Here are words to warm the hearts of the anthropologically minded.
The're from The Game-Changer: how you can drive revenue and profit growth with innovation, by Lafley and Charan.
P&G needed to look at consumer more broadly. It tended to narrow in on only one aspect of the consumer--for example, their mouth for oral-care products, their hair for shampoo, their loads of dirty clothes and their washing machines for laundry detergents.
P&G had essentially extracted the consumer out of her own life (and, at times, a particular body part as well!) and myopically focused on what was most important to the company--the product or the technology. P&G has since learned to understand and appreciate her and her life--how busy she is; her job responsibilities; the role she plays for her children, husband, and other family members; and her personal and family aspirations and dreams.
This broader view promises an advantage.
[It} has enabled the identifications of innovation opportunity that truly provide meaningful solutions to her household and personal-care needs and wants that otherwise wouldn't have been discovered through more-traditional, more-narrow, and often more-superficial methods. (p. 36)
I think some people in marketing continue to work with a narrow view. And I am sure it feels to them like an act of discipline. "Look how closely we scrutinize the consumer. Look how microscopic is our view!" But of course, as Lafley and Charan point out, this eliminates from view the very things that make the life make sense and opportunities come to view.
A complementary view can be found in Blue Ocean Strategy by Chan and Mauborgne. The argument here is not that we dolly back for the bigger picture, but that we scrutinze the assumptions that shape how we see the consumer and the marketplace. (And there is a real resonance here with Theodore Levitt's famous question, "what business are you in." Levitt liked to point out that Detroit researcher were a little like lawyers. They never asked a question to which they did not know the answer.)
Both the game-changer argument and the blue-oceans one represent what I think of, too parochially, I know, as anthropological reflexes. The first, from Lafley and Charan, says, "put this consumer and this problem in its broader context," and for an anthropologist, of course, this means the cultural context. The second, from Chan and Mauborgne, says, pay attention to the assumptions, the cultural logic, the shapes your understanding of the problem. Escape these and "blue oceans" (aka uncontested markets) open up to you.
But this is parochial of me. Here I am stuffing marketing models into anthropological ones, the very thing Lafley, Charan, Chan and Mauborgne criticize. What business am I in?
References
Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne. 2005. Blue Oceans Strategy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Lafley, A.G. and Ram Charan. 2008. The Game-changer. New York: Crown.
Levitt, Theodore. 1986. The Marketing Imagination. In The Marketing Imagination. New York: The Free Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Life and Google for access to this photo. It's by Mark Kauffman. It was taken in Seattle in 1955. It's called "Young houswife taking time for a cup of coffee while her sons play around her." here
I had the honor of doing a call with Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn on Monday. Jerry and Pip focus on "interactions between technology, business and society" and their Monday telephone "broadcast" looks at this topic from many points of view.
To prepare myself, I scratched out these notes to clarify what an anthropologist (or at least this anthropologist) has offer to a group like theirs.
1. I am interested in culture and commerce, especially as they intersect.
2. One of the things you see from this "picture window" is the arrival of new kinds of capital (cultural, social, intellectual, moral) and new kinds of exchange. This may or may not herald the arrival of a "gift economy."
Or to put this another way: Since the 17th century we have seen culture get more commercial. Now we are seeing commerce get more cultural.
3. Here's a story that means to illustrate what I mean by cultural and social capitals.
In 2000, a client asked me to study rum in the Maritime provinces of Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland).
I did my ethnographic research. I conducted a couple of focus groups and many one-to-one interviews. I asked men in middle age what they thought about alcohol, drinking alcohol, brands of alcohol, pubs, bars, parties, the whole "rum" package.
The first finding, the one just sitting there are the surface of everything else I learned, was that Maritimers are great talkers, that they have a fantastic collection of stories to tell, and that Martimers are especially active as talkers when active as drinkers. (Duh.)
Well, so, was this first finding something I could use, or was it merely an interesting observation, fun to know but not so very useful? I decided finally this finding ought to be the point of strategic and tactical departure. We needed to find some way of getting the brand involved in all these talkers talking.
