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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
This is a note for people who are visiting this blog as a result of the conversation I just had with Jack Conte of Pomplamoose.
Welcome!
Jack and I were noting three things:
1. The world of commerce (specifically ad agencies and corporations) need a new kind of meaning for advertising and marketing campaigns. What they need are hand crafted or artisanal meanings.
2. The world of culture is filled with lots of cultural producers capable of producing these artisanal meanings.
3. The world needs is some exchange that specializes in matchmaking, bring these two parties together.
The question is: who is going to build this exchange?
At a minimum, it takes a team of people who canvas two groups, the advertisers on the one hand, the cultural producers on the other.
Would love to hear thoughts and comments below.
Thanks again to Jack for the chat!
Thanks also to Leora Kornfeld who invented the "CxC" formula several years ago.
Social worlds tend to settle. And once they settle, a fine coating of inevitability forms around them.
Who is what to whom under what circumstances as constrained by what rules, eventually this is completely "done." We’re weighted down by stasis.
Case in point? A couple I saw years and years ago in a restaurant. They were in their 70s. I guessed they had been married a long time. Occasionally, he would raise his eyebrows and she would smile. They had shared this meal so many times it was terra completely cognito. Jokes didn’t need telling. They just need referencing. This tiny, social world had settled. They were now riding the inevitability through to dessert, and, no, there weren’t going to be any surprises there either.
What happens to couples happens to corporations, universities, cities, countries. Countries? Sure, Canada. Once dynamic, these social worlds have settled into stasis. They are now going through the motions, even when those represent a bad, lifeless idea.
What these static worlds need are provocations, events that "short out" the stasis, so to say. People are suddenly released from the confinement of their settled social world. They are not freed for long, and revolutionaries are inclined to believe that this moment of liberation will last for longer than it does. But there has been an "interrupt" as the psychologists call it. For a moment, the inevitability cracks, the rules become clear, the stasis is suspended.
There are a million possible provocations. Some years ago, Abby Hoffman showered the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills. [Please share other examples in Comments.] There are species of art and/or politics that live for the provocation that will accomplish through imagination what cannot be accomplishment through more structural economic, political and social change. Some of these groups believe in an "open sesame" event, the one perfect provocation that will set all the dominos tumbling till real and lasting change is accomplished. This provocation may exist, but it will take a lot of very careful thinking and experiment to discover what it is.
This is where pie comes in. A couple of years ago, a group of people stood on a street corner in Belfast, Maine, and handed hand slices of pie, pecan, pumpkin and apple, to passers-by. "The idea was to spur community and conversation, one slice at a time." (in Edge, below.)
Pie is an interrupt. It forces people out of that habitual frame of mind, the little script that reads, "Ok, that’s the shopping done, now I have to get to the library and pick up Betty at 4:00." Oh, what’s this? Pie? And before you know it, you are sharing pie and a joke with the guy who coaches Becky, your daughter’s best friend.. You are broken out of your routines, out of stasis.
What happens next depends upon the skill of the pieman. In this case the pieman is Project M, something established as part of the "design for good" movement by John Bielenberg in 2003. Project M is works as what Edge calls an "idea incubator." Younger designers meet to "generate social problems and enhance public life." Pie provocations had taken place in Greensboro, North Carolina. Working with the design firm Winterhouse in Connecticut, Project M has also staged a Pizza Farm.
Designers are very good at thinking about provocations. After all, they are in the imagination business. They are trained to look at existing systems, spot where stasis lives, and think of ways to make things new. What designers are not so good at, in my humble opinion, is figuring out what happens next, what comes after the provocation. Handing out pie and pizza does have the potential for provocation. But something substantial happens if and only if new arrangements are made visible, thinkable and doable. Pie qua pie will not get this job done. Pie has to be the start of something more than a jolly conversation with a soccer coach. It must do something more than "spur conversation."
There are social and cultural mechanics here. (Again in my humble opinion, designers tend to assume and ignore these mechanics when addressing the design issue at hand. Well, so do we all. That’s the point of being an anthropologist or a sociologist, getting at the rules and meanings culture works so hard to conceal from view. I am not accusing. I’m just saying.)
