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Advice to a young consultant

This will be Section 5 of the blog compendium How to be an anthropologist (for hire).

There was a time I had traveled so much I had 1.5 million frequent flyer miles with Air Canada. I was the first generation of anthropologist to make my way in the world, to serve as a consultant moving constantly from project to project. Naturally, I made many bone-headed mistakes. From time to time, I have posted on the perils of being a young consultant. I collect these little essays here.

1. How to be a self-funding anthropologist

This is my advice to a young man in Mumbai who wrote to ask me if I had any advice on how to do ethnography for a living. (See the post here.)

2. How to win with culture

This is an interview I did with Scott Berkun who asked me why culture matters to managers. As a young consultant, you will be called upon to explain and to justify what you do many times. I hope you will steal anything that's useful to you from this essay. (See the post here.)

3. Advice to a young consultant

It's easy to spot the young consultant. He or she often gets some of the practical matters wrong. Consider this essay a source of useful advice. (See the post here.)

4. The Perfect Black Bag

I had to learn lots of things the hard way as an anthropologist for hire-on my own. One of the things I learned was that it is necessary to have the right kit. In this case, you need a perfect black bag. (See the post here.)

5. Why I just bought a night light.

If you spend enough days in enough cities and hotels, you wake up sometimes with no idea where the bathroom is. Now, of course you can turn on the lights. But this flash of light is sure to reset the body clock you just spent a week trying to get right. Hence the need for a night light. (See the post here.)

6. Learning to notice

Enough practical details. The first order of the anthropological profession is noticing well. Here's a little essay on say. (See the post here.)

7. Watch this space

Normally, this sections come in sevens. But I don't have a last essay! And that means I have one more essay to write. I am on the road next week, to Chicago, Fort Worth, and Jacksonville, perfect opportunities to learn something more about the art of travelling an as anthropologist for hire. Watch this space.

Story time: aka commerce gets more cultural

I had the honor of doing a call with Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn on Monday. Jerry and Pip focus on "interactions between technology, business and society" and their Monday telephone "broadcast" looks at this topic from many points of view.

To prepare myself, I scratched out these notes to clarify what an anthropologist (or at least this anthropologist) has offer to a group like theirs.

1. I am interested in culture and commerce, especially as they intersect.

2. One of the things you see from this "picture window" is the arrival of new kinds of capital (cultural, social, intellectual, moral) and new kinds of exchange. This may or may not herald the arrival of a "gift economy."

Or to put this another way: Since the 17th century we have seen culture get more commercial. Now we are seeing commerce get more cultural.

3. Here's a story that means to illustrate what I mean by cultural and social capitals.

In 2000, a client asked me to study rum in the Maritime provinces of Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland).

I did my ethnographic research. I conducted a couple of focus groups and many one-to-one interviews. I asked men in middle age what they thought about alcohol, drinking alcohol, brands of alcohol, pubs, bars, parties, the whole "rum" package.

The first finding, the one just sitting there are the surface of everything else I learned, was that Maritimers are great talkers, that they have a fantastic collection of stories to tell, and that Martimers are especially active as talkers when active as drinkers. (Duh.)

Well, so, was this first finding something I could use, or was it merely an interesting observation, fun to know but not so very useful? I decided finally this finding ought to be the point of strategic and tactical departure. We needed to find some way of getting the brand involved in all these talkers talking.

My recommendation was that the brand ought to hire a handful of out-of-work actors, train them in the art of story telling, and set them into bars and pubs to tell a spell binding story. It was important that this was a bar that the story teller had never been to before, and that he never went to again. I wanted to make the story the original "mysterious stranger," a man for whom no information was forthcoming. I wanted maximize the oddity of the event. (I once had a brother-in-law who was such a good story teller he routinely make the bars of St. Andrews fall completely silent and abjectly worshipful. This guy, David Joy, was my model, I think.)

I wasn't entirely clear how to feature the brand. Making it part of the story would be too obvious. It would diminish the magic of the story telling at a stroke. Standing everyone a round of the brand was possible but still trying to hard. The art of this deal was to evoke the brand without damaging the story telling. I decided finally that it would be just about right if the story teller merely ordered the brand for himself.

The idea was to create a cultural capital. That's what a story is. Naturally it had to be a good story, something with stormy seas, calamity, heroism, inexplicable outcomes, ghost ships, nature on the rampage, phantoms, pirates, princesses, Leviathans of the deep, etc. Just a telling of Turner's Shipwreck of the Minotaur (pictured above) would do. The idea, or one idea, is to tell a story that resonated with the best stories of this maritime culture.

But it wasn't just the story told that was key, it was the story telling. We wanted the actor to be tall, dark and handsome. We wanted the event to be rich in story but otherwise poor in detail. By withholding the identity, the motive, the mission of our story teller, we were inviting other story tellers to leap into action. In an oral culture this rich, staffed by story tellers this good, I felt certain the the bar would soon teem with many, conflicting ideas about who "this guy" was and why he had come to tell his single, perfect story. Nature abhors a vacuum. So do talkers.