My recommendation was that the brand ought to hire a handful of out-of-work actors, train them in the art of story telling, and set them into bars and pubs to tell a spell binding story. It was important that this was a bar that the story teller had never
been to before, and that he never went to again. I wanted to make the
story the original "mysterious stranger," a man for whom no information
was forthcoming. I wanted maximize the oddity of the event. (I once had a brother-in-law who was such a good story teller he routinely make the bars of St. Andrews fall completely silent and abjectly worshipful. This guy, David Joy, was my model, I think.)
I wasn't entirely clear how to feature the brand. Making it part of the story would be too obvious. It would diminish the magic of the story telling at a stroke. Standing everyone a round of the brand was possible but still trying to hard. The art of this deal was to evoke the brand without damaging the story telling. I decided finally that it would be just about right if the story teller merely ordered the brand for himself.
The idea was to create a cultural capital. That's what a story is. Naturally it had to be a good story, something with stormy seas, calamity, heroism, inexplicable outcomes, ghost ships, nature on the rampage, phantoms, pirates, princesses, Leviathans of the deep, etc. Just a telling of Turner's Shipwreck of the Minotaur (pictured above) would do. The idea, or one idea, is to tell a story that resonated with the best stories of this maritime culture.
But it wasn't just the story told that was key, it was the story telling. We wanted the actor to be tall, dark and handsome. We wanted the event to be rich in story but otherwise poor in detail. By withholding the identity, the motive, the mission of our story teller, we were inviting other story tellers to leap into action. In an oral culture this rich, staffed by story tellers this good, I felt certain the the bar would soon teem with many, conflicting ideas about who "this guy" was and why he had come to tell his single, perfect story. Nature abhors a vacuum. So do talkers.
So, the idea was to have the brand gift the community with a story told and the provocation of the story telling. The oral tradition on the Maritimes was now richer by one story and provoked to make up still more stories. And with every story told, the social capital, the connections between story tellers, will be augmented. (We can posit a crude metric here: the more talk that flows between talkers the richer the connections between them. The higher the quality of the talk and the more vivid the telling, the richer the connection. The more and the more richly we interact, the deeper our social capital. This social capital is fungible it can be spent in times of crisis and in aid of those in need. As you can see, I am sketching as I go. This is what precisely what needs working on and I suggested to Pip and Jerry that we find someone to sit out out to the desert in a benign version of the Manhattan project.) Thus does cultural capital begets social capital in moments of exchange.
I am obliged to tell you that the client absolutely hated this idea. He actually looked at me and scowled. (In the corporate world, in my experience, this very rarely happens. In the interests of good relations, everyone's a cipher.) Part of the problem is that in those days we didn't have the concepts we do today. The other problem is that marketing for spirits has a long traditional of deep stupidity. A favorite tactic is to paint an RV with the colors on the brand, put a really big image of the logo on the side, and fill it with cheerful, buxom women. By this standard, sending in poetic story tellers may have looked like a college prank, or perhaps an anthropological self indulgence.
But here's the pitch I would make now, and it is a pitch in the changed world of marketing that might now actually work. In our story teller scenario, the brand is creating a cultural meaning in the form of a story. It sends this story out into its brand community, where the local story tellers will convert it into social capital. These cultural and social capitals return to the brand and augment it as a kind of brand capital. If we have augmented the cultural and social world of the drinker successfully, we will move drinkers to switch to our brand and to purchase same. Now cultural and social capital have become a more fungible kind of capital. Now they convert into financial capital.
This is a value flight. The brand releases value into the world by contributing something not for itself but for the community of consumers. If the brand creates the right capitals, and the conversion chains work successfully, eventually value returns to them. But this is risky. There is no easy Smithian calculation here. It is not possible for the brand manager to judge tit for tat. It's hard to say how a story will create value for the corporation. It's harder to know how much should be invested in the story's creation.
4. It looks as if the old dog of marketing is having to learn a new trick. If we want to create financial capital, we may now have to help create social and cultural capital. This takes us a way from the old calculations of the marketplace. We are no longer creating "utility" (or not only creating utility). We are not making functional goods and services. We are creating culture and society. These have always been the off shoots of capitalism. Here they are the very objectives of the undertaking.
