Digital Addiction (unfinished) (12 Aug 2010)

It's easy to amass anecdotal evidence of rising internet addiction. The marathon Asian gamers who prefer to starve rather than leave their terminal; the couples at restaurants, ignoring each other as they engage with their iPhones; the compulsive sharers on social networks who leave no private experience unmediated and recapitulated online; the restless oscillation between email accounts and Twitter and RSS readers looking for a personalized jolt of novelty; the sheer volume of content on YouTube -- where did it come from and who is watching it? -- these all suggest the dissolution of boundaries that many would have thought impervious even five years ago. The lines that once separated, say, public from indiscreet, consumers from connoisseurs, sharing from stealing, and enthusiasm from compulsion, have been progressively blurred. TK here.

The relentless encroachment of the internet into our everyday lives can feel out of our control. Suddenly, we palpably risk social exclusion if we can't keep up, if we lack online presence. The vaunted network effects that the Web harnesses begin to come at the expense of our autonomy. We have to maintain a Facebook page. We have to shop through Amazon.com. We have to Google ourselves to check up on our reputation. We must have a smart phone. We yearn for unlimited data plans.

But does that TKTKTK constitute addiction? Recently Paul Graham, an early Web pioneer, argued that technological innovation inherently focuses on enhancing the addictive properties of any given good. Because of this, "increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much."

Built into this is the assumption that quantity is the only quality.

Says we'll need social antibodies, but digital natives already seem immune to the internet issue--

Memes and Marketing (22 July 2010)

In the most recent NYT Magazine. Rob Walker has an article about the ramifications of internet memes. It's well worth reading and not merely because it mentions Carles.

Any discussion about internet memes -- beyond participating in them by passing them along -- is inevitably a discussion about marketing. Meme circulation is an obvious laboratory of persuasion, a sort of testing process that exposes otherwise hidden ways in which the network connects us, revealing the strength of certain circuits and what causes them to fire. For marketers, memes sound-check the microphone and PA system of the internet in preparation for the commercial messages it will be expected to carry; they also allow a census to be taken of what sort of people are listening. Proven memes serve as a marketable demonstration of pure influence, abstracted from the relevance or utility of the message. So in other words, a meme is a pure, formal expression of marketing potentiality.

Not surprisingly, the meme professionals Walker talks to are all in the marketing business in one way or another. Tim Hwang, the organizer of the academic conference on memes that Walker attends (now he works for a branding company, is puzzled by those who challenge the natural marriage of meme-making and marketing: "There’s been this weird push around ‘Did ROFL culture sell out? Who owns all these spaces? ... This isn’t cool anymore because there’s people making money off it.’ " But those aren't exactly "weird" questions. Because memes pointedly blur the distinction between consumption and production, they prompt all sorts of concerns about the future of knowledge work, of creativity, of everyday life as a social factory -- of who makes "internet awesome," to borrow the terms Walker picks up on to start the article.

Harnessing the way people spread memes is a bit like getting a free media buy, only with far more dynamic potential. Ownership of the mechanisms that harness the value in meme production matters -- people make real money off the free labor of others' "goofing off". And that labor supplants work that has in the past been compensated with wages or intellectual property claims. The content of memes can be exploited, as the LOLcats entrepreneurs have managed to do. (And incidentally, why do people criticize LOLcats for being stupid? They are just mainstreamed Barbara Kruger.) And it is certainly not that memes become uncool when their links to marketing become explicit -- what makes the connection explicit is the marketers' own evocation of cool with regard to the process of meme circulation; their insistence that it be turned to account, made use of, made profitable in some way by urging the reconception of memes as culturally significant.

