Margaret Talbot has a wonderful essay on a new trend on college compuses: the use of neuroenhancers like Adderall and Ritalin. 

She says: “College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement.”

Talbot says that University of Michigan’s Substance Abuse Research Center, says that in the previous year 4.1 per cent of American undergraduates had taken prescription stimulants for off-label use.  At some schools the rate is 25%.  A 2002 study at one small college discoverd that 35% of students had used prescription stimulants nonmedically.

Talbot is not happy with what she sees here.  She concludes her essay by saying, “Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.”

Still, it looks as if some kids on campuses, to judge from Talbot’s story, are using Adderall in order to fund several lives: one as an accomplished student, another as a ‘party-hearty-Marty’ party animal, yet another of someone with a hedgehog’s passion for one thing, or a fox’s passion for everything.  And this is huge news. 

Gen Y have been defined as a generation of “rules and regs,” devoted to doing the right thing.  This is another way of saying that THIS youth culture choose not to engage in the protest, rebellion, rites of May liminality that we have come to expect from youth.  But here in Talbot’s article we see evidence that Gen Y may have found a way out of it’s orthodoxy.  With the pharmacological intervention made possible by Adderall, it is now possible to have one’s cake and eat it too, to be a “good kid” and a “wild child” at the same time.  And if this is true, it would tell us that we are on the verge of seeing youth culture as alternative culture flourish once more. 

But there are other illuminations to be had in Talbot’s article, things stirring that will catch the eye of the anthropologically minded.  This drug revolution actually has some supporters in high or at least morally elevated places.  Talbot tells us that “some bioethicists are leaning toward endorsing neuroenhancement.”  Wow.

Talbot does a nice job showing neurohancers in their larger, cultural context, as something that promises to enable and augment the human hardware in a way that appeals to transhumanists like Nick Bostrom and the futurist writer and inventor Ray Kurzweil.

As Talbot puts it,

Transhumanists are interested in robots, cryogenics, and living a really, really long time; they consider biological limitations that the rest of us might accept, or even appreciate, as creaky obstacles to be aggressively surmounted.

And this gives us two very different impulses in our culture…as usual.  This transhumanists approach that treats the body as just so much beta hardware that badly needs a refit and a relaunch.  And then there is the kinder and gentler approach that we carry with us still from the 1960s, the one that says the body is a temple to be treated with love and respect.  How lovely. 

I’m not interested in either option.  But I love living in a culture that cultivates the opposite of every idea it cares about. 

References

Talbot, Margaret.  2009.  Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.  The New Yorker.  April 27, 2009. here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Chrissy Kiernan for the image.  See Chrissy’s thoughts on Adderall here.

Some time ago, I signed up for Nike Plus.  This means I walk with a chip in my shoe and this records my distance, time, speed and calories consumed.  Every week or so, I download these numbers to the Nike Plus website, and a tally is kept.  So far I have recorded 1150 miles over 365 trips.  You can see the 2008 total above. 

I like Nike Plus for lots of reasons.  I would guess that roughly 20% of the miles recorded for 2008 should be attributed to Nike Plus.  This to say, I would not have walked them were it not for that chip in my shoe or that website on line.

But here’s where Nike Plus seems to me to have failed spectacularly.  Nike Plus is among other things a social network.  It gives the walker/runner the opportunity to interact with other walker/runners.  And here Nike Plus proves to be clueless… at the very moment, mark you, that the social networking opportunity is blossoming in the most spectacular way in other venues.  (Can you say “the Obama run for the White House”?)

Nike Plus allows me to interact with other walkers in only one way.  It helps me compete agains them.  It does not allow me to treat my miles like a social capital and make them fungible for various purposes in various markets.  It does not allow me to find them or walk with them.  Walk with Nike Plus, and, sorry, but your walk alone. 

