Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

Found this among my drafts. Apparently, I had forgotten to publish it. I had intended to publish this on April Fools.

Scott Brown on Wired: “Humor is the Lingua Franca of the Internet”.

Because “funny” is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world. You can’t update your Facebook status without a self-deprecating quip. You can’t respond to a Gawker post unless you’ve got something equally snarky to add. Snark, of course, is Web comedy’s most renewable resource. [...] And if you’re still worried about bombing in what is, basically, the world’s biggest, cruelest comedy club, don’t be. I assure you, you’re getting funnier all the time, simply by dint of being plugged into the collective e-conscious and keeping up with the high-bandwidth badinage.

Marshall McLuhan’s first and second laws of media ask what does the new medium enhance or make obsolete in a culture. An instant and participatory medium like the Internet has replaced jokes of the traditional variety (“a Finn, a Norwegian and a Swede walk into a bar…”) by something more instant, more contemporary. Today’s jokes are YouTube clips, PhotoShop manipulations, Facebook comments and the like. In the old days, jokes could be retold over and over, some jokes were deemed “classic” because they were more general and based on timeless notions. But now, jokes have a shelf-life that is measured in weeks, even days.

Granted, “reactionary” jokes are not a new phenomenon (just think of political cartoons and talk show monologues), but the Internet has made them common currency among us regular folk. A good “snark”, as Brown calls it, will not be limited to the cocktail party it was uttered, it can catch on and become sort of the joke of the week. Internet memes are a great example of this. But as said, these kinds of jokes don’t last long, and because of their contextual and contemporary nature, they rarely if ever become classic jokes that stand the test of time.

Kanye West has been under fire a lot lately. First South Park made fun of his out-of-control ego in an episode which West said hurt his feelings, but was also a wake-up call and he promised to deflate his ego a bit. Not too long ago, his outbursts at VMA where he bumrushed the stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech earned him the questionable honor of inspiring one of the year’s most popular Internet memes. Murmus of West’s troubles have only gotten louder, as quite recently he canceled his tour. Meaning-wise, West has bee damaged goods for a while now.

The old way of diffusing this situation would have been for West to go on a few talk shows, publicly apologize to Swift and vow to change. In fact, initially that’s what he did. In the old days, the worst case scenario for West would have been that Saturday Night Live parodies the situation, and even that could have been handled with a guest appearance on the show later on. Problem solved.

But now we live in an age where meaning management is more nuanced and difficult. West’s meaning management efforts are in direct competition with those happening in social media channels, and the most intriguing and culturally relevant meaning will prevail. Going on Jay Leno’s show and saying you’re sorry is calculated, obvious, and uninteresting. It had no chance against the “I’ma let U finish” meme’s cultural momentum.

So what’s Kanye to do? One fairly good solution would have been to confront the meme head on, be seen in a “I’ma let U finish” T-shirt. West could have showed he was aware of his current perception, and he was willing to confront it and even make fun of himself. This, too, could have been seen as a callous and calculated effort though.

Instead, West has gone for something really bold and interesting, something that could in fact trump the meme. He has made a short film with Spike Jonze where he literally rips out his ego from his intestines, and kills it. See the video here.

We’ll see how this rather unusual but highly intriguing mea culpa plays out with the public.

UPDATE The video was taken down from Vimeo, but I posted a new link to it.

/Film reported that there’s a movie in the works based on an article in GQ called “Will You Be My Black Friend?” There was a link to the original article, which was a fun read with a good eye for detail and reflection.

But this especially caught my eye (emphasis mine):

There’s a psychological term that’s used to explain why white people and black people aren’t friends: homophily. It means that people are likely to be friends with those who are similar to them. (There’s an aphorism about homophily: “Birds of a feather flock together.” One of the peculiar duties of social scientists is to prove the most obvious things, make them seem complicated, and then reconstitute them as simple. For examples, see the work of Malcolm Gladwell.) I would argue that the modern world is, in many quarters, dominated by increasingly extreme homophily. If you don’t want to, you’ll never have to talk to anyone whose jeans are different from yours. And there’s the trend toward so-called cultural cocooning, where you only have to listen to people who have the same opinion as you, be it on Fox or MSNBC or Lou Dobbs, depending on if your philosophy is galvanized around conservatism or liberalism or angry people with wet piano keys for teeth.

I’ve seen many a presentation or blog post that raves on how the Internet and especially social media will make us more informed readers. The reasoning goes that if you’re interested in something, say like the current economic crisis, you can use social media to read about it from a variety of different sources and from different viewpoints. Compared to the Average Joe who only gets his news from the evening news and the local newspaper, this social media reader and his pluralistic worldview is painted as almost an “undupable” force of nature that will save society as we know it from the manipulators (and killing traditional journalism along the way).

The truth is, as you might have guessed, somewhat different. Media technologies are always cultural and social systems; the possibility of some kind of behavior with a media technology doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to happen. For example, you already see worrisome examples of partisanship in the US where conservatives and liberals only listen to their favorite talking heads and get their news and the interpretation of the news from like-minded folk online. This makes mutual discourse with people outside of you’re “cocoon” increasingly difficult as the shared understandings are eroded.