Goods Into Stories (1 Dec 2010)

As the holiday season settles in, I need to segue into Scrooge mode. In this Design Observer post, Chappell Ellison notes the sentimental exploitation of the idea of storytelling in some current ad campaigns, including Starbucks'.

“Stories are gifts — share,” snakes across the cardboard coffee cozies. “Share a cup, share a story,” proclaim the banners hanging in the store windows. While the act of storytelling and coffee is a logical connection, it hardly seems fair for Starbucks to co-opt such an intimate bond.

This offense might have gone unnoticed if several other large corporations weren’t abusing the art of storytelling. I recently spotted a Whole Foods bag, printed with images of snowflakes, red ribbons and the phrase, “Every meal has a story.” And here I was thinking that writers were purveyors of stories, not coffee chains or organic grocery stores.

Contra Ellison, I think that advertisers have always been the purveyors of stories, and fiction writers and marketing professionals have long traded tropes and structures meant to appeal to our desire for more suitable scaffolding for our daydreams. Advertisers tend to be more efficient in their evocations. In Ellison's examples, "storytelling" has become a shorthand idea in the story the companies want to tell, a metonym for family closeness, for holiday memories passed down generationally. "Fair" or not, Starbucks and Whole Foods want to glom onto those memories and draw some of their affective energy to their products, which can then serve as the prompt for evoking those feelings much more efficiently and cleanly, without the ambivalence that colors any genuine recollection (even if the ambivalence is an awareness of time passing, of mortality).

What may be new is the "sharing" aspect of these pitches -- that the products will prompt users to tell their own stories, just like using social media is supposed to do. Sharing and intimacy are conflated in the ads, even as the automation and commercial exploitation of sharing drives them further apart than ever. "Sharing" has taken on talismanic ideological significance in our culture as the great gift that has been bestowed upon us by technology and its miracles of connectivity. But the importance of sharing to business is in the value that "sharers" create without compensation: for example, by spreading advertising messages virally or innovating new meanings for products and enriching the storytelling base on which they draw.

So I think that the "creating/sharing stories" angle in these ads reflect not only the sentimental significance of storytelling for commercially exploiting notions of the idealized family, but also the increasing interest companies have in our brand-enriching immaterial labor, which, drawing on Lazzarato and Virno, I defined this way in an earlier Generation Bubble post:

the everyday acts of identity-building consumption and friendship that the increasing mediatization of society now make available for capture... This sort of labor has precipitated a value crisis of its own, in the form of work that can’t be valued in wages, as capitalism has always required. What is that work really worth? Why are we even bothering? What price tag can we put on the effort it takes to make life livable, to make ourselves known to ourselves, to secure social recognition?

If capital has run out of productive investments for making goods and services, and the cycle of expanding fictitious capital has played itself out for the time being, it may retrench by financing a manufacturing project that never ends — the production of the self, as carried out in the “social factory.”... Rather than imagining ourselves valuable for the traditional role we assume in our community, we instead try to discover and enlarge our subjectivity through publicized acts of consumption — be they conspicuous luxuries or altruistic acts or clever, innovative re-uses of goods, or what have you. We consume to create cool, which in turn reflects the glories of its creator. But from the point of view of capital, our acts of everyday self-realization are perceived as knowledge production for the information economy, elaborating the intricately woven code (as Jean Baudrillard calls it) that constitutes the symbolic value of brands and goods.

In this sense, Ellison is right. We tell stories about the things in our life that companies are more and more able to co-opt and transform into marketing. This in turn makes our own storytelling always already seem like marketing. The product placements are already implicit.

Social experiences (30 April 2010)

More about social media. a post by Steven Hodson (via TMN) makes several good points about social media: it redefines privacy for the benefit of commercial entities that will likely ramp up their marketing efforts to persuade us how great the new publicity is for us. At the same time, the constant flow of information devalues each individual piece of information. We find out so much that it all seems sort of beside the point to us -- unless we automate its integration into our lives, in which case we surrender an aspect of our autonomy. Hodson writes:

the real value for all this information is to those whose jobs it is to convince us that privacy has changed, that we are social, that we all need to be a part of some larger social experience.

The larger social experience being promised is the same sort of thing reality TV models for us -- the fantasy of fame and of some kind of general relevance, at the expense of the humdrum social relations with a sensibly small circle of friends. Constantly flooding the zone with self-disclosure allows us to believe others are watching; the responses these disclosures prompt almost seem incidental. But admittedly, I have never been able to wholeheartedly commit to social media to see what it really feels like to have people respond. (Given my own pathologies, I am sure I would feel embarrassed. So take what I say about social media with a grain of salt.)

