MURKETING

Thing-narrative tools: Four examples

In the last couple of months, a number of services and projects have come to my attention (thx: Molly B., Jee W., Grant M., maybe someone else I’m forgetting) that play with the idea of thing-narrative.

The easiest way to explain is by example.

1. Itizen. So you have an object — a thing. You put a special Itizen tag on it: This is either a sticker or sew-on tag with a QR Code on it. You type up the story about your Thing on an Itizen page that correspondonds with that QR code tag. And then, I suppose, you can give the thing away, or sell it, and its new owner can then add his or her own story. This is all rather new, so not surprisingly I don’t see anything with more than two stories so far.

2. Tales of Things. So you have an object — a thing. You write up (or video) its story, and you put a special coded tag on it, and again anyone who accesses that code with an iPhone or whatever will be led to the page where the thing’s story (“describing its history or background”) is told. I’m not sure whether this or Itizen came first, but you can see the similarities. This outfit was involved in a side project, RememberMe, in which the stories of objects in an Oxfam shop were recorded, presumably making the objects more desirable for purchase.

3. D-Build. While this Syracuse, New York, project is primarily concerned with green deconstruction, repurposing the materials from torn-down or refurbished materials into furniture and other objects, it also aims to include a dose of narrative: The creators want people to submit stories (memories, historical information, etc.) about the deconstructed building. (I also mentioned this on Unconsumption.) The idea is to create a “network of information, along with a marketplace for users to exchange reclaimed materials, finished products made of these materials, as well as ideas and services.”

4. StickyBits. This one is an app, and here’s my understanding of how it works. Via this app, you can scan any existing barcode and “attach” whatever information you want, so that whoever scans that barcode in the future will see your added info — a picture, text, whatever. An example they give is adding a recipe to the bar code of a cereal box. But this sounds to me like it could be easily used for more activist or prankish aims, if I understand it right.

You can also get code stickers from StickyBits and attach them to physical objects that don’t have a bar code. The latter scenario again sounds like Tales of Things and Itizen.

Are there others? Have you used any of these (and if so have I described properly)? Are you tempted to?

With the exception of the D-Build example, what these remind me of in a way is how I save and “tag” stories and sites I encounter with Delicious and I guess to some extent with Tumblr. It seems a bit like extending that categorization and archiving impulse into the physical world. It’s possible then that my use of the word “narrative” here is a little off, but I believe that narrative is what all these services aim for.

[Addendum: These examples are all distinct from the manufacturing “narrative” of an object, which I wrote about here and here, and also from made-up “narratives” relating to a thing, such as the Significant Objects stories (or some advertising)].

In The New York Times Magazine: Designer diapers

THE BORN IDENTITY
Designer diapers join the repertory of child-as-prop tools.

Even in penny-pinching times, parents still want to demonstrate how well (or at least tastefully) they are bringing up baby. Designer diapers are a useful tool for sending that message. And perhaps more to the point, they are also an extension of the well-established tendency among contemporary parents to treat their children as identity props.

Read the column in the August 1, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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

WikiLeaks impact update

I’ve seen tons of stories about the implications of the WikiLeaks stuff on media and informationflow and secrecy — but I haven’t seen much evaluating actual impact on public dialogue about the war in Afghanistan. I would like to see someone compare to the impact of the Pentagon Papers in terms of public opinion, etc. Maybe that’s been done and I’ve missed it?

The Times has a story today: “In Midterm Elections, War Barely Surfaces.” It sort of gets at this side of the story, but it’s pretty anecdotal, and doesn’t have much in the way of historical context. This guy makes a good point about one thing that’s changed since the Vietnam era:

“Unfortunately, most Americans aren’t paying attention,” said Representative Patrick J. Murphy, Democrat of Pennsylvania. “Which I think is a testament to the fact that 1 percent of us are fighting these wars.”

What do we know and when do we care about it?

There is nothing that has been raised that will be a surprise to someone who reads the newspaper every day.

— Pentagon spokesman reacting to the flood of documents released by Wikileaks

This is probably pretty close to true.

But it could also be restated like so: “Much of what has been raised will be a significant surprise to most of the American public.”

If you see what I’m saying.

The question would be how much of the American public is even really paying attention to the coverage of the Wikileaks material. I was interested to read that Wikileaks decided to essentially team up with mainstream media outlets to distribute this information because the Wikileaks head honcho “is frustrated that some of the site’s other disclosures, such as a database of military procurements in Iraq and Afghanistan, didn’t garner more attention.” (According to “people familiar with the matter,” anyway.) His thinking is sound: As I’ve noted before, in a more frivolous context, mainstream media coverage is the new media’s seldom-acknowledged secret weapon.

Even so, it remains the case that today’s media culture is vastly more fragmented than in the time of, say, the Pentagon Papers. So while it’s easier to distribute information, I think it’s a lot harder to get the majority of the public to pay attention, let alone care, for very long. So I’ll be curious to see what the effects of this incident really turn out to be.

