Talent imitates, genius steals

PLOT: Data is Beautiful

2009-11-13T23:09:20+00:00

My mate Lisa just spent her maternity leave [CONGRATS!] conceiving an idea, spawned by many hours staring at ugly data.

boring meetings = interesting ideas
Lisa Prince, a strategist at Wieden+Kennedy, sat in many meetings staring at data. Sometimes her mind would wander. She started to notice that by squinting a little the data began to transform into something quite beautiful.
When strategist Lisa met art director, Nicholla, x met y and they had the idea to transform data into beautiful pieces of wearable art.

So Lisa asked her lovely husband - APRINCE - to design the site, and jewelry designer Hannah Havana [is that your real name? I have just realised that names that rhyme are awesome] to make the jewelry come true.

PLOT is the result - a data viz jewelry company, created in association with W&K London, that believes:

Data is Beautiful!

If you have seen the piece about data viz Noah and I wrote a while back for Contagious - Ways of Seeing - you'll know we agree.

Those of you interested in data and how it effects marketing and that would also do well having a read of Matt's President's Prize winning IPA Excellence Diploma Thesis:

Data is Our Future: Welcome to the Age of Infomagination. DOWNLOAD MY PAPER HERE.

More Mind Tonic

2009-11-11T17:42:38+00:00

Mind Tonic Issue 2 - featuring the lovely and awesome Jess from Contagious' thoughts on Radiohead and how awesome they are at being a band of the web, and Retail In Action's thoughts on the new shopper, as well as the usual fragments of inspiring culture - is now available.

Download it from here as an ecofriendly pdf.

Meta-Semiotics (Awesome Youtube Composition)

2009-11-09T21:14:45+00:00

[via - where you may also find the full lyrics]

This piece of recombinant awesomesness is just beautiful - and, importantly I think, NOT A REMIX.

See, recombinant compositions began as remixes, this is true. But increasingly I have come to think that recombinance is not the same as remixing and this is a lovely example of why.

This composition - and it is a composition - is created from fragments of culture, but is not a remix of any of the pieces.

It is rather something new, created from existing pieces.

[Of course, every new piece of culture is created from others, because culture is inherently recombinant.]

The difference, as I've said before, lies in the level of complexity - the signs being deployed have previously been deployed, and that deployment is being incorporated into the composition.

This is what's known as meta-semotics: a secondary sign, where such is considered to be of a different quality than the meaning of a word in language. The reference of the one [secondary] sign is to another [primary] sign.

[You can argue, of course, that words are in some ways the same, that every word has the weight of all its uses built into its cultural meaning, but nevermind that for now.]

The power of using cultural units that have been deployed before comes from their density - they already have a large number of hypertextual meanings associated to them, which can then be leveraged, acknowledged, pushed back against, in the composition.

The title - The Golden Age of Video - that author Ricardo Autobahn gives his pieces alludes to these allusions.

So recombinance lets you say a lot with a little.

Snuggie Inside

2009-11-06T15:30:20+00:00

Thanks to my mate Thomas I got to go to the Halloweezer gig last week at the Hammerstein ballroom.

This was highly awesome - the crowd was all in costume and some people were invited up on stage to help the band out of their costumes: a liminal space if ever I saw one - costumes allow for more fluid identities and roll reversals, hence the audience becomes the performer and that.

One of the bits I particularly enjoyed would probably have not had the same effect for anyone else there.

Allow me to explain.

The last time I saw Weezer play was in 1994 -

[Oh Lord can it really have been 15 years? Wowzer. Weezer are like an old band now.

{Kottke pointed out a while ago that listening to, say, Nirvana's Nevermind album today is the same as someone listening to Terry Jack's Seasons In The Sun (1974) in the year 1991}]

- they had just released their first album

[now known as the Blue album and still worth listening to if you don't have it].

When I saw them play Rivers Cuomo was in crutches because he had just undergone surgery to lengthen one of his legs.

[It was whilst recuperating from this apparently very painful surgery that he wrote the much darker [and always difficult] second album Pinkerton, which bombed when released but has steadily gained admiration and sales ever since.]

So it gave me a particular kind of joy to see a trampoline on stage, which Rivers would use to to leap up onto the drum kit and back again.

The video infomercial above promoting the new album shows the band pimping the Snuggie - and you can get Weezer branded Snuggies when you buy the new album, which is awesome.

