MURKETING

Technology, information, and people shouting down their enemies

The various new communication technologies that have come into our lives in the last 10 or 15 years are amazing: It’s never been easier to access information, to hook up with whatever sources you choose, from international media outlets to informed citizens in your very community.

What then are we to make of the recent rise of a rather retro form of communication: Shouting down ideological opponents. I mean literally shouting, drowning out out others’ ability to express views by way of sheer volume. I’ve watched some of these clips of health-care “town halls” — not to mention the gatherings where some person stands up and screams about Barack Obama being “a citizen of Kenya” or whatever — and I really wonder how close we are to hurling rocks and bottles as a manner of dispute settlement.

So are wondrous technology and shout-em-down tactics at odds? Is there a tension there?

I just mentioned having seen “the clips,” but of course I just saw snippets. Sometimes I saw them on television. For years and years people have complained about sound/video bites dominating news cycles at the expense of more considered coverage. Newer technology has not arrested that trend; it has accelerated it. There are more clips to choose from; the competition to air them asap is ever more intense; the overall pace of broadcast media continues to quicken; etc. But all that aside, some I did not see on television, and I didn’t have to see any of them that way, since all are online.

If a crowd shouts down a politician, the broader context matters very little in the media ecosystem. The story is: Crowd shouts down politician. And here’s the clip, edited as tightly as possible for maximum impact. It’s shown over and over, and at some point maybe Jon Stewart will show it again, and make a joke about it. If it’s shown often enough, it starts resemble something real — “The people are outraged!” Ten shouters are multiplied into an imaginary movement of some sort. Pundits and commentators can then say with a straight face that “a lot of American are very angry about this.” It affects the polls, and the change in the polls becomes news. And so on.

A lot of this is very run of the mill, I guess. It’s a variation on the way the media cycle has worked for my entire adult life, and the kind of pseudo-event discourse Daniel Boorstin was writing about in The Image, well before I was born.

The exception is the degree to which actual shouting is a serious factor in this process. That, I’m sorry to say, strikes me as a new development.

UPDATE 8/12: Some examples from today’s papers: AP: “‘One day God will stand before you and judge you!’ shouted a man before security guards approached and he left the room.” NYT: “‘This is about the dismantling of this country,’ Katy Abram, 35, shouted at Mr. Specter, drawing one of the most prolonged rounds of applause.” WSJ: “Outside, the gathering verged on a street brawl. The opposing forces lined up like screaming armies on either side of the street, about 1,000 people a side.”

Linkpile

• Hordes Gather And Sing Along To ‘Purple Rain’: NPR piece.
• How to make a snow globe: It doesn’t look easy, but I kind of want to try it.
• Comprehensive List of the Most Boring Questions About Memes: “How can I make money using memes?” Etc.
• The Knack … and How to Forget It: An Inquiry into Consumption Deskilling: “Consumption becomes either a matter of following directions (the devolution of cooking into processed food consumption), a matter of tallying vicarious experiences, watching other people perform activities as a substitute for actually possessing their competence (what Pollan wrote about), or a matter of inspiring ersatz competence, as with box cake mixes or video games like Guitar Hero.” Rob Horning essay following up Pollan’s piece.
• Creativity & Psychological Distance: “What makes us more creative at times and less creative at others? One answer is psychological distance. According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person’s perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely.” Via Mindhacks.
• Ireland Cow Plate | Significant Objects: “This plate is about cowherds, about shamrocks, about Ireland, yes, but it is also about liberation, about preservation, about eternal life.” Story by Sarah Rainone.
• Idol | Significant Objects: “Meh!” the goat said. “Meh meh meh!” Story by Andrew Ervin.
• ‘If Significant Objects is a cynical marketeer’s scam, then consider me conned’: In The Independent. “A mildly romantic social experiment” is actually pretty much correct, though, I would say.

These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

In The New York Times Magazine: No Mas Cassius Clay T

CALL IT A DRAW
An indie designer comes up against a big trademark owner — and the unexpected happens.

When the indie brand No Mas got an e-mail message from CKX Inc., the company that holds a majority stake in Muhammad Ali Enterprises and oversees the rights to commercial uses of his name, his image and his likeness, founder Chris Isenberg pretty much knew what was up. Most such stories end unhappily, with the small-brand creator stymied, the rights owner accused of bullying, or both. But this one has a twist ending…

Read the column in the August 9, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here. (See the T shirt more clearly here on the No Mas site.)

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile

• Old Cutlass transformed into luxury ride with magical Chanel logo: BoingBoing takes note. Previously: Consumed on themed-out donks. For more on appropriation of lux logos, see chapter five of Buying In.
• Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Revised Edition: Corrects a graphic lots of people — including me — have been linking to.
• Tattoo removal firm aims for IPO: “Dr. Tattoff says it’s seeing record high volume and revenue.”
• Predicting a Shift in Communications Spending: “An interesting shift occurred in 2008, the report said. For the first time, consumers spent more time with media they paid for, like books or cable television, than with primarily ad-supported media, like newspapers and magazines.” Huh? Don’t they pay for magazines? And aren’t there a lot of ads on most cable stations? And where’s the Web in this?
• Finding Clues to National Well-Being in Songs and Blogs: In a new paper, a pair of statisticians at the University of Vermont argue that linguistic analysis — not just of song lyrics but of blogs and speeches — could add a new and valuable dimension to a growing area of mass psychology: the determination of national well-being.
• Telegram Postcards: Neat.

