Memeification (26 March 2009)

Ordinarily I confine my Hipster Runoff commentary to this blog, but this post, an apparent reaction to the environment of desperation at South by Southwest, thick with media consultants and other assorted douchey brand-management types, warrants further attention. It's an elaborate recognition of the fact that bands don't have to worry about making music so much anymore; they need to generate internet memes.

In our modern world, 99% of ‘bands’ could be defined as groups of people who created a myspace page and uploaded 1.5 songs. These people have no vision of the modern landscape, and do not understand what it takes to grow into a ‘band worth following.’ While the ‘live performance’ is eventually a critical element in a band’s rise to prominence, there is a game which can be played on the internet to achieve success.
Your band must invade the Perception Economy. Your Band must no longer be a band. Your band must be a meme. A Meme Which Generates subMemes. These memes must be compelling, intriguing, and interesting enough for people to ‘follow’ or at least think that you are ‘worth following.’

If Twitter is the hot medium, in other words, than content producers of all stripes must change their output to accommodate it. People need to be able to "follow" what they are doing without having to devote more than an instant of their time. Relative to memes, songs are cumbersome. And music has never determined which bands are important to know about -- instead there are certain bands whose names circulate as currency with no regard to their music. This has always been the case. I've found that the best thing about not trying to be up-to-date with pop music is that I've lost touch entirely with those sorts of bands; I know there are such bands as MGMT and Grizzly Bear but feel no need to find out what they sound like or confirm that they suck just as much as I expect them to. I've moved on to a different status hierarchy, I guess. But memeification, as Carles, the proprietor of Hipster Runoff, depicts it, is a good way of conceptualizing how the shifts in the music hierarchy have accelerated, asymptotically approaching realtime, where memes would be instantly outdated the moment they are broadcast online.

Carles augments his argument about memeification with several charts, parodies of the sorts of things marketing gurus presumably present during actual conferences at SxSW. He diagrams, for instance, the "music memeosphere" and details it with this account of the cultural food chain:

* BAND GENERATED MEMES - These are units of information which are generated by the bands themselves. Bands with more creativity and personality tend to create the best memes. However, bands have been successful being ‘cryptic’ and ‘weird’ in recent years. The bigger your band is, the less you have to do to create a gimmicky meme that people want to follow. The MP3 is pretty important, but not always as important for certain bands.
* THE TASTEMAKING MEME AGGREGATING & CONTENT FILTERING SERVICE INDUSTRY - These have replaced magazines and the radio as the optimal sources for music. These services & openly-biased news/meme sources are meant to build trust with consumers. Whether it is an algorithm to filter new music, a team of bros who love music writing about new bands, or just some bitter ass hole who ‘couldn’t make it as a band’ and decided to ‘cultivate influence’ any way he can, these are all providing a service to consumers. They all work together. While it may seem that they are covering ‘different niches’, they all sort of balance eachother out.
* MUSIC MAGAZINES AND RADIO - These make modern people feel sad and constraint. These put a bottle neck on consumer individuality, feeling like they only see a ‘limited snapshot’ of what is available. Minimal ‘personal relationship building’ means less authenticity and less trust. When a band is viewed as ‘relevant’ from these sources, people who like them are either ’stupid’, ‘just want to fit in’, or ‘ironically like the band/artist.’
* REGULAR PEOPLE/CONSUMERS - These are consumers like you or me. We want to listen to music and populate our iPods for different reasons. Some people enjoy ‘hunting for music.’ Others just get it from friends. Humans are at the tail end of the meme trail, but they do create a demand for memes which can sometimes force a band to exhaust their presence.

As with virtually everything on Hipster Runoff, it's hard to tell the degree to which Carles is joking, or even whether that determination would have any meaning. He's basically guilty of everything he mocks, making his blog a sort of self-consuming artifact. It points two mirrors at one another and records the infinite regress: a blog worth blogging about. Memes as memes. Consequently, there is nothing exaggerated about what he reports here -- this really is a pretty accurate portrait of the "music-meme economy." It lacks only the oozing cynicism.

In its way, Carles's discourse is far more performative than anything Derrida ever managed. I'm wondering, though, if Carles's style of discourse, the mode of proceeding by tautology and negating irony by both fully indulging it and entirely rejecting it simultaneously, is the only creditable form of discourse for addressing the contemporary cultural scene. It captures perfectly how every phenomenon is already processed and accepted as a strategy, and the possibility of appreciating any given thing in earnest is always already in quotation marks, without the presumption of there even being a reason.

Failures of social media (13 March 2009)

Danah Boyd, who has recently completed a dissertation about social networking, distills her conclusions in this lecture. Her academically oriented perspective is extremely useful in filtering out the hype about social networking driven by its commercial potential, and looking at it more as a social practice -- what needs has it served, what needs has it created, and how thoroughly have we assimilated the technology that makes it possible. Are they more than online friend-management services? Are they altering the category of friendship itself?

Boyd regards social media as being born primarily to provide virtual spaces for young people to interact -- places where people can show off and secure recognition, and where friend groups can be defined and police their boundaries. The influx of adults into social media shifts the emphasize toward commercial purposes -- self-promotion and networking -- and toward nostalgia. Hence the rolling (and unsettling) high-school reunion that Facebook is for people my age. Boyd's point is that network effects fuel social media's growth. We join if we think people from our high school are there (whether we are in high school now or were 25 years ago -- no wonder it seems so adolescent) and maybe want to contact us. For adults, at least, the momentum of a network's expansion seems crucial; the experience of being caught up in one as it expands exponentially is a heady experience -- as we intuit when some forgotten person from the past contacts us. But this momentum is unsustainable -- eventually it levels off. Does that take away the thrill of social networks with it?

