Archive for Economics, Culture and Commerce
New life for the independent bookstore
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David Michaelides is the owner of Swipe Books in Toronto. I was
chatting with him the other day and he offered what I thought was
a dazzlingly good idea for the independent book store.
As we all know, the independent book store is struggling. The rise of
more and better TV, independent film and new media, and a rich, ever
more interesting internet, these put books at risk. The advent of Amazon.com and Amazon.ca puts the
bookstore at risk. The advent of
Amazon’s Kindle and other digital delivery vehicles put the very idea
of the book at risk. Even if books and bookstores survive, advantage
goes to the large chains that can buy in bulk. It’s tough running in
the independent book store.
But it may be that bookstores create value that we don’t appreciate.
David points out that book stores have a magical effect on the social
world around them. They work as magnets for pedestrian traffic. They
manufacture an invitation to enter. They endow the visitor with a
permission to browse. They give the visitor a reason and a right to be
out and about.
This is important because two things are true about the North American city.
1) The prohibition against being at large but unoccupied in public, while diminished,
continues to haunt us. There are lots of things that helped create
this prohibition. One of my favorite causes: that Northern European
hostility for idleness. Anyone in public not gainfully employed,
without purpose or pretext, was clearly "loitering" and this must indicate an intellectual or moral deficit from which only bad things could
come. We are a little less preoccupied by this prohibition. And thanks go to several things, including urban renovation, the new
urbanism, the rise of distributed commerce, the creative professionals passion for city life, the fall of crime. Starbucks with its
creation of a "third space" contributed mightily. Now it was ok
actually to exist in public without a warrant, to sip coffee without an
excuse. (Of course, I still look at my watch occasionally to make it
clear that I am waiting for someone.)
2) buildings and neighborhoods that do not have pedestrian traffic
become pallid, even hostile places. Their decline, the very death, is not impossible. As a result, some economic interests of the city depend upon the kindness
of strangers. Without pedestrians walking to and fro, the emotional
temperature begins to drop, the welcome of a place begins to
fade.
We have robust virtual evidence of this effect. This is precisely why
Second Life, so extraordinarily promising for some purposes, proved
finally a space people did not wish to occupy. There was no one
about. Neighborhoods were ghost towns. Second Life was itself a kind of
vapor ville. If this is not evidence enough, consider downtown Detroit
on the weekend. We like the presence of other people, even if we have no interest in them as people. We are pleased to treat them, perhaps, as walk-ons in our own personal dramas. They give a certain, pleasing effervescence to the world around us.
Clearly, these two problems belong in tandem because the solution to
one becomes the solution to the other. As and when we lift the
prohibition, people occupy buildings and neighborhoods in great number
for longer times and hey presto both buildings and the neighborhoods come alive. And when
this social and emotional change takes place, an economic event is set
in train. Property values begin to rise. Commerce flourishes. Cities
become safer and more habitable.
Very good. Back to independent bookstores. There is no point in
special pleading. These bookstores are deeply interesting place but we
cannot made a place for them on these grounds alone. They must pay
their way. They must extract their own value from the world to bless this world with their presence. But it’s now clear that value narrowly defined is not going to sustain them. If they are to survive
we must show that they create value of another kind.
And this is where David’s argument comes in. Bookstores are very good
at breaking the prohibition against public loitering. They attract
people to neighborhoods, into buildings. They endow the visitor with a
permission to browse. They give the pedestrian the right to be out and
about. And they do this just as well as the "third space" coffee shop,
perhaps better. What is called for then is an expanded appreciated for the value that bookstores create and we need property owners and managers to begin to factor this value into their calculation of the rent they demand of their tenants. (Margie Zeidler might be an inspiration here.) Something tells me Richard Florida could do a more elegant job of rendering this argument, but until he weighs in, this will have to do. Bookstores, independent bookstores, especially, create a value over and above the supply of printed materials and we must understand and act of this value, before it’s too late. As David Michaelides points out, many more of North America’s bookstores will go out of business this year.