The Point of Pie
We have used pie to draw people out of their routines, their stasis. The point of pie is that it carries with it very particular cultural meanings. It is indulgent, festive and when served on a street corner surprising, funny and lighthearted. Pie sets certain meanings in train. It has drawn people not just out of their stasis, but into an amused, curious frame of mind. We have mobilized them.
Talk to me, not to Becky’s friend’s soccer coach
This is NOT the time to encourage them with one another. This is the path pack to stasis. Oh, sure, tiny trace elements of community will be generated, but these will begin to generate almost immediately and they will have disappeared within a month.
No, we want to talk to us, and this means taking the people who make up our Project M, Pie Lab, and Pizza farm and press them into conversational service. We want them to be there serving pie and chatting up the people who get the pie.
Building a gift economy
There is a social science about these social moments, and we will want to consult this literature. But for present purposes, let’s just say the following. You the Project Pie person are building a little gift economy. It begins with free pie. But that is merely the beginning. Now we want the pie recipient to feel the full effect of our absolute interest. (Almost all conversation is the opposite of a gift economy. I give attention and time and interest to you in proportion to the attention, time and interest you give to me.)
The idea is to gift the pie recipient with complete attention. This means refusing our turn in the conversation. (See the linguistic literature on turn taking for more on this topic.) It means looking at the pie recipient as if we expect them to say something absolutely wonderful. It means approving everything they say as if it were especially apt and especially well said. It means, in effect, showering the pie recipient with complete approval.
But is this manipulation?
Well, I am sure some will say, but this is manipulation. You are asking Project M people to fake interest, as if they were used car salesmen. And this would be absolutely true if the Project M person’s heart was not pure, if his or her interest were not sincere. But I am assuming this is wrong. I mean otherwise you wouldn’t be standing on a street corner in Belfast, Maine, handing out pie to perfect strangers.
No, it isn’t manipulation
Our interest is sincere. We do want to know about them. We want to seize this opportunity to find out who they are, to listen to anything they’re prepared to tell us. We are doing ethnography in tiny bite size bits. (Here too we want to consult the work on methodology.) Some people who wish to make a social difference don’t really care to hear from the Pie recipient. They have a vision of the new world, and they mean to keep banging away at this vision until the pie recipient embraces it. But if we have learned anything about engaging the world it is that it can’t be about us. Our best efforts must begin with a study of them.
Here’s what we hope for. Gifted with pie and sincere interest, the pie recipient is now prepared to find out who we are and what we are doing here. They are reciprocating our interest with their interest. More than that, at this point they kind of like us. We are funny and approachable. There is no evidence of cult enthusiasm. We are by every marker out culture holds dear likable. And at this point, something miraculous happens. Several things actually. People come up out of stasis. Their mood warms. Their interest is mobilized. They identify us as someone interesting.
Pie Project Failure
And this is precisely where most provocateurs leave them. This is where the pie projects really fail. I believe. Provocateurs are mezmerized by their act of imagination, and by their sudden, charming departure from social convention. Free pie. Brilliant. God, we’re groovy, Our work here is done.
Pie Project Success
But pie is, as I have labored to demonstrate, merely the first step, the opening gift. And almost nothing will come of it unless the Pie provocateurs are prepared to follow through with some jewel-like intervention, a further project that takes the pie recipient to the verge, indeed into the very grasp, of a new arrangement of idea and practice. What the pie recipient needs now is a culturematic.
(More on "culturematics" and other things to come. This post took much longer than I can afford, and I am completely behind schedule!)
Today I’m featuring a guest post from Michael Knolla.
Michael works for an investment firm.Thanks to Pip Coburn, that great conveyor of intellectual exchange, Michael and I recently shared a conference room.At some point in the proceedings, I overheard Michael talking about comic books and popular culture.Passionately.
