HENRI WEIJO*
As Twitter keeps getting more and more media hype (even mainstream media, I can’t even watch an NBA match anymore without hearing Twitter being discussed), it’s nice to see somebody as prominent as Joseph Jaffe step up and say that we need to take a deep breath and take a fresh new look at Twitter.
Hear hear:
Quite recently I learned about Iron Butt driving, which is a sort of long distance driving slash manhood test for bike enthusiasts. About the Iron Butt Rally:
The Iron Butt Rally is a competitive motorcycle road rally held in the United States. It takes place in odd numbered years, usually in August. The rally lasts 11 days, and riders often travel nearly 11,000 miles (18,000 km) in that time. During the rally, entrants earn points by riding their motorcycles to various “bonus” locations in the U.S. and Canada. A bonus is a task or destination with a point value. In order to earn the points for a bonus, a rider must provide evidence by photographing an object or scene, purchasing a particular item, or by various other means specified by the organizers.
Iron Butting is not really my cup of tea, but it’s an interesting case example of a phenomenon that’s being redefined by changes in culture, and quite predictably, even.
Now that that whole world has gone green (or likes to pretend it has), it makes “pointless” joyriding (meaning that there’s no real destination for the travel) like this seem a bit wasteful, even immoral. But on the other hand, it might also make it a bit taboo, a protest gesture even. Culture has a tendency to swing like a pendulum sometimes; a change in society at large will invite a counter culture to oppose it. Polarization is in our blood, especially when confronted. If Iron Butt is indeed deemed “bad” by society at large, it’s not going to stop. More likely its core is going to embrace it even more.
In the future, if gas prices will continue to climb, iron butting will also become less attainable to most, making it seem like even more of a waste. And more special to those who love it.
Nice post by Living Brands. I especially liked his (post author John Howard) list on what it means to be iconic:
1. The truly iconic affects us whether we like it are not, unlocking instinctive memories, emotions and beliefs
2. The image of the truly iconic is more important than, even transcending, the actual reality of its subject
3. The truly iconic subject should be understandable via visual shorthand.
4. The truly iconic is immediately recognisable, the visual equivalent of an unmistakable catchphrase
Read the whole post, it’s very insightful. I really hope that “iconic” doesn’t join the ranks of “authentic” and “green” as terms totally diluted by over use and misuse – especially in a branding.
A small remark though on the images used at the end of the post. “Iconic” in terms of branding doesn’t mean that a brand should necessarily leech on MORE iconic visual shorthand, for example (like the examples used in the post), a brand should look to become an icon in itself, like a VW Beetle or a bottle of Coke.
What a scoop!
In an earlier post on Twitter, I argued that “There’s a certain allure in being “in the know”. One of the most common stereotypes in cultural products is the brave journalist with the scoop story exposing the truth.” In a later post I argued that the internet as a medium (as a medium, mind you) is changing a lot of cultural meanings, one of them being criminality. Combine these notions and what do you get? Ad-Age’s review of Russel Crowe’s new film “State of Play”.
Here’s a short excerpt:
Watching “State of Play,” I couldn’t help but think that I was witnessing the dying of a cinematic archetype: the Hero Journalist. It feels like a bookend to “All the President’s Men,” with Crowe’s worn-down, worn-out reporter character, Cal McAffrey, as the earnest-but-embittered descendant of Robert Redford’s and Dustin Hoffman’s dashing young Woodward and Bernstein. Hollywood’s going to stop making movies like this because, let’s face it, newspapers — those that are left — are in no position to inspire yarns like this anymore.
I concur that the internet has indeed changed how we view journalism. As my Twitter post showed, traditional news outlets are sometimes slow to react to emerging stories that are being talked about in Twitter, for example. This is one key driver for stripping journalism of some of its allure, but to me the biggest reason is the multitude of viewpoints the blogosphere offers on any given topic; an interested person can read blog posts (of severely varying quality, granted) that cover a happening from different angles, something that most newspapers simply can’t match. Or rather: after reading on a topic extensively in a variety of blogs, the “generalist” view that newspapers offer can seem quite lacking.
I do slightly disagree with Ad-Age’s piece in the sense that the hero journalist archetype is not likely going to face a fast and sudden death. More “extinct” archetypes still emerge in films every now and then (especially those having to do with gender). But it’s still a very astute observation they made.
Here’s the second guest lecture I did for the “Brands in Strategic Marketing” course at HSE. A lot of stuff crammed into 45 minutes, but I think I got the message through.
There were a few example videos I used, and here they are, in order of presentation. They’re in the embedded presentation as well, but some folks might want the direct links.
William Shatner’s “Rocketman” performance at the 1978 Science Fiction Movie Awards
Family Guy version of the the Rocketman performance
Coke’s classic “Mean Joe Green ‘Have a Coke and smile’” cultural branding ad
Pepsis’ spoof of Coke’s ad with David Beckham
Jordan Brand XXI ad with kids all over the world doing Michael Jordan impersonations
In my last post I talked about how the copyright wars were reframing the meaning of “criminal”, and in a post before that, I had expressed my worry that on the internet, being “in the know” or even being “first” were values that trumped even empathy. Both of these phenomena represent (to me at least) the darker side of the web, or at least they are an indication of still-developing social codes.
