CBS is planning to use Dexter to fill the programming hole left by the writers’ strike. (Dexter is a Showtime series now in its second season.) The Parents Television Council thinks this is a bad idea, claiming CBS is driven by "corporate greed" and that Dexter turns a serial killer into a hero.
This is the sort of thing that gives the Right a bad name. Dexter is not a celebration of violence. It does not encourage us to admire a serial killer. Only a knucklehead or an opportunist would suppose otherwise.
Dexter offers an absorbing what-if study. What if, it asks, evil were domesticated for good. It tells the story of a young man who kills animals without remorse. His adoptive father, a policeman, understands that he has a choice: to turn his son in or put this pathology to a useful purpose. He chooses the latter course, effectively creating a "secret weapon" in the war on crime. His son is a monster who now kills monsters like himself. His pathology is now a thing of discipline and purpose used against pathologies that have no discipline or purpose.
So there is something sociologically interesting about Dexter. But it is also a chance for moral self scrutiny. We are startled to find ourselves empathizing with a man who has no idea what empathy feels like. We catch ourselves briefly rooting for a guy who is a monster, plain and simple. Dexter is not a celebration of violence, but a chance for us to contemplate it and our response to it. (The NBC’s series Life is a second opportunity of this kind.) (Have another look at the poster for the show [above]. I believe that’s what they mean by the phrase, "dead hand of competence.")
Somehow one feels contemplation is not a strong suit at the Parents Television Council. I wondered whether the people at Parents Television Council watch television. Do they actually have a television? Now that popular culture is our culture, and now that programs like Dexter and Life take on "big questions," it is time to treat the likes of Parents Television Council as they philistines they manifestly are.
References
Hibberd, James. 2007. Parents Television Council Denounces CBS’s ‘Dexter" Plan. Ad Age. December 5, 2007. here.
Big news this morning for fans of good television.
The Hollywood Reporter reports "The Wire" is issuing 3 short films produced by creator David Simon. These "prequels" are now available at Amazon.com. They are free. (Click here.)
Have we seen Amazon used as the delivery mechanism in this way before? Another channel opens! Have we seen prequels used in this way? The transmedia project expands!
References
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Complexity on TV. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. September 15, 2004. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Pop Culture Lifts Off. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. December 15, 2004. here.
Wallenstein, Andrew. 2007. ‘Wire’ plus in VOD vignettes. The Hollywood Reporter. December 5, 2007
At Thanksgiving, my sister-in-law suggested that we all give to charity instead of giving to one another. Some of us will use the new philanthropic technologies to do this: Donors Choose.com or one of the micro credit loaning sites.
What has happened here? Gift giving in North America is becoming more general and philanthropy elsewhere is becoming more specific. What used to be really vague is now particular. What used to be really particular is now quite vague. We have relocated the particular, sent it off shore.
Yesterday, I heard about something called micro arbitrage. This is investment activity by people who detect a stock on the upswing. They buy this stock and hold it for… a couple of seconds. (That’s what the … signifies in this case.) For them day trading is like an ice age. They make tiny fractions of time pay handsomely and they do.
We have seen other instances of this hyper differentiation. The death of mass culture and the rise of plenitude makes for lots of little social and cultural distinctions. The possibility of niche marketing does something like the same. Customization everywhere means that we now make distinctions where before we could or would not. Some part of the world, the local world, is parsing ever more finely. Blogging has replaced 10,000 journalists with 1,000,000 journalists.
This is a kind of inversion. At the top end of things, globalization collapses differences, making countries once very different from one another more and more alike. And the bottom, finer distinctions become ever finer.
I am not sure I am ready for this. I am still working on the old typologies, trying to master the old architectures of knowledge. If what we are saying is that we now will generalize where once we were particular and particularize where once we were general, well, I am not sure I’m following you.
Ours is a participatory world. Lots of people create culture. Artists, musicians, film makers, writers. Many of us do it for free. I do. This blog, I do it for nothing. (I know. I know.)
This means, we need day jobs, something to pay the bills. There are lots of possibilities: waiter, high school teacher, bookstore owner, night watchman.
May I suggest anthropologist? That’s what I do.
Here’s why anthropology is perfect for you. As an artist, musician, film maker or writer, you know a world that interests the rest of the world. Let’s say that you write Romance Fiction. This is a lively world, filled with its own heaving developments, so to say. P&G needs to know about what is happening in Romance Fiction because Romance Fiction is a window on the world of a very large group of consumers they care about.