“Ah,” I thought, “This is not always the background or the passion of people working in the capital markets.”Indeed, the worlds of investment and fan culture are pretty discontinuous.You can do one.Or you can do the other.In our culture, you have to choose.
More’s the pity.The investment world is increasingly shaped by cultural forces that fans are especially good at understanding.And a career in investment is, I think, a great platform for anyone who wishes to carry the study of popular culture into their professional life.The poetry and the banking of Wallace Stevens were mutually exclusive.For Michael Knolla, there are lots of connections.
Indeed, Michael has apparently discovered a Northwest passage, and I was anxious to find out how he did it.
You will see the full text below, but I liked this passage especially.Michael is referring to the skills he learned from transmedia or as he calls them,
“the ‘shared worlds’ of Marvel, DC, Valiant & Image comic books as well as the Dragonlance & Forgotten Realms novels.Shared worlds, where different authors use the same settings and/or characters to tell stories with varying levels of interconnection, require a different kind of reading, I think, than stand alone or self-contained works.With plots that would go on for months, if not years, crossing over at various times into other titles I learned to categorize and recall data in a way that helped me make connections and anticipate twists in the story.Later this would be incorporated into one of the frameworks I use for identifying & monitoring investment themes.It was also an early exercise in sorting signal from noise in learning which authors’ characters were more restricted in their ability to influence the larger arcs.
Michael found strategic understandings in popular culture.
I’m guessing I was about 3 years old when my father first showed me the original King Kong.The iconic image is of course King Kong on top of the Empire State Building with the airplanes flying around him, but what has always stuck with me was King Kong fighting the dinosaur.This giant gorilla vs. T-Rex dynamic opened a whole new mental framework in my toddler mind, one that would be nurtured by a healthy serving of Godzilla movies as I grew older.The latter were important as they moved the dynamic from one of x vs. y, winner take all, to a more rock, paper, scissors model.For example, Godzilla could defeat Mothra in its caterpillar form but Mothra would triumph in the moth version, yet it might take both Godzilla & Mothra to triumph over MechaGodzilla.It is easy to fall into heuristics in this profession when it comes to competitive advantage (that industry X is all about branding or company Y will always dominate because of its low-cost manufacturing, only to see these paradigms subverted by new distribution models or changes in the consumer decision metric) despite the warnings of Porter & Christensen.
Michael sees a still more general benefit to this popular culture consumption.
Read enough books, watch enough movies, and you’ll eventually develop a strong sense of how stories work that enables you to go beyond Chekov’s gun in your forecasting (not just that it will be fired, but at whom, by whom, for what reason, and what the fallout and resolution will be).This experience in predictive pattern recognition combines well with the above into a framework for developing investment theses and forecasts.
Here’s the full text.It begins with Michael’s note to me:
Grant, thanks for the opportunity to talk about two of my favorite subjects: the research process and media consumption.I am blessed to be someone who has found a job they truly enjoy, yet I doubt many of those who knew me in my youth would have guessed I would end up an equity analyst given that the only stock I grew up around was the livestock at the farm at the end of the street.Yet, almost a decade into my career hindsight suggests that I was hardly disadvantaged by my starting point.Rather, to borrow from Steven Johnson’s new book, I needed to exapt the skills I had developed in a different context to my new profession.This is NOT intended to be an “Everything I Needed to Know About X I Learned from Y”; college, the CFA exam, the mentoring of analysts I’ve worked with, experience, etc. have all been vital to refining those skills and adding many more.But if you are interested in how culture or commerce can catalyze/synthesize thinking about the other my experiences may serve as decent conversation starters:
·Shared Worlds & Learning to Identify & Monitoring Investment Themes: My first experience with an investment bubble was the late 1980s/early 1990s comic book craze.At the time I was convinced I would pay for college with my comic book collection.Strangely enough in a way I think I have, as I pay down my student loans with the money I earn as an equity analyst.While Marvel was briefly a publicly traded company before being acquired by Disney, and DC has been a part of Warner Brothers for some time that is not the connection I am referring to.Rather it relates to the skill set that evolved out of reading the “shared worlds” of Marvel, DC, Valiant & Image comic books as well as the Dragonlance & Forgotten Realms novels.Shared worlds, where different authors use the same settings and/or characters to tell stories with varying levels of interconnection, require a different kind of reading, I think, than stand alone or self-contained works.With plots that would go on for months, if not years, crossing over at various times into other titles I learned to categorize and recall data in a way that helped me make connections and anticipate twists in the story.Later this would be incorporated into one of the frameworks I use for identifying & monitoring investment themes.It was also an early exercise in sorting signal from noise in learning which authors ^ characters were more restricted in their ability to influence the larger arcs.
