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What happens to the old economy in the new media? (aka the eclipse of interest)

If there is a concept crucial to our understanding of what and who we are, it is "interest." This is the sinew in the movable hand. It is emergence's secret motive. Interest replaces elite control and expert wisdom. In our world, we turn our affairs over to interest, and usually we live with the outcome. (No monarchs or mullahs for us.)

In our world, unlike traditional and hierarchical ones, culture comes from interest, not the other way round. The miracle of social cooperation comes not from shared values or mutual regard. It comes from interest. As Adam Smith put it,

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages (Wealth of Nations [1776] 1976:26–7, as quoted in Swedberg, reference below)

For anthropologists, interest is miraculous. It makes things we didn't think possible, possible. Once a social world gives itself over to interest, one person no longer needs to to like or understand a neighbor. As long as a relative small set of social conventions is satisfied, one person doesn't have to know or care about the interior life of another.

Indeed, we no longer need even to have what the students of autism call a "theory of mind." As long as those conventions are satisfied, I don't need to have any insight into you, nor you into me. We will meet in the marketplace but in this case we are merely mirrors to one another. I am selling something you think you need. You are selling something I think I need.

And now a hundred poppies grow. Now that we are protected from scrutiny, presumption and control of our neighbors, we may engage in any and every act of social invention. We are free to become preps or punks, geeks or goths. We are free to invent Burning Man, Country and Western music, the Antique Roadshow, or Steampunk. In the bracing air of our mutual indifference, we are free to find our own way. Culture is free to wander where it will. And now the anthropologist really has his work cut out for him or her.

Do we understand interest? Or is it a matter of, "what's to understand?" We may simply assume actors are able and willing to identify their interest, and let it go at that. But everywhere we look, we see the economics paradigm under challenge. People are saying that the new media ushers in a new market, and this is shot through with notions of community, moral value, shared objective, and a good deal of sharing and caring. More and more, capitalism would have us reverse the terms of Smith's dichotomy and address not "self-love" but our mutual humanity. (And indeed yesterday in the New York Times, David Brooks seemed to be saying that this was the inclination of Britain's new conservative party.)

This is all very interesting for the anthropologist. And a little exhausting. It turns out our social world is a little like the weather in Ireland. If you don't like it, that's ok. Give it a couple of minutes and it will change. But this difference, this eclipse of interest, I mean, would make for lots and lots of differences. If interest is to be displaced, we will be a more humane place, but we may be a dramatically less inventive one. And let's face it, if there is a truth more certain that the need to transcend the interest model of the economy, it's that by the looks of things, we are going to need all the inventiveness we can muster.

Sturdy little interest. The little engine that could. It helped build great sprawling social worlds. Western societies in their present form are unimaginable without its constant inventive, relentless press. What happens when it is eclipsed by new economic models?

References

Brooks, David. 2008. Editorial. New York Times. May 13, 2008. [Sorry, no link. My WiFi connection is down.]

Swedberg, Richard. 2003. Principles of Economic Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7525.pdf

Walter Disney meets Wikipeda thanks to Google Maps

WI don't

Thanks to Drew Breunig, I am informed of a couple of developments germane to my recent "Walter Disney" post.  Drew notes that a hacked iPhone is capable of accessing Geopedia. 

More spectacularly, he notes that Google Maps now allows us to access Wikipedia.  In the image above, we see a map of midtown New York City, with several Ws, including one expanded for the Seagram Building.  We evoke this view of the city by clicking on "more" between "traffic" and "map." 

I am in Toronto today and presenting tomorrow, so it's time to get back to my Powerpoint decks. 

Walter Disney now?

Thursday night at the C3 MIT event in Cambridge, I met Ira Hochman, the CIO of Untravel Media. He was there, I think, to bask in the reflected glory and the greatness that is Henry Jenkins, but he ended up talking to me.

And I couldn't quite escape the sense that listening to Ira was my chance to experience what it was like to listen to Walter Disney in the late 20s, early 30s.

Ira was talking about his Untravel and the "tours" it gives of Boston through mobile story telling. Untravel Media lets us use a cell phone or a PDA in the streets of Boston to listen to a "voice over" narrative. We can travel the West End of Boston and listen to historical matters otherwise obscure (as above).

Normally, Leora Kornfeld and her Ubiquity Interactive is my guide in matters of this kind. And so I have some rough idea of what this technology can do. For starters, it disintermediates the museum in a big way. Now the work of museological, curatorial exposition can be moved out of the museum into the world. Now, we can learn the story of the Empire State Building while in and around the Empire State Building instead of staring at text and models at the Museum of the City of New York.

One of these days our phones will catch up to Japan, and we will only need to point at a building to listen to its story (if someone has recorded this.) The possibilities are mind bending. A city with all of its history attached and on tap? A world with its history there "in the air." "Living memory" is a perishable thing. It dies with every generation. But this technology lets it live on, not in a book or a museum, but in situ. A city that never forgets.

Ira was talking about an idea of transparency. The virtual companion could now let us see through walls into buildings. We can think of class as a matter of space and knowledge access. The highest ranking person in a social world probably has rights of greatest access. He or she can go anywhere, know anything. And Ira's technology, to the extent that it can make the world transparent, allows anyone with a PDA to see and know in ways previously forbidden them. The PDA in this case becomes a sociological equalizer.