Am I asking you to peach? That’s the English term. Am I asking you to tell? To give P&G insider information, things they should not know?
In the old days, when marketers when playing a game of trickery, you would well to be concerned. But these days, there is no trickery about it. These days P&G is just trying to stay in the same "head space" of the consumer. Telling P&G about Romance Fiction is merely a matter of keeping them in the loop, in the cultural know.
You will need to know some anthropology, of course. But I can teach you that. Er. Or someone can. If you are part of the Cambridge university community, here’s the course I am doing with Joshua Green.
This course will provide students with an introduction to qualitative research. Working in small teams, students will design and conduct a qualitative project designed to propose strategy for media and cultural organizations – an indicative project would look at ways to revitalize PBS to keep pace with participatory culture. Students will receive an intensive introduction to planning and conducting qualitative research including ethnographic and participant observation methods based on real world case studies.
How do you find your market. Start a website. Write a blog. Speak at conferences. They will come to you.
Now, I get that many artists don’t want to know what other artists are doing. They want to commune with their Gods and the less they know about the competition the better. This option is not for you. But for the rest it’s a good deal, an excellent add on. And if you are a natural schmoozer, someone who loves to reach out to others and listen to what is going on, this is perfect.
It’s a two way deal, finally. What you give to marketing, you also give to anthropology. When you record the world of Romance Fiction, you serve the Caesar of P&G and the Christ of anthropology. (If that’s the right way of putting it. Probably not.) Anthropologists in a hundred years will read your blog.
Image explanation
The image above was captured in Toronto. It is a relief from the building that used to be a post office (perhaps the main post office) downtown. It is now the Raptors arena. There are several reliefs, each of them showing a different form of transportation. This one shows a ship, obviously. If you click on the image, and look carefully, you will see a small figure on the bridge, presumably the captain. That’s you.
In my Toronto talk, I argued we’re changing heroes.
Specifically, we are moving from Raymond Loewy (above) to Rube Goldberg (below), from modernist stream lining to a world that is episodic, accidental, diverse in its composition, just barely interacting, always on the verge of stopping still, made from local materials, made from objects formed to another purpose, and inclined when they gain momentum to run like a river.
Our world is less a beautiful idea that springs full formed from a design intelligence and more an order that emerges in the moment of interaction. This is the wisdom of objects entering new, unexpected and "just barely" interactions. This is the dynamic version of what Weinberger so winningly, brilliantly called "small pieces loosely joined."
So what’s my evidence?
There’s the wonderful Honda ad that sprang from the planning work of Russell Davies. (In a sense we could argue that Russell’s Interesting 2007 was a network version of the Rube Goldberg cartoon, a place where unexpected, accidental contacts could and would be made.)
And yesterday, we got notice of an ad called Tipping Point for Guinness by Nicolai Fuglsig. It is glorious. Make that sublime. See it here.
Hail to Rube, visionary and man for our times.
References
Weinberger, David. 2002. Small Pieces Loosely Joined. New York: Basic Books.
See the Honda version of a Rube Goldberg Machine here.
For more on Ruben Garret L. Goldberg, see the Wikipedia entry here.
Acknowledgments:
to the Very Short List for notice of the Guinness ad, here.
Boomers have reached middle age, and they are well settled there. The question is whether they will remain so. Will Boomers breakout? the run up to the present condition:
There are some 72 million "Baby Boomers," people born after World War II and before 1964. Coming of age in the late 1960s, they were skeptical of their parent’s values. Many of them engaged in political and cultural experiment. They were egalitarian, cooperative, spiritually experimental, counter-cultural and restless.
In the 1978 film Animal House John Belushi seized the guitar held by a folkie Stephen Bishop and smashed it against the wall. This felt to some like a final repudiation of the values of the 60s. Boomers were primed for a new stylistic signature.
By mid-decade they were calling themselves "preppies" and "yuppies." Now defined by a more conventional frame of mind, boomers embraced an aggressive individualism, upward mobility, career orientation, status competition, all of this given the patina of an "old money" symbolism.
The Preppie-Yuppie arc took roughly 10 years. Tom Wolfe was there at the beginning with The Right Stuff, a book that restored certain values. And he was there at the end, with the publication of The Bonfires of the Vanities, a novel that declared the bankruptcy of the trend.
