Alex Steer

Activism Programming Interfaces

There's an interesting thought in a piece in The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal:

What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. So, to make the metaphor here clear, Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers don't have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers).

The elaboration of the thought feels a bit overdone to me, suggesting various aspects of the movement as GET and POST calls, etc. - I'll let you read it and decide for yourself.

But the idea's stuck with me today, and has been elaborated by something completely unrelated, as so often happens. The something was Microsoft's announcement of the Kinect Accelerator program that it's launching to fund startups that take advantage of the Kinect user interface technology. This is an astonishingly smart piece of thinking from MS, who have continued to demonstrate that you can create far more value by incubating a technology platform than you can by just launching a product.

What's really nice about it is that it embraces the fuzziness - the hackability, if you like - of the Kinect concept. So many companies are fiercely protective, not just of their IP and their patents, but of their ideas about how people should use their products and services. (This is a hard habit to break - when you spend ages making something, whether it's an ad, an app or anything else, your first instinct is to be so protective when you release it that you want to shout, 'You're doing it wrong!', when you see how people respond to it.) What many companies treat as warranty-voiding behaviour, Microsoft supports, and is now backing financially. Good on them.

Which made me think. The one thing I keep hearing from observers of Occupy Wall Street and its family of protests is the idea that it's all very laudable, but if only they'd be a little bit more coherent. To use Alexis Madrigal's geeky analogy, if only we could see the underlying well-formedness of the API. If only it were making clearer calls.

I don't agree. Treating OWS as if it's a slightly dodgy hack of mainstream political philosophy, and therefore voids the warranty of serious debate, misses the point. Not the point of these protests, but the point of all protests. Protests exist to say, something's wrong, and to gather together a lot of people who agree with that simple sentiment. It's tough for smart people who care about quality of argument to hear, but protest isn't a mechanism for advancing a high-quality, well-defined argument. It's a device for amplifying the quantity of contention in a society: to make noise in the hope that others will make noise, and force a change. The mechanism for deciding which changes get made is politics, not protest.

Protests are platforms - designed to be extended, designed to be hacked. (The flip-side of this is that it makes little sense when the organisers of protest events disclaim all responsibility if they get turned into riots. You can't control a protest event, so you shouldn't imagine you can when you organise one.) They are not build for neatness, and insisting that they articulate themselves neatly means you end up hearing nothing, or a small something, when many discordant things are being said. That, of course, puts you at risk of being surprised by an unpredictable future.

There's an obligatory 'So what does this mean for communications?' note at the end, and this is it. What it means is that most 'movement branding' is getting it wrong because it still insists you can manage and 'own' social conversations. Getting it right means building a platform and letting people hack it, and not trying to own it. Of course, marketers and communicators also need to promote their own agenda, which is difficult in a platform. To do that they need to be good at politics, too - the art of advancing their own agenda while acknowledging the noisiness of the public sphere. Most marketers, even most advertisers, remain bad at that.

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Data uncertainty

At an event hosted by Stream a few nights ago, I listened to someone talking with obvious enthusiasm about the LTE standard for 4G mobile data. He didn't dwell on the technical details and neither will I, but the promise of LTE is really, really fast mobile data connections. According to this Motorola report, it also comes at a lower cost-per-bit to the provider.

Good news for those of us who don't like waiting for our YouTube cat videos (or futuristic internet-of-things equivalent).

But this made me think about how futures planning responds to high-tech innovation. You see, starting from the world as it is, I've been a bit wary of claims about permanently rising bandwidth and permanently falling cost. As the wireless equivalent of Moore's Law, it's held good so far but is likely to have an inflection point, as technologies tend to do. If you (hypothetically, unwisely) took a zero-innovation scenario, looking at the UK today you'd say we'd already passed peak data. We're seeing mobile providers scale back on all-you-can-eat data offers. This seems to be happening for two reasons. First, in the short term, the shock effect of the explosion of mobile data use as smartphone adoption has reached (and exceeded) 50%. Bluntly, it seems no-one really foresaw just how many cat videos we'd all want to watch. (Having done some work for a client in the comedy broadcasting industry, I can attest the appetite for hilarious video clips is huge.) In the longer term, we're starting to see a confluence of difficulties for unmetered data that is going to be harder to solve, even in the absence of rising demand. Long-term rising energy and tech commodities costs mean that it's getting more expensive to service and maintain the underlying infrastructure - and while data services providers may be keen to compete with each other by offering consumers more for less, there may come a point at which that's unfeasible for the carriers.

Of course, we don't live in a zero-innovation environment. New technologies like LTE mean that significant marginal gains can be made. Compared to previous standards, they can deliver faster data at a lower cost per bit. This kind of thing is a good nudge to futurists not to get lazy. Though technology is rarely a driver of change on its own, it can be as significantly disruptive as economic, social, political (etc.) factors. The social and consumer environment for LTE to flourish already exists and so it should be factored into thinking about the future of data, just as energy and commodity costs should be. So the question is, how should we balance rising costs against rising gains from innovation? Especially when these two are not independent? Rising underlying costs make the cost of data and technology innovation higher, but the payoff greater.

So where am I going with this? As you'd expect, in several directions. On the one hand, we don't give fundamental technology innovation enough credit when thinking about consumer technology futures; but on the other hand, we're curiously optimistic about the future availability of low-cost bandwidth and hardware, despite the present evidence of an approaching crunch point. The obvious conclusion is that there's value in scenarios-type approaches in situations like this, where future innovation depends on likely future resource availability but could also affect the efficiency with which those resources are used - but the approach may be different from the 4x4 matrix futures model. (Maybe something more like morphological analysis, where we can 'dial up' or 'dial down' various constraints - if we can effectively design feedback loops into that kind of analysis, to explore variant cases for how thoroughly tech innovation affects the other variables, and vice versa. That sounds pretty tricky.) The other conclusion is that there's a role for futures work within the high-tech venture capital model as a tool for identifying the futures we'd prefer, and modelling the innovation paths (and therefore investment strategies) that might get us there.

On the whole, though, I think we presume too easily that there will be cheap data, just as we presumed too easily that there would be cheap credit ten years ago. Even getting to the stage where we're more aware of the risk to our data habit, even if we expect too many gains from innovation, would be a step in the right direction. So the first job is to recognize that there is data uncertainty. Then we can start working out what to do about it.

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Coming back soon

I realise this blog's been quiet for the last couple of months. That's because I've been moving from New York to London, getting started at Fabric Worldwide, and generally being busy.

Hoping to be back in action soon, talking about data and media and how they're changing, and how they reflect how we're changing, and all the usual.

