Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

This made me laugh and think:

It’s a mashup between Star Wars and a news clip that made the rounds a few years ago. It wasn’t the most popular of YouTube clips, but apparently popular enough that it inspired some people to mash it up with something more familiar. I’d like to think that this is sort of a new baseline for how obscure your references and mashups with popular culture can become while still remaining somewhat relevant. No reason to think that mashups like these will become increasingly obscure and weird, pushing our limits of both media and pop culture literacy.

Here’s the original newsclip:

Thanks for the clip, sir

/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.

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.

Earlier today, a 40-story hotel caught fire in Beijing. Within an hour of the fire starting, it was already big news on Twitter. Some people were naturally very concerned and shocked (especially Asian tweeters) of what was happening, but some were more interested about the novelty of the news itself, being the first ones on earth to know about it. People were spreading the story like crazy and I saw many tweets almost giddy about the fact that none of the major networks in the US had anything on the subject. Or to quote somebody from Twitter:

Now, I’m not saying that I have never acted in this manner myself or that I’m some how above this kind of behavior (hey, I pasted a link to some photos from the fire to my Facebook status), nor am I really condemning it (though some comments were a bit on the tasteless side considering there was a real chance of lives being at danger in the incident), but I’m starting to believe more and more that this kind of hypernovelty is not exclusively a positive phenomenon of social media.

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. Our culture reveres the pioneer and the trend setter: it’s a staple of our culture and it’s often seen as a trait of individuality. You can hear it in the way we talk about our holiday experiences, how we like “discovering” (though that’s rarely the case) new things and recommending them to friends, the we shop for clothes, and the way we value expertise, just to name a few. Having your finger on the pulse is also a sign of passion and a keenness for a given subject, which is hardly a bad thing.

However, having your ear constantly on the ground puts a certain strain on you, especially in this day and age of ubiquity of information. Whenever a new story or something interesting thing pops up, some people have an urge to “break” the story and sort of put up a flag on the story that says that “if this story becomes big, remember my name!”.

Being “first” (a rather relative term, to say the least) to blog/tweet about something has become more important than actually writing something meaningful about the subject. The urgency to act (because somebody might write about first!) does not really allow for deep thought or fact-checking. It also feeds a certain anti-intellectualism, making debate or analysis less and less of a merit of expertise.

For example, online newspapers have had to sacrifice (grudgingly, at times) some of their quality control in favor of promptness, because blogs and social networks were beating them to the story so often (as said, the hotel incident was “old news” within two hours of it happening). Smart newspapers have moved on to offer more in-depth or second opinion pieces, but that’s a whole other post.

Relating to my own field, I don’t like it how so many marketing blogs, for example, have become more or less obsessed about spreading viral videos or “cool campaigns” instead of actually discussing them. And if there is any type of analysis being done, the tone is hyped and one-sided. Ideas are reduced to bullet points or statements that look great in keynote presentations, but might not have any theoretical substance to them.

Services like Twitter have their merits – especially in acting as an information filter and connecting like-minded people – but people tend to overvalue it and forget what the trade offs of a constant information flow are. It takes deep thought, taking your time and actually detaching yourself from the information overload to create original thought.

Speed isn’t everything.