But in the short term, it does seem to have minimized the Shirley Sherrod non-incident as a topic of conversation and pundit-blather, and I’d count that as a big plus.

In The New York Times Magazine: Digital Antiquing

BRILLIANT MISTAKES
Band handwriting, warped vinyl, flawed images: Digital tools ape them all

Progress toward perfection has genuine skeptics, who insist on sticking with marginalized tools. The newer thing may seem less flawed or simply easier, such traditionalists insist, but it sacrifices warmth, soul, depth, personality, chance and the human touch. They must have a point, because practically every antiquated creative process ends up inspiring some kind of digital filter, effect or add-on designed explicitly to mimic its singular properties. The upshot is a form of progress toward perfecting flaws.

Read the column in the July 25, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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

Notable design feature of the “black box”:

It is not black.

The man “credited with creating the prototype of the flight data recorder, or ‘black box,'” David Warren, has died. According to his obituary, his prototype was red. “Today’s black boxes … remain red or orange, to make them easier to find in wreckage,” after a plane crash. Why are they called “black boxes”? The obituary says:

How Mr. Warren’s red box came to be called a black box is not altogether clear. At the time, black box was a slang term in the Royal Air Force for a navigational instrument in an airplane. One story has it that a person who witnessed a demonstration said something like, “What a wonderful black box!”

Uh, good “story.”

In The New York Times Magazine: Taking ROFL (Sort of) Seriously

No Consumed today, but I have a feature on ROFLCulture, here.

[Big] thinkers [are] engaged in the popular debate over whether the Internet makes us smarter or dumber. And that question is interesting, but let’s face it: it’s not awesome. What Tim Hwang and his cohorts basically hit upon was the conclusion that, while that debate drags on, funny cat pictures and so on are really, really popular. And maybe another question to consider is what that means — to consider the Web not in terms of how it might affect who we become but rather in terms of how it reflects who we are. ROFL, after all, is not a seductive theory about what enlightened things democratized culture may one day produce; it is a pervasive fact on the ground. This is how sizable chunks of our cognitive resources are actually being deployed, so it’s worth trying to figure out why that is, what functions this stuff serves and how it differs from or falls in line with more familiar forms of entertainment. Perhaps, in other words, it’s worth taking ROFL seriously. Or at least sort of seriously.

Unconsumption update: On Twitter; also: beloved by Green Thing

1. Finally, @unconsumption is on Twitter. (Big thanks to @mollyblock for making it happen.)

2. Kind words from Do The Green Thing:

Green Thing can’t get enough of Unconsumption. … The Unconsumption Tumblr is a team effort involving several volunteer contributors and who share all kinds of interesting upcycled, recycled, reused, preloved goodness.

3. More in the works. Patience.

4. Please keep helping us spread the word. Thanks!

In The New York Times Magazine: Semiotics of Abandonment

ART WITH ABANDON
Adding color to the visual language of unused property

This isn’t utopian-future optimism but a kind of joyful celebration right in the midst of challenging reality. More to the point: In the lingering hangover of the real estate bust, unoccupied housing has become a much more familiar feature of neighborhoods, urban and suburban, that is hardly limited to Detroit.

Read the column in the July 11, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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

News imagery, analyzed

This photograph was on the front page of my Wall Street Journal this morning. I couldn’t find it online, so I cut it out and scanned it. I found other pictures of this event — the perp walk, basically, of some alleged mafia boss in Italy, supposedly responsible for 80 murders or something like that — but none were as striking as this xanax one.

First of all, please note the T-shirt that the alleged mob chief is wearing. Steve McQueen? A barechested Steve McQueen T-shirt? Where do you even get a T-shirt like that? Is it supposed to be part of disguise? It looks like a 1970s era iron-on, which might mean they’re selling them by the ton at Urban Outfitters, for all I know. But, again: Steve McQueen?

Second, however, please take note of the law enforcement officer — Polizia — on the right. Pretty fabulous, am I right? I mean, that’s not what cops look like in my city, at least. And more to the point, if you look closely at those sunglasses — they’re Dolce & Gabbanas!

C’mon. The Italian polizia hauling off the murderous mob dude in her D&G shades? How hot is that?

In The New York Times Magazine: Fate of a new global tchotchke

HAVING A BLAST:
Why a plastic commodity became a cultural signifier.

The meaning(s) of the souvenir that tourists carry home will ultimately be shaped by the nature of the surprisingly heated disagreement.

Read the column in the July 4, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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

— > By the way: MKTG Tumblr vuvuzela-stuff tracked here.

Books: The Idea: Not here anymore!

Click to continue the series in its new home.

