I am in SF doing ethnographic interviews and Saturday night I was briefly swarmed by 8 or 10 young women who were, apparently, gay, punk and drunk as a skunk
They were set up at the entrance to the 24th street Mission station of the Bart system. It’s impossible to know but my internal prayer ("please don’t kill me") may have helped. Seconds later, of course, I thought, "Wow, what an opportunity for anthropology!" but by that time I was being spirited away on the Bart. Darn! Whew! Darn! Whew!
I am doing 14 interviews in SF. You can see some of their locations marked on this Google Map. These interviews are what I do for a living, but it is also ought to be what I do for fun. Going home to home, talking to San Franciscans in their home for a couple of hours, this is fantastically interesting. If the objective of tourism is to "get to know" a city, there is nothing quite like ethnography.
I am pretty sure tourists wouldn’t want to do 3 interview a day. That ends up being a little grueling. But perhaps that’s only because I am asking questions to a very particularly purpose, listening as carefully as I can, keeping lots of data and interpretive possibilities in my head at once, and otherwise fatiguing myself to the point of incoherence. Three more general interviews might be fine.
Between interviews, the trick is to take public transport. Moving between those blue "push pins" on the map gives you a pretty comprehensive view of the city. You don’t actually see any tourist sights, but then aren’t tourist sights the very thing that’s wrong with tourism? The SF transport system is fantastically good. And it is of course filled with San Franciscans, another opportunity for ethnographic observation and the occasional conversation.
Someone has to create a business here. It’s a great opportunity to meet smart, thoughtful, interesting people. It is a great opportunity to get beyond the cliches of the usual tourist experience. Whether you want to talk to punks on a street corner, well that’s up to you.
This time last week I went to a retirement party for a woman leaving the New York education system. It was a big joyous event.
This was predictable. Justine, the retiree, is a one of the most animated people in the universe. No, I think it’s probably true that one of the animating forces in the universe. That’s her, second from the left.
Most of the affair following the usual "text" that our culture supplies for an event of this kind. There were drinks, toasts, speeches, remembrances, tears, laughter, good wishes, promises never to forget, "goodbye" played out over 3 hours. Pretty standard package…except of course for the animation. This was Justine standard.
One thing was different. Towards the end of the evening, Justine’s colleagues from school put on a fashion show. That’s them in the photo. I didn’t get what was happening at first but finally it became clear that what the "models" were playing out the stylistic changes that Justine had gone through over her career. The fashion show was a transformational review.
Retirement parties are usually classic rites of passage. Normally, they transport us from one status (working) into another (retirement). It is a Van Gennepian event. We are looking at a cultural reengineering as the ritual occasion is used to erase one set of social markers and cultural meanings and insert/apply/impose another. But Justine’s event represents a new kind of ritual (anthropologically interesting all on its own) to a new social and cultural purpose. Justine is not merely being moved from work to retirement, she is being reminded of a larger transformational cycle even as she was primed for a transformational opening.
When you ask Justine what she is going to do next, there is no talk of a tending gardens and winding down. No, it’s clear that Justine plans to take retirement by storm, as she did teaching. And to some extent this is Justine. But I think if we asked most people on the verge of retirement there would be relatively little talk of winding down and a good deal more talk of opening up. (And this makes Justine quite a lot like the 70 year old man I interviewed in Beijing a couple of years ago. See post below.)
No one goes quietly anymore. No one winds down until the very last. If once the life course was a little like MetroNorth commuter line. With well marked stops and schedules. Now, it’s really hard to know what’s next. Even Justine doesn’t know. The transformational cycle has lots more churn and vastly more indeterminacy.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. China II: Americans of Asia. This Blog Sits At the … here.
Last note:
I am headed to SF for a week. I promise to get back to the rationality theme when I settle in.
My Princeton hotel room this morning got the news from Philadelphia. There was an ad for running for Barack Obama and I was impressed, as I always am, by the cadence with which he speaks.
Senator Obama speaks with a special quality of self assurance, as if he has thought about everything he’s saying for a very long time and he has rendered a decision with such depth and profundity that there is not even the merest chance of contradiction. The Senator is sorry about this, he seems to be saying, but there is nothing to be done about it. That’s just the way it is. The Senator wishes he weren’t reading from tablets, but, well, that’s how the thing falls out.