This is not a comfortable notion for many people in marketing. We are asking the brand manager to release value into the world without any reassurance it will return. We are saying that financial value now must sometimes come from complicated conversion chains that include cultural and social capital over which the marketer has no strict control. But this much is clear. The days of firing very simple messages repeatedly at monolithic groups of deeply passive consumer with the big cannons of TV, radio and print are over. If we want the brand to resonate for the consumer, we must make it participate in culture. We must bring the consumer in. We must bid them to help us build the brand. We must make ourselves companionable. And maybe it comes to that. Maybe its time to stop being that bore at the party, the blabbermouth in the corner, and step into the role of the story teller.
This isn't, in the clue train tradition of Doc Searls and David Weinberger, a matter of conversation. We have much more to do than merely hold up our side of the conversation. We are, whether we like it or not, the more active meaning maker in this conversation. We have to get things started. And we have to supply the conversations with semantic cues and interpretive riches. But after that, then, yes, it's very like a conversation.
5. The big questions, the take-aways, for anthropology:
5.1 what are the capitals, cultural and social?
5.2 how do they create one another?
5.3 how do they convert into one another?
5.4 what are the models and metrics with which we can clarify this issue?
I am hoping someone will send us to the desert to think about these issues.
6. If I'm not crazy about the "conversation" metaphor, I'm also not sure I'm crazy about the "gift economy." Which this space for more detailed criticism.
Post script:
During the course of the call, I was complaining as I always do about the embargo imposed intellectuals on the serious study of culture and commerce. (I have documented this charge in Culture and Consumption II if anyone wants the details.) I believe we are slow now to think about capital and capital conversion because of this embargo. And this raises the question: what changed? Why is it ok now to talk about the intersection of culture and commerce?
I caught a glimpse of one of these questions this morning when I stumbled upon this comment from Kevin Kelly on the Whole Earth Catalog.
Kevin Kelly:The WEC helped rid us of our
allergy to commerce. [Stewart] Brand believed in capitalism, just not by traditional
methods. He was the first person to embrace true financial transparency. His
decision to disclose WEC’s finances in the pages of the catalog had a profound
ripple effect. A lot of those hippies who dropped out and tried to live off the
land decided to come back and start small companies because of it. And out of
that came the Googles of the world.
The corporation contains two different creatures. It is two different creatures. I got to meet both of them this week.
I was talking to a guy who does marketing research for a big brand. He said, dismissively, "
"We no longer collect any numbers. Things change too fast. We don't
know what to measure. We do ethnographies and stuff...to find out
what's going on out there."
Last night I was talking to a graduate of the Sloan business
school at MIT. He doesn't think about something unless he's got the
numbers.
It's weird. It's seems to me that the corporation is becoming more quantitative and more qualitative.
Senior managers are getting more and better training in metrics. And
they are (for some purposes) now in possession of more and better data
suitable for "crunching." On the other hand, the role of concept
people, the quantitative creatures, grows ever more important.
Corporate wayfinding and innovation are otherwise unthinkable.
The continental drift continues. The qualitative and the quantitative
are two solitudes, they are Snow's two cultures. And it remains
fashionable to take sides. The numbers people sneer at the hopeless
imprecision of a world without numbers. The concept people believe
that anyone who waits for the world to manifest its intentions in
numbers will have waited too late.
The world loves to organize itself on this distinction. The bschools
are sold on numbers. I watched management at the Harvard Business
School vote for still more math. You could almost hear the collected
faculty exulting. "That'll show em!" And I thought to myself: "you
have just made this place even more monolithic. And HBS is supposed to
be the manager's school!"
And of course on the concept side, there are people who are hostile to
numbers and to the deeply grounded thinking that numbers make
possible. This group likes to flit from "creativity" to "innovation"
to "getting in touch with their feelings." Can it be surprising that
managers think, "Good lord, you want me to trust the fate of the
corporation to Peter Pan, to a person who thinks it's attractive to be
all creative and crazy and out of touch with the world."
Finally, of course, this is an empty tribalism. Really, in their heart's of
hearts, everyone
knows you use numbers when you can, and concepts when you must.