References
The Swipe bookstore here.
Peter. 2008. Memory Lane Lined With Bookstores. Collecting Children’s Books. March 5 2008. here.
Teich, Jessica. 2008. Eulogy for an Independent Bookstore. The Nation. March 10, 2008. here.
For more on Margie Zeidler here.
American Booksellers Association here.
culture studies and capital markets: parallel or converging?
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Yesterday I had drinks with a friend from Toronto. We talked about the crisis that besets cultural studies. Once the new kid on the academic block, the field is now in steep decline, losing both students and credibility at an impressive clip.
The crisis was played out recently in the pages of Time Magazine. Several people were asked to identify the formative trends of our time. David Brooks, Mark Dery, Esther Dyson, Malcolm Gladwell, Moby, Tim O’Reilly, and Clay Shirky took up the assignment and several of them distinguished themselves.
Things did not turn out quite so well for Mark Dery, author and "cultural critic," as Time describes him. He piped up early but his contribution was ill advised and off target. He was to speak 3 more times and then fall silent. (It is impossible to say whether he spoke infrequently or that he was edited out, but then these outcomes are, perhaps, symptomatic of the same problem.)
Dery rolled out the idea that technology has separated us. "More and more, we’re alone in public." We were just putting away the hankies when he piped up again to say "the 18-year-old with a modem is just a click away from a universe of fellow travelers." Now we were obliged to wonder whether he did, or did not, mean to imply that ‘more and more, we’re together in private.’
It may be that Dery wished to evoke both ideas, as bookends for his argument, but in these the last days of the paradigm, it is more likely that he is merely reproducing one of the chief problems of the field: the use of fixed piece, pre fab analysis when something bespoke is called for. The cultural theorists look for a target and fire at will. The discourse is found to be totalizing, essentializing, fetishizing, epistemologically presumptious, ideologically deplorable, or otherwise insufficiently scrupulous. And the cultural studies crew believe themselves to be deeply scrupulous.
Scrupulous to a fault because they are now intellectually incapable. The Time debate was as close to a fair test as we are likely ever to have. A cultural critic now called upon to compete with a musician, several journalists and a couple of technological savants. It turned out he had almost nothing useful to say. Indeed, as we have seen, confronting the big issues of the day, he was almost completely silent.
Dommage, ca. But not surprising. Denis Dutton gave us fair warning of the problems here more than a decade ago. But the infatuation was intense and certain scholars made life long committments from which intrication will be tricky. (Chances are no one thought to insist on a prenup.) How appalling it must be to see this discourse now under challenge and so widely. We may expect to see the cultural theorists hauled before Judge Judy any day now. ("Your honor, I believe these people stole my college education.")
The cultural studies shelf at the book store grows more slender with each passing year. The conditions of knowledge are so scrupulous that it’s hard to construct an argument, and almost impossible to sustain an entire book. Most discourse is now a recitation of the verities and even Routledge cannot recycle these forever. (They will of course try.)
Students are now bailing out. Were it not for the fact that cultural studies was for awhile the only corner of the campus in which students could pursue their interest in contemporary culture, this defection might have happened long ago. (And this might be part of the problem. Cultural studies are better represented on campus, and with alternatives come choices, and with choices, come winners and losers. As long as cultural studies were sole source, they could misbehave themselves…which is to say, I guess, that the cultural studies frankenstein had several accomplices on campus. Those who staged the embargo against the study of contemporary culture must share some of the responsibility.)
Then there was the Sokal hoax. A physicist persuaded the journal Social Text to accept for publication a paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" as a contribution to "liberatory post modern science." Professor Sokal revealed that his paper was designed to show the limitless credulity of Social Text, to demonstrate that Social Text was, in effect, incapable of simple acts of scholarly discrimination. The effects were devasting. The culture studies crew had brought ridicule upon themselves.