So, the idea was to have the brand gift the community with a story told and the provocation of the story telling. The oral tradition on the Maritimes was now richer by one story and provoked to make up still more stories. And with every story told, the social capital, the connections between story tellers, will be augmented. (We can posit a crude metric here: the more talk that flows between talkers the richer the connections between them. The higher the quality of the talk and the more vivid the telling, the richer the connection. The more and the more richly we interact, the deeper our social capital. This social capital is fungible it can be spent in times of crisis and in aid of those in need. As you can see, I am sketching as I go. This is what precisely what needs working on and I suggested to Pip and Jerry that we find someone to sit out out to the desert in a benign version of the Manhattan project.) Thus does cultural capital begets social capital in moments of exchange.

I am obliged to tell you that the client absolutely hated this idea. He actually looked at me and scowled. (In the corporate world, in my experience, this very rarely happens. In the interests of good relations, everyone's a cipher.) Part of the problem is that in those days we didn't have the concepts we do today. The other problem is that marketing for spirits has a long traditional of deep stupidity. A favorite tactic is to paint an RV with the colors on the brand, put a really big image of the logo on the side, and fill it with cheerful, buxom women. By this standard, sending in poetic story tellers may have looked like a college prank, or perhaps an anthropological self indulgence.

But here's the pitch I would make now, and it is a pitch in the changed world of marketing that might now actually work. In our story teller scenario, the brand is creating a cultural meaning in the form of a story. It sends this story out into its brand community, where the local story tellers will convert it into social capital. These cultural and social capitals return to the brand and augment it as a kind of brand capital. If we have augmented the cultural and social world of the drinker successfully, we will move drinkers to switch to our brand and to purchase same. Now cultural and social capital have become a more fungible kind of capital. Now they convert into financial capital.

This is a value flight. The brand releases value into the world by contributing something not for itself but for the community of consumers. If the brand creates the right capitals, and the conversion chains work successfully, eventually value returns to them. But this is risky. There is no easy Smithian calculation here. It is not possible for the brand manager to judge tit for tat. It's hard to say how a story will create value for the corporation. It's harder to know how much should be invested in the story's creation.

4. It looks as if the old dog of marketing is having to learn a new trick. If we want to create financial capital, we may now have to help create social and cultural capital. This takes us a way from the old calculations of the marketplace. We are no longer creating "utility" (or not only creating utility). We are not making functional goods and services. We are creating culture and society. These have always been the off shoots of capitalism. Here they are the very objectives of the undertaking.

This is not a comfortable notion for many people in marketing. We are asking the brand manager to release value into the world without any reassurance it will return. We are saying that financial value now must sometimes come from complicated conversion chains that include cultural and social capital over which the marketer has no strict control. But this much is clear. The days of firing very simple messages repeatedly at monolithic groups of deeply passive consumer with the big cannons of TV, radio and print are over. If we want the brand to resonate for the consumer, we must make it participate in culture. We must bring the consumer in. We must bid them to help us build the brand. We must make ourselves companionable. And maybe it comes to that. Maybe its time to stop being that bore at the party, the blabbermouth in the corner, and step into the role of the story teller.

This isn't, in the clue train tradition of Doc Searls and David Weinberger, a matter of conversation. We have much more to do than merely hold up our side of the conversation. We are, whether we like it or not, the more active meaning maker in this conversation. We have to get things started. And we have to supply the conversations with semantic cues and interpretive riches. But after that, then, yes, it's very like a conversation.

5. The big questions, the take-aways, for anthropology:

5.1 what are the capitals, cultural and social?

5.2 how do they create one another?

5.3 how do they convert into one another?

5.4 what are the models and metrics with which we can clarify this issue?

I am hoping someone will send us to the desert to think about these issues.

6. If I'm not crazy about the "conversation" metaphor, I'm also not sure I'm crazy about the "gift economy." Which this space for more detailed criticism.

Post script:

During the course of the call, I was complaining as I always do about the embargo imposed intellectuals on the serious study of culture and commerce. (I have documented this charge in Culture and Consumption II if anyone wants the details.) I believe we are slow now to think about capital and capital conversion because of this embargo. And this raises the question: what changed? Why is it ok now to talk about the intersection of culture and commerce?

I caught a glimpse of one of these questions this morning when I stumbled upon this comment from Kevin Kelly on the Whole Earth Catalog.

Kevin Kelly: The WEC helped rid us of our allergy to commerce. [Stewart] Brand believed in capitalism, just not by traditional methods. He was the first person to embrace true financial transparency. His decision to disclose WEC’s finances in the pages of the catalog had a profound ripple effect. A lot of those hippies who dropped out and tried to live off the land decided to come back and start small companies because of it. And out of that came the Googles of the world.

References

Kotler, Steven. n.d. The Whole Earth Effect. Plenty Magazine. Issue 24. here.

Culture capture

This will be Section 4 of the blog compendium How to be an anthropologist (for hire).

Culture is the anthropologist's stock in trade, the thing that makes us useful.

So naturally we want to be alert to what is happening in the culture around us. There are plenty of opportunities. Things will emerge while we are doing interviews, watching TV, wandering around in the mall or on mainstream, or listening to your spouse or your kids. There's data everywhere.

1. How to spot a trend

As an anthropologist, you will be on the lookout for new cultural developments. This post identifies the two rules that aid in our search. See the post here.

2. Two and A Half Men: birth of a new male?

One of the engines of innovations in our culture is gender. Our ideas of how to define maleness and femaleness are changing constantly. In this post, I look at the rise of the unapologetic male. I am using the best kind of data: a very successful prime time comedy from CBS. See the post here.

