Sidewalk Life

Last Years Model

I really like the idea of going against throwaway gadget culture. 

I'm not sure I like the idea of trying to make it cool.  Seems slightly hypocritical. 

Against Realtime

Great post about Realtime from Gawker today.  It starts out like this: 

"The future is now, more so than ever. Silicon Valley, filled with worshipers of the new, has embraced "realtime" as the latest trend. If it didn't happen in the last 10 minutes, it doesn't matter."

Why is everyone on steroids?

"There's something simply un-American about this" scolded Senator Joe Biden during the Major League Baseball hearings on the use and abuse of steroids in the sport.  But as the documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster explains, being on steroids, and the 'win at all cost' attitude is as American as it gets.

The movie is often funny and insightful, but ultimately depressing if you like sports and want to believe it's fair.  Worth watching if you missed it theaters earlier this year.

Optimism For Sale

There's a quote in Bruce Mau's book LifeStyle that kind of makes you feel good about being a producer of advertising (Yes, it is an eight year old book.  I just happened to be looking though it again).

"The image industry splits broadly into two sectors: the Utopian (advertising + Hollywood) and the Dystopian (media + Hollywood)."

Commerce produces utopia.  Their line is:  "There will be a future.  It will be good.  You will be there."

Newsmakers produce violent dystopia.  Their line:  "If there is a future, it will be violent and brutish and you will be there."

So, what we sell is hope.  What they sell is fear.  Sounds vaguely similar to the differences in the Presidential campaigns.

8 oz. Jar of Optimism: Project Optimism

Peace is Controversy

Ogilvy New York is showing some of the artwork curated by artist John Carr in an exhibit called yo! what happened to peace?    Over 200 visual artists contributed to the show as a response to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.  Evidently, it has caused quite a bit of controversy between the pro and anti-war forces inside the agency. 

I'm no political science major, but just when did peace become controversial in America and what does it say about us that it is?

Here is some of the work.  Apologies for the quality of photos.  I took them with my iPhone.

Youth Culture is Dead

Adbusters Magazine declares an end to youth culture in Hipster: The Dead end of Western Civilization

"An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society."

"An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over."

Bread and Soccer

I thought this would be good.  It wasn't. 

There were only a few installations, nothing much to do with Austria (other than being held in the Austrian cultural forum on E. 52nd Street) and the only real connection to the reference about how the Romans quelled the masses with bread and sport spectacle was in the accompanying book. 

Slightly funny video watching people on the street copy the Zidane head butt from the last world cup though.

Is Bill Gates George Washington?

Saw these magazines side by side at the airport.  Coincidence?  Or is Bill Gates the George Washington of our times? 

Both led a revolution, became king of the new world, then walked away at the height of power to start a new life.   

Modern Celebrity

According to the NY Times, Tila Tequila is famous for no reason other than that's the way celebrity works today.   Here's a caption form the article.

Joshua Gamson, the author of “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America” calls “a shift from top-down manufactured celebrity to a kind of lateral, hyper-democratic celebrity.”

That is if you don't consider the accelerators of Ms. Tequila's celebrity, MTV and its owner Viacom, part of the manufactured top-down celebrity industry.

A better analysis of today's media/celebrity culture might be...if you're willing to do crazy stuff on camera, someone will be there to put you on.

Justin Timberlake's Cumulative Advantage

This article from the NY Times a couple months ago on cumulative advantage makes two points. 

First it suggests that JT isn't popular because he's good, but that he's popular because he's popular.  Second, that predicting his success (or anyone else who participates in the culture markets) is nearly impossible. 

For brands, it suggests putting ads into pre-testing might be a total waste of money.  Here's an excerpt.

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like,
differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative
advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object
happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point,
it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random
fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run
differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is
similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory.
Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical
universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market
tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been
popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a
nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural
markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions
of individual people who participate in them.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people
make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one
another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part
because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of
ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really
sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so
much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same
things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

Yet our mutual dependence has unexpected
consequences, one of which is that if people do not make decisions
independently — if even in part they like things because other people like
them — then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually impossible,
no matter how much you know about individual tastes.