People say, "Grant, what are you really doing on these crazy trips of yours?  Moscow, one week.  Chicago, the next.  What gives?"

And now on the heels of a great triumph, I can reveal my true mission: to discover and document the often obscure and distant origins of popular culture.  Think of me as Carter of  Egypt.  Speke of African.  Lewis of Oregon.  Or just some guy looking around.

For this trip, the question was simple.  What were the origins of the Andre the Giant "obey" poster that began to appear a couple of years ago in the American city.  The posters were a great phenomenon of the 1990s.  Suddenly they were on park benches, road signs, utility poles.  None of them were signed. None were attributed.  This mystery of popular culture had no ready explanation. 

We met, as we always do, at the Explorer’s Club in New York City.  Preliminary intelligence suggested that Andre origins might be found in Chicago or LA.  The specific notion was that "Andre" might be a corruption of "Andrew," and something useful could be found if we scrutinized records of the English or Scottish immigrant communities of the 19th century.  (A free floating "w" was discovered in the archive of Chicago’s Folger Museum, but this proved, finally, a false lead.)

Eventually, the hunt took us abroad, first to Moscow and then Shanghai.  I had my doubts we would find anything of value in the former, and I now believe the trip was contrived by Marriott who had never been to the hermitage in St. Petersberg.   (Not all members of the team are quite as dedicated or discliplined as others.  For some team members, frankly, it’s all a bit of a lark.  And just between you and me, if Marriott’s father hadn’t put up substantial funding we would have dumped the little fellow years ago.)

Then last week, a frantic call in the middle of the night.  One of our people in China had stumbled upon an important clue.  And the race was on.  (We couldn’t be sure that the Scandinavians or the Israelis weren’t already in place.)  Time was of the essence.  Steam ships were out of the question.  We would have to fly. 

A week in Shanghai gave us nothing useful.  The evidence seemed to operate like a shortwave radio, first a weak signal, then a strong one, then nothing at all.  It looked like a trip to Guangzhou might be "indicated," and, as some of you know, we arrived here on Sunday.

And then yesterday, the break through.  The local team had zeroed in on a block of flats on the outer rim of the southern part of the city.  It took all of Monday and most of Tuesday to work our way through the possibilities.  Finally, in the late afternoon, with dusk coming on, and the exertions of the day upon us, we climbed the 8 floors up to the modestly appointed apartment of a startled woman of middle age.  "No," she said, she had never heard of "Andre" and, no, she was most certainly not harboring clues as to his origins. 

"Would she consent to a search of the apartment", we asked her, and when she said, "no," we did one anyhow.  The entire scientific community awaits these results, and we’ll be damned if we let someone’s rights to privacy get in the way.   It’s for science.  I mean, really. 

We were just about to give up altogether when, ho, a cry from the pantry.  Marriott was shouting incoherently but with great force.  We rushed in to see what the matter was.  And sure enough, there it was.  Marriott, the little bastard, had done it.  We were looking at the object of the hunt, no doubt about it.  I don’t have to tell you it was a bitter sweet moment.  Marriott’s name, not mine, would now live on in history as the man who discovered "Andre antecedent, CBNYD 2". 

Here’s what the little bastard found.  To the right, you will see a round plastic container, with a pinkish top and a face staring out.  That’s a Ritz container on the right, and a white plastic bag on the left.  We think it’s now being used as a cookie jar.

To be sure, this is an early Andre.  He is happier, rounder, and, er, like, not yet a giant.   But I think the identifying characteristics are unmistakeable.  The eyes, especially.  And that gaze, hollowed out, fixed on the infinite, seeing all, fearless, unblinking.  The Andre we know from bus shelters in St. Louis is of course an older, more mature Andre, an Andre who has lived too well, seen, perhaps, too much.

But as I say there is in my mind no question that this is the original Andre, the image from which all the other Andres must spring.  What the image is doing here on a child’s biscuit container, that’s a question for future expeditions.  How the image made its way from Guangzhou to the West, this is another puzzler.  There is of course every possibility that Andre’s origins are entirely elsewhere, that the biscuit container somehow merely "turned up" here Guangzhou, here in this 8th floor apartment, here on this kitchen shelf.  But I am proud to say that we did something remarkable yesterday. 

The mystery of Andre the Giant is now a little less mysterious. 