I don't know if what I mean by that is at all clear. Memes aren't "cool" -- they become cool retroactively when they are reported about, exploited, made to serve another function other than their pure viral transmission, their discharge of an ephemeral need for distraction. The space in which memes are initially generated is noncommercial, almost quasi-utopian. Maybe even postcapitalist. It's the anonymous space of 4chan that Walker cites, for example, a Bataille-like realm of expenditure, negativity, unredeemed human urges, unrationalized and unassimilated expression. It traces potential routes of circulation that operate outside of commercial influence. Walker mentions the American Indian trickster myth in relation to this, but it also exemplifies Bakhtin's notions of the heteroglossic and the carnivalesque -- in other words, it's a discourse that subverts or mocks official culture though doesn't necessarily challenge it (and may in fact reinforce it by venting off popular discontent or surplus creative energies). For better or worse, it's all about the lulz, as Walker points out.

The “for the lulz” attitude can be more broadly thought of as a rationale for the idea that everything is worth making fun of, nothing should be taken seriously, not even a guy getting punched in the face until he bleeds.

As long as that attitude and the material it produces troubles us, the space of memes retains its peculiar autonomy and can function as a kind of unreflexive social critique, if not a return of the repressed. It has the potential to be something other than what Marcuse calls represssive desublimation -- the liberation of formerly suppressed drives as a new mode of social control.

But that is where the meme professionals/marketers step in to play their crucial role. Marketers find such spaces and contrive ways to assimilate them -- a function far more important than selling any particular product or idea. They bring tangible social recognition and even money for those savvy enough to game the system that has sucked them in. And in the process the creative and chaotic energy that fuels the generation of memes is neutered, rechanneled toward supporting the status quo.

Something LOLcat honcho Ben Huh says touches on this:

“What interested me the most was there’s this entire community of people devoted to following the rules and the system behind the framework of Lolcats,” Huh, who is 32, told me. “No one ever said, ‘These are the rules.’ But everybody said, ‘I know the rules.’ ”

At first, there are no rules but instead the spontaneous order of the bacchanalia. But then, as metacommentary about memes begins to be distributed through marketing channels rules are codified, and what was a spontaneous expression of collectivity becomes obedience and exploited productivity masquerading as free expression.

Sleaze addiction (26 Sept 2007)

Every time I see another one of American Apparel's ultrasleazy ads, I presumably fall into the trap these ads have set for me and find myself wondering about sleaze's effectiveness as an promotional strategy. (Angry advertising blogger copyranter has an informative set of posts on the campaign here, if you need a reference point.)The people I know who wear American Apparel's clothes usually claim to wear them despite the ad campaign, claiming the clothes are exceptionally well-designed, or comfortable, or well-fitting or some other mitigating factor -- because they obviously want to disassociate themselves publicly from the implications of the ads, namely that sluts and pervy scumbags wear American Apparel.

It's fairly well-established that American Apparel founder Dov Charney is a tad skeevy; this NYT story about his selling the company to a private equity group details how employees now sign a sort of sexual harassment waiver: "American Apparel is in the business of designing and manufacturing sexually charged T-shirts and intimate apparel, and uses sexually charged visual and oral communications in its marketing and sales activity." But he's also a successful businessman, as the NYT article also makes amply clear, so obviously this ad campaign would have stopped long ago if his skanky predilections would have had any chance of hurting his big payday. Clearly the ads keep coming because they are working; one of the ways they work is that they prompt people like me to fret and complain about them in a public forum, doing word-of-mouth advertising for them gratis. And plus I get the prude's thrill of being titillated by what I complain about without having to acknowledge fully to myself that it's so. "These ads are so terrible; just look another one, aren't they terrible?" But people like me will never support the company by actually buying the clothes.

So these ads must have something for actual fashion-conscious shoppers: They must project an identity that some consumers apparently identify with and find attractive; some people must see these ads and feel a vicarious thrill at the lifestyle they suggest: the possibility of blase sexual exploitation lurking around every urban corner. If you buy into these ads, maybe wearing American Apparel's clothes makes you feel sexualized as well, makes you believe that wearing a T-shirt is suddenly bold, even risque.

