean that the Don Cheadles and Steve Zahns and Siobhan Fallons of the world do not steal movies after all. Which forces to ask what we meant when we talked about “stealing” movies in the first place. Do they belong to the stars? Is this a zero sum enterprise? What goes to one actor must come from another. Is every movie a quiet competition for that very scarce thing called attention (and admiration)? All of these sound like old economy assumptions to me. And then the question becomes whether we must dispense with the idea of movie larceny altogether. Just wondering.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2008. Grand Larcenty, Hollywood Style. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. April 17, 2008. here.
Blowhard, Michael. 2008 Post for April 23. here.
huffing in toronto
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What a day in Toronto! I am in town to interview women of middle age about chocolate. By the 4th interview my head was spinning: so much data, such a whirlwind of interpretive frames.
On the subway to Scarborough, near the Victoria Park station, I watch 3 girls in their early teens: one an African-Canadian Muslim wearing a chador (sp?), another women who appeared to be Ethiopian by descent, now dressed in a thoroughly Canadian manner, and their Eurasian friend, a women who entertained the car by dancing in the isles. She wasn’t very good at dancing. But she was young and beautiful and, well, she was dancing…and that never happens on a Canadian subway.
I remembering riding the Bloor line after the Blue Jays won a World Series. Everyone was just sitting there, minding their own business in that Canadian way that absents us from the situation even as we monitor one another right down to the ground. Finally, a Jamaican guy exploded with indignation, leapt to his feet and said, "What is the matter with you people? You just won the World series, I mean, it’s the World series, and you’re just sitting there." It’s what we do, our national thing. We just sit there.
Anyhow, the third girl was wearing the colors and fashions of gang affiliation…I think more as a fashion statement than a declaration of group membership, but who knows. And to complete this picture of pretend (practice?) menace, the girls were being aggressive with one another, threating violence, promising vengeance, wowing the car filled with the people in the car all of whom, including your trusty anthropologist, practice nonviolence as a way of life, blue helmet and all. (Who cares about fashion when you can wear headgear that says, "please don’t shoot me.")
And then, as if by magic, a man appeared on one of the seats. He was middle aged, deeply tanned, pretty well and casually dressed. He had a big sports bag, brimming with paper and clothing. And he was struggling with something…what was he struggling with? Ah, a metal can filled with paint thinner. He was grinning like a silent film villain, chuckling madly, establishing eye contact with everyone one by one. (Canadians are wonderfully circumspect on this issue. We can see sideways, so eye contact is quite unnecessary.) And every so often he would dip a piece of fabric in the can, hold the fabric in a cupped hand, put his hand to his mouth, and inhale deeply. Ah! He was "huffing," I think it’s called.
The girls were stunned into silence. I think they were surprised that anyone could be so absolutely menacing without the aid of fashionable clothing or gang colors. The question was, how menacing? Was this guy a threat? The girls thought about it. They seemed to decide the guy was harmless. But there was another question. Were they still menacing?
We are hearing a "just enough" sentiment more and more. It’s as if we are as a culture working on a new definition of what’s enough. And this marks a change. After World War II, big was it. In those days, nobody wanted to have "some fame." Celebrities like Fey wanted to be the biggest star ever. Winner take all. Frank Sinatra size. Jumbo big.
As I was saying in my PSFK talk, the old model was America the bountiful, land of plenty. In the 1950s, it was one size fit all: gigantic or nothing at all. We wanted groaning buffet tables. We celebrated the "good life:" by consuming heroic quantities of sugar, salt, fat, nicotine, alcohol and sun (and as much carbon as possible). We wanted cars the size of a 1958 Cadillac, block long conveyances, fins and all. We wanted more shoes the Imelda Marcos. We wanted homes the size of a small town. Small town? Dayton, we wanted homes the size of Dayton.
The world used a Denny’s model: all-you-eat plus 3000 calories more. "No one leaves this place with an empty plate." A Martian would wonder at this. Denny’s had given us more food than we could possibly eat. Food was being wasted. There was irrationality here, no? What the Martian did not see was that there was a greater ritual objective to be satisfied. America is about plenty, plenty of plenty and more to come. America was limitless in its ability to inspire needs and satisfy them.
This is still the logic of luxury markets. That car by Maybach, that Birkin bag, that hotel suit by the Four Seasons, the jewelry by [insert name of incredibly high end jeweler here, all I can think of is Tiffany's]. The idea here is not to meet a minimum standard. The idea is to violate our scale of things and achieve the sublime. The idea of luxury, even quiet luxury, is ever so briefly to take the breath away.
