This Blog Sits at the

Great rooms all over the place

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.

The Huffington problem: saving innovations from their early adopters

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 . 

anthropology and the new branding: Kleenex for good and bad

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.

You can find the Let It Out website here.   

More reading for the holidays

Now that you've finished Martin Cruz Smith's Stalin's Ghost, 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.   

Orphan objects: new markets, new cultures

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.   

Nicolas Negroponte's difference engine

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. 

PSA (Plain Style Anthropology)

Last week, I had the honor of speaking to a distinguished senior anthropologist.  (I will name him, if he'll let me.)  We talked about a lot of things, but we stopped a moment to mourn the rise of a post modern anthropology. 

Today, I came across these well chosen words in the Times Literary Supplement. 
Traditionalists who lament the decline of old crafts and media in Western art are mourning a loss not so much of sophistication as of innocence.  It is not nowadays enough just to depict things because you think they're interesting to think about, or, God forbid, pleasing to look at.  The almost Maoist culture of self-examination, and critical engagement with this or that artistic tradition, which modern Western art schools enforce, give much contemporary art its force, but also contribute to one big weakness.  Much contemporary art is what an old-school aesthete would call mannerist - it's art about art, not art about life.

Different field, same problem, apparently.  For many of my disciplinary brothers and sisters, anthropology is about anthropology, not about life.  It's mannerist.

Now I would like to say that I refused mannerist anthropology, rising up to slay the postmodern dragon with the bright sword of my Chicago training.  But the fact of the matter is simpler and less noble.  I make my living as a practicing anthropologist and post modernist verities don't serve me very well. 

This October I will have done projects for a new media firm, a Canadian telecom, a sporting equipment company, and a research firm, and I will have given presentations to designers, financial marketers, and people interested in trends.  Every report and presentation was designed to fit what I believed would serve my client, and never once did it seem to me they needed to hear choice words from Derrida or Lacan.   I need ideas I can use, because I make my living selling ideas that clients can use. 

But no, it's probably not just pragmatism.  It's not just the market imposing an intellectual discipline.  I am Scottish Canadian Presbyterian of middle age for whom the "plain style" is more or less built in.  (I had to get over the pretensions of my youth for these to become clear.)  Postmodernism is too slushy for me.  (It may herald an epistemological springtime, but this Canadian wants the bracing clarities of a winter's day.)  I think best when using simple propositions, put as plainly as possible, with evidence and argument summoned as necessary (and no more), with a "garnish" of metaphor to make comprehension faster and more fun. 

Plain style anthropology comes with engineering specs on the outside.  You can see what the pieces (propositions) are and how the relationships (the argument) work.  You can see what the fault lies, and what needs fixing...when something needs fixing.  And yes I understand that I making old fashioned demands, and that these badly misunderstand the intellectual, political and epistemological challenges before us.  But hey, I have a problem to solve, a client to satisfy, a post to right, and I have, usually, 40 minutes to wrap things up.  You've noticed I expect that postmodernists have a way of making the same argument over and over again.  They are, after all, mannerists.  Anthropology is about anthropology and always, come to that, the same anthropology. 

References

Miller, Keith.  2007.  More whaling and shouting.  Times Literary Supplement.  October 19, 2007, p. 17. 

Gratuitous remarks

I have just started up reading TLS after years away from it, and I have to say what a pleasure it is.  It's never very expensive and it would be good value at 4 times the cost. 

Apology

Sorry not to have been posting.  I am at a kind of brainstorming thing in Mexico and time and internet access are in short supply.

Nike + and the creation of private and public consumer value

When BusinessWeek gets around to choosing the best innovation of 2007, Nike + will win going away.  It's an astonishing development.

Here's how it works: I put a chip in my (Nike) running shoe.  This broadcasts information to the iPod nano I carry with me on the run.  I come home from a run (more usually, a walk) and my iPod uploads my running information to the Nike website where it is aggregated with all the other running/walking data uploaded by all the other runners and walkers in America.

I know.  I know.  This is one of those classic innovation moments that makes you go, "Wait.  What?"  Actually, this is actually what I got engraved on my Nano.  There's a good chance you will have to try this technology before it makes perfect sense.

See the image insert.  (Clicking on it will make it easier to read.)  This describes my walk for yesterday.  The line represents the moments I sped up and slowed down.  It appears that I came to a dead stop at one point.  I have no idea what happened there. Mooning over flowers, possibly?  You can see the overall distance. Along the top are my accumulated stats.  As I say, I am walking on most trips, so that's why the mile per hour figure is so large. 

One way to understand this innovation is to look at the private and public value it creates.

Exercise is lonely, painful, and boring.  And this is enough to discourage most people from doing it faithfully (or at all).  Nike + can't actually do anything about the painful part, but it gets at lonely and boring very effectively.  It allows everyone to devote their miles to challenges. 

This means, for instance, that everyone on the South side of Chicago can now use their miles to compete against everyone on the North side of Chicago.  The Nike + works as a vast spread sheet.  It sums all the runs.  At the end of every day, you can watch your run uploaded and you can see who's winning the challenges you belong to. 

That's an incentive that may launch a couch potato out of the house. If our runner is just running for himself, well, the temptation to remain housebound is strong.  But if he is now running for everyone on the South side of Chicago, and his team now happens to be just a few hundred miles from acing those North side numskulls, it's a different proposition altogether.

The private value is that I exercise more.  The public value is that I now "belong" to and participate with collectivities that would otherwise not much interest me.  This is a kind of mechanized networking of the kind we see more and more of. 

Of course, these are early days.  I am using my accumulated miles to compete in a competition between my little town in Connecticut and Steam Boat Springs, Colorado.  It's not going very well.  No one in Steam Boat Springs has picked up the challenge.  Or maybe that's not so bad.  (We could take this one.)   My little town in Connecticut is not always the friendliest place in the world.  (That New England frostiness, you know.)  But I can see our competition with Steam Boat Sprngs changing changing that a little.   (I also issued an open challenge to all the towns smaller than 5 k in Connecticut, proving that I didn't really get how challenges work.)  As I say, it's early days.  This is one of those technologies that is going to find its own applications, and amaze us as it does.

I wonder if we are going to see that Nike miles "on the ground" will become anything like frequent-flyer miles "in the air."  We were all surprised to see the air miles became a measure for things other than travel and a currency in markets beyond the frequent-flyer one.  It's not hard to imagine runners becoming "mile philanthropists," donating their miles to worthing causes, with brands other than Nike matching them mile for mile. 