The minute that sociality is transformed into information (made into data), it ceases to be social behavior as it has been traditionally understood. Not a new complaint, I know, but one that continues to become more and more urgent. The fabric of social experience was once defined by the way it eludes quantification; now it seems quantification is the prerequisite, has become the medium for what passes for friendship.

Objects and Experiences (13 April 2010)

PsyBlog has posted a list of "six psychological reasons consumer culture is unsatisfying." All of them can be boiled down to the idea that when it comes to purchases, experiences are ultimately more satisfying than objects, mainly because experiences become fond memories instead of outdated clutter. Retailers who sell objects are as aware of this as psychologists are, so their marketing efforts arguably tend to try to make shopping itself into an experience, and make the purchased object into a necessary souvenir of that experience. Or is that experiences have become polluted with souvenirs as they are made "consumable"?

I guess what I am driving at here is that the opposition of "object" and "experience" is not as absolute as it may initially seem. Contemporary "experiences" for sale are generally shot through with opportunities to purchase objects, and objects are often packaged as requisite goods for experiences -- e.g., you can't go camping without the appropriate gear, etc. The post contends that consumers typically have a "maximizing" approach to buying things (get the most value for the least money -- the neoclassical assumptions about rationality) and a "satisficing" approach to choosing experiences (getting just enough to satisfy without worrying about maximizing utility). I guess I would like to know more about how the studies were designed to reach this conclusion, because the point the post makes at the end -- that we can think experientially about buying objects -- seems eminently reversible. We can be goaded into thinking of our experiences as objects, as would seem to suit the vested interests of consumerism. That means that the "shopping as experience" ruse may work as a clever piece of marketing jujitsu, promoting shopping for things as an experience in order to habituate us to thinking of experiences as discrete purchasable things rather than a flow of possibility.

Also, I am skeptical that this sort of thing can work:

This experiment suggests that thinking of material purchases in experiential terms helps banish dissatisfaction. Try thinking of jeans in terms of where you wore them or how they feel, the mp3 player in terms of how the music changes your mood or outlook, even your laptop in terms of all the happy hours spent reading your favourite blog.

Making the effort to think in this way would seem to negate the ability to take the contrived thoughts seriously. You have to trick yourself, a la dialectical behavioral therapy, I guess, to forget about how you are forcing yourself to see things differently from how you know, at one level, they are.

Another way of putting this is this: we don't live in a culture that wants to let us think experientially about purchases or to transcend "invidious comparisons", so it requires active resistance to hold on to a experiential perspective. I think that we should worry less about experiences vs. objects and think more of a different continuum -- that of individualism. There must be studies out there that investigate whether thinking less about personal identity leads to a greater indifference about the signifying component of things and experiences and a broader sense of being in the flow of the events of one's life.

Meme moments (30 May 2009)

At Murketing, Rob Walker notes the rise of an ironic T-shirt, "Three Wolf Moon," which looks like something that Brett from Flight of the Conchords may have worn. As Walker explains, lots of people wrote silly reviews praising the shirt, and sales took off. If you look on Amazon, you can see the gallery of images Photoshopped to show celebrities wearing it, and so on. Very creative and fun, a contemporary collective experience. So why does it creep me out?

Here's Walker's analysis of the shirt phenomenon:

This is an example of an object acquiring a narrative, and meaning. At first, it was simply a bad T-shirt. Then it became that bad T-shirt, the one that attracted a reviewer-flash-mob. If you were wearing it, and someone asked, you could tell them a story. In fact you could tell them the story even if they didn’t ask -- it’s a good story! -- particularly if you submitted a funny review which you can then recount.
The object becomes a souvenir of a moment and an experience: The time we all got together and made fun of this T-shirt.

I can't tell how serious Walker is about this being a "good story" that anyone would want to hear -- I guess I found it interesting, which is why I am writing about it now, but I would think anyone who was wearing the shirt telling me that story was sort of annoying. I'm sure there are scads of opportunities for this sort of pile-on participation online at any given moment, which seems to rob them all of a significant ingredient of serendipity that would tip the resulting personal stories from lame to not lame. That is to say, the fact that this occurred online on a retail website makes the whole event seem contrived, even though it probably wasn't. The network effects, the rapid scaling-up of online viral phenomena, generates the air of contrivance -- for me at least -- which makes all such spontaneous events seem feasibly pre-plannable. It seems as though there are always enough bored yet clever people out there on the internet to latch onto memes.

