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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

The Wikipedia article on Reverend Wright here.

huffing in toronto

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plenitude everywhere

Rob Eshman, editor in chief, Jewish Journal:

This year in Los Angeles there will be a Latino Jewish seder, a       black-Jewish seder, a feminist seder, a male consciousness-raising seder,       a gay rights seder and, just when I thought I'd heard it all, an S&M       seder. I'm not joking: A group that enjoys that kind of thing is touting       a seder that runs backwards: it begins in freedom and ends in bondage,       which for them, I guess, is an expression of freedom.

References

Eshman, Rob.  2008.  Food Issues.  Jewish Journal.  April 11, 2008.  here. 

McCracken, Grant.  1997.  Plenitude.  Toronto: Periph. Fluide. 

Virtuality, time travel and Brooklyn Dodgers, circa 1955

Here's what I want to do next spring.  I want to return to 1955 and listen to every game played by the Brooklyn Dodgers, in real time, several games a week through to the end of the season.

I don't know what happened to the Dodgers that year.  I have no idea whether Brooklyn did well or badly.  So if someone can contrive to play the radio broadcasts over the week and send me newspaper clippings  at the appropriate intervals, I can live the entire season with each inning, each game, and the season outcome as a complete surprise.  Within certain limits I can experience the Brooklyn  Dodgers of 1955 as if I had found a seam in time, stolen back in history, and managed to come upon these boys of summer as they played a season completely unaware that there was a time traveler in their midst.

Thank god for the death of "living memory."  None of this makes any sense unless the knowledge of the season is completely extinguished.  But happily it is.   Unless someone blurts out details or, horrors, the season's outcome, I will be listening to the 1955 season as innocent of its outcome as the fans of 1955. 

I am assuming someone has the tapes of the radio broadcasts.  I am assuming someone could send my the newspaper clippings each morning.  I am assuming that someone in the video game industry could actually mock up a street card ride to the stadium and that I could watch various parts of 50s Brooklyn passing by.  You could scale this up to be as absorbing as a fan could want.

I love the idea of sharing New York City with people who are playing an Area/code virtual game as a result of which the city takes on new drama and urgency that completely involves them but remains invisible to me.  (Come to think of it, this is often true of life in the city, area/code or no.)  And I really love the idea that I could be watching some guy listening to a game in emotional time and historical time simultaneously.  Is he rooting for the Denver Broncos now or the Bears many years ago?   There is something charming about the possibility that he is agonizing over games that have the intensity of the emotional moment but are played by athletes now turned to dust.  I love the idea of having the  spring and summer of my 2009  commandeered by a season that happened a half century ago. 

I understand this approach splices reality and history in a weird way, but there is now a plenitude of experiential realties out there now, why not this? 

Motorola and the story of Geoffrey Frost continues

Geoffrey Frost was a CMO at Motorola and the man perhaps most responsible for the Razr.  (The Razr is a hand set launched in 2004. Motorola projected sales of 2 million.  By the end of '05, it had sold 20 million, by the end of '06, 50 million.) 

I heard about Frost belatedly...about a month after he died.  I could tell from the business literature that 1) that he was, or ought be, a kind of hero in the world of marketing, 2) he grasped the new rules of marketing in inspirational ways, and 3) he deserved a memorial more generous that the world appeared to be mustering for him. 

So I created a virtual memorial on this blog, just a post, really, but I was gratified to see the post become one of the places that people began to leave thoughts and recollections. 

A second chapter of this tragic story occurred in 2007 when stories began to circulate that Frost's wife, Lynne, had committed suicide.  I posted once more.  Further details on Lynne's death were not forthcoming.  Frost's public and private life remained relatively opaque.  We had a small glimpse of his accomplishments, and some sense of the cost of these accomplishments. 

A third chapter has been brewing for the last month or so.  We have now heard from inside Motorola.  Numair Faraz worked for Frost there.  In a letter dated February 5, 2008, he wrote to Motorola's CEO Greg Brown. Thanks to Engaget, we now have the text of this letter.

This is a story of self destruction, too.  Fazar's letter is heart felt, accusatory, incendiary, one of those "j'accuse" things.  In the short term or the long, it must mark the end of Fazar's career at Motorola. 

But apparently different from the rest of the incompetent senior executives at Motorola -- except instead of merely being inept, you're actually actively killing the company. Your lack of understanding of the consumer side of Motorola doesn't give you a valid reason for selling the handset business; moreover, publicly disclosing your explorations of such a move, in an attempt to keep Carl Icahn off your back, shows how much you value the safety of your incompetence.

You clearly have no interest in fighting the good fight and attempting to mold Motorola into the market leader it can and should be. Taking control of the handset division, as you have recently announced, will accomplish very little except but to give you an abiity to say, "We tried our best" -- which you haven't -- when you finally do cart the business off to the highest bidder.

In order to turn the handset division around, you need to bring in another Frost; someone worldly and dynamic who is more interested in Motorola's success than their own corporate career. You need to task the company's designers with the same mantra that created the RAZR -- make me a phone that looks, feels, and works like a symbol of wealth and privilege. Recognize the superiority of American software, and bring back those jobs so irresponsibly  outsourced to China and Russia. Fully embrace embedded Linux and Google's Android initiative, and take the phone operating system out of the stone age.

Recognize that, while rich people don't really know what they want, the lower end of the market does -- and fund the development of an online "crowdsourced" device design platform to take advantage of this fact. Get rid of all of your silly, useless marketing, including those overpriced and completely ineffective celebrity endorsements, and do one unified global campaign with Daft Punk (the only group whose global appeal extends from American hip hoppers to trendy Shanghai club kids to middle-aged Londoners). Understand that the next big feature in handsets isn't a camera or a music player -- it is social connectedness; build expertise in this area, and sell it down the entire value chain. (In Block.)

Fazar's accusations may be true, but they are so vituperative as to discourage credulity.  When corporations fall apart, things get very nasty, very fast. 

The story in this story is clear.  The world of the corporation is volatile. Motorola had the hottest handset two years ago, selling 50 million phones in 06.  Last quarter, some 2 years later, the cell phone division managed to loss $388 million (Miller 2008).  Hero to zero is around two years. 

This is a sad story, any kind of failure is, but I think we might make these our take-aways:

1)  that we are now moving at the speed of light.  The Razr came out of no where, enjoyed almost complete triumph, only within several months to fall into almost complete eclipse.  We see them on current TV series and think, "Razr.  How sad." 

2) that steady stream of innovation is not a zany enthusiasm of business press and the business guru.  It is the new order of business.  Motorola failed to find a replacement for the Razr.  (Fazar blames Zander, the previous CEO at Motorola.  He says that Zander blames Frost.)

3) that to survive in such a world, we need more Frosts.  We want people who can nurture and enable innovation.  Here's to the memory of Geoffrey Frost.    

References

Block, Ryan.  2008.  Motorola insider tells all about the fall of technology icon.  Engadget. March 26th, 2008. here. 