Interviewing 17.2 million people takes time, patience and plenty of pens and paper.  But now I can put my feet up and call the first week a job well done.  I may have missed a couple of people, but I am pretty sure I heard from everyone at least by horn. (Next to a table of drunken Australians, this is the noisest place on earth.) 

Naturally, I am now thoroughly smitten by Shanghai.  If I can persuade Pam, I’d would like to come back and live.  She said she’d think about it.  And she really will. 

Certainly, I could do what I am doing now, consulting.  But I notice that American business schools are setting up shop here, and that would be an interesting option.

This would give me a trojan horse with which to get cultural literacy into the b-school curriculum.  If I was teaching at a Chinese b-school, or an American b-school in China, I could make a strong case for courses that taught American culture to Chinese students and Chinese culture to American culture.  Once we are talking cross-culture, suddenly there’s a license to do what the b-school should have done in any case.

The best model is something like this:

1) teach a class with both Chinese and American students enrolled

2) teach the first half of the class in the US

3) teach the second half of the class in China

4) in the first half of the class, teach American culture and consumer behavior.  Putatively, this is for the Chinese students, but in fact this is also an opportunity to teach American culture to American students. 

5) in the manner of the case study method, engage the American students to help teach the Chinese students American culture, in the process giving the American students a reason for being in a classroom that teaches something the b-school community believes they already know. 

6) in the second half of the class, teach Chnese clture and consumer behavior.  Putatively, this is for American students, but in fact it is also an opportunity to teach Chinese culture to Chinese students

7) in the manner of the case study method, engage the Chinese students to help teach the American students Chinese culture, in the process giving the Chinese students a reason for being in a classrom that teaches something the b-school community believes they already know.

I think this could be interesting.  The "cross culture" mandate is a useful license, and at this rate it is the only way the b-school community is going to take culture seriously as a educational responsibility.  (This despite the fact that business now turns increasingly on innovation and dynamism.  Innovation is almost always cultural in origin and it is always cultural in effect.  Dynamism, ditto.)

So it’s one of the paradoxes.  The only way to fix  the American business school curriculum is to move it to Shanghai.  Got it.

My hotel here in Shanghai is not nearly as good as the one in Beijing.  There are lots of little errors and some quite big ones.  The place has a certain randomness.  It’s a Hilton and maybe that’s why.  But I wondered if this is systematic variation. 

If yesterday’s post is correct, Shanghai is the more expressive, more individualistic of the two cities.  And that would be that most everyone in Shanghai is less interested in role perfection and more interested in self expression.  (I adopt Lionel Trilling’s distinction here.)

From this point of view, working in a hotel is not an honor but a drudgery.  Stuffing yourself into a uniform, being eager, exact, exterting…all of this belongs to those who live for the corporation.  If you are more self expressive, if you are from Shanghai, you are much more inclined, sorry, to want to blow your own horn.  Working for an institution like the Hilton that obliges you to efface your individuality, must eventually come to feel like "working for the man."  This North American phrase is the cry of outrage against a world in which the consumer realm may express be used to construct and assert personhood but the producer realm is very different. 

As capitalism gets more demanding of novelty, variation and responsiveness, the contradiction is closed a little.  Now the work-a-day world is more expressive of difference, less demanding of sameness.  China will someday adapt this approach to capitalism.  It will someday master it.  For the moment however, people are being inducted into individualism only by halves.   

References

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  China II.  This Blog Sits At The … December 20, 2004.  here. 
(see this post for an interesting case study on Chinese individualism.)

Three tiny ethnography observations

Lots of dogs as pets in evidence.  And a certain pride of ownership.  I am told this partly a reflection of the one-child policy.  Clearly, it is also true that pets serve some as a fashion accessory.

Lots less evidence of smoking than the last time I was here when everyone seemed to be smoking 4 cigarettes at once.

I went to the Shanghai Municipal Television building to do an interview, and I was interested to see in the lobby here several guys of middle age wearing baseball caps.  We see this in North America and I wondered if this was a Hollywood influence.  (Ron Howard and lots of other directors, not just bald ones!) 

The drive in from the Shanghai airport yesterday was telling.  Unlike Beijing, where everyone seems to drive in a state of grace, hands careful poised at "10" and "2," Shanghai is more pell-mell, more pet-met (petal to the metal).

In fact, people in Shanghai drive with verve and panache.  They honk much more than in Beijing.  And they do not just honk informationally. No, they honk with indignation and sometimes outrage.

