My anthro & econ "dream team" of "must read" journalists continues to grow.   

James Poniewoznik is now our man in TVland, joining Lisa Schwartzbaum of Entertainment Weekly (movies), Barbara Lippert of Adweek (advertising), and Joan Kron (plastic surgery).  (Please feel free to nominate people.)

Poniewozik recently noted several TV shows he thinks we might have missed.  And I have to say this sent a chill through me.  TV I might have missed?  It seems like only yesterday, I could take for granted that by this time of the year I would have seen all the new shows.  But sure enough, Poniewozik names several shows I have not seen.

His list: Sons and Daughters (ABC), The Loop (FOX), Free Ride (FOX), Wonder Shozen (MTV2),  Nighty Night (Oxygen), and Slings and Arrows (Sundance). 

TV was for a long time our hearth, the focal point around which families and the nation could bathe together "in the glow."   One measure of how customary (and obligatory) was this participation: everyone knew pretty much knew all the shows, even if they didn’t watch them.  It was rare to speak of a show in conversation and discover that someone had no clue what it was about.  This was a common ground.

Now there are several good shows in their second season, I don’t know.  This is no doubt a measure of my addled condition and one of the many costs of living in Connecticut, but it is also a reflection of changes taking place in the TV producer and the TV consumer.

There are now many, many good channels carrying many good shows.  I am astonished how high the standard of the comedic writing is.  I was watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother recently, and there was a particular jewel about an American boyfriend driving off a French girlfriend that was fiendishly clever.  It’s amazing how many people can write well for TV.  The art of sit com acting is all about dropping the line in at exactly the right moment, delivery it with perfect economy and emphasis, and then giving way to the next joke.  It’s amazing how many people can do this flawlessly.  This tells us that as channels grow, so will the shows capable of supplying them.  There is, apparently, no shortage of talent.  The profusion of "must see" TV that I fail to see will continue to grow.

On the consumer end, there is  an explosion of options.  Lots of channels carried on lots of TVs in the home.  There are DVDs (via purchase or Netflix) and pay per view movies.  There is place shifting (Slingbox) and timeshifting (Tivo).  At any given time, a family has thousands of options.  The chances of them all sitting down to a single moment of "destination television" (aka "appointment television") are increasingly slender.

It’s almost as if TV is going to go the way of the family meal.  A shared meal (sometimes, Sunday night, sometimes Friday) was once the center piece of American family life.  It was the moment when people came together to remember, reenact and otherwise reassert that they were a family, and what it was to be a family.  This institution has been under extraordinary pressure in recent years.  Someone told me recently that Americans now eat something like 10% of their meals while driving in the car!  ("Dashboard dining" they called it.)   "Grazing" and individual preparation is also on the rise.  The family meal is now longer a staple of family ritual, but increasingly an occasional and ad hoc accomplishment. 

This wasn’t so bad because families were still sitting down to destination television.  (In a perfect world, some academic would have worked out the precise differences between shared meals and shared television, but until our scholarly cousins awaken from their postmodernist slumber, this topic will remain unexamined.)  But if destination TV is now for the high jump (as the English say), what can this mean for family life?

Now if this were 1972, we could rely on an academic to write a book about how TV is killing our culture.  Happily, it is now 21st century and we are more inclined to wonder how this will change culture, not kill it.  To some extent, the family has been a balwark against plenitude.  Culture fragmented outside the family, and to be sure, some of this leaked in.  But the family was still largely a world onto itself.  What we are looking at with the end of destination TV might be the death of the family’s last ceremonial center.  In this event, plenitude will have come home in earnest and not even a great room will be big enough to contain the explosion.

References

Poniewozik, James.  2006.  6 Totally Funny TV Series.  Time Magazine.  March 20, 2006, p. 118. 

Yesterday, Pam and I played host to the DeCesare/Goodman/Bergman clan.  This meant five kids in the house.

We have a little room, a kind of shed, attached to the garage.  The kids adopted this as their own.  We were charmed when they appeared to turn the shed into a new country, complete with its own three color flag.  "As long as they don’t start singing and marching," the adults joked, and that’s the last we thought of it.

Then the four year old wandered back to the house carrying a slip that read, "Beutyful 2414."

Eventually, it dawned on us that this was her password and security code.  Here is the entire manifest.  (I give it to you in the strictest confidence.) 

Pretty: 8412
Curley: 3333
Navey: 1384
Beutyful: 2414
Flower: 1211

Each of the kids has a password and security code.  I don’t know how many terrorists there are in my part of Connecticut but clearly the little shed is now secure.  Relatively speaking.  We could use a metal detector and a rent-a-cop but then the kids will have to start raising taxes, and no one around here wants that, believe me.

Now, it may be that this is the 21st century version of the those hand scrawled signs that have always appeared on tree houses and forts, the ones that read "keep out."  (We adults couldn’t help noticing that no one gave us passwords and security codes.) Maybe the kids were just building a boundary the way kids have always liked to do.

But surely these kids are the children of 9/11.  I don’t think their homes, education or worship bristle with security, but it’s inevitable they feel boundaries to be imperiled, scrutinized, and  protected.  Notice that the kids yesterday had passwords AND security codes.  Nothing casual about this system.  Besides, the passwords are vaguely descriptive (to make them easier to remember), but not so easy that you could just guess what someone’s code would be.  This security system is in earnest.  It makes a little chill run down your back. 

If the pundits are right, technological enablement is going to make these kids as porous as anything.  The cell phone is just the beginning.  Eventually, all the world is going to be able to find them anywhere.  From an anthropological point of view, it’s also clear that these kids are going to be loose bounded, not just the world streaming in but the kid streaming out.  Any way you look at it, porousness is the new order of the day. 

Perhaps it’ s their sense of this, as much as the heritage of 9/11, that makes them prize the idea of border control.  Frost said, good fences make good neighbors.  These kids may feel they make good kids. 

I will be on the Design Matters with Debbie Millman show today from 3:00-4:00 (eastern standard) on www.business.voiceamerica.com Call in live, toll free: 866-233-7861.

I prepared these briefing notes for myself, things I hope we will talking about:

1) lifestyle design. 

There is an opportunity here and the market has yet to supply.  Most of us have cultivated a diverse portfolio of selves.  We are several people and we will be free and forced to be several more before the game is up. 

Most of us are a "crowded house," many persona, not always on the best of terms.  Some of us are actually more like a motel, with several of the personae that make up personhood are strangers to one another.

Some of these selves are self created, but some are taken from the media market place (movies, novels, games).  I actually learned something about selves I didn’t know lurked within in the final moments of the PC version of Blade Runner.  Some part of me has been shaped by my reverence for certain intellectuals, celebrities, and politicians. 

Some of the selves come from or are at least shaped by lifestyles.  I venture to say the Punk movement shaped all of us, as did, if you’re old enough, the preppie movement.  (Diverse, see.)