Obama hits the last syllable of his sentences with assurance. And then, surprise, surprise, he brings the sentence in for the softest of landings. This doubles the effect of self assurance. He enters that last syllable like a lion and leaves it like a lamb. And that’s because, well, he really merely stating the obvious and it would be unseemly to pound the gavel or make a fuss.
This is deeply presuppositional speech and what it presupposes is that no reasonable man or women can disagree, that this truth is self evident, that the speaker is merely, and with some modesty, pointing out that all of us already know. More generally, this is the art of politics taken places it hasn’t gone in some time.
The anthropological question (and today, after the heated debate of yesterday, I am prudently and quite pointedly putting my anthropology hat back on) is where did Obama get this very effective rhetorical instrument. It seems to me ecclesiastical, but it is not the sort of thing he can have got from the likes of Reverend Wright. It is also a little as if from the mold of the newscaster, Cronkite etc. But it doesn’t appear to have a political precedent, not at the moment anyhow.
I think Obama has studied other oratorical exemplars. And I think he has made this a very careful and purposeful study. I leave it to someone with an ear better than mine to "reverse engineer" Obama’s style speech and figure out what these influences are. Some of the secrets of the coming kingdom are there to be divined.
In the Wall Street Journal today, the book review opens this way.
Consider Linda, a 31-year-old woman, single and bright. As a student, she was deeply concerned with discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear protests. Which is more probable? (a) Linda is today a bank teller; (b) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.
[Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky determined] that most respondents picked "b," even though this was the narrower choice and hence the less likely one.
Shaywitz, the reviewer, says that Kahneman and colleagues have
reshap[ed] the study of economics by challenging the assumption that a person, when faced with a choice, can be counted on to make a rational decision.
I would argue that "b" is the rational decision. It shows us the respondent working with what he knows. We have given him a little information and he is working this information into an intelligent choice.
Except of course the economist will not accept a choice as intelligent unless it meets his narrow definition of the rational. For the economist, the rational choice is the broader choice. "A" is more likely because less constrained. From a better’s point of view, this is the right choice. But it is not, I submit, the more rational one. Because it forces the respondent to forget what he knows, to forgo the opportunity we have given him to make an "informed" choice.
We could do the ethnography here. If we asked the the respondent how he thought this problem through, he would give us an account of his "rationality." He would demonstrate that he satisfies the definition of the term according to Princeton Wordnet. It would be easy enough to show that he occupied "the state of having good sense and sound judgment."
Economics continues to insist on its notion of rationality when we know that this rationality is always embedded in a social context and a cultural one. Rationality is only sometimes about calculating odds. It’s also about working with a set of parameters and bodies of knowledge. Rationality is almost always profoundly social and culture event.
In the experiment reported in the WSJ, Kahneman was effectively asking the respondent to "forget what he knew" to make the rational choice. Funny how often economics seems to ask us to do the same.
References
Shaywitz, David A. 2008. Free to choose but often wrong. Wall Street Journal. June 24, 2008.
An article in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times points out that celebrity endorsement continues to matter to marketing. Indeed, the data say the celebrities showed up in 14% of ads last year.
And they are everywhere. The article notes the recent work for Totes by Rihanna, by Nicole Kidman for Chanel No. 5, by Eva Longoria for L’Oreal Paris hair color, by Jessica Simpson for Proactive, Jamie Lee Curtis for Dannon Activia yogurt, and Ellen DeGeneres for American Express
But the article reports a muddle in the model.
One Davie Brown category in which most celebrities appear vulnerable is trust. Celebrities are recognizable and appealing, but are often viewed with skepticism. “Trust always seems to be the lowest score among celebrities,” observes Matt Fleming, a Davie Brown account director who helps brands evaluate celebrity talent.
This is a puzzle. If consumers buy products because celebrities are endorsing them, doesn’t this imply that they must trust the good opinion of the celebrity. But if they don’t trust them, um, why do they buy the product so endorsed?