Driving while indignant, this is easy for an American to understand. Indignation is, for many of us, our secret motive for driving.  We take to the interstate with the conviction that the world is filled with idiots who have somehow escaped notice that they are idiots.  That’s what our horn is for.  A patriot duty is satisfied, and the spleen well vented.

But the Beijing case tells us that indignation need not take the wheel, that honking with outrage is an abitrary, cultural convention.  Which raises the question, where does indignation come from? 

In the American case, it comes from property rights.  When in a car on the road, Americans file a claim.  They say that the road ahead of them belongs, for the moment, to them.  We call this our  "right of way."  If you cut me off, you violate my right of way and my property claim.  I seek redress with my horn.  I try to make you pay, at least sonically.  That this never works, that you can be relied upon to honk back or flip me the bird, this bothers me not at all.  Behind the wheel, each of us in Judge Judy, trying fellow drivers, finding them quilty, and meting out punishment.   Body by Fisher, radio by Sirius, wisdom by Solomon. 

Is that happening here in Shanghai?  I have no idea.  But Shanghai drivers do honk with embrage and this could be a key to a series of differences that appear, if only notionally, between Beijing and Shanghai.  For the diferences between the cities goes much deeper than driving practices.  People who live in Shanghai are said to be more entrepreneurial, more expressive, more vivid.  In their time, they were more international, more fashionable, more au courant. 

For parochial purposes, we may look for a Western correlate:

Shanghai is to Beijing

as

Montreal is to Toronto
New York is to Chicago
(i.e., First cities are to Second cities)
Rome is to Milan
Milan is to Paris
Paris is to London

There is a famous phrase in North America used to describe the difference between Canadian and American attitude towards over-the-counter drugs.  In Canada, everything is prohibited, unless it is allowed.  In the US, everything is allowed, unless it is prohibited.  It feels something like this difference might hold here.  Which would give us:

Shanghai is to Beijing

as

the US is to Canada

Westerners tend to think of China as something monolithic, as the Chinese do too, sometimes.  When you ask someone here how Communist party officials played midwive to capitalism, you are told, as if this were not just the best explanation but the obvious one, that they, the officials, managed the transition "for China."  This says that over and above the ideas called "communism" and "capitalism" this is a still larger, more encompassing one called "China."  And this is a very monolithic idea indeed.

But in other moments, the Chinese think of China as a country of countries.  At the very least, one is obliged to distinquish between Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou, to which one would have to add the far North, the deep South and the wild West. 

From an anthropological point of view, the idea called "China" is sensationally rich and supple.  It allows for commonality big enough to bridge warring ideologies, and a particularity deft enough to parse out a lots of smaller differences.  Clearly, the Chinese have not heard of the post moderism that insists that all categories of knowledge are unstable, those of nationality and place, most of all. 

But then as any right thinking person understands, this conceit was really a Trojan horse introduced to Western thought by willy intellectuals.  Post Modernism was designed to persuade us to dismantle Anglo American theory and the ideas of incumbent culture, and clear a path for the French intellectual’s "right of way." 

I am now in Beijing.  And yesterday, I had a chance to participate in the local version of a traffic jam.  I can now say that I have experienced the international traffic jam at several of its locales: Mumbai, Moscow, and now Beijing.  How miserable, a waste of time, money and the ozone layer.  How shall we fix this?

I was driving back to the hotel around 7:00.  Just the right time to see exhausted moms and dads making their way home in one direction passing, in some cases, their own children, beautifully dressed,  going out for a night on the town.

It was dusk, always evocative, and the city had an anguished beauty.  Glimpses of life on this outdoor patio and that factory compound coming at me with force, like a recollection from my  deep past but of course it manifests itself in circumstances that tell me that the sensation MUST be illusional (if not delusional).  Strange, someone else’s nostalgia.  Jet lag, it’s a very odd thing.

I have been coming to China for 20 years.  When I first arrived, the hotel experience was strange.  I would place an order for breakfast with room service, and eventually some guy would show up with a toaster, a piece of bread and a look of confusion.  He knew something was required of him but he wasn’t sure what.  Within 15 years this exercise in amateur theatre had been replaced by note-perfect hospitality.  I mean really perfect.  And this trip, evidence of the transformation continues.  This hotel (the Shangri-La) is actually better than perfect.  Everything from service to design is superlative, much better than anything I have ever seen in the West (with one or two exceptions).