But there is plenty more to do here, and part of the problem is that there is no professional to whom this responsibility of lifestyle invention now falls.  So there are two possibilities (roughly speaking): existing design take this on as a new responsibility and a new design professional springs up, peopled, most probably, by Hollywood script writers, novelists, account planners, ad biz creatives and other people who routinely find themselves in the invention game.

I wonder what Debbie and her listeners will say.  Certainly, they can comment on the likelihood of option 1.

2) implications of the supposed "death" of TV advertising.  As more marketing happens on line, in game, and on shelf, what does this mean for design. I think it has to be new emphasize on brand and package design.  In many cases, this will be the only visible part of the brand messages. 

3) how can designers help address the "profusion of choice" problem. 

4) how can designers help still the world.  In a dynamic world, there is new value to be had from clarity and calm.  Designers control the means of production here. 

5) how to build brands that are both responsive and still.  To be brands are coolhunting, when this is only a part of what they need to do to create value.  The perfect brand looks like a sailing ship from the 18th century, with ballast meanings it will carry with it always, cargo that changes with each voyage (campaign, brand manager, or deep trend) and the sails that can be adjusted to pick up every sudden change in consumer taste and preference. 

6) I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about the Honda spot of a couple of years ago that shows a Rube Goldberg cartoon made from Honda parts.  I think we could take this as a piece of design that forswears some of the classic principles of design in order to build a model of a dynamic culture and the operation of emergent properties. 

Hope you can join us. 

References

You can see the Honda spot here.

Here’s what I have to look at every morning.

Two of my little books (Culture and Consumption I & II) are struggling to climb the ladder.  Today, they are doing relatively well, their ranking marked in 5 digits.  (I won’t tell you the number of times I find them ranked in the deep 6 digits.  400,000 is not uncommon.)

But every morning, Blue Ocean Strategy, the book by Kim and Mauborgne, is right up there.  IN TWO DIGITS.  I don’t begrudge them this success.  Yes, I do.

Kim and Mauborgne say that companies should forsake the roller derby in which companies fight for tiny, and brief, moments of advantage.  No, they say, strike out on your own.  Look for blue oceans that are presently unoccupied, markets you can have all to your own.

The good thing about this book is the fact that it tells us how much marketing has become a game of ideas, imagination and innovation.  Indeed, it is increasingly a game in which advantage goes to those who can step out of received wisdom and current assumptions, and see the world new.  This is great news for the likes of me and you (dear reader).  After all, we are the people who live for (and through) our wits.  An intellectually vital market place is good (and billable) news.

The bad thing about the book is that the book is naive.  Only academics could have written such a thing.  Blue Ocean Strategy acts as if "wishing makes it so," all we have to do is to find an uncontested market space and all the hard work of marketing just goes away.  Hurray! 

If only it were so.  If only we could just wish away the competition and the close quarter combat that characterizes every mature market.  Yes, General Motors created a blue ocean when it was prepared to customize in a way that Ford would not.  Yes, Dell created a blue ocean by disintermediating the marketplace.  Yes, the megaplex changed the movie house.  Yes, Cirque reinvented the circus.  And, er, that’s pretty much it. 

This kind of good fortune happens to a handful of companies.  (This is, not incidentally, the reason the book is so thin on examples, and why several of them seemed forced.)  To mix my metaphors, people find blue oceans about as often as they are struck by lightening.  (Yes, there is an evolutionary joke lurking in there somewhere.)

To make this the strategy for everyone to follow…well, it’s just nuts.  It’s like telling every baseball team that, if they want to win, they should just go out and hire a Roger Clemens.  Great, thanks.  Why didn’t we think of that?

But there is a deeper problem with Blue Ocean Strategy.  Two of them actually. 

The first is that Kim and Mauborgne don’t ever see the underlying cultural trend that creates up the ocean.  The GM opportunity is driven by an American individualism that demanded that people have distinctive cars.  The megaplex trend represents a fragmentation of consumer taste and preference (perhaps a first hint of Anderson’s "long tail").  If the corporation really wants access to blue oceans, one of the things that it needs to do is to monitor trends with new acuity.  Kim and Mauborne do not see this.

Second, there is a DIY opportunity here.  Some of the corporations have opened up blue oceans because they helped to create blue planets.  Nike discovered the fitness trend early, and made it an American pasttime.  Starbucks created a new category of public space, (aka, the "third place").  Coca-Cola helped to invent Christmas.  Pepsi helped to create youth culture.  Snapple helped to invent the 1990s. 

The "blue planet strategy" are not so much about discovering empty spaces.  It’s about something more pro active, creative and hand’s on.  It’s not a matter of shifting assumptions and changing frames.  It’s about making something new (or newish). 

Naturally, comporate acts of invention have to correspond to something in the culture.  Consumers have to be able to grasp the "third space" concept, and they have, at some level, to need to want it.  So there is an element of discovery.  But finally, this is an act of cultural creation that takes the considerable intelligence, deep pockets and vast retail resources of a Howard Schultz. 

Talk about ownership.  Corporations that merely discover new oceans may "own" these oceans till the rest of the world comes piling in.  But corporation that create new planets, this is a deeper ownership.  After all, the corporation owns the blue prints, not just the phenomenon.  They get the blue planet "down to the ground."  They invented it. 

Naturally, this is not the sort of thing to which the corporation takes easily.  Blue planet creation would take a room full of cultural engineers, a certain amount of patience, and a willingness to get out of the discovery game into the creation one. 

The corporate world can engage in acts of cultural invention.  And by this means they can create blue planets.  (The good news is that the blue oceans come attached.)  But there is an "entry cost" here.  They are going to have to stop listening to French intellectuals. 

References

Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne.  2005.  Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 

The ranking in the image above comes from Titlez here. 

Ok, they got him.  Yesterday, the President of Harvard University resigned. 

Now, I am not going to say I told you so.

Yes, I am.

I told you so. 

In March of 2005, I wrote a piece called President Summers, Beware the Yalies of the Yard.  My argument, briefly, was that there are really two Harvards: the outer rings occupied by the professional schools, the Economics department and some of the physical sciences, and the inner planet of the Yard. 

The outer rings are occupied by scholars who are ambitious, worldly and engaged.  The inner planet is occupied by people who do not have power and do not like those who do have power. 

My conceit: that the inhabitants of the inner planet are really more like Yalies.  President understood his colleagues of the outer rings.  Generally, I think they were happy with him.  Fatally, he misunderstood his colleagues from the Yard.  He did not see that they were Yalies.

Am I right to say Summers was brought low by the Yard?  Joseph O’Donnell, is a former member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers and a prominent donor.  This morning he was quoted in the New York Times:

"How can anyone govern a university where a fraction of faculty members can force a president out?"

Here then is my warning to President Summers from March of 2005. 

President Summers: Beware the Yalies of the Yard. 

I think I see President Summers’s problem.  He has been speaking to his Harvard faculty when he should have been addressing the Yalies of the Yard. 