This idea will hold. The rich will be with us always. But there is a new consumer aesthetic struggling to be born. Some consumers, even very rich ones, now want just enough.
When Yale economist Barry Nalebuff invented Honest Tea, he used this approach.
Newman’s Own now makes a line of cereal called "sweet enough."
Just enough is audible even in the start-up world of small business. Old entrepreneurs used to talk about scaling up till they could sell out. We wanted to get as big as possible to sell for as much as possible. New entrepreneurs talk about getting big enough to "get comfortable." And the idea is not to sell out but to sit tight. A small winery, small software company, small consultancy, that’s fine. That’s just enough. In the case of Hollywood, everyone used to want to be Steven Spielberg. Now some of them, Fey included, what to be Christopher Guest. "Just live your life, make hilarious movies with your friends, and then go home."
What are the motives and motors of "just enough?"
Fey has a practical reason. Fame comes with a price tag. If you get too famous, you lose your privacy or as she puts it, you have people wanting to take "a picture of your butt on the beach."
Speaking of butts, there is a second motive for just-enough and it’s the one that inspires us to shift from Coca-Cola as a sugary trophy of the consumer society to Barry’s Honest Tea exercise in marginal utility and diminishing returns. We want as much satisfaction as we can get without having to pay for it with calories and an expanding butt.
In the case of an entrepreneur, "just enough" is about control. Staying small(ish), staying private, supplying your own capital, all these mean calling your own shots. Venture capitalists and Wall Street can drive someone else crazy. The just enough entrepreneur can take his or her own chances. When it comes time to choose between interesting and profitable, you can go with interesting. Just enough in this case is about control.
I wonder if one of the motives is also about freedom and mobility. Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder, has a yacht that is 416 feet long. It cost something like a quarter of a billion dollars. It carries two helicopters. It’s so large it cannot dock anywhere on the French Riviera. (That’s why it needs those helicopters. They are the only way to get to port.) The "Octopus" seems to be a perfect example of way-too-much. Possessions of this kind act like barnacles that slow movement and limit freedom. "Going for a sail" must seem to Allen like something that requires him to mobilize a third-world country, an event so wearying that it must seem better, most of the time, just to leave the thing be. Allen’s Octopus is really an Albatross.
But the biggest motive of just enough is the environmental one, clearly. Now that we can see that reckless quantities actually have a cost beyond our own little domestic world, now we have a motive both personal and public. I saw a man get out of his Hummer on St. Laurent in Montreal. He was strutting a little as if to say, "check out my wheels." In a way I have never seen before, passers by gave off an unmistakable feeling of contempt as it to say, "get the fuck out of here, you self congratulatory prick." And he did. He slunk back to his car and drove ever so meekly away.
This is the week in Connecticut when those little yellow "pesticide applied" rectangles bloomed on my neighbors lawns. I may once have admired their perfect lawns. Now, I could hear myself thinking, "Surely, a "just enough" lawn would be good enough, especially if it protected the Long Island sound from yet another infusion of poison. Or is your lawn more important?"
All the really big trends have carried by lots of little trends in that "perfect storm" construction needs to drive competing trends (and all the noise) in our culture out of the way. There is privacy, control, choice, freedom, mobility, and the environment. And what happens when that happens. Does America become more European, more Japanese. It certainly, in some fundamental way, becomes less American. We are reworking the fundamental terms of the consumer contract, and from this difference many more differences must flow.
References
Anonymous. 2006. It’s hull to be famous. The Sydney Morning Herald. August 9, 2006.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles
Baldwin, Kristen. 2008. The Accidental Movie Star. Entertainment Weekly. Issue. 987, April 18, 2008. pp. 20-26, p. 24.
McCracken, Grant. 2008. PSFK talk.
Plenitude everywhere
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Rob Eshman, editor in chief, Jewish Journal:
This year in Los Angeles there will be a Latino Jewish seder, a black-Jewish seder, a feminist seder, a male consciousness-raising seder, a gay rights seder and, just when I thought I’d heard it all, an S&M seder. I’m not joking: A group that enjoys that kind of thing is touting a seder that runs backwards: it begins in freedom and ends in bondage, which for them, I guess, is an expression of freedom.
References
Eshman, Rob. 2008. Food Issues. Jewish Journal. April 11, 2008. here.
McCracken, Grant. 1997. Plenitude. Toronto: Periph. Fluide.