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The future of social networks - six pivot points

This is a short post to draw your attention to The Futures Company's blog, where over the course of this week we're launching our work on the future of social networks. I've been leading this work, and have been busy on it for the last few months, and I've written a series of posts which we'll be posting on the blog over the course of this week, and which will be available after as a short paper giving an overview of the full report.

In a line or two, we suggest that too much attention is paid to technology change in online social networking, and not enough to changes in how people want to interact online. We identify six 'Pivot Points' - points of tension based on the choices people make when they engage online, and the conflicts they experience - that will shape the future of social networks. These decision points - around scale, privacy, specificity, pervasiveness, utility and worldview - will have different outcomes for different people across the world, but their different combinations will shape the future of online social networks. So rather than making big bets based on technology (or luck, or the latest fads in advice), business should understand what these Pivot Points are, and use them to see what decisions their customers are making about how they want to interact.

So there. If you want to know more, drop me an email or tweet, or go through more official channels and talk to @futuresco or sales@thefuturescompany.com.

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Female artists and drug-related deaths: the numbers

Just a quick post. I was sad to hear of the very early death of Amy Winehouse yesterday, and interested at the speculation it had prompted about dying young, and particularly drug overdoses, among musicians. (Note, the cause of death isn't confirmed at the moment.)

Impressively, National Statistics gets us pretty close to an answer with its Occupational Mortality in England and Wales series, and its datasheet on Occupational Mortality: Women Aged 16-59 for 1991-2001 [ZIP file, 2.6MB]

For the period 1991-2000, 13 women in literary and artistic professions in the England and Wales were recorded as having died from accidental poisoning by drugs. National Statistics puts the ratio of observed to expected deaths at 126, when standardized by age and social class. This is high: of the 188 occupations for which a ratio was provided, it ranks 13th highest. (Note that the nature of the 'accidental poisoning' is not specified.)

A further 2 women in literary and artistic professions in the England and Wales died from drug dependence, with an observed-to-expected ratio of 127.

In case you were wondering, the highest ratio of observed-to-expected deaths from accidental drug poisoning is among carpenters and joiners (927, but from a very very small sample of one death); the highest absolute number of deaths was among office workers and cashiers, at 136.

Note: I originally said 'in the UK' here a couple of times. I meant, of course, 'in England and Wales', and have corrected.

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Why the Republicans are getting their strategy wrong

I don't normally talk about politics on this blog, largely because I'm not very good at it; and US politics, in particular, is a crowded space that you don't wade into lightly if you don't know what you're talking about.

However, I have spent a lot of this year tracking and trying to make sense of the attitudes, sentiments and values of people in the US on different issues (no easy task for a Brit). And I reckon whoever's running the Republicans' political strategy at the moment is basing it on flawed insights.

Even beyond the Tea Party movement, there's a new wave of Republicans in the House of Representatives who are trying to focus the political agenda on public debt, spending and the deficit. These more activist Republicans in Congress have forced the issue of the debt ceiling, and generated an equally stiff response from Democrats and the White House, leading to the current deadlock in debt talks - and, today, abandonment of the talks by the Speaker of the House.

The strategy, if you hadn't guessed, is to make the most of control of the House by showing some muscle, roadblocking initiatives coming out of the White House, and taking a firm and very simple line on debt, deficit and spending (summed up neatly, if cheesily, in the term 'cut, cap and balance'). I think the intended message to the American people from all this activity is: 'In a tough economy, you're learning not to spend more than you have; you expect the federal government to do the same; we're going to make sure government lives within its means.'

But that's not the message that's getting through. The reason is a combination of old insights and flawed planning.

When I say old, I don't mean that old - but that's the problem with public attitudes: they do have that awkward habit of changing on you. The Republicans seem to be assuming that, because economic conditions and consumer behaviour haven't shifted all that substantially since about mid-to-late 2009, insights into people's values around the economy and personal and public finances haven't changed all that much either. The thing is, that's not true.

When the shock of the recession first hit, people reacted by battening down the hatches - spending less, aggressively paying down debt (though, admittedly, only to about 2006 levels), trying to balance their personal budgets. It was around that time that sentiment began to shift away from the idea that decisive collective action was the best way to redress the balance of a catastrophic market failure: by December, when Time named Ben Bernanke their Person of the Year, the idea of celebrating Big Government's Mr Fix-It already seemed a little out of date.

The later part of 2009, and much of 2010, was characterized by exactly the kind of attitudes that the Republicans are currently betting on. Trust in institutions - government as well as business and finance - fell through the floor. Just as one of the purest expressions of the 'collective response' stance had been Obama's election victory, so this new 'won't get fooled again' self-reliance was captured in the emergence of the Tea Party movement into mainstream discourse (regardless of the very atypical demographic makeup of its support base). In 2009/10, the idea that the best thing government can do is pay its late bills and cut up its credit cards would have felt just right to a lot of people.

But in mid-2011, the landscape of attitudes has changed. In part, it's changed precisely because conditions have not. In July, when the latest employment data came out and showed that only 18,000 jobs had been added, instead of the roughly 101,000 predicted, it signalled another period of 'same old, same old': depressed growth, no jobs, low security. So it's easy to assume, looking at those numbers, and at consumer spending and economic confidence, that people will still be huddling from the howling storm, receptive to the same messages about fixing the roof and getting the house in order. Ask about people's attitudes, though, and it's a different story. I've mentioned before, in a post about the problem with consumer confidence, that pollsters too easily assume that attitudes are tied to hard numbers in the economy, and that consumer confidence in the economic future is a good barometer of the kinds of ideas and actions they will respond to in the present. That's broadly true of consumer behaviour (though even then it assumes that the conditions for consumption don't change much, and that businesses are largely reactive - in fact, they can create the conditions for stronger or weaker consumption, but that's another story). For attitudes, there's no such short-cut, and we're seeing that now. Yes, the economy's as bad as it was. Yes, job security and availability are unlikely to improve. But no, people are not still focusing on 'panic cutting' in the immediate present as their priority response.

Instead, people are starting to think about the future. It's clear there's no light at the end of the tunnel, so people are learning to live without it. I've described the mood in the US at the moment as 'post-optimistic', and I still think that's right. Rather than focusing on the immediate situation and waiting for things to change, people are adjusting their lives and their spending to equip them to cope with a longer-term future whose outline they can't yet see. I'd describe this as planning for everyday resilience. It's the reason why New Yorkers pack an umbrella, even on a sunny day (except me, apparently), or why you always carry a few notes in your wallet in case you end up somewhere that doesn't take your debit card (note: not a credit card, not these days).

Post-optimism is driven in part by lack of trust, just as panic cutting was. In the last year or two Americans have felt let down by powerful institutions in all sorts of ways, from mortgage lenders to banks, to oil companies, to banks again (bonuses), to government (ask those teachers in Wisconsin). But planning for everyday resilience doesn't mean people expect government to just step aside. There's a recognition that government can help build resilience, file smooth some of the spikes of a market economy. It has to be accountable, and measurable, and it has to show that, in the face of uncertainty, it's focused on making the country tougher - not just cheaper.