But, listening to Ira, you could also hear about extra-historical possibilities. It sounds as if his technology is mostly used for expositional purposes. And you can imagine how readily it come be used for evocational ones.

What for instance if you did the history of the West end of Boston not from the point of view of well told history? What if you told it from the point of view of a Southern Belle in 1840s Boston? What if you told the story of the West end not so much to illuminate the place but the person? Not the story told, but the story teller?

This enterprise is a largely fictional one. We can imagines writers abandoning the printed page for an Untravel media or Leora's Ubiquity Interactive. Novelists released from the novel. A story could begin at the Harvard subway line and wrap up somewhere near Kendall station, proceeding at the pace at which we walk, unfolding in the streets and buildings as we pass them by. This is a little literal. How about hearing from the god (or is it the ghost) of Longfellow Bridge anytime we pass between Boston and Cambridge on Red Line?

There is a compromise position between the two, something expositional that allows us to glimpse a Boston at mid 19th century and something evocational that allows us to participate in what it might have been emotionally. I believe when bring these are brought together, we may call the outcome anthropological.

Was this what it was like to talk to Walter Disney? Hard to imagine that it can have been this interesting.

References

See the Ubiguity Interactive website, here.

See the Untravel Media website, here.

Steampunk, a new trend

I am at C3 at MIT today, and I am sure I will have lots of interesting things to report by the end of the day.  But let me point to an article that appeared in the NYT this morning, for those of us interesting in trends and movements in contemporary culture.

La Ferla describes the Steampunk as a

subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

The term comes apparently from the The Steampunk Trilogy, written by Paul Di Filippo (eyes right).  I went to see if I could download this to my Kindle, but the publisher (Running Press) has yet to make this possible.  So I contented myself reading the excerpt on Amazon.  (This is a kind of "stealing signals" that shuts the author out of proceeds due to him.  Still, I am only going to take a little, and I would ask you to look the other way while how I generalize shamelessly on the strenghth of a page or two.)

The opening paragraph of the Steampunk Trilogy gives us a writing machine, all burnished copper, Moroccan leather, pumps, hoses, and glass jars, assembled in a gratuitously complicated contraption that appears in the "lambent, buttery glow" of Victorian gaslight.  It's operator is Cosmo Cowperthwait, a gentleman of "comfortable income" who on this occasion wears  a "Paisley plastron cravat, embroidered waistcoat, [and] trig trousers."  Cowperthwait also carries a large turnip-watch which he sets by the passing of the 11:45 Totting omnibus. 

Lambent and buttery.  That's the key.  We respond to this image, and, perhaps, to steampunk because it plays out our technological present in an interesting mirror.  First, this fun house reflection of our Airbooks and iPhones.   In this world, a passing trolly is better time keeper than our turnip shaped watch.  In this world, technology is on the verge of springing apart, something my ThinkPad does only under exceptional circumstances and duress. 

We imagine the Victorian social world is a rickety machine, one that works perfectly well without ever inspiring confidence that it will continue to do so.  This happens to be exactly the way Mumbai seemed to me.  By contrast, we live in an exquisite machine.  Tokyo, at the limit.   We like the idea of a world made of crafted beauty, where seams show, and things continue to be a miraculous even when they work.

Victorians appeal to us in several ways, not only out of a faux nostalgia.  These were people who were profoundly crafty, inclined to working on combustion engines in the tool shed at the end of the garden.  It was a place where rank amateurs could make a contribution to knowledge in their spare time, a motive that is a great motivating hope here at This Blog.  Several institutions of the Victorian period, including the Oxford English Dictionary, and great swathes of the periods of natural history came from amateurs working together in a thoroughly distributed way.  As an anthropologist who is Scottish only by genetic "origin" and otherwise Mediterranean, there's a puzzle here.  How can the English have been so demonstrative from an intellectual point of view, when they were so utterly undemonstrative for a social one.  Aren't ideas animating.  Do they make us marionettes (mechanically demonstrative) whether we like it or not?  One gets the feelings that the English men and women in Steampunk (past and present) are pretty darn demonstrative. 

These are early days in the trend, the moment when the thing is still forming.  Now that the New York Times and the likes of This Blog can have at it, we may expect this cultural innovation to begin to over-form and eventually to sit so far down the Kauffman continuum that the early adopters bail out and the thing turns to cliche.  I do my best to serve. 

Just a last note: who would have guessed how syncretic and cooperative punk was going to be.  This look was designed to be uncompromising, hostile to every other form of social life.  But it turns out that punk plays well with others.  We have had gothpunks, skater punks, almost as cooperative as hip hop.  True, still no hippie punks, or luncheon punks, or preppie punks.  There are some places punk can't play.  Still you can't help feeling that luncheon punks might be a movement waiting to happen.  No, not really. 

References

Filippo, Paul.  The Steampunk Trilogy.  New York: Running Press.  Order from Amazon here. For the opening page, go here.

La Ferla, Ruth.  2008.  Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds.  New York Times.  May 8, 2008.  here.

von Slatt, Jake, proprietor of the Steampunk workshop.  here.

Acknowledgments

To Sara Winge for helping me to understand the present trend for craftiness. 

Goddess, phone home

Transformations is finally out and let me give profound thanks to everyone who have bought a copy.

One of the things surprised me most about bringing the book to press is Ani DiFranco's unwillingness to let me quote her lyrics.