It's not clear whether the network effects of using social media have any durability, whether they are generated not by the experience of using social media but by the hype surrounding it. Users have tended to migrate from site to site as new services become more fashionable and old services become overpopulated with lame late adopters or worse, too many of those people who cause "contexts to collide": As Boyd explains, "In choosing what to say when, we account for both the audience and the context more generally. Some behaviors are appropriate in one context but not another, in front of one audience but not others. Social media brings all of these contexts crashing into one another and it's often difficult to figure out what's appropriate, let alone what can be understood." When your current friends get to see how you interact with people who knew you decades ago, or when parents can scrutinize profile pages looking for insight into their children's social life apart from them, it can be problematic. The sites try to come up with ever-more-fine privacy controls, but these make using sites onerous and slip-ups are inevitable. The safest things to do are to move elsewhere or cease sharing -- then the network effects that sustain social media can disintegrate.

Boyd isolates some characteristics that make mediated friendship distinctive and which make these sites, in my opinion, inherently unstable:

1. Persistence. What you say sticks around. This is great for asynchronicity, not so great when everything you've ever said has gone down on your permanent record. The bits-wise nature of social media means that a great deal of content produced through social media is persistent by default.

2. Replicability. You can copy and paste a conversation from one medium to another, adding to the persistent nature of it. This is great for being able to share information, but it is also at the crux of rumor-spreading. Worse: while you can replicate a conversation, it's much easier to alter what's been said than to confirm that it's an accurate portrayal of the original conversation.

3. Searchability. My mother would've loved to scream search into the air and figure out where I'd run off with friends. She couldn't; I'm quite thankful. But with social media, it's quite easy to track someone down or to find someone as a result of searching for content. Search changes the landscape, making information available at our fingertips. This is great in some circumstances, but when trying to avoid those who hold power over you, it may be less than ideal.

4. Scalability. Social media scales things in new ways. Conversations that were intended for just a friend or two might spiral out of control and scale to the entire school or, if it is especially embarrassing, the whole world. Of course, just because something can scale doesn't mean that it will. Politicians and marketers have learned this one the hard way.

5. (de)locatability. With the mobile, you are dislocated from any particular point in space, but at the same time, location-based technologies make location much more relevant. This paradox means that we are simultaneously more and less connected to physical space.

All the characteristics on this list are fleeting advantages that eventually become liabilities, at which point users have incentive to light out for the territories -- head for a new, more exclusive site and build up network effects again. And online, there is always more undiscovered territory.

Realtime and realspace (7 March 2009)

Nicholas Carr has two good posts (here and here) about the hegemony of "realtime." The upshot is that technology is eradicating the cultural time-space for contemplation. In the first post, Carr points out the atavism in this.

Pretty much the whole history of civilization has been a war on realtime. Culture, we've been taught, is what goes on in the blank spaces, the mind-holes that open up when we exit realtime. Before the civilizers came along to muck things up - to put things in perspective, as they'd probably say - the universe was entirely realtime. There was no before. There was no after. There was only the instant in which stuff happens.

Realtime is our natural state - it's what we share with the other animals - and now at last we're going back to it. Listen to the birds. They'll tell you all you need to know: realtime is a stream of tweets. Yesterday, when he announced the twitterification of Facebook, the realtiming of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg said, "We are going to continue making the flow of information even faster." The first one to remove all the spaces wins.

Accelerating the flow of information is tantamount to commodifying it, effacing the differences between things. It all becomes data to process; if it slows us down, it is an inconvenient datapoint that warrants a more careful calibration of the information stream -- the appropriate response in the realtime world would be to put in place a better filter to remove such troubling material.

Speeding up information consumption for its own sake plays into the fantasy that technology permits a kind of ubiquity, lets us be present everywhere through online interconnections, so the maximum potential opportunities are available to us. We can see what all our friends are doing at all times and receive news from every corner of the world as it happens and so on. But it seems that this ubiquity of online presence is counterbalanced by surfeit of information, which flattens it all and renders no opportunity any more compelling than any other. As Carr explains in the second post, "Realtime, you see, doesn't just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen - the "intimate portable world" that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension." He call the two-dimensional space "realspace," the companion to realtime.

Optional paralysis, indifference and solipsism loom, as the coping strategies for the onslaught of realtime and realspace. When our social reality is ironed out into a stream of broadcasts on a feed, mediated by devices that guarantee each of us an isolation in an environment that gratifies our fantasies of total control, the illusion that friends can be monitored entirely on our own terms grows; the requirement of reciprocity begins to seem provisional, old-fashioned, a signal of a breakdown of the better technologies for person management. As Carr suggests, efforts to accommodate "realtime" amount to a regression into pure reaction. Reasoning become passe, particularly when it extends beyond 140 characters. The triumph of realtime takes the celebration of snap judgments (a la Malcolm Gladwell's Blink) to its logical conclusion, where we operate by instinct, confident that it inherently can't be wrong. That's a scary thought, if you believe that what we experience as instincts can generally be shaped more easily by exogenous forces, and that only conscious consideration of our impulses subjects them to our internal value system.

We know what gets us into realspace; it seems to me a continuation of the space of consumerism -- of impulsiveness, instrumentality, convenience for its own sake, and ersatz individualism. And obviously it is not just going to go away. We are all complicit in it, eventually. At some point it suits our purposes and we go along, as though we control the terms by which we interact with it. We don't notice the creeping ways in which it begins to dictate terms to us.

So it seems imperative to keep in mind points of resistance, the ways in which we escape realspace and realtime, the periods when we are out of the dataflow that is imposed on us by our devices and are instead in the flow generated by our absorption in our own activity.

More on consumer disappointment (29 Dec 2008)

In Shifting Involvements, Albert Hirschman takes a prolonged look at the ways that disappointment is built in to consumerism. Drawing on Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy, Hirschman argues that what is pleasurable is not merely the use value of the goods and services we buy, but the process of their taking us from dissatisfaction to satisfaction. That move is what we register as pleasure, not the fact of being in the satisfied state itself. If we merely remain satisfied on account of something we've purchased, then we experience no joy. From this point of view, pleasure hinges on our capacity to be dissatisfied.

