The market for something to believe in is infinite* + facts and resoning are ways people justify their already-held irrational, emotional beliefs**= The role of TV news and the role of Advertising, intertwined as they are, today.
Explanations. The first term, which I think can be used as a constant in any "equation" describing human behavior, is simple: People want to believe, badly. (careful where ye put that comma) I think what makes this phrasing so apt is the treatment as a market. I am selling a THING, it's main feature is that it is SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN. The actual content isn't important outside of it's function as being a thing to believe in. Think of it in terms of survivability. Those that are things to believe in that appeal to broader samples of hosts, live and multiply and prosper. And eat brains. Sweet sweet brains.
Term 2 just describes the normal mode of functioning for people.
News and Advertising, indie and mainstream, have evolved into the right side of this equation.
* This is one of those things that I ran across that struck me as not just true, but very true. The other stuff on Hugh Macleod's site is good, but not as good as this.
** this is my own synthesis of several things that've drifted across my transom in the past few years. I swear there was a study that seemed to point to actual experimental evidence of this, but I can't find it right now.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Artsy Fartsy
Peter Bagge thinks that Shakepeare wrote "hokey, unintelligible 400-year old situation comedies," and I'm going to have to agree with that sentiment. The Tragedies and the Histories, I think, still have the power to excite and to stir, but the comedies are lame. It's hard to think that a work is funny when every joke needs an explanation. Heck, even the explanations don't help. What's all that about cuckolds and their horns? I even took a Shakespeare class and no one was able to explain it. (aside: I wonder if Ulysees (which I find funny still) will continue to age well. Maybe in 400 years it'll be an unintelligible mess. Maybe it is now.)
Anyway, that's not the point of the essay, and it's only a small part of what I agree with here. I disagree on small points, but I'm on board with the whole.
Art= commerce. It's easy for snobbish hipsteres to forget thhat the pop song ("oops, I did it again"), the blockbuster movie, and the vacuum cleaner are all art. All art done for a paycheck and with evident resultant compromises, but art. NB: Less money doesn't mean less compromises (correlation != causation and all that), it means different compromises. Poor movie maker can't make rad explosion, but can do what he wants. Rich movie maker makes rad explosion but it must please people so there is a ROI. The tricky thing is: would important art not get made without state funding? Is state funding more liekly to generate self-indulgent crap? If an artist will not create his/her art without a grant should we care?
Bach and Bethoven got state funding. huh.
The other thing I liked was about art that is supposed to "make us question our assumptions about...blah blah blah," or "blurs the lines between gender and butter..." or whatever. This art is fucking coercive man! Which is an inherently modernistic (dare I say reactoinary?) viewpoint masquerading (in the form of an unintelligible mess) as a post-modern redefinition or recontextualization (NB: these things do exist in non-hollow shell form). Good art would contain both an intended message, and plenty of room for interpretation. Or it could just be beautiful. That's still allowed, right? What? No?
I was also reminded of a great exhibit on Modernism (the art movement, not the worldview) that I saw at the Minneapolis Institue of Arts. They had an Electrolux vacuum cleaner sharing gallery space with Target's new Michael Graves products. Target is big in MN, and was a big funder of the exhibit. The romanticism of modernism, the starry-eyed promise of technology as better living gave us well-designed, cool-looking kitchen appliances. This is great, and I think that we're seeing a swing back to this aesthetic. Your blender can be art. It's OK.
Where I disagree is that I get the impression that Bagge thinks there is no room for the navel gazing installation and performance art. I, on the other hand, would just like to see a whole lot less of it.
Anyway, that's not the point of the essay, and it's only a small part of what I agree with here. I disagree on small points, but I'm on board with the whole.
Art= commerce. It's easy for snobbish hipsteres to forget thhat the pop song ("oops, I did it again"), the blockbuster movie, and the vacuum cleaner are all art. All art done for a paycheck and with evident resultant compromises, but art. NB: Less money doesn't mean less compromises (correlation != causation and all that), it means different compromises. Poor movie maker can't make rad explosion, but can do what he wants. Rich movie maker makes rad explosion but it must please people so there is a ROI. The tricky thing is: would important art not get made without state funding? Is state funding more liekly to generate self-indulgent crap? If an artist will not create his/her art without a grant should we care?