It has more than 5000 comments on youtube - I suspect, in part, because, you guessed it, it is culturally recombinent.

Every Vote Counts (So Please Vote for Me)

2009-10-29T19:21:32+00:00

A nice chap called Alistair just emailed me to let me know that TIGS has been selected [by public vote] as a finalist in the British Interactive Media Association Awards for Best Blog.

Gosh. Since I'm guessing you probably read this if you nominated me - THANK YOU!

I really appreciate it. It's awesome to be a finalist.

But it would be even more awesome to win so if I could beg your indulgence again - the finalists are being put to a public vote....so...

Could you click over to their website and vote?

By the way - I love you. And I think you are very attractive. I've always thought that, I just haven't said anything because I'm shy.

Thanks!

This Place

2009-10-27T21:39:37+00:00

The world isn't simple.

It really isn't. At all. It's massively complex, or complicated, or whatever.

There aren't just two sides to every story, there's an infinite number of sides, and an infinite number of permutations of at least 7 different stories.

There aren't any right answers - we need to put that idea down right now - it's not like this country is right and the other is wrong, in, say, some conflict.

In fact, we don't even know what right and wrong might really mean, not just in that moral relativism way that different cultures have different value systems and that, but also because usually situations are so confused that idea of there being a right and wrong doesn't really make sense.

Beliefs simplify the complex - they reify 'right' and 'wrong', they demark actions into a specific contextual classes.

But even with such things place, stuff can still be really confusing.

Pretty much people agree that killing people is bad, except under certain conditions, when its not.

And that's with killing people, which is pretty black and white.

With climate change - hoo boy is that complex [or complicated, or whatever]

This Place 09 is a side project from a couple of nice plannery people in the UK.

They want to delegates at the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference that, while the issue is complex, people feel very strongly that something needs to be DONE, and that their voices should be heard.

So they are compiling tweets on the topic into a book for the delegates. People nominate places that are or will be effected by the changing climate, to remind the delegates that this is about real places, and real people.

The issue will remain complex, but the twitter format will at least keep things short.

Tankard Tales

2009-10-23T19:16:56+01:00

I met the legend that is Paul Coleman on the 20th July 2006 - we both went to a talk Russell gave at W&K, and I went for a beer with him after.

I know the specifics of this meeting because he blogged about it [don't you love the internet?].

Paul now works at W&K - perhaps the seeds were sown that very day, who knows - and his wonderful blog is about, well, mostly about his understated but mind blowing observations on life [not about planning or ads and that] - which is why he is a founding and lifetime member of the plannersphere.

Paul sent his ceramic tankard around the world, using that self same blogging planning nice peopleing community.

I received it from Age, who got it from Lauren, and it traveled all the way from Australia to New York.

I had it for a while.

Then I took it to Toronto, where we gave a speech together.

Then I took it to dinner, where Dino had if for a bit.

And finally I handed it over to Jason.

Who took to it well...

- and then passed it on to Gareth in SF...where the story continues...

Projected Identities

2009-10-22T15:35:38+01:00

[via]

In a flash of glorious digital juxtaposition, a coincidence that became meaningful, this morning I saw three films in different places, all promoting the Nikon Coolpix S1000PJ - the first compact camera in the world with a projector built in [which seems pretty awesome].

The one above comes from Japan, the ones below come from Europe and the 1980s, respectively.

Two have had about the same number of views on the tube. What I like about this, in totality, is that you will probably like one of them.

Or maybe not, but I certainly did.

[via]

And maybe that's the point - more different stuff, more chances people will like something, more hooks for the network.

The awesome Cory Doctorow calls this ' thinking like a dandelion':

Take the dandelion: a single dandelion may produce 2,000 seeds per year, indiscriminately firing them off into the sky at the slightest breeze, without any care for where the seeds are heading and whether they'll get an hospitable reception when they touch down.
The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!
Dandelions and artists have a lot in common in the age of the Internet.
This is, of course, the age of unlimited, zero-marginal-cost copying.
If you blow your works into the net like a dandelion clock on the breeze, the net itself will take care of the copying costs.

My bet is that Western cool kids will love the Japanese Helicopter Boys, but conservative Japanese grown ups will love the infomercial. But who knows!

Put them out there and see what happens.