I believe that this puzzle tells us something useful It says that we are wrong to think about celebrity endorsement as endorsement. The celebrity is not speaking on behalf of the product. They are not declaring their approval. This is why the consumer can find the celebrity untrustworthy and effective. The model has a muddle because the model is wrong.
So what is the celebrity doing here? When Rihanna appears with Totes, when Ellen DeGeneres speaks for American Express, what is happening? I believe that what the celebrity does is lend their meanings to the brand. Some part of Rihanna’s glamor is made resident in Totes. Some part of Ellen’s humor is made resident in American Express.
Celebrity endorsement is a process of building band meanings out of celebrities. If we think of the celebrity as a brand (and all celebrities do), then the celebrity endorsement is the transfer of meanings from one brand (Ellen) to another (Amex). This is simple meaning transfer. For a more detailed treatment of the argument, see my article on this topic (as below).
This is not an extraordinary complicated notion. It was the way Aristotle described metaphor several thousand years ago. But it has a way of escaping the popular and the academic press. The NYT article parades our many misconception. But the facts are clear.
Celebrities matter to brands because they supply them with meanings, incredibly fresh, powerful and nuanced meanings. Many planners, creatives and agencies get this. Many brand managers do. When do the journalists and the academics catch up?
References
Creswell, Julie. 2008. Nothing Sells Like Celebrity. New York Times. June 22, 2008. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Who is the celebrity endorser? In Culture and Consumption II: Marketings, meanings and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Purchase from Amazon.com here.
Acknowledgements
Ryan Holiday for bringing this article to my attention. See Ryan’s blog here.
At Nokia, we believe that nothing compares to the intimacy of face to face communication but people will always deal with the barriers of time and distance. We aim at making mobile communication as natural as possible, and technology as human as possible. There is no better way of achieving this than by People Centered Design. Its not about consumers, it’s not about users. It’s all about people.
Timo Veikkola, Nokia
References
Veikkola, Timo. 2007. A view of the future – trends research, ethnography and design. Weaving Usability and Cultures. July 16, 2007. here.
It’s like that scene in Men in Black, the one that shows aliens bailing out of spaceship earth.
A lot of talent is now in flight, including Flickr founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, Delicious founder, Joshua Schacter, not to mention Jeff Weiner, Usama Fayyad, Jeremy Zawodny, JR Conlin, and Bradley Horowitz.
But wait a second. Delicious and Flickr belonged to Yahoo? No kidding. I am sure lots of people knew this, but, if I may use myself as a measure, lots of people did not.
This is an interesting branding problem. I mean, what if Yahoo were in the hands of a different, more expert, branding team? What if the meanings were actually being managed here?
One strategy is, of course, to rename everything Yahoo. But that seems pointless and dumb. Not least because we have such interesting naming exercise in the works: Del.icio.us and Flickr.
Vowels excised or isolated? It was if these new brands were taunting the skittish adopter, as if to say, "we are so necessary, we can call ourselves anything, and you will still embrace us." I, for one, was terrified by del.icio.us and it took me an extra month to try it out. Sure enough, this service was so useful, I found a had to use it and that funny sounding word.
The other extreme is "embarrassed parent," no acknowledgment. This appears Yahoo’s present strategy, if they have a strategy, that is. But this seems just as pointless. "Brand neglect" is never a good idea. Especially now that Google appears to have stepped up their game. HP has done some nice work recently. I feel like we are still waiting to hear something sustained from Cisco, but what little we hear is nice. Microsoft bumble along as usual, truculent and contrary, the teenager who blames us for his mistakes. The social networks have their own brand vivacity. Anytime you are the platform for identity creation and identity management, you don’t have to work very hard. But it won’t be long before the space too becomes crowded with competition and then branding will have to be done deliberately. This moment will come sooner than Facebook thinks.
In between is "big tent" and "loose orbit." And in this case, we want the lesser brands to flourish beneath, or around, a concept that is gigantic and capacious. And this would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Building the architecture within which these very vital brands could play. We would be looking for the subtle and not so subtle exchange of meanings between the star ship and the things in orbit. Who builds the brand capital? Who ferries it? How do brands divide the labor of meaning manufacture.