But these are down stream effects.  In the meantime, the question is simply: did Nike accomplish something that is good for the brand.  Well, in my own experience, it just went from being another sports supplier to an enabler that has changed the way I think about exercise and the way I participate in it. More than that, Nike has found a way to amplify my accomplishments...and then broadcast them. 

Talk about engagement.  Talk about partnering with the consumer! Talk about brand and consumer cocreating.  Geez, Louise, this is good marketing.

post script

I am traveling most of tomorrow.  I will blog if I can but I will be most of the day in the plane.

post script 2

The partnership with iPod uses music in some interesting and useful ways.  I left out this part of the story to simplify the exposition.

References

The website for Nike + is here. 

Gawker.com as a Harvard Business School case study

One of the joys of teaching at the Harvard Business School was watching 80 students take on a problem, chew through the data, and work their way to clarity.

What would they do with "Everybody Sucks"?  This is an exquisitely interesting article in the current issue of New York Magazine.  It treats Gawker, the gossip column that has attracted so much attention recently on the web. 

I propose to treat "Everybody Sucks" as if it were a case study tossed into the Piranha-filled waters of HBS classroom.  I don't say that I will do as good a job as 80 HBS students.  But I'm going to try. 

Extracting the issues

1. the tone of the article is agonized, and it doesn't take long to see why.  The author, Vanessa Grigoriadis, is caught in a contradiction. She is a member of a journalist class that has long enjoyed the pleasure of playing the outsider, telling truth to power.  For someone who belongs to this class, Gawker comes as a nasty surprise.  It is a website that treats journalists as they treat the rest of New York. Gawker has scorned Grigoriadis herself, "dragging my family," she says, "into [a] foul, bloggy sewer..."

2. Grigoriadis' discomfort is something more than a personal problem.  It is something more than a sociological switcheroo.  It is an technological and economic issue in so far as it represents the disintermediation of a marketplace.  The internet makes possible another lawyer of journalism, a new medium for public discourse, and the participation of a new generation of individuals, as a result of which journalists matter less than they used to.  They do not control our access to the news, as once they did.  They do not shape our understanding of the world, as once they did.  They do not play gatekeeper, as once they did.  This elite has lost power. (And this is a special injury for journalists.  Badly paid, and shabbily treated, power was the best of their compensations.)

3. How old is Gawker?  Not very.  (I can get away with this sort of thing on a blog.  In the HBS classroom, everyone would have extracted this from the article.  Ok, it was 2002.  I looked.)  In this brief history, Gawker has undergone a disintermediation of its own.  In the early days, comments on site were an "embarrassment," to use the language of Gawker owner Nick Denton.  But they are now, he says, a strength.  Post comments introduce what Denton calls an element of "anarchy" Gawker was beginning to lose.

4.  Here we could depend upon a student to observe the rise of "commenter value" and to say that even the disintermediators are now at risk of being disintermediated.  The Gawker bloggers who challenged New York journalists are now being challenged in their turn by Gawker commenters. 

5.  And this latter-day change suggests the possibility of another business model, which Grigoriadis sketches in the following way:

Gawker as an automated message board, with commenters generating exponentially greater numbers of page views as they click all over the site to see reactions to their comments, could be the dream.  There would then be no editors to pay...  (135)

This is extraordinary.  I am not sure we would want to call it an exercise in the wisdom of crowds.  It's spleen soaked discourse, as if the body politic has lost all bladder control.  But the idea of journalist-free journalism, this is interesting.

6. Some debate would surely turn on how how very disagreeable Gawker is.  It is a "foul, bloggy sewer."  It specializes in the ad hominem attack. Indeed, it has turned this into the exclusive stuff of its "journalism."  We might argue, in its defense, that this is what we ask of journalism.  Doubting people's motives, puncturing their pretensions, seeing past their self serving accounts of what they do, this is what the press is for.  But Gawker takes this to an extreme so loathsome, it diminishes the reader as much as the victim. 

Not a week goes by when I don't want to quit this job, because staring at New York in this way makes me sick.  (Choire Sicha, Gawker managing editor, p. 42)

It is finally, I would guess, the person who works at Gawker who pays the highest price.  If you doubted and diminished motives 12 posts a day, surely an accumulated cynicism must eventually render you incapable of participating in contemporary culture in any other way

7. There is a larger way to make this argument and surely someone in the classroom can be relied upon to chime out this: Gawker is merely the latest symptom of a cultural decline, further proof that Western Civilization is going to hell in a handbasket, incontrovertible evidence that politesse is dying and civility is dead.

8. Another student else could be relied upon to respond that this is perhaps the essential truth of capitalism, that we live in a culture shaped by what people want, not what we think they should want.  The success of Gawker tells us that people want to read this stuff.  This doesn't make Gawker right, or true, or just.  But it does mean that it has a constituency, that it represents a market. Finally, it's not about us.  It's about the reader.  And this, not to put too fine a point on it, is precisely what makes markets responsive, and, yes, unseemly.  But if you have to choose...and we do.

9.  There is an anthropological observation to make here, and this kind of thing is notoriously difficult to get into the HBS classroom and culture.  And that is that people have been declaring the decline of Western civilization for some hundreds of years.  And I think it's fair to say that even by the most typical Victorian standard, even the most conservative among us looks slovenly and vulgar, a lawless wretch incapable of probity or finer feeling.  We are horrified by what we see there, but our children and our children's children may will wonder what the issue was. 

10. We are reacting to the reformation of our culture and the not very dangerous decline of old sensitivities.  Most everything that has happened in the last 100 years tells us that these sensitivities may be "reset" without actually damaging the moral core on which restraint and civilization depend.  Western civ will survive even this.   (Why do we think it's so delicate?) 

11. What we are hoping for is that someone has picked up a stray sentence buried in the middle of the article, dropped into the article by Grigoriadis without further comment. 

Denton...gives free reign to editors to attack anyone they'd like (only ex-employees get a free pass).  (43)

Case studies are sly creatures.  They hide the best things, the better to give the clever students a chance to identify themselves. 

12. Let's begin with the disagreeable contradiction.  This "fearless journalism," "anti-media," "friend of the people" stuff only works when no one is protected.  The moment you exempt your own is the moment you become yet another special pleader, a vested interest, and a perfect scoundrel. 

13. But, hey, this is a case study...in a business school...searching out opportunity, and as opportunities go, this is an absolute beauty.  In my classroom, it would have been someone like Charles Hale, Yen Liow, Neil Houghton, students who would have surveyed the problem, spotted the opportunity, and schooled us with 40 well filled seconds of observation and a new map of the problem.