So it 20 years, this Westerner has had the opportunity to watch China move from a country struggling to catch up to a country that may now be poised to pull ahead.  Yes, the Shangri-la is a hotel with Western connections.  Yes, hotels are not the best place to judge larger patterns of change.  (And surely an anthropologist of all people should know this.) 

But in an imperfect world, we take any measure that presents itself, and by this measure, China is now finished with catch-up and will someday begin to pull away.  This is a country moving at time-lapse speed.  It won’t be long, perhaps, before it passes us and disappears into the future.

References

The building pictured is from the software park in Beijing.  It was taken through a taxi window.  Hence the patina on the window. 

Abstract: Freston got his job as a CEO of Viacom because he was deeply informed about contemporary culture and lost it because he was not informed enough.

The whole essay:

Corporate America doesn’t get it.  It has never got it.  And until yesterday this didn’t seem to matter.

Then the Chairman of Viacom fired the CEO of Viacom, and Tom Freston was out of a job. 

This might herald a shift in corporate American.  I think it is now possible that that not knowing about contemporary culture is now a career liability for the senior manager and a problem for the corporation.

My first proposition is, I think, pretty clear.  Corporate America doesn’t understand contemporary culture.  There are lots of examples.  Gatorade buys Snapple after the  trend has passed.  (Three years later, it sold Snapple at a $1.3 billion loss.)  Levi-Strauss missed hip hop and lost $1 billion in sales.  There are lots of examples of corporate America making bone headed moves because no one in senior management has a clue what is happening in music, film or culture. 

Some of this is due to the appalling illiteracy of the business school.  Most b-school faculty are stuck in a time warp constructed out of Bob Seeger’s CDs and the Die-Hard retrospectives.  Not so the b-school students, most of whom have a clue.  There are no courses on contemporary culture and the marketplace (unless Rob Kozinets is teaching a course at York I haven’t heard about).  There are no courses on the theory and method with which one read contemporary culture. 

This was seen to be OK.  Then Redstone fired Freston.

My second proposition, that the firing of Freston is a leading indicator, this is less clear.  Here’s my argument.  Tom Freston began his professional life as an ad guy.  Ad guys are generally pretty well informed about contemporary culture.  (Ad guys are the way the corporation "cheated" on this issue.  As long as the agency knew what was going on, it didn’t have to.  This was foolhardy but possible in the early days.  But now that the corporation is an innovation machine, and now that contemporary markets and cultures constantly interact, it is, as a policy, still less well advised.)

On the strength of the ad work, Freston became a founding member and head of marketing of MTV: Music Television.  Eventually, he rose to become the head of MTV Networks.  I think there is a chance that it was this deep training in contemporary culture that qualified him for the job as CEO of Viacom. Freston’s reputation grew.  The WSJ calls Freston "a man long regarded as one of the most successful executives in the entertainment business."

So what brought him low?  Why did Redstone fire his mighty CEO? Comments circulating in the business press (some of them from Redstone in the FT) suggest that the reason has to do with Viacom’s failure to acquire MySpace (which went instead to News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch). This seems a little unfair.  At the time, as I recall, everyone thought News Corporation paid much too much for MySpace.  Only now (following a deal with Google) are people now insisting that Freston was outplayed. 

In sum, Redstone hired Freston because he knew a thing or two about contemporary culture and its markets, and fired him because he did not know enough to spot the MySpace (and social networking) opportunity. 

Now there is no question that Redstone continues to play the diva on this issue.  Anne Thompson in today’s Hollywood Reporter makes this clear, quoting Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen who says: "The change is unexpected and not likely to be well received by the Street or the creative community."

Still and all, there is perhaps a "pattern recognition" moment.  It may be that Freston got his job as a CEO because he was deeply informed about contemporary culture and lost it because he was not informed enough.

There is a still deeper, and more chilling pattern here: that senior managers will have a brief window of culture competence. Without constant refitting, this competence may expire, as when an executive of one technology (Freston as a TV executive) is supplanted by the rise of a new shift in contemporary culture (social networking) enabled by a new technology (the internet).

Maidment pointed out in Forbes today that Wallstreet

has not been over-enamored with traditional media’s attempts to come to terms with the media consumption of the iPod generation.

Could this be because the managers of tradition media don’t actually know very much about the media consumption of the iPod generation.  When do we put this right?   When does the corporation get in touch and build a system for staying in touch?  Naturally, this will happen when senior managers decide that it is in their best interests that it happen.  Perhaps the Tom Freston story will sound an alarm.