·“Cigarette Burns” & Leading Indicators: Many of those comics were read between shows while I worked at the movie theatre my father managed.I’d started out tearing tickets and cleaning the theatres and worked my way up through concessions & ticket sales to eventually become a projectionist, just like both of my brothers, before heading off to college.For a few summers I helped put together the new films each week, splicing the reels together and then running them through late at night to make sure they’d sent all the reels and they were in the right order.To this day I can’t help but notice the “cigarette burns” that indicate a reel change.What I came to appreciate was the structure the reels provided to a film.They each would run ~15 minutes so your typical 90 minute film had ~6 reels, with the characters & setting being introduced in the first, the conflict in the second, and the resolution in the fifth with the denoument in the sixth.(That reel changes also conform decently to commercial breaks when eventually aired on TV, further supports their relevance to film structure I’m guessing.) By simply watching for the cigarette burns it was easy to anticipate the pacing of a given movie.The corollary I would later experience is the focus required to know when to look for leading indicators in cyclical industries and the understanding of the different implications depending on when in the cycle they occur.
·Plot Structure & Pattern Recognition in Forecasting: As I was advancing from ticket tearing to concessions & tickets to projectionist I was also graduating from comics and TSR books to more “sophisticated” reading.Again, there was a lot of time to read between shows, so the fast reading (another very helpful skill in this profession) originally honed on week long driving vacations as a child, in the days before handheld videogames and portable DVD players, was further refined between shows.Read enough books, watch enough movies, and you’ll eventually develop a strong sense of how stories work that enables you to go beyond Chekov’s gun in your forecasting (not just that it will be fired, but at whom, by whom, for what reason, and what the fallout and resolution will be).This experience in predictive pattern recognition combines well with the above into a framework for developing investment theses and forecasts.
·Cash Flows Across the Value Chain: I would later go on to work at the small bookstore in the mall where the movie theatre was located, and these teenage employments provided another lesson applicable to business analysis. Movie theatres don’t make their money off of ticket sales, but rather concessions. The lights at the bookstore were kept on not by the sale of bestsellers (particularly given the heavy discounts they often had), and certainly not via sales of “fine literature” but rather through the regular sales of Harlequin romance novels and detective fiction.The price points on these books may have been lower, but the margins were higher and the frequency of purchase was far more regular.This taught me to look beyond the obvious revenue streams & horse races/popularity contests to the multiple cash flows across a value chain.
·Godzilla & the Relative Nature of Competitive Advantage: I’m guessing I was about 3 years old when my father first showed me the original King Kong.The iconic image is of course King Kong on top of the Empire State Building with the airplanes flying around him, but what has always stuck with me was King Kong fighting the dinosaur.This giant gorilla vs. T-Rex dynamic opened a whole new mental framework in my toddler mind, one that would be nurtured by a healthy serving of Godzilla movies as I grew older.The latter were important as they moved the dynamic from one of x vs. y, winner take all, to a more rock, paper, scissors model.For example, Godzilla could defeat Mothra in its caterpillar form but Mothra would triumph in the moth version, yet it might take both Godzilla & Mothra to triumph over MechaGodzilla.It is easy to fall into heuristics in this profession when it comes to competitive advantage (that industry X is all about branding or company Y will always dominate because of its low-cost manufacturing, only to see these paradigms subverted by new distribution models or changes in the consumer decision metric) despite the warnings of Porter & Christensen.Certain competitive advantages are stronger and more sustainable than others but the movies & comics of my childhood serve as a reminder that there is always a weak point that could be exploited, the kryptonite or Achilles’ heel if one is feeling more classical.It may not be, or it may take longer to exploit it than your investment horizon, but you darn well better be aware of it and monitoring for it because when a competitive advantage breaks down the market shift can be fast and dramatic.When I worked at the bookstore, where we sold Magic & Pokemon cards, and I can now see a similar learning opportunity among the kids engaged in the games (as opposed to simply collecting the cards).That these also incorporated crude “resource management functions” makes them even better in my eyes.