McCracken, Grant 2005.  Remembering Geoffrey Frost.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  December 19, 2005. here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2007  Geoffrey Frost and the perils of the fast lane.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  May 16, 2007.  here. 

Miller, Paul.  2008.  Motorola officially considering dropping its phone unit.  Engadget.  January 31, 2008.  here. 

Curator: meme in motion

Yesterday at the PSFK conference, the term "curator" was used several times.  For instance, Steve Rubel repeated his argument that "digital curators" are "the future of online content."

Having been a curator once, my ears always perk up at the mention of the term  I am pleased that the term has taken on new meanings and new currency, that it has escaped the dusty corners of a museum and gallery world.  It and me, both.  Still, I wonder what this term is now being asked to mean, and why we should now find it now so compelling and fashionable. 

In the "museum" use of the term, curators might as well be called "keepers" and they sometimes are.  They are responsible for bodies of object and knowledge.  It is their job to see that these bodies are organized, protected, illuminated, and disseminated through publications and exhibits, and otherwise made available to publics popular and scholarly. 

Christian Crumlish comes pretty close to this usage when he calls himself a curator of Yahoo's Design Pattern Library.  So does, Dwight Blocker Bowers, curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's entertainment collection.  Bowers  collects things like Archie Bunker's chair and the Maltese Falcon statuette from the 1941 film of the same name.  (The latter was recently stolen so I guess we now obliged to say it's in a private collection.  Thank God we still have the movie and the poster, as above.)

Steven Addis started a blog called The Curator Effect in 2005.  First, a professional photographer and then a marketing consulting, Addis wrote an article for Advertising Age in July of 2007 subtitled: Be a Curator: consumers will seek out products, services that engender trust.

The term slides around a little in his hands.  He appears sometimes to be saying that consumers are curators (now that they can research and review consumer goods), that brands are curators, and that marketers are curators.  It is hard in any of these cases to see that the term is anything but the loosest act of metaphor.  To call brands curators is especially puzzling.  Addis' blog fell silent Oct. 2, 2007 so we can't hope for clarification.

There is something about popular culture that attracts the term.  The Job$ page at MySpace actually has a category called Pop Culture Curator.  Meg Asaro uses the term this way.  What she curates are ideas and images from popular culture, and the way she does this is with other ideas and images. This might be "curator" in the art gallery sense of the term.  But I am not sure a gallery curator would recognize her usage.  (Incidentally, Asaro has the distinction of being the first person to describe herself in the new sense of the term.  Fast Company did a story on her in 1999 in its "job titles of the future" column.)

Andrew Zolli calls himself the curator at PopTech, but it's not clear what he's a curator of.  Is it his network of contacts, of the contacts in the network, of the ideas that spring from the contacts in the network?  I don't mean that he doesn't so something remarkable at PopTech, and he is, as I have said in these pages before, widely understood to be a kind of God, but it's not clear to me why or how we should think of him as a curator. 

Surely I shouldn't be too literal about this.  Perhaps there shouldn't be any objects involved.  Rubel might say, in a digital age, it is the virtual things in our world, multiplying in number and channel as they are, they need ordering.  And to his credit Rubel does appreciate the museum definition of the term, so his is not a reckless act of metaphor.  Rubel appears to wish to say that we need experts to sort through the great tide of digital content that comes at us each day. Aggregating, he says, is simply not enough.  To be sure.  Point well taken.  But I can't help feeling that what Rubel means is "editor." 

Here's the thing, I think it's fair to say that the term "curator" may not be used, even metaphorically, unless there is some "keeping," "collecting," "conserving"  involved.  It's not clear to me that digital curators have anything to do with keeping.   If there is someone in the digital world, who shows a genuine curatorial reflex, I think that's Sarah Zupko. 

Please, don't say that the new curators leave an archival record.  Everyone leaves an archival record.  And real curators don't just leave a record.  They assiduously build their collections, so that each new entry is made in full knowledge of its predecessors and with a deeply thoughtful anticipation for what comes next.  These collections vibrate like a spider's web with each new entry. 

Real curators think with their collections.  The collections are intelligence, memory, conceptual architecture made manifest.  I love the idea that someone would take up this function in the digital world.  But that's not what I see the new "curators" doing.  This richer, more authentic, more sincere rendering of the term could accomplish something astonishing.  It would help sort and capture contemporary culture with some feeling for context, relative location, relative weight, what goes with what.  This is the sort of thing that Pepys accomplished, unwittingly, with his diary.  This notion of the curator has yet to find its champion.  I don't think we quite yet have a Pepys of the present day.

References

Abramson, Marla.  1999.  Job Titles of the Future: Meg Asaro.  Fast Company.  Issue 27.  August.   here.

Addis, Steven.  2007.  Raise Your Brand to the Level of a Peer: Be a Curator...  Advertising Age.  July 17, 2007. here. 

Beckman, Rachel.  2007.  The Smithsonian, Trying to Stay Cool and Collected: How American history competes for showbiz treasures.  Washington Post. October 7, 2007.  here. 

Crumlish, Christian.  His blog at Radio Free Blogistan. here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Nike: new branding approaches.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  March 11, 2005.  here. 

Huang, Christine.  2008.  Steve Rubel on the Digital Curator. PSFK.com.  February 8, 2008. here. 

Orman, Mary Jane. xxx.  Press Release: Le Meridien Introduces LM100.  A group of international creators that will transform Le Meridien hotels into creative hubs and reinvent the hotel guest experience.  here.

Rubel, Steve.  2008.  The Digital Curator in Your Culture.  Micro Persuasion. February 6, 2008.  here. 

I am 1000

I am a week away from my 1000th post. I have written 1.3 million words since I started in August in 2002.  I've had 1,350,000 page views since I starting counting in April of 2004.  There are a couple of thousand visitors a day.  Bless you, one and all. 

I did my first post in early 2002, I guess it was.  And then I gave up. I thought, "Everyone's writing.  No one's reading.  What, really, is the point?"  I happened to see Virginia Postrel at a conference.  She said, "Oh, no, things are changing.  You have to start again."  So I did.  Blame Virginia. 

Six years later blogging proves a relatively simple process.  It takes about an hour a day.  I can't blog about the work I do for clients, but there is always some idea buzzing about that can serve as a talking point. 

Relatives no longer scorn my blogging as "pretend writing."  I think all bloggers are feeling a little less marginal.  When were we vindicated?  Sometime, in the last 12 months I guess.  I always felt my obscurity was hard earned and well deserved, and I bid it farewell with some sadness. 

The real challenge recently has been excavating 1.3 million words for the books within the blog.  But to find these books meant chipping away 1.1 million words.  Tough!  A clear demonstration why it is always easier to build new than to renovate.  Hey, but eventually two quite interesting books emerged, one of branding, one of the new impulses shaping contemporary culture.  (Publishers looking for manuscripts on same, please let me know.)

But books are old media and no longer the obvious form for knowledge to take.  And I am now read by lots of people after they drop a key word into Google.  And in this form, I get read by people interested in how Craig Ferguson, Peter Drucker, Alec Wildenstein, and Lawrence Summers, (TV personality, management guru, plastic surgery enthusiast and university president, respectively).  They come to this blog because they are interested in the cultural implications of pets, doing ethnography at McDonald's, the life of an anthropologist working in Russia and China.