Numbers when possible, concepts when necessary. Which is another way
of saying, more qualitative, more quantitative, all the time.
Concept to the rescue. Is there a way to think about the qualitative
and the quantitative so that they are not mutually exclusive
categories?
Is this a center-periphery relationship? Deep inside the corporation
and high up in senior management, the corporation thinks in numbers.
On the edges, out "there" where it makes contact with dynamic taste and
preference, it thinks in words, imagines, metaphors. We could evoke a
Medieval concept of physiology and say that the corporation (the body)
is qualitative in its the organs of apprehension, and quantitative at
the seat of comprehension.
Oh, but I'm quite sure someone can do better than this. And someone's
going to have to. As the corporation is obliged to become more
qualitative and more quantiative, we need to come to our senses. I
mean, comes to our wits. No, our senses. Yes, our...
In the Wall Street Journal today, the book review opens this way.
Consider Linda, a 31-year-old woman, single and bright. As a student, she was deeply concerned with discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear protests. Which is more probable? (a) Linda is today a bank teller; (b) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.
[Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky determined] that most respondents picked "b," even though this was the narrower choice and hence the less likely one.
Shaywitz, the reviewer, says that Kahneman and colleagues have
reshap[ed] the study of economics by challenging the assumption that a person, when faced with a choice, can be counted on to make a rational decision.
I would argue that "b" is the rational decision. It shows us the respondent working with what he knows. We have given him a little information and he is working this information into an intelligent choice.
Except of course the economist will not accept a choice as intelligent unless it meets his narrow definition of the rational. For the economist, the rational choice is the broader choice. "A" is more likely because less constrained. From a better's point of view, this is the right choice. But it is not, I submit, the more rational one. Because it forces the respondent to forget what he knows, to forgo the opportunity we have given him to make an "informed" choice.
We could do the ethnography here. If we asked the the respondent how he thought this problem through, he would give us an account of his "rationality." He would demonstrate that he satisfies the definition of the term according to Princeton Wordnet. It would be easy enough to show that he occupied "the state of having good sense and sound judgment."
Economics continues to insist on its notion of rationality when we know that this rationality is always embedded in a social context and a cultural one. Rationality is only sometimes about calculating odds. It's also about working with a set of parameters and bodies of knowledge. Rationality is almost always profoundly social and culture event.
In the experiment reported in the WSJ, Kahneman was effectively asking the respondent to "forget what he knew" to make the rational choice. Funny how often economics seems to ask us to do the same.
References
Shaywitz, David A. 2008. Free to choose but often wrong. Wall Street Journal. June 24, 2008.
There was report yesterday in The Telegraph reporting the "death of the dining room."
More
than a half million dining rooms will be demolished in Britain next year,
and Halifax Home Insurance believes the dining room may have
disappeared completely by 2020.
In North America, we think of
this as the rise of the" great room,"a topic we have treated in this
blog a couple of times. A vast transformation took place in our
domestic world, and it reflects I think changes in how people work, how
they eat, and how they interact as families.
In particular,
open kitchen is the material manifestation of feminism. Women
complained that the dining room made them servants in their own home,
obliged to leave their guests and ferry things to and from the kitchen,
charging through heavy doors, turning their backs on the festivities
and otherwise obliged to absent themselves from the occasion.
The
open kitchen also suits new models of parenting. Americans are
inclined to raise their kids in a way that privileges emotional and
physical freedom over ceremonial perfection. From this point of
view, the dining room was always a problem. It insisted that kids be
formal, still, observant, when their natural condition, especially in
an over stimulating America, was more active and spontaneous. The great
invention of the new kitchen is the island at its center. Kids treat
this as a planet around which they orbit during meal time. Less
confined, they are more agreeable. More agreeable kids make for more agreeable
parents.
For both these public and private purposes, the open
kitchen was an important step for the North American home. I have once
or twice looked for the figures and couldn't ever find them. But they
must be astronomical. The money that North Americans spent and will
spend to open their homes must many hundreds of millions.