I don’t have a lot of ethnographic data on Yalies but I do recall one astonishing weekend I spend with 8 of them in Washington.  We were there for a Yale-Smithsonian conference and, as part of the proceedings, we, the participants, were driven around the nation’s capital in a small van.

What caught my attention (and there is nothing like forcible confinement to sharpen the senses) is that the Yalies kept up a line of self congratulatory humor and comment that said, roughly, "this may be Washington, but we are Yalies!"  It was as if they were trying to show they were not threatened by the nation’s capital.  In that great tradition of protesting too much, they managed to demonstrate just the opposite:  "This is Washington, we are terrified."

As I say, it is not a lot of data, but it makes a nice little puzzle.  Why would people from one of the nation’s great universities become defensive when obliged to tour the nation’s capital? 

One way to solve this puzzle is to embark in a long, reckless, thoroughly speculative, and utterly groundless discourse on Yale’s strategy of self presentation, and this is precisely what I intend now to do.  For roughly 304 years, Yale has fought a status game with Harvard and lost it almost every year.  (They’ve done some what better in the classic football contest, where the two schools are virtually tied.)  For all its greatness, Yale is poorer than Harvard in virtually every category.  For all its antiquity, it is a newcomer.  Yale sometimes wins "the game" (as they call the Harvard-Yale gridiron contest).  It almost never wins the comparison. 

This is tough on a college, even one as mighty as Yale, and a response is called for.  The classic cultural response is to doubt the grounds of the comparison, and here, I think, Yale may have been tempted by two options.  The first is to insist that Yale is other-worldly and to that extent a finer, more cerebral enterprise than Harvard.  This is one of the ways Oxford declares its difference from Cambridge and all those earnest, artless scientists on the fens.  The second, and this might be offered as a demonstration of the first, is to position Yale as a place that refuses power as enthusiastically as Harvard pursues it.  (Do universities "position" themselves in this manner?  Nations do.  At the end of the 19th century, France recognized that it would lose all future military contests to Germany and all economic ones to England.  Culture seemed the wisest course, the prudent thing to do.)

Did Yale "manage" the Harvard comparison this way, by escaping it on the grounds of a higher calling?  I can’t say.  This is, I hasten to remind you, discourse both speculative and groundless.  But we judge ideas by the work they perform in the world, and this one helps explain a couple of things.  It would explain why those Yalies were so threatened by Washington.  It would also explain why Yales are so often liberal and/or lefty.  (If there is a single reason that keeps the Democrats out of the mainstream, it is their presumption of moral superiority.  Thus have they removed themselves from the mainstream.)  Finally, it would explain why we’’ve heard of almost no one at Yale.  I bet with a little effort you could name ten to twenty people teaching at Harvard.  Take a moment.  Think of Yale.  Three?  Five?  Any?  No, Yale is too good for this world, too good in any case to be compared with the likes of worldly Harvard.  ("Whew!  You can not judge us, we are too fine.")

That’s the trouble with this status strategy.  Renounce the world often enough and, after awhile, otherworldliness becomes obscurity.  Those who are too good for the world are charged with ever fewer responsibilities and finally, the world begins to lose interest altogether. 

Back to President Summers (just ignore the sound of gears grinding heroically as I redirect the argument).  President Summers comes from the outer ring of his university, the economics department, a place so worldly and influential it supplies many people for Washington posts, including, of course, Summers himself, who was secretary of the treasury there.  Harvard has not been shy about power.  The business school, the law school, the medical school, these are the brilliant rings of the planet and carry the university’s influence out into the world and back again.  Ironically, only the Kennedy school manages to keep itself disengaged (managing to look a little Yale-like in the process). 

All of the professional schools know a thing or two about chain of command, the realities of power, the privileges of standing, and what it takes to make the world bend to Harvard’s, or anyone’s, influence.  The rule here, and it’s got to be in Machiavelli somewhere, you can’t be too particular or fastidious.  You have to get on with it.  The chief executive officers of these schools are not quite CEOS in the corporate sense, but certainly they bear very little resemblance to the godly churchmen who were their predecessors.  They know the lessons, the realities, of power in a way that most academics do not. 

Here’s the rub.  President Summers comes from these outer rings.  He embraced its culture.  He constituted himself a creature of power, a man of standing.  He wore, we might say, his rings on his sleeve.  And then he made an anthropological error.  He assumed that his Harvard was everybody’s Harvard.  He failed to see the Yalies within. 

Mr. President!  The first rule of rhetoric is "know your audience."  Harvard has a little Yale, the scholars who occupy the liberal arts, the social sciences and the Yard.  These people are largely shut out of, or kept from, Harvard’s engagement with the world.  Not for them the government posts, the consulting gigs, the television interviews, the world’s eager consultation.  For most of them the "ambit of influence" is the table they commandeer each day at the Faculty Club, and, outside of academic circles, not much more.  (Notice I am using here a rhetorical trope here called "exaggeration".)

I’m sure this rankles but it should not surprise.  After all, most scholars in the humanities and social sciences have made Yale’s bargain with the universe.  They have insisted that they are much too good, too noble, too moral to engage with the world.  They have, in sum, cultivated an obscurity of their own.  They are now a little like ceremonial creatures of court removed from the world that they might commune with the gods.  Not for them the rough and ready pragmatism of the outer rings.  As keepers of the nobler view, they are, some of them, just a dubious hat and push cart away from wandering out of the Yard to shout imprecations at startled fellow Cantabridgians.  (That pesky trope again.)

This strategy of absenting yourself from the real world has many implications.  Some of them are tragic.  (The social sciences and humanities are now frightfully out of touch with some of the real compelling intellectual issues of our day.  Too bad.  They might have been useful.)  But here is the important implication for our purposes.  If you are surrounded by power but kept from it, if you are made a ceremonial creature, but only that, if you absent yourself from the world, and rewarded with obscurity, if all these things are true, you are in a very bad temper a good deal of the time.  The world has done you wrong.

Now, we know what happens to ceremonial creatures when they are wronged.  They become obsessed with form.  The world may not respond to their will, but they will have their due.  They will insist upon a precise acknowledgement of every detail of the ritual regime.  In President Summers’ case, this means no gratuitous references to the ROTC program, that sterling demonstration of the military-industrial-educational complex.  It means no reckless comments about women and science.  This too is, forgive me, a "motherhood" issue in the Yard.  And it means that the President may not evidence the arrogance of the CEO from the outer ring, nor the swash buckling style we might expect from a man who owes his Harvard position, in part at least, to the fact that he once had a corner office in the corridors of power. 

Finally, the Yalies of the Yard have one metapragmatic directive: you may have power, you may have the task of bending the world to Harvard’s will, but.don’t. rub.our.noses.in.it!  Give us this illusion: what we think matters, what we do counts.  And by all means, observe the ceremony and ritual that is our balm, our succor, our consolation.  Mr. President, we have only one power, that of form, and unless you honor us by acknowledging it, we, sir, will make you pay. 

(Sorry that got a little CSI: Miami at the end there, didn’t it?)