1978 Animal House 1979 The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe 1980 The Preppy Handbook, Lisa Birnbach 1880 Free To Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman 1982 Family Ties and the unexpected celebrity of Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton 1982 In search of excellence, Tom Peters 1987 Wall Street 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
The Preppie-Yuppie trend may have come and gone, but it left a lasting impression on Boomers. The rest of the world might move on to new cultural developments (alternative music, rave cultures, digital communities), but boomers, apparently, were set for life. They would wear those Polo ponies to the grave.
The Boomer aesthetic was old money, as served up by the likes of Ralph Lauren, Restoration Hardware, BMW, Land’s End, Rolex, Cole Hahn. Boomers had a fashion. Just as plainly, the fashion had them. Together, the demographic group and their cultural envelope were mutually presupposing. Boomers were fixed in place.
Or are they? I guess the developmental literature says that the older someone is, the less likely they are to embrace any kind of change, social or stylistic. If we were in a cynical frame of mind, we might resort to the old chestnut that says "prisoners learn to love their cells." And this psychological truism is accompanied by a sociological one that say that the public world has a way of acting upon us, so that eventually choices take on the weight of necessity. Anthropologists might say that as we age, we loose our cultural elasticity. It just gets harder to imagine alternatives, and harder still to act on them. In any case, the social sciences, I think, agree. As we age, rigidity overtakes us. Familiarity grows more important. Stasis wins out. (Perhaps that’s stasis will out.)
But boomers are famous for making their own way. Once the stereotypes of age begin to interfere with their self regard and social mobility, they can be relied to react badly. The spirit of contrariness will galvanize them and they will insist once more on their much prized rights of self authorship.
Are there stirrings? Yes, there are stirrings. The Bobo phenomenon spotted by David Brooks shows a certain restlessness, a willingness perhaps to participate in the 1990s moment, or just to throw off the deep conventionality of Yuppie orthodoxy. There are Pirate watches. There are BMW with their new wicked styling. There are hints. But every signal is surrounded by noise, and we would be wrong to take noise as evidence of a new signal in the works. It’s just noise!
So, here we are. Boomers, will they were embrace their preppie/yuppie bourgeois concept indefinitely? Or is there one more stylistic (and some other) revolt waiting in the wings?
References
Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in Paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. New York: Simon & Schuster.
The fan is a big topic at MIT. Henry Jenkins discovered early that this creature is active, interested, engaged in ways that no one had recognized. We are all now trying to figure out who this fan is and how to take advantage of his or her passionate engagement. Narratives and brands will flourish or fail according to the way they address this problem.
Practically speaking, the fan is a blessing and a curse. Passionately interested and attentive to a show or a brand, they become its emissaries, evangelists, apostles, actually. Fans will go out and build an audience one conversation at a time.
But there is a darker side to the fan. This weekend, Heroes‘ Jesse Alexander implied that the Heroes team is sometimes haunted by the participative fan. Fans take ownership of the narrative and woe betide the writers who betray their trust. Stray even a little from the "canon" and the fans will make you pay.
The problem is the way fans build their identities as fans and the way they build the community of fans. How do fans prove their status as fans? How do they discriminate themselves from mere viewers? How do they sort themselves into a hierarchy?
The fan solves these problems by mastering the narrative of the show and demonstrating this knowledge any time fans meet. In sum, fans have a vested interested in getting to know the show in an almost obsessive way, and then protecting this investment, their badge of membership, by punishing producers for departing from the gospel.
What to do? Alexander noted in passing that one of the ways Heroes builds the narrative is through a process of rapid prototyping. This lets the writing team bring themes forward quickly and examine their options. And I found myself thinking, "well, why not let the fans do this?" First, they’d be really good at it. They control the narrative. Second, it would invite them to treat the narrative as something flexible instead of something written in stone, to see it under construction instead of something that appears only after the fact.
Needham, the historian of science in China, said, the history of ideas is not the history of thought, it’s the history of men thinking. Let us change the way we think about shows and brands in just this way. Let us make them not something that is finished and fired, but as something under construction and in process. This is a way to reach out to our most devoted fans, our earliest adopters, our most passionate consumers. It’s time to let them behind the curtain that once separated the cultural creation and the world.
I am at the Futures of Entertainment conference at C3 at MIT. Last night, we listened to two of the guys who write and produce the TV show called Heroes, Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw.
The revelation last night was to see how far the notion of "transmedia" has come.
Transmedia is the term for storytelling across multiple forms of media. Henry Jenkins, the author of the concept, uses The Matrix as a case in point. The Matrixis a kind of matrix, the narrative now expressed in 3 films, a number of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories and several video games None of this is authoritative. The Matrix is a transmedia property.