Mind you, this community of scholars doesn’t always need intervention. A lot of prose is so bad, so self indulgent, that Denis Dutton staged a contest to honor its excesses. Professor Dutton notes,
Thus in A Defense of Poetry, English Prof. Paul Fry writes: "It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness – rather than the will to power – of its fall into conceptuality." If readers are baffled by a phrase like "disclosing the absentation of actuality," they will imagine it’s due to their own ignorance. Much of what passes for theory in English departments depends on this kind of natural humility on the part of readers. The writing is intended to look as though Mr. Fry is a physicist struggling to make clear the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, he’s just an English professor showing off.
Finally, there were the defections. Marjorie Garber, William R. Kenan Jr. professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard, is widely known for Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1995) and Sex and Real Estate (2000). Talk about an English professor showing off. But recently Garber published what she called "an old fashioned kind of book" entitled Shakespeare After All. From someone like Garber, this is nothing less than a recantation, and, for the cultural studies crew, a terrible loss.
Fine, that was drinks. I then proceeded to a dinner hosted by Pip Coburn, a guy who runs Coburn Ventures a company that sells data and perspective in capital markets. To be honest, Pip is a little disconcerting. I once shared a 50 minute limo ride with him. All the while he was on the phone and never once did I guess what he did for a living. (This is a very good way to initimidate an anthropologist. If you can give up 50 minutes of spoken testimony and not give the game away…well, we like to think you just can’t.)
Pip asked me to say a couple of words and I decided to regale the 15 Wall Street types in attendance on the topic of "cultural literacy." I had about 12 minutes to speak. I suggested that a deeper and entirely current knowledge of contemporary culture was important for fund managers and stock brokers because a) this culture shaped consumer taste and preference and b) was itself shaped by a steady stream of innovation and discontinuity, c) early warning was the road to profit, and d) no warning was the road to ruin.
I offered two examples: that Levi-Strauss missed hip hop in the middle 1990s and managed to lose $1 billion dollars in sales that year. The money manager who knew that this trend was on the way, and that Levi-Strauss was "unresponsive," would be in a position to trade accordingly.
My second example had to do with the "great room" trend in North American homes. My argument was that this trend must tell us that there is a change in the North American notion of the family and that early warning of this trend would serve as fair warning of developments that would one day run through the capital markets.
It was only while I was going to sleep that I thought of a third argument. It’s a bit "house that Jack built" but then these things sometimes are. I have argued that Levitt might be wrong when he explains the drop in violent crime in the American city. A competing or additional explanation is that the new cultural authority of hip hop helped to broker a massive transfer of esteem from the suburban teen to the urban one. As long as hip hop prevails, the urban teen is well compensated (even when his socioeconomic status remains asymmetrical), but the moment the trend moves on, we might expect urban crime to rise once more. And this must have consequences for property markets and eventually capital markets.
Someone disputed my argument with conviction and skill, and I began to think that in fact the capital markets may not need cultural literacy after all. It is an open question.
If we decide that the capital markets need this kind of knowledge, we would then have an extraordinary incentive to develop our stocks of cultural knowledge and the indicators with which we track changes in consumer taste and preferences. One of my dinner companions told that he spends the day monitoring 8 monitors. I am guessing that these are Bloomberg-type data sources.
If the capital markets decide to embrace cultural literacy, Bloomberg is going to have to add a terminal or two. More to the point of this over long blog entry, the cultural studies are going to find themselves confronted with a very worldly problem, playing host indeed to the very capitalists they now so disdain. That is, if they are still in business.
References
Brooks, David, Mark Dery, Esther Dyson, Malcolm Gladwell, Moby, and Clay Shirky. 2005. What’s Next Forum: The Road Ahead. Time Magazine. October 24, 2005, pp. 80-86.
Dutton, Denis. 1992. Delusions of Postmodernism. Literature and Aesthetics. 2: 23-35 and here.
Dutton, Denis. 1999. Language Crimes: A lesson in how not to write, courtesy of the Professoriate. Wall Street Journal. February 5, 1999. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Rap and the esteem economy. This Blog Sits At… here.