For instance, I would love to pool my miles with other walkers who live on the Connecticut side of Long Island sound.  We could compete against those bastards across the water, the ones who live on the Long Island side of the sound.  Now when I go for my walk each day I can imagine my competitors walking on Long Island, and who knows this might be good for another mile.  (Yes, I’m that juvenile).  There are plenty of ways to slice this, plenty of ways to see to the interesting, amusing, perhaps imaginative disposition of my new social capital called miles.  Nike has managed to think of a single one, direct competition.

One of the really interesting things we have seen happen in the last few years is the redisposition of sports events.  This is the thing that makes rotesserie and fantasy baseball leagues work.  One sporting world is driven by the “event fragments” of another sporting world.  So it’s not as if this “capital transfer” model should be very hard to think in the athletic world.

There is a second opportunity, and that is using the network to find other interesting walkers in my neighborhood.  I have a great little walk here in my home town.  It takes about an hour.  I can do a running commentary on architecture, history and the anthropological present of my little community. 

I would love to trade this walk with other walkers.  I would love to go up to Westport and spend an hour walking and talking with someone there.  Perhaps Nike thinks its protecting my privacy.  Please.  There are ways of finessing this issue.  And let’s leave it to the consumer to work this out.  Spare me the Big Brother routine. 

It’s unfathomable why Nike Plus should have created this much value opportunity and then let it just sit there.  Especially when everyone else in the world is getting so good at networks.  I can’t help wondering whether this is the famously competitive Nike culture at work.  This is a corporation filled with intensely competitive people and social capitals used collaboratively just doesn’t “scan” in Beaverton. 

A Friday epigram.  (It just occurred to me.)

Design was once to please the eye,
now it serves to please the mind. 

I read with interest today the removal of Chris DeWolfe as CEO of MySpace. 

The paragraph in Brandweek that caught my attention was this:

[D]espite being eclipsed of late by Facebook and other properties, MySpace is still one of the largest single sites on the Web. However, its days of unstoppable growth are clearly over. In February, the site reached over 70 million unique users in the U.S., compared to 57.4 million for Facebook. But just a year earlier, MySpace’s unique user base was at 68 million versus just 32 million for Facebook.

According to the “growth” model of capitalism, MySpace has a problem.  If senior management can’t renew growth, change is called for. 

But what if this growth model is, at least for new media purposes, mistaken?  If we embrace a new model of the kind someone like Henry Jenkins, David Weinberger, or Don Tapscott might endorse, then this might be precisely the wrong way to think about things.

In a new media world, the objective is not continual growth.  This is because the new media proposition like MySpace is trying to build a community.  It is enlisting the collaboration, the cocreation, of a particular group of people.  In this event, it can’t be that everyone is a potential recruit.  MySpace is a particular networking proposition, one that works for some people and not for others.  In this event, there must be a limit to the market.

When MySpace levels out at 70 million, this may be because it has found its limit.  I don’t have access to the numbers, but if its the case that the social network market split roughly by age [MySpace for “kids,” and Facebook for “adults,” as I think Danah Boyd was suggesting several months ago], then 70 million may be just about right. 

To pursue larger numbers is a dangerous thing to do, especially if it means changing the MySpace formula to broaden it’s appeal.  Is this not tragic flaw of most branding exercises, diluting the brand in the pursuit of an ever larger market?  But what is a bad idea for all marketing purposes is an especially stupid one when it comes to new media.  Once we find our limit, we want to hold.

There is after all another option.  We may give up extensive growth for an intensive bond.  This may be the time to say “ok, let’s build a better connection with our community.”  I mean, that’s the business we’re in.  That’s what we’re for.  And who is to say that intensive “growth” is not better than extensive growth.  MySpace has yet to find a way to pay, but perhaps it has yet to produce right amount or kind of value.  And this may be the outcome of an intensive strategy. 

It’s early days.  The logic of capitalism and new media will continue to bump up against one another in this way.  Corporations will eventually begin to think more intelligently about the new creature in its midst.  Just not yet. 

