Bring back the phone!

So for lots of people, e-mailing has replaced the phone, and it's almost considered intrusive to call anyone but close friends and family at this point.

I was just e-mailing back and forth with one of my best friends, and was about to send yet another e-mail to clarify something, and then I was like: "What the hell am I doing?  Why don't I call her on the phone?"  And so I did.  And we had...a conversation.  And it was great!  It relieved the loneliness of working at home much better than typing.  I think people should e-mail and text less, and talk on the phone more.  Especially when it actually saves time (There's this assumption that you cut out some kind of unnecessary chatter by e-mailing/IMing, but I think that's exaggerated).

Talking on the phone is also cool in a romantic, retro way.  I even think people should talk on land lines more -- as much as possible.  First of all it's less potentially-carcinogenic.  Secondly there's not all that trouble with bad reception.  And thirdly, it can feel really nice to hold a good old-fashioned receiver.  I have a non-cordless phone and love it.  It's the wall-mount-option kind, and I even wish it were the big clunky desk model.

Talking on the phone more is also a way to counteract all the overproliferation of "hot" media by chilling out with a nice "cool" medium.

Of course, I'm not the only person who's said exactly this same thing: the Times is aaaallll over it (here, here).  But I think they're mainly speaking to an older audience about their work environments.  I'm talking about social phone calls, here.  We need more of them.

Movie trailers and the dangers of virtual reality

Trailers for old movies are really weird. Since I was born in late 1981, I didn't really see many movie trailers until the late '80s. What I didn't realize until recently is that that means I exactly missed the transition between the old style of movie trailers and the new. But now that movies' original trailers are almost always included in the special features of DVDs, I've been exposed to lots of these old trailers, and I'm blown away by how different and old-fashioned they seem.

What makes the old trailers so different is how focused they were on the narrative of the films advertised. This hits you right away in the voiceover. Whereas lots of trailers today -- maybe the majority -- have no voiceover at all, it seems like every trailer back then had voiceover, and a lot of it. These old voiceovers functioned like narrators, introducing you to the characters and giving you lots of exposition. In contrast, voiceovers in trailers today are spoken by a remote-sounding, Godlike man in vague, stereotyped phrases such as "In a world where...," "...one man...," etc. which set the scene and mood with as few words as possible. The clips in pre-'90s trailers, too, tell a story; they're loooong clips, all of uncut dialogue, all in order, mostly of the same length, going all the way up to the end of the film and often essentially giving away the ending. In contrast, trailers today show you lots of short, out-of-order clips of varied lengths, many of them atmospheric shots of setting, silent action, or even just text on a blank screen, and the clips containing dialogue are always edited down and compressed, creating more of a collage.

Here's a comparison: the upcoming Pineapple Express has a trailer that I love to watch over and over again because of the way it massages my mind's visual and aural pleasure center with its lovely rhythmic cutting while not taxing it with anything but the most basic evocation of narrative; contrast that to the relative clunkiness of the trailer of a similarly-themed movie from 1978. What a difference. And yet I'm sure that if someone made a new trailer for Up in Smoke, it could look just like Pineapple Express, because compared to trailers, the style of movies hasn't changed at all. It would also be funny to try cutting an old-style preview of Pineapple Express to see just how unenticing it could be made to look.

Anyway, basically, the people making the trailers figured out that what they were selling wasn't a story, but an experience of a story. And that's what trailers show you: an extremely heightened, compressed sense of what the full-length experience of seeing a movie will be like. And they work really well; movie trailers are like crack, and all human beings readily admit that they love the previews.

But in terms of the actual movie, people are there for the story, right? The importance of the story of a movie gets lots of emphasis from filmmakers, especially recently, in my experience. Seemingly all film schools aggressively proclaim that their curriculums are centered around "storytelling," and most screenwriters and directors emphasize how their main drive is to "tell a story.” It starts to sound a bit defensive – and with good cause. Because the vast majority of the movie-going public, I’m pretty sure, does not go to movies for stories; they go for the same thing they like about trailers – the experience, which is primarily the experience not of the story but of the alternate world for which the story is only a fourth-dimension framework allowing you to pass through that world in time.