Exciting isn't it?

Divided By Infinity

2009-10-20T18:11:21+01:00

View more documents from Jason Oke.

One of the things I was talking about at the AToMIC conference was the end of media scarcity.

This is an inevitable result of the technology drivers that are changing our world, the laws of Moore, Kryder and Gilder.

[I'm not going to go into detail - I'll post the deck when it's ready. It's not yet.]

When storage, processing and bandwidth are free, then, as a direct corollary, the amount of possible media channels becomes [virtually] infinite.

It already is [virtually] infinite online - at least there's far more content and context than any person can really comprehend.

This presents a challenge, assuming the other networks like TV, Cable and Mobile finally accept IP as their protocol of choice - closed networks can manufacture scarcity.

[I'm thinking on a very long term horizon here - but keep in mind that the goal of 4G networks is to provide a comprehensive and secure IP based solution, alongside more bandwidth.]

Because anything divided by infinity is zero -

[OK actually it's not because infinity isn't a number, but you could say something like the limit of 1/n as n approaches infinity is zero, whatever that means.]

- no matter how much stuff you push out, it equals zero, unless people choose to spend time with it - certain pieces of content will always aggregate attention, regardless of where they are consumed.

So the idea of planning which channels to put things in seems kind of pointless.

[I'm talking specifically about using 'channels' to distribute 'content' - not looking at all the operations of a company and working out which levers need moving, which is what I think constitutes true communications planning.]

You can only plan the kinds of content you intend to create, put it in as many places as is possble, and look for ways to help that content to spread, by perhaps bringing it to the attention of people who might find it interesting, and letting those people find it when they want it.

All of which leads me to these explorations of those arts.

Above, Gareth and Jason - two of my favourite industry minds and people

[although I've never met Gareth in real life, despite trying a million times, which makes me think that if I do the world may end or something.]

- suggest that maybe the media we should be planning for are time, space, depth and technology.

Below, David [who is also lovely and drew red glasses on me in his deck, which is awesome] has put together some lovely thoughts about intention planning and the future being the fusion of data + meaning to help people tell their own stories.

View more documents from David Gillespie.

As the emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus says:

As below, so above; and as above so below

Meaningful Coincidences

2009-10-14T06:27:00+01:00

I've just spent 50 minutes of jetlagged insomnia in a hotel room in Madrid watching a 'fantasy documentary' made by the BBC in 1990.

I found the documentary, hosted in full on Google Video, via a tweet by @eskimon, which led me to a post on Russell's blog called Hyperland, which is also the name of the documentary.

Hyperland is a documentary film written by Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [but you knew that] and one of the great futurologists of our time [he is greatly missed]. He saw the future clearly, as though it was obvious, as though it had to happen.

The show starts with Adams' frustration with the passive, linear nature of television and, upon disposing of his set, he is approached by an intelligent software agent represented by Tom Baker [who was the second best Doctor Who].

The agent explains that he is an application, able to source information from anywhere and anywhen and then follow the hypertextual connections of every datum outwards to all the data in the world.

It's too brilliant for me to keep describing - it's a waste of time. Set aside 50 minutes and watch it.

And keep reminding yourself it was written 20 years ago - before the first web browser.

One of the bits I really loved was an exploration of a quote from Kurt Vonnegut:

“The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”

The shape of society's stories right now could well be logos, but let's not get into that right now.

[Another bit I love is how much Adams hates the idea of talking fridges - the IP fridge is the great technological white elephant of pervasive computing.]

It covers World of Warcraft too, artificial realities, and points out that truly immersive interactive environments have an inevitable tendency to pull you out of the 'real world'

[at least until the one can be overlaid on the other - see Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge for a idea of what that looks like, a book I found out about because of a comment from my mate Wilsh].

As I'm sure is clear, the vision that Adams painted before any of you who aren't old enough to drink in the UK were born, is, well, here and right now.

The very context of my watching it is an example of what it's about.

The agent points out that intelligent hypertextuality likes to arrange meaningful coincidences, which is pretty much how I found out about it, and most other things, thanks to the human/computer hypertextual network I'm very fortunate to have found myself part of.

Coincidentally, I'm in Madrid to give a presentation about the disruption to linear passive content and communication that technology represents, and my speech opens with a quote by Douglas Adams.

I wonder if that's meaningful.