"Oh, he's all over the map," someone will surely say.  Not at all.  Proof of concept, I call it.  Anthropologists do not specialize. It's the death of their specialty.  The idea is to cast the net wide.  To find culture in all of its manifestations.  Proof of concept, proof of anthropologist.  The anthropologist who can't or won't cast the net wide isn't an anthropologist.

Anyhow, that's my excuse for 1.3 million words. Thanks for reading some of them.   

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  President Summers, Beware the Yalies Within.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  March 23, 2005.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Sanya, the Wonder Cat.   This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  June 28, 2006.    here.

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Meet Rosie: scourge of the new advertising. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  October 27, 2006. here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Craig Ferguson (brand exemplar?)  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  December 21, 2006.  here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2007.  The Charlie and Barney Show: birth of a new American male? 
This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  January 3, 2007.  here. 

Photo

Molly and me, photo by Pam.

Networks nodes: handbuild one by one

A friend of mine recently introduced me to a friend of hers.  She did it without urging and without motive.  She just thought, hey, I like them both, what are the chances they will not like one another?

But of course it's more than that.  It's an amazing act of networking.  She has collapsed a distance that would never have collapsed on its own.  She's created a dyad that could not have happened otherwise. 

There is lots of spontaneous networking these days.  Piers Fawkes and Noah Brier created likemind.us.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Dopplr, Ning, Interesting200x, help us make new connections more easily.  But its not clear they help us make friends.  Blogging has helped me make friends.  The new social "supernets," as Judith Donath calls them, not a one. 

The problem is that the new networks are, at the moment, pretty good at introduces us to people with whom we have some things in common.  But they are not actually any good at finer, more precise determinations.  For the moment, the machines still fail us.  (Or maybe it's not the machines fault.  The problem might be that we are not always frank and forthcoming when representing ourselves in networks, and, to this extent, we put muddy and sometimes actually corrupt the signal.  See Donath's excellent article on this particular point.)  In any case, a  human touch is still required.  It is, in sum, still up to us. 

So if I take inspiration from my friend, it's up to me to identify friends who make like one another.  I have to say it's a really daunting task.  Part of the problem is that it forces me to bring together disparate parts of my world.  I can think about b-school academics.  I can think about journalists.  I can think about tech world people.  I can think about capital markets people.  I can think about marketers.  I can think about bloggers. 

But bringing them together into the ambit of a single thought.  That's hard.  Once I have found a probably pair, I am still have to make the introduction and it is pretty easy, I'm discovering, to sound a little dorky.  There is even some small Los Alamos anxiety about these combination.  I mean, what could happen.  What forces might be unleashed when we supply connections that would never happen on their own?

But it comes down to this.  These connections, the ones that are really interesting, won't happen unless we make them happen.  Which is to say, they may be one of the responsibilities of digital citizenship.  We gotta.   Good luck.  And let me know. 

References

Donath, Judith.  2007.  Signals in Social Supernets.   Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.  13 (1).  here.

Likemind.us here. 

Why party like its 1999?

So it's now unlikely that Clinton or Obama is going to get the 2,025 delegates needed for party nomination.  This means the botched primaries for Michigan and Florida are suddenly key. Something is going to have to be done. 

There has been a good deal of dithering here.  A consensus appears to be forming around the the "mail in" option (see Malcolm, below).  No one knows how much this will cost.  Estimates for Florida run, at the low end, from $4 million to $10 million.  At the high end, the figure looks like like $30 million (Overby, below).

The Democratic party is acting like its 1999.  Mail-in?  Are you kidding me? American Idol manages to canvass 10s of millions of people in a two hour period with results tabulated within less than 24 hours.  You might not like the music that Idol insists on, but the show has done us all a massive favor by demonstrating how quickly and elegantly the wishes of the public can now be canvassed.

Yes, of course, there are differences.  On Idol, people can vote more than once and in the world of public representation this is, um, a wee problem.   But I cannot believe that there is not some work-around available.  With a unique identifier, it should be possible to prevent the Chicago problem of people who vote early, often, and indefinitely. 

Here's what's strange.  In all of the thousands of words inked on this issue, I can't find anyone talking about the digital option.  It's as if politics is the captive of a time lock.  And 1999 is optimistic by about 50 years.  The nice thing about this opportunity is that it's going to have to be irregular and unorthodox and a little unsatisfactory in any case.  Which is to say we have a license to try something new. 

Let's solve the primary crisis with a digital response.  Let's get on with the business of disintermediating politics.  All we need is a precedent. Once we solve one voting problem this way, the digital option becomes part of the solution set and it will be used again.  What we need is not so much a tipping point as a starting one. 

References

Malcolm, Andrew.  2008.  Democratic party leaders inch toward agreement on Florida, Michigan.  Top of the Ticket.  LA Times Blog.  March 9, 2008.  here. 

Overby, Peter.  2008.  If Florida and Michigan vote again, who pays?  NPR.  March 12, 2008.  here. 

Advertising and its new anthropological content

AT&T and Verizon are both making a pitch for their "unlimited calling" plans.  Their campaigns converge in an interesting way.  I wonder if we are not looking at an emerging anthropological approach to creative. 

The AT&T ad opens with a middle aged African American walking down the street.  His phone rings.  He says,

hey bud!

Then comes a quick succession of people answering their phone.  One after another, they say:

hey buddy!
how its going!
what's up!
what's shaking!
what's popping!
what's crackin!
yeah buddy! brother!
Dude!
what's up! (3)
hey! (3)
daddy!
dog!
sweetie!
buddy!
beautiful!
ah!

Verizon features a Dad, as he comes storming out of his suburban home, daughter in tow.

Dad says,

"Today, I plan on not freaking out about my wireless bill."

And with this he offers a recitation of every "hip" word and phrase he can think of, including that he's "kickin it,"  and "totally down with my boys."  Each cliche comes with its own daffy hand gesture.  Clearly, Dad has been watching too many "urban" movies.

Finally, the daughter can't stand it anymore and she says "Dad!"   We can tell by her tone of voice that what she is really saying is, "Dad, you are embarrassing me, yourself, my friends, our ancestors and every God featuring, sensate American.  Stop it!"

Dad snaps to as if from a trance, and looks sheepishly at the Verizon gang trailing behind him.  They pretend not to notice his humiliation.

At first glance, this looks like the triumph of Cliff Freeman advertising.  Mr. Freeman was the guy who created a string of funny ads, including "Where's the Beef," and "Sometimes you feel like a nut...sometimes you don't"  These ads were designed to amuse, but more than that it used "real" people and an earthy humor. 

As Madison Avenue struggled to find a model that worked, increasingly it resorted to Mr. Freeman's funny.  It might not be very strategic. It certainly wasn't sophisticated meaning manufacture.  But, hey, at least it got a chuckle or two.  It wasn't long before we witnessed the triumph of funny over loud, funny over function, funny over endorsement, funny over testimonial, funny over pleading, funny over Carney barker demonstration.  Funny came to rule the day.  (This is my impression and not historically well grounded.  I welcome comments from people who confirm or improve its veracity.)