References

Chaffin, Joshua.  2006.  Freston removed as chief of Viacom.  Financial Times.  September 6, 2006, p. 1. 

Karnitschnig, Matthew.  2006.  Ouster of Viacom Chief Reflects Redstone’s Impatience for Results.  Wall Street Journal.  September 6, 2006.

Maidment, Paul.  2006.  Why Viacom can’t win.  Forbes.com media newsletter.  September 6, 2006.

Thompson, Anne.  Par’s Grey loses patron: shake-up unsettles studio regime.  The Hollywood Reporter.  September 6, 2006. 

The Ok Go video I noted last week continues to tug at me.  It is an arresting piece of work, but I can’t say why, exactly, it should exercise fascination.  On its face, it’s dorky guys engaged in a dorky project.  (Perhaps 90s in this way but still, surely, too dorky actually to fascinate.)

At first, I thought that the power of the video come from the juxtaposition of synchronized dance and a rock band.  Rock bands are obliged never to exhibit anything so ordinary as coordination.  Cool in our time has been consistently defined by a refusal of anything so  individuality-killing as this.  For instance, the Beatles were the last band to wear a uniform, and no band in recent times has worn anything coordinated except as a rather good joke.

But no.   I think there is something else going, and if you will indulge me I am going to see if I can figure it out.  (I am in the LA airport as I write this, and I think God I remember to bring my earphones which now just barely protect from the roar given off by TV sets and travellers.)

There are two kinds of synchronization going on in the video: one is between the band members, the other between the band members and the treadmills they use to such good effect. 

I didn’t see it at first but these treadmills are arranged so that they run in opposite directions.  There are 4 or 5 of them, and each reverses the direction of the last.  This means that the walk ways have been side by side to make a walk way that runs back to front.  Clever!  The band member uses each walk way for a brief moment of transport and then steps off to avoid being carried away.  The video is among other things a study in person and machine interaction which  consists of careful, fleeting and exquisitely organized articulation. 

I had the feeling I had seen this somewhere before, and then it occured to me that this looks a little like the relationship between person to person conversation and email communication.  In the first, I am obliged to take your call when you place it, and you are obliged to take mine when I place it.  (I will ignore for the moment the function of answering machines, and much telephonic conversation is, really, machine to machine, not person to person.)  The power of email is that it allows me to lodge my communication when it is most convenient to me and you to deal with it when it is most convenient to you.  This is a kind of synchronization that fragents the conversation into shards and sees to their insertion as and when it is most opportune.  Or, in the language of the video, I get your video as and when I step into a time frame I can best content with it.  This is not only a matter of ease of access, but frame of mind.  I can entertain emails in the intellectual, conceptual, identity view corridor best suited to the demands they make of me.   (I’m thinking about this last issue thanks to Brad Berens [iMedia Communications] and a conversation we had yesterday.)

I think this is what contemporary culture must look like, ever more efficient synchronization that allows us to dispatch the various and pressing demands made of us (and rise to the demands of multiprocessing of multiple projects), even as we are free to engage in our own more or less lunatic enterprises (as these expand in kind and number as well).  (This is another way of saying that the new technologies and "lifestyles" will be designed to accommodate both of the individualisms identified by Daniel Bell: the instrumental and the expressive.)

This might be why the OK GO video is so fascinating.  It captures both these things.  So there are two things to observe about the video for anthropological purposes.  The first is that it plays out an emergent issue of the contemporary world, and this is I guess one of the things we hope art will do.  But, second, and more endearingly, OK GO get to make this contribution to contemporary culture only because they were prepared to break one of the principal rules of contemporary music, what we might call the anti-uniformity rule.

Tip to travellers

I just spent a week doing research in LA.  I stayed at the Los Angeles Athletic Club downtown.  If you have a taste for faded grandeur, this is the place for you.  The neighborhood is unsavory. The club is stuffed with great rugs, pretty good art, and a certain wainscotted comfort that is somehow ennobled by the fact that the club is no longer the beating heart of elite commerce and LA fatcat chumminess.  There have been several spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to renovate and redecorate and these too have the effect of making the grand dame more noble and more  interesting.  The staff are charming and courtesy.  The rooms are simple but plenty good enough.  And the prices are not to be believed.  You will have to belong to a university club somewhere that has reciprocal privileges, but I think the LA Athletic Club would be a good reason to sign up. 