·Trinitarian vs. Bull/Bear: All this reading and movie watching eventually coalesced into what I call my Trinitarian format, and it enabled me to move outside of the simple bull vs. bear dynamic that is so prevalent in the industry.In literature I came to understand that my appreciation of one work was often greatly enhanced by the comparison and contrast with at least two other works.Thus my life long love of Douglas Adams was deepened by my reading of Terry Pratchett and Kurt Vonnegut.My reading of Umberto Eco is improved by my reading of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.H.P. Lovecraft is all the more enjoyable when read together with R.E. Howard and Dashiell Hammett.As I began to read professionally I translated this dynamic into a framework that moved beyond reading something for and something against a given precept in a given area, to non-fiction trinities.These would be comprised, for example, of one book written from a macro-perspective, another from a micro-perspective, and a third maybe from a non-western perspective.Alternatively I might read works that take the same approach, but apply it to different issues or vice versa.I have found this very helpful in my research, especially as it often highlights what a given perspective is leaving out, which is often more telling than what it includes.
Finally, only about a quarter or a third of my current book reading directly relates to my day-to-day work (i.e. would be classified as “bizbooks”).Another third is basically fiction, which helps to refresh my mind.My wife would always laugh when I was studying for the CFA exam that after an hour or so I’d say I was sick of reading, yet fifteen minutes later she’d find me reading a novel.Those fifteen or thirty minutes of fiction, however, would typically rejuvenate me for another hour or two of studying.The rest is a quest for novel frameworks and perspectives.Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog & the Fox, for example, is one of my favorites.The dominant metaphors in business are sports related, having inherited the position from the previous generation of military metaphors, and it is useful to be familiar with them when communicating your ideas to others.Yet if everybody else is defining the category by singles, doubles or homeruns then it can be useful to apply a different framework as it might reveal what others are missing.
literary tattoo
moleskin
cat jewelry
Chicago Manual of Style tote back
funny hat
drunk author
These are telling details. They are not a perfect rendering of Book Festival culture, but they’re a charming first start. Next Book Festival, everyone will be a little more alert. Except for of course for the drunk author.
BusinessWeek sent observers to airports in Paris, Montreal, and New York City.
They began to notice and then to generalize:
Luggage Riflers
CNN Segment Chortlers
Twitchers and Touchers
Fortress Builders
Food Stuffers
The Wired Neurotic
Tabloid Readers
Chair Hoarders
Stuck at an airport, people try to make the best of a bad situation. They resort to several strategies, all of which test the rules of public life. Noticing happens, categories blossom. Is this perfect anthropology. But of course not. We have a very short while to make our observations. The trick is to see whether we can find a "square inch" and work it.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the anthropological work of Normal Bob. He has done a typology of the people we see at Union Square in New York City. Normal Bob, (aka Bob Hain) has observed "skaters," "scenesters," "models," and "junkies." He also has documented Ramblin’ Bill, The DJ and Quarter Guy.
Spotting culture is a way of creating culture. Everyone is smarter and more observant when we’ve given them the ethnographic head’s up. Cat jewelry? I had no idea. But now I will look for it. When I am stuck at the airport, I will use the BusinessWeek typology to observe the people around me. New categories will suggest themselves. Old ones will get refined. Union Square? I will keep my "Normal Bob" cheat sheet in mind as I go.
