Self-Service and Self-Serving (24 March 2011)

Tyler Cowen linked to this paper (pdf) from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation about the many blessings it claims that information technology bestows -- enhancing productivity, tempering the business cycle, making markets more efficient, improving the quality of goods, allowing us to defeat time and space and live forever, and so on. IT, it seems, enables employers to get more productive work per employee by eliminating the jobs of those whose work has been automated out of existence and by "letting" those who remain "do more things at the same time" -- that is, blurring the boundaries between work and nonwork, surreptitiously expanding the working day, and accelerating work processes through multitasking with little regard for the increased stress and irritability this imposes on workers.

What bothered me most is the paper's paean to technology-enabled self-service. Yes, I know, everyone loves checking themselves out at the grocery store and talking to robots on the phone instead of human customer service agents. We all recognize how companies have our best interests in mind when they get us consumers to do things they once had to pay an employee to do. Aware that some of us remain reluctant to rhapsodize over self-service, the paper explores the issue in a dedicated sidebar, which includes this tendentious passage:

Unfortunately, self-service sometimes gets a bad rap. The media routinely portrays the efforts of companies to implement self-service options as creating work for the consumer solely for the benefit of the company. In reality, most self-serve applications don’t cost the consumer more time, they just involve one person (the consumer) doing the work, not two (the consumer and the employee). Granted while some self-service applications (e.g., “press 2 if you are interested in opening an account”) can be maddening and cost consumers more time, overall self-service technologies usually cut overall labor time (for both the worker and consumer). And in some cases, they can save consumers time and add convenience. Even where personal service provides consumers with more value (a chauffeur-driven car is seen as a luxury), it usually costs more (which is why usually why only wealthy people have chauffeurs). Other kinds of personal service are the same. They cost more money to provide than does self-service. However, in the type of competitive markets more companies are facing, savings from self-service are passed back to consumers through lower prices, at least over the moderate to long term. As a result, standards of living go up.

Yes, while quality of living goes down. Notice how the concept of "prosumerism" -- where consumers get to be productive "co-creators" or "innovators" alongside their favorite brand buddies -- is here revealed in its true guise. The company just presumes that the consumer is already an employee, no different from the cashier or stocker. Post-Fordist, immaterial labor and consumption as production is not necessarily about getting to join in with creative-class while they shape social meanings and recast our shared material culture; it's about getting consumers to forgo some of the services they were once accustomed to assume are included and do those things themselves, which add value to the enterprise. When shopping becomes "productive," that means it has become a job you do for them, not yourself. Self-service means "serve the company."

To wash this down, consumers are sold on "convenience" or the ability to skirt human contact that might disrupt their solipsism -- indeed, the paper suggests the idea of personal service is a decadent luxury, not something the firm has implicitly promised in selling services to us ("Only wealthy people have a chauffeur) -- and we are promised that we'll ultimately save money, which after all is the only relevant value in a consumer society. "Standards of living" in this context means exclusively the ability to buy and have more stuff, not to have better experiences or enjoy humanized exchanges in an economy palpably made up of people doing things for one another. Instead we are encouraged to live in a fantasy world where everything is made for our money alone, and naturally we have no choice but to help ourselves to it.

Surreptitious Selling Out (9 July 2010)

The Arvidsson article (pdf) I mentioned in yesterday's post about jobs pinpoints precisely what is so troubling about being engaged with pop culture in our particular cultural moment. The economic engine of consumer capitalism is increasingly fueled by the good intentions of people who want to be engaged and critical and oppositional. But by assimilating their critique, consumer capitalism invalidates it at a higher level, negating the idea that there can be any other set of social relations within which we could experience culture at this point.

Arvidsson writes about the advertising industry's need to make distinctive messages capable of standing out in the ceaseless hum of informational noise that the spread of formula-reliant, capital-intensive mass media has brought on.

In an informational culture marked by almost infinite reproducibility, media culture thus tends to loose its grip over meaning. It is no longer able to command anything but the partial attention of its audience, much less provide it with a meaningful and coherent worldview. Instead it recedes into the background, losing its control over the practices in which meaning and affect are constructed. Media culture thus becomes a sort of white noise, a noisy environment for the more or less autonomous production of a common social world of common affective intensities.

Media industries have generally lost their power of imposing meaning on its products, imposing how they will be received and used, so they have shifted strategies. Because the mass meaning they once created for us no longer adheres, that means we are all out there producing meanings of our own -- Arvidsson calls this a "flowering productive externality" to the culture industry's ordinary bailiwick of designing and circulating products. With the advent of interactive media, those meanings circulate much more broadly and rapidly, becoming a source of value to industry beyond what money they manage to collect for their products originally. Our spontaneous conversation about culture adds value. Our self-made meanings, from our own point of view, establish our uniqueness, our identity, our particular point of view on culture. But from industry's point of view, they have the potential to reinvigorate their business.