And that's the problem for the Republicans. By making the conversation all about cutting the deficit and paying down debt, they've forgotten to remind people why any of those things might be a good idea when it comes to planning for everyday resilience, and trying to get a fairer deal for the next generation (and this generation as it ages). That's the big flaw in the strategy, and it's led to an even bigger flaw in the execution. By treating this as fundamentally an issue about public spending and government now, and not about securing the future, the Republicans in Congress have opened themselves up to accusations of grandstanding. People look at the situation and see it as a vast, remote political game, played for its own purposes, irrelevant and childish and stubborn. When they stop caring about the outcome of that game, they will support its fairest and most pragmatic player, not its victor.

If you happen to be reading this, and you happen to be a Republican political strategist (unlikely, I know, but possible), you need to start talking about the future in ways that are meaningful to the rest of us. You should know that I'm not a natural supporter of yours, but the current deadlock is self-serving and will do the opposite of what you intend in terms of sentiment and support.

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Content-sharing, medieval and modern

There's wisdom in two recent short pieces from the Ogilvy PR blog. The first is in Claire Lekwa's You Are What You Share: Why Pitchfork Gets It:

Today, sharing content is easy. But sharing goes beyond what happens online. Everything we choose to share about ourselves, in social media or face-to-face, defines who we are to others.

The second is in Maury Postal's The Medium Is Now More Than Ever The Message:

[McLuhan's] concept [that the medium is the message] has been refined and reborn in many forms and has underwritten the success of platforms like tumblr - by far the best self-expression mechanism in the known-universe - by allowing people to discover content they truly care about and claim ownership of in an active, vibrant community - one that fosters their personal growth and validates their actions or feelings.

[My emphasis.]

The implication is bigger than the individual points. It's that there's a growing emphasis on sharing and curation as a form of creative act. This is the sort of thing that divides people, obviously. I've heard it said that the emphasis on clipping and copying, made possible by platforms like Tumblr, is becoming a poor substitute for creativity. We're not writing, we're just pinching.

On the offchance that you read a lot of 18th/19th-century cultural history, you might recognize this argument as the sort of privileging of individual creativity and the originating genius that's cited as one of the defining traits of Western European romanticism. There's a tendency to think of the obsession with original creation as a Renaissance thing. It's not - it's much more strongly linked to romanticism. Anyway...

I'm in the opposite camp. I think it's hard to look at something like Dads Are The Original Hipsters, a very self-consciously curated thing, and not see some creativity in the selection and arrangement. If the 'original creativity rules' camp can be called the Romantic Mindset, I'm going to be just as cheeky and call this 'cut-and-paste creativity' model the Bonaventure Theory.

During the explosion of manuscript production in Europe in the central Middle Ages, the clerics who were churning out material didn't have Tumblr, but they did have a pretty elegant theory of the different ways in which you could contribute to the creative process. Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century bishop of Albano, pointed out four different modus faciendi librum (ways of making books):

Sometimes a man writes others' words, adding nothing and changing nothing; and he is simply called a scribe [scriptor]. Sometimes a man writes others' words, putting together passages which are not his own; and he is called a compiler [compilator]. Sometimes a man writes both others' words and his own, but with the others' words in prime place and his own added only for purposes of clarification; and he is called not an author but a commentator [commentator]. Sometimes a man writes both his own words and others', but with his own in prime place and others' added only for purposes of confirmation; and he should be called an author [auctor].

[Translated by J.A. Burrow in Medieval Writers and their Work.]

I like this model of the creative process. You'll notice it doesn't say anything about which kind of creation is best. It certainly doesn't privilege individual creativity- there's no option for writing something completely original in the bishop's scheme. The implication is that writing is to some extent always sharing - and that sometimes just sharing is enough. Bonaventure's thinking was hugely influential for several hundred years. You can see later medieval writers - including John Gower and Christina de Pizan - using it to humbly suggest that their very original creations were just cut-and-paste jobs - I'm just a humble compiler, not a real author at all, they'd say.

The simple, powerful idea is that individual creativity is beautiful, but sharing creates culture. It's good to see that idea coming to life again.

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Facebook 'likes' and dubious approval

I was a bit confused by this paragraph from Rohit Bhargava over at the Influential Marketing Blog:

Fast forward several years and you will really appreciate this stunning statistic - the "Like button" is clicked a total of 91 million times every month. And many of those clicks are for brand sponsored pages. Earlier this week I was lucky enough to be invited to attend and speak at Intel's internal conference focused on social media. More than 125 social media pioneers from within Intel came from around the world to participate, and one of the speakers was Aimee Westbrook from Facebook. Among the many interesting facts about brands working with Facebook that she shared was this data point which should make any marketer sit up in their chair: 50% of all the people on Facebook have clicked the "Like" button on a brand page in the last 30 days.

So how does that work? Facebook has over 750 million active users according to today's statistics page. For 50% of all users to have liked a brand page in the last 30 days would take 375 million likes just for brand pages; earlier in the same paragraph the total number of likes per month, for everything, is 91 million. Does anybody know something I don't about these numbers?

Sounds like we marketing types may just be fooling ourselves.

But even if we weren't fooling ourselves about the numbers, would we be fooling ourselves with the analysis? Much as planners, creatives, brand managers etc. like to be liked (and 'liked'), I'm dubious about how much love - let alone intent - is conveyed with a click of the 'like' button.

Bear in mind that likes show up in your news feed - and, more importantly, in your friends' news feeds. Liking something (anything) can be a way of signalling something to those third parties whose social validation you crave, not just the person or brand whose thing you liked. In other words, if someone likes your brand, they may not be trying to tell you something - they may be trying to impress something else.

In itself, this can be very powerful. If people use your brand as a way of signalling something to third parties, you want to know what that is. But just patting yourself on the back and feeling loved won't help you work out your role, and how to make the most of it.

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Bad theory in advertising

My post on 'advertising after messaging' is on the Futures Company blog at the moment. It's not perfect, but the gist is that a lot of the rubric about advertising shifting to ongoing brand engagement is wrong, because it under-prices people's attention. (To their huge credit, Influx Insights summarizes my post better than I did.)

Bad insights and bad ideas get a lot of stick for generating bad advertising, which is fair enough. A planner will typically tell you your insight is awful, and a creative will lay into your idea. But I don't think enough blame gets laid at the door of bad theory: faulty ideas about how and why advertising has effect.