But
to see this development at work in the UK is much more
remarkable, I think. After all, the hold of Victorian propriety, the
notion of the dining room as an important ritual location of family
life, the belief in formality as a necessary coin in the social economy,
one would guess that these are still more active in the UK...or at
least not so steeply in decline as they are in the US.
Research
I did last spring suggested that the open kitchen is not just an
enthusiasm of the British, but may now be seen in Germany, Belgium,
France (a little less), and Poland. This suggests either that there
are non cultural forces at work here, or that there is a pan-Western
cultural trend under way. Certainly, this would be consistent with the
shift we see in the world of photograph where the portrait has given
way to the more spontaneous action shot.
The new orthodoxy discourages
us from making even very tiny generalizations. This means that
observations about pan-Western culture should be laughably out of bounds. But I am
always surprised how little interest my respondents have in the new
strictures of academic discourse. It doesn't matter how much I scold
them, how often I give them the gospel according to Derrida, Foucault,
and Baudrillard, they just go right ahead and remodel their kitchens.
References
Borland,
Sophie. 2008. Open-plan living leads to death of dining room. The
Telegraph. January 29, 2008. here.
Kron, Joan. 1983. Home-Psych: The social psychology of home and decoration. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.
Further reading:
Ames,
Kenneth L. 1985. Why Things Matter. The Material Culture of American
Homes. Unit 1 ed. Philadelphia: produced for The Henry Francis du Pont
Winterthur Museum.
Ames, Kenneth. 1992. Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Carlisle, Susan G. 1982. French Homes and French Character. Landscape 26, no. 3: 13-23.
Cowan,
Ruth Schwartz. 1992. Coal stoves and clean sinks: Housework between
1890 and 1930. American home life, 1880-1930: A social history of
spaces and services. editors Jessica H. Foy, and Thomas J. Schlereth,
211-24. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Denby, David. 1996. Buried Alive: Our children and the avalanche of crud. The New Yorker LXXII, no. 19: 48-58.
Doucet,
Michael J., and John C. Weaver. 1985. Material Culture and the North
American House: The Era of the Common Man, 1870-1920. The Journal of
American History 72: 580-587.
Dugan, I. Jeanne. 1997. Someone's in the kitchen with Martha. Business Week July 28, 1997: 58-59.
Foy,
Jessica H., and Thomas J. Schlereth, editors. 1992. American home life,
1880-1930: A social history of spaces and services. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press.
Gowans, Alan. 1986. The comfortable house: North American suburban architecture, 1890-1930. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Laumann,
Edward. O., and James. S. House. 1970. Living Room Styles and Social
Attributes: The Patterning of Material Artifacts in a Modern Urban
Community. Sociology and Social Research 54, no. 3: 321-42.
Monkhouse,
Christopher. 1982. The Spinning Wheel as Artifact, Symbol, and Source
of Design. Victorian Furniture: Essays from a Victorian Society
Symposium. editor Kenneth L. Ames, 155-72. Nineteenth
Plante, Ellen M. 1995. The American kitchen, 1700 to the present : from hearth to highrise. New York, NY: Facts on File.
Pratt,
Gerry. 1981. The House as an Expression of Social Worlds. Housing and
Identity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. editor James S. Duncan, 135-80.
London: Croom Helm.
Rapoport, A. 1969. House Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Thompson,
Eleanor McD., editor. 1998. The American home: material culture,
domestic space, and family life. Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont
Winterthur Museum.
Vickery, Amanda. 1993. Women and the World of
Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions, 1751-81. Consumption
and The World of Goods. editors John Brewer, and Roy Porter, 274-301.
London: Routledge.
Saturday, I bought an iPhone. What does that make me? A really late
adopter. The last to know. Very late to the party. Malcolm Gladwell
has a term for people like me but he's too polite to use it.
I
am stunned at how intelligent the iPhone is, and I retired my Sony
Ericcson W810 with no regrets. In fact, the SE was so bad at the
things the iPhone does well, I am thinking of giving it a ritual burial
in the back yard, a technological exorcism, as it were. I want to make
absolutely sure it has no residual hold on me. (Digital residue being
the worst possible thing.)