Jenkins has been talking about this idea for some years. Indeed this idea, as recently as a couple of years ago, existed chiefly in Jenkins’ head and his MIT ambit. Fast forward to last night. Transmedia is now a revenue stream and a business model at NBC. It is in fact one of the things that makes Heroes possible and profitable. (It was even hinted that transmedia properties help keep Heroes afloat when its audience numbers soften.)
This is one part of the future that distributed very quickly, from the realm of pure thought at MIT into the economy and an NBC spreadsheet at blinding speed. Alexander pointed out that this ancillary revenue stream is vastly more interesting than the "merchandizing" that it now rivals as a revenue stream. Merchandizing in my humble opinion actually manages to diminish creative accomplishment whereas transmedia is a chance to build it.
The revelation from this morning’s meeting, for me, was listening to Marc Davis. Davis is the Social Media Guru at Yahoo. Davis asked us to contemplate what happens when phones are not just spatially aware but socially aware. As phone report where we are and what engages us, we have access to a record of attention.
It made me think of San Francisco. Right now, if we were blimp born, we could tell what interests visits to San Francisco by noticing where the cluster. We would see for instance that there is something fascinating about fisherman’s wharf.
A record of attention spares us the blimp and gives us way more information. Now, we know where people are clustered throughout SanFrancisco on a map with a memory, a selective memory. Now when I come to this town, I can ask it to tell me where my best friends went, where my most media savvy friends went, where my most culturally savvy friends went. Now, I know San Francisco through the shared intelligence of friends who got there first.
Personal applications aside, it’s clear that these interest maps will be sources of social science data, a way to watch patterns forming and reforming as the world "votes with its feet." The wisdom of crowds made visible.
References
Jenkins, Henry. 2007. Transmedia Storytelling 101. Confessions of an Aca-Fan. The official weblog of Henry Jenkins. here.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006a. Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2006b. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.
I took the picture above while in a museum in Oaxaca. He is a MesoAmerican athlete who helped stage origin myths in another time. And the sculpture isn’t actually sculpture. As nearly as I can tell, it’s a man covered in clay. Do I have a reason for using it? Not that I can tell.
Who is Michael Eisner? We know this much: until recently he ran Walt Disney Co.
But important particulars are unclear.
If you read the press surrounding his last days at Disney and the treatment that appears in DisneyWar, you could be forgiven the impression that Eisner was punching above his weight. You say to yourself, "Ok, not so smart."
But the interview in today’s Ad Age gives a different impression. Eisner is smart and penetrating. You can hear the snap of intelligence, the power of a mind that goes right at things. You say, "Ah, sighted!" (This intersection in the Venn diagram is underpopulated. "Real smart" plus "real worldly" is rare.)
Now the question is this: does Michael Eisner know the market place? More particularly, does he know the cultural aspects of the marketplace? Ad Age’s Claude Brodesser-Akner’s raises the question.
Ad Age: One of the ironies of spending two decades as the head of a big media conglomerate is that you’re paid to have your finger on the pulse of what’s cool and where popular culture is going, but the job almost makes you the most isolated person on the planet. How does a 65-year-old multimillionaire stay connected to what’s cool these days so that he knows he’s headed in the right direction?
Eisner replies:
Well, we’re all much more connected now by new media, so you’d have to be pretty much brain-dead not to be connected. I have the benefit of being in the baby-boom generation, which was always the largest part of the population. I never spent any time thinking about popular entertainment: I just lived it. And I don’t think about it now. You’re informed by the very nature of being alive. A good story is still a good story.
Eisner says he stays in touch with culture because:
1. he is part of the biggest cohort in our culture, boomers.
2. he lives his life, and this life is, as all lives are, soaked through by the media streams.
3.The growth of new media, and faster access to old media, gives him access to the information he needs.
Well, let’s have a look at each of these.
1. Yes, Mr. Eisner is a boomer. Does this mean he knows about culture. Well, I guess it means he knows about boomer culture. But are we not obliged to acknowledge that boomers are moving away from contemporary culture at speed. Symptoms? They don’t quite get The Simpsons, not to mention Family Guy or American Dad. In sum, being a boomer means a person is out of touch with contemporary culture. Chances are the counter culture of the 90s was a mystery. Chances the social networking and new media are a bit of a blur.
2. Yes, everyone’s life is soaked through with media content. But when I turn on the radio when driving to the store here in Connecticut, what I hear is Van Halen and Kenny Loggins. "Soaked through," yes. "In touch with," no. Now, as the former CEO of Disney, Eisner had a seat at a very interested window, to say nothing of access to the best consulting advice money can by. And this no doubt gives him a deeper knowledge than most of us. But, notice, he is not claiming this as his defense.