But if you didn’t need a stable framework for the fourth dimension in a world – what then? Well, that’s what’s possible in virtual reality. And virtual reality is the direction we’ve been moving towards for a long time. It’s what goes on in the movie-franchise phenomenon, which allows you to experience a movie in multiple media – the film, books, websites, TV shows, theme parks, food, music, weddings, furnishings, clothing… – to the extent that you’re essentially participating in an alternate world. New electronic media, as well -- the internet, video games, even DVR and OnDemand to some extent – break down the artificial structure of time created by the story and open up untold new dimensions through which humans and their senses can travel. Interestingly, this surrender of the fourth dimension in media is coinciding with new advances in the exploration of multiple dimensions beyond the fourth in reality.

What’s happening is the implosion of fixed-time narrative in media and its replacement by experiences of other worlds in which we the audience create the narrative ourselves.

But wait. What happens when we get rid of the story?

I think bad things might happen. Bad, bad things.

Stories are what communicate meaning and truth. They’re normative. They’re stable. They provide reference points for comparison, standards. So when stories are completely eclipsed by experience, which is amorphous and amoral, we lose a way of examining and agreeing on central significances in life. Is it a coincidence that the most successful virtualesque video game, Grand Theft Auto, is about a chaotic and amoral world? No.

Not only do storyless media experiences dispense with frameworks for meaning, but they also create a very problematic illusion of free choice. In the phantasmagorical hyperreality of a Disney franchise or packaged-goods brand universe, we have the illusion of traveling into a new world, where we can try being ourselves in a different atmosphere. The problem is that this atmosphere is not a neutral playground for our senses; it is a highly fake fantasy designed expressly to sell us things. There is in fact a built-in message in these artificial universes, and the message is BUY ME. And this message gets across so successfully exactly because of the way it exists apart from narrative and time. A commercial, which is like a story, tells you one thing once. A world, which when very successful can get confused with reality, brainwashes you constantly.

Plum

An article today in the Times discusses the implications of the trend of businesses naming products and services after the color/fruit "plum."

Lots of associations with plum are tossed around in the article. Plum the color is said to evoke royalty, sophistication, emotion, individuality, class, calm, cleanliness, health, vitality, and purity.
Plum the fruit, in its literal form, is described as connoting sweetness and naturalness. But most of the discussion of plum the fruit centers around its metaphorical connotations, which have to do with something highly desirable and elite -- "something you strive for" -- such as a "plum job" or "plum assignment." One CMO quoted in the article mentioned the sayings "sweeten the deal" and "juicy deal" and noted that "in many societies, plums are given as rewards or gifts."

The article doesn't do much to relate all these various connotations of plum together in a way that explains the zeitgeist of the trend. What's missing is a theory that relates the creativity and hedonism of the color plum's meanings to the business-speak, achievement-oriented overtones of plum the fruit.

My theory is that this "plum" trend is all about the convergence of commerce and art in marketing. With art's makers priced out of cities and its products priced out of the budget of most consumers, art for art's sake is a less and less viable pursuit. The tide is turning, and aesthetics is ceasing to be an end in itself and beginning to be a means of "making special" Western culture's main socially shared significance: capitalism. Consumption is now the most meaningful way for an individual to participate in the group; modern self-transcendence takes place through transactions.

The growing sophistication, beauty, and pervasiveness of marketing are evidence that advertising is fast becoming the art of the post-postmodern age. Plum is the perfect motif of this evolution because its multiple meanings as color and fruit encapsulate the hallmarks of the ascendant superrich whose purposes are served by consumer culture: their obsession with luxury; their equation of creativity with entrepreneurship; their monopoly on self-realization; their status as the new royalty; their ability to afford health and well-being; their power as patrons of the arts.

Plum is very much a business branding trend -- not a fashion or general aesthetic trend. The author mentions this point only at the very end of the article, in a bit of a throwaway. But I think it's quite significant, as it points out the exclusivity of "plum." Plum is not for the masses; it's for the rich, creatively-entitled elite, and in a type of self-enforcing sumptuary law, it will not be glimpsed outside their world.

