Yearly Archives: 2011

Celebrities invade the corporation

Please come have a look at my post at the Harvard Business Review Blog on the good and bad aspects of the corporation using celebrity as a “creative director.”  

Please come comment!  Thanks.  

At the moment, I am in Schaumberg, Illinois.  I spend yesterday working with people in the Convenience store industry.  Very interesting.  

The image to the right is the work of Ruby Karelia, a Vancouver blogger and artist.  It is used by permission. See Ruby’s blog here.

As Ruby likes to put it, she uses her blog “to report from her childhood.”  

How fast are we traveling? iPad2 as a measure

We are traveling at speed.  And we move faster and faster.

That’s the assumption.

But a little voice in my head says, "but is this just the thing we like to think about ourselves?  What’s the proof, actually?"

Well, here’s some proof.

This is from Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Design at Apple.

In the event that announces the iPad2, Ive says

I can’t think of a product that has defined an entire category, and then has been completely redesigned in such a short period of time.  

As Steve Jobs points out in the opening moments of the event, the iPad2 redesign comes as the competition is just now struggling to catch up to the first iPad.  

I think the conventional wisdom was to exploit the advantage, especially when you are a category-creator (and not merely a successful innovator).  

So, at least for this player, at least in this category, the pace of change is extraordinary.  

References

The Apple event video is here.  Mr. Ive’s comment comes at the 62:53 mark.  

Is Barbara Lippert old enough?

My world rocked recently when it was revealed that Barbara Lippert was leaving Adweek for Goodby, Silverstein where she has been made “curator of pop culture.”

Yes, of course, I would have preferred that she be called a Chief Culture Officer.  But it’s enough that the appointment was made.

As readers of my blog will know, I was a fan of Lippert’s weekly Adweek column on advertising. It was superb.

Stuart Elliott’s announcement of the event was marred slightly by two of the reader comments that followed it.

[I have removed these comments at Barbara Lippert’s request]

Assumptions, assumptions!

Assumption 1: that Lippert was hired as a trend spotter.

Jeff Goodby doesn’t say anything about trend spotting.  In fact, Lippert has been hired as an expert on pop culture.  God spare us, Goodby and Silverstein, if she fulfills her duties by spotting trends. Culture is only about 20% trends. Agencies and corporations that spend their time spotting these trends lock themselves into an endless game of catch up.  Lippert is responsible for the whole of the water front of our culture, and here her age becomes an advantage.

Assumption 2: that you have to be one to know one.  (Specifically, only someone who is 18-34 can report on this demographic group.)

This notion was dispatched during the political correctness debates.  When members of excluded groups insisted that only they could report on these groups, the world had to remind them that the argument would cost them the right to report on any other group.  They stopped.

Assumption 3: that it’s ok to trade in stereotypes about [removed at Barbara Lippert’s request].

If you were generalizing about gender, race or ethnicity in this way, the world would have put you in a small room with John Galliano, the fashion world’s ranking anti-semite.

The real question:

Is Barbara Lippert old enough to be a curator of pop culture?  Has she lived, studied and observed enough to make good on the responsibility with which she’s been charged?Studying ads and the ad business for 20 years is actually an excellent perspective from which to study our culture.  And she is, to judge her by her column, a real talent.  My plan: wait and see.

References

Elliott, Stuart. 2011. “Longtime Ad Critic to Curate Pop Culture.” New York Times. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/longtime-ad-critic-to-curate-pop-culture/

Writing and wrestling

For the ancient Greeks, muses inspired the creators of poetry and myth, whispering deathless prose and immortal truths.

My muse are a roller derby team, the Dock Yard Derby Dames.  The brunette scowling is called Mytai SmashYa (aka Might I Smash You).  I met them at the Bob Rivers show on K-ZOK radio in Seattle when I was on tour for Chief Culture Officer.  I have never been the same.

The Dock Yard Derby Dames are a source of constant inspiration on the present book. They keep up a ferocious pace around the track, sometimes pushing, sometimes clearing the way. And when I completely run out of ideas, they pull up beside me, lift me by the elbows, and fling me into the crowd.  This has a way of getting my attention and I return to the track with a firm resolve never to run out of ideas again.  

This post is my way of apologizing for my absence here.  I just have to keep at it.  Because, well you know.  The dames. 