Back in April I posted a couple of items about a fantastic 1995 Nicholson Baker New Yorker piece about books used as props in catalogs. And on April 23 I promised “one more post” on the subject, “next week.”  I forgot to do so — and not one of you reminded me! Sheesh. No wonder this series has moved.

Anyway I found the draft of that “lost post” this weekend, quickly updated and finished it, and here it is:

This site’s occasional series on the idea of the book has included several instances of things (a necklace, a ring, etc.) made to look like books. That 1995 Baker piece, as it happens,  mentioned similar stuff from back then:

Not only is the book the prop of commonest resort in the world of mail order, but objects that resemble books – non-book items that carry bookishly antiquarian detailing – are suddenly popular…. Catalogues now offer book-patterned ties, book brooches, and settes covered in tromp-l’oiel-bookshelf fabric.

He gives other examples: a table whose base is “a fake stack” of leather-bound books, a “book-shaped box of candy bars,” book coasters, a magnifying glass with “faux bookspine handle,” and even a “Faux Book Cassette Holder,” to disguise the evidence of your middlebrow listening habits with a suggestion of more respectable reading ones.

On an aesthetic note, Baker suggests all this leather-bound book signifying might be replaced, or at least complemented, with visual suggestions of Penguin paperbacks and the like: “Our working notion of what books look like is on the verge of becoming frozen in a brownish fantasy phase that may estrange us from, and therefore weaken our resolve to read, the books we actually own.”

A fascinating point, probably even more salient now that the proposition of ebooks squeezing away physical ones is so widely discussed. Many argue that such judgments are premature — but surely there’s a good case to be made that our idea of what a physical book is may well cease to evolve soon, if it hasn’t already.

Anyway, this series is continuing, but not here. Please visit http://murketing.tumblr.com to follow along, if you like.

True gadget transparency: In the works!

In response to this morning’s Consumed column — in which I pivoted from the flurry of news stories about suicides at the Foxconn factories in China and suggested that a more meaningful form of “transparency” in a global consumer marketplace would entail being able to learn, easily, where exactly and specfically our stuff is made — I got a great note from Matthew Hockenberry, a visiting scientist at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

Turns out his team is working on something that sounds like what I imagined in the column:

Sourcemap (www.sourcemap.org) is an MIT project creating an open source and open data supply chain publishing platform that enables exactly the kind of transparency you talk about. Companies (and investigative consumers, academics and journalists) can use Sourcemap to share the supply chains behind products and show us all exactly where they come from. At the same time the site creates the opportunity to do automatic calculations based on this information, like carbon footprinting – with the only open data carbon catalog on the web.

We’re actively working on interesting partnerships with large and small business, governments, communities, journalists and educators. We’re not quite there yet, but we can definitely tell you where some things come from. On the site you can find things like Ikea beds, Tesla roadsters, ipods, where whole foods gets some of its ingredients, bicycles, Sony PSPs – there are even a couple of planes on there (airbus and boeing).

This is really cool! It’s not precisely what I had in mind, but it has great potential — and as I indicated in the column, I think this sort of thing is a lot more compelling than price-comparison apps. Check out the SourceMap.org for more.

Like any open source project, its ultimate success depends on people knowing about it, and participating. So: If you think, as I do, that this is a great idea, I hope you’ll spread the word.

UPDATE:

Here are some more sites, in addition to the above, and those mentioned in the column itself:

Closet Tour: “CLOSETTOUR is a blog about wondering what to wear in an increasingly complicated world. It is about finding value, and values in fashion, by following our clothing’s narrative threads.” Via Jeff Jarvis.

Andrew Condon also points out company-specific transparency efforts at GreenSource Organic, and, of course, that good old standby,  Patagonia.

Core 77 follows up here. Consumerist, here. Daily Grommet follows up here. Also, here is a the Ecosystem Notebook’s “ingredients” page, an interesting example.

And furthermore: Via Allan C. here is a slideshow of tips for finding out how your stuff is made, from Jen van der Meer:

In The New York Times Magazine: True gadget transparency

OPEN SECRETS:
Technology has made the consumer marketplace transparent – sometimes.

We’re accustomed to finding what we want with a simple click, but a lot remains murky until bad news pushes it into the open. … What if finding out where and how our stuff was made was as easy as finding the lowest price or peer opinions? What impact would it have on consumer choices? Wouldn’t that be a more meaningful form of transparency in a global economy?

Read the column in the June 27, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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

Unconsumption update

We’ve added a new member to the Unconsumption Tumblr team: “digital roustabout” Jaime Beckland, based in Portland, OR.

There will be more news on the Unconsumption front in the weeks ahead; stay tuned.

Meanwhile, if you’ve never checked out the Tumblr, I beg you to gaze upon the archive. It’s amazing! I’m honored to work with this team of volunteer contributors. Seriously. It’s endlessly rewarding to me, and I hope you’ll find some inspiration there. And even if you have already checked it out, I dunno, tell a friend?