Now it seems like whenever the agency can't decide what else to do, it goes for funny.  Hey, the client is not always very media or culturally literate (business school saw to that), but they do know funny when they see it.  And amusing consumer seems low risk thing for advertising. 

But are these ads merely an exercise in Freeman's approach to humor, to raw, real people treatments?  A closer look says that there is perhaps something anthropological going on.  ATT and Verizon appear to be using culture in a particular way.  In this event, the hero of the piece would be less Clifford Freeman and more Irving Goffman, the great student of our world.

Notice that the AT&T ad depends upon an ethnographic exercise.  It records and replays the way people answer their phones.  It makes greeting phrases the hero of the ad.  In they make us present in that happy moment when one friend acknowledges another with an exclamation of joyful recognition.  This is what a cell phone makes possible.  It's a wonder that some brand should not investigate this cultural domain before.  Brands flourish when they are fed in this way. 

The Verizon ad is also a steal from our culture: the middle aged man who appropriates gestures and language that belong to another generation.  We have all seen this.  Some of us have done it.  There is something comic and human here, and the ad plays both to perfection. 

In both cases, much of the punch of the spot depends upon a non verbal tick or a trick of speech.  And off the top of my head it feels like there are several examples.   There is the Jimmy Dean ad in which Father sun tells his daughter that he needs a good breakfast to light and heat the eastern seaboard.  What makes this work is the little girl's facial gestures which delicately mixes interest and dubiety.  As it happens, the star of the Verizon ad appeared in a Subway ad (I think it was) in which he asks an accountant if he can "manufacture [his] butt" in lieu of a receipt.  What makes this piece work for me is the little hand gesture he gives after the request as if to say, "I mean this is really the only sensible way to do this, no?" And finally, one of the really great ads of the last couple of years was the Volvo ad that shows a little girl talking and talking in the back seat as her Dad drives her gently home. 

A lot of "funny" ads are funny because they mine contemporary culture, and more specifically what they discover in their ethnographic expeditions is a nonverbal behavior.  So why?  What is going on here?  I will have to leave the answer her for another day.  I am in O'Hare and I want to post this before they call my flight. 

References

For more information on Cliff Freeman, go here.   

A question

I searched to find out the agencies and creative teams responsible for these ads.  No luck. Please if anyone knows, let me know. 

An anthropological report from inside the corporation

I spend a couple of days last week working with a large American corporation.  It was one of those reinvention exercises. 

Well, not so much an exercise as an urgent task.  The market has changed.  A new model is called for. 

Readers will know the drill.  Twenty people, 3 facilitators, a blank and anonymous room, lots of flip charts, stacks of stickies, everyone's name in plexiglass, all of us seated in a square. 

In a hundred years historians and anthropologists are going to want to know what happened in these events.  There will be no records to speak off.  Flip charts or stickies do not make it into archives.  The ideas will survive but only in the ways the corporation changes it's structure and practice.  (Good luck reverse engineering from here to the ideation session from which the changes came.)  Here then is an observation or two.

There are a couple of intellectual patterns that got my attention.

1.  furiously framing and reframing

The problem is that we can't tell exactly what the problem is and we have still less idea what the solution is.  So much discourse is devoted to saying "Ok, let's see the issue is x" or "what if it's y," or "look, I think the problem is Z."  And once we fix on a rough notion of what the problem is, solutions begin to flourish still more generously.  The selection process is unofficial, automatic, emergent. The better solutions stick around.  In the blizzard of possibilities, these stick.  People remember them, return to them, refer to them.  But what is happening here is a really liquid kind of problem solving.  We are are framing and reframing and reframing yet again...until the wisdom of this little crowd becomes apparent. 

2.  tagging 

Good solutions get tagged, and there is an art to tagging.  Vivid pictures and phrases get the job done.  Bad ideas will live a little longer if well tagged.  Good ideas have no hope of surviving to maturity and adoption unless (or until) they are well tagged.  Some people are really good at tagging.  Indeed, this is the job that some people end up performing in the group.

3.  pattern migration

There are wonderful moments when someone will say, "look, here's something we know about this context.  I wonder if we could transfer this to another problem set."  I am sorry this must be so vague but I am obliged to honor my confidentiality agreement.  But this really is a revelational moment.  And it works almost exactly the way metaphor does.  We have migrated what we know about this domain to this domain. Friday, one of these came from a women who was not very much involved in the debate.  Bang, suddenly the conversation was hers.  The ratio of words spoken to ideas delivered in her case must have been something like 10 to 1.  Most of us were working on 1000 to 1. 

4.  scaling up, scaling down

There is lots of intellectual scaling up, scaling down.  At one moment, we were dealing with the biggest possible problem sets in the broadest possible ways.  The next, we have zeroed down to a very particular problem.  Sustaining control of the problem at all points on the scale is a special talent.  Some people are good at one end.  Others good at the others.  But a surprising number of people were good at all levels and good at moving up and down the scale.  I have to say some of these movements are breath taking.  Literally, you think "whoa!"  as you move. 

5.  messier models

I was interested to see a new impatience with the usual box and arrow models with which people identify units and relationships between them.  We saw people insisting on messier models in order to honor some of the messiness in the world in the model.  The bigger point to make here is that as the world gets messier, more multiple, more various and changeable, discourse about change is beginning to take on these structural properties.  In a word, we are adapting. 

6. acknowledging fear

For the first time, I saw people building models of process that acknowledge the emotional difficulties inherent in the change making process.  Everyone always feels the pain of entertaining new ideas and having to give up old verities, but this used to be a very private condition.  Now people are openly acknowledging it.  And this is a good idea because there are moments when someone (perhaps ones own self) becomes obstructionist because suddenly their (your) nerve has snapped.  Building emotional difficulty into the model because this sensation and the problem more manageable. 

7.  new language like "chunking"

For a few years now, people have been using the term "chunking."  From the outside, this look like sloppy language for sloppy thought.  And of course lots of people like to think that corporations are "stupid." The Left is especially guilty of this.  But in point of fact the corporation is pretty smart not least because it is filled with smart people.  And "chunking" is a good example. 

When problem sets are really messing and heard to read, "chunking" is useful.  It's a way of saying let's call this [thing] a something. Because we are chunking we are not obliged to say or to know what it means.  We are just saying "there's something here we need to look at."  This is a kind of problem solving in a fog.  It's a kind of "edge finding" exercise.  (From whom did I get this term?)   We know have language for the first and vaguest act of problem identification. 

8.  porousness

People are now prepared to acknowledge that the corporation is no longer a free standing, discrete entity.  It is customary to hear people dealing with the fact that the corporation has loose boundaries.  This is because, in a Japanese manner, they are cooperating with competitors.  It's because they are "cocreating" with the consumer.  This throws into question the very idea that the corporation is a corporation.  After all, this term is a metaphor. It's saying that this business enterprise is a body, separate and free standing.  Now that porousness is the new order of the day a new term is called for.  Suggestions?  I still like calling these new units "drafty" or "cloudy" but I may be the only one who finds these terms appealing.