Smith, Dinitia. 2005. A scholar of the outre returns to Shakespearean Basics. Wall Street Journal. January 11, 2005.
Stearns, Peter N. 2003. Expanding the Agenda of Cultural Research. The Chronicle Review. Chronicle of Higher Education. 49 (34): B7. here.
Vans go shoe gazey
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The long tail promises endless multiplications in the world of goods. My favorite: this custom pair of Vans now selling on
line for $348.00.
The well dressed blogger will want to commission a pair for every perabulation he intends to take in every city he intends to visit. (Excellent for cheating in Geography class, as well.) Now that’s multiplication.
References and Acknowledgments
A tip of the hat to Core77, to the Barcelona-based customizing firm of Espaipupu (ok, so it’s not Boston), and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.
anthropologist overboard
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Those fellas at PSFK keep earning our admiration.
See the post by Piers on mixed tapes and webites like TinyMixTapes that solicit themes for which they then supply play lists. An example:
A request someone posted at TinyMixTapes:
I need unapologetically cheerful music, perfect for dancing around the kitchen while baking cookies and forgetting that I am very, very alone.
The response:
requested by: M
compiled by: little cola wong
Side One:
01. The Partridge Family – "Come on Get Happy" (Partridge Family: Greatest Hits)
02. Billy Bragg & Wilco – "I Guess I Planted" (Mermaid Avenue)
03. Cookies – "Girls Grow Up Faster Than" (Complete Dimension Sessions)
03. James Brown – "I Got Ants in My Pants (And I Want to Dance)" (Make It Funky – The Payback)
04. PJ Harvey – "Good Fortune" (Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea)
05. Pizzicato 5 – "We Love Pizzicato Five" (The Sound of Music)
06. K-OS – "Fantastique" (Exit)
07. Le Tigre – "Tres Bien" (Feminist Sweepstakes)
08. Jill Scott – "Golden" (Beautifully Human)
09. Bjork – "There’s More to Life Than This" (Debut)
10. Cibo Matto – "Sci-Fi Wasabi" (Stero Type A)
This summons the idea of an exchange in which we program culture for one another. Blogs already serve this sorting function. ("Hey read this. Consider that.") But what’s especially interesting is that there could exist large banks of playlists or playlist creators which could deliver playlists that are very carefully chosen to fit a very particular moment. Now the playlists become "sound tracks," as exquisitely appropriate for our lives as they are for a movie.
And this makes me think of the discussion that just took place on the Wharton site: Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: what does the new internet mean for business. Janice Fraser, Ross Mayfield and Philip Evans are interviewed by Kevin Werbach, and Janice talks about
a shift from what I call host-provided value — such as CitySearch (where publishers provide local events listings in different cities) – to user-provided value in websites such as Upcoming.org (a global events calendar managed by users).
As we see it being played out at the moment, it works precisely as an exchange in a quite literal sense. You and I engage in several reciprocities, and, as I result, I can reasonably ask you to program music choice for my drive to the Cape in July. (I will reciprocate with a list of the 10 best novels about Elizabethan England to read on your vacation.)
But unless we are living on a Kibbutz, filled with fabulously smart and well informed people, chances are we are going to want some cultural programming for which no friends exist. And this is, I believe, the reason we have a marketplace (and something liquid called "money" to make non reciprocal exchanges possible)!
So how about it? When is the internet going to create a marketplace inwhich intellectual, social and cultural capitals trade hands in exchange for money. When are we going to grow up and move on? The problem, to use Weberian language, is that we have made most of the cultural exchange that takes place on the internet "enchanted." It is shot through with larger meanings and governed by larger reciprocities. And yes, he said, wiping away the tears, I think there is something touching about all of us, and especially me, doing all this programming for free.