The Economics Of Media

2009-10-12T22:15:19+01:00

[The value you as an average American TV consumer represent - from the posts mentioned below]

Advergirl has written a series of short, provocative posts about Media in Crisis that I think you should probably go and read.

She's nailing something that we all know but perhaps like to ignore - the economic model that underlies the media industry is, to put it kindly, in flux.

As I pointed out in Content Republic, the binary opposition model of content monetization, ad supported or paid for, probably doesn't cover the entire possible gamut of commercially motivating models for the creation of content, but that said, most existing media owners have yet to truly explore significant alternatives.

This is possibly in part legacy thinking - content on broadcast commercial media was originally created by advertisers for the sole purpose of aggregating the right audiences to sell certain products to.

Content and commerce divided, for economics reasons, and since then the content creators and media channel owners have aggregated attention and then sold that on to advertisers.

A model which is clearly breaking down, for lots of reasons I've been talking about recently, to do with the end of media and content scarcity, the competition for attention that personal content from your friends constitutes, who are mostly creating stuff for 'free', and other drivers brought about by that thing we like to call 'digital'.

I was talking about this kind of thing at the Atomic Conference in Toronto last week and there were clearly two kinds of reactions to this change.

Those that accept change as already evident and embrace it, and those that said, well, 'digital' is just another channel to pump brands through and things are basically the same really, aren't they.

No, it isn't, and no, they're not.

Although change is neither as fast nor as slow as either group want to believe, I suspect.

Remarkably, this was on the very day that Canada's largest media conglomerate, Canwest, declared bankruptcy - if that isn't an indicator that media economics might need re-thinking I'm not sure what it.

Advergirl's excellent posts are below:

The Media Crisis: Part 1, Overview of an Implosion

The Media Crisis, Part 2: Publishers and Creators (working for scratch)

The Media Crisis, Part 3: Advertisers (looking for their lost sheep)

The Media Crisis, Part 4: Consumers (will people buy their eyeballs back?)

What Do You Do Exactly?

2009-10-09T21:59:13+01:00

There's an article in the current Boards magazine which looks at people with weird job titles in the industry, which very kindly includes me.

{I quite fancy both Alchemist and Resident Theorist as jobs - then maybe people wouldn't confuse me with the CTO and try to sell me enterprise software. Or ask me to help when they can't plug their laptops into the projectors.}

As I said in this Fast Company piece, all these new job titles are indications that the system is trying to assimilate the rapid change in cultural context, driven by technology's increasingly pervasive role in all communication.

Perhaps the divisions of the past, the departments and roles, the linear production processes, aren't the only, or the best way, to create communications products, to help companies use creativity to solve the business challenges [and take advantage of the opportunities] that this changing context create.

When I was judging the London International Awards last week, I was being interviewed and was asked why there were no 'creative people' on my jury.

I said that I strongly disagreed with that - there just weren't any traditional 'creatives'.

But Ben, Frank, Kevin and Noah are some of the most creative people in the business - they also happen to be incredibly smart, which I guess makes them 'strategists'.

One is even one of the most creative people in business, according to FastCompany.

Like entries into the NEW category itself, they just don't fit conveniently into the industry's old boxes.

UPDATE: The lovely Fitz just sent me this article that asks will planners be the creative directors of the future? I see 'planners' as the architects of the system of engagement myself.

AToMIC

2009-10-06T21:37:26+01:00

Tomorrow [OCT 7th] I'm speaking at the AToMIC conference in Toronto.

They think I'm speaking about transmedia planning - and I'll touch on it but I've got a bunch of new ideas I want to try out. I hope they don't mind. Shhh don't tell.

There's an interview I did for the magazine behind it - Media in Canada, should you like to read it.

If you are going to be there, and are reading this, why not come say hi tomorrow.

Brand Patronage

2009-10-05T23:46:03+01:00

I wrote this piece a while ago for this book called Defining Sponsorship - you can buy it off Amazon.

It was put together by an agency called Red Mandarin - they are, as the sharpest among you will have already guessed, a sponsorship agency.

My piece was called: And now a word from our patrons...

Because I think knowing the history of advertising [or whatever you do] is important, it starts with the fact that back in the day all advertising was sponsorship, and that even further back in an earlier day, we called that patronage.