Marketers, to their credit, tend to have pretty robust ideas about the contribution of advertising. This isn't surprising, as their jobs/bonuses/reputations are rather pinned to the business success of whatever marketing activities they do (or pay for). The problem is, and this is a huge generalization, marketing theories of advertising effect tend to focus on the different kinds of effect advertising can have, rather than on how advertising achieves those effects.

That kind of theory could be - and often is - within the domain of planning. That doesn't mean it has to be done by planners. (At best, I tend to think, planners are the people who make sure planning happens, not merely the people who do planning.) Where it's there, it can be an effective check and balance against faddish thinking. Those checks and balances can be very old: it's fashionable to knock the idea of the USP, and it's not always right for every product, brand or campaign - but bearing it in mind can help guard against producing campaign that are laden with insights and glinting with ideas but are nonetheless ships in the night and pass unnoticed. They can also be very new. Even if it contributes nothing more, a lot of the research from behavioural economics is reminding advertisers of the heuristics and biases in how people pay attention and how they decide.

A campaign needs insights and ideas, but it also needs theory, even though theory is not terribly fashionable among planners. Maybe this is because it reeks of grand theory, some all-encompassing, intricate, mad model of reality - like those Afghanistan war PowerPoint slides - that can clutter up a campaign brief, never translate into an idea and not sell a thing. But I'm not talking about cultural or critical theory (which I'm sure many planners schooled in the humanities are better versed in than they'd like to admit), I'm talking about communications theory - a point of view on how you get attention, how you get remembered, and how you get people to act on those memories when it comes to parting with their money.

The short version of the above is: if you want to sell something, you need to know how to sell it. (Sometimes theories can be obvious.)

Each campaign needs its own theory of advertising wired into it, like the detonator in a plastic explosive. Everything else can be shaped around it, but without it you're in dereliction of duty, however many insights or ideas you might have. The theory won't always be the same - it needs to be built on a specific business challenge, after all. But with a theory in place, you can stop bad insights at the gate.

One of the pleasures of working in trends and futures consulting this year has been finding concise ways to express big social changes. But trend insights, however neatly put, can generate either great advertising or terrible advertising - so for a consultant, seeing an ad that's clearly based on a trend insight is a game of chance. It's a flip of the coin whether the ad will be good or terrible. Before you even get to judging creative, what sets the 'good ads with good insights' apart from the 'bad ads with good insights' is the presence of a theory of advertising.

Without one, it's easy to make your trend insight the grounding of your campaign, and then just ladder it up to abstraction. Insights, like genes, are selfish - they want to be the centre of attention. So you have an insight that says 'older people have more money and are healthier...', and you ladder it up to 'older people want to live life to the full...' and then, 'the most important thing to our target market of older people is being in control of their destiny...' and you end up with a soaring, lofty campaign about destiny which sells none of the tins of Premium Spam that your clients asked you to shift off the shelves. If you'd stayed grounded, and built in a theory of how advertising catches the eye in the moment and the memory on the shop floor, you could have made something that would have had the spam aisle looking bare in a week.

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Brands and the order fetish

I have the kind of handwriting that could induce a stroke. I have no idea what my desk looks like, because I haven't seen it since October. I was one of those people who wanted to be neat, and to write all my ideas down in an immaculate notebook, in a sort of clean, clear, Apple-sponsored vision of modern creative productivity. Instead, I am one of those people who writes illegibly on bits of scrap paper, at the kind of carnival angles that only left-handed people seem to opt for, in a sort of cryptographic shorthand, which ends up on my desk in an arrangement that is impervious to rational analysis.

All of which is odd, because I'm not a particularly messy thinker. In fact, I've always been quite good at sifting, sorting and distilling. I love structured data, dictionaries, bibliographic descriptive catalogues, well-written code, creative briefs, and, yes, those systems diagrams that make people laugh at consultants and futurists. I can't help it, I'm afraid. I'm a natural boiler-down of things.

I think a lot of people in my line of work are probably of the same cast of mind, and I imagine it's tempting to assume that the instinct to simplify and add structure comes from a fear of disorder. By that reading, the entire strategic planning profession is made up of people of the kind who gave Thomas Carlyle such sleepless nights in Signs of the Times (1829):

The same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, - for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

We may trace this tendency in all the great manifestations of our time; in its intellectual aspect, the studies it most favours and its manner of conducting them; in its practical aspects, its politics, arts, religion, morals; in the whole sources, and throughout the whole currents, of its spiritual, no less than its material activity.

In other words, we're order fetishists, relying on systems and structures to add a soothing veneer of comprehensibility to the complex and chaotic.

But I'm not sure. See, a fetish (in the non-whips-and-chains sense, if you please) is a piece of magical thinking, something you do to impose order on a world you can't control, whose effect you can really only hope for. Like crossing your fingers for luck, or avoiding black cats, or paying for brand ads. (Sorry.)

What you might call 'messy structured thinking' is different. It starts with the desire to act in the world, and it ends with a plan of campaign. The sorting out and simplifying and diagramming is (or should be) just an intermediate stage. And before it can be neat and tidy, good planning needs to be messy and complicated, capable of taking in as much dissimilar and discontinous stuff as possible, then working out which bits can be acted upon to make change.

And that's why plannery types can look both messy and compulsively neat, depending on what they're up to. And that's why my desk is a mess. Or at least that's my excuse.

The real order fetish assumes that you get to action by starting with neatness. You can see it at work in a lot of productivity and stationery brands - think Moleskine, for example. And be honest - how many of you have a posh notebook that you're too scared to write in because you don't want to mess it up? TippEx, despite its incredible YouTube campaign, has a bit of an order fetish to it as well; and I've already mentioned Apple.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a stationery brand that appreciated the value of scribble and scrap?

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Planning under uncertainty

Occasionally I end up accidentally reading a lot of books on the same thing, one after the other. A couple of years ago, everything I read seemed to wind its way round to the conduct of the war in Iraq. This year, everything, no matter how superficially diverse, seems to have boiled down to (a) the causes of the credit crunch, (b) behavioural economics, or (c) both.

Without wanting to go on about my boring choice of reading matter, I should mention John Cassidy's How Markets Fail, which I knew would include a bit about the credit crunch, and turned out to include a lot on behavioural economics; and Dan Gardner's Future Babble, which is a readable extended taunt of the worse excesses of futures work when it pretends to predict, and which also turned out to have a long bit about behavioural economics in it. And a little bit about the credit crunch. Thanks, Dan.

So it seems only right, or at least opportunistic, to pinch and adapt the title of this post from the founding fathers of behavioural economics, Kahnemann and Tversky, and their book Judgment under uncertainty, and use it as a way of introducing the notion of uncertainty, to ask about its value for brand and communications planning.