The moment Denton exempts his staff, he opens a competitive opportunity.  Why not a Gawker watcher website that catalogs the real and imagined life failings of people who once worked for Gawker? 

Let's calculate the number of people Gawker has offended, the depth of the offense, and their wish for revenge.   Small number, big offense.  (What would these numbers look like?)

We want three things for this group:

1. we want them to come to our "Gawker watcher" website
2. we want them to supply content for the website by remarking on the lives of ex-Gawker employees
3. we want them to act as early adopters who spread the word of our website

Gawker victims have been deeply, publicly wounded.  The need for revenge must run deep.  And it is not as if they do not control the means of production.  They are talented writers equipped with research skills, and they occupy a proximate professional and social world. They know who the ex-Gawker writers are.  They know where they live.  Failing that, they know how to find them.  Failing that, they will feel themselves to have a license to just make stuff up, the more damaging the better.  We can rely on Gawker watcher to make up in creative writing anything it happens to lack in investigative reporting.

14. Classroom debate will  center on whether a little website like "Gawker watcher" could ever scale up.  If it remains a local New York enthusiasm written about a tiny world by a world that isn't much bigger, I mean, really, who cares?  But that's the point about small enterprise and the classic start up.  All you really need is the beachhead, the place from which to start.  Once that's in place, we can add on additional content, new targets, bigger audiences.  We can bootstrap it upwards.  The question is this: is there enough here in the first instance to give us purchase in the marketplace, to carve out a little niche in a world where, frankly, Denton now controls the waterfront with the powers of a mob boss or a union head.

15. The business opportunity aside, I wonder if the presence of a Gawker watcher website would have a salutary effect on Gawker itself.  If I were a present Gawker writer, such a thing would give me pause.  The knowledge that my victim is now supplied with the opportunity to defame me, this might change what I say.  The Gawker proposition depends on the fact that it is the only credible player in the ad hominem game.  Surely, it is only a matter of time before the marketplace responds to evident demand with interesting supply, and it will be interesting to see what difference that difference makes.   

In any case, our case study turns on someone spotting the fact that Gawker has made a mistake.  Nick Denton has given someone an opening, a way to steal a march.  See the opportunity, take the opportunity, scale up the operation, make a name for yourself in the process, sell early, buy a house in the south of France.  It's what an MBA is for.

References

Grigoriadis, Vanessa.  2007.  Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass.  New York Magazine.  October 22, 2007. 

The Long Tail Strikes Back

Chris Anderson submitted a comment on my Friday post.  He quotes the offending passage from my blog and then expresses his displeasure.

"I guess we should be grateful that Penn is not offering up Chris Anderson's "long tail" fallacy, the odd idea that because we have ceased to be a mass culture we are now an utterly particulated universe of ones."

Huh? "Universe of ones"? Are you confusing my book with "Bowling Alone"?

Grant, either you've never read my book or you're willfully misrepresenting it. Which is it?

Chris, thanks for writing.  To answer your question: neither one.  Your options are confining and, if I may say, perhaps a little prosecutorial.   

In The Long Tail, you refer to

[the web as an] uncategorizable sea of a million destinations (page 2)

an infinite number of niche markets (p. 5)

the shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards (p. 5)

infinite slots (p. 8)

an unlimited number of niche demi-elites (p. 35)

a million niches (p. 52)

interests splinter[ing] into narrower and narrower communities of affinity, going deeper and deeper into their chosen subject matter (p. 57)

When mass culture breaks apart, it doesn't reform into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of micro-cultures, which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways.  (p. 183)

You can see where I might get the impression that you're committed to a universe of ones, at least in the long term.  The terms infinite and unlimited keep cropping up.  An "infinite number of niche markets" is a universe of ones.  And if this universe is not there in the first place, we will get there eventually, as interests "splinter into narrower and narrower communities of affinity."  You have posited a disaggregating dynamic.  Interests that are ever narrower must necessarily become a niche per consumer...and a universe of ones.

You will complain that I am cherry picking phrases.  (This would be a more robust defense, if you hadn't used these terms so often and enthusiastically.)  But even if we ignore "unlimited" and "infinite" as artifacts of the rhetorical heat of the moment, we still have a problem.  The word to which you return repeatedly is "millions," and this is, I think, much too high.  Millions of niches is many too many. Even if you are not headed for a "universe of ones," you are positing a very particulated marketplace.  Our spectacularly fecund culture/commerce of ours will never parse that finely.

Happily, it's an empirical question.  The natural laboratory of contemporary culture will do it's work.  One of us will be proven right, the other wrong.  Let's call it a bet.  If you're right, I'll look forward to buying you a case of good Merlot and toasting your success. 

But there is a larger problem with The Long Tail.  I didn't see it the first time through but it came charging off the page as I went looking for proof of Friday's post. 

The Long Tail a thoroughly partial book.  As I read through a second time, I was struck by what is missing.  You give plenty of attention to aggregators like Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, eBay, and Google and pretty much ignore the rest of capitalism!  You have taken on one of the most explosive developments in contemporary capitalism...only to offer a partial view and a single solution.  It's as if you declined the larger intellectual challenge. 

Readers who doubt this argument may wish to examine the index and see if they can find brand names that are not aggregator related.  What is missing in The Long Tail is the work horse of capitalism, the corporation, and the extraordinary challenges that now confronts its innovation, strategy and marketing functions.   As virtually everyone knows, the corporate world is scrambling to deal with the speed with which taste and preference now fragment and change.  In turns out, The Long Tail pipe has pretty much a single answer for exploding markets: big (or bigger) pipes.

There are two problems with this answer.  First, there can only be a few aggregators in the world, and this limits the usefulness of this book for the rest of the world.  Second, bigger pipes isn't, in the larger order of things, really the most interesting, ambitious or canny solution. What the "aggregator answer" ignores are the real challenges that exist as a single corporation learns how to be many things to many people, how it makes the boundary of the corporation more porous, letting the world in and innovation out, how it escapes the inevitable gravitational field created by the corporate culture, how it accomplishes some kind of continuity in the face of its external and increasing internal discontinuity.  The scope of this book is smaller than I realized, in its ambition, in its  accomplishment, and in its usefulness.

A case in point: At the culture camp here today in Toronto, we were wondering if a corporation like say P&G or Kraft might ever solve the problem of dynamic culture and commerce by becoming more like a Hollywood studio, a pool of capital, intelligence and decision making that draws continually on an external world in order to create the stream of innovation that now appears to be necessary for a corporation to survive.  This is of the many things The Long Tail might have explored. 