Bach and Bethoven got state funding. huh.
The other thing I liked was about art that is supposed to "make us question our assumptions about...blah blah blah," or "blurs the lines between gender and butter..." or whatever. This art is fucking coercive man! Which is an inherently modernistic (dare I say reactoinary?) viewpoint masquerading (in the form of an unintelligible mess) as a post-modern redefinition or recontextualization (NB: these things do exist in non-hollow shell form). Good art would contain both an intended message, and plenty of room for interpretation. Or it could just be beautiful. That's still allowed, right? What? No?
I was also reminded of a great exhibit on Modernism (the art movement, not the worldview) that I saw at the Minneapolis Institue of Arts. They had an Electrolux vacuum cleaner sharing gallery space with Target's new Michael Graves products. Target is big in MN, and was a big funder of the exhibit. The romanticism of modernism, the starry-eyed promise of technology as better living gave us well-designed, cool-looking kitchen appliances. This is great, and I think that we're seeing a swing back to this aesthetic. Your blender can be art. It's OK.
Where I disagree is that I get the impression that Bagge thinks there is no room for the navel gazing installation and performance art. I, on the other hand, would just like to see a whole lot less of it.
Fun with context.
When Technical Documentation goes bad.
I particularly love #1 and #24.
#1 is pure hilarity. Can't any product be used by one kid to hit another kid? What makes this one so special? Why was it thought necessary to show this? Well, because of the rage.
#24 suffers from a huge context problem. Don't put a helicopter in this box? just a general "no helicopters?" What?
Of course the lesson from most of these is that the encoders were assuming that certain information would be had by the decoders. When a fool like me sees the helicopter box without any other information, I get confused. Can you guarantee that no serviceman would be similarly confused?
I particularly love #1 and #24.
#1 is pure hilarity. Can't any product be used by one kid to hit another kid? What makes this one so special? Why was it thought necessary to show this? Well, because of the rage.
#24 suffers from a huge context problem. Don't put a helicopter in this box? just a general "no helicopters?" What?
Of course the lesson from most of these is that the encoders were assuming that certain information would be had by the decoders. When a fool like me sees the helicopter box without any other information, I get confused. Can you guarantee that no serviceman would be similarly confused?
Friday, July 30, 2004
Lazinees. Cab drivers. Reportage.
CJR, which should just about be required reading, points out my favorite bias in media. The laziness bias. Stronger than any political ideology, stronger than and advertiser's pressure. Laziness. In short: A lot of reporters are interviewing their cab drivers instead of actually doing some real work. Question: is there anything at all to be gained from man-on-the-street interviews? Reporters always give it this twist, like "here's a man on the street. Here's an average joe. This is waht people really think of [Candidate *|proposition *|enron]. Aren't I great for cutting through all the talking head bullshit? Bow to me! And what do you know! The man on the street agrees with me almost exactly!"
blah.
blah.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
I float down the Liffey/I'm not here/ This isn't happening
Came across a mention of what Joyce once said Finnegans wake was about:. That the Wake is a dream and that the dreamer isan old man dying by the Liffey. Sparked a little recognition is me, having just read some Beckett. The last two books of the "trilogy" seems to be the last sparks of a dying sentience. old men (or a head in a jar(!)) telling free form stories from the past. We know that Joycve and Beckett were friends, and both were interested in Jung. I wonder if they weren't both trying to explore the disintegration of a mind.
What's interesting about the thoughts of a dying old man anyway? This: Traditional walls between subjects and subjects, subjects and objects, objects and objects all begin to crumble, and the subjects and objects begin to spill over onto each other. An old man, with 70-80 years of awareness, from prelingual to post-, thoughts running like heavy rain in gutters, with old connections broken and new ones made every second. Traditional timeflow is dostorted: What happened when? Is it happening now? What came first, second, third?
For the reader who wants to be active, this stuff is great. The reader gets to decide who, what, when, and where, out of the nonauthoritative material on the page. Like a whodunit, sort of. So the reader is left to find what heshe wants in the text.
It's funny to look at the two different approaches (if that's what the Wake actually is. If it isn't, is the effect any different? hmm). Joyce with his baroque, multi-layered, punning prose v. Beckett with his pure economy of style. Wildly differring techniques leading to a similar endproduct. Ultimately writerly texts.