Luxury entertainment

You may have read about these new $35-per-ticket movie theaters that are about to start showing up, where you pay a higher price for nicer seats and food, etc.

I was just thinking, though -- even though these theaters are going to charge more to see a movie, they're still going to charge the same amount for every movie. Why is that? Why is it that you can buy premium vodka, designer clothes, etc., but there's no such thing as "designer" or "luxury" movies? Why does it cost the same amount of money to see Drillbit Taylor as it does to see Paranoid Park?

There always has been, and still is, a considerable cost difference between media formats made for elites (like ballet) and formats made for the common folk (network TV). But what about different styles and qualities of content in the same format? In some mass media, there is already a "premium" price for high-quality content. Most obviously, there's a price difference between cable and network TV; an even better example is the extra you pay for what are actually called the "premium" TV channels, such as HBO. Higher-tone magazines like Harper's always cost more than tabloids like US, and the same is true for newspapers. On the internet, until recently, you often had to pay for content on legitimate, recognized sites. Increasingly paid content is disappearing -- except, of course, for pornography: the Queen of Media.

But in a few other media -- namely, movies, books, and music -- there is no quality-based price differentiation. For instance, why not charge higher (instead of lower, which is the norm) admission for art-house movies than for blockbusters? Or more for movies starring A-list actors than with B-list actors? Also, why not charge more -- at least a little more -- for books of literature than for chick lit books? For singles by popular bands than for unpopular ones?

Introducing "luxury"-based stratification into consumption costs for movies, books, and CDs would also be much fairer to and nurturing of artists with new, edgy ideas. If ticket prices for indie movies were higher than for other movies, for example, indie filmmakers could remain "indie" while still being able to support themselves. And people who wanted to have "good" taste in movies would likely be willing to pay a premium for arty films, just like many people already do for fair-trade coffee or cage-free eggs. Paying slightly more "for a good cause" might actually raise demand by giving media consumers an ego boost.

I'm just going to guess that when you pay a uniform price for movies, books, and songs, the quality costs of indie movies/groups and books of literature are already built into the price, and people paying for chick lit and blockbusters are actually being overcharged, rather than indie filmgoers and literature-readers being undercharged. Anyone in film/publishing/record industries care to tell me if this is right?

If I am right, then these media are actually set up to nurture emerging talent. What does that say about the fact that two of them -- the publishing and record industries -- are supposedly in deep trouble? And what about the fact that increasingly content on the internet, the most cutting-edge form of media, is free? I guess it looks like the new model of media shifts most of the price of developing talent off of the media companies and onto the public. Non-contributing viewers/readers get "free" or at least underpriced media, but for contributors, the "price" of media viewer/readership is "built into" their labor in creating content.

So, I guess I'm paying Blogger right now. You're welcome!

So hot it's cool, so cool it's hot

I've been reading Understanding Media and thinking about how McLuhan's theories about hot and cool media apply to the internet.  It's clear that with its combination of "hot" text and "cool" electronic communication and participation, the internet does not fit neatly into either category.  But does that mean that McLuhan's theory doesn't apply to the internet, that it breaks down in our new media atmosphere?  Or does the mixing of "hot" and "cool" online make the internet "lukewarm"?

I think a good way of understanding the internet in McLuhan's terms is with the description used in a Pop-Tart commercial I remember well from the '80s, which seized on the phenomenon of how the burning sensation of freshly-toasted fruit filling searing one's tongue is indistinguishable from the similar "burning" coolness you feel when your tongue is stuck to ice.  The overstimulation of your senses in one direction leads to an inverted experience of the sensation.  And so, Pop-Tarts are "so hot, they're cool -- so cool, they're hot."