In sum:

All of these new intellectual inclinations and practices suggest I think that the corporation is learning to live with dynamism by learning how to practice dynamism.

Explanations

That image is the floor of an elevator of a hotel in Cambridge, MA.  But it kind of reminded me of a starter's flag, hence its metaphorical usefulness here.

Acknowledgments

I have learned a lot about the corporation from many people, including Tom Peters, Stuart Kauffman, Ed Batista, Tom Guerriello,  Rick Sterling, all of whom are acknowledged here. 

Vox populi

I am in a conference facility that, miraculously, has no useful internet access.  (When did this become a utility, like phone service or running water?  This place hasn't got the news.)

Here's something I overheard at breakfast:

I didn't do it

and if I did do it

it's not my fault

and if it is my fault

you can't blame me

and if you can blame me

my wife has to forgive me anyhow.

And the AEIOU (Vowel) Award goes to...

I am finally in a position to award the AEIOU (aka vowel) award to the winners of the contest announced in December of last year.   (I am deeply sorry this took so long.  The winter has been hectic.)

AEIOU stands for the Account Planner, Anthropologist, Ethnographer, Insight and Observation Award. 

We were drawing inspiration from Jacob Rubin's wonderful experiment in Union Square.   Rubin approached strangers and asked a favor.  The object of the exercise: to see how forthcoming New Yorkers would be. 

One of the questions Rubin asked is:

"Would you watch my dog while I run into the health food store and buy yogurt?"

One New Yorker fell to bended knee, and exclaimed,

"Look at you, Mr. Doggy!  Aren't you a doggy-woggy?"

The idea of the Vowel award was to see if we could make anthropological sense of this found data. 
The essay question was this:

A man approaches a woman in Union Square and asks, "Would you watch my dog while I run into the health food store and buy yogurt?"

She falls to her knees and says to the dog in question, "Look at you, Mr. Doggy!  Aren't you a doggy-woggy?" 

Please unpack.

There are three winners:  Juri Saar, Brent Shelkey and Reiko Waisglass.  They will split the $100.00 Amazon.com prize.

Many thanks to everyone who participated.

References

The original essay contest post.  http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2007/12/holiday-essay-q.html

Rubin, Jakob.  2007.  Because we're not actually that rude.  New York Magazine.  December 24-31, 2007, p. 66.

Winning entries

Winner 1: Juri Saar

The Location.

In the case of Union Square were are dealing with a location that is an important intersection drawing thousands upon thousands of people each day into a relatively small area. This leads us to two assumptions:

1. since we’re essentially dealing with an intersection of various streets we cannot assume Union Square to be an end-destination in itself, but rather a place where people pass through,   perhaps only to slow down for a few moments before moving on to their final destination.
            
2. finding a familiar      person who can be trusted to look after a pet for a few minutes is next to      impossible in a city of millions, especially at one of its more notable intersections, therefore a stranger will probably need to be approached which will require a question different from that presented to someone familiar.

The Question.

Once the man has determined that he will need to approach a stranger he needs to formulate a question that will signal his intent as well his requirements of the person he’ll be asking the question. There are at least four assumptions in the question:

1. when the man talks about watching his dog he does not mean passively stare at the dog while he visits the store, but rather actively monitor the dog - essentially take care of it for a few minutes. This probably includes preventing anyone from harming the dog as well as not allowing the dog to just wander of.
       
   
2. when the man says that he will run into the store, he is indicating that he will visit the store quickly and respects the other person’s priorities while trying to minimize the inconvenience of his request. The least he can do is make the visit a quick one.
            
3. when the man says that he’ll be visiting a health food store he is using the specialty of the store – health – to indicate that his request is not a trivial one (cigarettes, coffee, milk etc.), but possibly has an impact on his health. The fact that he wanted to buy yogurt, which does have direct health benefits, seems to indicate that additional details act as additional trust cues.
       
4. being specific about the health food store also signals that this not just any store that might turn a blind eye to people who enter the store with their dogs, but a store that places more emphasis on hygiene than usual and therefore dogs are definitely not allowed – there      is no other option, but to leave the dog outside.

The Answer.

The question was answered in a way that is much more likely to come from a woman than a man. There are at least five assumptions in the answer:

1. when the woman falls to her knees and starts talking to the dog she is essentially giving the animal human characteristics not for the benefit of the animal or herself but the owner who is able to deduce her attitude to dogs by seeing how she relates to the animal.
       
       
2. falling to her knees closes the distance with the dog and allows the woman to indicate that the dog has her full attention, as if to start a conversation, which of course she promptly does.
            
3. when she uses the “doggy” the woman is using babytalk which is often also used with animals that have features that are uniquely child-like such as big eyes, disproportionally big head and small eyes i.e. cute.  Doggy is commonly used in baby talk instead of dog. By adopting baby talk while talking with the dog instead of the man, the woman is indicating that she will care for the animal as if for a human child.
   
4. when she addresses the dog with “Mr. doggy”, she is also asserting that she takes the responsibility of looking after the dog seriously, almost formally as the "mister" is an honorific title indicating respect. 
      
5. Her use of “doggy-woggy” is meant to emphasis playfulness and affection that lets the owner of the dog know that the animal can safely be left under the supervision of a caring woman, who will not neglect the animal and has no problem spending a few moments with the dog.

Conclusion.

It seems that it all comes down to trust cues – how do you approach strangers inherently suspicious, and how do you signal your honest and sincere intentions to strangers, essentially respond to their trust cues.

Winner 2: Reiko Waisglass

The woman in Rubin’s article is very familiar to me. She’s the young woman in the Upper West side who owns a Chihuahua named Princess. She’s the 40 year old woman in the West Village whose eggs are slowly drying up, along with her ability to form viable relationships with available men. She owns a Pomeranian that she pushes down Bleeker   Street in a doggy pram. She’s the 60 year old woman on the Upper East Side who longs for grandkids if only she’d made time to have children. She owns a bird, but only because her doorman building doesn’t allow dogs. 

In other words, in New York City, dogs are children, grandchildren, lovers and expensive accessories.

If one is to perceive of dogs as supplemental children, somehow the baby-talk documented in Union Square starts to make sense. This woman, like many women in New York, reacts to small dogs as she likely does to babies. After recently becoming a dog "aunty" I have discovered the appalling cost of doggy sweaters, the amount of doggy toys and accessories deemed acceptable in the eyes of dog owners, and the increasingly common practice of cooking and preparing one's own doggy food.

If one is to perceive of dogs as supplemental lovers or life partners, then one must also question the other significant ties between animals and human companions. While the woman in Union Square sets an example of how people personify small-scale pets as adorable, miniature human beings, reversely people are driven to express their affections for human companions with fluffy, diminishing animal references, aptly called “Pet Names” (such as “Honey Bunny” or “Love Monkey”…)– akin to the baby-talk or Union Square “doggy-talk” as it were. The next level question, for which I have no answer, is: What is the thing that connects babies, pets and lovers that elicit this type of behavior/lexicon of stupidity?