Both of these relate to a subject I had sworn I wouldn’t touch because it has been covered to death in other blogs and I found the subject just a tad too sensationalist for this blog, but the conclusion of this phenomenon and how it highlights contemporary culture was just too important for me to ignore.
Here in Finland, the ad world has been abuzz about a certain 20 000€ personal ad that was taken out in the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. In the ad, some man is calling after a woman he had seen and fallen for in a bar here in Helsinki. The buzz around the ad has been basically regarding if it is a viral campaign or not, and if it is, which agency did it and for whom?
Well, to the joy of romantics all over, behind the ad was a real person actually looking for his lost love. But what gave me a real pause was the way the man was discovered. The folks at Muro BBS had hacked his gmail account (which he had posted in the ad) by conning Google and thus salvaging the account’s password. This way they were able to discover the true identity of our digital Romeo.
I’m shocked that I have yet to see a single blog post or news piece condemning the way the identity was dug up, the only backlash I’ve seen was one poster at Stealthunit voicing his disapproval (his post was the inspiration for me writing about this). The method the Muro folks used was nothing short of a felony. The yellow press was more than happy to jump on the discovered identity and publish the man’s photo (albeit with his face blurred); I guess falling in love is no longer a private act in modern society, or at least one person’s right for privacy is secondary to the curious mob’s thirst for gossip. This is, to me at least, both a severe lapse of media literacy (the ad has been in the media, ergo he gets the celebrity treatment) and lack of social precedent guiding behavior. Since when has taking out a personal ad (granted, a 20 000€ personal ad) qualified as becoming a celebrity and forfeiting your privacy?
What I find ironic is that the Muro folks fit the demographic who are very vocal about protecting their own privacy on the web. But I guess compromising someone’s privacy is OK as long as it doesn’t happen to me. This is all very troubling to me, and I think it’s going to be a while until at least somewhat civil social codes are established on the internet.
We’re all criminals in some sense, be it jaywalking, littering or some other petty crime. Laws are rarely followed to the letter; each society and culture has their norms for how much bending the law is OK. Society’s norms need to be quite stable for a society to function, and these norms also guide national ideals (the other way around, too), which in turn guide our identity construction, and thus our consumption.
Of course, there are issues where societies fail to reach common ground and there’s constant debate about the lawfulness of certain types of behavior. One such subject is the use of drugs, which has been raging as a debate for ages, but I doubt we’ll see a resolution soon. The unlawfulness of drugs, the theory goes, is responsible for putting a lot of underprivileged African-Americans behind bars and leaving many children growing up without male role models, which in turn has helped glorify the “thug life” and turning going to jail into a rite of passage for some (this is not to say that outlaws are only glorified in ghettos, quite the contrary). Soon, such markers of said rite being passed (baggy clothes, tattoos) spread to the rest of the society, becoming fashion.
Another legal/cultural issue under debate is copyright law and the act of file sharing. Lawrence Lessig had a great TED talk (below) that touched upon this issue.
Lessig is, as some of you might know, the father of Creative Commons. While Lessig’s argument was mainly on copyright laws stifling folk culture creativity, he also stated that we’re moving towards a polarized society: copyright owners enforce their rights overzealously, and as a result people (especially young people) are unwilling to recognize any rights to intellectual property at all. On one hand, I do feel that copyright owners have gone too far in enforcing their supposed rights, and they’re doing more harm than good to their business. But then again, this kind of behavior has created a truly bloated sense of entitlement among some people who claim that piracy is a almost a birthright.
To illustrate the point, a few days ago I found this on Mashable!:
It’s an initiative meant to support the PirateBay trial where people can upload their face to show support for PirateBay or somehow protest the unfairness of copyright laws. People are embracing criminality, kind of like vanilla versions of thugs. It’s yet another indication of this polarized nature of the whole debate, and I fear that it’s getting more and more polarized. The RIAA and MPAA have recently pledged to stop harassing regular people and their minor crimes, but these concessions might not be enough, at least not yet.
Some of this is just about the growing pains of the internet. Whenever a new medium (yes, I called the internet a medium, for all intents and purposes, it’s a medium of media) emerges, the social codes and protocols take a while to establish themselves (or at least become somewhat stable). To me, this is one of those cases. We have to find a middle ground, for both parties’ sake. We can’t turn a whole generation of people into “career criminals”, but we can’t simply abandon a model of compensation for content producers. Just last week I saw a documentary called RIP: A remix manifesto. It’s an open source documentary that very thoroughly describes what’s at stake with the copyright war. It also gives us a glimpse of how things could be if we embraced remix culture, because Brazil has already done it.
Watch all the episodes behind the link I posted. Here’s the first chapter:
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