That's what the internet is like.  It is, I believe, an inherently "hot" medium -- so hot that we've come to experience it as "cool."  The internet's heat comes from its inherent characteristics:

• high definition (computer screens)
  
• high density of data
  
• high specialization (specialized function of transmitting text, images, and sound)
• intense engagement of a single sense (sight)
  
• high degree of fragmentation (on millions of web sites)
  

The internet's "cool" attributes have to do with its apparent effects:

• high audience participation
• unification of time in a continuous present
• inclusion of all
• retribalization

These "cool" effects have all come about precisely because of the internet's extreme "hot"ness: it's the "hot" qualities of data density and intense visual engagement that bring about the "cool" sensation of unified time and instantaneousness; "hot" fragmentation that is causing "cool" retribalization and all-inclusiveness; and the "hot" specialization of computer technology that requires "cool" participation.  The extreme hotness of the internet makes it "feel" and in some ways behave like a "cool" medium.  But it still lacks the essence of "cool"ness.

McLuhan theorized that electric technology would deliver us out of the literate (often misconstrued as "rational") mindset of mechanization back into an intuitive ("irrational") world, where myth, the "total field," non-illusionistic art, structure and configuration (as opposed to linearity), and oral culture would gain ascendency.  But I don't see that happening.  Sure, the internet's intensity creates a kind of buzz that gives a feeling of iconography, mythology, simultaneity, and complex structure; but, to me, in practice the internet mainly displays the characteristics McLuhan assigns to traditional, Western, "mechanized" culture: fragmentary, superficial relationships; sequentiality; the hiding or denying of causes; an over-focus on "point of view"; attention to specialized segments of information; the divorce of form and function; and written modes of communication.

McLuhan warns that cultures always make the mistake of trying to use new technologies to do the work of the old.  That's what we're currently doing with the internet by using it as the medium for our same old literacy-focused culture.  It's not impossible for the internet to "cool down" so that we can bite into it without burning our tongues; but in order for that to happen, I believe it would have to evolve dramatically from what it is today.  It's fun to think about the ways in which people initially "misunderstood" how to use the internet -- which suggests that we "get it" now.  But I think we're still mistaking a "hot" medium for a "cool" one.  That's a mistake that may have some disappointing consequences.

My marketing idea

There's apparently this big problem where no one can figure out how to make money off of Web 2.0. I came up with an idea for this and I'm curious if anyone thinks it could work.

The problem is clearly that the old marketing paradigm (companies pay advertisers, who buy ad space from media, who show it to consumers, who buy the products advertised) is poorly suited to Web 2.0. The mass-market messaging of traditional advertising is just really clunky within the highly segmented realm of the internet. So far, marketers have been sticking to the old paradigm, tinkering with ways to insinuate mass-messaging into social networks, etc., in creative and sticky ways. But I think this is going at it from the wrong direction.

What if instead of changing how the ad space is used, marketers changed how the ad space was bought? Namely, why don't marketers start buying ad space from consumers instead of from media? This is already sort of what goes on when you watch TV episodes online on networks' pages and they make you watch a little commercial first: you agree to submit to advertising in return for the "payment" of entertainment. But the same idea could be expanded into an actual financial transaction between the company and the consumer. For example, marketers could pay MySpace and Facebook users to post ads for products they like on their pages. You can already be a "friend" of a product; but in this case, you would be a paid "friend." The catch would be that marketers would invent a new kind of spider to crawl social network pages and decide which people are the most popular and cool; these people would be paid more to post ads than other people. Similarly, on YouTube, the posters of videos that got the most views would get paid the most money for showing ads before their videos.

In other words, The Media would get cut out of the advertising loop. Instead of being providers of content, they would become providers of technology -- period. They would be paid by users, not advertisers. So, use of Facebook, YouTube, etc. would no longer be free. This transition from free to paid Web 2.0 would be similar to the transition from free T.V. to paid T.V. (cable).

This new marketing paradigm makes sense to me because it represents a true, complete adaptation to the user-created-content revolution. I'm not sure quite how it could come about, but I think it probably will.

It feels good to be American again

One of the little tricks of culture that I've always admired is how it facilitates group survival by making cooperation feel good.  It just seems to be something that human cultures naturally do: set up rituals through which food, money, labor, and goods are redistributed in the context of festivals full of sensual pleasure, the relaxation of societal norms, gorging on food, spectacle, dancing, and play -- in other words, fun.  Good times.