Why can’t we just get along: engineers and anthropologists at it again!

 

My apologies for having been slow to post.  

I am working on the new book and with a deadline looming, every word I can put to paper goes to that.

I did have a chance to bang off an essay for the Harvard Business Review blog.  

It asks why engineers can’t take culture more seriously.  

There’s a lively discussion there.  I would be grateful if you would have a look at the post and offer a comment.  (Because This Blog has the best commenters.)

The post went up yesterday, but I only found out today.  My apologies for being slow to let you know.  I just found out this morning.  

You will find the post by clicking here.

Holding the hand of a burning man

Larry Harvey and Jerry James took an 8-foot wooden man to San Francisco’s Baker beach on June 21, 1986 and set him on fire.

The reaction was spectacular.

People came sprinting up the beach to have a look.  A stranger began improvising a song on his guitar.

And when the winds drove the flames to one side, a woman rushed in to hold the Burning Man’s hand.

It’s this last part I can’t get out of my head.  She tried to hold his hand?  

What can we say about this?  

That some women have terrible taste in men?

That tragedy makes a guy more appealing?

Well, if there were a simple explanation, this image would rush out of my head, instead of just sitting there.  So why is it just sitting there?

It’s something to do with the way she is seizing the moment, the sheer opportunism of what she does.  She can see that this is fleeting.  The wind will change.  She must act now and she does.  And of course there’s the sheer daring.  Because the wind will change.  And suddenly. Whatever she’s doing matters extraordinarily to her. 

I picture her holding the Burning Man’s hand and facing out to the crowd.  (This might be wrong.)  As if to say, "look, we’re together."  And in this moment, she turns him from a collection of wood scraps into, well, yes, something like a man.  (Hey, if he can pull chicks, the Burning Man’s claim to personhood just went up a notch or two.) With this gesture, she goes into the spirit of the occasion and helps make burning wood a burning man.  (As ritual transformations go, this is the sort of thing bound to impress an anthropologist.  No, but really anyone, no?)

And when she faces out to the crowd (if she did), it’s as if she is striking the portrait pose.  It could even be a wedding portrait pose. "With this gesture, with this daring, I thee wed." "Look, we’re together.  We’re a we."  We’re, as Goffman would have said, a "with."  

And now she’s playing with paradox or just playing.  After all, every portrait stakes a claim to permanence. It is as close as an ordinary person ever gets to asserting some official truth about themselves…for the record.  

It’s standard sociological stuff.  We are showing that we, this person, belong to this formally assigned identity, this role.  We are stapling ourselves to a social meaning.  We are consenting to a shared, collective definition…for the record.

And she is doing this in a fleeting moment with a burning man!  It’s astounding…even if merely playful.  A claim to permanence that takes and lasts a couple of seconds?  Lady, you’re a genius.

The Burning Man has always been a work in progress. Their official account is this: "Burning Man is about coming together is a beautiful yet unforgiving environment to celebrate radical self-expression."  And here she is helping define the man just seconds after he appears on the beach. She forges a relationship for the two of them, and an identity for the Man. She’s made her own, instant, origin myth.  Blimey.

References

Anonymous. n.d., “What is Burning Man?: The Early Years.” Available at: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1986_1996/ [Accessed November 29, 2010].

Last thoughts

Some tickets for the 2011 Burning Man are still on sale. here.

Really last thoughts

Speaking of blimey, you really have to see these mug shots taken in Australia a very long time ago.  You will not believe your eyes.  Thanks to Very Short List for finding this treasure and letting us know.  here. 

The writer’s workbench, the writer’s tech

My apologies.  I have been writing all day every day and this means I have been neglecting the blog.

I have assembled my own little work bench and I thought I would share with you the tech in question.

Upper right hand corner of desk

This is my iPad now serving as a time keeper.  I am using Clock Pro, specifically the Count Down function that shows that I have 5 hours, 22 minutes and 19 seconds till the manuscript (this version of it) is due in the hands of my editor.  That means I will be writing til 5:00 today.  

Upper left hand corner

This is Molly, a grumpy Siamese cat.  Cats are not optional.  You must have one if you want to write well.  Strictly speaking, you should have several.  I do.  Vivienne and Zsa Zsa are asleep somewhere.  When they wake up they will want me to make breakfast and throw things for them to fetch.  So the idea is to see how much work I can get done before all hell break lose.