Precisely because this externality has autonomy in relation to capital, it provides a tempting source of innovation, rejuvenation and creativity for the system, the very standardizing logic of which tends to eliminate such results a priori. In the most advanced factions of immaterial production users are indeed in charge (to use the motto of the present Web 2.0 movement), their agency creates the kinds of products that have the greatest use-value for the capitalist system.

Since these meanings are made outside advertising and culture industry auspices, they can be credibly touted by those industries as "authentic" or "genuine" rather than merely contrived to dupe us. Our own agency -- our autonomy, our reflexive self-identity, our affect, our motivation to do something or create something, whatever you want to emphasize about it -- becomes both an input and an output of marketing and entertainment. Those businesses threaten to become perpetual-motion machines, subsuming culture altogether.

That probably sounds a little bombastic. But it helps me understand why I sometimes dread my own "agency" -- why I become particularly ambivalent about trying to write theoretically informed commentary about pop culture. No matter how Adornoesque one thunders about the reifying effects of the culture industry and the curtailment of autonomous creative thought and so on, one is still left feeling that nothing has been accomplished but the further validation of the phenomena one meant to denounce and discourage.

It's not just that the culture industry absorbs critique and rechannels its energy into its own reinvention -- it's not merely that ceaseless flow of amateur criticism powers the mighty fashion wheel. Maybe I am alone in this, but I find that I experience my efforts to be objective about culture simultaneously as efforts to sustain some sort of "cool" subjectivity. And that unwanted synthesis is incredibly frustrating. I don't have any "authentic" experience, I often realize. It seems as the space for it doesn't exist amid all the cultural participation I put myself in for.

I find I inhabit the subject position of pop culture itself to write about it, if that makes any sense -- as though I am parasitically sucking the zeitgeist from it, becoming of the moment myself, culturally "relevant" as Carles likes to say. I become conscious of my immanence in a way that's unbearable; my inescapable existence within culture suddenly produces cognitive dissonance for me, driving me to further reflexive gyrations of opinion-making.

I think that to be at home in consumer culture, it helps to either (a) not engage too far or too self-consciously with pop culture, a sort of fatal strategy of willed ignorance or silence; or (b) sell out completely and openly, and recast the cynicism as pragmatic realism like the former underground folk Arvidsson describes who turn entrepreneurial and get into self-branding, or ironicized futurism along the lines of Takashi Murakami. I find that I fall somewhere in the middle, and I feel like I have no home.

Entertainment as attention (16 November 2006)

In No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, Tom Slee's book about the foibles of individual choice, he cites this passage from Grant and Wood's Blockbusters about the risk involved in putting up cultural goods for sale:

The risk factor in launching new works of popular culture is impossible to overestimate. Simply put, the great majority of cultural products do not succeed: few people by the CD or watch the movie, and the investment in the creation of the intellectual property is not recouped. Adding to the risk is the blunt fact that research and pre-testing are notoriously ineffective in the realm of popular culture. Until audiences actually experience a creative product, it simply cannot be evaluated. In advance of the actual release of the title, nobody knows.

This point is often raised when someone wants to debunk the power mainstream-media conglomerates have in shaping taste or to validate the sovereign, spontaneous role of the consumer in creating culture, which, if this is true, is exactly what we want and deserve. But Slee is citing it to make an almost opposite point -- the market for cultural product is so polluted with failure that audiences are always becoming that much more risk-averse themselves. The more product that floods the market, the more difficult it is for an audience to choose something, and the more the audience will rely on safe herd choices.

According to Slee, it's an asymmetric-information problem -- no one knows what makes anything any good (i.e. successful, profitable -- the meaningful criterion) so the slightest fortunate accident that creates a focal point (or the concerted ad campaign, or the presence of a known star, or any other aspect that brings a modicum of familiarity and comfort) can drive a herd to something specific, which then becomes something everybody needs to know about in order to have something to talk about with one another (which is the main function of most popular culture) -- you need to see Borat because everyone else has and is reliving it in conversation. Economists calls this increasing returns to scale -- the bigger something becomes, the bigger it will continue to become, because the incentives for choosing something else diminish. This is why the longer the long tail gets, the bigger the blockbusters become. Adrift in the deep, vast ocean of mediocrity, we need brighter beacons to bring us home.

But what makes the ocean so deep is the ease with which anyone can distribute their creations. This may allow more people to conceive of themselves as creators making culture rather than consumers digesting it, just as cultural-studies Pollyannas were fond of saying all along -- consumption is a form of making, of production. Now, consumers have the opportunity to really prove that by distributing their various repurposed versions of the culture they consume -- the remixes, the mash-ups, blog posts, etc. With that distribution capability available, it may become incumbent to distribute one's creative work. One no longer has the excuse of being shut out from the technology as a reason for not attempting to share one's innovations with an audience larger than the person in the mirror. If one takes the possibility of an audience for the innovative ways in which you consume culture seriously, this shift changes the pursuit of entertainment into the pursuit of attention. So perhaps the future of the "superstars" economy is this: a handful of successes in the sense that Grant and Wood mean, and then a legion of reimagined versions of those successes, at varying degrees of separation and revamping.