Grand larceny, Hollywood Style (a brand new party game)
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Who has stolen the most picture with the smallest part?
Now that we are all so Hollywood savvy, everyone should have at least one answer for this question.
My candidates:
Holly Hunter in Time Code
Steve Zahn in Out of Sight
Selma Blair in Cruel Intentions
Siobhan Fallon in Men in Black
Stealing a picture is a wonderful thing. It is the stuff of career advancement. Because as they say in acting, there are no small parts, just small actors. Potentially, anyone should be able to steal any picture with any role. All you need is a magnetic screen presence and searing talent. Read Holly Hunter.
On the other hand, if an actor does it too often, and he or she will never work in this town again. (And if anyone can think of someone who ruined their career chances in Hollywood this way, please, sing out!) Stealing pictures, it’s a crime that must be practiced with care and some subtlety.
Please, let me know who we can add to this list.
Virtuality, time travel and Brooklyn Dodgers, circa 1955
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Here’s what I want to do next spring. I want to return to 1955 and listen to every game played by the Brooklyn Dodgers, in real time, several games a week through to the end of the season.
I don’t know what happened to the Dodgers that year. I have no idea whether Brooklyn did well or badly. So if someone can contrive to play the radio broadcasts over the week and send me newspaper clippings at the appropriate intervals, I can live the entire season with each inning, each game, and the season outcome as a complete surprise. Within certain limits I can experience the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1955 as if I had found a seam in time, stolen back in history, and managed to come upon these boys of summer as they played a season completely unaware that there was a time traveler in their midst.
Thank god for the death of "living memory." None of this makes any sense unless the knowledge of the season is completely extinguished. But happily it is. Unless someone blurts out details or, horrors, the season’s outcome, I will be listening to the 1955 season as innocent of its outcome as the fans of 1955.
I am assuming someone has the tapes of the radio broadcasts. I am assuming someone could send my the newspaper clippings each morning. I am assuming that someone in the video game industry could actually mock up a street card ride to the stadium and that I could watch various parts of 50s Brooklyn passing by. You could scale this up to be as absorbing as a fan could want.
I love the idea of sharing New York City with people who are playing an Area/code virtual game as a result of which the city takes on new drama and urgency that completely involves them but remains invisible to me. (Come to think of it, this is often true of life in the city, area/code or no.) And I really love the idea that I could be watching some guy listening to a game in emotional time and historical time simultaneously. Is he rooting for the Denver Broncos now or the Bears many years ago? There is something charming about the possibility that he is agonizing over games that have the intensity of the emotional moment but are played by athletes now turned to dust. I love the idea of having the spring and summer of my 2009 commandeered by a season that happened a half century ago.
I understand this approach splices reality and history in a weird way, but there is now a plenitude of experiential realties out there now, why not this?
Boycott FX
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How do you spell desperation?
If you are FX, you take a very good movie and you paste "DIRT, SEASON FINALE, SUN 10P" in the corner of the screen.
And you keep it there for the duration of the movie.
The movie in question was Any Given Sunday, one of Oliver Stone’s finer moments as a filmmaker with miraculously good performances from Lawrence Taylor, Lauren Holly and Jamie Foxx, and the likes Cameron Diaz and Al Pacino playing well above par.
There are several places where a marketing message should never appear, and the corner of a TV screen is one of them. Let’s put it this way. It’s my TV. So that space in the corner, it belong to me. If you want to use it, you are going to have to rent it. You may work out a deal with my cable provider who will work out a deal with me. And even then, I will opt in. Or I won’t. Otherwise, it’s hand’s off.
What FX did on the weekend was larceny. Grand or petty, you decide. We should hope that the consumer punishes FX by boycotting them. I’m going to.
There is a larger "product placement" issue here. I am on record as saying product placement is a bad idea, especially when it interferes with the suspension of disbelief. There are exceptions and one of them happens to occur in Any Given Sunday. Coach (Al Pacino) and his new star (Willie "Steamin" Beamen, as played by Jamie Foxx), make an attempt at conversation on the plane home from a victory. It goes badly. Coach is patronizing. Beamen is quietly scornful.
They decide to try again, over dinner at Coach’s house on the water. Beamen is out of his depth and manifestly uncomfortable. But he knows one thing: that Coach is going to renew his efforts to play "father" to his "son," and he is going to use this leverage to push Beamen into sacrificing his interests for those of the team. In this alien circumstance, Beamen needs a way to show his distance, to send Coach a message. His choice of Budweiser does this perfectly. It separates him from this house, this world, this coach.