What's interesting about the thoughts of a dying old man anyway? This: Traditional walls between subjects and subjects, subjects and objects, objects and objects all begin to crumble, and the subjects and objects begin to spill over onto each other. An old man, with 70-80 years of awareness, from prelingual to post-, thoughts running like heavy rain in gutters, with old connections broken and new ones made every second. Traditional timeflow is dostorted: What happened when? Is it happening now? What came first, second, third?
For the reader who wants to be active, this stuff is great. The reader gets to decide who, what, when, and where, out of the nonauthoritative material on the page. Like a whodunit, sort of. So the reader is left to find what heshe wants in the text.
It's funny to look at the two different approaches (if that's what the Wake actually is. If it isn't, is the effect any different? hmm). Joyce with his baroque, multi-layered, punning prose v. Beckett with his pure economy of style. Wildly differring techniques leading to a similar endproduct. Ultimately writerly texts.
Saturday, July 24, 2004
hypertext arrives
Hypertext never really took off the way its inventors and visionaries thought it should. Why? It's a lot of work. Creating a well-structured hypertext document with relevant links is an editing nightmare.
It's also a pain to maintain. Links go stale as whole presences drop off of the web. F'rinstance, if you want to talk about James Joyce, one of the very best references on the web is just some guy. If you create a document that has links to his site, what happens if any of the myriad things that can go wrong does, and his whole site goes away? Your doc is affected. You need to fix all your links that used that resource.
Plus! The amount of discretion put into determining which links are valid and which are invalid.
Now, with a couple of Firefox extensions, all that stuff is irrelevant. The Googlebar has a context menu option to "search for selected text." This gives you web, news, image, dictionary, and newsgroup search of whatever term in a doc you feel like searching on. The action is slightly more convoluted than a straight click-on-a-link, but it's much more seamless than copy-and-paste, or type-into-a-search-box. Now the user has control. Which words or groupings of words are you interested in? What kind of search are you interested in? The reader gets to choose. All the author needs to do is write. Authorial and editorial control are still completely available. But if the authro didnt bother to hyperlink the word "gnomon" to a good definition, the reader is about one second away from doing it himherself.
What's great is that this recognizes the impermanence of the web. There may not be a google in the future, or a dictionary.com, but a simple select and search can point anywhere. It will take advantage of future technologies (a multimedia search, a better image search, &c.).
Hypertext is coming closer to realizing its potential.
EDIT:
I just realized that this works best going from specific to general. Like, if you see the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" and search on it, you'll fond out more than you ever wanted to know about zero-wing. But if your doc has the phrase "meme" and you want it to go to a flash animation of the AYBABTU song, then the right-click thing isn't going to work real great. hmmm.
It's also a pain to maintain. Links go stale as whole presences drop off of the web. F'rinstance, if you want to talk about James Joyce, one of the very best references on the web is just some guy. If you create a document that has links to his site, what happens if any of the myriad things that can go wrong does, and his whole site goes away? Your doc is affected. You need to fix all your links that used that resource.
Plus! The amount of discretion put into determining which links are valid and which are invalid.
Now, with a couple of Firefox extensions, all that stuff is irrelevant. The Googlebar has a context menu option to "search for selected text." This gives you web, news, image, dictionary, and newsgroup search of whatever term in a doc you feel like searching on. The action is slightly more convoluted than a straight click-on-a-link, but it's much more seamless than copy-and-paste, or type-into-a-search-box. Now the user has control. Which words or groupings of words are you interested in? What kind of search are you interested in? The reader gets to choose. All the author needs to do is write. Authorial and editorial control are still completely available. But if the authro didnt bother to hyperlink the word "gnomon" to a good definition, the reader is about one second away from doing it himherself.
What's great is that this recognizes the impermanence of the web. There may not be a google in the future, or a dictionary.com, but a simple select and search can point anywhere. It will take advantage of future technologies (a multimedia search, a better image search, &c.).
Hypertext is coming closer to realizing its potential.
EDIT:
I just realized that this works best going from specific to general. Like, if you see the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" and search on it, you'll fond out more than you ever wanted to know about zero-wing. But if your doc has the phrase "meme" and you want it to go to a flash animation of the AYBABTU song, then the right-click thing isn't going to work real great. hmmm.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Poor Michael Jackson
MJ is such a micromanager of his image, but it's completely out of his control. In fact, the results of his PR campaign (including his face) are pretty much opposite to the intended effects.
