Tag Archives: Hiten Samtani

Making culture, mapping culture

A couple of years ago, Rick Meyerowitz was on the A train in New York City. He was staring at the subway map and he was thinking about lunch. Suddenly, station names began to look like food.

Rick asked, “What if I redid the subway map [as] a food map?” He brought in his friend Maira Kalman and the two of them renamed 468 stations. Avenue H became Mulligan Stew, Avenue J became Can of Soda, and Brighton beach became Beach Stroganoff. The New Yorker published their map in 2004.

This is remapping, taking a world we know, and reworking how we see it.  It’s one way to make culture.

We don’t have to work with something as grand as a subway system. Over the course of many walks, I have remapped my little town in Connecticut. I live pretty close to “the old woman who listens to her TV really loudly. She’s 100.” I am up the street from the “the house built by that crazy Swedish guy who eventually returned to Europe and died in a pauper’s hospital.” About a mile from my house is “smuggler’s cove.” Down the street from there is “The Chinese pavilion,” and from there it’s an easy walk to the “Fortress of mystery,” “Where the roller coaster once stood,” and “House of the trapped Brazilians.”

Maps used to belong to faceless bureaucracies and the state. They were literal. They gave up everything beautiful and imaginative to be accurate and clear. (By some miracle, it takes even the most sober map around 15 years to turn into a thing of beauty. We don’t know why. Apparently map makers install secret beauty on time release.) There are cultures in which maps are rich in connotative meanings (see Basso on the Western Apache, below), but usually our maps are an unamused rendering of the world. What you see is what we got.

Until now. With the decline of elites and the rise of an technologically empowered everyman, well, remapping is inevitable. All we need is the right pen and paper (or hardware and software) and hey, presto, the world begins to take on new properties.

One precedent was Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue. This give us a glimpse of The New Yorker’s myopia. Maps like this record not geographical but psychological space.  See also this map of New York City from the point of view of a 3 year old.  

Lots of options. How does a city look to any one of the groups that occupy it? How does Chicago look to a recently arrived runaway? What about a Cubs fan? How about a student at the University of Chicago? (That’s a trick question: UC students do not leave Hyde Park so they have no map of the city.)

Naturally, no one wants to use these remapped maps as way-finders. This would be like driving across the country with the aid of Denny’s placemats. But to be fair there is way finding and way finding. These remapped maps are very good for certain kinds of navigation. They can take us places we could never find otherwise. Those who make them make culture.

Please if you make a "remap," would you let us know.

References  

Basso, Keith H. 1984. “’Stalking With Stories’: Names, Places and Moral Narratives among the Western Apache.” In Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society.  Jerome Bruner, ed.  Washington, D.C.: American Ethnological Society, p. 19-55.

For more on the map by Meyerowitz and Kalman, go here.

Acknowledgements

Hiten Samtani for the New York according to a three-year old.  

Cultural intelligence: the Boomer report card

I believe boomers have broken out of orbit. They know less and less about our culture.

As managers, they continue to make decisions that guide the corporation. Some of them go so far to insist that their detailed knowledge of the Kenny Loggins songbook and Law and Order episodes is quite enough to help them steer the corporation through the meteor field of contemporary culture.  (Block that metaphor!) 

But they are wrong.  Boomer culture must not be mistaken for contemporary culture.  (It is a diminishing subset.)  Boomers are badly informed.

How do I know?  I have a test.  

Entertainment Weekly recently published a Power List that shows the "50 most powerful entertainers."  If we look at the top 10 people in this list, there’s no real cause for alarm.

1. Johnny Depp
2. Lady Gaga
3. Oprah Winfrey
4. Simon Cowell
5. Will Smith
6. Robert Downey Jr.
7. Sandra Bullock
8. Ellen DeGeneres
9. Leonardo DiCaprio
10. Eminem

A boomer will recognize all the names on this list.  But unless they are stealing cultural signals from their teenage sons and daughters, they will be a little vague on three names: Lady Gaga, Simon Cowell and Eminem.  

They will have imperfect knowledge.  The signature of imperfect knowledge is first emotional and then linquistic.  When asked, "So have you heard of Eminem,"  the boomer will protest too much (i.e., defensively) with "Sure, I have."  But the real give-away is always the admission of scant knowledge.  As in, "Sure, I have.  Isn’t he the one who…"  Let’s agree. Imperfect knowledge is insufficient knowledge.  It is not nearly ehough to make the corporation culturally alert.  

So the report card here is something like C+ with a sternly worded note to parents that reads, "Bobbie Boomer must try harder!"

The situation gets much worse when we turn to the second list contained in EW, the 40 under 40.  Here the top ten are:

1. Sam Worthington
2. Daniel Radcliffe
3. Taylor Lautner
4. Jaden Smith
5. Robert Pattinson
6. Orlando Bloom
7. Shia LaBeouf
8. Tobey Maguire
9. Hayden Christensen

The only certain knowledge here is Tobey Maquire and possibly Orlando Bloom.  (Hayden Christensen should be here, but he seems to keep a low celebrity profile.)  There are several soft spots.  ("Robert Pattison, isn’t he like that Vampire guy?")  And there are several complete blanks.  Again unless they are stealing signals from their kids, boomers have never heard of Jaden Smith or Taylor Lautner.

Now, let’s be clear.  Entertainment Weekly does not canvas the bohemian fringes of the film world.  They are our pretty much our "magazine of record" when it comes to contemporary culture.   For anyone with managerial responsibility to know only two names with certainty, well, that’s a problem.

The letter grade here is D and the note reads, "Please make an appointment to see me.  I am beginning to see that letting Bobbie out of Junior High was a terrible mistake."

I’m not saying boomers should be forced to submit to show trials or forced exams.  But I am saying that there is something odd about giving power to people who do not have reliable access to one of the streams of intelligence on which competitive success depends.  I keep waiting for Gens X and Y to establish a Fifth Column in the corporation, to band together to and fight as one.  Sorry, wrong movie.  

I believe Buzz Word Bingo gets things started.  It is a covert activity with which Gens X and Y agree to observe and comment on the cluelessness of the corporation.  If there are other practices out there, I would love to hear of them.

The other question is how to bring boomers back into orbit.  A subscription to Entertainment Weekly is a good place to start.  This is a natural undertaking for Executive Education courses.  Thoughts on our options here would also be welcome.  That D can be improved.

References

Anonymous. 2010. “THE POWER LIST.” Entertainment Weekly, October 15 http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20432613,00.html (Accessed October 14, 2010).

McCracken, Grant. 2009. Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. Basic Books.  At Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Chief-Culture-Officer-Breathing-Corporation/dp/0465018327.

Acknowlegments

Thanks to Hiten Samtani with whom I have been talking about the problem.