3. Beauty and the death of zero sum

What is beauty? Every culture has it's own take. (We insist on "thin," some cultures prefer "thick.") As usual our idea of beauty is in transition. One of the parties sensing and responding to this change is the Unilever brand called Dove. See the post here.

4. Celebrity culture

Thanks to PSFK, I got to attend a forum on celebrity. I got to hear Jessica Coen of Gawker and Janice Min of US Weekly, among others. This provokes an anthropological response. See the post here.

5. Pets are people too

We are a wacky culture in many ways. One of our recent stunts is confering personhood on our companion animals. See the post here.

6. The artisanal trend

Artisanal bread? In the culture that created Wonder Bread? Chocolate that used to come industrially from Mars or Nestle's is now fashioned by skilled workers in closed shops under glass. Even some brands of beer are being called artisanal. This is very clear cultural trend. Here's my effort to give it the anthropological treatment. See the post here.

7. Just enough

If you have ever been to Vegas or even a local Sunday buffet, you know how good our culture is at excess. But even this may be shifting. See the post here.

8. Not kinship, kidship

How people are related, this is one of the key interests on anthropology. In this post, it seems to me that in our culture there is something interesting happening here. See the post here.

9. Lil Wayne, Prince of the gift economy

The economy as imagined by Adam Smith, the one that sees value move between exchanging parties is short, clear, delimited bursts is now being joined by an economy that sees new kinds of value (especially social and cultural capital) moving in long arcs through collections of strangers. In this post, I am nominating the rapper Lil Wayne as the gift economy's patron saint. See the post here.

Syd McCusker (1955-2008)

My sister Syd died on September 25. Not even a really bad photo can conceal how vivid she was.

Syd lived in Victoria, a place that didn't seem to me ever really to suit her. It's a place filled with hippies, retirees, and bureaucrats, people sure to provoke her impatience.

As a wife, mother, and gardener, she had a gentler side, something softer and more spiritual.

And just when you began to think that this was the real Syd, you'd find a magnet on her fridge that read:

"Jesus Loves You."

Then a picture of the Italianate Christ (the one with the flowing hair, soulful eyes, and pious expression).

And below:

"everyone else thinks you're an asshole"

What a magnificent sister. I always felt a bit dozy by comparison, a bit slow on the uptake, a little too credulous. She was the least little little sister.

Culture is our export

This will be section 3 of the compendium of posts forthcoming on this blog. The compendium will be called "How to be an anthropologist (for hire)."

1. Culture Matters I

In this post, I try to show that and how culture matters by calling it the software of contemporary life. I offer my "Annapok experiment," in which we contemplate the experience of an Inuit man called Annapok who must go to Manhattan without the right software. (See the post here.)

2. Culture Matters II

As the software of contemporary life, culture is essential to marketers. Here we look at branding work by Acura, Disney, Rache Ray, Volvo, and department stores. (See the post here.)

3. Culture Matters III

Culture is essential for marketing and marketers but in fact it is routinely dismissed or derided by many experts. In this post,I Iook at Clayton Christensen, Clotaire Rapaille and trend hunters. (See the post here.)

4. The Devil Wears Durkheim

Culture does not descend to us from on high. It is often the outcome of commercial forces. (This is one of the reasons it is so various and so responsive.) In this post, I look at how the fashion industry helps shape our culture. My talking point is a key scene from the movie the Devil Wears Prada. (See the post here.)

5. Prefab culture

Culture created by the fashion world, by the movies, by marketing, by fiction and theatre, sometimes delivers itself straight into the details of everyday life. This post looks at the phrases liked "what's up!" or "Oh, behave" that start as commerce and end up as culture. (I take this as a demonstration of how often commercial forces create our culture and in the process us.) (See the post here.)

6. How to be a self-funding anthropologist

This is my career advice to a young man who wrote me from Mumbai to ask about how to learn about culture. Please note my distinction between culture above and culture below. There are two parts to our export, short term trends and deeper, longer continuities. It is our attention to the last that distinguishes the anthropologist from many people who are also interested in culture. (See the post here.)

7. Anthropology, the business model

This is my effort to treat the more general, and perhaps the most important, project an anthropologist can undertake to make him or herself useful to serve the world. This post is about watching things change in our culture, detecting new patterns, and proposing a new architecture. here.)

Anthropologists and others

This essay will be part of the blog compendium called How To Be An Anthropologist (for hire), coming to this blog soon.

Anthropologists are not the only ones trying to make sense of markets and meanings. There are several parties with which it competes and collaborates. In this section, I am in a competitive frame of mind. I look at how engineers, economists, managers, CEOs and university presidents ignore the cultural part of the equation.

1. Culture and engineers I

In this essay, I talk about one way to present culture to engineers. (See the post here.)

2. Culture and engineers II

When people started using social technologies like Twitter and Facebook to tell their friends things like "I just fed the cat," engineers threw up their hands. We give the world this new way of communicating and what do they do with it? Engineers went so far as to call these messages "exhaust data." This was another way of saying it was message without content, data without significance.

But there's a better, anthropological way to look at these data, I think. It is to see it as "phatic communication." (See the post here.)

