Author Archive
Women Behaving Badly
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I have just posted a cultural reflection on the new show "Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23" on the Harvard Business Review Blog.
My argument: that the main character Chloe is an important cultural development. Popular culture is our gender laboratory.
Please come read the blog post by CLICKING HERE.
Excavation Day #1: App Opps
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I have a habit of jotting down ideas here and there, always with the certainty that I will come back to them and turn them into a post for this website.
I have the best of intensions. But the ideas pile up. And I have the attention span of a gold fish, so things...well, they pile up.
So my resolution here is to dig down through all those lists and share the ones that still hold my attention.
These two I call App Opps, aka application opportunities. Use them as you will.
App 1. The inside of your head, Thursday afternoon
I want an app that automatically posts clips of things I am looking at and working on and creates (or curates) a picture of the inside of my (or your) brain two weeks ago, so that I could wonder through it and see the stuff that was on the horizon, in the works, in hand, and on its way into the world. This should be a kind of flash freezing.
Yes, I guess I could get this my looking at my (your) twitter stream, Evernote clippings, Kindle highlights, Pinterest page and so on. But I want this put together in the manner of a news briefing or a museum exhibit.
As the world gets faster and we get more multiple, we are going to want this sort of thing for the sake of continuity and remembering.
App 2. Less is more media
I want a program that removes 2 minutes out of every 10 in the movie I am watching. That's because with a lot of popular culture "less is more." Somewhere on this website I talk about the advantage of coming into a movie or a TV show, 10 minutes late. You miss the set up and the exposition, so you are left to figure out what's going on and the viewing process is much more fun. If a film is really laborious, it could be made more interesting if we extract 2 minutes every 10 minutes, and films that were made to the laborious standard of say the 40s could be returned to usefulness or watchableness. We could think of this as colorization. Perhaps we call it storification. (The background thinking for this idea can be found in the discussion of the Kauffman continuum in Flock and Flow.)
Making a culturematic of yourself (the Nick Sherrard way)
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Everyone constructs an identity on line.
Some do it with wit and panache.
Others, mea culpa, are more plodding and less interesting.
This morning I laughed out loud when I read Nick Sherrard's description of himself on Twitter.
Note: CCTV refers to the system of cameras that blankets the UK. We see Nick standing one of the few places in Britain that does not appear on CCTV, aka the moral high ground (at sea level).
(Post script: thanks to Barbara Monteiro, Connie Perry, and Sarah Fogarty for a great conversation yesterday.)
Bjork and Tina Brown: sisters of innovation
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Björk and Tina Brown have many differences but one common problem: They are watching the boat beneath them sink. Their print and music industries are being disintermediated by the digital revolution. They are struggling to respond to the blue-ocean and white-space and black-swan disruption that besets us all.
For more of this post, please go to the full post on the Harvard Business Review blog by clicking HERE.
Justin Theroux, culturematic
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The old career path was simple.
Fix on an objective. Commit body and soul. Keep your eyes on the prize. Stay at it.
No experimenting with other options. No idle curiosity. No putzing around. In sum, no career wanderlust.
Make a choice. Stick with it.
But for some Hollywood stars, this has changed.
Take the case of Justin Theroux. He's the one in the poster to the right (bottom row, far left).
Theroux wrote Tropic Thunder, Iron Man 2, and stars in the new comedy Wanderlust. He also dates Jennifer Aniston (bottom row, second from the left).
Rottenberg of Entertainment Weekly says:
More the most actors, Theroux is a moving target, bouncing between small roles and big ones, art films and blockbusters, dramas and comedies, TV and film. "I've had the most unpredictable career path -- it's really a career stumble," says the actor, 40.
We have seen this pattern before. In Culturematic, I write about the case of James Franco, an actor famous for trying a wide variety of roles and educational programs, all of this at the height of his career.