Further to the above point, (if one is to perceive of dogs as supplemental lovers or companions) one must also consider the ironic double-use of using dogs to facilitate human interaction in the hopes of leading to real human companionship. Dogs are the ultimate pick-up tools. They also open doors to communities people would otherwise be excluded from (such as dog runs and dog walk “drive-bys” if you can figure out what I mean by that). The mere presence of a dog alludes to a safeness and gentility of an otherwise forbidding stranger on the streets of New York. The Union   Square interaction would not have taken place without the aide of the dog as a prop.

This also makes me wonder about the significance of Rubin’s scenario being between a man and woman and whether there is a romantic ritual taking place here as well.

Winner 3: Brent Shelkey

*Cultural assumptions:*

Dogs are a subservient pet in American culture, but Americans have
relationships with them that may belie or play with the idea/ranking of this
social status. .  We have a phrase/maxim that relates that the dog is "a
man's best friend."  Dogs were probably domesticated here many years ago to
assist in hunting, transportation, and protection but have since evolved in
serving more of an emotional attachment for humans.  This in all senses is
what the American notion of a pet is, which is an animal to be cared for by
a human for purposes that do not assist with survival but rather with
fulfilling more social or emotional needs. Dogs provide companionship,
entertainment, and a simulated parent/child relationship between owners and
pets.  This relationship allows owners to fulfill some kind of mothering or
parental instinct for caring and nurturing without the full extent of
parental duties that human babies require.

Americans often use this parent/child relationship among pets to project
human attributes onto the animal.  Often times, the dog is considered to
always exist in a baby or infant state of development even when fully grown.
In fact, this may be a key attraction to having them as a pet as they remain
perpetual babies, whereas human children grow up and become adults.

In this sentence, the woman uses several words and phrases that mimic the
relationship and way of talking that American adults may use with babies or
small toddlers.

"Look at you, Mr. Doggy!"  Here the use of Mr. is meant to be kind of funny
and ironic, as the dog fulfills a subservient role but is referred to with a
title of Mr. that normally conveys a sense of importance and formality when
used in conversation. In this case, it creates a kind of mock-formality by
pairing both with the addressing of a dog in this manner and by the name of
Doggy.  Doggy is diminutive form of dog that is used affectionately, and
also mimics the style of speech favored by mothers towards babies that add
vowel sounds on the end of common words to accentuate a softer, more
pleasant and playful sound.

So in this sense, Mr. Doggy is a kind of oxymoron pairing of opposites, the
dignified title of Mr. with the silly, infantile term of Doggy.

The following phrase, "Aren't you a doggy-woggy?"  adds to this style of
baby-talk by rhyming and morphing the term of doggy with woggy, a
non-sensical term whose only purpose is to rhyme with the preceding term and
pose a playful tone with the dog.  Americans will often use this style of
speech when talking with infants, such as "Who's my little cutsie-tootsy?
Are we feeling grumpy-wumpy?"

This response to the man's question almost assuredly means that she will
watch the dog and is glad to do so.  She has moved from the more polite,
reserved, and formal tone of the asker and switched the mode into playful
baby-talk with the dog.

TED and the ANTI-TED

Across the street from TED this year in Monterey, California will be a competing conference called BIL.

BIL stands for Beauty. Ingenious. Learning.  It is described as an

open self organizing, emergent,and anarchic science and technology conference. 

Nobody is in charge.

If you want to come, just show up.

If you have an idea to spread, start talking.

If someone is saying something interesting, stop and listen.

BIL is too kind hearted to say so, but the implication is that TED is part of the problem it means to solve.  TED is top down, centralized, hierarchical, elite driven, celebrity centered, and, at $6000 a ticket, really expensive. 

It would have been one thing if BIL merely existed in the world.  But to set up shop across the street from TED?  On the very two days that TED is running?  This is agit prop.  This is mischief.  BIL appears to be the idea jamboree it says it is.  But it is also very clearly means to make itself an opportunity for comparison. 

References

For more on the BIL conference here and here. 

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Thomas Hawk for the photo of Lady Birds convening.   

the law and order of Law and Order

Shows like Law and Order are ubiquitous, our constant companions on air. This makes them hard to see, and therefore hard to reckon with.

It helps to take a look at the numbers.  Law and Order has been on the air since 1990 with over 400 episodes now “in the can.”  It has done well, averaging better than 10 million viewers an episode.  A rough calculation tells us that the original series has been seen 4,000,000,000 times, and many people will watch an episode more than once (wittingly or not). 

But saturation does not appear to have exhausted our appetite for the show.  New episodes continue to pour from NBC.  There are variations on the theme: Law and Order: Criminal Intent and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. New shows and reruns play on TNT, USA Network, Bravo!, and Turner Broadcasting.  On an ordinary day, there are  6 hours of Law and Order running on TV. 

If we take all three series together, there are 740 extant episodes of Law and Order.  This means that, if we wanted to, we could play a unique episode of Law and Order every hour of every day for a month.  All Law and Order all the time for a month.  Now that's a marathon.

The answer to the popularity and staying power of this franchise must be known to its founder Dick Wolf.  The rest of us will have to resort to speculation.  My guess is that this show is a genre within a genre within a genre.  It is constrained by formula, right down to the wisecrack that ends the first segment, and the "chung CHUNG" signature sound that opens each scene.  There is something deeply comforting about a world as predictable as this.  To borrow a line from an old milk campaign in Canada, the fast the world gets, the more sense Law and Order makes. 

But this explanation surely is not robust enough to explain 740 episodes and 4 billion viewings.  It's not enough to explain the deep familiarity with the show possessed even by those who claim "I never watch it."  Like the Antiques Road show I talked about last week, EVERYONE watches Law and Order.  A lot. 

It never fails to amaze me how often academics over sherry, after protesting the fact that they don't have a TV, that they do have a TV but they don't get cable, that they do get cable but they "never watch anything," eventually to demonstrate a Talmudic mastery of Law and Order trivia and compete with one another to demonstrate a superior grasp of the casting intricacies that characterized the early years of the show.   (Everyone, apparently, likes to be the first to note how much more interesting Ben Stone was as a character than Jack McCoy.)  It's not long before the sherry has inspired a full account of every character and every actor.  Cast your eyes right and you will see a wonderful chart from Wikipedia.  Somehow it's just not the same without the sherry, but here it is.  Every character in every role. 

Thoughts on the mysteries of Law and Order are most welcome. 

References

Law and Order on wikipedia here. 

Law and Order, the franchise on wikipedia here. 

Dick Wolf according to wikipedia here. 

Lee Goldberg on the improved state of the present season here. 

Antiques Roadshow

This is one of the mysteries of popular culture.  The Antiques Roadshow gets 10 - 11 million viewers a week.  This makes it the pride of the PBS fleet. 