3. Culture and economists I

This post is my reply to Steven Levitt. I think there is a better, more cultural explanation for the urban issues he has been examining. I think we are called upon to look at the social context, the rise of hip hop and the transformation of popular culture. These are almost always the things excluded from consideration by the economist. So of course I was going to reply. (See the post here.)

4. Culture and economists II

This is my reply to behavioral economists. I argue that the notion of rationality must be defined broadly enough to capture cultural knowledge and not just the calculation of benefit. (See the post here.)

5. Culture and managers

Scott Berkun was kind enough to interview me for his blog at Harvard Publishing. I found myself attempting to define the value of culture for managers. See what you think. (See the post here.)

6. Culture and CEOs

It's my conviction that virtually every CEO has a great big hole in his or her knowledge. What they are missing in an understanding of what culture is and how culture works. More to the point for some, what is missing is a nuanced and thorough knowledge of what is happening in culture now. Here is a post on Michael Eisner, a guy who apparently believes that just living in our culture gives us a sufficient knowledge of our culture. (See the post here.)

7. Culture and university presidents

I believe that the man who was the President of Harvard might have survived controversy and remained in office had he had a deeper understanding of the culture (and cultures) that flourish at his university. This post was my advice to him, a kind of open letter. (See the post here.)

how anthropologists make a living

I am preparing to mount another blog compendium. See the first one of these, eyes right, called Branding Now. This second compendium will be called How to be an anthropologist (for hire) and it will draw together posts from this blog that treat the theme.

What do anthropologists do to make a living?

1) Pit bulls in Chicago

The most common thing that anthropologist do is to serve as "eyes and ears" for someone. The client (often but not always a corporation) needs to get in touch with the people who buy its products and services. They have many ways of doing this. One way to hire an anthropologist to talk directly to the consumer. These are called "ethnographic" interviews

In the case of this post, I was in Chicago talking to people on behalf of a financial services company. Normally, ethnographic interviews are done in undistracted circumstances, someone's home, perhaps an office. But in this case, we were talking about money. And many Americans would rather talk about their sex lives then their financial circumstances. (This is an interesting cultural puzzle all on its own.) So it made sense to interview respondents in public. This is where I met the pit bull. (See the post here.)

In any case, this ethnographic interview is the standard thing an anthropologist does for a living.

2) How Fieldwork works

Here I am toughing it out in the field. This post will also give you a sense of the mechanics of the ethnographic interview. I have quite a few posts on this blog on ethnography, and I hope to create a compendium called Ethnography: how to do it. In the meantime, treat this post as your introduction to what ethnography looks like. (See the post here.)

3) Decoding culture

A second way to serve the client is to x-ray a new development in the marketplace. Quiznos might hire you to tell them about the artisanal trend in bread and chocolate. Detroit might ask you to find out about the new trend in customizing autos. The USA Network may ask you to figure out why Rachel Ray is such a big hit. These questions have anthropological answers. And in this case we supply them not be talking to consumers, but by examining culture. (See the post here.)

4) Building Brands

A third way to serve clients is to help them build the public image, the public face, the public meaning they present to the world. I do not have a particular post here. No, I have 40 posts here. You will find them organized as a blog compendium at www.cultureby.com. Looking for the book covered with the title Branding Now. This is the anthropologist's view of what a brand is, how this is changing and now an anthropologist can help.

5) Preventing the blind side hit

The corporation lives increasingly in a dynamic, unpredictable world. In order to protect itself from the "blind side hit," it will sometimes hire an anthropologist. His or her job is to figure out the points of vulnerability. This exist where the corporation makes a Here's another way for the anthropologist to serve. Sometimes, the corporation won't use him or her to talk to consumer but to identify risks or to solve problems. In the case of assumption hunting, the anthropologist is hired to find out where the corporation is most vulnerable to disruptive change. (See the post here.)

6) Ferret Mode

Sometimes, the corporation knows it has a problem but it can't quite tell what the problem is. This is the time to send the anthropologist in in "ferret mode." The corporation says, "Have a look. Let us know. Tell us the best way to define and approach this problem." This puts a premium on the anthropologist's powers of pattern recognition. (See the post here.)

7) Anthropology's broadest responsibility?

This post is a very general treatment of what anthropology "brings to the party." I think of this as a statement of the anthropologist's biggest intellectual responsibilities: helping our culture and our commerce think see the new fluidity of the contemporary world, and helping to propose new ways for us to think about culture and commerce now that fluidity is upon us. (See the post here.)

Topic stack # 4

Another topic stack. Please make of these what you will. Feel free to borrow, steal, repackage, republish, illuminate and otherwise add value.

1) narrative perfume

Thanks to a friend at Saatchi, Mary Mills, I am informed that someone in Paris is making narrative perfume. The idea is not to smell good. The idea is not even to evoke any of the traditional meanings invested in perfume: wonder, mystery, romance, the sublime, voluptuousness, abandon, etc. No, the idea in the case of a company called Etat Libre D'Orange is to tell stories. A perfume called "murder" smells of metal and blood, eloge du traitre' tells the story of a traitor. This really does open up the expressive range of a consumer good that for a very long time had its semiotic range well capped.