3. Fair enough, the new media give us extraordinary opportunities to stay in touch, from YouTube as the raw feed of contemporary culture, to the many critics and commentators who work these turbulent waters. Maybe he "hooked up" here in ways that make him knowledgeable and prescient.
So, one of Eisner’s arguments appear patently wrong (perhaps even self incriminatingly so), one of them appears unlikely, and only one appears possible. Frankly, we would expect an answer more robust.
What’s troubling is that line, "I don’t think about [culture] now. You’re informed by the very nature of being alive." As long as there were three networks, a handful of influential newspapers and magazines, with New York and Los Angeles the ports through which innovation had to pass to find its way to the mainsteam, this might work. But as we know too well, cultural innovation has exploded. If we want to stay in touch, we have to think about culture now.
Of course, it’s not clear that Eisner is very different from the average senior manager or CEO. Cultural competence is not being cultivated by the American corporation. But now that it’s (belatedly) clear that Eisner is one of the smart ones, one of the decision makers who will insist on depth and clarity, one of the captains of industry who owe their position to special stores of knowledge, well, we want a better answer to Brodesser-Akner’s question.
We only need to add a circle to the Venn diagram to see why. Real advantage will go to those who are real smart, real worldly, and well informed.
Reference
Brodesser-Akner, Claude. 2007. Eisner on Dentists, Topps and ‘Foolish" Writers Strike. Ad Age. November 12, 2007. here.
Stewart, James. 2005. Disney War. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Last Note:
Do I need to justify the question asked by Brodesser-Akner? Here goes.
Brodesser-Akner’s question is important for the following reasons:
1. culture supplies the foundations & architecture of consumer taste & preference 2. cultural trends help churn consumer taste & preference 3. cultural basics and trends both now change more, more often & less predictably 4. we have to know about culture to be Michael Eisner
We were once creatures of God-like capability. Now we are more like small, forest-dwelling animals. It’s devolution…in a good way.
Technology was the secret of our Godhood. Machines amplified us. They let us see better. Go faster. Communicate at distance. Find our way. Travel on water. Travel in air. Escape hunger, cold, and danger. Machines allowed us to defy our mortality…for awhile. With technology, we became if not quite gods, far more than mere mortals.
We are augmented beyond anything that an average hunter-gather would recognize as human. The glasses on our nose, the cell phone at our ear, the PDA in our hand, the TV in the living room, the computer on the desk top, the car at the curb, the GPS in the car, all of these plugged into grids electrical, electronic, digital, vehicular, and locational. Man, we’re it. Our machine-assisted evolution has been a triumphant success.
What Nye says about Americans applies to everyone. (OK, not everyone.)
For Americans, machines were the concretization of reason. They were a representation of man’s ability to construct an infinite and perfect world.
I believed all of this (or most of it) until I bought a C. Itoh printer in the early 1990s. This technology promised to be extend my abilities but the price was high. It also demonstrated with sudden clarity the modesty of reason, my reason.
Before long I was stuck.
Was that:
"push the 3rd button once and the 1st button twice while holding the CTRL button"
or was it,
"push the 1st button once and, while holding the CTRL button, the 3rd button twice"?
The fix for this is the escape button with which some technology now comes equipped. Pam’s iPhone has a button like this (as above, at the bottom). Whatever happens, however lost you are, you just hit this, and it takes you back to "start here." I no longer stop to think "damn, where am I and how did I get here." At the first hint of trouble, I just bail. I just keep hitting that escape button till I am returned to the reassuring familiarity of the first screen. I will try again, taken wilder and wilder risks, guessing ever more implausibly, because I have the reassurance that I can find my way home.
Take the control panel created by Sam Lucente for HP (eyes right). When Sam joined HP there were lots of variations at work of a printer’s "steering wheel." Sam came up with this. HP calls it the Q panel.
That button on the lower left. It’s a back out key. It’s an escape hatch. Get into trouble and we can use this button to sound the alarm. Every time we hit it, we climb a little higher in the feature hierarchy, and until, hey presto, we bob to the surface like a NASA space capsule.
It’s a glorious thing, the ability to just get out. So much better than having to master the whole of the C.Itoh manual, hold every option in your head, and divine what to do next.
Very helpful, but a little humiliating. Doesn’t this sound like the way complexity theory explains how stupid animals do intelligent things. They follow a really simple instruction set. As in: "Try this. And if that doesn’t work, stop trying that, and hit here."