This may be in part why needs turn out to be such slippery things, in that we often think we want thing until we have it, whereupon we discover that we really want something else. This movement to disappointment may be less a matter of fussiness than a protective move to guard our capacity for pleasure. Hirschman points out that "we never operate in terms of a comprehensive hierarchy of wants established by some psychologist surveying the multifarious pursuits and 'needs' of mankind." In other words, the hierarchy is always in flux, always in the process of being articulated through our life activities -- in consumer society, predominantly through shopping. We discover who we are and what we want in the process of shopping for ourselves. Shopping becomes the end in itself and the acquired goods mere souvenirs of the pleasure process. (This is the "experience economy" that zealous marketers frequently champion.) But at the same time, we have an innate tendency to be disappointed with what we buy, to preserve the capacity to renew our expectations for surprise, for a repeat of the satisfaction-seeking process. When shopping and identity are conflated, as they are in a consumer society, the result is an inherent, structural tendency for us to be continually disappointed in who we think we are, accompanied with an increasing tendency to try to solve that problem through acquiring more stuff. Journeys of self-discovery launched in the mall are almost by definition never-ending. There are good reasons for our identities to be somewhat fluid and open-ended, but anchoring them to consumer goods subjects them to a distorted set of criteria that undermine any sense of stable accomplishment. Our self-concept gets linked instead to the vagaries of the fashion cycle rather than to our own rhythm of personal growth. We become alienated from our own development and start to feel like we harbor multiple personalities, all of them shallow and fickle.

A similar paradox adheres to our efforts to customize consumer goods. These efforts seem to make the product more durable and less prone to dissatisfy in that it is reshaped to express and suit our needs, and in that we remain actively engaged with it, remaking it afresh. But the customization process may in fact reflect a dissatisfaction with the good's durable usefulness -- we want to distract ourselves from its humdrum utility and render it more exciting, though this excitement can only be short-lived, more so than its utility in most cases. Hirschman points out that in many durable items, we long for a "certain amount of 'built-in obsolescence,' " since this makes for a "radical shift in the pleasure-comfort balance." Replacing a good gives pleasure; getting more use out of something we already have merely supplies unrecognized comfort. By customizing something, and tying it to an expression of identity in a particular moment, we can build in an object's obsolescence by ourselves, without having to rely on the thoughtfulness of manufacturers making goods shoddy for us. By foregrounding a good's ephemeral function of articulating an ever-fleeting sense of self, we undermine its lasting quality of being prosaically useful and make it far more likely that we will want to replace it before it's entirely kaputt. By fusing our personal fashion whims to a durable item, we make its depreciation more recognizable; it becomes something that more evidently falls out of date. It becomes something that gets used up rather than being merely useful. Customization, then, is a matter of adapting useful things to disposability.

Consumer atrophy (16 Dec 2008)

Rob Walker's column about the "new frugality" nicely skewers the concept.

We were told our willingness to spend more — on fair-trade coffee, eco-friendly totes, organic dog food — demonstrated a fresh consumer sophistication that would change the marketplace. Now, suddenly, our values are reflected in cheap shirts from Costco.
A new normal that revolves around buying lots of stuff while bragging about our bargain-hunting skills doesn’t seem to reflect changed values.

That's a good concise way of getting across something I've been trying to express but have managed only to formulate somewhat inchoately in posts like these.

Walker ends the essay on this faintly hopeful conundrum: "If there’s a deeper shift in our thinking, it’s still to come. And maybe it will. After all, the mere fact that we have managed to characterize consumer shock as frugality chic offers a perverse form of hope: That whatever happens, we’ll never lose our tendency toward optimism — even, it turns out, about our pessimism." But to be honest, this strikes me as all the more reason to be pessimistic, since optimism usually strikes me as ideologically induced naivete. It's better than being miserable, but it licenses our perpetuating in the same self-defeating practices with regard to consumerism all in the name of a dream -- that dream of finding our perfect reflection there in the world of things rather than discover it through the more arduous but more fulfilling route of making and doing. (I can anticipate the objections: Shopping is doing! Consuming is producing! I would argue that they successfully simulate those things while simultaneously promising an escape from them. Shopping has developed the alibi of plausibly passing as "self-actualizing.") I have a hard time reconciling optimism to anything but sunny yes-man-ism, and some critical scrutiny on a society-wide scale will be necessary to uproot consumerist fall-backs.

PSFK linked to this LA Times article that basically epitomizes the new dispensation on consumer behavior. The key goal for service-feature writers in the mass media is to show us how we can maintain the consumer mindset -- shopping with style for self-definition -- only without our having to spend as much (for the time being). This allows us to hold the cherished consumerist attitude in abeyance, keep it well-exercised and prevent it from atrophying while we wait for the economy to turn. Doing away with the mind-set is, of course, unthinkable.

Here, in this article, the formula is simple: Send a celebrity to a closeout discounter and watch him turn junk into magic with his imprimatur! In this case, Philippe Starck.

Famous for putting a modern spin on 18th century French furniture and for creating exquisite environments using expensive materials and craftsmanship, Starck also embraces sensible consumerism. Buy quality over quantity, he says.
"You must be very rigorous," he says, sifting through discounted wares in search of the gems. "Try to find the essence, the most iconic or simple representation of a thing. Look for the bowl that looks most like a bowl. That means we must avoid colors and patterns, and everything that can be trendy."

Starck is also worried about the kids:

"In a crisis, we have to think about our children and especially push their creativity," he says. "If capitalism is failing because it is a selfish system, we can teach them to reinvent society so that it is based on sharing."

A nice sentiment -- but what prompted this reflection? Prada green.

Starck is pleased by the store's furnishings and art supplies for kids. He picks out the aforementioned folding table and chairs, as well as sidewalk chalk, a 240-piece paint and marker set, a packet of paper in a color he dubs "Prada green" and a 10-pack of No. 2 pencils. Total: less than $50.