The SE did one thing well. It took
miraculously good photos. There were times when I wanted to crawl into
the world so pictured and just stay there. Apparently, this isn't
possible. (Product feature idea?) But the SE was bad at capturing
numbers, delivering email, managing calendars, delivering music, and
otherwise making itself useful.
The SE was an exercise in claustrophobia and bean counting. The iPhone makes it really easy to
capture data. Now I get the point of a touch screen alphabet. It
allows for a bigger screen, a better speaker and an astoundingly better
interface. There is something visible, accessible, conceptual about
this phone that 10 years of cell phone use had not prepared me for.
It's miraculously good.
The question is "what took me so
long?" My wife has owned an iPhone for months and she loves it.
Friends rave about it. But I would not budge. The problem, I think,
is that for me Apple products have an air of specialness about them. I
don't resent this air. I just feel that it doesn't belong to me. I
prefer to think of myself as a "plain style" kind of guy. (This may be
a way of saying "I'm special" because, "behold, I am not special." It
wouldn't be the first time a social vocabulary has coded "x" as "not
x." Protestants, they're just plain sneaky.)
This suggests a
massive marketing problem for Apple. What makes the iPhone thrilling
for its present constituency proves off putting for the rest of a
muchlarger market. This is not a technological chasm, to use Moore's
language. It is a cultural chasm.
So Apple is working on
repositioning itself, right? No. The present campaign, the one that
shows Microsoft and Apple as two men on a sound stage, this actually
exacerbates the problem. The execution is fine. The ads plays
perfectly. The Apple guy is unassuming, unprovocative, likeable, more
or less Canadian,in point of fact. His opposite, the Microsoft guy, is
an obnoxious, self centered blowhard. And a lot like me. Well, no,
it's not that I identify with the Microsoft guy. It's that I can't
imagine being mistaken for the Apple guy. That's just not me.
I
had a go at this issue some time ago, while contemplating the problem
that Prius has in this regard. There is a slightly holier than thou
quality to the Huffington crowd and this has the effect of discouraging
the very adoption they wish to inspire. So we might argue here, as I
did there, that Apple has been taken hostage by its adopters. We are,
in other words, wrong to think that there is a natural momentum to
adoption as things pass down the diffusion stream. In point of face,
there is a chasm here that must be finessed.
The question is
whether there might be a Diderot effect to this purchase. Will the
symbolic meanings of the iPhone creep into my sense of self, and
gradually set in train a sense of transformation. Watch this space.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2007. The Prius Problem. This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. here.
This is a small note of appreciation for the Kleenex "let it out" ad now
running on television. You may have seen it. It features people weeping copiously
in public.
Now, this is the last place you would expect a brand to play. Big
emotions? In public? People losing control of the feelings? In
public?
Something in the culture of marketing balks at this. Emotions in
advertising were supposed to be upbeat, cheery, and peppy. That's why
we have been forced suffer all that "fun in the sun" advertising.
Addled icons like The Doublemint Twins, the forced good humor of a
family drive to Knott's Landing, the spectacular gratitude that came
from discovering just how much fun to operate a George Foreman grill, these were the emotional orthodoxies of the advertising
world. Negative emotions were forbidden. The culture created by capitalism
was thin and risible.
Plus, something in the culture of marketing balked at associating the
brand with something it couldn't "own." What marketers really wanted
was the Unique Selling Proposition, the one functional utility the
brand possessed over all others. People crying in public? Who could own this?
We can imagine the contest that took place within the agency (JWT, New
York) and the brand (Kimberly-Clark). In the old days, "let it out"
was an impossible marketing proposition and even today it remains a struggle. So hat's off to the agency team and the marketing group. Hat's off, specifically, to Walt Connelly,
Toby Barlow as executive creative directors, Jim Carroll as art director;
Richie Glickman as creative director/copywriter, all of JWT New York.
The fact that "let it out" appears in
this campaign tells us that marketing is becoming a little more
anthropological. Brands are listening to their publics more closely.
They are taking in aspects of the human experience more broadly. They
are playing back things that have a little more narrative or at least
dramatic oomph. They are now prepared to send their brands up the value hierarchy. They are making themselves partners to larger,
worthier undertakings than fun in the sun. (See for instance the work
done by Done on the ideas we have about beauty and bodies.)