This Bud works so successfully on the screen that it is impossible to know whether it is product placement or another of Stone’s inspired directorial choices. And that is what it should always be. Anything more obvious is too obvious. This is the standard of subtlety that must apply when commerce meets culture in this context. And by this standard, any ad stuck in the corner of the screen is an abomination. And it has to be punished.
The Wikipedia entry on boycott here.
Jan Chipchase, ethnographer in the field, in the paper
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Jan Chipchase is one of our heroes. He must be the hardest working man in anthropology, traveling almost constantly on behalf of Nokia, doing more fieldwork in a quarter than most anthropologist manage in a year.
His beat? Global culture, including Tupelo, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Accra, and Tokyo, where he lives in those brief moments when not on the road.
Jan is now up for his 15 minutes with coverage in the New York Times Magazine this weekend.
Two quotes captured my attention:
the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.
According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network.
New markets, new applications. In Africa, people are using phone credits as a medium of exchange and S.M.S. to encourage people to take up arms. Everywhere the cell phone has supplanted watches, alarm clocks, camera, video cameras, home stereos, televisions, computers and now banks.
I not sure what Chipchase thinks, but I am beginning to think this cell phone thing could really catch on.
References
Corbett, Sara. 2008. Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? New York Times. April 13, 2008. here.
Acknowledgments
Naunihal Singh for the head’s up.
Rainbow warriors
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Pam and I are here in the Pacific Northwest, chasing rainbows. We have a van outfitted with all the latest gear.
Traveling with us is a small team of dedicated meteorologists, all of them hardened by years of doing the weather on TV.
Pam is playing the role of Dr. Jo Harding. I am playing the part of Bill Harding. It is nice to have literary inspiration when the going gets tough.
It is, as I am sure you know, incredibly dangerous, but, as you can see, the rewards are spectacular.
Straight out of Aristotle
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Metro North is not the same as True North, or even Magnetic North. Metro North veers quite distinctly to the east and it is marked by a railroad track that runs from NYC to New Haven and beyond.
There are stations and the stations have ads and that ads are, well, a little amateurish and darn good fun for this anthropologist and all the other marketing types who use this track to get to and from Madison Ave. Indeed, Metro North is to marketing what Australia is to evolution: the place were weird stuff happens…and that’s ok.
Take the ad I have photographed here. Accountant as super hero. Really? I mean, really? If there is a creature in the universe less like a super hero, it’s an accountant. Or so the stereotypes tell us. Totally unfair, of course. And for all we know some accountants live lives of real adventure. Enron accountants, do you think?
So it’s wrong to generalize this way, but it is also probably wrong to advertise…this way. Part of the problem is that this ad is trying too hard. A good ad is an act of metaphor. It transfer meaning from a world we know to a world we don’t. In this case, it invites us to transfer what we know about superheroes to what we know about accountants. (This is straight out of Aristotle.) But some acts of transfer are more possible than others.
But perhaps I am missing the "premise." In the strange world that is Metro North, a new physics may apply. In this world, superheros are just little less heroic. Accountants a lot more grand. And the two are close enough, transfer is possible.
I am on the West coast and running out of time. So this investigation of the cultural properties of alternate realities are going to have to wait for another occasion.
“business literature” that sounds like literature
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So this kid writes me this morning and you can hear that his head is swirling with ideas and you can see that his prose is just effortless, and he is talking about pattern cognition. Nothing bad can come of this, I think to myself.
He runs a unit for a big company. (I won’t say more than this.) And he doesn’t know what he wants to say, exactly, but you can tell that this is a guy that just points thought and speech in any direction and light shines down from the heavens.
Except that he’s not using speech in the usual, didactic, expository, plain style way we all strive for. (Nancy Friedman uses this line from Matthew Arnold and it is just perfect: "Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.")
No, this kid uses speech in a way we never hear it used in our circles. He opens it like a sail and waits to see where he and the reader will end up. Meaning is unmoored in the most interesting and alarming way. You want to rush into the field(s) of reference but you are quite sure you’ll be looking the other way when an interesting idea comes pelting through. (Readers ought to be fitted with orange safety vests for this sort of thing, and I can’t find mine.)
And I started thinking, this is a voice we never hear in the business literature, and that’s because in the present BIGPRINT regime of business publishing, business literature never sounds the least bit like literature. Why must this be? As the intellectual and imaginative demands of business continue to grow, surely we need a body of discourse that isn’t just denotative, but actually connotative and evocative. No? Yes!