I was going to do a kind of stage 2 of this post. For the events at Yahoo this week raise still deeper anthropological issues that take us from the meanings of the brand to the culture of the corporation. I am thinking especially of the brilliant resignation letter that Stewart Butterfield sent to Yahoo this week. It is the most brilliant thing I’ve read in a long time. (It is reproduced in the article here.)
But then I thought, hey, this last day of the week is the first day of summer. I am going to make the toys go for Molly, have dinner with Pam, and raise a glass of something rich and mysterious. Happy summer solstice!
References
Thomas, Owen. 2008. Stewart Butterfield’s bizarre resignation letter to Yahoo. Valleywag. June 17, 2008. here.
Wray, Richard and Bobbie Johnson. 2008. ‘I’m off to tend my alcapas’ – Flickr founder’s exit marks end of a web era. The Guarden. June 20, 2008. here.
I am happy to report that the passport of Erna Schonwald now resides in the American Jewish Archives.
A couple of years ago, I spend my summer vacation trying to piece together the story of Erna’s passage from Europe to the safety of America.
Here’s what I found out. (The original post follows.)
What I did on my summer vacation
On my summer vacation, I went looking for Erna Schonwald.
I’ve wanted to collect for some time now. My father collected Inuit carvings. Will Straw, a friend in Montreal, turned eBay into a collecting machine, making one brilliant acquistion after another. The two of them made it look like fun.
I especially liked the idea of collecting, the solitary pleasure, the little universe you build purchase by purchase, the way things you never knew or cared about suddenly assume "must have" status. But what to collect? Rugs, watches, wine, movie posters, motel coasters, first edition noir? Nothing appealed to me.
Then I came across Erna’s passport on eBay. This, I thought, this I would like to have. It came in the mail, paper in paper. The passports of 1920s Austria were delicate things, green ink on beige paper, filled now with forms, stamps, signatures, and of course Erna’s photograph, from which she looks out at us steadily, apparently thinking something funny and kind.
My German isn’t very good. So the passport didn’t give away very much. Erna was born in late October in 1894. The passport was issued in 1922. In between, what? It looks as if Erna gives her profession as a private beautician, but I could be wrong.
Lots of questions. Why did she leave? Where did she go? How did she fund her trip? What happened next?
My sister said, "look at the Ellis Island website," and this says Erna arrived in the US in 1923. She was sponsored by her brother Philippe who arrived the year before. Philippe is described as "Dr." Schonwald and he had been sponsored by his cousin, A.F. Low in Seattle. Ah, so that’s where the money came from.
But more questions. Why was a doctor leaving his homeland in 1922…at 47 no less? The early twenties seems a little early to be escaping anti-semitism, but then my German history isn’t much better than my German.
Then my sister discovered a reference to a Dr. Schonwald, President of the East Point Oysters Company of Stanwood Washington. What are the chances, she asked me, that there were two Dr. Schonwald’s in the area in the period? So, what, Dr. Schonwald was a biologist? And then I discovered that someone has digitized the Seattle phone book for 1923. (I mean, is the Internet not the greatest thing in the history of the universe?) This calls "Philipp" a physician. And it says that his office was at 227 Cobb building. Using these key words in Google, we learn that the Cobb was built in 1910 with the purpose of offering "200 of Seattle’s best doctors and finest dentists the choicest office possible." Ok, so he’s a not just a doctor but a man of substance. (So what about the oyster thing again?)
If we consult the 1930 census, we discover that Philippe has a wife, Peggie, and two daughters, Lurlie, 15, and Rose, 12 and a Norwegian servant called Matilda. These means, among other things, that when Philippe came to America, he was travelling with two children under the age of 10.
The census also gives us a glimpse of Erna (mistransliterated as "Ema") as a boarder. Oh, my heart sank a little. Erna would now have been 35. The census says that she was a bookkeeper. Finally, it gives her birthplace as "Vatican City State." My heart rose. There is no way that this is a misprint. There’s no way the census taker misunderstood. This is either an extravagant act of the imagination or the truth.
The 1930 census says that Erna was boarding with Ariston Wchwertner, but it is clear that this too is a misprint. Erna was boarding with a "Schwertner," with whom she shared German as a first language. Also, it turns out that Schwertner was working as a nurse in a doctor’s office, and now of course we wonder whether Erna’s might have been a bookkeeper in same.