Just to put this is proportion, let's point out that network TV thinks 8 million viewers is a great showing.  Cable is impressed with 4 million.  Eleven million on education TV? Astonishing.   

And there more.  People call the Antique Roadshow a "guilty pleasure." And this means few people admit to watching it.  People don't talk about it around the water cooler.  There is almost no "buzz."  This means AR got to it's massive popularity with very little word of mouth.  And that makes it huger still.

Apparently, AR has arresting properties.  It's just plain fascinating, in the words of one blogger, "compulsively watchable." 

But why?  On the face of it, this is "talking head" television of the worst kind.  And it's about "old things."  Shot in a church basement or a high school gym, the production values are virtually nil.  There are no special effects.  No beautiful people.   No car chases.  No athletics.  No scandal.  No titillation.  No sex.  No sizzle of any kind.  It's people talking about something carted out of a garage or an attic.  Very low amperage.  Under normal circumstances, this would be barely enough to sustain consciousness let alone a TV show. 

I clipped a couple of quotes from the blogosphere and these help.

1) There is a sense of demographic trespass. 

I don't know what it is about that show but i watch it all the time...and i mean actually watch it, not that i just have it on as background noise. and i enjoy it. no...i'm not 70 years old.  (Amy)

2) some sense that this show can be joyful

I don't actively seek this show out.  But if I turn the TV on, and PBS is Antiques Roadshowin' it up, I CANNOT RESIST.  I must watch, and squee at the things that turn out to be worth huge sums of money.  And then!  The people are so happy!  And it makes me happy to see that.  A lady just brought in a painting she'd bought for $400 and had restored for $600-900.  AND IT TURNED OUT TO BE BY ONE OF THE FIRST HAWAIIAN ARTISTS TO PAINT IN A WESTERN STYLE, AND HE ONLY DID LIKE 5 OR 6 PAINTINGS.  AND THEN IT WAS WORTH $100,000-$150,000!  And it made me happy, and she cried, and I cried on the inside out of happiness for her. I'M WEIRD. (Joie)

3) some sense that the show can level those who are arrogant

the BEST part is when some uppity person comes in and they think they have something rare and valuable worth thousands of dollars and they give them the (incredibly polite) smackdown that its worth about $2.75.  (Steve Betz)

4) some sense that the show combines the everyday and the historical as well as the expert and the civilian. 

I think it is the fact that there is so much lost history that is rediscovered by everyday people.  (Cubsfan)

5) it sounds as if the show amuses when its  staid exterior is punctured by participant loss of control

I [...] take pleasure in watching people throw hissy fits because great grandma's momma's daddy's pocketwatch was a fake and actually created in Japan about 1972.  (Grunt)

But surely this just begins to scratch the surface. 

References

Amy.  2006.  guilty pleasures.  Live Journal.  January 22, 2006. here. 

Bly, Jenn.  2007.  Naked Mole Rat.  Moonlight Masquerade.  December 03, 2007. here. 

Betz, Steve.  2007  Comment on Is This a Guilty Pleasure.  September 17, 2007.  here. 

CubsFan.  2008.  Treasure Found.  Cats, Cubs, Bears, Battlestar Galactica. here. 

Grunt.  2006.  Stop the Insanity.  Two Pink Flamingos and a Doubly-wide. here. 

Joie.  2007.  Is this a quilty pleasure.  Wish I was an English muffin.  Sept. 16. 2007.  here. 

Culture Maps (a new game?)

Lana Swartz, a colleague at MIT, has an interesting response to the Things That Don't Go Together game.  (see the post for Wednesday).  I was suggesting that Dave Eggers and Alan Alda were distant points on our culture map.  Lana disagreed. 

I don't know, Grant...

My guess is that is goes a little something like this:

Eggers/McSweeneys is very NPR

NPR is very West Wing/Alda

Not too far a walk!

I like the idea of forge a path between points on the map, in this case between Dave Eggers and Alan Alda.  The point is to show that for all their disparity, these people occupy contiguous space. 

How about this? 
1) Alan Alda to Robert Altman
    (Mash is the connection. Altman directed the movie version, Alda acted in the TV version)
2) Robert Altman to Hal Hartley (a more alternative American director than Altman)
3) Hal Hartley to Jim Jarmusch
4) Jim Jarmusch to Douglas Coupland
5) Douglas Coupland to, say, Bill Buford (editor of Granta, author of Heat)
6) Bill Buford to [blank, help please]
7) [blank] to Dave Eggers

Ok, it's not perfect.  Some of these links are not just a "stretch" but a leap.

This game tests our knowledge of contemporary culture and it gives advantage to the  generalist.  We need more generalists.  (See the work of Eric Nehrlich, below, on this point).

Rules of the game:

a) People named in links don't have to have a connection.  This is not a "6 degrees of separation" exercise.  They need only be proximate, i.e., within shouting distance of one another in cultural space.  (And in any case, we are not looking only for people, but also for institutions, events, movements and trends.)   

b) There is a sufficiency rule.  We must have at least 6 links.

c) There is a parsimony rule.  We mustn't have more than 10 links.  (This is to discourage showing off and other trivial pursuits.)

d) There is a distribution rule.  Points have to be fairly spaced.  No bunching up where we know things and passing over where we don't. 

e) We are allowed to leave blanks.  We are allowed to be hazy.  This is to give us a chance to admit the limits of our knowledge and seek help from others.

f)  We want to open our maps to the contribution of others.  Collaboration is encouraged, and indeed the only way to build good maps. 

This would make a dandy website.  Where we go show off our maps, post challenges, share knowledge, and otherwise refine the art of culture mapping.

We would hope to attract a variety of people the better to divide the labor. 

a) Those, say, who are good at identifying far flung points.  These tend to come up when you are thinking about other things.  Mr. Rogers and a Senate subcommittee, say.  The website would allow us to register these antimonies for others to "map."

b) Those specialists who are really good at tough links.  Leora Kornfeld comes to mind with her encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture.  Conspiring with the formidable Nardwar, the Human Serviette, she would be invisible. (Leora will have things to say about my Alda-Eggers map, I'm sure.) 

c) speed players who's work is cheap, fast and out of control.

d) the deep thinkers who can be relied upon to dwell in encyclopedic space for long periods in their efforts to find the link juste. 

The long term effect of this sort of thing could be interesting.  One of these days we could bundle together all the good maps to create a cartography, a longitude and latitude of our culture now. 

References

Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist, here. 

The "Things That Don't Go Together" Game, Installment 2.  This blog sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  February 18, 2008.  here.

The "things that don't go together" game, installment 2

I was looking at the Amazon.com entry for Dave Eggers's book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Part way down the page, Amazon offered one of its "Best Value" recommendations.  (It's one of those "buy this second book for a price reduction" kind of things.)  The second book was by Alan Alda's Never Have your Dog Stuffed and Other Things I've Learned.  (Sorry this image is so little.  Clicking on it may help.)

If there are two things that don't go together it's Dave Eggers and Alan Alda. 