In general, the media-appointed style mavens always make an appeal to art and timelessness, which on its face seems ludicrous, since nothing is less enduring than fashion dictates. But the trope is important as an analogue for what is truly timeless from the point of view of the fashion industries -- that is, consumerism. The idea that we'll all reach a point where we don't care about the message we send with the "essence" of our bowls and our Prada green is too terrible for them to contemplate.

Rebranding disease (11 Dec 2008)

At the Mind Hacks blog, Vaughan Bell links to a study whose name is self-explanatory: "The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perceptions of Illness." Medical language, it seems, is deployed to make humdrum conditions more exploitable in the market. Conditions like baldness can be rebranded with medical jargon that has the effect of making the condition seem more acute, more unhealthful. We take diseases more seriously if they sound complicated and Latinish. Patent-medicine hawkers and nostrum makers have of course taken advantage of this for years—using obfuscation and crypto-erudition to cause alarm and insecurity—so it's no surprise to see the efficacy of the tactics confirmed in research. And of course, one of the triumphs of modern advertising was the invention of "halitosis" -- the semantic means of medicalizing bad breath.

Capitalism thrives by fostering new needs; luckily, new worries also qualify. In 1936, Printer's Ink, an advertising trade journal, began to keep a list of diseases invented through marketing. It makes good business sense to hit people where they are most vulnerable and potentially most ignorant. Jargonizing health discourse has the neat effect of seeming to educate consumers while actually confusing them and making them more manipulable. (Perhaps all jargon serves this function.) It's subtraction through addition.

Bell sums up the larger ramifications of the research well:

Pharmaceutical companies often promote the benefits of their product, but they also regularly attempt to change our understanding of the problem itself, so the use of their medication seems the most sensible option.
However, there are many other players in the public discussion of illness and certain ideas about causes, symptoms and treatments are often pushed by people because it fits in with other agendas they have.
This is particularly relevant for scientific theories and it is no accident that many of the most significant public medical debates in recent years have been over the acceptance of certain explanations - such as the role of the MMR vaccine in autism, the role of neurotransmitters in mental illness, the role of genetics in obesity.
There is no explanation of illness independent of culture and an understanding of how popular ideas influence our personal medical beliefs is an essential part of understanding medicine itself.

In an article from Stay Free, Carrie McLaren drew the requisite conclusions about the commercial persuasion industry's effect on that "culture" and those "popular ideas."

when it comes to advertising, the more symptoms–and the more noticeable, painful, and embarrasing the symptoms–the better, because the easier it is to sell to consumers; that is, the more likely the illness will be self-diagnosed. And drugs for self-diagnosed ills–allergies, weight-reduction rather than cholesterol or blood pressure–are those seeing the greatest boost from commercials. Eskimos may have 14 words for snow, but we’ve now got just as many for allergy symptoms. In the same way that the availability of a drug such as Prozac can define an illness, televisibility now figures in.... It is, in other words, eerily fitting for drugs to be sold as consumer products, for products–whether cookies, diet drinks, or cigarettes–have long been sold as drugs, as magical cures.... Consuming, in other words, is our placebo.

This is what makes consumerism so tenacious -- it makes us feel better without fulfilling any of its promises. It's essentially a means for circulating promises; the products themselves are, in a sense, by-products -- just props for the healing daydreams.

The birth of the wrongness (18 August 2008)

I'm still thinking about wrongness, purposeful attempts to alienate an audience through a kind of puerile repetition or offensiveness that on its face contains no politically subversive content. Pop music has been a fertile ground for breeding wrongness, as PopMatters' recent list of Detours, unlikely albums by established artists, makes plain. Wrongness may be defined as the attempt to reject aesthetically or repudiate the constraints of popularity after the compromises to achieve it have already been made. (Think Metal Machine Music or Jim Morrison's Miami performance on March 1, 1969.) Since it is so self-referential, it tends to be politically and artistically sterile. The appeal of such wrongness is limited mainly to connoisseurs of disillusionment and cynicism, and more important, to those "true fans" of the contemptuous artists. By sticking with performers no matter how much hatred they direct at their audiences, these fans prove they are not dilettantes.

But the 1990s may have been the heyday for wrongness, as college rock became indie rock, which became alternative, which became profitably embedded in the established mainstream of pop genres. Efforts to preserve indie credibility and maintain integrity in the face of commercial success were played out at the aesthetic level at the very moment when what had first been seized upon as the sign of integrity -- grunge -- became a highly marketable and easily duplicated commodity. Elaborate simulacrums of lo-fi ineptitude became a calling card in alternative rock and graphic design. Grunge could connote integrity and/or authenticity without its purveyors needing to have any. But, of course, that has been true of many up-and-coming commercial forms emerging from various subcultures. What was interesting about the 1990s was that authenticity for the first time became the main appeal of the new style, its basic substance and message, the organizing principle for all its hallmarks. Hip-hop moved in the same direction, fetishizing authenticity as an end in itself rather than serving as an ex post facto description of a style that was ultimately "about" something else.

When grunginess became a mainstream cliche, something more heinous was necessary to demonstrate how alternative you meant to be. Hence, wrongness, or being "brown" as '90s alternative rock band Ween called it. Around the time the band made the quintessentially "wrong" move of putting out a straight contemporary-country record replete with the genre's cliches and lyrics full of derogatory stereotypes -- all the while insisting they were fully in earnest -- it would play shows featuring limit-testing 20-minute versions of b-side "Vallejo" and "Poop Ship Destroyer," an epic tribute to brownness. These were the antithesis of hippie jams (though Ween ironically would later become embraced by the jam-band scene), meant not to be expansive and pleasing to drug-altered minds, but to be abrasively tedious and mind-numbing, forcing observers to question when, if ever, it will end, and cleasing the mind of all remembered pleasures in the show, perhaps so the band could start fresh afterwards, trying to re-earn the audience's trust and approval. In this was an analogue to all indie bands' predicaments, having full knowledge of their own selling out and wondering if it were possible to regain integrity somehow, through some purifying ritual of awfulness.