These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

Linkpile

• The story of a New Orleans sign-painter: Artist Lester Carey: He isn’t a “street artist” celebrated on blogs or courted by corporate marketers. But he’s as “authentic” — a word those folks tend to be obsessed with — as it gets. This is a post by me, on one of my other sites.
• Burritos and Socially-Conscious Docs: Summarizes company that made Food Inc., and sponsorship deal with Chipotle chain. Interesting.
• Temptation More Powerful Than Individuals Realize: “The research found the sample, on average, displayed a “restraint bias,” causing individuals to miscalculate the amount of temptation they could truly handle, in turn leading to a greater likelihood of indulging impulsive or addictive behavior.”
• Video Blogger Lauren Luke’s Product Range Hits Sephora: “The YouTube star launched her new line last week.”
• Be consistent!: Something for your next redesign meeting. Via Swiss Miss.
• The evolutionary origin of depression?: “Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.” Via Mindhacks.
• 10 Rules That Govern Groups: And group formation. Also via Mindhacks.
• Kneeling Man Figurine | Significant Objects: “Hell, of course, has a hierarchy.” Story by Glen David Gold

These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

Advertising, entertainment, and what’s for dinner tonight

If you missed it, I really recommend Michael Pollan’s cover story from the Times Mag this weekend, on food preparation as something we watch on television, rather than something we do. It’s really well done. Here’s one side note that’s particularly relevant to this site:

It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

Yes. And of course those advertisers know exactly what they are doing: Associating their processed or prepared-for-you foodstuffs and meals with the vague idea of hands-on cooking. Maybe watching someone expertly prepare a meal from scratch is something that makes you feel good, and if a can of Manwhich can associate itself with that good feeling, nonconsciously of course, perhaps that association will still lurk in your brain somewhere as you wheel through Kroger.

The whole piece is actually full of great stuff about consumer behavior, advertising, and entertainment, filtered through the lens of food. Great stuff.

Linkpile

• When Context Matters: Consumers Link Unfamiliar Products To Surrounding Items: “We might think a car advertised among expensive cars is also pricey—but only if we’re unfamiliar with the car.” Intuitive. Has now been studied.
• poppytalk: This Week from Lisa Congdon: Artist Interview – Amy Ruppel: Ruppel’s new painting series, “Birds That Are Mean,” looks quite interesting.
• The Joe You Know: On Shakespeare and “Stealth Starbucks”: Interesting writeup on Generation Bubble.
• A Top Etsy Seller Downsizes: Craftypod Podcast interview with Ryan McAbery , a top seller on Etsy who decided to walk away from it.
• Interesting aside in Nicholson Baker’s NYer Kindle piece: “Romance readers are major Kindlers. ‘The success of the ebook is being fueled by the romance and erotic romance market,’ Peter Smith, of ITworld, reports.” I didn’t know that. Extra detail: “Smith cites the actress and Kindle enthusiast Felicia Day, of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’ who has been bingeing on paranormals like ‘Dark Needs at Night’s Edge.’ ‘I’ve read like, 6 books this week and ordered about 10 more,’ Day blogged. ‘It’s stuff I never would have checked out at the Barnes and Noble, because the gleaming and oily man chests would have made me blush too much.'”
• Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga: In 1985. BoingBoing link, to video. Neat.
• Shockingly violent coffee commercials starring Muppets: “The ads starred the cheerful Wilkins, who liked Wilkins Coffee, and the grumpy Wontkins, who hated it. Wilkins would often do serious harm to Wontkins in the ads — blowing him up, stabbing him with a knife, and smashing him with a club, among many other violent acts.”

These links compiled via delicious, and repurposed here with plug-in Postalicious. Not enough stuff? Not the stuff you wanted? Try visiting unconsumption.tumblr.com, murketing.tumblr.com, and/or the Consumed Facebook page.

In The New York Times Magazine: Latisse

EYELASH OF THE BEHOLDER:
A prescription product doesn’t claim to cure an illness. But is it a symptom of a different malady?

During clinical testing of a glaucoma medication called Lumigan, Allergan’s researchers noted a side effect: eyelash growth. Recognizing the market potential for such a thing, the company conducted a new safety-and-efficacy study, this time making the former side effect the main focus, explained Robert Grant, the president of Allergan Medical, the company’s aesthetic-products division. In December, the Food and Drug Administration gave Allergan clearance for this new use. By May, Latisse ads were on the air, and in its first three months on the market, the product totaled about $12 million in sales. This suggests that there is a bigger market for “eyelash hypotrichosis” relief than you might have guessed before Latisse’s promotional campaign began….

Read the column in the August 2, 2009, New York Times Magazine, or here.

Discuss, make fun of, or praise this column to the skies at the Consumed Facebook page.