I am going to be on the plane most of the day, but before I board, may I suggest this video from the Swedish Chicago band Ok Go?

It’s not like anything I have ever seen before.  It is astonishing, in a very low key, very low tech, utterly wacky, entirely brilliant way. 

So the Letterman-Schaeffer question: "is this something or is it nothing?"  What new developments in contemporary culture does this portent?  It’s kind of like syncronized swimming without the swimming?  Rock and roll has always made a near fetish of being more rough than ready, more chaotic than formed. And this most be one of the reasons this video is such arresting (and arrested), so genre busting, so sincere on the one hand, so ridiculous on the other. 

Here is YouTube acting as our periscope on a world that might otherwise passed right over head.

See the video  here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Leora Kornfeld for this extraordinary find. 

Sumner Redstone recently fired Tom Cruise, complaining of what the WSJ calls "public antics and incessant stumping for personal causes." 

We don’t think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot.

Mr. Redstone, what in God’s name would you know about "effectuating creative suicide?"  There is a presumption here, that Mr. Redstone is capable of making this determination and that he is correct in making it here.

A great many movie goers might be inclined to say that they don’t much care how Mr. Cruise conducts himself off the screen just so long as he entertains and engages on the screen.  The private and the public Cruise may have been delinked.  It’s almost certainly true that Mr. Redstone has never tested the proposition or even considered it in any systematic way.  I would be very surprised if he even had a model of contemporary culture that helped decide the matter one way or another.  No, he’s just winging it…and risking some part of the future of Paramount in the process.  Very odd, really, when you stop to think about it. 

This raises an interesting possibility: that when Chairman Redstone publicly fires a big star and does so with grand declaration to which he is not entitled, he is engaging in behavior that is not very different from jumping on the couch in the middle of an Oprah interview.

References

Marr, Merissa.  2006.  Sumner Redstone Gives Tom Cruise His Walking Papers.  Wall Street Journal.  August 23, 2006.

What is YouTube, exactly?  We know the particulars: it was founded a February 2005 by a couple of guys, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen.  It serves up user-created or user stolen videos to anyone who comes to the YouTube website.  The numbers are sensational: 100 million views a day.

But that doesn’t really answer the question.  I mean, what is YouTube? (These speculations are always tricky, a little shapeless and difficult to do.  It used to be that thinking about the future was hard.  Now it’s thinking about the present that’s the challenge.)

Let me offer a "starter thought" and see where it takes us.  I think YouTube is not about entertainment, it’s about information.  Or it’s not about information, it’s about intelligence.  To put this another way, YouTube is not the future of Hollywood, it’s the future of the magazine.  Actually, it’s the world post-magazine. 

All of us are now trying to stay within shouting distance of a contemporary culture busting out in all directions.  The cost of falling out of touch is substantial.  Not knowing about YouTube in, say, August of 05 was perfectly okay.  No harm, no foul.  Not knowing about YouTube in August of 06 is really a good way of destroying your credibility…as an anthropologist, an analyst, a marketer, an educator, a librarian, a parent, a teen.  Well, there is almost no one in our culture who can now afford to say, "YouTube?  No, I’m sorry I haven’t heard of that." 

This is a special problem for an anthropologist like me.  I invested heavily in the 1990s to get in touch with contemporary and popular culture.  Pursuing an education at the University of Chicago and then tenure in Canada meant that I missed most of the 70s and the much of the 80s. Off planet, out of touch, inclined to say things like "John Travolta? No, I’m sorry, I don’t recognize that name."

Once I had a hard time of it even after "graduation."  The problem was always staying in touch.  Movies and music.  What was the best plan here?  Go to lots of movies?  Buy lots of CDs?  Spend a fortune in time and money keeping up?  Not really.  Better to stay in touch with people like Leora Kornfeld and Dave Dyment who could be relied upon to give gentle, whispered council, like listening to a trusted financial advisor who puts things right with a few, carefully chosen words. 

What I needed was 1) the wash on the internet, a tide that could be depended upon to deliver new key words and early(ish) notice (i.e., "Panic! at the disco"), and 2) YouTube, a place that can give me a more, mostly visual, information.  Ok, now I have it.  My self training gave me that foundation, and YouTube provided most of what I need (i.e., the video "I write sins not tragedies") to place this in a larger context.  It didn’t matter that the quality of the video is sometimes abominable.  I just needed a general idea.  Most of all, I need costless access.  I don’t have to buy the CD.  I don’t need to hunt down information.  A couple of clicks and I know. 