What happened to that grand idea that cast us as masters of the machine, and through the machine, of a infinite and perfect world. Now we are much more like pigeons. I mean, really, that Q panel sends a message. "We know you are going to fuck this up. We expect you to fuck up. When that happens, peck here." That button is an embarrassment, our declaration of defeat.
People used to brag about their knowledge of machines. In the post war period, they were always going on about how cars worked. (Cars were then what digital is now, the most important enablement of human powers.) I couldn’t actually follow this talk, but this didn’t stop me from hurling around terms like "camshaft" and "carborator," to suggest, occasionally, that I too might be a master of the machine. Machine talk was triumphant talk.
And there was awhile in the 1990s when people would roll out talk of mother boards, chip speeds and baud rates. But that’s over now, isn’t it? We now understand that every new advance in technology will be yet another measure of how little we understand and far we are falling behind. Now mastery is finding the escape key and the willingness to use it early and often. I’m using mine now.
References
Breen, Bill. 2007. Streamlining HP. Fast Company. October. 134-140. (for the story of Sam Lucente.)
Nye, David E. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 287. (This quote is approximate.)
I have a problem. It’s the way I talk. I speak in full sentences. I speak in long sentences, sometimes, not at the moment, but in some cases, I do go, like, on and on. I go for complete thoughts. I sometimes throw in parenthetical passages. (I do this by lowering my voice slightly.) I will "indent" my talk when starting "new paragraphs" in speech. (I do this by tilting my chin and raising my eyebrows to let you know I am moving onto something new.)
It’s a very real problem. The only one with any real patience for it is Molly, my cat, for whom everything I say is "blah, blah, blah," in any case, (in the immortal words of Gary Larson).
My wife, Pam, finds this a challenge. For most purposes, she prefers an Italian American model of speech, where speech is made to overlap. I like to think of this as the "baton" model of talk, where the new speaker runs up beside the person currently speaking so that the conversational lead can be transferred at speed. For Pam, overlapping speech is a good thing. It gives talk brio and animation.
I prefer to take turns. You speak. I listen. I speak. You listen. Otherwise, it feels like we are trapped in one of those play areas at McDonalds, with things flying in all directions. I am trying to listen to what you say ever so carefully. That’s my job. If you have several topics going at once, my head feels like one of those play areas at McDonalds, with things flying in all directions. Look out!
I have to change, I know that. The world is speeding up. My style of talk slows things down. All of us are obliged to increase our baud rate, and I have noticed that a lot of people at MIT tend to speak really fast. At least, they don’t stutter. This is an Oxford affectation meant to show the sheer velocity of the thought behind the speech. I just had a conversation with David Edery (first of the Sloan school, now at Microsoft). I swear I clocked him at speeds in excess of 200 w.p.m. What’s weird is that every word was perfectly formed. A miracle of speech production! Subject to this kind of competitive pressure, I just start saying anything, the faster the better. I don’t think he noticed. It’s "blah, blah, blah" here too.
I don’t think I’m plodding. But then of course I wouldn’t. It’s for the rest of the world to think "when is this guy going to get to the end of the sentence?" I have a laborious style because I believe that’s what I owe you the listener. I am obliged to think it through and serve it up not as a fragment, an idea facsimile, but to nail it down as something that has the properties of a proposition. I am quite sure that myself has something to do with my Victorian boyhood. Good speech is complete speech, the way we show our respect for our conversational partner.
Ok, so this is totally wrong. Denotative speech just isn’t as much fun as connotative speech. It’s kind of fun carrying on several conversations at once. Like being caught in a salad spinner. Communication works as speakers point briefly at semantic fragments spinning around them. You can’t really say at the end of the conversation what the conversation was about, but a good time was had by all, and it is remotely possible that you and your partner managed to canvas ideas never before thought or, and I now use this term advisedly, said.
My favorite conversations are intellectually athletic. Both partners talk and listen simultaneously. After awhile there are two streams of speech that intersect over and over again. Talkers leap from their stream to the other and back again. It’s daring stuff. Stunt training is highly recommended. (I sometimes use a stunt double.)
With our favorite conversational partners, a trajectory becomes clear. We are now "on to something" and the thrill of the chase is upon us. Now we can take up positions on the far horizon to the speech event. "Yes," says the other speaker, "that’s exactly where we are going!" Or, "no, not there, but how about this?" These acts of anticipation obviate great stretches of talk, and momentum grows.