Pile of magazines

This is a pile of magazines, each of which represents a blog post I have not written. This is the only paper that allowed on the desk.  (Well, except for the letter you see between Molly and the iPad.  This was type written on antique stationary.  So an exception is made.) Sitting on the pile of magazines is a little Canon camera which serves as an excellent paper weight (and camera).  

Coffee cup

This is caffeine that enters my body in the form of coffee that begins in the kitchen as the  Starbucks whole bean "house blend" which the package tells me is "lively and balanced" but I prefer Dark Roast because this is, the package tells me, X – Bold, and I am pretty sure my prose needs every little bit of momentum it can get.  

Book on desk

This is the LiveScribe system.  It captures anything written, stores it in your computer where it becomes searchable.  I have the bad habit of writing on anything that handy and then I can’t ever find it again.  Now I have everything in one place and it is finally findable!  Highly recommended.

Computer on desk

This is a MacBook Air.  I just converted from a Windows ThinkPad and boy am I grateful I did.  I recently had to fire up the ThinkPad and it reminded me of an occasion some years ago when I had to go from my computer based word processor to an IBM Selectric II.  Talk about time travel.  On the Air, I am running Google Chrome, Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, Zotero, Things, Gmail and assorted other programs.

Schedule

This is invisible but it is the biggest thing in the room.  The idea is to write for as close to 12 hours a day as I can manage.  I never get much more than 8 hours done, but if I don’t aim high, I get, like, 4 hours done.  The trick is to keep distractions at bay.  Email, Twitter, Blogging!  I just try to keep my head down and write as much as possible.  Oh, I do take a walk.  

Your assignment

Every writer has his or her own system.  Please share yours!  

Cultural assignments as (or for) a Chief Culture Officer

A friend of mine writes to say she is looking for someone who writes well and can help her "communicate creative projects."

This would be an interesting assignment because a) this person has an extraordinary cultural knowledge, b) she works for an international organization which extraordinary cultural reach, and c) there is a good chance she will end up as a Chief Culture Officer somewhere and,God willing, there.  On all accounts, this would be a great assignment.

Here’s the deal.  If you are interested, send me an email with a one page CV attached. I will pass the email along to my friend unopened and unread.  Please don’t ask me for any additional information.  I know only what I’ve told you.  And please don’t ask me for the secret password for this assignment. It’s secret!

On other matters to do with the Chief Culture Officer, I was thrilled to hear that Goodby, Silverstein and Partners have appointed Barbara Lippert as their pop culture curator. Readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of the work that Barbara did on advertising for Adweek.  (And I remain convinced that if the New York Times did not harbor a contempt for popular culture, they would have hired Barbara as their advertising critic long ago.)  I owe news of Barbara’s appointment to a friend of this blog (and mine), Rick Liebling. See Rick’s treatment here.  As Rick points out, Goodby, Silverstein also employs Gareth Kay as their head of planning.  This gives the San Francisco firm two powerhouses in the cultural field.

References

Elliott, Stuart.  2011.  Longtime Ad Critic To Curate Pop Culture.  New York Times.  January 28.  here.  

The genius of Portlandia

Portlandia (IFC, Fridays, 10:30) is funny, but mostly it’s daring.

Cultural innovators, like the ones who live in Portland — bike messengers, locavore chefs, and assorted others with nose rings — usually get a pass. The satirists leave them alone. The notion: if you are a rule breaker, you’re above reproach.

Satire, that’s for poor, rule-bound schmos. For them, satire is a mixed blessing from the avant-garde: a punishment for schmo-ish-ness, and an opportunity for liberation.

Making fun of a rule breaker — especially rule breakers who are so disarmingly earnest and serious? This is actually very rule breaking.

This is exactly what Portlandia means to do. SNL’s Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein take aim at the rule breakers of Portland. The reward is comedic riches. After all, no one’s working this territory. There’s satiric opportunity just about everywhere.

In one skit, Armisen and Brownstein scrutinize a restaurant menu to see if it is Kosher according to Alice Waters and the artisanal movement. Brownstein’s character wants to know, for instance, precisely how large the range is in which the free-range chickens are kept. The joke here is that restaurants are completely unsurprised and not even a little exasperated by this. They present a little dossier for the chicken-who-would-be-dinner. (His name is Colin.) But this is not enough for Armisen and Brownstein, who insist that the restaurant hold their table while they drive 30 miles to check out Kevin’s farm for themselves.