Anyway, with the Family Guy's success, it may be that wrongness of this sort is in the process of going the way of grunge. What will the new oppositional aesthetic be now that wrongness and purposeful annoyance is losing its ability to repel?

Brand anorexia (13 August 2008)

Advertising blog AdFreak passes along this finding: "Jeremy Kees of Villanova University has published a study that suggests that seeing skinny women in ads makes women feel worse about their personal body image but better about the brands advertised." The blog poster, Rebecca Cullers, asks of her ad-industry peers: "assuming you think the study's findings are correct, would you use anorexics in your ads if testing showed it sold the product better?" I think anyone who has seen a fashion magazine knows the answer to that question.

The typo-ridden press release for the study details its method, which seems somewhat absurd, almost demeaning.

The controlled study of 194 women ages 18-24 on two college campuses, finds that after seeing an ad featuring a thin model, young women are twice as likely to decline to eat a cookie or chose a low fat alternative.

It reminds me of a scene in a fifth-season episode of The Larry Sanders Show where Todd Barry, as one of the writers, tries in a patronizing voice to force a swimsuit model to eat a cookie. "Come on, you want a cookie. Just one cookie."

The account of this research can't help but trivialize women: "All women (high and low self monitors) were more likely to choose reduced fat Oreos or opt for no cookie. Compared with those who saw advertisements without models, the women exposed to the models were nearly 4 times as likely to decline a cookie and 42% more likely to choose reduced fat cookies." It's hard to imagine research revolving around Oreo consumption being conducted on men. But then our culture is much less likely to consider a man's weight an index to his character or social relevance.

But the core finding here is pretty dismaying, as it suggests not only that destructive fantasies of what weight is appropriate for women have taken a firm hold, but also something that we should all probably take for granted, namely that marketing can often become more effective precisely by making us feel worse about ourselves. After seeing ads, we don't necessarily have to feel good in order to feel good about the brand. The study's findings also seem to suggest that brands take on the exclusionary "glamour" associated with emaciated models whose figures are impossible for the ad's target audience to achieve.

This sort of phenomenon isn't limited to fashion, though. One of the inegalitarian aspects of ads is that they elevate expectations of what is a "normal" standard of living across the board, projecting a fictional classless society in which everyone can indulge in luxury without pain of privation. We can all participate in this fantasy thanks to the media, but we don't all experience the same amount of harsh cognitive dissonance upon realizing just how far we are from actually achieving those standards. Our exclusion from the reality doesn't undermine the fantasy, though we probably would be better off hewing to a sour-grapes reaction to the unattainable things that marketing misleadingly promises. Instead we react to the exclusion by imagining what was promised was even better than we might have thought initially. And if we actually achieve what seemed impossible, acquire the goods that signify the better standard of living that once excluded us, of course we will be disappointed in it.

Advertising as creative destruction (7 August 2008)

Anne Elizabeth's Moore's Unmarketable takes an anecdotal look at advertising's tenacious ability to co-opt any position within a consumer society and use it to its own advantage. Movements that begin as explicitly anti-consumerist end up providing tropes and techniques for ads promoting brands. Part of the problem, as Moore points out, is that "marketing has become so diffuse as to be a social activity" and "friends and acquaintances in the struggle to condemn the bad and support the good have simply gone into advertising." Advertisers, in apparent good faith, deliberately cultivate ties to underground or subversive art movements in order to spread and popularize their aesthetic (while at the same time selling Toyotas or what have you). These movements succumb to the marketer's blandishments because the alternative is to languish in obscurity or to end up promoting the same consumerist culture anyway, inadvertently through having their artistic methods appropriated by advertisers without their participation. "Adbusting, subvertising, and many other activities employed by culture jammers and copyfighters alike, whether parodic or satiric, fundamentally reproduce and reinforce brands and the aims of branding," Moore writes. "They not only reassert the icons they half-heartedly attempt to dismantle, they encourage their continued survival.... The impervious logic of branding means criticism is becoming almost impossible to voice or hear."

The ubiquity of advertising helps establish that appearance of imperviousness. Moore concludes that it has become impossible to express integrity in the public sphere, because the symbols and the means don't exist. Advertising destroys them in its need to continually reinvent itself to remain relevant, to continue to surprise audiences and reach them: "marketing strategies are constantly evolving in new directions, any directions, all directions. It is a business dependent upon both expansion and innovation to survive." Moore quotes a marketing group that boasts its ability to achieve "maximum intrusion" by using guerrilla methods once used by underground artists out of necessity (in a desperate attempt to reach an audience) or as an attempt to shock people out of complacency. As a result, any attempts to present ideas to the public all take on commercial overtones. If they are not directly sponsored, their presentation mirrors forms familiar as advertising. Branding leaves no interstitial space in the culture for alternative conceptions of public communication, for non-commercial expressions of social meanings. All such attempts are quickly assimilated to the mode of branding. Habits become lifestyles, which become reified into branded products. We conceive of ourselves as brands, we brand our work, we present ourselves in quasi-logo form on internet social networks, while twittering slogans for ourselves throughout the day. With more and more of our social existence taking place in a fully quantifiable space online, all forms of social recognition are collapsed into the metrics appropriate to monitoring business. This undermines the possibility of integrity, which may perhaps be defined precisely as that which can't be measured but only practiced.

Precious moments (18 June 2008)

I've been reading Swedish economist Staffan Linder's The Harried Leisure Class, which examines the impact of time constraints on consumption. Linder argues that the time it takes to consume and maintain the goods a larger income allows us to acquire must be taken into account when evaluating our decisions regarding whether to save or spend, whether to work more or seek more leisure. These sorts of concerns have returned to prominence recently, but under a new name -- such is our customary passivity and our habit of pathologizing and psychologizing social problems with regard to consumption that the problem of time scarcity has been reintroduced as the "attention economy," with many of us suffering from an "attention deficit."