Eggers is a network of activities, large pieces loosely joined, and these include his fiction (most recently What is What), a publishing house (McSweeney's), his non fiction (most recently, Surviving Justice), his literary journal (McSweeney's), teaching (at 826 Valencia), screen writing, artwork (for Thrice), whistling (on Aimee Mann's forthcoming album), and editing (see his The Best American Nonrequired Reading series). 

Alda is an actor and most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the TV series Mash. He has won 5 Emmies, 6 Golden Globes and one academy award nomination. Alda was born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo in the Bronx in 1936.  He survived Polio as a child, went to school in White Plains, graduated from Fordham, and served in Korea.  He was perhaps the most genial celebrity of the 1970s and 1980s, and he was for many a model of the new male when gender categories were really in flux. 

Clearly, they are both gifted players in the cultural domain.  But trying to think about them at the same time is hard.  Ok, it's impossible. So of course we don't.  We are dissonance shy.  Trying to think of Eggers and Alda in the same thought, it's a good way to f*ck yourself up.

More grandly, it's all very Foucault out of Borges.  Recall the encyclopedia taxonomy that caught their attention, the one that divides animals into the following categories: a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, ... k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.  Foucault chuckled at this, asking us to consider the "sheer impossibility of thinking that." 

Eggers and Alda are only a taxonomy of two categories, but it still confronts us with the "sheer impossibility of thinking that."

Of course, if you are a post modernist, you confront this odd couple with the sure conviction that the epistemological sky is falling.  This is all very well for those snobs from the continent, the ones who are all too happy to dance on the grave of Western culture.  (And let us forget our suspicions of a hidden motive, specically that if the France and its intellectuals are not going direct Western culture, as appeared to be inevitable in the 19th century, damn it, then no one's going to.)  But this won't do for the hard working social scientist who has actually to account for his or her findings, and then press them into service in the world.

And it is precisely here that things that don't go together make themselves useful.  They force us to put two pins at either ends of the map and to marvel at how much terrain there is between.  There are two possibilities.  One of them is a kind of Clay Shirky problem.  This one says what if we insist that this is a problem, how do we discover a hidden commonality.  What does this new category tell us about the world?  This is another way of reverse programming the Amazon pairing routine. 

The other is the more frankly anthropological problem.  In this case, we marvel out of different, how obviously anti-categorical these items are.  And now we really have our world cut out for us.  What if we had to give driving instructions to a Martian, so that it could traverse all that distance between Eggers and Alda. Where would we start?  What would we say? 

References

Dave Eggers according to Wikipedia here. 

Dave Eggers according to McSweeneys here. 

Alan Alda according to Wikipedia here. 

Foucault, Michel.  2001.  The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the human sciences.  New York: Routledge. 

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Mr. Rogers, the US Senate, Mary Baker Eddy, a sneaker sanctum: just another day in the neighborhood.  {installment 1 of the "things that don't go together" game.]  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  February 1, 2008.  here. 

Lunch hour anthropology

My Valentine gave me a book today called The Company of Strangers by Gus Powell.  Pam and I had seen Powell's photographs at the Museum of the City of New York a couple of weeks ago and we were wowed by how very good his work is. 

This book demonstrates how much anthropological work there is to be done, and that it is open to anyone prepared to engage in simple acts of observation.  Clearly Powell is extravagantly talented as a photographer but some of the power of his work comes I think from a willingness to notice what the rest of us let slip by.  That is to say, there is a Pepysian project here that invites the participation not only of the likes of a Pepys or a Powell, but anyone prepared to pick up a camera or a pen.  Lunch hour anthropology is open to everyone.

And I particularly love the constraint Powell puts in place.  After his inspiration Frank O'Hara, he asks, "what can I see in an hour?"  A constraint of this kind prevents us from being overwhelmed by everything that needs noticing "out there."  A little act of discipline makes the project manageable and this in turns makes the project possible.  I'm going to try it today: one hour, one act of noticing, one act of noticing somehow recorded.   (As it turns out, it was fun, and I have posted the result at a Ning social networking page called "Lunch Hour Anthropology."  Link below)

Powell describes his lunch hour project in the Afterward to the Company of Strangers.  Here's what he says. 

In the mid 1950's Frank O'Hara wrote a book called Lunch Poems.  Each day he would step out of his mid-town office, walk his way to the Olivetti typewriter showroom, and band out a poem about "the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon."  For the past few years I have worked behind a desk not far from where O'Hara once sat.  After I was given O'Hara's book my lunch breaks started to get longer.  Sliding out of the revolving door I found myself transformed into a hungry sailor with one hour of liberty from his ship.  Some days the sidewalk offered a dramatic or romantic one act play; a pedestrian might fall, a couple might kiss...but most of the time I was looking at people who walked towards and away from me.  The quiet gestures of strangers in daylight became significant, and these photographs became my lunch pictures. G.P.

References

For photographs from Powell's Lunch Pictures, go to his website here. 

The Gus Powell exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York is up till March 16, 2008. 

Powell, Gus.  2007.  The Company of Strangers.  Atlanta: J & L Books.  This book may be purchased from the J and L Books website here.  It is also available from Amazon.com here.

The Ning Social Networking page for Lunch Hour Anthropology is here. 

The Wire and the death of Dr. Exposition

Thanks to DVR, I am catching up with episodes of The Wire.  In what is I think the penultimate episode, there is a wonderfully cheeky moment in which The Wire plays us like a suburban Dad who happens to have wandered into the "wrong part of town."

Lester Freamon (Clark Peters) and Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) are installing a wire in a telephone exchange.  It looks complicated with a mess of wires running in all directions. 

It looks complicated and it sounds complicated.  Lester gives one of his professorial accounts, but Jimmy isn't sure he gets it.  He says something like "I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but you're going to have to run that one past me again." 

And at this, every viewer, or at least this viewer, gives a sigh of relief.  We didn't get it either, and we are grateful that one of the characters are giving to step out of scene and almost out of character to explain it to us.  This is what Mike Myers calls an appearance of Dr. Exposition, after than Bond character who comes in and explains everything.  (Let's be honest, even Shakespeare will do this sort of thing.  That would be Sir Exposition.)

But no!  This is The Wire.  And of course it never breaks from scene or character.  It's so deep in, so committed to its moment, it will never stop to give us the 411.  Ever.  So just is just The Wire f*cking with us, in the manner of a little moment of police humor.  Lester explains himself, but the explanation is way more complicated and mystifying than the original.  The Wire treats the series as another participant in the neighborhoods and networks of Baltimore.  There are some things you get.  There are some things you don't.  Just because you're watching TV doesn't give us a privileged point of view.

Take that, you craven, pop culture, have it your way, consumer of the televisual.  The Wire and David Simon stop for no man.  But it's not above scorning us for wishing that it would.  Just to remind us how good and necessary The Wire has become as a precursor of the new popular culture.

B to B, B in B, and the cultures of commerce

I was talking to Mary Walker, a Silicon Valley-based anthropologist, about the proposed (now improbable) deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, and we were wondering how such a deal would work itself out. 

Mergers and acquisit