While I was searching for Schwerter, a familiar name popped up: Philipp Schonwald. This is the man who sponsored her journey from Guafenstein, Tchecho Slowakei, via Surabaya, Indonesia to San Francisco and then Seattle.
This means that Erna is merely listed as a boarder. She is in fact living with a woman who is almost certainly a relative. And chances are now good that she works with this woman as well, which suggests that she is working for her brother. Ah, Erna safe in the bossom of her family.
After that, the trail goes cold. I can’t find any more about her. Thoughts, speculations, more information, any of this would be most appreciated. Does anyone have an idea why Dr. Schonwald left in 1922 or Erna left in 1923? What little I know tells me that the Jewish community had been leaving since the 1860s. But what would have persuaded a physican to move his family and two small children across first an ocean and then a continent? But most of all, was Erna born in the Vatican City? Or was this a brilliant lie?
Let’s say we wanted to ask a perfect stranger to participate in a relay race. This stranger has no prior introduction to the idea of the race. They have never heard of it.
At a minimum, we’d have to explain the concept, the rules, the race. Drawing on the Wikipedia entry, we’d say something like
In a relay race, members of a team take turns running parts of a circuit. Each runner hands off the baton to the next runner at a certain zone.
In effect we are programming the stranger, supplying him or her with the knowledge he or she would need to participate in the event. It’s going to be time consuming. The stranger will say things like
ok, so you want me to carry this stick once around the track, and then give it to someone, right?
Right. Fight temptation to roll eyes. It’s actually a little bit more complicated. Never mind, this will come. First the idea, then the practice. But finally, we’ve build knowledge into memory and ability into muscle memory.
Now the stranger can run the race. Not well, but thanks to our efforts, he’s mastered the little things. Like, well, listening for the starter’s gun, which way to run on the track, that he should "stay in his lane," to whom the baton should be passed. "Not that guy. He works for the competition. That guy. Better."
When you break it down, it’s a lot of knowledge. And it is not just stuff you need to know. It’s stuff you need to have deeply embedded in mind and body. When you stop assuming the things we all know about the relay race, the instructions, the software, turns out to be kinda intricate. (We can imagine the code required to program a machine to run a race.)
Now compare this to the knowledge in the head of a member of the American relay team competing in Beijing this summer. The Olympian knows exactly what the relay is, where to go, where to stand, what to do, and so on. He or she has a deeply embedded knowledge of relay.
Ok, now compare these two people: the perfect stranger and the American Olympian. Culture is exactly the difference between what is in the head of the Olympian vs. what is in the head of the stranger.
This is not a pedantic exercise. Engineers do well, thank you very much, without knowing about culture. They do astonishing things. Bridges, I believe are everyone’s favorite example. And quite right too. Without engineering, every passage shore to shore would be an foolhardy act of faith.
But the fact that engineers don’t know about culture can be a problem. Because culture is the place that essential knowledge sometimes hides. Culture contains the things we need to know about the consumer. And it also contains the things we are assuming in our lab in the corporation.
In both cases, this is deeply embedded, deeply assumed, knowledge. Consumers cannot readily tell us what they are thinking. It is assumed knowledge. Which is to say, consumers know things about the world they do not know they know. There is assumed knowledge on the corporate side as well. The corporation and its engineers hold certain assumptions so deeply they can no longer see them.
So here’s my plan. It is to suggest that when the engineers think about the consumer, they think about themselves as a relay racer who understands the race, speaking to a consumer who has no clue. The task now is to surface all the assumptions the engineer is making and make sure these get passed along to the consumer. As we have seen, there are lots of things the engineer/race knows that must be passed along. The trick is to make sure these things are not concealed from the engineer by their familiarity. The trick is to make sure the corporate culture is not getting in the way.
But we could work it the other way round. We could suggest that engineers think about the consumer as the American Olympian, and about themselves as the novice. In this case, the engineer should assume that the consumer is a person who lives in a highly complicated world, one that is mysterious to the engineer. The task now is to get into this world of knowledge. This won’t be easy because the consumer doesn’t always know what they know. They can’t always say what they are thinking. We can’t just ask them. We have to listen and probe and follow up and ask some more.