Linder foresaw this turn of events, recognizing that we would struggle to find time to make use of all the goods we acquire, and that we would be easily seduced into believing that we could make fertile exchanges between productive work time and consumption time in the search for more marginal utility from the expenditure of our precious moments. In other words, if we can increase our income and buy more things, we would take our utility that way and figure we'd actually consume the stuff later, when presumably we'd have more time to do so and wouldn't have as much capability to earn. Hence working and shopping replaces the actual enjoyment of leisure. Collecting books replaces the pleasure of reading them, and so on. "One may possibly buy more of everything, but one cannot conceivably do more of everything.... The purchase of more expensive golf clubs is taken as an indication that golfers are devoting themselves more to their sport." I suddenly understand my absurd music collection in a new light.

We are too deprived of time to do any better -- we think that working and earning the money to buy a bunch of books is better quantitatively than working less, buying one book and reading it carefully. And because conserving time is of the essence, it makes more sense to buy more things thoughtlessly and discard the rubbish than to consider every purchase carefully -- we have a surfeit of goods and money, what we lack is time. That is why the 99-cent store is such a suitable emblem of our culture -- an overwhelming avalanche of cheap goods that we can even begin to process the true worth of.

As Linder explains it,

The yield on time spent in acquiring information on different decisions would gradually deteriorate in relation to the yield on time spent in production. This must lead to a reallocation of time. The time used to acquire information must be reduced per decision. One has to concentrate on acquiring information only of such value that the yield on time spent for this purpose will be as high as in the production of goods. It pays to make a larger number of mistakes in expenditure, instead of preparing all decisions very carefully -- and thus having correspondingly less time to acquire income. As the scarcity of time increases, we can expect a decline in the quality of decisions.

This in turn reinforces the appeal of the throwaway society, and the idea that the moment of purchase is where the pleasure is achieved, not the moment of use. The moment of use is where the inevitable disappointment comes when we realize we just acquired more crap. Linder speculates that planned obsolescence can be better understood as the consumer's preference, since it means the product will ultimately make fewer time and maintenance demands on the consumer.

Similarly, advertising is appealing to us because it limits the time we spend in decision making, regardless of whether it steers toward a wise one. "People can be made the victims of persuasion not because they are irrational but because they are rational. Since they are rational, they are not prepared to spend all their time gathering information on what are the best things to buy" -- service journalism notwithstanding. "The increase in the volume of advertising can hardly be attributed to sales departments having become increasingly malevolent or the customers increasingly irrational." Instead, we'd rather save time and risk being mislead by advertising then research all our purchasing decisions -- the number of which are continually increasing, as we substitute acquisition for usage of goods. I have tended to see the appeal of advertising as the vicarious enjoyment it enables -- it helps us frame the fantasies that makes goods seem useful to us, particular in shaping the identity and lifestyle we want to project. But this same inducement to vicarious consumption is compelling in relation to our own goods even after we own them -- ads help save us time by doing the consuming and enjoying of the goods for them. We can just buy them and know through the ads that we could in theory enjoy them, probably sometime down the road (that will never come). Linder argues that "one actually wants to be influenced by advertising to get an instant feeling that one has a perfectly good reason to buy this or that commodity, the true properties of which one knows dismally little about." If that is the case, then we are consuming decisiveness as an end in itself, as the pleasurable commodity that ads are able to supply. As usual, the item itself around which the decision making is staged is superfluous, a souvenir of the pleasure of choosing.

"Ultimate convenience" (27 May 2007)

For a long time I tried to not drink bottled water on principle, the principle being not merely habitual cheapskatery but that I didn't want to contribute to the erosion of safety standards of tap water -- if the political constituencies that matter all become de rigeur bottled water drinkers, then the will to ensure that the government protects water supplies weakens, and waterborne diseases among those too poor to secure bottled water increases. But the insanity of the packaging waste brought on by people requiring a special container for every single serving of water is brought home in an article in the NYT Magazine by Jon Mooallem, who has written several illuminating articles about the food-packaging industry and its implications. The article mainly looks at the bottled water industry's attempts to remain exempt from laws that tack on bottle deposits, as on beer and soda. Grocers, who have to deal with the infrastructure of collecting and repaying deposits, are the primary opponents of this arrangement; they protest the hassle of having to cope with storing all the bottles and the chaos the redemption process forces them to try to manage. Bottle-deposit laws encourage the development of a scavenger class, who might turn up in your alley rummaging through your garbage and then can be found pushing their battered shopping carts full of empties to the Trade Fair for cashing in. Proponents of bottle deposits seem to think they provide useful incentives to the indigent; instead of begging or menacing people, they can be doing something useful for society. But it also incentivizes waste in the more fortunate, who can rationalize littering (and the unnecessary disposable-single-serving consumption it stems from) with the classic patronizing line of how it gives some bum a job to pick up after them.

The problem with deposit laws is they don't punish the wastrels, namely the people who can't be troubled to refill a Nalgene bottle but instead burn through plastic throwaways instead. I was staggered by the following quotes from a market researcher, which depressingly enough, seem right on:

Michelle Barry of the market research firm the Hartman Group told me, “Water is not really critically considered” — not even the object itself, it seems. “We believe bottled water has become less about the physical act of hydration and more about being a companion to people,” she said. “They like to walk around with it and hold it.” Increasingly, the typical consumer sips out of a bottle of water “to mark time.” “It’s like their bangie,” Barry added, meaning a security blanket. Or rather, each bottle of water is one in a readily available cast of interchangeable security blankets that we can capriciously acquire and toss throughout the day.
Several industry people told me that water’s most exciting growth is now in sales of large multipacks or flats of single-serving bottles — stockpiles that we keep in our pantries or garages and grab a few bottles from on our way out the door. The obvious question then is, why not fill up a reusable bottle from the tap and take that with us. “If you’re on the go, and you’re buying something to consume on the go,” Barry told me, “that assumes you don’t have the time for preparation before you go. You need that ultimate convenience.”