References

Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press.

Shields, Mike.  2009.  MySpace’s Chris DeWolfe Out as CEO.  Brandweek.  April 22, 2009.  http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/digital-downloads/broadband/e3i2b46d200e6140dd0951130c252fd7b53

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. 2008. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Portfolio.

Weinberger, David. 2007. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books.

You've heard about the PepsiCo debacle?  It will be a case study and a cautionary tale for many years to come. 

It took 24 years, but PepsiCo now has its own version of New Coke.

The basic details: Sometime in 2008, PepsiCo Americas CEO Massimo d'Amore decided to rebrand the Pepsi, Gatorade, Tropicana and Mountain Dew. 

It's epic error.  It represents perhaps the largest and most cavilier destruction of brand value we will ever see.

I want to concentrate on Tropicana.  A new Tropicana package was launched in January (package on right) to replace a package of long standing (on left).  This was then withdrawn in late February.  But not before sales had fallen 20%.  Consumers were furious. 

So what was PepsiCo thinking?  Here's Peter Arnell, the man D'Amore asked to do the Tropicana package design. 

The objective was very, very clearly laid out.  We needed to rejuvenate, reengineer, rethink, reparticipate in popular culture. 

On balance, this sounds like a laudatory end.  Of course a brand should be in touch with popular culture.

But let's look at what Peter Arnell, acting as Pepsi's unofficial Chief Culture Officer, thinks this means.   His first act of office, apparently, was to embark upon what BusinessWeek calls a "five-week world tour of trendy design houses."

This is where he went searching for culture?  In design houses?  Dude.  A CCO is not just responsible for culture as defined by designers.  He or she is also responsible for all the rest of American culture.  And he won't find this exhaustively represented in design houses.  Indeed, the rest of American culture is, I would argue, sometimes systematically excluded from the design houses. 

Let me say something about the people who care about the Tropicana package, the ones who rebelled against Arnell's innovation.  

American householders are at the moment caught in the three little storms that we know make up a perfect storm. 

Storm One: They are raising 2 kids, running a home, and struggling to achieve sufficiency for the family.  By itself, this would be a tough assignment.  Americans make it tougher by routinely changing what counts as a good "parent," a good "child," a good "family."  No sooner than they have worked out a pretty good facsimile of the American family than Dr. Phil begins to beam them new instructions. 

Storm Two: American householders are wondering if the present downturn will cost one or perhaps all of the incomes on which the family now relies.  The anxiety is palpable.  It's audible.  It's there all the time. 

Storm Three: American householders are trapped in a new health regime, one that forces them to give up the sugar, salt, fat, richness and gusto that makes the meal rich and satisfying.  At the very moment, moms (mostly) want to make great meals to make great families, to distract everyone from the crisis at hand, to insist on the things that matter and not "all that other stuff," the health profession is denying some of the very things that makes a meal wonderful.

The old Tropicana package was a welcome presence in this household.  It was familiar, cheerful, good hearted.  Sitting on the breakfast, it was a little like a light house, a symbol of some of the things that makes mornings in America a good way to break the fast and prepare for the day.

But who cares about the old package?  Who cares about the American consumer?  Pepsi's has an idea!  It wants to "rejuvenate, reengineer, rethink, reparticipate in popular culture" and if this means turning out something that looks like generic packaging, well, too bad.  In an act of marketing malpractice, Pepsi managed to reach into the American breakfast and diminish it.  It managed to reach into this precious occasion and make it poorer and more paltry.  Pepsi did this deliberately…to itself…and the American consumer…with design. 

If you want to "reparticipate" in popular culture, well, you have your work cut out for you.  Going to design houses, that's a good idea.  (Peter, you can sit around with other designers and congratulate one another on having really cool glasses that only 1% of 1% of Americans would ever consider wearing.)  And then, well, really, why not get out of the design houses into the lives and the homes and the kitchens of the other Americans?