2) managing scarce resources

I was on the train last week, coming back on the Acela from Philadelphia. The great thing about the train is that it is easy to eavesdrop. It's as if someone is doing your anthropology for you. All you have to do is sit there wide awake, or as Melville says in Moby Dick, "broad awake," and the data comes to you. In this case, I was listening to a manager managing. I only had access to half the phone conversation, but it was pretty easy to piece things together. I was listening to a senior manager managing a junior manager. It was clear that Senior was having to indulge Junior. Junior was telling Senior much more than Senior needed to hear. And you could hear the calculation running in Senior's head. This kid is talented. This kid's a keeper. So I let him run...and run...and run. Clearly, there was a clock ticking in Senior's head. How much time could he give to this employee? How much time should be given as an investment? Now much to sustain the relationship? And how much was too much. Because management is always about choice. As long as there is more to do than humanly possible to do, you have to choose. On really hectic days, you are hoping you have done "just enough," exactly as much as is called for and not a jot more. You could hear this manager trying to make his "just enough" decision.

3) Beauty on the train.

Sometimes on the train, you don't just listen in, you also participate...in that odd way we participate in urban life. Speaking of broad awake, sitting across from me was a women, a well appointed, somewhat angular blonde, the kind who sends a little thrill through you (well, ok, me) top to bottom, burning slow but true, not a vast, reckless explosion of the kind you get from some women, but something else.

And then, darn it, she sees me seeing her, and flush with this triumph, she communicates something new to the guy she's sitting with, a CEO type, her husband, by the looks of things.

And now they go from not talking to one another at all to vibrating for one another, little eddies of gaze, conversation, phatic murmurs running back and forth. They are chuckling and enjoying one another. They are what Goffman would call more emphatically a "with."

So here's how it goes in the pin ball game that is urban life. She picks up my (very quiet) admiration. (Honest.) And she feels differently about herself. And her husband picks up her new self admiration. And this converts to his renewed admiration for her. And she plays this back as a renewed admiration for him.

Anthropologists. We do what we can.

4) Boutique banks

There was a little protest here in Connecticut as small town merchants began to protest the intrusion of lots of new banks. And sure enough a town like Darien has an intrusion of banks. And this is odd, and I wondered if we are now a kind of micro brewery trend in banking. Or is there such a thing as artisanal banking? Has small come to the ultimate big? And how will we feel about banking and bank branding once we recover from the present difficult?

5) Branding

I found wondering whether brands may have moved from oration to aeration.

6) I have the name of a sensationally good Moscow contact for anyone who is doing research there. Let me know. Happy to share this order of talent.

Topic stack # 3

I am suffering a build-up of topics and so I am going to note a few of them here. If someone would care to write them up into something intelligible and interesting, that would be great.

1) Interesting vs. Interesting

One of the differences between Interesting2008 NYC and Interesting2007 London might have been that the English did a better job of giving presentation the outcome of which was unpredictable. This really is discourse released from genre, and it was fun to listen to especially because there was a "no looking ahead" rule in place. The presentation was, in this case, a shaggy dog story. What the Americans did that the English did not was present from within someone else's persona. So we had a great visit from Bud Melman from the Mad Men mailroom. Azita Houshian appeared as Jane Eyre.

2) Paranormal romance.

Someone mentioned this over drinks at Eric Nehrlich's good-bye party as a new category in fiction. And this is when you know women are really giving up on men, when they begin recruiting creatures from other worlds. The new TV show that features vampires would fall into this category. I am not sure what else is intended. This is flat out interesting and a thesis waiting to happen for the anthropology student who is up for the challenge.

3) livery in America.

A livery is a uniform or other sign worn in a non-military context on a person or object to denote a relationship with a person or corporate body, often by using elements of the heraldry relating to that person or body, or a personal emblem and normally given by them. It derives from the French livrée, meaning delivered. Most often it would indicate that the person was a servant, dependent, follower or friend of the owner of the livery, or, for objects, that the object belonged to them. (Wikipedia)

Favre's No. 4 shirt already is the NFL's all-time best seller and current No. 1, according to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy. NFLshop.com so far has taken 1,250 orders for the jerseys, which cost $80 each, a one-day sales record. Revenue from licensed merchandise sales is split among the NFL's 32 teams, with a portion going to the player. (from the official Favre site)

4) The SDG (self dramatizing gesture)

"Oh my God!" As uttered by a teenager, this is a little linguistic designed to seize and hold the attention of the group. Ever so fleeting, it is a way to make the social self more vivid and present.

This too is a thesis topic waiting to happen. I wrote about it a bit in Transformations but I don't think I got to the bottom of it, by any means.

One further thought. In any hierarchical system, things trickle down from high ranking parties to low ranking ones. And we could say that the SDG is a way that teens cut themselves in on the celebrity culture. For that one brief second, they are the star.

5) Being black in America

The cultural idea of who an African American is has changed with fantastic speed since the 1960s. Youth cultures assigned African Americans special properties: a particular authenticity, an entitlement, a currency, and in some cases a thugishness. I am thinking here of a particular kind of hip hop. White Americans knew who Black Americans were with such certainty that it looked from time to time that racism had not so much disappeared as changed its valence. People, black and white, were still prepared to insist on defining the African American, and too bad that someone acting in a manner that defied this definition. For instance, God help the kid who wanted to be a poet when everyone else thought he should be a thug. These wobbles in our culture are acutely uncomfortable, but typically they stimulate inventiveness. As an anthropologist, I am prepared to guess that people have risen to the occasion and cultivated a fantastic versatility, the better to take advantage of all, even the most contradictory, selves they are supposed to inhabit.