In Culturematic (out in May!), I compare Franco to Bethenny Frankel. Both Franco and Frankel are experimental, trying a variety of things. Whereas Frankel exhibits a simple opportunism, Franco appears to give us something broader. Here's what I say in the book.
The point of Franco's explorations is not celebrity. Indeed, he appears almost in flight from celebrity. More probably, his motive is curiosity. In the old Hollywood, stardom brought the actor a kind of completion. Nowadays, for some actors, it is seen to close off options and experiences the actor cares about. Franco doesn’t know what he needs to be an actor or a person. And he doesn’t know what he needs to know to stop being an actor. So he needs to find what’s “out there.”
For most of us this sort of thing would be take as a symptom of indecision, perhaps a refusal to commit. For Hollywood stars, some of them anyhow, it's a way of doing business.
Both Theroux and Franco have turned their careers into culturematics. They are using it to search the world for options. They are prepared to risk a certain blurriness of image to surface options that are otherwise hard to see. There are to this extent treating their careers, once so simple and well defined, as adaptive exercises.
This really was a bad idea when Hollywood was a simpler place, when ours was a simpler culture. But now that our culture is so various and unpredictable, now that Hollywood is a more complicated, less scrutable place, it makes sense to do a career "stumble" as Theroux calls it. This is an excellent way to discover and make contact with possibilities that would otherwise be invisible.
First quote: Rottenberg, Josh. 2012. It's Time You Got to Know Justin Theroux. Entertainment Weekly. February 24. (I can't find this article on line. Sorry!)
Second quote: McCracken, Grant. 2012. Culturematic. Harvard Business Review Press. (To be published May 15, 2012. You may preorder from Amazon by clicking HERE.)
Learning to live with complexity
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We are up against it, aren't we?
The world moves so fast, changes so much, and disrupts so often, that most of our instincts and many of our strategies are just plain wrong.
We are obliged to manage a contraction.
On the one hand we want to stay steady, grounded, true to mission, maximizing as much continuity as we can.
On the other, we want to create new ideas and behaviors, to spot disruption and reply in kind.
Niether of these is easy. Doing them together is really, really hard.
In a new essay, Stanford's brilliant Ed Batista gives a glimpse of how a coach can help. It's a wonderful piece reinventing coaching in order to reinvent the corporation.
See read the essay, click here.
Photo acknowledgment: Thanks to D'Arcy Norman for the magnificent photo which appears in Batista's post.
Inside Inside Comedy
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You don't go into comedy unless, really, it's all about you. Even if your comedy is about self loathing, it's still about you.
What comedians want is clapping, whistling, foot stomping approval. The room, if not the heavens, should ring with our admiration and gratitude.
So Inside Comedy (Showtime, Thursday, 11:00) had a problem. Where to find someone who knew comedy from the "inside" but was not the captive of the comedian's essential self regard.
Popular culture is strewn with projects in which the comedian serves as interviewer only to ruin the occasion by butting in with their own observations or hunting down the funny. (David Letterman has no clue how to conduct an interview despite 30 years of trying. There is no more convincing demonstration of someone's inability to learn on the job.)
Enter David Steinberg, the interviewer (and executive producer) on Inside Comedy. Nancy deWolf Smith says:
Mr. Steinberg ... is the ideal interviewer. He does not focus on himself but is exquisitely tuned in to his subjects, many of whom he knows well. This seems to have relaxed some of his guests to the point where they appear more natural, and less switched on—as entertaining as that can be—than they are with other interviewers.
Steinberg has a courtly quality, a fineness, a liquid intelligence, all of them made more generous by the evident conviction that comedy is not a zero sum enterprise. He also has a curiosity that promises us genuine interest in the place of the paddle-ball approach that characterizes so much interviewing these days. Inside Comedy should be good.
See the full article by Nancy deWolf Smith, by clicking here.
Culturematics come to tourism
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Please come have a look at my latest post at the Harvard Business Review "Conversation."
With the Nextpedition, AmEx appears to be taking a Culturematic approach, taking out the predictable and adding in surprise.