This the best kind of comedy, both broad and cunningly detailed. In the Adult Hide and Seek League skit, there are lots of little grace notes. Brownstein is completely preoccupied with the after party. Armisen tries to make “SEEK” into an acronym, and can’t think of a word for the second “e.” Armisen does a brilliant little Spider-man thing while hiding in a hall way.

The best piece takes place in a bookstore charmingly named Women and Women First. Steve Buscemi commits an error — he uses the bathroom that’s clearly reserved for customers only — and Armisen and Brownstein, the proprietors, have him. He must pay for his error with a purchase. But no, it turns out, Armisen and Brownstein are not going to let him make this purchase: he is not worthy. So he can’t actually leave. It’s a little anthropological study of what happens to commerce when freighted with morality. The anonymity, the choice, the freedom we look at with some suspicion actually begins to look OK. At least you can leave.

Armisen and Brownstein have managed a small cultural miracle. They found a way to make fun of those who are normally the agents, not the objects, of ridicule. They found a way to set up shop, comedically speaking, in a place more avant than the avant garde. Good going! Who knew there was a there there?

The big question: will Portland see the humor of Portlandia? The Women & Women First skit suggests not. The proprietors have no sense of humor. (And this is too often true of cultural innovators. They gorge themselves on moral certitude and righteous indignation.) And if Portland does not see the humor of Portlandia, well, there’s always hide and seek.

You might wonder what a post on Portlandia is doing at HBR.org (where it was originally published), instead of at Entertainment Weekly’s website or my own cultureby.com. Most corporations simply do not pay enough attention to contemporary culture — they react instead of respond. But corporations need to know about the slow food movement and why the hot color this season is a particular shade of blue — and about shows like Portlandia — because such intelligence matters for how they shape their products and interact with their customers. They need to see the early warning of changes taking place in American culture. (Plus, if nothing else, this gives you fodder for small talk at your next dinner party.)

 

David Saunders, Minerva winner

Daniel Saunders won a recent Minerva for his answer to a Minerva essay contest. It’s a really good answer but for some reason I forgot to post it.

Here, then, is Daniel’s answer to the question: "JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon, compare and contrast."

I’ve figured out what’s special about JJ Abrams: he’s the master of taking things away. He makes the kind of stuff I love most, which is genre fiction that is not stupid and childish. Of course genre’s roots are in the simple-minded and child-oriented, e.g. pulp magazines, comic books and action movies, so the first thing you have to do is to clear out a lot of the crap that comes with it. This usually includes racism and sexism, depending on how far back you’re going, but also the crushing repetitiveness of genre that makes it easy to parody. JJ Abrams realizes that if the audience knows exactly whats going to happen next, why not skip it?

I really noticed this skipping past the boring in a clever scene in MI:3 where Tom Cruise is going to do a complicated, time dependent heist in a building. I could feel myself start to go to sleep, but then was grateful to realize we were just seeing the outside of the building from the van – and then Tom Cruise sprinting the hell out of there. And there are countless other examples of that in Abrams’ stuff. Not only does it make you feel smart, and not deadened, but you’re more engaged, because your imagination is doing a lot of the work. You do get quite a few glimpses of the monster in Cloverfield, but most of the time you’re imagining what it’s up to and what it’s like – things are rarely overexplained. This is closely related to JJ Abrams devotion to creating a sense of mystery, that is earned, which he talks about in his TED talk, something that has led to great rewards in his non-franchise works like Lost and Cloverfield.