Look, for example, at the "King of Pop" title. Googling the two phrases "Michael Jackson" and "King of pop" gives markedly different results than if you do the same search with the word "proclaimed" added.
Apparently (I can't verify this) MJ instructed MTV to refer to him by his royal title. So you do get a lot of instances of news sources (ABC, CNN, &c) calling him the "self proclaimed" king of pop. You can also find a fan run petition that professes to not know the reason that the media do this, and urges you to sign, so that he can be the proclaimed "king of pop" by his fans. So. Is he the King of Pop or not? Both, kind of.
His face is another issue. He's had an extensive amount of work done on it (I imagine blowtorches, vats of acid, and lots of cackling from the doctors) and then denied having the work done. In the process he's, instead of looking ageless or beautiful or whatever, become a poster boy for celebrity-flavored insanity.
Or how about "blanket"? To protect (ostensibly, of course. I can only go with stated intentions) his kid, said kid has only appeared in public covered in a blanket, and is only referred to as blanket. I can't imagine that being great for the kid, and it certainly doesn't make MJ look like a protecive, responsible father shielding his offspring from the limelight. He just looks too nuts to function and too rich to lock up for treatment.
He's never going to get back into control. #1 reason is that it's jut to easy for a news source to do a feature on how wacko he is. News people are like most people. Lazy. If they can get away with showing a clip of MJ dangling his kid out a window (taken by someone else's news crew), raising their eyebrows, saying "Wacko Jacko," and calling that a news segment, they will.
Look, for example, at the "King of Pop" title. Googling the two phrases "Michael Jackson" and "King of pop" gives markedly different results than if you do the same search with the word "proclaimed" added.
Apparently (I can't verify this) MJ instructed MTV to refer to him by his royal title. So you do get a lot of instances of news sources (ABC, CNN, &c) calling him the "self proclaimed" king of pop. You can also find a fan run petition that professes to not know the reason that the media do this, and urges you to sign, so that he can be the proclaimed "king of pop" by his fans. So. Is he the King of Pop or not? Both, kind of.
His face is another issue. He's had an extensive amount of work done on it (I imagine blowtorches, vats of acid, and lots of cackling from the doctors) and then denied having the work done. In the process he's, instead of looking ageless or beautiful or whatever, become a poster boy for celebrity-flavored insanity.
Or how about "blanket"? To protect (ostensibly, of course. I can only go with stated intentions) his kid, said kid has only appeared in public covered in a blanket, and is only referred to as blanket. I can't imagine that being great for the kid, and it certainly doesn't make MJ look like a protecive, responsible father shielding his offspring from the limelight. He just looks too nuts to function and too rich to lock up for treatment.
He's never going to get back into control. #1 reason is that it's jut to easy for a news source to do a feature on how wacko he is. News people are like most people. Lazy. If they can get away with showing a clip of MJ dangling his kid out a window (taken by someone else's news crew), raising their eyebrows, saying "Wacko Jacko," and calling that a news segment, they will.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Plastic: Gov. Schwarzenegger Evolving Into Caricature Of A Caricature
Plastic: Gov. Schwarzenegger Evolving Into Caricature Of A Caricature
I think this is great. Saturday Night Live comes up with characters based on Arnold Shwarzenegger's public persona (a media construct). Now, more than 10 years later, Arnold uses the phrase "girlie-men," which originated in the Hans and Franz skits, in his official capacity as governor (Another public persona. You know, serious, republican Arnold). Arnold-The-Gov has now co-opted this phrase; he's subsumed this element of a parody of Arnold-The-Actor into his new self. Neither of these are Arnold himself by the way. So, what we have here is a four-fold removal from Shwarzenegger himself:
And a bunch of people got offended, which isn't very interesting.
I think this is great. Saturday Night Live comes up with characters based on Arnold Shwarzenegger's public persona (a media construct). Now, more than 10 years later, Arnold uses the phrase "girlie-men," which originated in the Hans and Franz skits, in his official capacity as governor (Another public persona. You know, serious, republican Arnold). Arnold-The-Gov has now co-opted this phrase; he's subsumed this element of a parody of Arnold-The-Actor into his new self. Neither of these are Arnold himself by the way. So, what we have here is a four-fold removal from Shwarzenegger himself:
- Arnold-the-actor. From Conan, Predator, The Running Man, &c.