And this is why God created ethnography. This is the technique expressly designed for listening for assumed knowledge. This is the way we get at culture. This is the way we learn the things a racer needs to know in order to race. This is the way we learn what the engineer needs to know to create something that actually serves the consumer.
And this is why God created ethnographers. Professionals with real training and experience. Ethnography does not mean an interview done in someone’s home. It cannot be done by someone who took an anthropology course in college. It cannot be done by someone who "thought about majoring in sociology." There is tons of data flying around, and hundreds of interpretive possibilities. The search for embedded knowledge, this takes patience, skill, a delicate interpretive touch and a certain brute intelligence. Many of the people now pretending to be ethnographers are simply too stupid for the assignment. Training aside, they are simply too stupid to process the data.
Ethnography shouldn’t be done by amateurs anymore than bridges should be designed by someone who "really thought about going into engineering." Caveat emptor. We get want we pay for.
Firefox 3.0 appears today. Downloads will set a new record as the internet slows to a crawl. And already Firefox 3.0 is a champ. PC Magazine has declared it their choice for best browser. (I thought the download is not available at 1:00 Pacific, 4:00 Eastern, but the internet is already moving glacially.)
Firefox is proof that the Microsoft model is broken. Steve Ballmer becomes the undisputed leader of the corporation this summer and this tells us that the C suite is unprepared to step up to the challenge. If ever there were a company taken captive by its own corporate culture, it is Microsoft.
Yesterday, Brian Briggs offered a satiric news-story in which he “reported” that Ballmer was announcing the end of Internet Explorer 8 and telling his employees to convert to Firefox. Henceforth, Microsoft would treat Firefox as their standard browser. From the Briggs’ “story”
Ballmer pleaded with other browser makers to coalesce around Firefox. “Why should we have so many programming hours going into different browsers? It’s so easy for everyone to contribute to Firefox. Safari and Opera programmers should get on board too. If we all rally around one browser then consumers will be the big winners, and that’s always been a priority for Microsoft,” said Ballmer.
It’s a funny story. But it’s also a nice little “thought exercise.” It is impossible to imagine Ballmer acting with this kind of initiative, imaginative or vision. (I’m not suggesting that what Briggs proposes is a good idea. Only that it is hard to imagine Ballmer ever acting with this scale and dynamism.) It is impossible to imagine Ballmer advocating a position that would make consumers “the big winners.”
No, what we expect from Ballmer is the sort of thing we got from court records a couple of years ago. Ballmer was talking to a Microsoft engineer who was threatening to move to Google. Ballmer is said to have said of Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
I am going to f*cking bury that guy. … I’m going to f*cking kill Google.”
This much is clear. Microsoft helped create an industry that is creating a culture that is creating an economy in which Microsoft can sustain itself only with an installed base and bully boy bluster. In sum, Microsoft helped start a party to which it is no longer invited. Apple gets it. Google gets it. Firefox gets it. (Each of them in a different way, interestingly.) Microsoft, not so much. Microsoft, not at all. How can something as smart as a corporation sometimes act as dumb as a corporation?
References
Albanesius, Chloe. Mozilla Unveils Firefox 3.0 Tuesday. PCMag.com. June 16, 2008. here.
Anonymous. “I’ll kill Google,” threatens Ballmer. Microsoft bruiser on the warpath. PCadvisor.co.uk. here.
Briggs, Brian. 2008. Microsoft Abandons Internet Explorer 8 Development for Firefox 3. BBspot. here.
There’s an ad playing on TV that has a graphic novel (aka comic book) artist, saying
"we like to think of ourselves as the people who do the R&D for Hollywood"
This notion was still circulating in my head when, Wednesday, I finally got to see V for Vendetta. And it was easy to see the scenes that sprang from the graphic novel. It reminded me of early Hollywood movies where you can still see the signatures of the stage play from which they came.