The limitation of JJ Abrams is that when you clear all the boring the crap from old cornball genres, you should have something to replace it with. You should be doing more than they tried to do. In fact, you should use that free space to create art: something that expresses a little of your worldview and ideas about life. I’m not convinced that JJ Abrams has those. Lost is actually, scene for scene, very sharply written, largely avoiding cliches and letting us connect the dots. But it’s a failure (as of partway through season 3) because it doesn’t have much to say. This is especially clear in the flashbacks that occupy half of an episode, which are a perfect storytelling venue in a way: peek into the soul of someone, learn the secrets of their background they don’t want you to know. But in practice, though they are well acted and all have little twists and surprises, they are stultifying, because they don’t add up to anything, they have no perspective on human nature. Some broader themes are emerging in the series, to do with authority and control, but they’re out of focus, and the flashbacks rarely contribute to them. Those flashbacks are truly just killing time. And the emptiness is extremely apparent in Cloverfield and MI:3 whenever they slow down for a second (which, fortunately, they rarely do)

So I will never care about JJ Abrams half as much as I do about Joss Whedon. Whedon clears out the crap, and in its place puts in urgent convictions about the world. Buffy is about growing up, Angel is about guilt and vengeance and negotiating with evil, Dollhouse is about desire and the desire to control others. Among many other things. Everything he’s done is packed full of rich themes, even the 45 minute Dr Horrible. I just read this today about Speed, by David Edelstein:

"Remember: Jack and Annie are on a runaway subway train heading for the end of the line, and she’s handcuffed to a pole. He tries to free her but can’t. Instead of leaping to safety, as she pleads with him to do, he settles down and hugs her tightly as they hurtle towards certain immolation. This might be the most romantic moment in any action picture, and it’s only because Jack is a risk-taker who faces death with stoicism."

Could this also be the cause of the other obvious difference, that his characters are far more loveable and memorable? Maybe it’s not enough for a character to be "well written"; maybe there has to be a point to them. Even Jack – even a Keannu Reeves character! – expresses something interesting about how you might approach life.

JJ Abrams might actually have the edge on some measures – the lack of heart might make it possible to be more streamlined and surprising. I will certainly check out everything he makes, as one of our few incredibly talented and successful genre writers. And I’ll bet there are themes out there that he could speak to deeply. James Cameron doesn’t understand people very well but made some of the best films ever about technology and the techno-warrior mindset, two things he does understand. Until then I doubt JJ Abrams movies will be  more than skillful and creative amusement park rides.

Daniel Saunders grew up in Victoria, B.C., studied Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and he is now a graduate student in Cognitive Psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Making culture, making translations

It’s like someone put our culture in a centrifuge.  Things now move away from one another at speed.  The Vegas "player," the Meth crisis task force administrator, the person in LA who casts actors for films and television, the Atlanta housewife equestrian, the museum administrator in the Miami Latin community, the Dallas 14 year old who spends most of her time playing Dragon Age, the electrical engineer who works for Ford, these people live a long way a way from one another, culturally speaking.  They are not just out of shouting distance. They work from different assumptions.  They inhabit different world views.

Which is not to say they do not need one another.  These days serendipity is our special friend.  Because while the problem these people face may be diverse, the solutions share certain structural properties.  And even if this is not true, the truth of one domain makes a dandy and illuminating metaphor for another.  If these parties could talk to one another, they would be immediately or indirectly valuable to one another.

But of course they don’t talk to one another.  They do not have the translation table necessary for even a simple conversation.  So even simple conversations can be too laborious to establish the momentum conversations must achieve to sustain themselves.  If we don’t get airborne in quite short order, we just stop talking.

Plus of course distance makes for its own kind of difficulty.  Some years ago I was sitting in a Kansas hotel bar chatting somewhat awkwardly with a senior African American male.  He was nursing a drink while his wife met with other women in the ballroom next door.  (They were talking about how to raise African American kids in the prosperous suburbs of the middle and upper middle class.)  It took the husband and me some time to establish a link.  It took still more time to find a topic.  It then took a while to talk about the topic. (This proved to be the why the women were meeting next door.)  There was a lot of "not saying" and "not asking" which required a lot of guessing on my part.  To be honest, I’m still not exactly sure about some of what I "learned."

What we need are mediators.  No, not that kind of mediator.  Not the kind who comes in and helps everyone "get to yes." I mean a more literal kind of mediator.  We are not talking about shared interest or conciliation.  We’re talking about shared understanding.  This is the mediator who brings the casting agent and the electrical engineer together and helps them achieve mutual comprehension.

Think of yourself as a Rosetta Stone, a translation table capable of turning one language into another.  This would make a great exercise.  Choose two people and "translate" them.  It would make a good thesis.  Specify all the things in a detailed, thoughtful way that one party needs to know about the other.  Come to that, it would make a fantastic book.  In any case, it’s a wonderful contribution to culture, to the culture of culture.  