The problem is simple.  When Arnell thinks design, he thinks cool.  When we ask him to redesign a Tropicana package, he's going to bless it with notions of cool now circulating in his own and other design houses. 

The trouble is that culture is only marginally about cool.  Cool may be the most active, the most talked about, the most flattering part of culture, but it is also a relatively small and evanescent part of culture.  Let's call it 20%. 

When you are told to put the brand in touch with popular culture, touring design houses won't do it.  Really, what you want to do, Peter, is talk to the owner-operators of this culture, Americans…living by the millions…out there…

Peter, here's the thing.  It's not about you.  It's not what you think is hip and happening.  It's not about cool.  It's not about New York City or design houses or startling images of the future, or breathtaking mastery of the design vocabulary, or breakthroughs that reinvent the brand.

It's about Americans at their breakfast table.  How can this have escaped you?

Reference

Elliott, Stuart.  2009.  Tropicana Discovers Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging.  New York Times.   February 22, 2009.
here.

Helm, Burt.  2009.  Blowing Up Pepsi.  BusinessWeek.  April 27, 2009. 

Levins, Hoaq.  2009.  Peter Arnell Explains Failed Tropicana Package Design.  Ad Age.  February 26, 2009.  (AdAge appears to have removed this and the next article from its website.)

Zmuda, Natalie.  2009.  Tropicana Line's Sales Plunge 20% Post-Rebranding.  Ad Age.  April 02, 2009. 

On the last Saturday Night Live, Michaela Watkins, playing blogger Angie Tempura from Bitchpleeze.com, was critiquing movies, including The Haunting in Connecticut. 

Tempura snears,

"what's scary about Connecticut, losing your tennis racket at Pottery Barn?" 

A fine and pressing question.  I have also left a racket at J. Crew, and I'm honestly not sure which was worse.  Pottery Barn.  No, J. Crew.  No, Pottery Barn.  Both were scary.  Let's put it that way.  

We are a tidy people.  Many of us carefully sort our recyclables into paper and plastic.  We can see the man who collects them.  He pours both blue boxes into the same bin on his truck.  But we continue sort anyhow.  Because, well, not to distinguish what is distinguishable, this, next to a tragedy at Pottery Barn, is the scariest thing that can happen in Connecticut. Think of us as America's Switzerland.

Which brings me to two innovations in our kitchen.  We have a new sink soap and a new refuse container. 

The sink soap is a complete disaster.  Total nightmare (in Connecticut).  The soup (Clorox Green Works Liquid Dish Soup) accumulates at the mouth of the dispenser and seals it shut.  You have to run the thing under hot water to melt away the sludge.  And then of course the soup runs too freely.  Everywhere.  And there is a disaster of the middle range.  Just enough soap will accumulate so that you think you have to squeeze really hard and you do, and then bang, it's soap everywhere again.  We don't like this sort of thing in Connecticut.  Disorder is frightening.  Chaotic dishsoap, that's just not for us. 

The refuse container is another matter.  We used to have an open container.  This was because Grant liked to see if he could drop wadded paper towels in from the three-point range.  He could, pretty much at will.  (Or 2 out of 5 times, whichever came first.)  But we know have two kittens (Vivian and Zsa Zsa) careening around the kitchen, and they liked to pull the container down just to see what's inside.  And eat it. 

So now we had to buy a container with a lid and we got a metal thing from simplehuman.  And it is superb.  Everything fits and works and closes and stays upright and stays closed.  Hallelujah.  We invited our neighbors over to gaze on our good fortune.  And a shout of great joy rose from the assembled multitude and it spread (in a very orderly way) across the land. 

Still, while I am acknowledging the special obsessions of my countrymen, I can't help noticing that the SNL's Angie Tempera character appears aimed at discrediting that shocktrooper of the new media, the teenage blogger.  I would have thought an old media operation like Saturday Night Live wouldn't stoop to character assassination.  Unless of course SNL is suffering anxieties of its own. 