Ancient Athenians would put up the funding for cultural and sporting events to make them accessible to the common man. In return they would get their name in stone. The tradition of patronage transcends culture and time; it has operated throughout history as the primary mechanism by which culture has been supported.
Royalty and aristocracy would provide patronage, for a combination of altruistic and image reasons, that allowed art to be created and events for the masses to happen. The nature of this commercial relationship was culturally defined – it was never a simple commercial transaction – and the impact a patron had on the work or event was equally prescribed by convention.
It was, for want of a better word, subtler than simply sticking your name on something. A patron’s taste and sophistication and grace were being reflected in how the patronage would manifest, not just their money.

Today, brands provide patronage, but often forget that it’s not just their money that should be evident.

You can read the rest of it here:

Download Defining Sponsorship Brand Patronage - Faris Yakob

More recently though, my mate Jared wrote a post on sponsorship which I think addresses some of the same points but is more useful and less historical, so perhaps go and read that instead.

Get Good Ideas from Nokia

2009-09-28T16:35:11+01:00

I like Jan Chipchase - he does what I like to think of as 'investigative ethnography' for Nokia - a gig which takes him all over the world looking at how people use phones and that.

He also has a great blog - Future Perfect - and we share a name.

[Jan is my middle name. Although I'm not sure we pronounce it the same way. Then again I never really say it out loud, so its hard to know how to pronounce it. It usually has a soft J, mine has a silent J-A-N.]

Jan [however you choose to say it - well however he chooses to say it I guess] is speaking at a PSFK Good Idea Salon on Thursday 1st October in New York.

You can get tickets here.

However, one of you lucky lucky TIGS readers can go for free - as I have a free ticket to give away.

Just leave me a GOOD IDEA in the comments - and I'll pick one, seemingly at random, and put you on the list.

Deadline is when I leave work tomorrow [tuesday 29th Sept]

To Tweet or Not To Tweet

2009-09-22T15:15:31+01:00

That is NOT the question.

Which is the really quite long title to this piece I wrote for Admap this month.

It riffs off the cultural latency thought I've been developing, and tracks the rise of twitter along Gartner's Hype Cycle.

Then it goes here:

The most interesting effect of new communication technologies is, perhaps, not how we use them, but how they change how we use everything else. An addition to the communication ecosystem does not simply increase the number of options – it changes the system itself.
The emergence of the internet as a content distribution channel changes what television is for and how it should be used, regardless of whether or not a TV campaign has a digital component – the world does.

Which pretty much sums up how I feel about the impact of 'digital' on 'traditional' advertising - although I'd like us to stop using those terms now please because they aren't really helping. Thanks.

You can read the whole piece here: Download Admap - To Tweet or Not To Tweet - Faris - let me know what you think.

Robotic for The People

2009-09-21T16:55:35+01:00

The Voicebot pt 1 from sidekick studios on Vimeo.

Robots are awesome.

I just got a Roomba. I can't believe how cute it is. It genuinely seems to vacuum stuff as well, but mostly I love my anthropomorphic interpretations of its cleaning pattern algorithm: it seems curious and cheeky and playful and lots of other things that it isn't really but that my brain likes to think it is.

This robot is less cute but is trying to help bridge the divide between the government and the governed.

Young people are encouraged to submit ideas about what's important to them on the Voicebox site [in 160 characters or less], then the Voicebot will transcribe them inside the Houses of Parliament in the UK so that MPs can see them.

The dudes behind is - SideKick Studios - have some thoughts about the needs for more open democracy that this robot represents here and you can see some of the messages on flickr.

I like the fact that the have an API so anyone can use the data the robot gathers - because:

'this isn't our data; this is your data'

Well indeed.

Having an XYZ Affair

2009-09-17T00:53:05+01:00

I saw the XYZ Affair play on Saturday - at the NYC Twestival Local - [unfortunately I couldn't really get involved in the organising this time around] and they were impressively awesome.

They sounded a bit like early Weezer to me: like the Beach Boys blended into the Smashing Pumpkins.

Or something.

[There's probably a reason my music journalism career was cut short...Actually I know the reason: I ran out of ways to describe drum noises and bass noises, after using the term 'rolling thunder' way to often in countless jungle reviews]

I love their DIY first music video above - fan as I am both of cultural re-appropriation and the endless discussion of how television shows and cartoons of the 80s and 90s are the undisclosed foundation of 'generation Y not''s cultural sensibility.