There are two kinds of movement: "side to side," as speakers leap from one conversational stream to the other, and "well forward and back around" as they race forward and then return to the conversational moment. Joy comes from the locational agility these conversations both require of us and confer on us. We are all now circus performers, athletes, that is to say, who are actually paid to show off.
Tom Guarriello and I had a good conversation at the Stamford Diner yesterday. As all diner conversations must, it turned eventually to Sunday’s game.
Sunday will see the clash of the titans. The unbeaten Indianapolis Colts will play the unbeaten New England Patriots in Indianapolis at 4:15 p.m. It is being billed as a contest between quarterbacks Payton Manning and Tom Brady. But it is also, of course, a contest between coaches Tony Dungy and Bill Belichick.
The thing I like about Belichick is that sweatshirt. Coaches are inclined to make themselves presentable. But Belichick has taken on a monkish quality, cowl and all.
When you are as successful as Belichick, you can dress anyway you want. In 7 years at New England, Belichick has delivered three Super Bowl championships, three conference titles, five division crowns and 12 playoff victories, posting a record of 87-39. Everyone seems to think there’s a good chance he could win all 16 games this season. (This would take his win-loss to 103 and 39. Crazy good, technically.)
Mr. Belichick is a little like a God. To be this good in a game where no one gets to play unless they are extraordinarily talented…that’s very good indeed.
So what’s with the sweatshirt? Tom thinks it’s posturing, an ostentatious gesture, a way of saying "I’m special." Belichick is telling us the rules don’t apply to them. For Tom, Belichick is a faux bohemian, someone who insists on an outsider status that does not truly belong to him. Tom says that Belichick is a football coach, plain and simple. The fact that he is a very good football coach does not warrant posturing. (See below for a more nuanced statement of Tom’s position, taken, with his permission from an exchange of emails we had this morning.)
I don’t know. Tom could be right. But I like an interpretive alternative. What if Belichick is charting new ground? What if we are looking at the evolution of American culture here on its most hallowed ground, the grid iron?
Bill Belichick was born April 16, 1952. His Dad play played fullback for the Detroit Lions and coached at the Naval Academy for 33 years. Bill went to Annapolis High, attended Phillips Academy, and graduated from Wesleyan with a degree in economics.
This guy is second generation football. He grew up in a household steeped in the game’s strategy and drama. In the right life, this kind of exposure can do interesting things. A deeply intelligent kid can take possession of the game, master it in ways previously impossible. In the cliche, he can take the game to "a whole new level." And we know what happens when this happen. Those who serve as vehicles of transport are changed by transport.
Call it the Cambridge Don effect. If you devote yourself to the study of something, there is an inclination to remove yourself from the world. You forget your car keys. You might even forget to take a bath. (At the Royal Ontario Museum, we had a curator who relied on his secretary to tell him when this was so.) You dress in whatever is at hand, because even first thing in the morning, you are already scheming on the best way to take the long pass away from Payton Manning. You don’t so much renounce the world as have it taken away from you. You are turning the gaze inward. You put your hood up.
Tom’s model is a bohemian one. Belichick is located at the center with pretensions of alternative standing. My model is something like a cultural involution. Belichick is burrowing into the game. He is find new ways to think about it, new ways to explore its complexities. In this interpretation, we are looking at an excavation of our culture at the very center of our culture. By a coach, for crying out loud.
Coaches are that most elemental of creatures. He’s the one charged with taking dreamy kids and introducing them to the harsh realities of the world. Coaches are supposed to be what they are and not another thing. They are our reality principle, or, better, our reality principles. If there is a fundament in our culture it’s a guy like Mike Ditka, force of nature, arbiter of culture. If Coach is changing, something is happening.
Tom might be right. Bill Belichick might be a poser. But I wonder if we are not looking at a man who went looking for a better way to play football and stumbled out of our culture into something…else…new…next?
Post script by Tom Guarriello:
The problem I have with the "monkish" image is its ostentatious rejectionism. Professional football is show business, athletic ascetics notwithstanding. There is no way to opt out of the show business aspect of it. Most coaches simply live out their relative discomfort with it by giving press conferences filled with "uhs" and "ohs" and saying the kinds of things that can be de- and re-constructed in Miller Lite ads. Belichick acts as if all this show business stuff is nonsense; as if he’d be happier playing the game without cameras, know-nothing fans, the ignorant press (watch one of his press conferences sometime; he’s such a prick) or any of that "distracting" stuff. You know: Pure man-on-man action, preferably in the mud.