References

For the brilliant performance by Watkins on SNL, see the clip on Hulu here.

Detroit has never had a Chief Culture Officer, someone who could help the GM, Ford and Chrysler manage the opportunities and dangers that come from culture.  (By "culture" I do not mean the corporate culture of Detroit.  I mean the "software" with which we run the hardware of our world, the shared understandings, assumptions, rules and practices that inform how we see and act.  This culture is rich, complicated and changeable.  It needs someone standing watch all the time.)

There was one man who served as de facto CCO: Bob Lutz (pictured).  On his retirement this February, Lutz was the Vice Chairman in charge of product development for GM.  Lutz was routinely referred to as the "design czar" at GM. And indeed it's clear he cared about design.  He was responsible for the development of the Buick Enclave and the Chevy Malibu. 

It is also clear that this was a guy who ought to have been disqualified from serving in the capacity of a CCO or a design czar.  In point of fact, he knew relatively little about our culture.  What Lutz knew was cars, and what he liked about cars, by all accounts, was speed.  A former pilot for the Marine Corps, he never got over his love of fast planes.  In later life, he purchased and flew a Aero L-39 ex-Soviet jet fighter.  Lutz loved muscle cars.

But if we know anything about contemporary culture, it is that General Motors was out of step.  The Japanese owned quality and used it to take away the sedan.  The Germans owned luxury and used it to take away the upper end of the boomer car market. Detroit struggled to improve on both counts, but it was clear that catch-up was impossible.  It would never do quality as well as the Japanese or elegance as well as the Germans.  It would always be a day late on both counts. 

There was one competitive opportunity remaining, the place were the Americans could beat the challengers.  The real chance for Detroit was design, to make cars that vibrate with the cultural moment as deeply and profoundly as they had in the 1950s (McCracken 2005).  Harley Earl was that man.  It is impossible to reckon the skill with which he spoke to (and for) the culture of the post-war period.  It is impossible to calculate how much money he made for General Motors. 

What Detroit needed was a man or a woman in every C-Suite who understood what was happening in culture.  It needed someone who understood what was happening in the minds of boomers (and why they were so deeply wedded to German luxury cars), in youth culture (when the muscle car culture was back with new and strange differences, and why cars like the funny, boxy little Scion was flourishing), in the life, the heart and the mind of the soccer mom (for many of whom the mini-van felt like the end of everything and especially their youth and their joy).  Detroit needed a senior executive who understood the consumer, and the American feeling for mobility in every sense of the word. 

This person was not Robert Lutz.  Lutz loved cars for his own deeply personal reasons.  He loved muscles cars because they went fast.  Lutz was worse than average as a river captain.  I think it's fairly safe to say that Lutz did not ever grasp the muscle car revival (the one portrayed by Hollywood in XXX, The Fast and the Furious, and now Fast and Furious).  He must have gloried in the power and the glory and all that sound.  Just as surely, he must have been mystified by fact that it was being produced in some case by tiny, winged Hondas.

Forgive us a Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life moment of speculation and let's imagine what would have happen if the Lutz part of the American automobile has been occupied not by Lutz but by Howard Schultz (Starbucks), A.G. Lafley (P&G), Steve Jobs (Apple), Philip Knight (Nike), Tom Kelley (IDEO), people who were very much more alert to what was happening in American culture.  It seems to me obvious that we would be looking at an entirely different Detroit and automotive design that was vastly more interesting, responsive, ecological and, um, profitable. 

But, you might well say, Lutz is retiring.  Clearly, Detroit got the message.  It is reaching out to another kind of fella, another order of CCO.  Correct?  Here's what the Wall Street Journal has to say on the matter.

I rest my case. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  When Cars Could Fly.  In McCracken, Grant. Culture And Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, And Brand Management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Terlep, Sharon.  2009.  GM Product Chief Lutz to Step Down.  Wall Street Journal.  February 10, 2009. 