Morgan Friedman, turning flaneurs into planners

In some circles, the "flaneur" is a key idea. The flaneur is a person walking, watching, stopping to pay attention and otherwise engaging with the city as it presents itself to someone in motion and on foot.

It's an idea discussed by some of the most gifted observers of contemporary life: Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin, and Sontag. Indeed, it has become so fashionable that it has become a kind of pose. (Baudelaire's great fear realized.)

The cost of the pose is high. Some of the hard and most urgent work of noticing in the city goes undone. Some flaneurs are so busy posturing and so very scrupulous about what they notice (the post modern list is a short one), they can't actually see the city very clearly. Thus does our self-impoverishment perpetuate itself. Some of the people blessed with the time and education to noticed the city particularly well have been removed from usefulness.

Compare if you will, Sontag's concept of the city as a "landscape of voluptuous extremes" and the somewhat more practical advice of our own Morgan Friedman, above. It's a slide from Morgan's presentation at Interesting2008 at FIT in NYC on the weekend.

While the flaneur is busy swanning the city scape engaged in acts of self exaltation, the Friedmanesque observer is running the city down, seizing every opportunity it gives for further investigation. Here (image 2) Morgan suggests we take advantage of the people with time, the knowledge, and the incentive to act as our guides.

Thus while the flaneur is posing moodily at a local cafe, hoping that someone will mistake the laundry list before him for a poetic expression of his delicate and yes, of course, heroically tortured sensibility, Morgan and those of us who walk in his footsteps are chatting up a fixture of the neighborhood who has the unforgivable temerity of being badly dressed, and, actually, wait for it, old.

Everyone retired to the Black Door for drinks after the conference and Morgan and I fell into conversation. And this is when I learned he's the guy who created Overheard in New York, that magnificent website that allows flaneurs to pool their observations of city life. Brilliant. See below my poor effort to take one of the conversations that Morgan has retrieved from city life, and convert it for analytic purposes.

I fell to wondering what else we could do to bind people together in the more thoroughgoing, less fashionable, investigation of contemporary culture and city life. In a manner of speaking this is what Pepys did in the 17th century. It is more or less what Lewis Henry Morgan did when he reached out to people in the 19th century. It is what Mass Observation did in Britain in the 20th century.

The good news is that our noticing skills are rising. We have superbly gifted noticers like Morgan, Eric Nehrlich, Jan Chipchase, and Russell Davies... well, the list is a long one. (See Davies' superb noticing on behalf of bacon and eggs.) We have the makings of a noticing conspiracy. Morgan came very close to recruiting everyone at Interesting2008, turning all us planners into flaneurs. Now if we could only persuade flaneurs to act like planners. Morgan Friedman offers a path to redemption.

References

McCracken, Grant. 2007. Overheard in New York. This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. March 13, 2007. here.

More on Friedman and his several projects here.

The wikipedia entry on the flaneur here.

Jan Chipchase observes how a city wakes here.

See Walking Paris with Henry Miller here.

Acknowledgments

Images are from Morgan Friedman's presentation at Interesting2008 as taken by Michael Surtees here.

Anthropology: The Business Model

I had the good fortune to participate in a call organized yesterday by Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn. This is an open discussion, the Yi-Tan, they hold by phone, addressing the big issues, intellectual and otherwise, that vex and test the tech community.

These are two sublimely smart guys, but it was clear they weren't sure exactly what to ask me. Join the club. I mean, what, finally, does an anthropologist bring to the party? No one is exactly sure, not even the anthropologist.

Ethnography, that's the easy answer. This is the method of anthropology, so, hey, if you need an ethnographer, you probably need an anthropologist, and now that A.G. Lafley, M.S.I. Kodak, IBM, and Campbell Soup use ethnography, anthropology has a place in the world.

But what else? Is there something to anthropology beyond ethnography?

Anthropologists are good at recognizing patterns in social and cultural data. My clients get this about me. They used to ask me to find the solution. More and more, they ask me to find the problem. How, they ask, should we be thinking about this? Anthropologists are good pattern seekers, good assumption hunters.

Jerry and Pip were kind enough to ask if I would join in the call. Please them for this confidence. And here are the notes I scratched out for myself. You may determine for yourself whether they identify a problem worth thinking about.

If we look at culture and commerce from a pattern-seeking, assumption-hunting point of view, we see two things:

First, a clarity is giving way to a fluidity. I grew up in a world that for all of its modernist momentum had a certain order. It was like something defined by a mechanical engineer: parts and wholes, relationships and processes, outcomes and feedbacks, all of these were relatively clear.

This clarity is now at issue. What are the parts? What is the whole? What are the relationships and processes? Can we predict outcomes? Are there feedbacks?

What, for instance, is a corporation, now that it contains so many different moving parts, now that it changes so much and so often, now that it has, often, many objectives instead of one. Does it have a boundary? Or is just more porous? And if it is porous, has it found a way to manage its new fluidity.

A friend and I were talking yesterday how much the corporation has changed inside, swapping personnel in and out, refashioning the employment contract now that "one size" no longer fits all.