Photo: Fernand Braudel (1902 – 1985), the French geographer, who was very good at translation.  See the Wikipedia entry here. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2011.  Making Culture, Provoking Culture.  This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Economics and Anthropology.  January 13.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2011.  Making Culture, Categorizing Culture.  This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Economics and Anthropology.  January 10.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2011.  Making Culture, Mapping Culture.  This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Economics and Anthropology.  January 7.  here.

Oh, behave

Lucky me.  Pam and I are going to dinner tonight with a distinguished anthropologist and his wife.  I am guessing we will talk about the state of the anthropology, and I will want to talk about how little and how badly anthropologists understand American culture.

The distinguished anthropologist will reply by offering several counter examples, including someone who has studied American culture from a Marxist point of view.

My reply will be that every reductionist reading of American culture is wrong. (How’s that for a reduction?)

(For those who don’t use this social scientific lingo, a reductionist reading is one that says there is a single truth beneath all the surface noise of a social world.  Thus does the Marxist, the functionalist, the economist, the primatologist, the Freudian insist, each for their own reasons, that the apparent complexity of American culture conceals a single driver, the revelation of which makes everything clear.  Class, says the Marxist, that ‘s what’s really going on here.)

The trouble is sometimes it is class.  But sometimes it’s lifestyle.  And sometimes it’s a new cultural formation unanticipated.  Sometimes it is economic choice driven by self interest of the naked kind and sometimes economic choice of the mediated kind.  And sometimes it is the influence of politics and sometimes religion.  And sometimes it is an idea from on high, that comes to us from deep thinkers in Europe, a fashionista in New York City, or Steve Jobs in California.  And sometimes it’s an idea, if that’s the right term, that is fully emergent, leaping not from one mind or even from several minds, but from a new practice, or a new industry or a new part of the world.

Even if it was one thing, there are many things this one thing could be.

But it’s never one thing.  Not any more.  The real problem is that it is always all these things engaged in a violent game of bumper cars, rippling through our worlds in unpredictable chains of cause and effect.

So the person who insist that American culture is all about class, or any one thing, must be wrong.

I get why these ideas appeal to us.  We live with so much noise and confusion that it is thrilling to think there is some secret key explaining everything.  And when these ideas come up, they have the force of revelation.  “But of course,” we say, slapping our foreheads, “it’s so obvious now that you say it.”  But eventually we begin to see that the new idea doesn’t discover everything and sometimes that it doesn’t even explain the important things.  This can take a very long time and there is always a group of people who are so wedded to the new idea that they argue it to their grave.  We don’t know why they can’t let go.  They just can’t.  Of course they get “read out” of the discipline.  No one listens anymore.  They inflict their orthodoxy on some of their students, but this really is a monstrous a betrayal of the teacher’s responsibility.  These kids are being marked for failure and obscurity, removed from usefulness much before their time.

This is an ancient debate.  And it has been taken up and debated more ably than I have here.  The point I wish to make is that there’s a new answer to this old problem.  And that answer is us.  It may once have been true that there was one or a few factors that could explain everything, but we are so various and multiple and changeable, those days are over.  Only a multiplicity of explanations can explain a world like ours.   And indeed, all those monolithic ideas are welcome to the debate, but they may not dominate the proceedings.

That’s what I’m going to say at dinner.   Wish me luck!

Being Human, Being Jenkinsian

I watched the opening episode on Being Human on SyFy this week.

The fun thing about science and fantasy fiction is that you never know which of the assumptions that govern your world will be reconstituted in the present one.  And even once you’ve spotted the difference(s), it’s still hard to anticipate what differences the difference(s) will make.

This is distinctly the pleasure of Being Human.  You can’t guess, beyond the obvious things, how vampires, werewolves and ghosts will coexist, and its fun to wait to see this play out.  The ghost (and the actress who plays her, Meaghan Rath) is especially interesting because she is still figuring out how to be a ghost and divides her time, in the meanwhile, between being a busy body around the house, and wailing, properly, at the sheer injustice of her fate.

Shake well.  Repeat as necessary.