Bernard-Henri Levy came to America "in the footsteps of Tocqueville" to study what he calls,

[a] crisis of identity.  The powerful country in the world does not know what it is, it feels itself in a deep trauma, a deep neurosis.  It was interesting to go behind the curtain.

Oh, please.  This is the difference between America and France, isn’t it?  America knows perfectly well that it "does not know what it is," that it cannot know what it is.  There are so many groups, driven by so many ideas, subject now to so many regional, ethnic, lifestyle, gender variations that America is a fountain of cultural invention. 

This causes no "deep trauma."  We all understand that difference breeds difference and we can never catch up.  A few people have lost their courage and run straight into the embrace of orthodoxy of one kind or another.  But most of us are reconciled to the fact that we live in a society of very strange strangers, and we accept this with the equanimity with which we regard the weather and the incompetence of our local baseball team: "whaddayagonnado?"

Second, I think we all understand, and one feels sure that Tocqueville would have grasped this, that there is no "curtain" to go behind.  No one is charge.  No one calls this shots.  I thought for a moment that it might be Ryan Seacrest.  I was wrong. 

One could argue that Tocqueville was particularly well situated to grasp some of the more difficult aspects of an earlier America.  Being a Frenchman of this generation and this intellectual moment, he had an advantage.  BHL, on the other hand, appears to suffer an intellectual deficit. 

France knows too well what it is, and this is a great and grave problem.  French self knowledge hangs like a millstone around the neck of national, economic and cultural aspiration.  To be sure, there is still a curtain in France, and behind, awash in self congratulation, a media green room, filled with politicians, film stars, and not least intellectuals.  (America learned long ago that intellectuals would necessary be the last ones to get the news and took pains fastidiously to ignore them.  Only Robert Thompson is still consulted.)  A visitor can penetrate the curtain in France, but this would be perhaps the worst place to go looking for national, cultural truths. 

Somehow, one feels that Tocqueville is the wrong comparison for Bernard-Henri Levy.  I do not mean to be disrespectful, but it occurred to me that Inspector Clouseau is a perhaps more apt.  And not the version accomplished by Peter Sellers.  ("You’ll catch your death of cold, Clouseau!"  "Yes, yes, I probably will, but…it’s all part of life’s rich pagentry, you kneu.")  M. Levy resembles M. Martin more. 

Yes, I think that’s it.  BHL is to Tocqueville as Martin’s Clouseau is to Sellers’ Clouseau. Not so much an act of deference as a comparison that’s ill advised.   

References

Levy, Bernard-Henri.  2006.  American Vertigo: Travelling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.  New York.  Random House. 

Swanson, Carl.  2006.  American Psychoanalyst.  New York Magazine.  January 23-30, p. 78. here.  (the quote comes from this article)

Wood, Gaby.  2003.  Je suis un superstar.  The Observer.  June 15, 20003. here.

For more quotes from Inspector Clouseau, here. 

As I reported a couple of weeks ago, Russell Davies, God of planning, asked me to sit in as an instructor in his Account Planning School of the Web.  I was happy, indeed, honored to participate.

Russell has now posted my assignment here and I was moved to attach this comment.  Anything in italics was added after the fact (of posting the comment).

Russell, this looks great.  Looking forward to new species springing to life first as assignments, then as realities.  Russell Davies and company, lifestyle architects. 

This is a start up we must start up.  I’m thinking of a subscription model.  Consumers/clients pay us $112 a year for a new lifestyle every quarter. 

Come to think of it lifestyle instruction is the sort of thing we, sometimes, we read magazines for and its not clear that there is a niche here for us to occupy.  On the other hand, if what we are offering is a deep cultural specification of the style in question, this might be different and interesting.  (And like totally worth $112.00 per annum.)

Those who want a more complete specification of the cultural meanings and objectives of the style in question or deeper instruction in the "script" for same can pay us more.   

And a lot more would not be out of the question.  Some will take umbrage at this abrogation of the individual’s right and responsibility to define the self by the self.  But golly, we call on experts to help us design everything else in our lives.  And this is pretty close to what many Manhattan psychiatrists do…and surely we can do better than this community of professionals.  I mean, we actually know something about the culture in question.

Absolutely, custom made, bespoke lifestyles, well, those cost more. 

In a transformational, Ovidian culture, surely this is an idea well past due. 

As to our business model, or better, our business style, I’m thinking of something along the lines of Saville Row tailors.  You and me and others standing around thinking deep thoughts on what lifestyle might "suit" this particular client.  Me: "I’m thinking this fellow needs a home in the south of France."  You: "No, no, no.  Rykivik (sp!) one weekend.  Mexico City the next."   

Thanks, Grant

References

I am almost certain that the front cover of Fast Company pictured here features a picture of Russell Davies.  But I might be wrong.  And if I’m wrong, I’m really embarrassed. 

I am still in Pasadena, bathing in the decanted light that is winter in southern california.  The conference on luxury by Virginia Postrel was really interesting, and I got to hear several very smart people say some revelationally smart things.

But as I wait to leave for the airport, I realize I have that terrible affliction, cursor crawl.  The cursor on my screen is no longer still.  It now heads up the screen at a slow but steady pace.  This turns my GUI into a game of whack-a-mole.  No sooner have I positioned the cursor over the thing I wish to "click" than it serenely continues its journey upwards, so that by the time I click, I am out of range.  Now, I position the cursor below the thing I wish to click, and wait.   Crawl and click, it’s a brand new game from Kenner. 

This should be a minor convenience, and, if I had a sense of humor, it might even be a little fun.  But instead it is pretty close to agony.  Watching the cursor crawl up the screen is indeed so painful, it might as well be making that sound of a nail on a blackboard.  Something happens to my nervous system, and I feel like shouting (which, it turns out, is not allowed at a Westin).

Something has happened to my nervous system.  It now presupposes the existence of computer technology (in this case a ThinkPad X40).  This machine is no longer "at my finger tips."  It is now my finger tips and, in good moments, the instrumentality that does my bidding in the electronic world.  To have some part of this malfunction begins to feel like a very personal malady, and an intolerable handicap.

This evokes a one of the theme’s of Virginia’s conference: that the luxuries of one generation have a way of becoming the necessities of the next.  This effect has happened in my life time.  Email, once kinda of useful, is now essential.  When failing technology turns it into a game of whack-a-mole, well, I’m a deeply unhappy guy.  I believe Adam Smith would understand.

Blogging is a funny enterprise.  Most of us define our interests broadly.  No one has a specific mandate that says "look here," or "examine that."  We consult our sources, and wait for something to ping.

A ping says "there’s is something out there."  We don’t what it is.  We just know that it is.  It’s up to us to poke around till the ping reveals itself. 

This morning started with a story in the New York Times about Robert A. Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company and Steven P. Jobs, chief of Pixar Animation.

Ping.