Listen, I have to get ready for tomorrow, let me close with this.  It seems to be that The Long Tail treats an astonishing problem, with a narrow, partial, and one might even say provincial response.  I rest my case. 

John Mackay, internet masquerade and digital illiteracy

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc., has been going on line...to tout his own stock...under an assumed name...for 8 years.   Naturally, the SEC is investigating and one fears for what is left of Mr. Mackey's credibility.

It was the "8 years" that brought me up short.  This means Mr. Mackey has been conversant with the internet for some time, much longer than most CEOs. 
And this means that Mr. Mackey had an extended opportunity to grasp the transparency of the internet...and never did.  Most of us get the notion that everything is eventually public online.  The digital world gives lots of shapeshifting opportunities (think Second Life, with its fake, borrowed, and stolen identities) but, finally, it's almost entirely see-through.  There is no place to hide.  Eventually the truth will out. 

The ethics of Mr. Mackey's digital masquerade are, well, troubling.  (Isn't that we always call ethical issues: "troubling"?)  But there is a second ground on which to doubt Mr. Mackey's "fitness for office."  Ethics aside, is this man technically qualified to be a CEO? 

Here's the question I would be asking if I were on Wall Street: if this guy managed to participate on the internet, without ever grasping its fundamentals, what else does he not know about contemporary culture? 

It would be one thing if Mr. Mackey's company made case hardened steel or CD containers.  Not grasping contemporary culture would be unsurprising and more or less forgivable.  But Mr. Mackey runs a company that runs a tide.  His company has come to prominence precisely because contemporary culture changed fundamentally the way it thinks about food, nutrition, cooking, health, wellness, and eating.

This isn't a single trend.  It's a wave of many waves.  If one were a Whole Foods investor (and very modestly, I am) one would like to think that somewhere at headquarters there was a big board in which all of these little waves were being tracked.  It would be nice to think that command central had a clue. 

Yesterday, Mr. Mackey said he would stop blogging.  Great, so when does he start paying attention?

References

Kesmodel, David.  2007.  Whole Foods Sets Probe as CEO Apologizes.  The Wall Street Journal.  July 18, 2007.

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  The Artisanal Trend.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  here. 

Oh Canada, Poor Canada IV

Sometimes, culture is better the less you spend on it. 

Not in Canada.

Christopher Hume says,

We have been on a spending spree... And the figures are impressive by Toronto standards: the Art Gallery of Ontario, $254 million; the Royal Ontario Museum, $270 million; the National Ballet School of Canada, $106 million; the Royal Conservatory of Music, $110 million; the Ontario College of Art & Design, $40 million; the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, $20 million; the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, $175 million, plus the other projects in the work. All in, we've spent about $975 million on the cultural infrastructure.

Now this is roughly what it cost to make Pirates of the Caribbean I, II and III, but, as Hume says, in Canada, it's a lot of money. 

But $975 million is not the real cost.  No, the real cost is much higher   This is because when we fund culture this way, we actually diminish it.  The opportunity cost is, in other words, phenomenal.  I reckon this cost is roughly equal to the Pirates, Spiderman, and Oceans trilogies combined, but then I'm a trained professional working in the controlled circumstances of a New England laboratory.  (Don't try these calculations at home.)

Sure, it sounds paradoxical.  Spending more gets you less?  Funding culture dismantles culture?  But dynamism teaches us, that cultures are like marketplaces, the less you intercede the more they flourish, the more you intercede, the less they do. 

Let's take three of the big cultural inventions of the last 30 years: Punk, hip hop, alternative.  All of these were invented in the US.  (Evidence for my controversial first choice: The Stooges, VU, New York Dolls, your Honor!)  All were invented without the benefit of state subvention.  Together, expressed in music and in film, they pretty much underwrote the America's continued, if wobbly, ascendancy in an emerging global culture. 

I'm not saying that Canada could have established it's own cultural ascendancy, if only the state had spent less.  I am saying spending more virtually guaranteed its present obscurity on the world stage. (And before someone writes in to complain about all the great music coming out of Montreal, let me point out this was made without state subvention too.)

Armies fight the last war.  States embrace the last idea.  There was a time when the model of state sponsorship worked.  My travels in Europe might as well have been a tour of opera houses, each more glorious than the last,  extravagant evidence that cities and states tied their identities to the musical accomplishment of local sons and daughters. (The Paris house, I was interested to note, was funded by private subscription.)

But that model passed.  Culture changed.  Cultural changed itself. Creative technologies got cheap.  Training distributed.  Creative communities decentralized.  Barriers to participation fell.  A wish to participate rose.  A willingness to defer to elite judgment disappeared.  Hierarchy died, the world flattened.  We might say that the culture funded by the state created a world that no longer needed the state.  To persevere in this funding is to discourage the cultural trend that makes funding unnecessary (could this be the bureaucrat's secret motive)? 

Call it the Yankee revelation: however much you spend, you can't buy yourself a World Series win.  Canada can try to fund a culture to call its own, but there are no guarantees.  The fact of the matter is that these cultures happen, if they happen, when the state  gets out of the way, when it cedes control.  The new idea is to turn culture over to people working in their spare time, off grant, off license, without control or supervision. This is where culture comes from now. 

References

Cowen, Tyler.  2002.   Creative Destruction.  How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures. New York: Princeton University Press. here.

Hume, Christopher.  2007.  What's our role on the world's culture stage?  The Star.  June 04, 2007.  here.

Postrel, Virginia. 1998.  The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.  New York: Free Press. here. 

value improv (dynamic pricing)

I wrote this post yesterday, but did not post it.  I thought: everyone knows more about pricing than an anthropologist, especially anyone with any economics  Then, I thought, well maybe there is something here.  You decide.

Pricing used to be a fluid, informal thing.  Prices in the market would fluctuate with the time of day, the clothing of the buyer, the stock of the seller or all three.  It was kind of value improv.

 

The fixed price is a relatively new thing, and someday it might a cloudy memory.  Someday, our grandchildren will interrogate their elders with questions like, "Is it true that things used to come with a 'sticker' and you had to pay what it said?"

 

We have the technology to "re-price on the fly."  But we have yet to put it into practice with any consistency.  Old habits die hard. And sometimes they will not die at all.  When Douglas Ivester, then the CEO of the Coca-Cola Company proposed that Coke machines might charge more in hot weather, there was a cry of outrage from all quarters. Heartless!  Unfeeling!   Coke would never exploit me in my hour of need!