Here's text I found on the letitout.com website.
Why do people keep things bottled up inside? It makes no sense. Nothing good comes from that. With that in mind, we invite and encourage you to let it out. Let out your tears, your joy, your anger, your frustration, your laughter and even your snot. Why? Because you'll feel better. How do we know? Because we recently went across America and watched all kinds of people let out all kinds of stuff. Some of those moments ended up on tv. Others are right here for your viewing pleasure. So go ahead, check them out -- then let it out™.
Ok, let's stop right there. Apparently, KC has trademarked "let
it out." And this is proof that the corporation and marketing still
has a lot to learn. When you seek to make cultural meanings part
of the brand proposition, you are a guest in someone's house. The
moment you start stuffing the silver into your pockets, that's when
we're going to ask you to leave.
Now that you've finished Martin Cruz Smith's Stalin'sGhost, may I
suggest something in a non-fiction, grand-theme, deeply
thoughtful, wonderfully written treatise. Something that takes on the
big question, specially, how market societies manage to work as
societies.
May I recommend The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre
McCloskey.
My favorite quote so far:
But the assault on the alleged vices of the bourgeoisie and capitalism
after 1848 made an impossible Best into the enemy of an actual Good.
(2)
References
McCloskey, Deirdre. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an age of
commerce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Order it here.
Here's what I got from my sister for Christmas. It's her best gift ever. (Click on the object to make it larger.)
I know it looks like
an 25 year old prescription bottle. That's because it is. It was
issued on December 20, 1979 by Dr. Allman through Folkestad's Pharmacy
in Lincoln City, Oregon. It contained Tranxene, an anxiety medicine.
The
gift is a puzzle. My sister is saying, "What happened here? Who was
this guy?" And it's a good challenge because there are lots of
particulars. The patient, the doctor, the pharmacy, the place and the
time are all specified. My sister found something tagged with enough
information to make historical detective work possible...but not easy.
My sister sent me a message in a bottle, someone else's message...in a prescription bottle.
She
is responding to my new hobby. A couple of summers ago, I had found a
passport for a German beautician called Erna Schonwald. Using the
internet as my new historical decoder ring I was able to access the
Ellis Island website, a publication of the East Point Oysters Company
in Washington, the Seattle phone book for 1923, historical details on
the Cobb Medical Building built in Seattle in 1910, and the 1930
census.
As a result, I was able to determine that Erma arrived in the US in
1923, sponsored by her brother Phillippe, a physician, who had arrived
the year before with wife, children and servant in tow. Erna went to
live in Seattle where she worked for her brother as a book keeper, and
lived with a woman called Ariston Schwertner. I posted these results
and actually made contact with one of Erna's descendants. (I am still
waiting for her to take receipt of Erna's passport.)
I think I
know what happened. My sister was at a garage sale or a yard sale.
She found the prescription bottle in a pile of junk, and thought, "this
will drive him crazy." So far so good.
What's changed? The internet makes each of us an amateur sleuth.
There are lots of resources out there. The fact that I could find a
Seattle phone book from the 1920s on line struck me as absolutely
miraculous. But there is no reason why every phone book for every year
for every city shouldn't be available eventually. The resources are
going to get steadily better. And this means small efforts at
sleuthing will bring ever greater results. And that means that the
internet will begin to satisfy the satisfaction threshhold of more and
more people. And that means that many more people will participate.
And that will incent even more people to digitize phone books, and
perhaps even create a sleuthing market of the kind that has sprung up
around genealogy.
That change makes for another change. A whole set of objects should suddenly return to
scrutability, as it were. Erna's passport that is something any good
historian should have been able to make speak. But with internet research instruments at our disposal, a vast set of objects will be capable of speech. Passports, prescription bottles, books
with plates in them, school scribblers, wallets, purses (assuming some
identifiers), cell phones with data still inside, computers (assuming
the same), clothing with names sewn in, automobiles, houses. There's a
lot out there.