This is a story about an old media player working with a new media player.  And the contrast between Iger and Jobs is thoroughgoing.  These guys are different by temperment, interest, outlook.  The fusion point is potentially a fission point, and that makes the Disney-Pixar connection is a nice opportunity to observe worlds in transition (if not in turmoil).

But it turns out that what really captures one’s attention are the remarks by Brian Grazer.  Grazer is apparently a friend of Iger’s and when asked to comment, Grazer says that Iger and Jobs should get along well together because "Bob’s been No. 2 for so long he is not so covetous of power.  A partnership is more biomedically comfortable for him."

Ping!

"Biomedically comfortable"!  Steve, turn the sub around!  This is promising.  We have just had a glimpse of the inside of Brian Grazer’s head, and…and…and more data is required immediately.

So I googled Brian Grazer and, praise God, it looks like there is a Charlier Rose interview.  Mr. Rose is not the best interviewer in the world, but 60 minutes is lots and lots of data. 

Ping!

We can have the interview, but it turns out it’s going to cost $34.95 on DVD.  The transcript, by email, will cost $9.95.   There appear to be old shows from mid-1990s on Google Video that cost $.99.

Ping!

I thought public broadcasting was funded "by viewers like you."  And the Bloomberg website says "Major funding for CHARLIE ROSE is provided by Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Cisco Systems, and DLJ direct." 

But when we buy a DVD or a transcript, we appear to be paying Charlie Rose, Inc.  We would like to know more about this company, but the http://www.charlierose.com website is not forthcoming.  There is link called "about the show."  There is no "about charlie.rose inc."  All we get an address on Lexington Avenue in New York City. 

Ping.

Charlie Rose is withholding his interviews from the new media world.  He may be a man of the people on PBS, but on his own website, it’s strictly "pay per view."  The costs of distributing transcripts is of course neglible, and we must wonder why Mr. Rose is not a little more open source, participatory and generous about this.  In short, Bob Iger may not be the only person struggling to understand how new media and the internet change the world of ideas.  Intellectually and otherwise, old economies are giving way to new ones, and Charlie Rose doesn’t get it.  (Charlie Rose interviews all and sundry and he still doesn’t get it.  This is most odd.)

Ping.

Charlie Rose appears to be using public, philanthropic, and donor funds to produce these interviews.  Then, apparently, he keeps the rebroadcast proceeds for himself.   This is not a new media problem.  This would appear to be a very old fashioned issue of morality and ethics. 

References

Holson, Laura and John Markoff.  2006.  At Disney, a Dealmaker in the Grip of Technological Change.  New York Times.  January 23, 2006.  here. 

For the Bloomberg claim about Charlie Rose funding, here. 

Crumbs premiered last night on ABC.  Marc Berman calls it "the funniest new sitcom of the season."

Pam and I weren’t very many minutes into Crumbs when she exclaimed, "I know this story!"  Art was imitating life most precisely: a gay writer from Hollywood, the family owned restaurant, the 3 sons, one of whom dies tragically, the instability of one parent, the infidelity of the other.  It was as if Greenwich gossip had taken to the screen.  The very particular story of one local family was now the stuff of prime time TV. 

And this art imitates life once excluded from prime time TV, managing, in the opening 2 minutes, to reference gay sex, interracial sex, sex in a public place, sex with one’s psychiatrist, and sex with one’s hospital attendant.

John Crook says series creator, Marco Pennette, was "convinced such a show would be too unconventional and daring for a network to consider. Fortunately, in the wake of … wildly successful shows such as Desperate Housewives and Lost, ABC jumped at his pitch."  We might add to this the license established by HBO and cable TV.

Art raiding life turns out, in this case, to be good for a sit com.  It confers a certain freshness, a new narrative range, the ability to surprise.  Many sit coms are over formed.  All the narrative excitement must come from a single pretext.  On Two and A Half Men, this means working the rich but pretty narrow formula established by the Odd Couple.   

But Crumbs reaches out of the usual situations into family tragedy, personal hardship, and most powerfully into the particular and the idiosyncratic: a restaurant, a brother’s death, a mother’s mental illness, a father’s infidelity.  These are not the things that normally "make the cut" when creative choices are being made.  It is by hewing to life (or something life-like) that Pennette is able to import the unpredictable and so distinguish his show from the usual sit com. 

Jonathan Miller once argued that the surest way to starve a stage play was to make a character overdetermined.  He noted, for instance, that if we make confer upon the character all the characteristics that say, "elderly" (i.e., grey hair, stoped posture, quavering voice, myopic gaze and so on), that the character disappears from view.  The highly redundant character is invisible. The secret is to make sure that some part of the character "plays against type."  The voice should be youthful, or the hair red, or the clothing fashionable.  Some part of the character should be, strictly speaking, unexpected, unpredictable, and "wrong."  Now the character lives.

Of course, sit coms don’t simplify because writers are lazy or because we want our comedy dumbed down.  They narrow the narrative package because this is the gesture of economy on which all comedy depends.  We always remove from the signal anything that might interfere with reception.  Charlie Sheen as whathisname on Two And a Half Men is funnier when we don’t have a back story for him.  All communication must begin with a massive act of exclusion.  There is, in short, a good reason why most sit coms pare away the idiosyncratic and the particular.  They just get in the way.

So why is it that we are now willing to entertain entertainment with Pennettian surprises?  Why is the sit com now leaning in the direction of the stage play?  Why is it bowing to Miller’s dictim, having for so long scorned it?  I raised this question on Tuesday and several posters suggested that the answer lay in the book by Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You. 

But this mistakes the question I am asking.  I get that we are more sophisticated as cultural consumers.  I understand that DVDs and dot.com communication allows us to master complexity in ways we could not before.  I am asking a different question: what makes us want this kind of complexity, especially in an era in which we so routinely suffer information overload and attention deficits?

I think the answer might be that we are in a period of transition moving from cultural consumers to cultural producers.  We get the basic propositions of a TV show in one and then even as we take up residence in the show we question casting choices, cameras angles and the actors’ comedic timing.  We’re redoing the show "in our heads."   It’s as if we having extra processing cycles to work with. 

The thing about formulaic TV is that it represents a kind of tournament approach to creativity.  One idea takes all.  We decide the show is about an odd couple.  Hey, presto, the thing is done.  All that remains now is the ingenuity required to make the jokes extracted from the proposition witty enough to sustain our interest.  (And it is a measure of how very good are the writers and actors of Two Men that they have managed to sustain the thing this well this long.) 

And how that we are, in a sense, co-producers of the comedy in question we particularly resent the tournament model.  Give us any piece of the proposition and we can pretty much guess the rest.  Idiosyncratic comedy is harder and more interesting.   The combinatorial possibilities begin to multiply.  Predicting becomes much harder.  There is much more to second guess.  In effect, tournament comedy cuts us out of the action.  We like the big idea, or we don’t.  But there’s not much we can do about it.  Combinatorial comedy gives us somethng to work with.  And with all the extra processing time on our hands, we need something to work with.   