 

But today [Friday], when I was boarding the train at Grand Central, I thought I glimpsed something more plausible.  In the present day, the train charges 10 bucks to get from New York to my little town in Connecticut.  Everyone pays 10 bucks.  Some of the people on my train, to judge by their clothing, watches, and briefcases, are worth great deal of money.  These are the kind of people who would happily, easily pay twice that amount.  And we might argue that Metro North, cash strapped as it is, does not fulfill its fiduciary responsibility when it does not fully capture the value it is creating for these passengers. (There are several assumptions here and throughout that I have not broken out.  If there is something of value here, I am happy to supply.)

 

Imagine a train with 10 cars, each of with has its own price point.  At the front of the train, the price is 30 bucks. At the end, the price is 10 bucks.  People array themselves according to what they are prepared to pay.  This might be a more lavishly appointed carriage.  But I suspect they would pay more merely for a seat and a little personal space.  And it will be easy to capture payment.  When the doors close, everyone's debit card will be billed the price of the car. 

 

The train today was absolutely packed.  I mean "standing room only" packed.  And there are moments during rush hour when Metro North feels like a troop train.  Now, we can imagine two opposing tidal forces at work setting prices in the 20 minutes the train sets idling in the station.  As the "cheap" end of the train fills, people will react to passenger compression by migrating towards the "pricy" end of the train.  But the people at the pricy end by indicating their willingness to pay more for their carriage, and increase the cost of staying there.  Eventually, over 20 minutes prices should establish themselves.  Yes, even the cheapest seats will become too expensive for some people to bear and they will have to get off the train and wait for one they can afford.  At the end of the day, the trains leave the station every 30 minutes, so this is not an impossible hardship.  If someone really needs to travel, they will, up to a certain limit, pay more. 

In the longer term, I guess the train will have a digital display in each car.  It will show the price of each car in the train, and historical average for that car.  Otherwise, a trip home to Connecticut turns into a game of "musical chairs." 

 

Getting to the station, that's another matter.  And here, as I stood on Park Avenue watching cabs rocket pass me, I thought, this is where dynamic pricing really makes sense.  I should have a card that signals how much I am willing to pay.  If my card glows red, I am prepared to pay a meter times 5.  If orange, the fare times 4, and so on.  If I merely have my hand up, well good luck.  It is easy enough to say, but this is unjust, that the rich will commandeer an even thicker share of our resources.  And this is true.  But it is also true that the taxi driver will now capture more of the value he creates, and this  seems entirely fair. 

The fact of the matter is that we have fixed pricing because variable pricing was too expensive to manage.  Now that the technology is in place, it can only be a matter of time.  Economists are much better at thinking of the effects of pricing, and how consumers react to one another's behavior in the marketplace.  It's the tidal thing that got my attention, and this is the kind of thing Simmel thought about, and it might here that the anthropologist can help out.  (Let's see what jens says.) 

Beauty and the death of zero sum

Virginia Postrel has a great post today on Dove's "real beauty" campaign (pictured).  In her clear eyed way, she takes issue with the notion that we should consider everyone beautiful.  She insists that it is more accurate, more sensible to see that differences of beauty exist and that these differences confer relative advantage in the world. 

I think this is right, and that it has the corrective effect Postrel intends.  Some heart felt notions about the world render us incapable of thinking about it clearly.  This is bad for many reasons, and especially because it frustrates our efforts to understand the operation (and interaction) of factors anthropological and economic. Advantage and a certain social capital is apportioned according to relative beauty, and culture decides, to some extent, what this beauty is.   

On the other hand, I think that we may be seeing a general shift here. If we are rethinking beauty, I think this might be because we are rethinking value.  Our culture is changing. 

There are three propositions at work in the world of beauty:

1. beauty contest

The old fashioned one, the beauty contest notion, says that beauty is distributed with almost perfect clarity.  Relative beauty makes for a single, steep, zero sum hierarchy.  There may be some points of contestation, but generally speaking, we could line up all the women (and men) in the world, from the most beautiful to the least.

2. many kinds of beauty

The second proposition says there are "many kinds of beauty."  In this case, we suppose that there many dimensions of beauty and that each of these may be used to fashion a different hierarchy.  If it's all about elegance, then one hierarchy results.  If it's all about voluptuousness, another.  And so on.

I think in the real world we oscillate between these propositions. Ideally, we think of beauty as something absolute.  Practically, we are hard pressed to show why Penelope Cruz should be considered more beautiful than, say, Aishwarya Rai or Audrey Hepburn.  We end up saying things like "well, it depends, you see, there are different kinds of beauty."

There is a strong form of proposition 2.  In this case, we all agree on a universe of beautiful women and then we organize this universe into different hierarchies according to the dimension in hand.  Cate Blanchett takes one contest.  Oprah takes another.  Angelina Jolie, a third. 

The weak form of proposition 2 says that there are many, many dimensions, and that it is possible to use them to give most women a claim to relative beauty.  This expands the universe of women with a claim to beauty, and it expands the number and the kind of dimensions that may be used to find them so.  I hope this is not demeaning, but I find that women who sell cosmetics in drug stores often fall into this category.  Quite often, they have a feature or two that are remarkable, and they are otherwise unexceptional.  Hippie beauty seemed to turn on this principal as well.

3. every woman is beautiful

The third proposition says that every woman is beautiful.  I think this is a question of using evaluative dimension in new ways or adding evaluative dimensions if necessary.  The defining phrase here is "every woman is beautiful in her own way." And I think this says that if there is no evaluation dimension, we will make one up.  Finally, if this doesn't work, the proposition resorts to the notion that all women are beautiful because they are women.  The attack on  zero sum hierarchy is absolute and complete. 

I like the inclusiveness of this proposition 3.  It's now up to all of us (and especially every male) to discover the beauty in a female companion, and this is an interesting, generous and generative way to proceed.  But I agree with Postrel.  The notion that "everyone is beautiful" violates the law of non-vacuous contrast according to which no assertion may refer to everything in its universe of discourse. More simply: if everyone is beautiful, how can anyone be beautiful?  If it isn't relative, it isn't real.

the death of zero sum 

But here's the thing.  Zero sum is dying in our culture.  The notion that there is one single hierarchy of any kind is now in question.  No one knows this better than Virginia Postrel, whose pioneering work on dynamism helps us understand why this should be so.  Ours is a splintering culture.  Some of our new social species, punks and hippies say, arose precisely to take issue with conventional notions of beauty, and these groups leave in their wake new evaluative standards. 