Our culture is that it is in a state of constant churn. There is lots to observe. Patterns come and go. And when we notice stuff happening, our work is only particularly done. Now it’s time to create artifacts like Bingo cards, BusinessWeek typologies and Normal Bob categories. Having observed culture, it’s time to create it.
References
Anonymous. 2010. Boston Book Festival Bingo Card. Boston Phoenix. click here.
McCracken, Grant. 2010. Normal Bob, Extranormal Anthropologist. This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. click here.
Murphy, Tim. 2011. Airport Gate Semiotics. BusinessWeek. January 10 – January 16. pp. 76-77.
Acknowledgements
Patti Wood, author of Success Signals; Jason Barger, author of Step Back from the Baggage Claim, David Givens, author of Your Body at Work. Wood, Barger and Givens are the authors of the Airport Gate typology in BusinessWeek.
A couple of years ago, Rick Meyerowitz was on the A train in New York City. He was staring at the subway map and he was thinking about lunch. Suddenly, station names began to look like food.
Rick asked, “What if I redid the subway map [as] a food map?” He brought in his friend Maira Kalman and the two of them renamed 468 stations. Avenue H became Mulligan Stew, Avenue J became Can of Soda, and Brighton beach became Beach Stroganoff. The New Yorker published their map in 2004.
This is remapping, taking a world we know, and reworking how we see it. It’s one way to make culture.
We don’t have to work with something as grand as a subway system. Over the course of many walks, I have remapped my little town in Connecticut. I live pretty close to “the old woman who listens to her TV really loudly. She’s 100.” I am up the street from the “the house built by that crazy Swedish guy who eventually returned to Europe and died in a pauper’s hospital.” About a mile from my house is “smuggler’s cove.” Down the street from there is “The Chinese pavilion,” and from there it’s an easy walk to the “Fortress of mystery,” “Where the roller coaster once stood,” and “House of the trapped Brazilians.”
Maps used to belong to faceless bureaucracies and the state. They were literal. They gave up everything beautiful and imaginative to be accurate and clear. (By some miracle, it takes even the most sober map around 15 years to turn into a thing of beauty. We don’t know why. Apparently map makers install secret beauty on time release.) There are cultures in which maps are rich in connotative meanings (see Basso on the Western Apache, below), but usually our maps are an unamused rendering of the world. What you see is what we got.
Until now. With the decline of elites and the rise of an technologically empowered everyman, well, remapping is inevitable. All we need is the right pen and paper (or hardware and software) and hey, presto, the world begins to take on new properties.
One precedent was Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue. This give us a glimpse of The New Yorker’s myopia. Maps like this record not geographical but psychological space. See also this map of New York City from the point of view of a 3 year old.
Lots of options. How does a city look to any one of the groups that occupy it? How does Chicago look to a recently arrived runaway? What about a Cubs fan? How about a student at the University of Chicago? (That’s a trick question: UC students do not leave Hyde Park so they have no map of the city.)
Naturally, no one wants to use these remapped maps as way-finders. This would be like driving across the country with the aid of Denny’s placemats. But to be fair there is way finding and way finding. These remapped maps are very good for certain kinds of navigation. They can take us places we could never find otherwise. Those who make them make culture.
Please if you make a "remap," would you let us know.
References
Basso, Keith H. 1984. “’Stalking With Stories’: Names, Places and Moral Narratives among the Western Apache.” In Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Jerome Bruner, ed. Washington, D.C.: American Ethnological Society, p. 19-55.
For more on the map by Meyerowitz and Kalman, go here.
Acknowledgements
Hiten Samtani for the New York according to a three-year old.
It’s clear, isn’t it, that we pay for Facebook and Google one way or the other.
One way: We pay by fee.
The other: We pay in privacy.
I get why Facebook and Google are prepared to play loose and fast with our privacy. That’s the business model. This is the way they make money. They "have to."
Actually, there’s an alternative. It is to give us the option of paying for Facebook and Google in something less precious than our privacy.
I’m not saying millions would sign up for this option. But it would clarify the debate nicely. It would allow Google’s Eric Schmidt to say, "Oh, privacy is important to you? Here’s the alternative. Pay us."