I seem to be talking to people about uncertainty a lot at the moment. That's not all that surprising in one sense, as I do a lot of futures work. This might sound a bit like a mix of economic forecasting and shamanism (especially if you've just read Future Babble), but really it's about helping organizations work out the most important of the things they don't know about the future, and plan for different possible outcomes, or just be better able to roll with the punches the future might throw them because they're prepared to be surprised. In that sense, I talk about uncertainties a lot. (Sorry, everyone who knows me.)

But here I mean uncertainty - the quality of not knowing; or, specifically, of being happy admitting you don't know. 'I've no idea' is not a phrase that trips off the tongue of many marketers. It's not exactly the fast track to promotion, is it? What does our target market want? Couldn't tell you. Does this campaign offer a credible reason to believe? Hard to say. Is our social media work driving engagement? I'm not even sure what you're talking about.

Perhaps for that reason, perhaps not, it's not a way of thinking that you'd associate with many brands or organizations, either. You might think you hear it in insurance advertising - 'None of us knows what tomorrow will bring...', etc. - but there's always a 'but', and it normally involves easy monthly payments. There's still, I think, an expectation that brands encode aspirations, that they rely on a conception of a better state, material or mental or spiritual or otherwise ephemeral; that we are always, somehow, 'laddering up'. (Or maybe I've been watching too much Mad Men.) Uncertainty doesn't sit well with all that.

And that's a shame, because uncertainty can be as liberating as it can be unsettling and harmful. I wrote here recently about what I think is an emerging sense of post-optimism in the US (confirmed by some dismal polling data on the state of the economy today), a pursuit of happiness that isn't pegged to the economy, and a sense of the future that is more a shrugging off than a shouldering of burdens. Nobody likes a boaster and nobody likes a charlatan, so saying when you're not sure can lend you a humanity and a humility than no amount of folksy blue-collar voiceover work or engagement strategizing can provide. That's the kind of uncertainty I seem to have been talking about recently - the kind that makes you feel like a gaggle of human beings rather than a corporate entity trying to ace the Turing Test.

So why not be like the rest ofus? Why not talk about different paths and possible outcomes? Why not help people plan for a future in which people have to throw out the plan? Why not talk about failure? In a world where superinjunctions are busted open on Twitter and crisis PR is hard to keep quiet, why not have a brand for which surprise is not an terrifying aberration? Learning to swim has got to be better than just getting hit by the waves.

Now, onto the causes of the credit crunch...

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The problem with consumer confidence

There's been much reporting in the last few days of the fall in US consumer confidence (more here, with a particularly good analysis from the FT (login required), who argue that the recovery is stalling and there's unlikely to be a major policy effort to stop that happening.

So now's a good time to talk about consumer confidence. The authors of the CCI give a nice definition [PDF]:

The index is based on consumers' perceptions of current business and employment conditions, as well as their expectations for six months hence regarding business conditions, employment, and income.

The CCI is very useful, but there's a need for caution when using it to make predictions about how people will behave. Doing that kind of prediction assumes a consistent relationship between confidence and consumer behaviour. The logic is that if we're more confident about the economic outlook and our personal finances, we'll be more willing and likely to spend rather than hoard. It assumes, then, that we're pretty rational, and scale our behaviour in the market according to our level of confidence.

But we aren't, and we don't - at least, not consistently. Fans of the anchoring bias will recognize that when making judgements we rely pretty heavily on the pieces of information that happen to be available to us, and fans of peer effects will tell us that we balance our expectations based on the expectations of those around us.

So what happens to rational expectations in an economy that's been down so long that we've forgotten what up feels like? There's little doubt that the last three years have seen major revisions in consumer behaviour in the US, moving through initial defensive shock and withdrawal from spending, to a reconsideration of spending and value priorities which was prematurely called the 'new normal', to the 'won't get fooled again' self-reliance which has characterized the last year, driven by the dawning awareness that the economy is not going to recover fast.

In this kind of scenario, the relationship between confidence and behaviour gets strained. People long ago got tired of waiting for the economy to recover - they went through the painful process of adjusting their priorities, and now a lot of them feel smarter for the experience. They're not pinning their hopes on growth and stability; they're finding ways to live without confidence. They're realizing they can't stay in shock forever, and there might even be something liberating about not feeling like we're all waiting for the sun to shine.

There's plenty of evidence that people are starting to plan a little more for the future, to make careful investments and try new things - in spite of the economy and their personal finances, not because of them. Some of these may be below the threshold of the kinds of intended consumer behaviours the CCI asks about - maybe not yet as big as buying a car or a house or major appliances. In that sense these small changes that are taking place in hearts and heads may not yet be all that interesting to marketers, but they should be. They may mean that economic and financial confidence is no longer the best predictor of purchasing behaviour, which in turn may signal a renegotiated relationship between consumers and brands, one based on meeting knowingly irrational expectations that are more personal or social in their orientation than they are economic. It may turn out that all the things marketers have been signalling more during the downturn - price, value, being a savvy shopper - are the things they should now be signalling less, because their consumers already know them, and are simply tired of the rentless hustling.

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The cloud without the silver lining

I'm still amazed how much of the public conversation about cloud computing has been focused on the upside. Admittedly, the upside is pretty good: the promise of reliable, scalable, cheap computing services, where somebody else does the grunt work of maintaining the servers and connections, and you just pay for what you use, like a driver on a toll road.

But it's good to see some of the downside risks start to make their way to mainstream attention in the wake of the Amazon EC2 service meltdown and the Sony Playstation Network hack. Bloomberg does a nice job of drawing the line between those two, showing that EC2 was used to bring down the Playstation Network. Is that the first case of cloud-on-cloud crime?

Reliable, scalable, cheap computing services, people are starting to notice, may suffer from a Holy Roman Empire problem: they may be neither reliable, nor scalable, nor cheap.

It's always slightly unfair to bash the reliability of a whole infrastructure because of some significant failures. Neither Amazon nor Sony means cloud computing as a model is necessarily flawed - but we should avoid the temptation to use the 'one bad apple' excuse. In these cases both Amazon and Sony were unreliable. That doesn't make all cloud computing unreliable, but it may show that organizations that rely on it suffer from low resilience.

Here's the difference between reliability and resilience. If Bob's Widget Company outsources all its computing needs to cloud providers, it probably gains computing reliability. As Adam Smith might tell you (and it's not often I cite Adam Smith), professionalization tends to drive up quality at least somewhat. Bob's decision to let computer professionals handle his computing needs is smart. In the hands of a pro, his services are less likely to topple over, and more likely to be fixed quickly if they do.

Economy-of-scale logic kicks in here. Rather than hire his own systems administrator, Bob can outsource to a big shared hosting company, who can do this job more cheaply with little apparent drop in reliability. For Bob, this is clearly an efficiency gain. He may also think of it as a gain in resilience. The economy-of-scale gains and the competitiveness of the shared hosting industry means lots of good things like better backup systems, version control, proper firewalling, etc. Bob's computing services are in safe hands.