But what I most fear -- and maybe I shouldn't -- is that these sorts of experiences may be the only sorts of experiences we will have in the future. For those of us used to different experiences, the transition may be painful. I think this was what I had been feeling at Yellowstone. All our experiences may come with this prepackaged feeling of being contrived, of being designed to be reported on, if only by ourselves. The moments that don't seem worth blogging about or "sharing" will become harder for us to fathom, undigestable, sitting in our minds like the stones in a bird's gullet.

Buying an experience (27 Feb 2009)

It may turn out to be a question of semantics, but the idea of "purchasing experiences," as this PsyBlog item discusses, has always grated on me. It seems to conform the pleasures of living to the calculus of shopping, as if they were essentially the same, and the consumerist paradigm can be applied to all pleasures and desires. Everything is for sale, and everything has its price, if you only think of it in the right way. (Just ask Gary Becker.) Is this in fact true, that rational calculation underlies even our most spontaneous-seeming choices and we just choose to block it out of our consciousness from ideological convenience, or is hyper-rational-choice analysis of human behavior itself the ideological proposition? The PsyBlog post confirms what most research into the subject has found: that buying experiences is better than buying stuff, because the stuff sticks around and becomes lame and/or embarrassing, while the experiences become warm and fuzzy memories.

Experiences also beat possessions because they seem to:
* Improve with time as we forget about all the boring moments and just recall the highlights.
* Take on symbolic meanings, whereas those shoes are still just shoes.
* Be very resistant to unfavourable comparisons: a wonderful moment in a restaurant is personally yours and difficult to compare, but all too soon your shoes are likely to look dated in comparison with the new fashions.

That makes a lot of intuitive sense to me, but I just wish it weren't represented as a matter of what to buy. Can we simply have experiences rather than arranging to purchase them ahead of time?

I had a similar feeling about another consumer-choice related post. Jonah Lehrer, who has just written a book called How We Choose, recently posted about a consumer-research study built on the premise that we all operate with two distinct decisionmaking systems: "the slow rational, deliberate approach (System 1) or the fast, emotional, instinctive approach (System 2)." The study set out to determine which yielded better decisions, using the metric of "consumer consistency." I have read the rationale for this several times, and have failed to understand it as anything other than an inexplicable plug for Nikon cameras.

When faced with a choice task, consumers need to evaluate the overall utility of each of the alternatives they are facing and compare these utilities in order to make their final choice. Such a utility computation process is likely to vary from case to case based on the exact information consumers consider, the particular facts they retrieve from their memories, as well as the particular computations that they carry out; any of these process components is a potential source for decision inconsistency. For example, when shopping for a new Nikon digital camera, it is possible that consumers might change the aspects of the camera they focus on, the particular information they retrieve from memory, the relative importance weights they assign to the attributes, or the process of integrating these weights.
As researchers, we often treat such inconsistencies as ―noise‖ and use statistical inference tools that allow us to examine the data while mostly ignoring these fluctuations. Yet, such noise can convey important information about the ability of the decision maker to perform good decisions, and, in particular, it can reflect their ability to conceptualize their own preferences. In the current work we focus on such inconsistencies / noise in decision making as indicators of the ease in which consumers can formulate their preferences: we focus on the question of whether the cognitive or emotional decisions are more prone to this kind of error.

I'm not sure why inconsistency iis defined as "error" (Am I reading this right?) or why they assume that beneath the "noise" evoked in a given decisionmaking moment is a preference that is true and consistent over time for a particular individual. People's desires aren't that static. And the "noise" in the decisionmaking process is what makes us more than automatons; it makes us strange to ourselves, potentially, but that also means we discover new possibilities for who we are that we wouldn't otherwise reason our way into. I tend to think that our identity is not so continuous as the researchers' assumptions imply; that instead our identity tends to be conjured up by the demands of a given context -- to put it in lit-crit jargon, subjectivity is intertextual. It's relational. It's not a given, transcendent thing that then responds to situations and decisionmaking opportunities. The "noise" is everything.

If we are start making consistent decisions when forced to rely on our "emotional" decisionmaking system, as the study found, that suggests to me a failure of imagination, a retreat into safe choices in response to being overstimulated. The emotional brain is boring in its consistency, not "rational" as Lehrer suggests. Again, this could be semantics, could be a matter of how you define "rational," but it seems irrational to me to continue to choose the same thing over and over again. That seems sort of regressive, tending toward an infantile repetition compulsion. As much as I complain about gratuitous novelty-seeking, the idea that only consistent choices are rational seems even more absurd. (I am missing something about this study? I must be.) I sometimes feel as though I am coming around to a totally indefensible and irrational position that we shouldn't bother to study how we choose at all, since it can hardly be anything but a weapon in the hands of marketers to control what we choose, to force out the noise that makes us unique to ourselves and replace it with an official, monologic hum.