I didn't want much, but she refused even to entertain my request. What's odd about this, of course, is that in the age of Weinberger, Shirky, O'Reilly and Jenkins, we understand that the new knowledge economy represents a new knowledge economy. More exactly, it is almost always better to turn our work into the public domain than to protect it from distribution.

This is a tough lesson for corporations to learn, keen as they are to protect their intellectual property rights. But a woman often styled as a folk-punk artist? This is a tough lesson for her? Really?

And that's the really odd thing about DiFranco's refusal. In point of fact, DiFranco ought to be the patron saint of the new economy, the new culture. Here was a woman who seemed to grasp what was happening to us. Indeed, DiFranco can actually claim to be an author of our cultural shift.

DiFranco seemed to get the new symmetry between producer and consumer. She resisted the smash and grab which which studios approached the music world. She resisted the celebrity model. She resisted an apotheosis that took people out of the ordinary world into stardom. DiFranco instinctively embraced the idea of growing your audience, one performance at a time, of staying small, of remaining loyal to your roots. DiFranco grasped the idea of remaining close to your home town, even when this meant making Rochester her base of operations and her mother the head of book keeping. Most of all, she understood that a musician could now control the means of music, marketing and celebrity production, of running her own show. I mean, much of what we see happening with all those independent film and music festivals begins with her. Lilith is impossible to imagine without her. (She did not participate, I think.) SxSW and even Burning Man, I think these were brought closely to the real of the possible by her acts of imagination.

In point of fact, DiFranco should now be an object of worship for anyone who cares about popular culture. Instead, she remains a minority enthusiasm. She is an architect who helped us move from a world of zero sum to something more generative, a prime mover in the transition from value capture to value release, a champion of what Sahlins would call generalized exchange, a participant in what Foucault would call a "sudden redistribution." DiFranco is there when we move the conference from something dialogic to something all-in. Foo camps, anti-conferences and interesting conventions, these come, in a sense, from her. (Wow, listen, "DiFranco is there,." Really, author, really?)

But she is, forgive me, unsung. The women who ought to be our patron saint, our Judith, our Joan, our firebrand, refusing the status quo, daring the future to happen, things seemed somehow to pass her by. Somehow DiFranco got "read out of history" as Kuhn would say. The paradigm shifted, but the women who helped shifted it got forgot. I have a friend who actually had in his possession the prow figure of the first American ship to enter an English harbor after the American revolution. Think of DiFranco so.

Well, and maybe this is just as DiFranco wants it. Perhaps she is distressingly true to her intentions. All of us want to pretend our independence but still be showered with fame, glory and riches. Maybe, DiFranco is more scrupulous than the rest of us. Perhaps she is distrustful of the center even when the center is pretty darn and increasingly alternative. But the tragic possibility is that she is addicted to the margin, even after the creative center of things has moved to the center. In which case, she is as the English would say, yesterday's woman, a person who just somehow can't grasp that the world has changed.

I say nothing at all of the fact that DiFranco is an architect of 3rd wave feminism, but of course this distinction, too, belongs to her. And I will say from my own experience that I was raised in a feminist household but it was only when I heard her music that I fully grasped what feminism could mean to our culture.

Last note:

Yesterday's blog, was written in an Air Canada Beechcraft 1900D, one of those little planes that seats, like, 16 people and make you wish to God you had never trusted your life to the miracle of flight. This post was written on an Amtrak Acela barreling from NYC to Boston. I dare you to tell the difference. Because here at This Blog Sits we exercise quality control. Every post, whatever the circumstance, is written by a small team of dedicated writers who stand behind every word they write. (No, not really.)

Really last note:

We here at This Blog offer birthday greetings to the state of Israel on her 60th birthday.

References

Cole, Susan G. 1995. Ani DiFranco: Folk-punk phenom unleashes songs and real-life passions. Now Magazine, no. March: 1-3. here.

DiFranco, Ani. 1996. Dilate. Dilate.Vol. copyright Righteous Babe Music. Buffalo: Righteous Babe Records.

———. 1996. Outta Me, Onto You. Dilate.Vol. copyright Righteous Babe Music. Buffalo: Righteous Babe Records.

———. 1992. What If No One's Watching. Imperfectly.Vol. copyright Righteous Babe Music. Buffalo: Righteous Babe Records.

Foucault, M. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Kuhn, T. S. 1972. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Leibovich, Lori. Ani DiFranco: Dilate. Salon.

Poet, J. 1996. Ani DiFranco: Independent as she wants to be. Pulse. here.

Sahlins, Marshall David. 1972. Stone age economics. Chicago, Aldine-Atherto: Aldine-Atherton.

Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody. New York.

Van Meter, Jonathan. 1997. Righteous Babe. Spin 13, no. 5: 54-60, 126-28.

Weinberger, David. 2007. Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder. New York: Henry Holt.

dude, the advertising of observation

I'm interested in the way advertising mines culture for useful meanings. A couple of weeks ago, I offered a post on the recent efforts by cell phone carriers. An ATT ad shows all the ways people answer their phones. ("Hey, buddy!" "How's it going?" "What's up!" etc.) Verizon shows a father's vane (and vain) attempt to adopt lingo 20 years too young for him. In a comment to this post, Natasha Estey pointed out that a recent McDonald's ad shows all the ways people eat a Big Mac. All of these find something in the culture of everyday life and seize upon it as a trellis upon which the brand may grow.