Today, I noticed that there is a new book out by Richard Zoglin called Comedy at the Edge. Zoglin describes the rise of the comedy club and its influence on TV and film. And it’s true; so many Hollywood stars began in comedy (Richard Prior, Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Catherine O’Hara, Drew Carey, Liley Tomlin, Jerry Seinfeld, Tiny Fey, Ellen DeGeneres, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Larry David, Amy Poehler, Amy Sedaris), and so many shows go straight from the comedian’s club persona straight to the screen (Roseann, Home Improvement, Everyone Loves Raymond, The Drew Carey Show, The Larry David Show, etc.) R & D indeed.
It’s no surprise to think that Hollywood steals from everyone. But this favorite 90s metaphor conceals a more interesting creative process and the possibility of a larger cultural shift. I mean, was there a moment when Hollywood "rolled it’s own," when the studios created both the cultural forms and the entertainment that sprang from it? Noir certainly came from the world of fiction, but Hollywood did something more than steal it. Action-adventure, surely that’s largely Hollywood’s own.
And if between stage plays and comic books, Hollywood was producing its own, how is it that it was once again obliged to look "outside the box" for ideas. I am assuming that, left to its druthers, Hollywood would prefer to invent things in-house. I mean, who wants to deal with those quirky comic book guys if you don’t have to. If we can do our own production, we do.
The other question, the anthropological one, is whether we could capture the net givers and takers of cultural inspiration. More than most culture, ours is a place where meanings are in constant motion. And not because Baudrillard was right to say they have been emptied of significance and now chance one another deliriously in popular culture. This is wrong, and you would have to be a French academic to think it even vaguely plausible in the first place. Happily, it looks as if the Humanities and Social Sciences that embraced this lunacy are now coming to their senses (see Menand below).
The question is this: can we identify and locate all the new producers for Hollywood? It’s a long list: graphic novels, sports celebrities, the comedy world, youth cultures (several and various), other national cinemas, the avant-garde (music and film), other creative worlds (e.g., The Devil Wears Prada), and what else…
This is the sort of thing Richard Florida should be able to do. And this would be a glorious contribution to our understanding of contemporary culture. We need to see where all the ideas are coming from, by what means they "diffuse" to a place like Hollywood, who does the retrofitting, and how ideas are changed in the process, and what happens to contemporary culture as a result. How porous is it? How mobile are the ideas within it? What turbulence is created as a result of swift passage? What producing stations are becoming more important
The image above describes flight patterns in North America. Planes, I mean. What if it were a map of memes?
References
Menand, Louis. 2005. Dangers Within and Without. Profession 2005. Rosemary G. Feal. editor. New York: Modern Language Association.
Zoglin, Richard. 2008. Comedy at the edge: How stand-up in the 1970s Changed America. New York: Bloomsbury.
In a hundred years, they will have a pretty good fix on this decade as the moment when social networks migrated on line and then back into the world. What they won’t know is when actually this made a difference to the way an individual individual felt about the world.
So, for the record, I log the following experience. It happened to me yesterday on the train from my little town in Connecticut into New York City. This is the commuter train called Metro North that delivers people into the city every morning and brings them home again at night.
At Stamford, I think it was, a guy got on and sat right in front of me. I had a seat looking in the direction the train was going. He has one of those seats that look in the other direction, the ones that people tend to use only when things are really crowded. We were sitting maybe 24 inches apart.
This guy was about my age, African American, graying at the temples, pleasant looking. I moved to move bag from the seat beside him and he said, "Oh that’s alright." And we smiled at one another in that carefully calculated way that New Englanders have. Not to much! No point in letting rip with our emotions. Snap out of it. Stay out of it. That’s our motto.
He was well dressed. He was carefully dressed. Fashionable but so precise about it, I wondered for a second if he might be ex-military. He wore a tan linen jacket, pressed khaki pants, a shirt with pink, black and white stripes in it, a 3 pointed white handkerchief, one of those Swiss Army Knife watches with its woven, vaguely military strap, and slip-ons with those tassels. So not military after all, then. (My guess is that no one who is ex-military would wear a faux military watch. But what do I know?)
As I say, he seemed a pleasant guy. And he remained so even after he spotted me taking detailed note of his dress. Just a brief look of alarm, and then back to that modulated New England geniality.