A tax on bottles needs to be high enough to inconvenience such people. Individuals tend to default to the more convenient option unless they are given a reason to think about what they are about to do, every time they do it. It's not always an active choice indicative of a strong preference -- convenience lures are grounded in the human tendency to want to evade choices, after all. Who wants to be part of the heedless, littering masses? It seems like a little "libertarian paternalism" might help in this instance, encouraging people through slight institutional tweaks to make the choice they would prefer to make and would be proud of rather than make the destructive and embarrassing choice out of laziness and habit, to the benefit of multinational manufactures of plastic and the petroleum companies that supply the raw materials.

Convenience and material culture (11 April 2007)

Via kottke.org comes a link to this Stay Free! interview with Giles Slade, author of Made to Break, a book about planned obsolescence. (I wrote about the book before here after reading about it here. The whole thing is worth reading, but these exchanges I found particularly interesting:

STAY FREE!: How did book come about?
GILES SLADE: I came back to North America from teaching in the Arab Emirates after 9/11, and every interaction I had in public was very curt, very rude. I wondered where that shortness developed and ultimately became convinced that it has to do with our attitudes toward material culture.

I thought this was an interesting connection -- rather than attribute rudeness and impoliteness to cultural mores and leave it at that, the move to ground our understanding of the mores in material culture seems an absolutely necessary next step. I wonder whether our fixation on efficiency leads us to build in the desire for convenience into our infrastructure, into our commonsense approach to the environments we find ourselves in and how we read them, making that pseudoefficiency hard to resist. And since convenience is so often understood as the elimination of human interaction, does the way our preference for it seems already built in to society then justify to us that ubiquitous rudeness Slade mentions? The expectation and privileging of convenience seems to make things road rage seem reasonable, normal. I rarely pause to doubt my righteous intolerance when someone in front me at the bakery where I get my morning roll takes a long time to count their change out. I get frustrated when everyone isn't in as much of a hurry as me, and I feel that's somewhat a product of living in New York, where haste is institutionalized.

And this:

STAY FREE!: When you talk to people about your book, do you notice a generational divide in how older people and younger people feel about these issues?

GILES SLADE: Yes, younger people don't want to hear anything negative about the iPod. I might as well put a turban on and grow a long beard. It comes down to the social value of consumer goods as icons. If I'm saying something negative about your tribe's icon, it's as if I'm attacking you personally. Also, younger people have much less sense that things should last. I find that really disturbing.

STAY FREE!: It makes sense, though. If you're born into a world where things aren't made to last, naturally you won't expect them to.

GILES SLADE: Sure, but then things less than 20 years old become what we think of as antiques. So your sense of duration, of history, of culture has collapsed and evaporated. If your favorite toys are constantly updated and replaced, how is that going to effect your relationships with people? I think you're less likely to have lasting commitments to people, to family, to a country, even. There's a well-known book called Bowling Alone, and I think this is where it comes from. We've become so accustomed to things only lasting for a few years we don't invest in them anymore. We don't see beautiful things like paintings and rugs as lasting.

If the values are built in to material culture, which is made up mostly of consumer products and embodies consumerist values, then it makes some sense that generations raised entirely within that culture, which has been proliferating steadily, would be protective of it and grow defensive if you imply that there's something damaged about it. It's as though you are saying they can't help but be impaired by the culture they grew up in. But that situation holds for everyone, no matter what generation; it takes a special effort of negativity and critical thinking to escape the biases built in to the society we learn to adapt ourselves to. It's made easy for us to seamlessly assume the prejudices of that society, and there's little benefit in resisting that process -- just a faith in principles, in the idea that there is some "real" beyond those prejudices worth aspiring to. It's easy, though, once you've adopted that negative attitude (hard to differentiate from cynicism), to assume that it's harder for the generations after our own to make the same effort, that things have become much worse.

Taste arguments (5 January 2007)

Sometimes friends ask me what music I've been listening to, and I always feel lame when I tell them, "Justin Timberlake." I put a brave face on it and try to make no big deal out of it, change the subject. I certainly don't expect anyone to congratulate me for it, as pop-oriented music critics some times seem to expect in their columns when they present their embrace of top 40 as some kind of radical position, as if they'd just endorsed Lyndon LaRouche for president or something. My suspicion is the vast majority of pop-music consumers are not especially reflexive about their tastes and enjoy music that much more for it. They are operating from pure praxis; whatever rationale drives their taste has become completely automatic.

Of course, some assume that means there is no rationale, and they are mindless sheep consuming whatever they are told, responding mechanically to hype -- a very seductive position, because once you come to this conclusion, you have exempted yourself and transcended such sheep, making your tastes (even if -- perhaps especially if -- they are for misogynistic rap or Satanic metal) automatically a sign of your higher consciousness. This position makes solipsistic thinking about yourself, what you like and why you like it, a supposed signal of your analytic prowess and your nonconformity and superiority to the mass -- narcissism becomes a sign of genius. Arguments about musical taste are inevitably about the participants seeking recognition for their individuality; by persuading someone else to concede your taste, we vindicate our right to our own opinions. The tragedy is that we are ever convinced that we don't already have that right; the process by which we are inculcated with that notion sadly goes unexamined.

Pop music's popularity can generally seem as though it requires no explanation. Its "goodness" seems self-evident -- just look at the sales figures. Then many questions go unasked: Why this kind of music now? What enabled it to give pleasure to so many people? What does it deliver along with the pleasure? What systems secured the mass exposure the music required to become popular? etc. These questions depersonalize music because they reveal that what songs actually sound like is ultimately insignificant to the economics of the entertainment industry and expose "pop-music taste" as a red herring. But this taste is a crucial tool in self-definition within a mass culture -- it differentiates one while simultaneously making a case for one's belonging to a group; it lets you conform and be different at the same time, which resolves one of the fundamental contradictions we confront. So critics and listeners alike reject such questions and get defensive when they are asked. ("I don't have to defend my taste to anyone"; "I'm not a robot consuming automatically what music companies spit out; I identify what is truly great." "The best pop music is art, and here's why...") The questions are threats to our sense of individual autonomy; the aesthetic is our cultural system for protecting that sense, even if it is illusory. Shifting discussion to the inherent quality of purposely disposable music (ie, arguing that something about the song itself has made it popular or great rather than the conditions in which it was produced and distributed) masks its disposability, and more important, ours as well. (Side note: consider how much pop music is about the singularity or indestructibility of some unique and timeless love.)