A couple of days ago, I saw another contribution to this exploration of popular culture. There is now a Bud Light commercial that consists in a study of all the ways that people say "Dude." And it is fantastically revealing of the number of things you can say with this single syllable: entreaty, exclamation, exasperation, dubiety, hilarity, astonishment, and so.

In one spot, two guys go to Vegas. As these pilgrims make their was around town,, each moment punctuated by a different, equally reveally "Dude." One of the duo meets a suspiciously muscular "show girl" and in a hasty ceremony marries her. His pal says "dude" in a voice of sad "I told you so but you wouldn't listen" resignation, and our suspicions are confirmed with a literal rendering of the term.

This study hasn't been done, I wouldn't think, but it would be very interesting to know the 10 words with this linguistic versatility. Can anything be more versatile than "Dude." Hard to imagine. But what are, for instance, the top ten? I think "wow" would make this list. I find myself using it lots of ways. I am sure there is an intellectual somewhere who takes this to me a measure of our decline as a civilization, but then if you are an intellectual everything, with the possible exception of an outbreak of Mozart festivals, is precisely this. Happily, it is the anthropologists job to observe, not judge.
Anyhow, I was struck by this comment in a recent New Yorker.

In recent years, some of the directors working on modest budgets (in and out of Hollywood) have developed a caste and rather refined new style--a style devoted to minute perceptions of character that lead to small revelations of how life works. Let's call it the cinema of observation. I'm thinking of filmmakers like Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale"), Nicole Holofcener ("Friends with Money"), Tamara Jenkins (The Savages"), Andrew Wager ("Starting Out in the Evening"), and now Noam Murro, whose new "Smart People" is about a middle-aged literature professor in a funk.

Perhaps ad interest in popular culture is also driven by a generationally specific enthusiasm. Perhaps a new generation is coming up anthropologically. Not a moment too soon. We need all the help we can get.

References

For more info on the campaign, go here.

For a look at the Bud Light Dude Vegas ad, go here.

Denby, David. 2008. Overripe, Undernourished. The New Yorker. April 21, 2008, pp. 142-143, p. 143.

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Advertising and its new anthropological content. The Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. March 19, 2008.

Acknowledgments (and hat's off to):

Bud Light Agency: DDB, Chicago Group Creative Director: Mark Gross,
Creative Directors: Chuck Rachford, Chris Roe Art Director: John Baker
Copywriter: Jeff Oswald Agency Producer: Will St. Clair Production
Company: Biscuit Filmworks Director: Kenny Herzog, Clay Weiner
Executive Producers: Shawn Lacy, Holly Vega Line Producer: Lisa
Stockdale DP: Ross Richardson Editor: Carlos Lowenstein Dude...New Spot
From Director Clay Weiner (repped by Biscuit Filmworks. The Spot And
The Rest Of The Story: Dude.

Marketing out of control at FX

I have broken my FX boycott, and the enterprise now lies around me in ruins, proof that I cannot mobilize public opinion even the tiniest bit.

I have a good excuse, though.  To boycott FX would mean missing The Riches, and this would mean missing Minnie Driver, a woman so exquisitely talented that she must now be regarded as perhaps Hollywood's greatest gift to television. (The contenders for this honor being Holly Hunter, Glenn Close, Lili Taylor, and Kyra Sedgwick.)

So I am watching the April 22 episode and low and behold, there is evidence of marketing mischief and meddling everywhere. 

First, Eddie Izzard, as Wayne Malloy, is seen driving a GMC Acadia.  This is one of the sponsors of the The Riches and ads play several times in the course of this episode.  I don't like product placement, as I have argued here, but as long as we TIVO through the ads this is perhaps forgivable.

But about one quarter through the episode, FX puts Minnie Driver, as Dahlia Malloy, in a GMC product on a GM lot.  Driver is sitting in the Acadia, talking on the phone. 

A neighbor comes up and says, "Ew!  Nice wheels!"

Minnie Driver responds, "I want to buy one."

Neighbor, "You sure?"

Minnie Driver, "Yeah."

Then a salesman walks up and says,

"So what are you thinking? GMC Acadium?" 

Neighbor, "How much down?"

Minnie Driver, "Yeah, how much down?"

Salesman, laughing, "Zero money down." 

Neighbor, "What's the sticker price?"

Salesman, "It's right there.  That includes a navigation radio with a rear view camera system."

Driver, "It's zero money down?"

Later, Ms. Driver is made to say,

"It's a great deal."

"I like that car though!"

and, once more behind the wheel of the GMC Acadia. 

"I'm feeling inspired.  I never bought a car before."

Holy ****.  This may very well be the most egregious example of commercial interference ever registered in our culture.  Recall that my original objection to FX was that they put an ad for one of their shows in the corner of the screen for the duration of an episode.  I thought this was a little much. 

But to put a sales pitch in the middle of the dramatic action, and to reduce a dramatic genius like Minnie Driver to a product pitcher, this is insufferable. 

If ever you doubted this Driver's talent, check out The Riches.  It is an astonishing performance.  No sooner was FX gifted with this performance than they decided to make Ms. Driver start selling cars.  ("It's zero money down?")  This is a little like asking Baryshnikov if he won't mind demonstrating the latest fitness gear from the Home Shopping Network ("Zighmazter!") during a performance at the New York City Ballet. 