And what happens then? People would begin to restore historical
details to objects, and in some cases restore the objects to owners or
the ancestors of owners. They could give them to museums. Or they could build magnificent personal collections that attract interest from other collectors, the historical community, and the museum world.
Or, we can imagine a "catch and release" program, that encourages me to
document my prescription bottle, tag it with the information I discover
about it, and then return it to the year sale circuit. There is
something like this already in the form of Geocaching, where objects
are being tagged with GPS coordinates. I like the idea of a garage sale in which some of the objects come with data attached.
A market will surely form, both a market for information that makes tagging
orphan easier and a market for objects themselves. Surely the
better tagged an object is, the more valuable it becomes. We can imagine a big piece of the eBay market raising on this tide. And a culture, too. We are on the verge of many more objects and many more people entering
the curatorial world. (Or perhaps I have that the wrong way round.)
Naturally, this raises questions of privacy. The prescription bottle I got from my sister was once filled with an anxiety medication. Which tells us volumes about the person to whom it was prescribed. I have blocked out his name, because, well, maybe he doesn't want all the world to know he was suffering anxiety in the late 1970s. (Though, I think it's fair to say we all were. I carried a brown paper bag with me everywhere I went.) Are we entitled to retrospective privacy? Tough one.
References
McCracken,
Grant. 2006. What I did on my summer vacation (or, "May I have your
passport, please?") This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology
and Economics. August 22, 2006. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2003. Tag, We're it. This Blog Sits at the
Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. January 05, 2003. here.
Now that I have placed my order, I learn that the OLPC is in trouble,
big trouble. Nicholas Negroponte's 3rd world computer is under attack.
OLPC was purported to have commitments from Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina,
and Thailand to buy 1 million computers each. A published report says
Libya was going to buy 1.2 million computers. The Taiwanese
manufacturer was told to expect orders of 5 to 8 million. That's all
over now.
Now, there is competition in the marketplace. Now, Nigeria is in line to buy "Classmate" computers from Intel.
Now, there's bad-mouthing from rival C-Suites. The Intel Chairman
called the OLPC computer a "gadget." And Bill Gates, chairman of
Microsoft, let fly with this:
Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and
you are not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to
type.
This is brave talk for a guy who hasn't had an idea since the 20th century. Microsoft is Japan circa 1950, an
imitator incapable of innovation that matters. (And if you don't believe me, I have a Zune I'd like to sell you.)
Here's the thing in a nut shell: Negroponte's One Computer Per Child
project looked like a brilliant, necessary idea in 2005. Now it's a
project in shambles.
Right? Wrong. We could argue that Intel and Microsoft are rushing
this market precisely because they were terrified that the first one in could own it. And this is a way of saying that Negroponte almost
certainly moved up the Intel and Microsoft participation by, what?, a
couple of years. Now we have a robust market, with real choices,
competitors with deep pockets, momentum, urgency; not philanthropy, but
that beast called capitalism.
And what's that worth? To move everything up by a couple of years?
Naturally, this is one of those calculations that don't calculate very
well. But at a minimum we would want to factor in
Kids who:
get on line
get knowledge
make knowledge
distribute knowledge
make friends
join networks
build networks
teach themselves to read
master math become more cosmopolitan learn to think clearly learn to solve problems learn to teach learn to lead learn to enterprise learn to spot zealotry and jingoism learn to refuse prejudice and violence create value for their families, communities, country, the human community
x some millions
x ~2 years
Damn. Who called the computer a difference engine? Negroponte has created a lot of difference.
Does he get thanked? No, he gets dissed and displaced. He pays yet another penalty of taking the lead. He is paying for making a market where
once there was none. Someday we'll come to our senses. Negroponte will get
his Nobel Peace Prize. In the meantime, this must really suck.
References
Markoff, John. 2004. Silicon Valley Seeks Peace in War With Microsoft. New York Times. April 4, 2004. here.
Stecklow, Steve and James Bandler. 2007. A Little Laptop With Big
Ambitions: How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants.
Wall Street Journal. November 24-25, 2007. here.
Postscript:
For more details on the One Laptop Per Child "Give One, Get One" program, go here.