[get a number of people of the same ish age together, give them drinks, see how quickly cartoons from childhood spring up. I think it's because they represent pre-fragmented media and culture, so they provide mutual referents for othewise disparate groups]

This video features lots of the actors from Nickolodeon shows from that time [we got Nick in the UK too] - who they just found using the internets and asked them if they wanted to play. I love that.

The XYZ Affair have just kicked off a kickstarter project to fund their album - go get involved and maybe they will tell you why they are named after a French diplomatic scandal from the 18th century.

A Few Favourite Mobile Things

2009-09-16T01:48:54+01:00

Adage asked a bunch of smart people about their favourite mobile type things - and kindly solicited my opinion as well.

I said foursquare - here's why:

What are you most excited about in the mobile space?
The technology/app/behavior that I've been most excited about recently is Foursquare, in essence because it is all those things. As a believer in combinatorial creativity, Foursquare is exciting precisely because it combines elements of 'geotility' [location-based usefulness], gaming, social networking, manufactured serendipity and more. By using a gamelike set of incentives to create a new kind of behavior -- checking in at a venue when you are out and broadcasting that check-in to your network -- they are creating a rich source of local data and delivering on some of the promise of the location-based social web.
[UPDATE: Fourquare for Business just launched and is strong indicator for how advertising as geotility is going to work]

They actually asked all of us two questions - here was my unpublished response to the other question, which I thought was funny...

What mobile efforts have impressed you?

*Don’t say an iPhone app, it’s too obvious..although should probably try to slyly mention the one we did for Mastercard...no don’t do that it’s lame...what about being contrarian and saying some SMS coupon campaign...or is that too obvious...maybe I should just google ‘best mobile marketing’....oh I don’t know...did anything mobile win at Cannes? That would be a safe bet...maybe that thing about Nokia making netbooks, or is that too clever clever....*

The Zippos lighter iPhone app!

*damn*

There's also a good, more in depth, piece on how location changes digital experiences that touches on geotility.

Watching Paint Dry

2009-09-01T19:56:54+01:00

Watching Paint Dry from Faris Yakob on Vimeo.

I'm off for a while - I'm doing a labour day long weekend one and then I'm doing a guest lecture spot for Henry Jenkins' new transmedia course at USC.

In the meantime I've made this little film for you.

It's called Watching Paint Dry.

There's a surprise at the end.

In return I ask only that you look at the post below and please vote on the SXSW panels.

I thank you.

Please Vote for South By Awesomeness

2009-08-31T21:08:33+01:00

Please vote for this panel to be included at next year's South By South West Festival.

Using this URL: http://bit.ly/Hv0ra

[Full disclosure: it's my girlfriend's panel, and she said I could be on it. However I maintain that my bias does not effect my judgment, and saw her speak to the theme at the NY Music Tech meet up, think it will be awesome, and the other speakers will be brilliant.]

Please also vote for this one, even though I won't be on it: http://bit.ly/10zb8p

What do women want in bed? With their laptops, of course. Why are some entertainment platforms better suited for females? We'll explore what women are using and why, providing perspectives for the marketers and brands while providing opportunities for sexy and sophisticated women looking to explore new digital trends.

Because I want the answer to 'technology for women' to no longer be 'make a pink one'.

Voting is open for all the panels until Friday. It will take you literally less than one minute to register. And then SXSW will be more awesome, thanks to you, and I will be very grateful.

Thanks.

Brands as Modern Myths

2009-08-27T23:22:17+01:00

[From here]

Over the course of the last week, 3 separate conversations have led me back to the first paper I ever wrote about brands, which essentially posits that brands have replaced myths in our culture.

One of these conversations was with Doug Holt, author of How Brands Become Icons, which explores similar territory from a slightly different point of view.

So I thought I'd post it here and see what you all thought.

It seems like the kind of idea that comes back into view every now and again.

The quotes above highlight an interesting dialectic concerning the idea.

Toby [who is lovely and very smart] suggests in the first quote that because the internets allow people unfettered access to the truth, and enable them to tell their own stories, that myth-making is doomed.

However, he is conflating myths here with lies, and he knows it - because later on in the article it comes from he says:

'this isn't to say stories aren't important' and 'it's still storytelling - just done differently'.