Now we know marketers have been meddling with cultural content for sometime now.  Here's what Cameron Crowe had to say about the issue, roughly a decade ago

You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys.  You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people.  What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big, broad joke, a high concept.  Everything is tested.  The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer's confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent."

But notice that in this case, the marketer is interfering with creative content.  But in the FX case, the marketer is actually insinuating the product in the creative content. 

Now there is a weird sort of solution to product placement problem.  We only need change the polarity.  We need to use TV shows as laboratories for the creation of product and brand ideas which then may be exported to the world.  As Rob Walker was saying on Sunday in the New York Times,

Pete Hottelet ... has started a business devoted to bringing to life certain products from movies. His business is called Omni Consumer Products, a name borrowed from the fictional megacorporation in “Robocop.” In addition to Brawndo, Omni has acquired from Paramount the license to market Sex Panther, a made-up cologne from the Will Ferrell vehicle “Anchorman” (“150% More Awesome Than Any Other Cologne. Ever.”).

I am not squeemish about the interactions of culture and commerce.  I am inclined to agree with the likes of Tyler Cowen that on the whole, culture and commerce have been better for one another than generally supposed by the guardian intellectual.  But this FX event must mark the limiting case.  Surely, it stands as proof that there are moments when culture and commerce must keep their distance. 

The first question: who's to blame?  It is hard for me to believe
that most everyone on the set is embarrassed by this thing.  The
question is, who is the culprit?  Presumably, this scandal takes us
into the upper reaches of senior management at FX.

The second question: how do we get FX to stop and discourage others from starting?  I would suggest a boycott but, well, that didn't really turn out so well the first time.  Plus, we would miss all of Ms. Driver's subsequent performances. 

Any thoughts on next steps would be very much appreciated. 

References

Rountree, Cathleen.  2008.  Film Actresses Find Second Lives on TV.  Women in World Cinema with Cathleen Rountree. here.

Walker, Rob.  2008.  This Joke's On You.  New York Times.  May 4, 2008. here. 

Weinraub, Bernard. 1997. Hollywood learns small is beautiful. Globe and Mail/New York Times. February 25, 1997 (GM): D3.

Acknowledgments

Elana Swartz, my colleague at C3 MIT. 

the business case study: raw versus cooked

Talk about a power grab.  A couple of days ago, the dean of the Yale School of Management offered his definition of the "raw case."   (For all I know, this idea has been in circulation for some time now.  This is the first I have seen of it.)

The "raw case" is delivered not in the tidy 20 pages of the Harvard Business School (HBS) case study but online in a multimedia format. 

[This] conveys material through a variety of perspectives and data streams that can include original source documents such as 10-K filings and analyst reports, news media reports (print and broadcast), faculty-authored notes and background readings, scholarly articles, interview videos or transcripts with the parties involved, as well as other multimedia tools, such as Google maps. Raw cases consist of hundreds, even thousands, of “pages” of data. So, in addition to the lateral synthesis of many disparate piece of information, part of the student’s assignment is determining the most effective allocation of time and attention in order to answer the assigned question or perform the required analysis.

We think of this gift to the b-school community as a Trojan horse.  If Yale can persuade the world to adopt the raw case, it will have displaced the HBS case study format and some of the influence and the centrality of HBS itself.  (Finally, a business school acting like a business!) 

To confirm our suspicion that imperial motives drive this gift to the b-school world, Podolny speaks of the incumbent dismissively.  He calls the classic HBS offering a "cooked" case.  Wow.  Can you spell "positioning," boys and girls? 

Podolny says that this shift in formats is driven by the new intellectual and problem solving style in incoming students.  This is a little patronizing but it is nice to see a business school that pays attention to the cultural developments taking place off campus.

References

Podolny, Joel.  2008.  Transforming the MBA for the 21st Century - A commentary by Dean Joel M. Podolny.  Published in the Economic Times on April 28, 2008 and reproduced on the Yale School of
Management website here.

Reverend Wright, the CEO, and dreaming in politics and business

I have a friend who as a child glimpsed the possibility that he might be dreaming all the time.  Everyone has had that "is this a dream?" sensation.  Most of us shake it off.  He didn't.  Not really.

What got my friend was the fact that he couldn't prove that he wasn't dreaming.  The fact that it didn't feel like he was dreaming wasn't proof that he wasn't dreaming.  After all, his dream might consist in the conviction that he wasn't dreaming.

He told me this matter of factly over dinner.  And I'm glad we were in a restaurant.  Because now infected by his epistemological panic, I felt the urge to start screaming, boxing my ears and carrying on like a deeply frightened, crazy person, and this sort of thing is frowned upon in the Harvard part of Cambridge.  (In the MIT part of Cambridge, it is of course completely ok.) 

Which brings me to Reverend Wright.  What must it be like to be him this morning?  On Monday, he gave his National Press Corps, a spirited defense of his religion, his church and his politics.  The next day he wakes up to discover that Obama calling his performance a "spectacle" and "a bunch of rants,", black leaders calling him a "narcissist" and the New York Times editorial accusing him of "racism and paranoia."

If you saw the performance on Monday, you know that Reverend Wright will be astonished by this criticism.  He spoke as a man who believed in his own grandeur, his centrality in the larger of schemes, the urgency with which the American polity required his guidance.  In sum, it was clear that here was a guy who lived in a bubble, who lived in a dream.  And this morning, he woke up.