So where's the drop in resilience? Well, it's to the resilience of the whole system. A thousand computing services hosted in a thousand locations is less efficient and reliable but more resilient. If Bob's and his widget-making rival, Tim, host their computing services in different places, and Tim's services are hit by a power outage or a bus crashing into the office, Bob isn't harmed, and may gain from the extra business from Tim's customers. If they're both in the same place, along with the services of lots of other widget-making rivals, then it's goodbye widgets.

In a low-resilience system the ripple effect from failure is greater. We've seen that with Amazon EC2, we've seen it with the attacks on Tumblr and Paypal, and we've seen it writ large with the subprime mortgage collapse. In that last case, in particular, it wasn't just the concentration of a single risk that caused so much trouble - it was the interaction of lots of risks. The assumption that all subprime mortgages were, like the unhappy families in Anna Karenina, each unhappy in their own way, led to an belief that a risk to one would not be a risk to all. Which meant that, a little like cloud services, all those mortgages could be bundled together into derivative products whose risk of going bad would supposedly be less than the risk of each individual mortgage defaulting. When the waves of foreclosures happened, it became clear not only that the risks to thousands of subprime mortgages were all much the same, but also that the interaction of risks - between mortgages, CDOs, credit-default swaps and all the other glamorous products hosted in the mortgage cloud - created a downward spiral effect, hastening the collapse.

Even more than shared hosting systems, cloud computing - where the underlying services are more fundamentally shared - are low in systemic resilience. And this means that all the talk of their scalability may also be pretty risky. They can be scaled in much the way that I can stack pennies on top of each other without much effort. I can keep on and on until I have an impressive tower of pennies for very little incremental cost. But if they fall over, I've got a lot of clearing up to do.

What about 'cheap', then? Again, this becomes a conversation about complex systems. The incremental cost of cloud computing to the end-user is extremely small. But that's because we're operating in an economy which assumes that a lot of the systems that let you access cloud services will continue to be extremely cheap, incrementally almost costless. As my colleague Andrew Curry has pointed out:

The technology industry has grown up in an age of cheap and abundant energy, and that has shaped, deeply and fundamentally, the way it sees the world, what it chooses to make, and how it designs what it does... But the age of cheap and abundant energy is coming to a close. It is about to become scarcer and more expensive.

The cloud computing model assumes cheap electricity and cheap bandwidth, assumptions that pretty much no scenario I've seen supports. This poses two problems: one about business continuity, the other about marketing. If the energy outlook or the bandwidth cost becomes more volatile, mass-scale cloud computing may suddenly look less attractive, since despite its low incremental cost it adds additional layers of cost in terms of data and the need for persistent high-bandwidth network connections.

The second problem is about changing attitudes. The available energy forecasts depend for their success on a reduction in resource use, especially in developed markets. After the economic downturn reduced disposable income, people learned how to tighten their belts, became more savvy and calculating about spending, and have grown angry with businesses and brands that seem to promote wasteful spending and financial irresponsibility. Might an energy downturn not prompt a similar anger at business and brands that seem to promote an over-indulgent approach to data and downloading?

So my question for marketers is: could we be heading for a cloud crunch? And if we are, could your enthusiasm for the cloud and for the always-on world turn from a strength into a vulnerability?

The cloud picture is by we_need_unity, used with thanks under a CC licence.

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Splitting the future of libraries into two

In this post I'm not talking about mobile networks or attitudes to the cost of cloud computing. I will do, but this is about libraries.

The BBC News website has a short and slightly overdramatic video piece asking whether e-books will spell the end of lending libraries. (It also shows lots of nice shots of the British Library, where I spent a summer scanning manuscripts and early printed books. Rock and roll.)

It doesn't exactly come to many conclusions, so I've come to a couple of my own.

It's hard to argue with the notion that digital or digitally scanned texts are more useful than printed books, at least in highly-connected environments like the UK. You can raise lots of other arguments for the superiority of printed books - as cultural totems, as art objects, as fetishes (in the broad sense - the smell, the feel, etc.), as gifts (though as I've said that perception may change, if slowly). But ebooks are weightless and searchable. In terms of sheer usability, for most of us, ebooks just win. As they become less unfamiliar and the technology improves and becomes less baffling, we can expect an acceleration in their uptake.

Under those circumstances, taken to an extreme, there's no need for physical libraries as places to go and borrow books from, even ebooks. The idea, which I've heard mooted, of turning up to download an ebook is insane. It's suggested by some ebook pioneer in the BBC video, but it just makes no sense and will kill lending libraries even faster, especially if the cost of buying ebooks falls - and it might, as the ability to peg the price of ebooks to the price of physical books declines because people realize it's horribly unrealistic.

Libraries have another function, though. If you take the idea of a lending library, rather than its strict form (a building full of books you can read and borrow), it splits neatly into two:

1. A resource for acquiring reading matter on a temporary basis at low or zero cost; and


2. A publicly-accessible shared work space available at low or zero cost

Online ebook lending takes on the first function. As far as I know, nothing takes on the second function except coffee shops, which do so incidentally and with varying degrees of begrudgery.

For now, and probably for decades, there will be a need for book-lending libraries, though I reckon it will become increasingly marginal. It feels, though, like the idea of shared public workspaces has a lot of mileage. If I had to advise a library on where to invest, I'd say more desks, comfier chairs, and faster, simpler internet connections. Oh, and coffee machines.

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Social media disaster response, 1906-style

Just quickly. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan have already started generated the usual hastily cobbled-together journalism on the role of social media during disasters.

I wondered if this was an entirely new phenomenon, or if people used to write the same sort of thing about previous leading technologies. Turns out the answer is yes, as this publication listing in a 1906 copy of Engineering Magazine shows:



Anyone got a copy?

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Switched-off futures - two quick thoughts

This is a note on a couple of things I'm thinking about. No, not Five Things; just two, to remind myself to write a bit more about them here.

I'm thinking, as I sometimes do, about the challenges that new media and technologies are going to run up against once the initial enthusiasm for them dampens a bit. Right now I'm wondering about a couple of things - social reactions to the energy cost of always-on mass distributed computing (i.e. what happens to digital channels if unlimited data becomes not cool?), and possible rejections of mobile in developing markets. Essentially the idea that the 'mobile boom' might come to be seen as parasitic for not just outstripping but preventing capital infrastucture development.

Both of these, as usual, have come out of great conversations, which I'll no doubt do endless damage to by trying to write them up into posts.