Defensiveness about materialist dismissals of the significance of taste protects us from contemplating what may be an irresolvable existential condition of participating in a society, how to partake of social benefits (e.g., everything that commercial culture produces without having us specifically in mind) without dissolving into a crowd or becoming a mere number to that society. As much as we talk about shopping to construct identity, it is also at the same time a self-annihilating process in which we admit at some deep level that we are willing to conform our desires to ones anticipated in us by manufacturers that know nothing about us, and to the desires of thousands or millions of others who are making the same admission by buying the same product. When we enter consumer society, we surrender or suspend much of the pretense of our uniqueness; then we struggle to get it back in the process of consumption. One way to do this is to build arguments for our tastes, to try to find a unique reason for being a Justin Timberlake fan. But really, there must be better ways for me to distinguish myself than that.

Addendum: This cartoon is a more concise exposition of my argument.

Indisposability (28 December 2006)

I've been reading Giles Slade's Made to Break, which explores the evolution of the concept of planned obsolescence in American industry. Slade goes into way too much detail for my taste about the nascent radio and nylon industries, but his overall account of the unstoppable rise of disposability is interesting. The story goes like this: the expansion of industry in the nineteenth century brought with it the specter of overproduction, which seemed to many to be responsible for the Depression. (Obviously these folks took no comfort in Say's law.) In order to get consumers to repeatedly purchase the same item, and thus keep workers employed in making these items, they needed to be convinced that what they already owned had become obsolete by offering a "new and improved" version. Of course, touted technological improvements were often specious, and most improvements are entirely stylistic -- as a quintessential example, Slade traces how GM pioneered styling in autos to steal market share from Ford, which stubbornly built durable cars. Slade cites Christine Fredrick, one of the pioneers of gender-targeted advertisement, as devising a list of three "telltale habits of mind" that we should be induced to cultivate, which he paraphrases as this:

(1) A state of mind which is highly suggestible and open; eager and willing to take hold of anything new either in the shape of a new invention or new designs or styles or ways of living.
(2) A readiness to 'scrap' or lay aside an article before its natural life of usefulness is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing.
(3) A willingness to apply a very large share of one's income, even if it pinches savings, to the acquisition of the new goods or services or way of living.

I don't think it's too cynical to say that this defines the meaning of life for those in a consumer society -- do whatever you can to remake yourself in a new and improved way with the aid of products that one can readily fantasize about and through. The degree to which you are "countercultural" is the degree to which you consciously resist these tenets. (And the degree to which we think we disobey these tenets but reveal nonetheless how deeply we have internalized them makes us faux countercultural -- makes us hipsters.)

Industrial design as an industry in its own right begins here, and the advertising industry, generally, takes off with this new mission in mind, to persuade the general public that fashion cycles must be obeyed in regard to all their material possessions, and the up-to-dateness of the stuff you have is the surest way of identifying status, rather bloodline or comportment -- this message has a democratic appeal to it, in that it seems to do away with inherited privilege in favor of what money can buy, but the relentless, ceaseless striving to be current if not novel is merely a different kind of tyranny, and one that is tremendously harmful to the environment -- Slade is especially good at illustrating the enormous amount of waste a consumer society generates by relying on unnecessary packaging (individually wrapped just for you!) and unnecessary replacement buying to connote one's personal progress. Inevitably we come to expect to throw away everything we acquire eventually; we don't saddle ourselves with the looming burden of ownership -- imagine if you were continually confronted with the possibilty of having to keep everything you got forever; think then what a borderline insult it would be to have gifty gifts foisted on you for no other reason that to make the giver feel thoughtful.

This burden of ownership, and our deeply ingrained commitment to disposability, may be why it feels so good to purge ourselves of unnecessary things. It's always a rewarding feeling when I drop off Trader Joe's bags full of junk at the Goodwill. (Though I usually end up buying more junk on the same visit.) At times I feel as though nothing is as satisfying as the experience of using things up, of finally extracting the potential of some object I've acquired and then getting rid of it. Consumer society orients us to think in these terms, of not merely using things but of using them up, of extinguishing them, of sucking them dry. The idea that something could be useful without being used up begins to seem like a dream, a scam, a lie akin to a perpetual motion machine. When I'm conscious of this, I try to resist; I begin to romanticize getting pleasure from the same thing, listening to John, Wolf King of L.A. over and over again, or glorying in playing Freecell repeatedly. I think about rereading books I love, sometimes I'll even thumb through them, suffused with warm wistfulness -- ah, that first time I read For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign....

So we glorify inexhaustible resources, but we don't trust them; they are fairy tales, mirages of nostalgia. Eventually we begin to think of other people as resources to be used up, that this is the honest and fair way of appraising them, and we attempt to extract whatever use we can out of them and then discard them, whether they are in the labor force or are our intimates -- though the "purity" of the latter may sometimes be constructed as an escape from the former, the way we feel obliged to use people in production, to manage them as disposable things. In essence we start to plan for obsolescence with regard to the people in our lives, though we regard this as something inevitable that we must "be realistic" about. (We need to expect the cheese to be moved, that sort of thing.) This leads perhaps to our wanting to compensate by prioritizing trying to be indisposable, feeling irreplaceable for some unique quality we have to offer the people who are closest to us. We love those who make us feel this way, regardless of whether the way we have become indispensable is also a way we can be any good to this world.