This is what magazines used to do: keep me in touch the things I needed to know.  But what has brought the once mighty Time to its knees is precisely that there is no way that a single paper based publication working even on a weekly interval to give me the notice I need. There are too many things out there, moving too quickly, and too many things in here, colliding too often, for a single editorial perspective to serve.  As usual, the middle falls out.  What I want is key word notice plus raw feed follow up. 

And this is what is wrong with the notion of the "branded channel" recently announced by YouTube.  The idea, if I understand it, is that YouTube will invite brands to pay for the privilege of creating customized channels.  The business model, never easy to spot in these matters, is, I think, this: I will watch ads (i.e., endure branding) if you, the brand, serve an editing, winnowing, filtering function for me. 

But isn’t this what just died?  If we know anything about millennials it is that they know how to work information sources extremely well, and that they have formidable editorial powers of choosing and combining what it is they want to know.    Ironically, YouTube is recreating the magazine it just killed.  Branded channels, that’s what magazines used to do.  YouTube works best as the raw feed of contemporary culture. Brand channels, this is what just got disintermediated.

References

Anonymous.  2006.  Advertising in search of revenues look to web’s latest heroes.  Financial Times.  August 23, 2006. 

Anonymous.  2006.  Paris Hilton to promote YouTube website.  Financial Times.  August 23, 2006. 

Panic! at the Disco.  2006.  I writes sins not tragedies.  On YouTube here. 

Acknowledgments

I had an illuminating dinner with Debbie Millman a couple of days ago and, the "periscope" comes, indirectly, from her.

I have an idea for your next vacation.

Phone Saida at Saros Research in London and set up ethnographic interviews with 10 people in London.

It sounds strange, I’m sure.  Who wants to play anthropologist on their holidays? 

Well, if the object is to penetrate the barrier that stands between every tourist and country/culture, ethnographic interviews are really very usful.

Russell Davies and I (with the help of people attending Russell’s Account Planning School of the Web) were recently wrestling with the idea of cruise ships, those suburbs of the sea, and it occured to me that almost all touristic experience has the quality of cruise ship containment.  We may get off the ship from time to time, but the closest we are getting to the host country is a shop filled with touristic chakahs that play out stereotypes and help extinquish the possibility of cross culture contact. 

I do these interviews for a living.  But I am suggesting that you do them for the sheer fun of it.  On a recent trip, I found Londoners fascinating on several topics, including how dinner parties are changing in London, the difference between lager andstout, what is the deal with Manchester United, anyway, when and how to use one’s best "telephone voice," gardening the Tony Blair way, and how English audiences received The Da Vinci Code (in some cases, with audible and enthusiastic scorn, apparently).

You will have to pay these people about 100 pounds each to sit for the interview.  But it’s  bargain, I’m telling you.  Interesting, lovely, charming, interesting people, will let you into their homes and the lives.

This is not sight seeing.  You want to the British Museum, Big Ben, the Thames, except from the window of your taxi as you race from interview to interview.  But it is the kind of contact that we treasure when it happens accidentally. 

Why wait for it to happen accidentally?

Yesterday, I came upon a red-tailed hawk sitting in a tree.  She was about 60 feet from the ground, on a branch in full view, looking as if she couldn’t quite decide what to have for lunch, a neighbor’s cat or the anthropologist gazing witlessly up at her. 

It was a thrilling experience…and a terrifying one.  Up close, there was no mistaking that this raptor was a killing machine. 

I was joined by an attractive woman who was out walking her two dogs.  I pointed out the hawk and she assumed her best "Polly wanna a cracker" tone and said to the hawk, "squawk! who’s a beautiful birdie, squawk!."

Zut alors!   She was hailing a magnificent, alarming bird of prey with an imitation of Elmer Fund talking to a parrot.  No…I can’t imagine either…

I am on the train to Philadelphia.  I believe God wants us to travel by train.  I mean, would he have invented trains otherwise?  I say no. 

Part of the charm of the trip is the security warning read over the intercom as we leave Penn station.  It reads something like, "if you see something, say something: a strange package, something that doesn’t look quite right, or, [and now I’m quoting precisely], somebody acting funny."