Putting a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost in a house is interesting.  Putting this vampire, werewolf and ghost even more so.  It’s not that this has ever been for me a matter of burning curiosity, as in “I wonder what would happen if…”  But it makes a diverting pretext on which to sharpen on our wits.

Because we don’t just sit there.  We are Jenkinsians.  We are hunting and gathering the simple where, what, and who.  We are also working out the back stories.  (It turns out the werewolf is Jewish and that woman we thought was his girlfriend is actually his sister.  To know something about this family makes what we may think about his identity as a werewolf richer and more interesting.  I mean, otherwise, he’s just a one trick pony, er, werewolf.)   And we are performing a kind of cultural Sudoku.  If this is true, and this is true, we tell ourselves, then this is probably true.

The cultural participant, the Jenkinsian observer, is looking for 5 things:

1)  What are the differences that create this little world?  (And have they been well chosen?)

2)  What differences do these differences make?  (How will this play out?  I will want to be rewarded for my perspicuity, what there is of that.  And I will want to be rewarded by developments I couldn’t possibly anticipate, that will thrill me in the unfolding.)

3)  What is the field of possibility? (What am I given as background and back story?  And what can I do with them?  How rich and engaging a field is this?)

4)  What can I assume, reliably and speculatively?  (Given what I am given and can surmise from questions 1, 2 and 3, what is my own invented Being Human.  This is where the cultural Sudoku comes in.)

5)  Has the world been successfully jumbled?  Have things been brought into collisions that are normally kept asunder, and does their combination deliver present, and promise future, interesting, outcomes?

6)  Oh, there’s a 6th.  I think we are looking at each of these characters and asking "what would it be like to be like that?"  

This is the unofficial viewer’s guide with which I watch Being Human and probably any show. We are active viewers, digging, poaching, reworking, creating, empathizing, as we go.

References

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual poachers: Television fans & participatory culture. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age. NYU Press.

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

Jenkins, Henry. 2009. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. The MIT Press.

Post script: I hope Henry, my esteemed colleague, will forgive me taking liberty with his ideas and his name.  This idea was buzzing around in my head, and I had a 50 minutes to turn it into words on the train.

Harry’s Law: flourish or fail?

One test of our knowledge of contemporary culture: can we predict whether an innovation will flourish or fail?

For the record, then, I believe Harry’s Law, the show that debuted last night on NBC, will fail.

The debut suggests I may be wrong.  Harry’s Law got at 7.5 rating / 12 share, putting it ahead of the latest hit show from CBS, Hawaii Five – O.

Harry’s Law has other advantages that should give me pause.  It has a formidable talent in the person of Kathy Bates (pictured) and it was developed and written by David E. Kelley, a guy who knows a thing or two about making hit TV. 

This show has a time-warp quality.  Harry’s Law feels as if untouched by the cable effect. The rise of HBO and the participation of TNT and USA Networks has created new standards of granularity (most recently Nurse Jackie).  TV will never work its way to perfect granularity and a one to one correspondence with the world "out there."  But the ratio is changing.  The cable effect has pushed all TV, even genre TV, to new veracity.

And by this standard, Harry’s Law feels completely "sound stage," a reality created by and for the cameras.  There is veracity here, but it corresponds to the "veracity standard" as that stood in 1990. At it’s worst, this show feels a little Murder She Wrote.

To make matters worst, there is a "crusading do-gooder" thing here that is cringe-worthy. Great and noble white people coming to the aid of defenseless black people?  How very 20th century Hollywood.  It expresses the secret racism of some parties: that the downtrodden depend on them, and their secret vanity: that when people come to the aid of the downtrodden they make themselves glorious. It feels as if Kelley is skirting that horrible Hollywood construction, the one that says the point of social action is not "social action," but the celebration of the do-gooder.  (Surely, this is why so little ever comes from the Hollywood fund raiser.  By week’s end participants have a hard time remembering the point of the event because, well, the point was to revel in their own generosity, and, hankies out, that was performed brilliantly.)

There is a deeper problem.  There are moments when this show has Kelley’s signature whimsy.  Madcap stuff happens.  Weird combinations occur.  When Kelley introduced this to TV, chiefly, I believe, through Ally McBeal, it was fresh and interesting.  Kelley is one of the originators of what Lisa Schwarzbaum calls "magical comedy."