Wright had no idea that he lived in a dream, I guess, because he must be surrounded by people who keep congratulating him on being so darned magnetic.  Indeed, the dream was really well insulated.  (Without an ethnographic investigation I wouldn't want to say what the R value was exactly, but we have to know it's high.)  It took national exposure, following by almost unanimous criticism to bring him around.  (We must hope it brought him around.)

There is a second, haunting possibility.  And that is that Reverend Wright was actually engaged in dream defense.  Now that African Americans have served as head of state, head of the military, and may yet serve sometime quite soon as the President, a pastor could be forgiven feeling that his very mandate to preach the way he does, his very self created centrality in the community, has been thrown in question.  Maybe Reverend Wright was engaged in sabotage against the man who's candidacy inflicted sabotage on his own place in the world. 

Let's go with the first interpretation, if only because it's more Christian.  Which brings me back to my theme.  Reverend Wright was dreaming and he couldn't tell he was dreaming and there was nothing in his world that was going to let him out of his bubble, back into the world.  It's easy to look at this as a catastrophe happening to someone else, a very bad dream, as it were, that couldn't possibly happen to us. 

But in point of fact, anyone of us could be caught in a dream.  And this is especially true if we are CEOs.  Every corporation has a culture.  The upside of this culture is that it supplies a set of assumptions and understandings which when well tuned to the world help us navigate and negotiate its complexities.  But when its wrong, it puts us at odds with the world.  It captures us in a dream that even really good spreadsheets can puncture.  Reverend Wright looks like a particularly tragic figure, but there are lots of CEOs who are "living his dream."  They are merely waiting for the moment to wake up. 

References

Anonymous.  2008.  Mr. Obama and Rev. Wright.  Editorial.  New York Times.  April 30, 2008.  here.

The Wikipedia article on Reverend Wright here.

Transformations

It's out! I'm not sure when it hits bookstores. But Transformations can now be ordered from Amazon.com. No kidding. No waiting. Hurray.

References

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. At Amazon here.

James Twitchell, plagiarist

Here are two passages.  See if you notice a similarity.

Passage 1:

This essay begins with Diderot sitting in his study bemused and melancholic. Somehow this study has undergone a transformation. It was once crowded, humble, chaotic and happy. It is now elegant, organized, beautifully appointed, and a little grim. Diderot suspects the cause of the transformation is his new dressing gown.  (McCracken, 1988)

Passage 2:

As he looked from his desk and glanced around his study, Diderot noticed that it had been transformed by mysterious forces. It was once crowded, humble, chaotic, and happy. Now it was elegant, organized, and a little grim. What happened?  [new para.] Diderdot suspected that the cause of the transformation was right before his eyes. It was a new dressing gown.  (Twitchell, 2002)

James Twitchell is a professor of literature at the University of Florida.  He is a prolific author.  He is also a plagiarist. 

The revelation of this behavior begins with Roy Rivenburg, former Los Angeles Times reporter.  Rivenburg discovered Twitchell had used his, Rivenburg's, work as his own. 

A reporter for the Gainsville Sun, Jack Stripling picked up the story, and the results appeared Friday. 

It appears Twitchell has stolen widely and I am in distinguished company, including Rivenburg, Leslie Earnest, Peter Van Ham, Lance Morrow, Joseph Pine and Virginia Postrel.  (See Virginia's post on this topic below.)

Twitchell claimed that passages borrowed for his book Shopping For God (2007) were only "little snippets" confined to a single chapter, the result of mere "sloppiness."

But "snippets" also appear in his 2002 book, Living It Up where he appears to have borrowed from a Harvard Business Review article by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, and a Reason article by Virginia Postrel.  Branded Nation (2004) has some too. (Stripling has a good review.  Link below.)

This was witting behavior.  Twitchell sent Postrel the manuscript of Living It Up to ask for a blurp.  She noticed Twitchell's use of the  Diderot Effect and asked him to acknowledge me.  Twitchell did not.  According to Stripling, Twitchell claims that Diderot Effect "has become such common parlance in his area of study that he wasn't even sure who coined it."  Really?  But his use of my exact words tells us he was acquainted with its origin.

According to Stripling, the University of Florida did not act with dispatch.

After Rivenburg made contact with Twitchell, Twitchell told his department chair about the problem. But Pamela Gilbert, the chairwoman, did not forward along the allegations to UF's Office of Research to begin a misconduct investigation.

Simon & Schuster is not pulling books from the shelf, as they have done in other cases.  Adam Rothberg, spokesperson for Simon & Schuster, is promising correction for "the paperback edition."  I wonder if the threat of legal action by the offended authors might concentrate the editorial mind?

References

McCracken, Grant.  1988.  Diderot Unities and the Diderot Effective.  In Culture and Consumption I.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 118-129.

Postrel, Virginia.  2008.  If You're Going to Steal My Prose, At Least Keep My Facts.  Dynamist Blog.  April 27, 2008. here.

Stripling, Jack.  UF professor Twitchell admits he plagiarized in several of his books.  Gainsville Sun.  April 25, 2008.  here.

Grand Larceny II

Thanks to a shout out from 2Blowhards, the post several days ago on "stealing movies" is getting some attention online. (The question was, "Who has stolen the most movie with the smallest part?")

I am grateful for this attention, and it occurs to me that the comments for the piece open up the opportunity for further comment.

Here's is the whole list, grouping suggestions from the post with suggestions from the comments.