Perhaps the ads, by depicting fetishes unapologetically, tap into something comparably compulsive in consumers, giving sanction to the innate tendencies toward sleaze that we typically suppress. But eventually when we become too conscious of the gratification, we'll reject the source of the dissonance. We'll feel as though the advertiser is trying to cheat by circumventing the approved filters, the customary disguises -- fashion advertisers may be able to get away with perviness under the guise of brash transgression for a while but eventually it becomes distasteful. Suddenly, depersonalized sex seems not a promise of some kind of transformative freedom (a pretty far-fetched notion the more you think about it) but an illustration of how depersonalizing fashion itself is.

American Apparel's popularity reminds a bit of the late 1970s power pop band the Knack, who seemed bizarrely compelled to take something immaculately crafted (pop songs as opposed to T-shirts) and sully it with sexist sleaze: "Good Girls Don't", "Frustrated", etc. Their signature song is like Dov Charney's interior monologue: "Never gonna stop give it up such a dirty mind / Always get it up for the touch of the younger kind." Yet the song is at the same time a clinic in pop craftsmanship; every nook and cranny is filled with an irresistible hook, and the guitar solo is one ear-tugging riff after another. When the Knack first caught on, they were ubiquitous, but soon audiences turned against them -- perhaps it was the overdone Beatles imitation of their album design, but it may also have been that the sleaze that was at first edgy and vaguely interesting -- making the familiar pop seem daring, hipper than its popularity would generally allow -- suddenly revealed itself as tedious and unimaginative. Their second album proved this to be so. Dov Charney, of course, is in the fortunate position of not having to come up with a second act for his career.

File-sharing decoys as ads (19 October 2006)

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal reported on a new record-industry ploy to make file sharing work in their favor by flooding LimeWire, et. al., with dummy decoy files that are actually ads. You search for Audioslave or Dashboard Confessional (why you would do this, frankly, I don't know) and you end up with advertisements and possibly teasers to spread the advertising "virally" in order to unlock the song you wanted in the first place. Or it's a rare two-for-one treat for the would-be pirate who thought he was getting the new Jay-Z tracks; not only does he get something bogus, he also gets an ad cajoling him to drink Coca-Cola.

I'm not sure why Coke would want to associate itself with such a negative experience for the target audience. Wouldn't the person who receives this particular advertising message think, "Fuck you, Coca-Cola, and the bullshit DRM you rode in on"? Is the faith in the razzle-dazzle of new technologies for delivering ads so great that companies fail to imagine the more mundane matters of context? (Maybe they crossed this line long ago when they started running cheerful liquor ads alongside pictures of starving and maimed children in news magazines -- which reminds me of my favorite moment in the TV version of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, when he shows of few of these juxtapositions and declares that Western culture had officially gone insane.)

It was only a matter of time before ads rode to the rescue of intellectual-property thieves. Our society couldn't go on having more and more consumers unrepentantly embracing criminality. Something had to change to reincorporate them. It's impossible to remain an outlaw once ads find you -- what the presence of ads proves is that your deviousness has already been expected and accounted for -- thereby neutralizing it. For a while, with its futile lawsuits against its own customers, it seemed the record industry was going the way of the war on drugs, but this latest turn makes much more sense. There's a nice symmetry to ads and file-sharing; you steal someone else's intellectual property, ads steal some of your intellect right back.

Anyway, the further blurring of ads and content in the pop-music realm is reminiscent of Sigue Sigue Sputnik's pioneering effort in the 1980s, when the band put ads between the songs on their album Flaunt It (featuring "Love Missile F1-11") This idea, needless to say, did not catch on -- maybe foregrounding the band's crass cynicism wasn't such a good idea. Maybe people, even in the 1980s, didn't find that kind of hollow greed appealing. You didn't have that vicarious pull that pop music typically provides; you didn't think, Gee, I wish I could be a smug, hack, makeup-wearing phony who revels in commercialism and played-out disco beats. But perhaps the time for ads merged with music files has come. SSS probably wasn't wrong about ads and pop songs being essentially interchangeable; they were prescient in predicting their growing symbiosis. Perhaps we're now ready for product placements within pop songs: Just imagine a R&B diva getting all melismatic with brand names: "Aaaa-berr-cro-oh-oh-ah-ah-ohm-bie-eee-aye-eee!".