Now normally I would think of a guy like this as worlds away. We had smiled but chances were we would not talk. He was busy with the Times and I was banging away on my lap top. I expect both of us would not have been surprised to discover that a conversation would have been more interesting than anything he was going to find in the Times or anything I was going to produce on my ThinkPad. But no. A conversation was not going to happen. We are worlds away even when 24 inches apart.
And normally, I accept this much thinking about it. It has an air of inevitability about it. Disappointing for an anthropologist, for we are by disposition and of necessity the nosiest people on earth. But pretty much true to the order of things as I have come to understand them.
But yesterday, for the first time, I found myself thinking,
I bet I know someone you know on Facebook.
My number is now approaching 400. I don’t think Facebook tells us how many friends our friends have. But if we make the muliplier 60, its a big number. For me, it’s around 28,000 people. This is not x % of the US population. It’s y% of people like me, educated, professionals, with money enough to live out of town and curiosity enough to sign on to Facebook. It can’t be many degrees of separation. If I don’t know a friend of his, I know someone who does.
So big deal. We are still not talking. This is Connecticut, and that’s the deal.
But here’s the difference. Today I looked on this guy in a new way. He was no longer a "perfect stranger." I did not take for granted that he lived worlds away. Thanks to social networking and Facebook, I now took for granted that we are somewhere in the same orbit. In a digitally mediated world, distance was small, and contact was possible. If you’d asked me a month ago, you would have found me singing the old song : distance is grant, contact is impossible. But very recently, alienation turned to something like a familiarity. Or better perhaps the presumption that used to run in the direction of alienation now runs in the direction of familiarity.
Cultures specify even this. They configure our basic assumptions about who the other is, and what our real and potential relationship might be. And in this case something has shifted. Social networking on line has worked back upon the way I think about sociality in the world.
I accept the gospel of Santa Fe. I understand that I am a little Complex Adaptive System. I appreciate that noise is good, messiness is inevitable, disorder the name of the game.
The question is how to manage this complexity. Over the last 6 months, I have been using both PersonalBrain 4 by TheBrain and MindManager by Mindjet. Both of them are good at making great tangles of information more orderly. Both of them make me a better Complex Adaptive System.
But today, I am moving permanently to Personal Brain 4. It wins because it manages hierarchies of information far better than MindManager. Also, and oddly, the fluidity of the presentation style helps me think. I found the swimming graphic style off putting at first. If I wanted things to wander around in my mind’s eye, I thought, I could just live without an idea management software. But then MyBrain colonized my brain, and everything was hunkydorey.
It turns out my life sorts into just a few categories (as above). Ah, that’s better.
References
Beinhocker, Eric. 2006. Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.
Holland, John H. 1995. Hidden order: How adaptation builds complexity. Helix Book. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1995. At home in the universe the search for laws of self-organization and complexity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lewin, Roger. 1992. Complexity: life at the edge of chaos. New York: Macmillan.
Taylor, Mark C. 2003. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Waldrop, M. Mitchell. 1992. Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster.
I am surprised to notice how bad the current Coldplay ad for Viva la Vida is…especially as it is attached to Apple iTunes. (Have a look at it here.) The Gamma ad for iPod, figures dancing in profile, with music from The Ting Tings is just about the best thing on TV at the moment. (See it here.)
It’s weird; all the same elements are more or less in place. But in one case, the ad captures us. In the other, it holds itself up to ridicule. One is interesting, the other faint hearted, dim witted, adolescent and posturing.
So what happened? Apple has a pretty good track record. One can only guess that it has something to do with “artistic control” from Coldplay. In the modular world of popular music, Coldplay substituted for Radiohead. They were prepared to be populist where Radiohead insisted on being arty. And I have a weakness for bands that have a weakness like this.
But, gore blimey, there is a difference between accessible and bad. And we can’t imagine Radiohead signing off on something like this? Never. No, indeed, it precisely because everything popular (even things as good as Gamma) look to Radiohead as bad as the Viva la Vida ad that they insist on going all arty so often and so earnestly.
If bands are brands, and I think for some purposes they are a wonderfully interesting test bed for same, the Viva la Vida ad is a stinker that will cost them dear.