Holly Hunter in Time Code
Steve Zahn in Out of Sight
Selma Blair in Cruel Intentions
Siobhan Fallon in Men in Black
Brad Pit in Thelma & Louise (Rick Liebling)
Brad Pit in True Romance (Keven Lofty)
Joan Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank (Keven Lofty)
Blutto (Ole)
Mickey Rourke in Body Heat (Communicatrix)
Chris Rock in I'm Going to Git You Sucka (Communicatrix)
Meryl Streep in Manhattan (Communicatrix)
Bill Murray in Tootsie (Mike Madison)
Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles (Mike Madison)
Joan Cusack in Working Girl (Mike Madison)
Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross (Bryan)
R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket (Bryan)
J.K. Simmons in Spider-Man (Bryan)
Don Cheadle in Devil with a Blue Dress on (MHB)
Sharon Stone in Total Recall (SRP)
Steve Buscemi in Miller's Crossing (Virtual Memories)
Steve Buscemi in Billy Madison (James)
Brad Pitt in True Romance (JewishAtheist)

If we squint our eyes (essential to all acts of analysis) and ask ourselves what these movies have in common, one answer is this: they are all good movies.

This suggests the possibility that it is easier to steal a good movie than a bad one. And this implies that a movie stealer is well served when he or she is working with other great actors in the larger parts.

(Let's assume that there is no selection process at work here, one that says we don't look at bad movies for issues of this kind.)

I think the sensible assumption is that it should be easy to steal bad movies. Less competition. But it may be that the bad actors who staff the big parts in bad movies will not let this happen. They watch great performances with envy, suffer a terrible insecurity, and prevail upon the director to fire the offending player.

Great actors are bigger than this. They believe, perhaps, that brilliant performances in small parts do not diminish their contributions but instead augment the movie's hope of success. All boat rise with the tide, as it were.

This would mean that the Don Cheadles and Steve Zahns and Siobhan Fallons of the world do not steal movies after all. Which forces to ask what we meant when we talked about "stealing" movies in the first place. Do they belong to the stars? Is this a zero sum enterprise? What goes to one actor must come from another. Is every movie a quiet competition for that very scarce thing called attention (and admiration)? All of these sound like old economy assumptions to me. And then the question becomes whether we must dispense with the idea of movie larceny altogether. Just wondering.

References

McCracken, Grant. 2008. Grand Larcenty, Hollywood Style. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. April 17, 2008. here.

Blowhard, Michael. 2008 Post for April 23. here.

huffing in toronto

What a day in Toronto!   I am in town to interview women of middle age about chocolate.  By the 4th interview my head was spinning: so much data, such a whirlwind of interpretive frames. 

On the subway to Scarborough, near the Victoria Park station, I watch 3 girls in their early teens: one an African-Canadian Muslim wearing a chador (sp?), another women who appeared to be Ethiopian by descent, now dressed in a thoroughly Canadian manner, and their Eurasian friend, a women who entertained the car by dancing in the isles.  She wasn't very good at dancing.  But she was young and beautiful and, well, she was dancing...and that never happens on a Canadian subway.

I remembering riding the Bloor line after the Blue Jays won a World Series.  Everyone was just sitting there, minding their own business in that Canadian way that absents us from the situation even as we monitor one another right down to the ground.  Finally, a Jamaican guy exploded with indignation, leapt to his feet and said, "What is the matter with you people?  You just won the World series, I mean, it's the World series, and you're just sitting there."  It's what we do, our national thing.  We just sit there. 

Anyhow, the third girl was wearing the colors and fashions of gang affiliation...I think more as a fashion statement than a declaration of group membership, but who knows.   And to complete this picture of pretend (practice?) menace, the girls were being aggressive with one another, threating violence, promising vengeance, wowing the  car filled with the people in the car all of whom, including your trusty anthropologist, practice nonviolence as a way of life, blue helmet and all.  (Who cares about fashion when you can wear headgear that says, "please don't shoot me.") 

And then, as if by magic, a man appeared on one of the seats.  He was middle aged, deeply tanned, pretty well and casually dressed.  He had a big sports bag, brimming with paper and clothing.  And he was struggling with something...what was he struggling with?  Ah, a metal can filled with paint thinner.  He was grinning like a silent film villain, chuckling madly, establishing eye contact with everyone one by one.  (Canadians are wonderfully circumspect on this issue.  We can see sideways, so eye contact is quite unnecessary.)  And every so often he would dip a piece of fabric in the can, hold the fabric in a cupped hand, put his hand to his mouth, and inhale deeply.  Ah!  He was "huffing," I think it's called. 

The girls were stunned into silence.  I think they were surprised that anyone could be so absolutely menacing without the aid of fashionable clothing or gang colors.  The question was, how menacing? Was this guy a threat? The girls thought about it.   They seemed to decide the guy was harmless.  But there was another question.  Were they still menacing?

Just-enough, a new trend in the works (or, why Paul Allen's Octopus is really an Albatross)

They should draw an equation: What level of fame do you need to achieve to keep doing what you want?  Because you don't want any more than that.  (Tina Fey)

We are hearing a "just enough" sentiment more and more.  It's as if we are as a culture working on a new definition of what's enough.  And this marks a change.  After World War II, big was it.  In those days, nobody wanted to have "some fame."  Celebrities like Fey wanted to be the biggest star ever.  Winner take all.  Frank Sinatra size.  Jumbo big. 