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From script to print to ebook and back

I said here (and again here) that I'd write something about that other great flashpoint in the history of the book, the sixteenth century. In fact, for brevity and interestingness it's hard to top this short piece of film which includes an interview with Elizabeth Eisenstein, the historian who's done most to establish and quantify the 'printing revolution' of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (It's from Eisenstein's book The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe that we get one of the most telling estimates of the sheer oomph of early print - that eight million books were produced between the printing press's invention in c1439 and the beginning of the sixteenth century.) So here goes.



If you're really interested in how media revolutions work, read Eisenstein's book. But also read Harold Love's Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. It describes how, despite the obvious onslaught of print, manuscript production didn't just die off. Instead it became a legacy system serving a small and devoted aristocratic audience who valued its uniqueness, intimacy and elite status. You can feel some of that dynamic if you read, say, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella poems (not printed until after his death), which rely for some of their effects on the assumption that these are handwritten poems designed to be circulated to an intimate readership; or in the prefatory poems to patrons and friends in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, which treat the epic poem as if it's being sent around by hand rather than printed for a general public. It's the same dynamic you might feel now if tempted to buy someone a hardback book as a gift, or send a handwritten note rather than an email.

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Kindles, iPads, and medieval readers

Blogging's been a bit derailed by work, but I promised something on the history of the book in the cultural imagination, and in particular about a couple of points when existing ideas about what books mean were transformed.

As I mentioned before, there's been a lot of talk about the factors forcing a rethink of what written matter looks like and how it's used. Books, magazines and various other historically printed matter (dictionaries and encyclopedias, for instance) are shifting online. They have been for some years, but the pace of change has started accelerating as new structural and physical formats for written matter have been developed (both hardware like e-readers and encoding systems like the work of the TEI) together with new distribution and revenue models, from paywalling to The Domino Effect.

What books mean in culture

These are the physical and infrastructural changes. But since the physical form and infrastructural mechanisms of books and publishing have been reasonably stable for so long, the book as an object has built up a huge cultural back-story. The bound, printed volume has a whole network of associations bound up with it. Those associations form part of the reason academics, especially in the arts and social sciences, regard the book-length study as the most definitive kind of work; or why financiers feel the day starts incompletely without a newspaper under the arm; or why so many religions as they are now practised rely on the exchange and circulation of heavy bound paper objects (now a rather easy task in many parts of the world; still difficult and even fatal in others, as in the past). In a very broad sense we are people of the book, and much of our cultural life has been conditioned by printers' economies of scale or the limits of binding glue.

And then, in July 2010, Amazon announced that it had sold 143 ebooks for every 100 print books in the previous three months, and we realized that digital text might not just lead to the generation of new literary forms (the blog, for example) but eventually to the extinction or extreme alteration of old ones. I still
remember the genuine shock that used to come from many people when I would suggest the possibility that there might be no more print dictionaries (at least for UK readerships)
within a few years.

Eventually this disruptive shock will generate cultural transformation as new written forms become part of the toolkit with which we think. The blog would have been difficult in the age of print - only the diaries of the famous or notorious were ever published - and the tweet would have been impossible, except as graffiti or marginal notes. Put like that, the scale of the cultural disruption begins to make sense. No wonder dictators and CEOs alike struggle to internalize the speed and reach of the web. Forget streaming video or mobile telephony. Words were never committed to paper so fast.

Western Europe has been in this situation before: what you might call disruptive bibliographical shock. A confluence of factors over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries rearranged our cultural furniture by putting pressure on the status quo of the book, even then one of the most powerful ways of transmitting information and ideas and making culture. I won't go into them in detail, but I'll give a sketch.

Book futures with medieval monks

If you'd been a reasonably learned clergyman thinking about the future of book production in western Europe at the start of the 12th century, you might have fallen victim to the same kind of bubble thinking that sometimes trips us up today. To you, literacy would have meant Latin literacy, the copying and annotation of theological, philosophical and occasionally scientific texts in Latin. The twelfth century was a boom time for that practice of book production. The reconquest of parts of southern Europe from Arabs had allowed Christian Europe sudden access to a large wealth of Arabic texts and a decently-sized bilingual and literate population to help find and translate them into Latin. As well as the vast reserves of Arabic knowledge were many texts originally translated into Arabic from Greek, a language lost to the Western Roman Empire and its successor states. So a huge bulk of ancient and late antique learning, from the Church Fathers to Ptolemy's astronomical work, was suddenly up for translation. You could forgive the Latinists for feeling a bit like the film studios when DVDs replaced VHS, or like publishers no doubt feel now as they rush to reformat their back catalogues for the Kindle.

Historians used to call it the twelfth-century Renaissance, and sometimes they still do.

But drivers of change are complicated things, and one largely unforeseen consequence of the sudden boom time in translation and transmission of Latin texts was a boost to the profile of book-making as a cultural activity. No longer was book production the preserve of monasteries. Literacy and learning were in vogue. We know this from the unseemly competition among royal courts in western Europe to attract as many scribes and literate men as possible. The clear winners was the Anglo-Norman King Henry II, and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, who built up impressive networks of scribes, book-makers and authors around them, producing new works as well as copying and studying old ones. In the early years works on science were all the rage, including a surprising number of books on timekeeping.

The boom time of the 12th century wasn't just confined to books, though, and royal courts weren't just centres of learning. Like most seats of power in good times they were centres of fashion, passion and politics as well. They were also, for the first time, overstocked with powerful aristocratic women who had vastly more leisure time than their mothers or grandmothers had enjoyed, in part a consequence of greater political and economic stability in France. They were also far more likely to be able to read - but not in Latin.

Anyone who works in publishing knows a demand shift when it happens, and this was an unprecedented demand shift. The wealthy, leisured populations of the royal courts didn't want to read about timekeeping, intricate theology and maths. They wanted something a bit more Jilly Cooper and a bit less BBC Four.

The shift happened slowly at first. The first signs were the production of more Latin treatises - except these ones weren't on astronomy, but on how lovers should carry on at court. (Notable examples include Andreas Capellanus's On Love and Walter Map's On the Trifles of Courtiers.) Being in Latin and full of clerical humour, these first efforts were probably as much pieces of wry social commentary as they were an attempt to meet changing demand, but they would have managed a bit of both, at least for male Latin-reading audiences.

Romance is in the air

But the big, decisive, disruptive shift was the production of works of literature in Western Europe's vernacular languages, not in Latin, for the first time, sponsored by these powerful royal courts. Designed to meet the demands of a new audience, in terms of content as well as language, it's unsurprising that the catch-all term for all those not-quite-Latin languages (which we still use today) became a byword for racy exciting fiction.

They called them romance. The French still call book-length works of fiction romans (and we call them novels).