Of course, this is a way of going back to the Jenkensian point that says the cultural consumers are more sophisticated.  And I am quite sure that this take on Crumbs owes a good deal to my colleague at MIT, Sam Ford and his recent paper on Fan communities.  But I believe (rather too defensively?) that this approach to the new structural properties of popular culture takes us beyond the ground mapped out by Johnson. 

We shall see how Crumbs does.  But, in general, I think there is a "take-way" for those of us who craft the cultural artifacts of contemporary culture.  If we want engagement with a single consumer or a community of consumers, we  want to stuff the signal with the unpredictable and the idiosyncratic as surely as we once stripped this out.  Once committed to the unmistakable and the indubitable, popular culture has had a change of heart.

References

Berman, Marc.  2006.  The Programming Insider.  Friday.  January 13, 2006.  (I think this comes to me by special subscription.) 

Crook, John. 2006 ‘Crumbs’ Turns Family Pain into Dark Comedy.  http://www.tv.com.   here.

Ford, Sam.  2006.  Fan Communities.  White paper, Comparative Media Studies Department, MIT, in press.

Jenkins, Henry.  2006.  Convergence Culture.  New York: New York University Press.  Forthcoming.

Lost. Alias.  24.  Something is happening on TV we don’t expect of a "wasteland."  Some prime time shows are becoming complicated.

Day time TV was often complicated.  Soaps shamelessly so.  And occasionally, soaps migrated to night time, there to wow us with narrative improbabilities (e.g., Bobby Ewing redux) and to prove that continuity was probably more trouble than it was worth, and, actually, a good way of spoiling the fun (to say nothing of the franchise). 

Prime time TV is, as we say, episodic.  Each show was supposed to be free standing and one-off.  No prior knowledge was presumed.  If we had seen the show before, great.  If not, never mind.  Narrative constructions like Rockford Files or Two and a Half Men are so structurally simple and referentially redundant, that prior introductions were quite unnecessary.   (In any case, a car chase is, forgive me, not so hard to follow.)

Prime time TV was not about continuities.  It was about episodes.  The world that just kept starting over.  Time didn’t happen.  Events didn’t accumulate.  There were no critical paths, no path dependencies, no differences that ever made a difference over the long term.  Typically, people didn’t age.  They didn’t change.  They didn’t grow.  Outside the narrow narrative particulars, prime time dramas were timeless and placeless.  It was as if all the characters had a really terrible case of amnesia. 

Clearly, this is changing.  Shows like 24 are really unthinkable without a knowledge of the larger, overarching narrative.  Lost the same.  I am noticing that while House can be watched without a knowledge of narrative continuity, it makes a vast difference when this is in place.  Even with the cheat sheets from Entertainment Weekly (to say nothing of the love notes), Lost remains daunting.

So what is going on here? Henry Jenkins tells us that all consumers of contemporary culture are becoming more sophisticated.  This opens up the possibility of narrative complexity…or at least it helps discourage the "keep it simple, stupid" that was once the watch word of Burbank and Hollywood. 

But even as viewers have become more sophisticated, they have entered an era of time poverty, attention deficit, and information overload.  For my own sake, the idea of sitting down to work out the complexities of 24 make my eyes roll back in my head.  Or to adapt the language of Robert Hutchins, a formative president of the University of Chicago, "whenever I feel the temptation to watch Alias, I lie down until it passes."

So there are powerful forces working against the trend towards complexity.  That it persists and appears actually now to flourish suggests that the "forces for" must be very strong indeed. 
So what are they?  Beyond the new media literacy, what drives the trend to offer TV narrative that replaces the old strategy (broad access to shallow narrative) with a much more demanding one (narrower access to deeper narrative)? 

For those who care about the study of contemporary culture, this is a nice little challenge, a rich little anomaly.  Individually, and more probably collectively, we can figure this out.  I would do it myself, but what do you take me for, an anthropologist?

Our enthusiasm for the internet is returning.  The nuclear winter that followed April 2000 has lifted.  The startups are back, baby.  Microsoft is once more playing catch up. 

If you are a civilian like me (an anthropologist, that is, without much technical savvy), it’s a little mystifying.  Will Internet 2.0 (aka Web 2.0) change everything or just some things?  Is this a revolutionary moment or an evolutionary one?  Is everything I know wrong, or just this, that and the other thing?  Is this 2.0h! or merely 2.0. 

I was listening to a podcast  in which Jenny Attiyeh interviews David Weinberger, Chris Nolan, and Stowe Boyd.  And it filled me with that sense of panic that always happens when I listen to people talk about the future.  Intellectually, I begin to hyperventilate.  What if everything I know is wrong!  Maybe the world is once more taking leave of my senses.

Here are three models that sort out the possibilities for me.  Consider them a kind of telescope.  Those who buy model 3, probably also buy models 2 and 1.  Those who buy 2, probably also buy 1 (but not 3).  Those who buy model 1 only buy model 1.  I make no claims for the veracity or the utility of these models.  But writing them out helped return my pulse almost to normal.

Model one: disintermediation

The Internet is an efficiency machine.  It removes the friction that stands between buyers and sellers.  Now Dell can sell directly, from factories to consumers.  Now Amazon can disintermediate the bookstore and someday the publisher.  We are on the verge of being able to tell how much of the marketplace was about the accidents, not the essentials, of supply and demand.  Markets will verge on maximal efficiency. 

In this model, the revolution runs deep but its structural effects are limited.  Really, we live in the same old world.  It’s just that certain pieces have been taken out.  Hey, we didn’t need them anyhow.  The world is merely more compact, more elegant.  And that’s a good thing. 

Model two: long tail

The Internet is a profusion machine.  It allows small cultural producers to find small cultural consumers, and as a result, all hell is breaking lose.  Chris Anderson’s long tail model (and my own plenitude model) says that the tiny acts of innovation, rebellion and refusal that used to die in obscurity can now, some of them, find just enough fellow travellers to sustain themselves.  As a result, the gravitational power of the center is being made to creak like the mast of an 18th century man of war in a perfect storm.  It might hold…or maybe this is the moment to throw ourselves overboard. 

I recently had dinner with a journalist who belongs to the upper reaches of the newspaper elite.  Casually, ever so casually, she let slip that the great newspapers may not exist five years from now.  This is a very good way to get an anthropologist’s attention and make his head spin.  I had to leave the table.  My paper bag was in the cloak room.

In effect, the long tail model is an efficiency model too.  It says that now that people can reach one another, they will reach one another.  The costs of access, the friction created by the media, has dropped to almost nothing.  But this model goes vastly beyond the efficiency model.  It says that the structural effects of the Internet 2.0 will not be merely a matter of making the economy more efficient.  There will also be social consequences large and small.  The world will ramify.  Elites will fall.  Diversity will flourish.  The fundamentals of association and government will transform.  In short, the very nature of the social beast will change. 

This is not a disintermediated world with "bits taken out."  This is the world less hierarchical and more heterogeneous, a whole with more, and more various, parts now wired and networked in new ways. 