To be sure, we still like to disparate things brought together, on the screen, on the plate, in the ad, in the fashion outfit, in the interior design.  Reckless, unexpected combinations has become one of our cultural signatures.  But we have moved away from whimsy to combinations that are more raw and to use the language of art criticism, "disturbational."  By this new standard, Harry’s Law feels like culture lite.  

Ok, that’s my prediction.  I might be wrong.  I hope I am.  I take no pleasure in the internet sport of trashing strangers.  I am not holier than David E. Kelley.  He has shaped contemporary culture in ways that deserve my admiration.  

My last prediction, that The Good Guys would fail, was confirmed.  Privately, I told a colleague that Undercovers would fail.  (She may or may not be prepared to back me up.) So I am batting 2 for 2.  We shall see how I do with this one.  

References

McCracken, Grant.  2010.  The Good Guys.  This Blog.  here. 

Schwarzbaum, Lisa. 1998.  Pleasantville.  Entertainment Weekly.  October 30.  here.

Will New York City go the way of the newspaper?

The digital effect rolls on. The record store has been vaporized by iTunes. Retail is being disintermediated by Amazon. The newspaper has been dealt a mortal blow by Craig’s list, the print magazine by PSFK, Huffington, etc.  Clearly, education is next.

No one talks about cities.  However natural they seem to anyone born in the 20th century, cities are arbitrary constructions.  They are predicated on the idea that humans must congregate and colocate.  But this idea is contingent.  A "face to face" connection matters only when there is no digital alternative.  

And now there is.  We can interact digitally.  You can be in a cab in Singapore and I can be in a cab in Philadelphia and our voices have real fidelity.  If we don’t need to be in motion, we can use the camera build into our computers, adding facial expressions to voice.

The fidelity of teleconferencing is still pretty horrible.  Jack Conte and I tried to create a conversation on line Friday using Ustream and it was spectacularly unsuccessful. (I ended up called Jack on the phone, and he held the received up to his computer microphone.) But this is merely a technical problem.  By the end of the present decade we will have perfect fidelity of audio and video.  (See Cisco’s Umi for a glimpse of the future.)

And then what?  I wonder if it isn’t the end of New York City as we know it.  

Here are a couple of crude speculations that will indicate what I mean.  In a perfect world, we would have Steve Crandall build one of his amazing thinking machines to help us work this through.  In the meantime:

Let’s say there are 8 million people in NYC at any give time.  And let’s say 1 million of them are there as commuters, traveling in from New Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island each day.  

When there is TCWTF (teleconferencing with true fidelty), these people will no longer commute every day.  They will probably commute once a week, because, and here I am making the BFA (big, fat assumption) that some face-to-face contact is called for, especially when the people in question or idea workers, cultural creatives or, as I like to call them, Floridians.  

The commuters who now come in one day a week will need perches more than offices and the corporation will now be in position to cut space requirements substantially.  Let’s say they do so by 15%.  

We have remaining 7 million people who live in the 5 boroughs.  (Forgive me if I am way off. I just need some figures to paint the picture.)  Let’s suppose the 2 million of these residents qualify as idea workers or Floridians.  I think we can assume that some 80% of this group will give up their homes or rentals in the city.

No longer tied to the city by the need to be there everyday, these people will give up tiny living circumstances for something larger, cheaper and less onerously taxed.  (Again, I am assuming that these people will want to be in the city say a day a week.  Face to face contact will continue to be important.  This too may eventually change and then there won’t be anything stopping us from moving to the rain forests of the Amazon or the stormy coast of Newfoundland.  For the time being we will telecommute from Philadelphia or New Haven.)  

Now the city is really up against it.  With a decline in demand for office space and housing, the tax base will take a tremendous hit.  (Given the kind of taxes paid by idea workers and the companies that employee them, it’s not unthinkable that this exodus would remove something like a third of the city’s tax base.  This without actually reducing very much of the need for the services that taxes support.  Actually, Richard Florida is exactly the guy to run these numbers.  I hope he will favor us with some rough calculations.)

We might be looking at the return of the 1970s "downward spiral" scenario.  Tax base falls, social services falls, crime rises, the city becomes chaotic, even more people leave, and the tax base falls again.  The city tries to correct by charging fewer companies more, and more companies leave.  After all, the tech now makes this easier and easier to do. 

Thoughts, please!