(And wouldn’t it be interesting to see someone run these numbers. What would Facebook have to charge us in the currency was, um, currency?)
But I think this wouldn’t just be useful for Facebook and Google. I think it might be obligatory. I think a fee option is something they’re obliged to make available. It would be mean they no longer "have to" invade our privacy.
I was in the Tumi store in Grand Central over the holidays and I was impressed to see their once staid briefcases were beginning to show the influence of the messenger bag.
If Jules Prown (and the worlds of material culture and art history) are right to say that some objects reflect changes taking place in a culture, what are we to make of this?
You have 1000 words and a month to complete the assignment.
I have 9 minutes to get this post up before midnight, so no panel of judges yet.
For more on the Minerva, please see the page marked "Minerva" next to "contact." Eyes right and above. For a little data on the relative position of briefcases (in blue) and messenger bags (in red), see this graph from Google trends.
Post script
Thanks to the many people who commented on the Pomplamoose – Hyundai campaign.
We all watched heroic amounts of TV over the holidays.
All of us saw the Hyundai ad that features Pomplamoose, the American music indie duo.
The Hyundai-Pomplamoose campaign looped the loop. It went from odd to charming to familiar to contemptible to irritating in about 3 weeks.
We can guess what happened. Hyundai discovered they had a hit on their hands. The campaign was doing good things for the brand and more to the point it was moving cars. So they sold the heck out of it.
Poor Pomplamoose! In a daring strategy for which I applaud them, they took this campaign as an opportunity to play pilot fish, to travel with the Hyundai shark for a short while in the hopes of sharing small bits of its dinner. And they got consumed in the process.
Now, some people will say, "Look, no band should do a deal with the devil. Pomplamoose got what they asked for."
Maybe. Certain kinds of indie "cred" do depend precisely on keeping one’s distance form a project of this kind. But for everyone who isn’t a culture-never-commerce separatist, the Hyundai-Pomplamoose case is an opportunity for illumination. I mean, Honda used "Holiday" as their sound track for the holidays, and I bet it was great for Vampire Weekend’s iTunes sales. Refusing all truck or barter because it sometimes goes wrong is shortsighted.
The question: what’s the best way for a small cultural enterprise like a comic, a playwright, or, in this case, a band, to maximize this opportunity and minimize this risk.
First things first.
1) Did this campaign loop the loop? (For all I know everyone hated it from beginning. Or, everyone loved it from the beginning and they still love it.) What we need is data. I am no master of the methodology but I bet someone could run the numbers for the twitter and blogging world and tell us what the "shape" of adoption was. Did it loop the loop? What was the loop? How fast did this happen? Where is sentiment now?
2) Why did this campaign loop the loop? Is it the fact that Pomplamoose created the campaign? I guess "creative control" was one of the reasons Pomplamoose was interested in making it. And I guess that the handmade aspect of the spots was what interested Hyundai. Now they had "artisanal advertising." How very fashionable, how very effective.
3) Hey, presto, the bargain worked. Both parties were happy. And the campaign in the early days tumbled obliging down the Kauffman continuum, from weird, to odd, to charming. Job well done. Culture and commerce had found a way to work together. Let’s all join arms and sing the hymn to "win-win."
4) Then things went wrong, badly wrong. By sometime in the second week I was hearing people (and by "people," I mean, my wife, Pam) say, "Oh, god, not them again."
I think the problem has to be repetition. We were obliged to watch the campaign so many times, charming turned coy. Coy got irritating. The campaign was pushed down the Kauffman continuum and became unendurable.
5) One take-away: Pomplamoose should have restricted how many times the ads could be played. And now they question, assuming this is possible, what number? Half the number of times the campaign did play? (Would Hyundai still have been interested?) A quarter?
6) But this is not just a Pomplamoose problem. When people started to react against the campaign, they were now repudiating Hyundai as well. It was actually in the Hyundai interest to restrict circulation. What was Hyundai’s magic number?