For his current salary, of course.
Which is where my charge of ostentation comes from. This kind of willful symbolic rejection of the fundamental economic infrastructure of pro sports, by cutting off his sweatshirt and pretending he is above the cult of celebrity (by dressing as if below it), is just too cute by half.
I was watching the NBC series Life on TIVO last night. It gets better and better. About half way through the present episode (the one about angels), Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi are traveling in a car talking about shooting a suspect. Reflections play on the windshield. (See the line of blue on this image of Shahi.)
Windshields are worth watching. How come?
1) The naturalistic conventions that rule TV continue to insist that certain kinds of artistic representation are forbidden.
2) This forces directors to smuggle things in to story and onto the screen.
3) One way to do this is to put your characters in a car in motion. Driving is an an ordinary event from everyday life and therefore welcome on the screen under the "naturalism" rules.
4) Good things happen when characters are in motion. The world gets more voluptuous. Color, shapes and city scapes stream in the background.
5) Better still, shapes and colors stream across the window. See, for instance, the scene in Grosse Pointe Blank when John Cusak is driving into town (eyes right). A flock of birds streams across his windshield. In Out of Sight, as George Clooney and Ving Rhames sit in the car before climbing the hill to break into big house owned by Albert Brooks, the windshield virtually steals the scene. Windshields are active.
6) Windshields give us a screen built into the screen. But this second screen adds light and color, as it were, accidentally. The Director can dismiss this as a natural or accidental artistic event. The viewer can dismiss it too. He or she can see through to the event taking place inside the car.
7) So windshields are a very discrete way of making the signal richer and more visual without sound the "art alarm," the one that says, "hold on to your hats, we’re going to get all creative here." Windshields have a take it or leave it quality, there if you "like that sort of thing," and more or less invisible if you prefer the naturalist convention.
8) Contemporary culture is getting more complex and creative. And the windshield is a good way of enriching the signal. This is also the future of branding as we learn to take one big signal and break it out into finer messages for smaller audiences.
9) Now if only we can find a way to built a third screen into that second one…
Acknowledgments
I am not sure who gets the credit at Life. One or all of the following parties: Rand Ravich, Far Shariat, Dave Semel.
Here’s an interview published in The Globe and Mail over the weekend in which I offer a couple of thoughts on the topic of design. Thanks to Amy Verner for the opportunity to sing out. You can find the interview here.
Apologies
No images today. I am in Portland using the public Metro Fi, free wireless internet.
I just finished watching Chuck on NBC (Monday, 8:00). It’s about a guy who runs a "Geek Squad" type service at the charmingly named "Buy More." The Big BangTheory (Monday, 8:30, CBS)is a Beauty and the Geek proposition, two guys living across the hall from a woman who is, as the phrase has it, totally out of their league.
These shows join Heroes, Numb3rs, and Mythbusters, all of which features nerdy people. I think we could even say that Tina Fay’s character Liz Lemon on 30 Rock is a nerd. She really just wants to stay home and watch Starwars. (30 Rock character Kenneth Parcell might also qualify.)
Geeks and nerds are surprisingly popular when you think that they are, officially, objects of scorn. They colonized a good bit of the Fall schedule.
If we had to choose another big trend in cultural programming recently, it would have to be Vegas. Viva Laughlin appeared on CBS (it has since been cancelled). This joins the NBC series Las Vegas and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and a slew of Hollywood movies including, Swingers (1992), Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Casino (1995), Very Bad Things (1998), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), MTV Real World: Las Vegas (1992), Ocean’s Eleven (2001), The Cooler (2003), Ocean’s Twelve (2004), Smokin’ Aces (2006), and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007).
Generalizing perhaps too generously, we’ve got two very different species of social life: geeks and, if we take the Vegas trend to its core, players (aka, playas). My assumption here is that the social type most favored by Vegas is the male who is a self aggrandizing, risk taking, high roller. The kind of guy who appears in the HBO TV show, Entourage, or Ocean’s X.
This leaves us with a nice little contrast. Geeks are timid creatures. Players are swash buckling and vain glorious. Geeks calculate the odds. Players just jump. Geeks are world renouncing. Players are overweening. How odd that these two creatures should have come out of corn or obscurity to high profile positions in contemporary culture.
What’s up? I think this strange duality might tell us something about Millenials. Geeks and Players might be their ying and yang, the two poles between which they have set up shop. Or maybe not. I haven’t done the ethnography, so I’m guessing. And asking. Thoughts, anyone?