The death of zero sum is especially evident on the internet where it turns out crowds matter more than elites.  The new media emerge and they create a multiplication of value, a new superfluidity of admiration. This may be because people are prepared to "pay themselves" in admiration they do not deserve...but if it works, it works.  There is nothing in the anthropological rule book that says that a culture may not make every individual an arbiter of his or her own value.  (And indeed the American psychological and therapeutic communities have been insisting on this approach to self esteem for some time.) 

Of course, we have all by this time seen enough delusional American Idol contestants to know how tragic the outcome of this cultural approach can sometimes be.  Still, it is possible for a culture to equip individuals with the right of self invention and self evaluation, and that is precisely what our culture has done, from the avant garde artist who perseveres with the conviction that some day that the world will see what he sees to the lonely entrepreneur who insists on her vision of the world in the face of an overwhelming indifference from the rest of world.  Our culture of creativity depends upon the destruction of zero sum evaluation.  And the more dynamic we become, the more surely we will and must move away from absolute hierarchies. 

As a Canadian coming south to Chicago in the 1970s, this struck me forcibly.  Americans were much more demanding of effort and accomplishment than my Canadians friends, but they were also much more prepared to expand the competitive domain to give everyone, or almost everyone, a place to play.  Being the best at something was important, but it was ok if you were merely taking gold at an obscure bowling tournament in the rural Midwest (which I am proud to say I did on several occasions.  Kidding.)  And that's when I came to understand the penalty of being good at nothing at all in America.  I sometimes wonder if this is the unexamined motive of self destructive behavior (drug abuse, etc.).  In Canada it's ok to be unexceptional.  In the US, God save you if this is so. 

America has always been relatively generous in supplying extra competitive domains and evaluative dimensions with which individuals could pursue the self esteem and social capital that success makes available.  And this was true before the advent of the plenitude and dynamism made possible by the new expressive domains (zines, blogs, home made music, transmedia, self made movies) that emerged in the 1990s.   But again Postrel knows this perfect well. 

The death of zero sum and the expansion of social capital has potentially explosive consequences for our culture. Elizabethan England makes this case quite well.   The likes of Shakespeare, Bacon, Sydney, Raleigh, Elizabeth herself made the world vibrate with new ideas.  There are lots of ways to explain this explosive cultural moment, but I wonder whether it was largely because Elizabethans had access to a sudden superfluidity of status.  There were new ways and new dimensions for claiming rank.  The (relative) decline of a zero sum social hierarchy had the effect of flooding the world with novelty.  Ours is a new Elizabethan age.

summing up

Here's my argument.  The Dove campaign for real beauty and new ideas of beauty may be seen as a reflection of a larger culture shift.  In every domain of taste, we are seeing a willingness to expand the tools of judgment and the size of the winner's circle.  Zero sum is dying as the logic of our evaluative activities.  As a result, our culture is entering a new multiplication of capital and creativity.  This is not to say that zero sum is dead in all sectors of our world.  It is just subject to new cultural forces here and there that blunt its prevalence and power.   

References

Postrel, Virginia.  2007.  The Truth About Beauty.  The Atlantic Monthly.  March. here. 
[this link is good for 3 days beginning February 13, 2007]

Postrel, Virginia. 2007.  Beauty is.  Dynamist Blog.  February 13, 2007.  here.

for the Dove campaign for real beauty, go here.   

Note:

I promise to get back to the pet post tomorrow. 

Patrons or Pirates: the music industry has to choose

The music industry is trapped.  The more it enforces copyright, the more piracy it provokes. 

The long term picture is grim.  Digital sales from the likes of iTunes do not compensate for lost hard copy sales.  (Unless people are buying less music, this means that piracy continues to grow.)   For many younger consumers, piracy is the way you get music.

The industry is mobilizing to respond. According to Victoria Shannon reporting from Midem in Cannes,

...at least one of the four major record companies could move toward the sale of unrestricted digital files in the MP3 format within months.

But this raises a problem: how to capture value.  The industry hopes that MP3 format will woo the consumer back to purchase, but the pirates might actually see it as the white flag of surrender, an invitation to board the industry and strip it clean. 

Here's a thought.  What if the music industry came up with a new pricing scheme?  What if the music industry started charging fewer people more?

I remember as a kid being impressed with how little I had to pay for my favorite "album."  I remember sitting there staring at the cover and thinking, "wow, I can actually own this!" 

Now that I have taught at a business school, I know what this is.  This is the failure of an industry fully to capture the value it is creating.  In point of fact, I would have happily paid the industry 4 times what I did for that album.

The notion here is that every artist has a deeply passionate core constituency.  For this constituency, the artist creates value like crazy.  The fan is not only willing to pay the full sticker price but to pay more than the full sticker price.  And this passionate engagement makes up for all those unpaid MP3 in circulation, which may now be regarded as loss leaders.  Some of them will end up in the hands of a would-be fan who will, it is hoped, convert to core constituency status.  Think of it as a "user pay" model.  Lots of people benefit, but only the real users pay. 

The fact that I taught at business school doesn't mean that I can run the numbers.  But I think the calculation would look something like this.  My generation listened to lots of artists, followed  some subset of artists, and committed to a mere handful, 6 or 7, say.  This model of music consumption looks a lot like a peak.  The pricing model proposed here supposed that I will pay more for those 6 or 7.  Whether this throws off enough funds to sustain the industry, to pay, in other words, for all the other artists and the rest of the landscape, is an open question.

Younger generations of consumers exhibit a different pattern, less a peak, more a mesa.  Kids, that is to say, tend to consume more music, listening to more genre sand more artists, following more artists, and committing, finally, to more than 6 or 7.  Or so I think.  I may be that 6 or 7 is the core loyalty number.  But if this distribution is "flatter," with more artists but less loyalty, my pricing model has a problem. 

What I am assuming here is that the motive for and the nature of purchase would change.  The consumer will pay more, but he or she wants to know that proportionally more is going to the artist.  Consumers have still not forgiven the industry the digital transition.  CDs cost less to make but the industry didn't charge the consumer less or pay the artist more.  It kept the difference.   (A penny of this difference could have funded a beautiful or at least effective jewel case. Instead, we got a piece of crap that breaks almost immediately.)  I think it's probably true that some part of the piracy problem can be put at the door of industry bad behavior.

The purchase decision becomes in effect a reward system.  I am not paying money to buy a copy of A Night in San Francisco from Van Morrison, say.  This is available online for free.  I pay for this music in order to thank and support the artist.   I am a little bit more like a patron, and a lot less like a consumer.  We are all Medici now.  Actually, the Medici model works twice.  My "purchase" supports Van Morrison's work and makes his music available free to a larger public. This is the public art model, I think.  Every "core fan" plays benefactor to every non-core listener.