It was a kind of writing that didn't exist before, in languages like French and Occitan that had had very little tradition of book-making. Over the next century or so it would spread prolifically, driven by demand, surrounded by moral panics and even some rather clever PR attempts to lend religious instruction some of romance's excitement (probably the main driver behind the equally meteoric rise of vernacular saints' lives between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, going head-to-head against romance for the hearts and souls of aristocratic readers).

Unlike the present shock to the system, the big drivers of change weren't technological - the form of books didn't change dramatically - but social and economic and linguistic. Still, the change shifted permanently the idea of what books were for, and introduced the idea of fiction in the West. So your holiday reading probably owes something to Henry II, his wife, and their set of well-connected writers.

This has gone on more than long enough, but sometime soon I'll talk about the 16th century, and a series of more technological shocks to the system, mainly print.

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The future of (the idea of) the book

There's been a 'kaboom' moment in publishing journalism, probably because there's been a 'kaboom' moment in the history of the book. Newsweek offers quite a deft summary of the big factors changing books and publishing, and the changes themselves. They may not all be surprising, but the scale and speed have suddenly reached a decisive rate.

Those with an interest in the history and future of the book (let me point you towards James Bridle and Ben Hammersley, for instance) have been tracking the drivers of change in publishing, and the early expressions of a seismic shift, for several years now, but a lot of that remains under the radar of public attention. Futurists (think strategy consulting rather than crystal ball-gazing here) often use the 'seasonal' classification to think about awareness of change. I like it, I use it quite a bit, so I'll use it here. In essence it's a nice piece of shorthand, and it goes like this:

1. Spring: Fringe issue. Only picked up on by specialists, scientists, radicals, and similarly esoteric and out-of-the-way sources.


2. Summer: Specialist issue. Discussed in subject-specific sources such as journals, conferences, blogs for expert readerships.


3. Autumn: Accelerating issue. Turns up in newspaper articles, popular magazines, blogs, TV shows, etc. as a widely-discussed new thing.


4. Winter: Mainstream issue. Regularly featured in government documents, corporate strategies, etc.

(Side note: I love that government reports are the benchmark medium for issues as they enter the 'duh, well, obvious' phase of their emergence.)

It feels right now like the challenges to the established forms of the book are moving from Summer to Autumn, and we're starting to take them seriously. Most of the discussion, in pieces like the Newsweek one, are about direct challenges to form, economy and use: what books are, and how we buy and read them. Newsweek's talking heads are also smart enough to know that challenge doesn't equal overthrow when it comes to media forms (see my many rantings on the 'Twitter exists, therefore email is dead' type of fallacy), and that there's no reason to assume that paper books don't have significant vitality left for certain functions.

So let me float another question, one that may still be hovering in Spring. What will the emerging challenges to the form, economy and use of the book do to our idea of the book as a meaningful unit within culture?

If this sounds like a crazy question, there's a good reason for that. The form of the book had a reasonably (though not entirely) easy time of it between about the eighteenth century and the mainstreaming of the web in developed countries about fifteen years ago. It's now taking a bit of a beating, but not for the first time. I don't have time now, and this post is long enough (an idea which raises questions of its own, I know), but over the next few days I'll aim to write one or two more posts which look at a couple more flashpoints in the history of the book - specifically, in Europe in the 12th and the 16th centuries - and offer a way of thinking about how cultures and books make sense of each other.

Meanwhile, I'd love to get a bit of a thread going on the future of the book, one of my favourite topics. Please do comment, trackback, tweet (I'm @alexsteer) or similar if you have thoughts on the bigger implications of the changing nature of books. Thanks!

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The internet, criticism and the culture wars

Malcolm Gladwell, mid-way through either stating the obvious or missing the point in a New Yorker piece on social media and activism, writes:

We would say that Mao posted that power comes from the barrel of a gun on his Facebook page, or we would say that he blogged about gun barrels on Tumblr?and eventually, as the apostles of new media wrestled with the implications of his comments, the verb would come to completely overcome the noun, the part about the gun would be forgotten, and the the big takeaway would be: Whoa. Did you see what Mao just tweeted?

To me the most important word in that paragraph is 'whoa'.

'Whoa' is not a word you put in the mouths of others if you want to portray them as serious and independent-minded thinkers. Nor, let's be honest, is 'apostles'. Speaking of long words, rhetoricians (there's one) used to call this tactic 'prosopopoeia' (there's a second) - speaking in the voice of another, to make a point of your own. Gladwell's point here, I think, is that social media users are essentially shallow and vacuous.

While pausing briefly to ponder the vacuities that print is able to bestow upon the world every day without anyone blaming the medium (yes, McLuhan, yes), this derisory 'whoa' speaks volumes about the ongoing vitality of the old debate about 'high' vs 'low' culture.

Only a few days ago, the Observer's Culture section went all 'O Tempora! O Mores!' about the shift in power from professional critics to amateur criticism. Unsurprisingly, social media was roped in for a whacking:

The real threat to cultural authority turns out not to be blogging but social networking... The point isn't that the traditional critics are always wrong and these populists are right, or even that these comments are overwhelmingly negative or invariably take on the critical consensus. More often than not, they aren't and they don't. The point is that authority has migrated from critics to ordinary folks, and there is nothing - not collusion or singleness of purpose or torrents of publicity - that the traditional critics can do about it. They have seen their monopoly usurped by what amounts to a vast technological word-of-mouth of hundreds of millions of people.

Those familiar with the history of debates on the function of criticism, particularly around the rise of English studies in the late 19th/early 20th century, might feel the icy breath of T.S. Eliot ('breathing the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust', maybe) and others at this point. If you're not familiar, I recommend Chris Baldick's The Social Mission of English Criticism, or virtually anything by Stephan Collini. This is not a new story - mass participation is the death-knell of criticism, as surely as home taping kills music.

There is no doubting which side of the high/mass culture division the internet falls on. What's doubtful is the continued insistence that mass culture has to be low culture. (If you don't think you're prone to this, go on, ask yourself: which is really better, Classics or media studies? If you have an answer off the top of your head, either way, you're prone.) Look all over the web and you will find thoughtful, sustained engagements with the future of media and culture that make many 'function of criticism' arguments look paltry and narrow. For all the dumb, there is plenty of smart - and, whereas much high cultural aesthetics invites you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, the best critical theories of mass culture ask you to understand the smart in the context of the dumb. Not just with the aim of appreciation of the smart (as in many aesthetic formalisms), but with the aim of understanding various cultural systems as wholes (or interlocking sets, or whatever - pick your metaphor), and perhaps even of engaging and (dare I say) improving, of helping the smart outnumber the dumb.

It's enough to make you say 'whoa'. And, thanks to various miracles of technology and economy, it's in all of our hands (quite literally; or pockets). Which means it may be time to take criticism seriously as a discipline. Again.

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