As I was saying in my PSFK talk, the old model was America the bountiful, land of plenty.  In the 1950s, it was one size fit all: gigantic or nothing at all.  We wanted groaning buffet tables.  We celebrated the "good life:" by consuming heroic quantities of sugar, salt, fat, nicotine, alcohol and sun (and as much carbon as possible).  We wanted cars the size of a 1958 Cadillac, block long conveyances, fins and all.  We wanted more shoes the Imelda Marcos.  We wanted homes the size of a small town.  Small town?  Dayton, we wanted homes the size of Dayton.

The world used a Denny's model: all-you-eat plus 3000 calories more.  "No one leaves this place with an empty plate."  A Martian would wonder at this.  Denny's had given us more food than we could possibly eat.  Food was being wasted.  There was irrationality here, no?  What the Martian did not see was that there was a greater ritual objective to be satisfied.  America is about plenty, plenty of plenty and more to come.  America was limitless in its ability to inspire needs and satisfy them. 

This is still the logic of luxury markets.  That car by Maybach, that Birkin bag, that hotel suit by the Four Seasons, the jewelry by [insert name of incredibly high end jeweler here, all I can think of is Tiffany's].  The idea here is not to meet a minimum standard.  The idea is to  violate our scale of things and achieve the sublime.  The idea of luxury, even quiet luxury, is ever so briefly to take the breath away.

This idea will hold.  The rich will be with us always. But there is a new consumer aesthetic struggling to be born.  Some consumers, even very rich ones, now want just enough. 

When Yale economist Barry Nalebuff invented Honest Tea, he used this approach. 

Sugar, like most goods, has a declining marginal utility. One teaspoon takes away tea's bitterness. Another adds a nice sweetness. That's where we stop.

Newman's Own now makes a line of cereal called "sweet enough." 

Just enough is audible even in the start-up world of small business.  Old entrepreneurs used to talk about scaling up till they could sell out.  We wanted to get as big as possible to sell for as much as possible.  New entrepreneurs talk about getting big enough to "get comfortable."  And the idea is not to sell out but to sit tight.  A small winery, small software company, small consultancy, that's fine.  That's just enough.  In the case of Hollywood, everyone used to want to be Steven Spielberg.  Now some of them, Fey included, what to be Christopher Guest.  "Just live your life, make hilarious movies with your friends, and then go home."

What are the motives and motors of "just enough?"

Fey has a practical reason.  Fame comes with a price tag.  If you get too famous, you lose your privacy or as she puts it, you have people wanting to take "a picture of your butt on the beach."

Speaking of butts, there is a second motive for just-enough and it's the one that inspires us to shift from Coca-Cola as a sugary trophy of the consumer society to Barry's Honest Tea exercise in marginal utility and diminishing returns.  We want as much satisfaction as we can get without having to pay for it with calories and an expanding butt. 

In the case of an entrepreneur, "just enough" is about control.  Staying small(ish), staying private, supplying your own capital, all these mean calling your own shots.  Venture capitalists and Wall Street can drive someone else crazy.  The just enough entrepreneur can take his or her own chances.  When it comes time to choose between interesting and profitable, you can go with interesting.  Just enough in this case is about control. 

I wonder if one of the motives is also about freedom and mobility.  Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder, has a yacht that is 416 feet long.  It cost something like a quarter of a billion dollars.  It carries two helicopters.  It's so large it cannot dock anywhere on the French Riviera.  (That's why it needs those helicopters.  They are the only way to get to port.)  The "Octopus" seems to be a perfect example of way-too-much.  Possessions of this kind act like barnacles that slow movement and limit freedom.  "Going for a sail" must seem to Allen like something that requires him to mobilize a third-world country, an event so wearying that it must seem better, most of the time, just to leave the thing be.  Allen's Octopus is really an Albatross. 

But the biggest motive of just enough is the environmental one, clearly.  Now that we can see that reckless quantities actually have a cost beyond our own little domestic world, now we have a motive both personal and public.  I saw a man get out of his Hummer on St. Laurent in Montreal.  He was strutting a little as if to say, "check out my wheels."  In a way I have never seen before, passers by gave off an unmistakable feeling of contempt as it to say, "get the fuck out of here, you self congratulatory prick."  And he did.  He slunk back to his car and drove ever so meekly away.

This is the week in Connecticut when those little yellow "pesticide applied" rectangles bloomed on my neighbors lawns.  I may once have admired their perfect lawns.  Now, I could hear myself thinking, "Surely, a "just enough" lawn would be good enough, especially if it protected the Long Island sound from yet another infusion of poison.  Or is your lawn more important?"

All the really big trends have carried by lots of little trends in that "perfect storm" construction needs to drive competing trends (and all the noise) in our culture out of the way.  There is privacy, control, choice, freedom, mobility, and the environment.  And what happens when that happens.  Does America become more European, more Japanese.  It certainly, in some fundamental way, becomes less American.  We are reworking the fundamental terms of the consumer contract, and from this difference many more differences must flow. 

References

Anonymous.  2006.  It's hull to be famous.  The Sydney Morning Herald.  August 9, 2006.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/08/09/1154802947123.html

Baldwin, Kristen.  2008.  The Accidental Movie Star.  Entertainment Weekly.  Issue. 987, April 18, 2008.  pp. 20-26, p. 24.

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  PSFK talk.