Model three: reformation

The Internet is a reformation machine.  It will create new fundamentals of and for our world.  It change the units of analysis and the relationships between them.  This reformation model says, in other words, that the coming changes will deeply cultural…and not merely social (model 2) and economic (model 1). 

I noticed this doing research in Korea.  Teens and college students were creating new networks with webpages (the local equivalent of MySpace) and and the clouds of photos and messages they were sending one another.  I assumed that this was Model 2 stuff, a change in fundamentals of interaction, until they began to talk about themselves in new ways. 

It became clear eventually that these people were reforming personhood and the self.  The self was not merely better connected, but now more porous, more distributed, more cloud like.  This cultural fundamental, the definition of what and who a person is, was changing.  (In the Attiyeh interview, Weinberger talks about buddy lists in the West and what he calls the "continuous presence" of friends.)

When I listen to Clay Shirky (pictured) talk about categories of knowledge and the tags by which it is organized, I begin to wonder, as he does more brilliantly than I could hope to, whether we are looking at new ideas of the idea.  This too is a good way to get the anthropologist’s attention.  If there is something my tribe cares about, it is culture and the way in which culture defines knowledge of and in the world.  To think that this is now "under construction" is quite enough to make me reach for a paper bag and my best hyperventilation cessation technique.  Just give me a minute.  No, really, I’ll be fine. 

The reformation model says fundamental categories of our culture (particularly the self and the group and the terms with which we think about them) are changing.  We are now down to what is sometimes called the DNA level of things.  This isn’t actually a great metaphor for anthropological purposes, but the phrase is a tag, so you know what I mean.  Model 3 is not about faster markets or new networks.  This is a change in the basic terms of reference, the very  internal blue print with which we understand and construct the world.

Model four:  continuous presence (everything and everyone all the time)

One way to assess innovations is to make a guess about where we are headed.  I think our economic, social and cultural destination might be this: we will be continuously connected to all knowledge and all people with a minimum of friction, and priviledge will be measured, in part, by how good are the filters with which we make contact with all but only the people and knowledge we care about.  One of these filters will, I hope, be a "pattern recognition" system that detects the fundamental changes set in train by models 1, 2 and 3 so that we can have a little early warning.  Because, frankly, you know, I’ve just about had it. 

References

Jenny Attiyeh interviews David Weinberger, Chris Nolan, and Stowe Boyd.  Thoughtcast.  here. 

Shirky, Clay.  2005.  Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags.  Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet.  here.

The TV series called Arrested Development was just cancelled by Fox. 

I think this real life situation would make a dandy case study.  (And there is, to my knowledge, nothing in the Harvard Business School case study archive on long tail markets.) 

If this  were a case study, the first paragraph would read something like this:

Series creator Mitch Hurwitz was sitting at his desk at The Hurwitz Company.  The office was quiet, even a little mournful.  Mitch’s  baby, Arrested Development, had just been cancelled. 

Five Emmys and the 2004 award for "best comedy series" had not been enough to protect it.    As Fox executive Peter Liguori put it, ”The fan base is unquestionably one of the most loyal in TV – it’s just too small." The numbers this season had been disappointing, around 4.3 million viewers a week.

(if this were a real case study, we would do a quick review of economics of TV: how many viewers are required to sustain a series, what it costs to mount one, what the break even point is, how decisions are made, famous exceptions, etc.We would also note how the audience for AD took shape.  Did the numbers build slowly?  Did early adopters convert to loyalists?  Was there a good deal of "churn" is fans came and went?)

In the old days, Mitch knew, cancellation was cancellation.  The networks were god.  There were no stays of executive.  When the network cancelled a show, it stayed cancelled.  But because Mitch was familiar with the writings of Chris Anderson at Wired Magazine and because he was a man deeply acquainted with the trends of his industry, he knew there was still hope.

(if this were a case study, we would talk about Mitch’s career in television, what he had come to know about the industry, how things had changed as he came up, etc.  There is a good interview at the AV Club (link below) from which we could steal shamelessly.  We would also talk about how network TV had changed, how cable plays had emerged, the role of HBO in the reinvention of cable, how even small cable outlets were now producing, and how the economics of the industry had changed as a result.  This would also be a place to talk about Anderson’s small tail theory.  We would also talk about new distribution options opened up by DVD sales, video iPod, Internet access, and consumers who "prepay" for access to TV shows as they do in the world of the arts [the opera subscription] and in the world of marketing research.] )

(Here are the four scenarios which smart students would extract from the welter of details with which we have filled the case.)

Scenario 1:  "revenge of the long tail."

Fox, bless them, gave AD it’s run.  The numbers are in and the test is over.  AD has found its audience: 4.3 million viewers is it.  Mitch should throw in his cards. He might want to take AD to cable, but a guy with his talent and track record would do better to start again.  AD gives him lots of profile and credibility.  People will return his phone calls.  Dump this baby.  Go again. 

Scenario 2: Retreat to cable

With the advent of long tail TV (LTTV?), there is a lingering hope for AD: that it takes refuge with a lesser network.  There are some networks for whom 4.3 million viewers is just fine, thank you very much.  On TNT, an only slightly larger number made The Closer one of the biggest hits in cable history. 

The students who take this position would have to defend themselves against the accusation that there is not enough money in cable to sustain a show like AD and if some of its stars left, the show would close in any case.

Scenario 3: Return to glory

This option says, take refuge with USA network for a couple of years, let the audience build, and return to Fox (and the big money).  Mitch is on record as saying, "why should we assume that when you try something different it will immediately be accepted?”   This suggests that he believes that AD is a little ahead of its time.  He might wish to say in play until the world catches up to him.

Scenario 4: Move to new channels and new revenue sources

[this scenario was added to the post thanks to the comments from Hey, Terry, Ken King, Ginna Dowler, and Peter McBurney.  Please see their comments below.  (Would these authors please let me know their full names so that I can give more complete acknowledgement?)]

Hurwitz can abandon TV distribution altogether.  The advent of the DVD market gives him both a new way to get to market and a new source of funding.  (See Ginna on Sternberg on Whedon’s Firefly options, below. )   There is also a internet distribution possibility, likely funded by a subscription model of some kind.

This option leaves open the "return to network glory" possibility, but I am guessing that Scenario 4 would give Hurwitz more creative freedom and better returns.  It was also give him a heroic standing in the small tail markets that remain, in the case of TV and Hollywood, still pretty "fat middle." 

And the winner is…

Each of these positions is defensible and every good case study should allow the class to break into camps and for controversy to ensue.  But every case has, in the heart of the writer and the instructor, a right answer.  And this is a section from the "teaching note" that is send to the instructor. 

How do we decide which scenario?  The shape of the numbers should tell us.  When Liguori says, ”The fan base is unquestionably one of the most loyal in TV," this is a bad sign.  This suggests that we have got everyone aboard who is coming aboard.  If this is what the numbers tell us, advantage goes to students who support Scenario 1. 