Anyhow, here’s how I replied to the kid:
Dear [name removed], you write beautifully, how about turning your thoughts into a contemplation by turning them into a novel, which is to say, treat some of the "who," "what," "where" of your [corporate] experience as the narrative frame and then let these ideas [go].
The world of management continues to believe that illumination can only be achieved with big books from the Business Press when in fact some of the truths we are after are more delicate and evanescent and will need a more subtle evocation. That’s it. Do a book about management using an evocation when all the others proceed by laborious denotation. Best, Grant
I am pleased to report that Eileen Fischer and John Sherry are doing a new book for Routledge called Exploring Consumer Culture Theory. It dares use poetry. So certain experiments are now afoot in the business school and business press worlds. I know that Mark McGuinness, the London poet, is, if he will forgive my saying so, well positioned here. I’ve been reading Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, and this has moments of anthropological illumination.
What we want is a "management literature" that reads like literature. Why must our writers work for the corporation and write, like Wallace Stevens, as if in another life? Everything in the corporate world is now changing…why not this?
References
Fischer, Eileen and John Sherry. Exploring Consumer Culture Theory. London: Routledge. [Couldn't find an Amazon or a Routledge listing.]
Nancy Friedman’s blog is here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Christopher Chan for the image above. See more of his work at Flickr here.
The “mullet strategy” as intellectual appliance
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In the PSFK presentation last week, I encouraged the audience to collect "intellectual appliances" to aid the "pattern cognition."
And this morning, I read about the "mullet strategy" and wondered if it might be a candidate.
Jonah Peretti, cofounder of The Huffington Post, uses this term to characterize HP’s editorial policy: "business up front, party in the back." According to the mullet strategy, the front page of the website is "kept sharp" by professional editors while the back of the site is given over to the unedited, unsubstantiated "venting" of unpaid visitors.
Could this be an candidate? Appliances are little machines that help us think. And the mullet strategy might be useful, first of all, as a way of thinking about any website that struggles to combine professional and user created content. We may discover that this is the model that will help lots of websites work. We now have prior acquaintance, and we will be quicker to spot this model elsewhere.
This pattern could prove useful for any commercial enterprise that wishes to work in consumer created content. Now the pattern can sharpen our wits. With this pattern at the ready, we are in a position to say, "oh, you know what could work here is the mullet strategy."
Indeed, this may be, metaphorically speaking, a good way to speak about many models now emerging as capitalism is renovated by the disintermediating effects of the new technologies. Once established as one of the ideas we have "on call," the mullet strategy may serve for many purposes.
Every idea, every pattern, has colonial intentions. It would like to bend the world to its will. In any case, like it or not, we all now live in a world where things are in steady flux. So we want to entertain many patterns at the ready for recognition and cogition.
At this point, we can’t say that the mullet strategy has any real promise as an intellectual appliance. The trick is to post it somewhere in the crowded airspace we call consciousness and see if we ever hear from it again. It is a Millian economy. We will use it again if we can use it again. Really good patterns start from these modest beginnings and end up dominating things quite thoroughly. (I remember when I first read Thomas Kuhn’s notion of "paradigm." Here was an idea I could not stop using.)
We really should have a Wiki for this sort of thing.
References
Alterman, Eric. 2008. Out of print. The New Yorker. March 31, 2008, pp. 48-59, p. 52. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2008. Pattern Cognition. My PSFK presentation. Available online at slideshare.com here.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Precipitation: from the virtual to the material
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Wow, how completely thrilling! This afternoon I got a chance to meet someone I know by blogging, internet and new network connections, someone, that is to say, who has been a complete virtual presence in my life however much we chatted on line.
What to expect? I made no assumptions. As it turned out, we got on like a house on fire. I would like to think that it was virtual contact that made this real world connection so effortless, but I am obliged to acknowledge that anyone one who thinks for a living is inclined to find a way to talk to anyone else who thinks for a living. We are endowed with the necessary skills. All of Richard Florida’s creatives share a language.
But I think it’s fair to say that we got from 0 to 60 with an acceleration that would have otherwise been improbable. There is a certain amount of conversational due process that I feel obliged to go through before the "trust them: yes" flat goes up. And the flag went up within 40 minutes. There is a certain amount of idea exchange that must take place before we believe that the conversational bridge can take your weight. And this too was diminished. Within 30 minutes I was risking things I would otherwise feel obliged to roll out and frame with care.
One of the topics was predictably how the new social networks mediate social connections. The conversation proved an interesting proof and contemplation of its theme.