Can we agree that the true history of New York City would contain every event that took place for every individual and institution from the founding of the city in 1624 to the present day?  Oh, I see.  Good point.  I'm being too narrow. 

Strictly speaking we should start 100 years before the founding of the city and include every event that shaped every individual and institution that contributed to the founding of the city in 1624.  And then move, as someone said of the Scottish historians, ever so slowly to the present.  Right? 

Even if we could agree what we mean by "events," "individuals" and "institutions," even if we could capture them as discrete episodes, even if we could understand how they interact with one another, even if we could understand the endlessly concatenating dynamic they then become, our history would be impossible.  It would be larger than all the histories ever written and it would take an infinity of lifetimes to construct…and many more to consume. 

So every history is a lie.  It may claim to be "exhaustive," "comprehensive," "encompassing," but it is in fact ferociously partial, an act of violence against the real facts and the full scope of the problem.  History ignores, it forgets, it selects.  From a statistical point of view, it depends upon excluding almost everything.  And then it excludes, forgets, and diminishes some more.  There is no scholar more scrupulous than a good historian.  For all this, they are the most promiscuous creatures in the academic world. 

Thursday of last week, at the first meeting of the AIGA Metronorth meeting in Stamford Connecticut, I had the chance to listen to James Sanders described the way he and Ric Burns wrote New York: A documentary film.  It was a joyful thing to listen to.  They solved the problem of history with ideas so beautiful, acrobatic, swift and daring that we the audience forgave them their act of violence against the data and thought, some of us sighing audibly, if the history of New York City can be told this well, perhaps there's hope for the rest of us working on smaller problems and tinier lies. 

If you ever get the chance to hear Sanders tell this story, run, don't walk, to hear him.  And take the family.  It was wonderful evening. 

But here's the really annoying thing.  Sanders told us about a classical Greek concept that Burns uses to describe his (their) objective in documentary film making.  It's about crafting an idea until it is irresistibly obvious and so well formed that it goes straight into consciousness, carrying all that grace and subtlety as it goes. 

As Sanders pointed out, people watching a documentary film get it the first time or they reach for the remote.  And I sat there thinking, yes, in the contemporary world all of us succeed because we worship at the temple of the "apodictic." or we court the obscurity we so richly deserve.  [Thank you, Scott Lerman for helping me with this term.]

Both these things, compressing fantastic data of impossible breadth and diversity into a few elegant generalizations, and then finding a way to communicate these generalizations with the utmost clarity, these are two of the most compelling tasks for most of us who loiter at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  Perhaps the temple we should be worshiping in is not the apodictic but documentary film making of the kind practiced by Sanders and Burns. 

References

Find a video, courtesy of Scott Lerman, at Vimeo here. 

I was in the Chicago yesterday and I noticed an overweight security guard.  I found myself looking at him through the eyes of Paul Blart: mall cop.  (I didn't see the movie, but like everyone I saw the ads.) 

The guard looked like the mall cop.  And through this lens, my view of him was, well, diminishing.  After all,  Paul Blart is a dolt, a happy, well intentioned dolt, but a dolt. 

NBC is about to launch a show called Parks and Recreation in which Amy Poehler stars as a minor functionary, an officious bureaucrat, a very busy body and, of course, a dolt.  A well intentioned dolt, but a dolt.   (It begins tonight at 8:30.)

We are told Parks and Recreation descends from the people who made The Office, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur.   The Office is about a paper company where under the delirious managerial misapprehensions of Michael Scott, the office staggers from one cringing misadventure to another.  The Office is dolts-ville. 

There's a commonality to these shows, a theme.  Call it: dolts in toyland.  These shows take us to a world in which not very bright people labor in cheerful obscurity, apparently forsaken by good sense and good form.  Because this is toyland, nothing bad ever happens to these people.  They are really just innocents, somehow protected from their stupidity by their stupidity.