On the other hand, if the enthusiasm is distributed, that’s more promising.  They should show degrees of enthusiasm and some evidence of conversion: that it takes awhile for newcomers to become fans, for fans to become loyalists and for loyalists to become devotees.  We should see word of mouth support and the statistical evidence that WOM is indeed taking place.

Of course, there is a more fundamental problem here and that is whether news of AD actually found its way to all or most of the would-be viewers.  Daniel Drezner says that news reached him belatedly…and this suggests that marketing has something to answer for.  Drezner is after all pretty well informed about popular culture.  If we determine that news was badly distributed, then we go with Scenario 2 and/or 3. 

So the "right answer" turns on whether we think the AD audience is a long tail market, or a long tail market struggling to become a fat middle.  So the "right answer" turns on what numbers we supply (or what they can be made to say).  Do they show an adoption pattern for AD that is thickly packed or more stretched out?  Does this flock cluster or does it attenuate?

Will this post become a case study?

If this post suddenly comes down, it is on its way to becoming a case study. 

References

Drezner, Daniel.  2005. My Personal Apologies to Mitchell Hurwitz. Blog post.  November 14, 2005. here.

Justin, Neal. 2005. Neal Justin: Kyra Sedgwick is getting her closeup — finally. Star Tribune. July 28, 2005.  here.

Robinson, Tasha.  2005. An interview with Mitchell Hurwitz.  The AV Club.  February 9th 2005. here. 

Snierson, Dan.  2005. Arrested Development 2003-2005?  We say goodbye to ”Arrested Development” — EW looks back on the three seasons of the critically acclaimed Fox comedy.
Entertainment Weekly.  November 18, 2005.  here.  (subscription required)

(all quotes and stats from the Entertainment Weekly article, with the exception of the numbers for The Closer which are from Neal Justin, as above.)

One of the most important developments in popular culture this year is going on sale in a few minutes.  Xbox360 is almost with us.

To celebrate, CSI Miami is now showing an episode about a killer "video game."  It’s about college students who cannot distinquish between virtual reality and TV reality.    Some kids rob a bank as if playing a game and chose their victims according to the "points" they’re worth.  Another plays for 70 hours straight, dying with his virtual boots on.  So remember, kids, guns don’t kill people, games and gamers do. 

Breathtakingly  stupid and further evidence that even the creators of popular culture are not always very well acquainted with it.   CSI Miami, say good bye to a segment or two.  But, hey, the genre is pretty much over, isn’t it?

How much is Google worth? Many said the share price was too high at $85. Many say it’s undervalued at $400. This is an Elizabethan problem.

The problem is one of scale and unreliable assumptions. It is hard to keep any sense of proportion when things scale up rapidly from $85 to $400.

It is our sense of proportion that serves us an early warning device. This is where are our instincts are rooted. When we get accustomed to thinking in the $100 range, $200 is manifestly too much. Grudgingly, we adjust, but when the share price goes to $400, we have to reset yet again. Our instincts, our "blink" ability, as Gladwell might call it, is now unreliable, no sooner adjusted than exploded. Our blinks have become twitches.

This is what made it so hard to say "when" when money was pouring into our accounts in the late 1990s.  Yes, it was all madness.  Our instincts said, "stop."  But, no, this is what they said six months ago, and if I had listened to them then, I would have missed a great runup of value. 

Elizabethans had this problem…not so much with share prices as with whales. Here is Thomas Fuller referred to

the mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming in them.

Like the Google share price, whales were hard to think about. And this was the problem of scale. A whale, very large, was contained in a limitless world. A whale, pretty small, contained a limitless world within. Hmmm.

It wasn’t just whales. The Reformation was, among other things, a massive adjustment of spiritual scale. It stripped away all the intermediaries between God and the believer. The hierarchy of saints, angles and prelates collapsed and took scale with them. Fundamental questions became hard to think. How large was God? Had we drawn closer? Or were we very far away.

The geographic discoveries, those of the new world, were hard to think as well. The "West Indies" was a very long away, but it proved to be not nearly far enough. "India: proved to be another ocean or two away. And then there was the problem of all that Spanish wealth (by which we mean South American gold and silver). It was enough to elevate Drake, float the nation, and dwarf local notions of wealth out of all recognition.  Hmmm.

Sir Francis Beacon was prepared to stand at the gates of knowledge (as pictured) and observe what happened when certain assumptions were abandoned. The Mediterranean, he said, was once a useful metaphor for knowledge, but now, clearly, not all the oceans, even with all their whales, would serve.

In a sense, the Elizabethans were working on the problem of problems. What was the unit of analysis? What were the actual and possible relationships between these units? What was the field in which to located units and their relationships? What scales applied here? What was the best concepts/assumptions with which to see the present and the possible? What in short was a problem?

We have the problem of problems in the very worst way. The Social Architecture meetings at Berkman last week was awash with them. My favorite: the "is this something or nothing" test. Someone tells you about new software (www.pubsub.com). It searches the future not the past! And you have to decide whether this is something or nothing. And if we are a VC or an analyst, we can’t just be guessing. But until we have decided what Google is (merely a way of searching the past?), who knows?

The second problem, which assumptions did I just use to reach my conclusion? The thing about assumptions is that they are hard to unearth. We make them assumptions for a very good reason, so that they can serve us as subroutines, small compact understandings that we can run quickly without much effort. But now we have to root them out, lay them bare, test them thoroughly, and then decide how Humpty Dumpty goes back together again. Oi! (The Yiddish one, not the Skinhead one.)

And if things really get messy, then it’s right down to basics, as above. What are the units, relationships, fields, concepts? Double oi! All I want to know is whether to invest in subpub (now that I’ve given up on subpop). And it turns out that what I have to do is reinvent the universe. It’s as if there is no such thing as a small or simple problem. They all seem to spiral back to basics, to scale up to head-wrenching complexity.

Here’s the biggest question. Will this get better or will it get worse?

The "better" scenario: Someday the world will settle down. We won’t have to think about every thing to think about some thing. We will develop new intellectual appliances and subroutines with which to deal with the new world (and all that silver). There will be some people who engage with, and some problems that demand that we engage with, the problem of problems. But for the most of us most of the time, we may return to that sense that the world is, give or take, an intelligible place.

The "worse" scenario: Don’t count on it. Things are going to get curiouser and curiouser. The world will explode into a diversity and dynamism, and subroutines be damned. We will carry on and occasionally we will catch up. Occasionally, there will be Mandelbrotian masteries of scale, for instance. But usually, every problem will have to be addressed de novo with a down-to-the-ground scrutiny of all the possibilities.

So is Google worth $400? Well, see, it depends.

References

I got the Fuller and Milton quotes from the opening pages of Melville’s Moby Dick.  (No, he doesn’t give a source either accept to say the first is from the Holy and Profane State and the second, Paradise Lost.  I hate it when that happens.  )

Milton (a near Elizabethan) called the whale "a moving land [which] spouts out a sea."