What is a "brand" now that consumer are let into the moment of creation, now that the corporation spends so much more time out and about, sensing and responding to the world "out there?"

What is a "self," now that each of us is so crowded with diverse interests and the ability to negotiate the complexities of a dynamic world?

Each of these things has in a sense "gone global," embracing more heterogeneity in a more dynamic mix, trading clarity for fluidity.

Fifty years ago, the specs for each was pretty clear. Intellectuals were unhappy with some of the design particulars but the rest of the world just got down to business and got on with life. Now, it looks as if someone had a Starbucks accident. Blueprints drip with coffee from Sumatra, not to mention that latte and cinnamon. Boxes and arrows run and blur. Fluidity, to be sure.

Second, it's not clear that we have come up with a better way of thinking about a world like this, despite the fact that we have been on notice since the work of the Tofflers in the 1960s. There are small inklings here and there, the Long Now Project, the complex adaptive theory that comes from the Santa Fe institute, the call for dynamism that comes from gurus like Tom Peters. A big tech company recently asked me to rethink the B to B relationship. But these are all mere inklings, and nothing like a formal shift.

As I say, not everyone sees this as the anthropological "value add." And that's a shame. Because the world is getting complicated in ways that anthropologists know how to reckon with. As people survey the fizzing, teeming confusion of the contemporary world, they ought to be saying, "where can I find an anthropologist to help me think about this. "

Value Tax, and the trouble with Vista

Here's what happened when a guy moved to Vista.

The worst problem is drivers. It took me hours to get the right combination of drivers to get my scanner working again. I'm pretty upset that my HP 5150 printer software no longer works. The driver works fine, but the software that allows me to clean the inkjets fails so now I have horrible looking printouts. You'd think with all the time Vista has been in development that this wouldn't be an issue. My Logitech mouse driver doesn't install and, believe it or not, it didn't even install the software for my Microsoft keyboard. I had to search Microsoft to find it.

And here's the reply he got from someone on line.

Vista is prime time ready period. It is not Microsoft's responsibility to make your HP printer drivers work properly. It is HP responsibility and HP responsibility only. It is not Microsoft's responsibility there are no drivers for your mouse. It is Logitech's only. Microsoft has published detailed info on how to make drivers and software compatible with Vista. They had the beta and release candidates out for a long time plenty of time for non Microsoft I repeat non Microsoft companies to get their stuff right. Microsoft has done everything they possibly can do to help other companies make their products compatible. So if HP sits on their rear with drivers for your printer it is HP fault not Microsoft's. Learn to blame the right people.

"Learn to blame the right people." Hmm. That is the problem, isn't it? Where does responsibility fall?

When I used Outlook a few years ago, I would spend some time everyday weeding my in-basket, getting rid of the spam. Apparently, Microsoft believed that spam was my problem.

Enter Gmail. Google believed that spam was their problem and they created a way to solve the problem. Instead of 10s and sometimes 100s of spams a day, I now get one or two.

I perfectly understand Microsoft's point of view. They are drawing a line in the sand. This is what we expect corporations to do. This is what makes them rational economic actors. Right?

Well, this is not clear. What is happening here is a weird value scrape back. Microsoft makes magnificent software in the form of Outlook and Vista, software that creates tremendous value for the consumer, and then it scrapes some of this value back in the form of a value tax.

And this is of course precisely what Apple and Google have learned: when you create value, you can't recall any of this value. You cannot ask Grant to give up several minutes everyday weeding spam. You can't ask the Vista customer to spend a weekend hunting for drivers. You have to build the product so that it doesn't expose the consumer to any value tax.

It is finally a question of boundaries. And, yes, drawing a line in the sand is the thing that corporations do well. This is the thing we ask them to do. We don't want them to solve all the problems in the world. We are not asking that Vista come bundled with an answer for world peace. We are merely saying a consumer good can't get in its own way. It can't impose on us a value tax.

References

NGC457. 2007. Vista is Ready For Prime Time Period. A reply to Silver-Surfer57. here. (No permalink. Please scroll down.)

Silver-Surfer57. Windows Vista Ultimate: Not Ready for Prime-Time. CNet Reviews. January 25, 2007. here.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Wordle for the image.

Interesting2008 NYC

I wanted to remind you that Interesting2008 is meeting in New York City on Saturday.

This is the Wordle that Rick Liebling created for the event.

I am talking about how you, dear reader, have Asperger's syndrome. I really feel you should be there.

It's only $35, pretty good value for an anthropological consult and diagnosis. We will repair to the Black Door about 6:00 where self medication will begin immediately.

For details on time and place, go here.

Seinfeld, Gates, and Microsoft: brand rebuilding

The new Microsoft ad featuring Seinfeld and Gates has arrived. People are using words like "dud," "misfire," and "bomb," but I thought the spot was brave and interesting.

More particularly, people are saying the spot is confusing. Russo of the LA Times says,

"many ... viewers are leaving a trail of rancorous confusion all over the web. People are asking, nay, demanding to know what the minute-and-a-half spot is trying to convey.

Peter Collins offers this case in point:

I watched the commercial this morning online--I may be stupid but I just didn't get it! What was the purpose. What did it have to do with selling computers. And Microsoft is supposed to be paying $300 million for this series ???????