We may think of this trend (if that's what it is) as counter-prevailing, a kind of low pressure zone that takes the meteorologist by surprise.  After, these days, popular culture seems preoccupied with master noticers and other smart people. 

I'm thinking of Monk, House, The Mentalist, Psych and perhaps the CSI franchises from Jerry Bruckheimer featuring William Petersen, David Caruso, and Gary Sinise.  These are people gifted with extraordinary powers of observation (they miss nothing!) and the ability to find their way to revelation (case closed!).

But dolts in toyland offer another America altogether. They don't really notice much of anything except the opportunity to be maladroit and clueless.  This programming approach isn't as bad as Kath and Kim, a piece of nonsense that is now, blessedly headed for the chopping block.  Kath and Kim was completely bicoastal, LA and NY conspiring to ridicule people in the heartland.  America knows when it is being scorned and it rewarded NBC's effort with benign but firm neglect. 

Paul Blart, Parks and Recreation, and The Office have a little more going for them than this.  In fact, they have a manical energy, as if their stupidity serves them as a navigational device and a way to escape the ordinary and obvious.  There is a chaos and absurdity to these shows that appeals to us.  But it is of course very low risk chaos.  Their stupidity puts these dolts in a liminal places beyond the reach of social conventions and orthodoxies.  But nothing bad can happen, because this is toyland. 

Also, dolts in toyland are the opposite of the economic man, the creature who is endlessly capable, rational, vigilant.  They would like to pursue their self interest, but it's just so very hard to figure out what this is.  And in this sense, these projects play out the cultural logic of Cheers, that 80s outpost of incompetence, a respite against the newly aggressive individualism of the Yuppie era. 

And finally, we might call these projects some variation on the "greater fool" theory.  We may not be feeling very capable or resourceful in the present economy, but, hey, it looks as if we will always have more on the ball than Paul Blart.  And notice that these projects are always, and patronizingly, set some place where incompetence probably doesn't matter.  The Office is set, probably, in an obscure part of Pennsylvania.  Parks and Recreation is set in an obscure part of the mid-West.  Paul Blart is set in a mall.  I mean, really, what's the worst that could  happen?

In sum, there are a number of ways to think about why this little trend (if that's what it is) should be flourishing now.  It is a funny corrective (if that's what it is) to the master noticer trend of House and Monk.  Our culture is working on something. 

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome!

Post script:

Paul Blart has flourished at the box office.  Sony projected $20 million for the opening weekend.  The movie took $39.2 million.  It's current total stands at $143 million. 

References

Brodesser-Akner, Claude.  2009.  Maketing Lessons From 'Paul Blart: Mall Cop.'  Ad Age.  http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=135862.

I found this comment a couple of days ago.  It bears on whether an economic downturn can refashion consumer taste and preference.  Janice Castro puts it this way.

The trouble is Castro made this argument in 2001, on the eve of one of the greatest moments of consumer enthusiasm in the history of the American economy.  Castro wasn't just wrong.  She was spectacularly wrong. 

We don't know what will happen as a result of the current downturn, but this time around we should avoid rushing to conclusions. 

References

Castro, Janice. 2001. “Cover Stories: The Simple Life Goodbye to having it all.” Time Magazine. June 24 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,156757,00.html (Accessed April 5, 2009).

Tina Fey has this to say about Amy Poehler:

This is perhaps another way of saying that Poehler isn't needy.  She doesn't crave our approval.  And this gives her a certain freedom and confidence.  She's like the cool kid in high school, the one who will take any comedic or social risk because, really, she just doesn't care whether she succeeds or we approve.

Fey's observation is a good way to think about comedians, but I think it's also a nice way to think about branding.  The new brand is self confident in just this way.  It's less agreeable, less eager to please, less unapologetically pleasant.  The old brand was a bland brand.  The new brand is Amy Poehler. 