We know that the fixed price is a historical invention that installed itself relatively late in the Western markets.  But certainly we have seen the reemergence of variable pricing.  This has not always gone well.  The CEO of the Coca-Cola Company proposed variable pricing for Coke vending machines (the machines were to charge more on hot days) and he was made to pay for this act of temerity with his career.  But it is surely contrary to the vaunted rationality of the marketplace that we should cling to pricing conventions merely because they are habitual. 

Every business school appears to believe in a Platonic cave concept of capitalism.  There is a perfect original of industry and organization there in the cave, and all the real world industries and organizations are so many shadows.  These real world industries and organizations differ from one another only because of the accidents of history and the irrationalities of the world outside the cave.  Actually, all industry and each organization is formally the same.  (This is why b-schools insist on one-size fits all instruction, treating industry-specific courses as so many trade schools.)

The music industry has followed suit.  It has never made much of its difference from other industry.  By and large, it sells music the way the Gap sells clothes the way Detroit sells cars. But it is now an industry in crisis and perhaps this is inducement enough to rethink the business model and reach out to its consumers as patrons. If we don't treat them as patrons, they can be relied upon to act as pirates. 

References

Shannon, Victoria.  2007.  Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music.  New York Times.  January 23, 2007. here. 

LaRacuente, Nicholas.  2007.  Free Culture Labs.  Free Culture Blog: voices fo the student movement for free culture. here.

American Idol: could we have seen it coming?

Last night, around 9:30, American Idol hit 42 million viewers.  This means that 40% of the homes in the US tuned in. 

What are the compelling questions for anthropology?  THIS is the compelling question for anthropology.  How can this many people be interested in what is nothing more complicated (or strictly speaking, more interesting) than a talent show. 

A talent show! Growing up in Vancouver, I sometimes saw a talent contest held every Wednesday night at the Showboat down on Kitsilano beach (pictured here in its newest, grandest manifestation, complete with the Vancouver Firefighter's band).   Kids would twirl batons.  Someone would attempt an aria.  A lunatic would roll down from a local bar and try ill advised standup.  It was impossible to tell who won these contests.  Canadians are much too polite actually to signal a preference.  Not that it mattered.  There were only 7 people watching. 

Forty-two million viewers!  When did talent contests get this big?  How did this lowly form of entertainment commandeer the TV schedule?  It is not so difficult to answer these questions with the benefit of hindsight.  But imagine what it was like when, some years ago, the phone rang at Coke's Atlanta headquarters, and someone on the marketing team was asked  whether Coke would like to sponsor a new show, now merely a twinkle in a producer's eye. 

Tell me again what it is, again. 

Well, the show travels America and invites people to try out...and become the next American idol.

The next what?

Idol.

What, like an Easter Island idol?

No, you know, like a really big star. 

But when you find them they're total nobodies? 

Right.

Don't you have to be Clive Davis to do this?

Well, actually, it's a competition.  The nation will vote.

So it's a talent contest.

Well, yes and no.

I thought talent contests died in the 1950s.  On the west coast.  Kitsilano showboat, wasn't it?  The spring of 1959?

Well, yes, but this is brand new.  Completely different.

Precisely  the same, but completely different?

Exactly!

Every hour of every day, someone asks the Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) whether it wishes to participate in yet another invention of the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Most of the time, the TCCC says "no."  But not in this case.  In this case, TCCC said yes.  And the payoff was sensationally large.  Last night, 42 million people looked at branded cups.  Today, Thursday, January 18, 2007,  TCCC sold thousands upon thousands of gallons more.

Talk about dodging a bullet.  What if TCCC has said "no" to American Idol?  What if someone trusted their gut and their gut was wrong? 

So here's the marketing problem.  What system of divination would have helped the TCCC make this decision?  What would have constituted "due diligence" in this case?

In a perfect world, TCCC marketing executive would have engaged a marketing appliance, a system of marketing intelligence that would have delivered, speedily and accurately, an answer to the following questions:

what is this?

This is really the most interesting question.  The marketer is asking, in effect, "tell me what I am looking at here?  Is this something or nothing.  If it's something, what is it."

where does it come from?

Here the marketer asks for a historical answer to judge the trajectory of the trend.  The answer would be something like, this is a variation on the "talent contest."  Like spelling bees, the talent contest was an enthusiasm of rural America.  It fell from fashion in the 1950s with new technologies (transistor, radios, 45s, stereos), the emergence of powerful music labels and stars, (and a particularly awful aria at the Kitsilano showboat in 1959).  By a general cultural consensus, it was decided that the expert trumped the amateur. The possibility of renewal came in the 1970s when  Punk music and a culture of participation, as documented by Henry Jenkins, demonstrated a new willingness for non experts to take part.  {and so on.  None of this has good ethnographic or quantitative foundation.  As usual, I'm just guessing.)

does it have legs

We believe that the new talent contest has momentum, that it will enter the mainstream in 18 months, and pass from it in 2.5 years. 

for whom

here are the segments

in what numbers

here are the numbers

by what arch

here are the probable angles of the ascent, the most likely peak, these are the probable angles of the descent

what will it cost us

here's what we think costs would be

what should we pay

here's the return

In sum, what we need is a marketing appliance that draws on a deep knowledge of culture and commerce. 

The corporation is now called upon to make difficult decisions of the American Idol kind.  Maybe something is a good idea.  Maybe it's a totally bad idea.  But the profit to be made (or lost) is so great, it is surely wrong to be guessing on opportunities and outcomes.

All of this is wishful thinking until the analyst begins to say, "what a second, are you telling me they are making their way in a dynamic marketplace without a way finding system?  Do you mean to tell me they don't engage a decision making GPS?  You are asking me to invest in a company flying by the seat of its pants?  How about a little due diligence?"

Yeah, what he said.  How about a little due diligence here?

A stock market for music

It is 2010.  You're in San Diego, visiting a friend.  He takes you to a hip little eatery.  The neighborhood is filled with auto repair yards and unbranded coffee...but not for long.  The condos are coming. 

There's a guy in his 50s sitting at the table in the corner.  He is dressed casually, contrarily, anti-conventionally, but there is no concealing the fact that he's got money.  (Why is it that wealth always shows through, shines through?  You'd think money would buy advice, wardrobe, camouflage, concealment, but, no.  You can always tell.)   