[If anything, myths are stories that contain truths, not the other way around]

Fragments of it have appeared here before no doubt, and elsewhere in stuff I have written. It was the first time I sat down and had a proper think about what I thought about brands and that.

The second quote suggests that the stories are more important than the products, and part of me agrees in the sense that the stories around the product, or provenance and corporate behaviour and cultural impact, have never been so consciously part of the decision making process, in essence because of the access to information that the internet allows.

But the product is part of the story, which we mustn't forget.

Anyway, having opposing viewpoints is good and healthy - and also plays into my model of brands as myths, as the function of myth, according to Levi-Strauss is "provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction" found in culture.

A few random quotes to sample the flavour:

We are “meaning-seeking creatures”.

Duckworth points out, “brands enable us to make sense and create meanings for ourselves in the socia world of consumption in which we participate.”

Grant has suggested, brands are “ideas to live by” that we look for due to our “tradition hunger”.

The emergence of brands as myths has been triggered by the decline of standard myths in western culture.

Western modernity is “the child of logos” [the opposite of mythos in the Hellenistic tradition, it represents science and facts]. Science became the dominant paradigm for understanding the world. But logos alone is unable to give us a sense of significance – it was myth that gave life meaning and context. Thus society unconsciously cried out for and ultimately created its own myths around the newly dominant force of consumerism. Logos led us to logos.

Myths are inherently complex and polysemous; they can be interpreted in a number of equally valid ways.

Levi Strauss posited that “it is likely that languages exist in which an entire myth can be expressed in a single word”. There is – it is the language of brand.

You can read the whole paper below if you want.

I don't think the brand/myth is the only story we tell ourselves about ourselves, but it's definitely the dominant one of modern times, perhaps even more so today than when I wrote this a few years back, as every young person online begins to realise that when broadcasting your life through media fragments, you are creating an impression of who you are that is distinct from, but inextricably linked to, who you are, that is increasingly being referred to as a personal brand.

Download Logocentrism - Brands as Modern Myths - Faris Yakob

Humanology

2009-08-25T17:26:55+01:00

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

My mate Chris just made this.

Get more details from Neurosonics Audiomedical - the film features turntablist legends The Scratch Perverts and multi-mike beatbox genius Shlomo [as the drums].

Kingdom of the unreal but also a higher state of being, ultimately free of the limitations of the material world through the agency of science, technology, and imagination.

I may be biased but I still guarantee it is the *MOST AWESOME* thing you will see today.

[Possibly tomorrow also. Maybe even all week, but the internet is a big {metaphorical} place, and things move fast nowadays, speaking of which...]

People and technology are blurring in both directions.

You have the idea of cybernetic enhancement, the addition of technology to people, from invisible tools all the way to the cognitive amplification that Ray Kurzweil claims will be necessary just to keep up with the increased rate of technology wrought cultural change in a couple of decades time [see the upcoming Transcendent Man for more on his particular flavour post singularity thinking] [Thanks Stephanie for the tip].

And you have technology getting humanised, until it plunges into the uncanny valley, that scary place where robots get so close to peopleness they freak you out, until it emerges as something more Roomba-like, [because pet robots are much less scary than people robots.]

[I think the uncanny valley equally applies to any technology that mimics or attempts to mimic humanlike functions, which is why behavioural targeting can seem sinister if it's heavy handed, and also why that paperclip in MS Office was so annoying.]

I'm thinking a lot about 'technology' as an idea at the moment for some upcoming talks - if you come across any really awesome old technology / old technology prediction stuff on the youtube I'd love to see it - thanks.

World of Mouth

2009-08-21T22:03:38+01:00

It doesn't really say anything new but who doesn't love Fatboy Slim and some dynamic typography.

If You Can't See The Angles No More

2009-08-20T19:12:58+01:00

To promote their new cameras with screens on the front so you can take pictures of yourself more easily, Samsung and the 'Viral Factory' [an unfortunate name in my opinion but let's not start on that again], have created some interactive youtube videos that show you how to capture your best side for your social media profile, which is especially useful if you are a hideous monster.

The Mediation Generation has found its autocamera, bringing with it reminder that what we choose to mediate is usually a specific side of ourselves.

As Carltio pointed out, "if you can't see the angles no more, you're in trouble".