But until we monitize this exchange, we systematically exclude from possibility some of the cultural productions we will care about most. (I would love a mix every fortnight of current music from several genre, complete with intelligent commentary and a little cultural GPS positioning on the cultural map. And, yes, I would pay for it.)
Put it this way. The informal, enchanted, reciprocal exchange of cultural productions has been great. It has been an honor and a privilege, that is to say, to live on this Kibbutz. But, ladies and gentlemen, we must someday come to our senses, move to Haifa, and live in the real world. Ok, Tel Aviv.
It cant read! (Microsofts PMC illiterate?)
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Weve all been waiting for a killer appliance for digital text.
Surely, someone would do for text what iPod did for music: create an exquisite “must have piece of hardware and software that made reading on the screen the pleasure it is on the page.
The eBook from Gemstar was so bad, they gave up. Tablet PCs are too big, and PDAs are too small. Sony is launching the EBR-1000 Librie eBook reader. A fellow blogger says, ‘this product will go down in Sonys vault for stupid, expensive ideas. At least it’s so small it should fit. A second blogger says, “a great innovation trashed by an idiotic implementation rendering it practically useless.
Microsoft might have used its deep pockets to make a difference. But depressing news today from the NYT. It reviews the Personal Media Center from Microsoft. Apparently, the PMC cant read.
To make sure, I went to the Microsoft website:
Portable Media Centers put all of your favorite video, music, and pictures at your fingertips wherever you are. Take digital entertainment from your computer with you on the go, including recorded TV shows, downloaded videos, home movies, music, and photos.
Really? Everything but text? Nice going. The iRiver appliance (above) looks like it could handle text. Too bad, it wont be able too.
I do appreciate that Microsoft does not make appliances, killer or otherwise. And I appreciate that the PMC software is designed to run on cell phones, not perhaps the best place to read War and Peace. I also understand that Microsoft created Reader, which is smarter and better than Adobes Acrobat, and that they gave us Clear Type which was welcome too.
But this is a huge market opportunity. We all want print made available to us with iPod grace and simplicity. Clearly, more people need to carry text than music. The numbers are staggering. Last year 15.3 million students attended college classes.
If Apple and IBM wont step up, perhaps its time for Microsoft to show a little leadership. It wouldnt be hard to insource the hardware design and outsource the manufacture.
An opportunity is a terrible thing to waste. Especially this one.
References
Pogue, David. 2004. From Microsoft, A First Take. New York Times, September 2, 2004 here (subscription)
The Sony review from dottocomu here
The second Sony review from cinquero here
PMC info from Microsoft here
college attendance stat here
With apologies to Beggin Strips.
Canada Day
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Who said that the right believes in the liberties of the marketplace but not in those of culture, while the left believes in the liberties of culture but not the marketplace?
Canada, it turns out, believes in neither one. The marketplace is regarded with suspicion. Its dynamism is feared, and, when possible, controlled. Culture, especially commercial culture, is regarded with discomfort. Canadians prefer their markets regulated by governments and their culture mediated by experts (Margaret Atwood, take a bow).
At the moment when commerce and culture have a newly provocative relationship, one funding, and driving, the other to new heights, new intensity, new dynamism, this is a bad place for a country to be. This is not the fount of the “wealth of nations.
Canada never struck out on its own. It managed a seamless transition from being a colony of the UK to being a dependent of the US. Caution always seemed the better part of valor. Actually, caution seemed a whole lot better than valor.
This opportunity for independence came and went again this week when Canada went to the polls in a federal election. It looked for a moment that voters might declare their independence from the old order and the long standing Liberal Party, that champion of cowardice. But, no. It the last days of the campaign, frightened by Liberal scare tactics, the nation lost its nerve again.
Its actually there in the words to the national anthem. Oh, Canada, my home and native land. I stand on guard for thee. “Standing on guard is good and noble, but it is not the path to dynamism.
References
I believe the person who gave me the lovely little logical package in the first paragraph was Charles Paul Freund, Senior Editor at Reason Magazine. Thanks, Chuck!