Your first guess is that the guy is a trust fund baby.  But there's no hint of self reproach, so that can't be it.  Hmm.  Well, maybe he made his fortune in a conventional way, patio furniture, say, and then went bourgeois bohemian.  No, the small signal of wealth aside, this guy is vastly more bohemian than bourgeois. This is no interloper.  This guy fits in.

When there is a lull in the conversation, you ask your friend.  He looks over, and says,

Oh, that's Tom.  He invested in Sarah McLachlan early.  Made a bundle.  Ran it up.  Good choices.  Worth a fortune. 

This spring, President Bush signed into law a tax code change that will make it easier to sell intellectual property as stock.  One of the people to seize this opportunity is Terry McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group. 

Once we have access to [the full range of] intellectual property, we're going to offer shares in individual artists and take in equity investments.  Eventually, a major band could be its own public company.  (from Howe, below)

A stock market for music.  McBride's model says that "even a band selling 100,000 units a year becomes profitable." 

Is this what the future looks like?  Is this where music and popular culture heading?  We know that the existing business model is busted on two sides.

First, there is the problem of plenitude.  The producers of music are now apparently infinite.  The tastes of the consumer are fragmenting spectacularly.  The technologies for distribution are changing at light speed.  The old model looked like a Mississippi delta with all the music running back up stream, from the few to the many in the hinterland.  This is over.  The new world of music looks a lot more like a telephone exchange of the 1940s, with the remaining studios now obliged to play harried operator (bright lipstick, hair net, smoking theatrically) desperately taking calls and stabbing at a match.  Plug and play, feverishly.

Second, digital rights management continues to put the industry at risk.  Sunday, the New York Times leveled its guns at DRM (Randall Stross, below).  I was thinking that the problem with DRM is not that it protects the property of the music makers, but that it insults the consumer with barriers and inconvenience.  And as I was thinking this, I just happened to be struggling to open a new CD and the hinge on the jewel case snapped off, as it often does.  Insulting the consumer, let's just call it a music industry specialty.

So the existing model is at risk.  And this is precisely why the Nettwerk model, let's call it, has a chance.  (Actually, there are several experiments in the area, including Dimensional Associates, Ingenious Media and even Warner Brothers' Cordless.)   The world of culture has always had minority plays that succeeded at the margin without ever putting the mainstream at risk.  But McBride's innovation could work.  This could be the future. 

But how would I know?  Asking an anthropologist whether a market can work is like asking a TV weather man to describe the science of a cyclone.  "Well, I know the wind goes really fast.  In a circle."  [Spin finger in tight spiral to "demonstrate."]  No, this is a job for Pip and Dave at Coburn Ventures.  (And I hope they have a go.)

An anthropologist can comment on the cultural implications.  The interface between musician and industry is not very mediated.  The talent spotter, the A&R guy, might be a real fan of the music, but every successive link to the studio runs abruptly away from the music. It's not mediation, really.  It's more like a series of damage control chambers, designed to keep the artist out and the money in. (And we thought it was fans committing the piracy.) 

But what about Tom?  What if there were a Tom on the scene?  Now, the creative recruitment and the capital decision are being made by the same person.  And Tom doesn't need to make a fortune, so he doesn't need to find the next bright light, the next Beyonce, say.  He just has to make his numbers, and these can be as small as 100,000 units.   Even these numbers can make Tom a very rich man.  He doesn't have to make a fortune to make his fortune. 

Tom doesn't have to communicate his decision up the ladder so he is freed of miscommunication or committee cowardice.  He is not obliged to use a shot gun strategy, funding many artists to find the one who can pay for all the failures.   He can risk more because he is risking less.

Tom's world scales beautifully.  If his choices are bad for the year or even the decade, he lives more simply.  He doesn't have a payroll, to speak of, or fixed costs.  Well, he can always sell the place in Panama.  Best of all, he doesn't have to force the issue.  He doesn't have to manipulate taste or hand out payola.  He just has to read taste well. 

I think fans will like Tom as much as they now dislike Warner Brothers.  The latter always took a big because it was going to keep a big chunk.  Tom has a smaller foot print.  In a sense, he is merely charging less to do what the studio does:  spotting talent and funding it.  (And that may be what the consumer is now telling the studio when they help themselves to intellectual property: it shouldn't have to cost that much.)   

Tom helps to solve the plenitude problem even as he helps exacerbate it.  He is prepared to take risks that the studio can't afford, because he trusts his taste in a way a studio never can.  And I believe that when he begins to make money, he will have to pour some of this back into the creative community (art, film, not just music) because he will need to augment the social capital that allows him to book talent in the first place.  (In anthropology, this is called the "big man" model of reciprocity.)  What he cannot do is the studio thing: take the money and run. 

With many Toms in place, capitalism can no longer bend the world back into the mainstream.  Recently, capitalism has made a habit of making money for the center by selling culture from the margin.  Profits are used to fund the corporation, and the downtown towers, private jets, and stadium boxes thereof.   Profits are used to fund senior manager's pay packages and the gated suburbs that rise from them.  Thus does capitalism sell one, alternative, culture to fund another, middle class, culture.  Thus does capitalism take out profit and  difference.  Tom's capitalism will fund difference.   (I don't believe this will ever be "long tail difference," but it will be much less chunky than it is now.)    

So where will Tom come from?  Some Toms will be naturally occurring and self invented.  And this is as it should be.  But some Toms will have to be brought along, in the same way, for the same reason, that any creative talent must be brought along.  Someone will have to play selector and banker to Tom so that he can play selector and banker to artists.   

And so who is that?  It won't be the conventional b-schools.  It won't be HBS. And it won't be the big corporation as professional training ground.  It's won't be UBS or UPS.  It's going to have to be a new kind of b-school, or perhaps one of those new fangled d-schools.  And when someone decides to create one of these schools, they should call me.   Oh and Russell Davies.  Yes, and Pip, Virginia and Steve, Cheryl and Craig, Tom, Carol, Peter, Jens, Auto, Leora, John, Tim, Marc, Daniel, Jaynie... Never mind, give us  the money and we will build you a business school that creates graduates who create businesses that create cultures.   No gentrification required.

References

Howe, Jeff.  2006.  No Suit Required: Terry McBride has a maverick approach to music management: Take care of the fans and the bands, and the business will take care of itself.  Wired.  September (Issue 14.09). here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Flock and Flow.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Stross, Randall.  Want an iPhone?  Beware the iHandcuffs.  New York Times.  January 14, 2007.  here.

Division of Labor, crises of