See the post by CLICKING HERE.
Innovating at your public library the culturematic way
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My local library recently did a sleep over. Not for local kids. But their toys.
Brilliant. Here, I thought, was a brilliant little Culturematic to change the way people, and especially kids, thought about their library.
Please come to HBR and see the full essay. Click here.
Assumptions Hunters
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Please come have a look at my essay on (what I take to be) a new profession for people educated in the humanities and social sciences.
I am arguing that they can serve as "assumption hunters."
Please come have a look. You can find the essay by CLICKING HERE.
Time machine: a conceptual model for predicting culture
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In Boston this January?
Come sit in on my course.
Here's the outline.
MIT CMS.S62
Special Subject: Comparative Media Studies
Time Machine: Building a model for predicting culture
Grant McCracken
Wed-Thu, Jan 18-19, 25-26, 1-2, 03-05:00pm, 4-231
Pre-register on WebSIS and attend first class.
Listeners allowed, space permitting
Prereq: Permission of instructor Qualitative and quantitative skills.
Level: U 3 units Standard A - F Grading Can be repeated for credit
As our culture becomes more diverse and changeable, cultural prediction becomes more urgent and difficult. The point of this course is to build a model for making predictions. We will proceed in a practical way, taking on "real world problems." How quickly could we have seen the influence Alice Waters and Chez Panisse were to have on American culture? Could we have predicted a shift in Hollywood that demoted the likes of Schwarzenegger and promoted the likes of Michael Cera? To build the model, aka “big board” or “time machine”, we have to solve theoretical and methodological problems: what is the unit of analysis, what are the best markers of adoption, what are the best metrics, how can we make and monitor predictions, how can we represent data according to best “infographic” practice? To my knowledge, a model like this has no precedent. Think of the course as something out of the early Soviet space program. The engineering will be dodgy. Failure is not unlikely. The process will be messy and frustrating. But the outcome is sure to be illuminating and instructive. Plus your heroism is guaranteed.
Contact: Grant McCracken
Innovation the culturematic way
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Here's my recent post on the HBR website.
It's about a clever renovation at the St. Regis hotel.
This is, I believe, a great example of creating innovation through a knowledge of culture and a shift in perspective.
See the full text by CLICKING HERE.
Ethnographic reportage: one tweet at a time
Posted by: | CommentsI love people who tweet from inside their lives.
I really love people who tweet from inside an event.
Here, first image, is someone tweeting from inside a visit to the printer. (Read from bottom to top.)
[I apologize for the quality of this image. I am using Skitch and WordPress, and this appears to be the best I can do. Click on the image for clarity.]
Confined to 140 characters, a tiny keyboard, and the discomfort of texting while waiting and standing, this can't be ethnographic in any conventional sense. But what it lacks in cultural background, it makes up in vividness and emotion.
Here, in the second image, is "Johann Gutenberg" reporting the frustrations of having to sit in a meeting that presumes to rally the troops with vapid, brainless generalities. As Johann reminds us, it's like being forced to witness the death of your own intelligence.
Working in the moment has a certain heroism. 'Johann" is acting as a kind of war correspondent, bravely posting under fire, vulnerable to discovery at any moment.
"This close to heckling." Brilliant.
How many millions of times has this impulse gone repressed in corporate America. Well, why just corporate America? Educational, medical, governmental America, too. There is no shortage of stupid people keen to colonize our consciousness with their personal limitations.
In a more perfect world, we would know who WWGD really is. (I am betting he or she is not really a 15th century goldsmith, not unless someone got their time machine working.) We would also know the person who staged the Sales 101 meeting. The light of public revelation can sometimes discourage stupidity. Not always but sometimes.
I believe Twitter sprang from a technology designed for emergency personnel, people who needed to send tiny messages in the heat of the moment to solve very immediate problems. But it is learning to serve other purposes, and in some cases, and the right hands, it becomes a new observation platform for the study of American culture.