Peter, I have bad news. Please sit down, and we can call your wife in from the waiting room, if you'd like, but you must listen to me very carefully. Your self diagnosis is exactly right.

The Microsoft spot has a clear task: to rebuild the Microsoft brand. It is using Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Gates and a particular situation to perform an act of meaning manufacture. We can say it is good meaning manufacture. We can say it is bad meaning manufacture. But we can't be mystified a) that this ad exists, b) what it means to do, or c) what it has to do with "selling computers."

Microsoft has dug itself a very deep hole. It is seen to be smug, arrogant, monopolistic, and indifferent to consumer wishes. What was left of the brand after this misbehavior was pretty much finished off by those brilliant Mac vs. PC ads by TBWA\Media Arts Lab. So, hey, Microsoft had to do something.

What they did was call Crispin. I haven't been persuaded by all the work of CPB. Some of the Burger King work seemed to suffer a Steve-O fascination with stunt marketing. But this spot is interesting.

Simplifying, we would say that Crispin's job was to move the brand from the PC side to the Mac side of the TBWA\Media Arts campaign. So, what do you do? Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at Crispin as they ran through their options! Oh, to have taught this as a case as a bschool or dschool challenge! Me, left to my own devices, I got nowhere. I ran this experiment in my head when I heard that Crispin had been hired and eventually just threw my hands in the air. I couldn't think of anything even remotely convincing. Microsoft seemed to me a little like a meteor so utterly wedged into the surface of a planet that you really don't have much choice but to leave it there. But the new Microsoft spot actually manages extraction. The brand is not saved. It's not repaired. But it is mobilized a little, and this is a Herculean accomplishment. This may not be a sufficient act of brand rescue. But it is a necessary first step.

Frankly, I didn't think hiring Jerry Seinfeld would help. I mean, for all his centrality to our culture in the 90s, his star had faded, his moment passed. But here he is replaying Jerry from the TV series, that goofy guy who believes he has all the answers and is just smart enough to be right some of the time and interesting all the time. Mr. Know It All, this was Jerry and especially George on Seinfeld. Often wrong but never in doubt. These are guys who believe they can beat the system, only to watch their best efforts spin gently out of control in a slow motion Rube Goldberg disaster that brings embarrassment to everyone. This is the Seinfeld Crispin recruits for the ad.

The meaning mechanics of the ad are wonderful: Jerry's shoes squeak like a cartoon character. A store called Shoe Circus. A family gathered outside the store window in solemn and learned reverence for shoes within. The meaningful glance between Jerry and Bill that makes no sense. Seinfeld's lunatic advice that Bill try wearing his clothes in the shower. The starring role give churros. The idea that anyone would want to earn points in a store like this, especially when the card calls them a "shoe circus clown club member." The idea that computers could ever be "moist," "chewy," and edible. The idea that Jerry suspected this "all along."

In a more perfect world, Crispin might have put Microsoft into company with something like the Wes Anderson movie The Life Aquatic, the one that starred Bill Murray as Steve Zissou. But there were two problems: Microsoft is utterly out of touch with contemporary culture, and Bill Gates is, as someone once said of Dick Cavett, "spectacularly gentile" which is to say utterly out of touch with contemporary culture. The Aquatic Life was a world too far. Some day. Perhaps someday this will be the "sufficient" act of meaning management.

Well, what does this have to do with selling computers? I am going to have replace my laptop in the next few months, and despite the fact that I have been an intensely loyal Thinkpad and Windows guy for more than a decade, I am thinking for the first time of an Apple conversion. And I have to say that this ad, for a very brief moment, actually gave me pause. Maybe, I thought to myself, Microsoft is not an embarrassing relic after all. Briefly, very briefly.

And so what is the act of meaning manufacture? Crispin manages to mine Jerry Seinfeld, a very particularly Seinfeld. Crispin transfers Jerry's off kilter way of seeing things to the brand, and this makes Microsoft seem more human, more actual, funnier and more companionable. and most of all, more present to the world. Is this a good thing? Ladies and gentlemen, we are talking about a brand that had made itself the paragon of the humorless and the monolithic. I would say this is work well done. Crispin earned its dough and then some. It's just a start, but what a start.

The meaning passes through a series of intermediaries. It must pass from Jerry, this Jerry, and the ads particulars (as above) into Bill and from Bill into the brand. And Bill plays his part very well, considering. He seems in every way hip to the joke here. And this anthropologist is inclined to suppose that some of this ad is a mystifying to him as it is to poor Peter Collins (above). But Crispin, to their credit, brought him into the ad and found a way to make him work. (We can imagine how Bill calculated the risk: if Jerry thinks it's funny, it's probably funny, and, if Jerry is prepared to share the risk, it's probably not so risky.)

So everyone hates the new Microsoft ad? We shall see. It represents an act of meaning management by one of the best agencies at the top of its game. It is a powerful first effort to rebuild the brand. Let's hope Microsoft sticks to its guns and gives the campaign a chance. This thing could work.

References

Russo, Maria. 2008. Seinfeld and Gates' Microsoft Misfire. LATimes: Webscout. September 5, 2008. here.

See the Seinfeld-Gates Microsoft spot on YouTube here.

See the Microsoft PR backgrounder on the campaign here.