This perhaps another way of pointing out the death of mass marketing.  And if that's all it is, I apologize.  But I thought Fey's comment was paradoxical in a useful way.  (Fey warns us with the adjective "complicated.")

That we find it complicated and a little paradoxical tells us that we have a long way to go before we are completely comfortable with or ready for the new brand.  The old logic of mass marketing, the one that makes us agreeable at all costs, continues live in our instincts and inclinations.  It remains a kind of cultural stowaway, there in our reflexes.  And will remain so for decades to come. 

References

Stack, Tim.  2009.  Poehler Express.  Entertainment Weekly. p. 34.  April 10, 2009.  [source for Tina Fey quote]

Thursday I heard a characteristically wonderful presentation by Faris Yakob at the BrainJuicer event in NYC.  (This guy is talent with a capital T[shirt].)

In passing, Faris noted that some people now groan when the term "twitter" comes up in conversation.

Groaning?  I can see exclaiming, kvelling, even plotzing.  But groaning.  Why groaning?

The answer to this question lies, I think, in another question: why do people groan at puns?

Strip away the consensus (the one that says, groaning is what we should do in the presence of a pun), and what are we looking at?  We groan at puns, I think, because we are a little frightened of them.  They force us to see the mechanisms of language.  When one word is pressed into service for a new purpose, it "trails."  It has its old meaning, and a new one.  It is x and not-x.  Actually, it's x and y.  Language is normally our most natural and effortless of act of meaning making but now we can see through to the gears and the levers.  We can see it for what it is, artificial and convention bound, fragile and effortful.

Because a pun is "only word play," we are not allowed to shriek.  Plus, to show fear, we fear, would credit and empower the pun.  (And no one wants that.)  Ignoring the pun isn't possible because it really is unsettling.  We go for the compromise.  We groan. 

What's more we groan together.  We groan in unison.  The group asserts it's solidarity against the pun.  We reassert the power of a sound to efface the danger of a sound.   

If this is right, we may think of puns the way I think Mary Douglas might have done.  Puns confuse cultural categories and next to physical danger or physical want, this is one of the surest ways to destabilize us. 

Back to Faris on Twitter.  I haven't had a chance to talk to him about precisely what he meant, so I may have got this wrong.  But if what he meant was that non Twitterers groan at the mention of the word "twitter," we might surmise they are playing out the logic of the pun.  Maybe we groan at "twitter" because it represents a cultural confusion, a semantic overload, an immensity of messages too much for our frail cognitive capacity.

A twittering universe is one in which messages and data are constantly in transit, coming from many sources, unpredictably, in great volume.  It is always too voluminous to track exhaustively.  We can only "dip in" to this Amazon as it passes.  And it trails like crazy.  Almost always the twitterer asks us to supply something we know about the sender as a person in general and right now, and this means we must meet this Amazon of messages with an Mississippi of knowledge that makes what they say make sense. 

Omphhh!  Twitter "sees" our porousness and raises it.  Email, 400 cable channels, thousands of feeds, a million blogs.  And now many, many, many, many tweets.  We have been railing against silos, corporate and personal, but a silo now seems like a really sensible idea. 

I am sitting on the plane to Chicago as I write this.  In my line of sight, there are two business travellers playing solidaire.  Solitaire, this must be the anti-tweet.  It is a closed world that contains no novelty, scant variation, precious little challenge.  It demands a bookkeepers' eye for detail, forcing us at the end of every failure to wonder, "did I just miss a match?"  Solitaire is such a bone headed activity that I belief it exists now only as a respite from the digital jet stream.   I mean, once you've played it 3 million times, as I have, surely it sustains interest only for what it isn't. 

Anyhow, I am in a real jet stream at the moment, and I am guite sure that there are several better explanations for why we groan at the mention of the word "tweet."  I would love to hear them. 

References

Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Taylor. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to John Kearon, Ari Popper and Susan Griffin for including me in the BrainJuicer event. 

Thanks to David Burn and AdPulp for the image of Faris.