Actually, I am watching someone acting funny.  There are 4 guys in my line of sight who are acting …I guess "funny" captures it.  By the looks of their suits, ties, brief cases, and watches, they are 4 young princes of the capital markets.  Or they are McKinsey consultants, red of tooth and claw, the ones who rampage, well tailored holligans, through a corporation.  They take no prisoners, this lot.  They leave careers where they break them.  They got a train to catch.  I would guess they have degrees from Wharton, Columbia, HBS, or Yale.  No, not Yale.  (Yale should be so lucky to graduate guys as good as these.)  They are in their late 20s or early 30s and they are making a small fortune.  And this is just the financial.  The funds of self esteem are, evidentally, still greater. 

What’s funny about them?  They are quitely tormenting the steward.  Well, why not.  They’re bored.  He’s struggling.  Why not have a little fun? Pricks. 

This is class in America.  The distance between the steward and these guys is vast.  He may have made it through high school, a public one.  They went to private schools, likely, and enjoyed the best college educations money can buy. 

I am not saying that these guys are racists. I am not saying they are actively hostile or dangerous.  (This is good, because I am sitting in their line of sight.)   

Let’s give these kids their due.  They are entitled to think well of themselves. They were smart to begin with and they are now, thanks to Penn, formidable problem solving machines.  And they are the reason American corporations are so much better at capitalism than the competitors, including those from France and England.  These kids are the future because they own a piece of it. 

But, really, does this give them the right to torment Amtrak employees.  I don’t think so.

Over at Passionate, Kathy Sierra suggests that some consumers now  give one another "The Nod."

Sit in a cafe with a Mac PowerBook, and chances are you’ll get The Nod–that acknowledging, approving, knowing, we’re-special look.  MINI owners give each other The Nod at intersections. Display Gnome on your ThinkPad and you’ll get The Nod. But run Windows on your Dell and you won’t. (Never confuse the "I feel your pain" look with The Nod.)

To give The Nod is to recognize and appreciate another person who "gets it", whatever it is.

Kathy tells us that the "nod" tells a consumer someone thinks he/she is smart, risk-taking, indie, or fun.

I guess this is better than the "nervous glance," when consumers scope out one another’s shoes or cars with fear or envy.  Happily, the competitive consumption of the 1950s is mostly dead. 

But I have to say "the nod" creeps me out.  I don’t want to be a co-conspirator in someone else’s act of self congratulation. 

I am pleased that you believe your choice of computer or car or browswer makes you look riskier or indie-er.  But leave me out of it. The fact that we share consumer choices, put that down to coincidence. The moment you start sending me the nod for my MINI is the moment I take it to the used-car lot and see if I can’t trade it in for a Nod-proof Valiant.  No, actually, a Valiant isn’t Nod-proof.  (Valiant’s are wonderfully expressive cars, aren’t they?  The one pictured above looks as if it’s on the verge of tears.  And can you blame it?  Mind you, it has clearly found a pretty good friend in the airstream.  And thus was a children’s story born.)  Make it a Camry.  The Camry is a triumph of nod-proofery, and I’d be damn proud to drive one.

Self-by-other congratulation, it’s an ugly thing.  I can see how it works in California.  But constructing community (or an affinity) out of a non verbal gesture at a traffic light, that has to be a Californian’s idea of a lasting social bond…not to mention as big a boost to the ego as a Californian is likely to get in the 2006 calendar year. 

Now, there is a third candidate for non-verbal gifting, and that’s the big laugh of sheer gratitude.  These are not calculated, these are not self congratulatory, they are involuntary acts of reciprocity, as in "you purchased something" so funny, interesting, clever, unexpected, or imaginative, I just have to laugh out loud.  In fact if I saw a Valiant in my little town in Connecticut, laughing out loud is precisely what I would do, an act of gratitude for an act of imagination.  (Any consumer choice that makes one doubt one’s senses is a very good consumer choice indeed, especially in this part of the world where many consumers appear to hope that will have anticipated your expectation to perfection.)

Let the typology building begin.  Call it the typology for non verbal gestures that approve and police the consumer society.  We have:

1) The Nod.  (Thank you, Kathy, I hope you take my comments in the spirit they were offered.)

2) The Nervous Glance

3) The Big Laugh of sheer gratitude

4) The Gaze (I went on about this awhile ago, as below)

Suggestions?

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  The Economics of the Gaze.  This Blog Sits at the…  August 24, 2004. here.

Sierra, Kathy.  2006.  The Nod.  Passionate.  July 7, 2006.  here. 

Hat tip to:

Tom Guarriello at the True Talk Blog here.