7) Not all ads are created equal. Not all "content" is the same. I think part of the problem here comes from the fact that this was an artisanal campaign and these are delicate things. They take much of their power from whimsy. And whimsy is perishable. It’s natural enemy is repetition. There are several "magic numbers."
8) The cultural, creative take away: when the campaign uses meanings of this kind, care must be taken. What makes a "hand-made" ad powerful is the very thing that makes it vulnerable.
I can hear a couple of protests:
9) I can hear people insist I’ve found a new way to state the obvious. They will say "repetition killed this ad. Because, duh, repetition kills every ad." In point of fact, there are ads I love despite the fact that I have seen them hundreds of times. So there is no simple rule of thumb. Hyundai, with or without Pomplamoose, could have made a campaign that would have stood up to this constant repetition.
10) From the brand manager, I hear another protest altogether, one that says, "look, I took a big risk running this campaign. The huge response was my reward. I hit a gusher. My job was to work the gusher." To which the answer is, "you are not actually engaged in oil discovery here. You are drawing on and giving to a culture. It will give you opportunities and snatch them away the moment you overplay your hand." The Cluetrain manifesto chaps like to say that marketing is a conversation but they are wrong. Marketing is more difficult and less durable than a conversation. It is much more like a performance on any big city stage (Carnegie or Apollo). The audience is filled with people who are very good at listening. Some of them are very good at producing. Hyundai Xmas performance was a little like someone producing one successful performance of Mozart or Michael, and then to everyone’s astonishment playing it over and over and over again.
11) Repetition is one way we master culture. It is what moves new things down the Kauffman continuum from the "too new" to the "just right." (See my book Flock and Flow for more on the continuum.) It is also the way, we taken novelty and stuff it into the air extracting, shrink wrapping compactor to which we consign almost everything we love. And this is why advertising and other kinds of marketing are NOT like a performance. Repetition is not only OK, it’s obligatory. But we must use it in a most precisely measured way. Because once something is done, it’s entirely done. Happily, artifacts can be managed on the continuum and they can refreshed. We can slow the trip to the compactor.
12) Last thoughts. I admire the courage exercised by Hyundai and Pomplamoose in giving this campaign go. I think it’s up to the rest of us to figure out what went wrong and why.
13) The bigger picture, it seems to me, is this. We have a world of advertising that is desperate for innovation and creative partnerships. Some of the meanings that brands need cannot be produced by the conventional agency. We have a world of cultural producers, millions of people at this point, who are very good at producing meanings, and they would be glad of the exposure and the revenue that partnership makes possible.
14) It’s up to the likes us, people who loiter at this intersection and others like it, to figure out how to smooth the connection and build the relationship. And by "people" in this case I mean, yes, Pam, but also Robert Barocci and Todd Powers at the Advertising Research Foundation, Geoffrey Precourt at WARC, Sam Ford at Peppercom, Ben Malbon at Google Creative Labs, Bud Caddell at Victors and Spoils. That’s just to name a few.
15) The immediate question, to put it in the language of a Harvard Business School case study, is this:
You are Pomplamoose or Hyundai. What would you do?
16) The larger question:
How do we solve questions of this kind?
17) The still larger question:
How do we put culture and commerce at one another’s disposal?
References
Levine, Rick, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Jake McKee. 2009. The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition. Anniversary Edition. Basic Books.
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace. Indiana University Press.
Pam gave me the greatest gift ever. It’s called a Grid-it: a board covered in elasticized bands.
Here’s what I did with mine. You will see Apple plugs for iPhone and Macbook. My earphones which I sometimes wear just for sound control. But notice i have the wires that would allow me to plug into my iPhone and Macbook. You will also see my thumb drive I use to get ATT wireless access. Finally there are the dongles I need to connect my MacBook to someone else’s AV system. Oh, and a Sony thumbdrive for back up.
I have three different briefcases, large, medium and small. The Grid-It lets me transfer these essentials from brief case to brief case. Almost always, I do this in a hurry and there’s a good chance I am going to miss something.