- Parody of Arnold-the-actor. They're here to pump you up.
- Arnold-the-governor. Since he's supposed to save CA from the budget crisis, this is related to point 1.
- Arnold-the-governor's use of parody catch phrase.
And a bunch of people got offended, which isn't very interesting.
Gin.
On my way in to work, I keep seeing this billboard. It says:
1) a white background/black text foreground
2) ad text that does not refer to product, but to the advertisement itself.
I can't imagine this approach working real well. What's the hook? That the company is so free of artifice that they can be trusted? That their product is also artifice-free? I'ts probably just about being different enough to get the product name stuck in one's head.
I think that the Ketel One ads work a bit better. They refer to the actual product in the text, albiet obliquely. So I knew what they were for without going to Google, which is what i had to do to find out what the Beefeater ads were selling.
And they're not so confusing and ambiguous. It's hard to argue with that statement. -Yes, the Ideal Reader says, it is an ad for Ketel One. The Beefeater Billboard is much more ambiguous. In the context of selling us something to pickle our liver in, the phrase "gone too far" has quite a few separate connotations, and it resists contextual disambiguation (to borrow a phrase from Stan Kelly-Bootle (I like how it gives agency to the phrase is question)). Like this:
Interpretation one(probably what they are actually trying to convey, I think.)Have we passed the party? Must we turn back? Turning back from this billboard would put us in 5 points, which let's face it, is not where the target demographic's friends live and throw partys.
Interpretation two. This is an advertisement for something that is a physical location, and you just passed it. Like those much clearer "you just passed Bob's knives and Navajo souvenirs!" billboards. This reading is supported by the fact that the actual product (gin) is displayed in the lower right corner and is hard to see as you're trying to dodge slow moving RTD busses and still make all the green lights on Broadway.
Interpretation three. Your drinking has gone much too far. You've hit on my wife/sister/pet once too often. You've left the halfused contents of your stomach on my front steps again. You need help. Since you won't listen to reason, I bought ad space on a billboard. Yes, you.
Ahhh.
This is the Sign Your Friend Said You'd See If You'd Gone Too Far.It's an ad for Beefeater Gin. It's really similar to the Ketel One magazine ads I've been seeing ("Attention Ketel One drinker, this is a Ketel One ad...blah blah blah.) in that it has
1) a white background/black text foreground
2) ad text that does not refer to product, but to the advertisement itself.
I can't imagine this approach working real well. What's the hook? That the company is so free of artifice that they can be trusted? That their product is also artifice-free? I'ts probably just about being different enough to get the product name stuck in one's head.
I think that the Ketel One ads work a bit better. They refer to the actual product in the text, albiet obliquely. So I knew what they were for without going to Google, which is what i had to do to find out what the Beefeater ads were selling.
And they're not so confusing and ambiguous. It's hard to argue with that statement. -Yes, the Ideal Reader says, it is an ad for Ketel One. The Beefeater Billboard is much more ambiguous. In the context of selling us something to pickle our liver in, the phrase "gone too far" has quite a few separate connotations, and it resists contextual disambiguation (to borrow a phrase from Stan Kelly-Bootle (I like how it gives agency to the phrase is question)). Like this:
Interpretation one(probably what they are actually trying to convey, I think.)Have we passed the party? Must we turn back? Turning back from this billboard would put us in 5 points, which let's face it, is not where the target demographic's friends live and throw partys.
Interpretation two. This is an advertisement for something that is a physical location, and you just passed it. Like those much clearer "you just passed Bob's knives and Navajo souvenirs!" billboards. This reading is supported by the fact that the actual product (gin) is displayed in the lower right corner and is hard to see as you're trying to dodge slow moving RTD busses and still make all the green lights on Broadway.
Interpretation three. Your drinking has gone much too far. You've hit on my wife/sister/pet once too often. You've left the halfused contents of your stomach on my front steps again. You need help. Since you won't listen to reason, I bought ad space on a billboard. Yes, you.
Ahhh.
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