It follows that when a culture's traditions of making cooperation feel good break down, the cooperation will not work so well.  This is, of course, what we have going on in our society.  We are not all able to "party" together, exactly.  Bill Gates does not throw keggers to which we are all invited.  This is a problem.

The 1968/2008 connection has been pretty hyped recently.  So I'll add this to it: Another important similarity between the two years is that they're times when a counterculture has made important political progress that was facilitated by methods that felt good.

A friend who participated in some of the protests and marches of the late sixties was recently insisting to me that those political actions, though sometimes scary and difficult, were also pretty fun -- even "sexy."  I'm sure that point must be obvious to most people, but for me it was a bit of a revelation.  In my mind, I'd always kept the counterculture's social and political action in a separate compartment from its other manifestations (music, fashion, art, lifestyle).  I'd always thought of those latter things as mere superficial manifestations of the more substantive things that were going on.  But of course, they were a crucial element of the engine of change.  Because they provided the good times, the fun, that made taking real risks feel good.

Since the sixties, our culture has been lacking that means of making political engagement feel good.  As the medium of TV became more and more powerful, people felt more and more disengaged from, angry at, and helpless against culture. Rather than facilitating worthwhile action, popular culture became a soma.  This happened because there was no meaningful way to engage with our pop culture.  No ordinary American can participate in TV culture, because TV culture only goes one way.  All you can do with TV culture is receive it, not contribute.

But now the internet.  The internet feels good.  It's not nearly as visceral a medium of communal cooperation as actual dancing, feasting, etc. -- but it is one in which everyone can participate.  And that is the crucial part.  The internet is 2008's version of the streets and parks where the protests and happenings of 1968 took place.  It's a place where participation feels good, because it's taking place in the cultural vernacular -- a vernacular that seems pretty silly and childish to people sometimes, but there it is.  In the sixties there were folk songs; now there's Obama Girl.

Because engagement in the American political process is feeling good, American patriotism is coming back.  Michelle Obama's controversial sound bite about feeling proud of her country again is more representative of how we've been feeling as a nation than most would care to admit.  But now, I believe, a trend of popular, mainstream, non-ironic American pride is beginning, and it's showing up in pop culture.  The main examples I'm aware of so far are HBO's John Adams miniseries and the new, heavily-advertised JC Penney "American Living" line.  But I bet more are coming soon.

Escape from "New York"

This spring we're finally seeing the last gasp of the media's over-the-top fantasy of consumption-fueled, glamour-filled "New York." What began in 1998 with "Sex and the City" the show will come to an end, this May, with Sex and the City: The Movie. Leading up to it have been the pale copycat shows "Cashmere Mafia" and "Lipstick Jungle" and now "The Real Housewives of New York City."

Ever since the media's "New York" debuted, real New Yorkers have bemoaned the disappearance of "real" New York (= affordable, creative, dirty, crime-filled New York in the 1970s). But now that "New York" is about to be over -- and the utter tiredness of the "New York" fantasy in these new shows leaves little doubt about that -- can "real" New York come back?

Well, I don't think so. New York today is very unaffordable, clean, safe, and, according to popular opinion, less and less creative as a result. And I don't think there's any going back. The problem is not New York itself, but the whole idea of the creative city: it just doesn't work anymore. New York is a great place to showcase creativity, because all the infrastructure, both physical and social, is concentrated here to support it. But that's all it is: infrastructure. And that infrastructure has gotten so big, established, and expensive that it's pushing out the creativity it was originally meant to support.

The infrastructure isn't just overgrown; it's obsolete. The art world is already moving onto the internet, and as this trend progresses the physical location of art and other culture will become not just irrelevant, but nonexistent. Marshall McLuhan predicted this outcome in 1967 in The Medium is the Massage:

The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis. What remains of the configuration of former "cities" will be very much like World's Fairs--places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monuments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.

Isn't fantasy "New York" just such a "Williamsburg"?  The only difference is that it, like the rest of culture increasingly, exists not in physical reality but in the virtual reality of media.

I predict that the creative work of the future, which will be aided more and more by technology and the internet, will be done by people scattered across the remote, affordable, natural, and beautiful rural areas of the country and world, as rural gentrification becomes the next "creative class" trend.  (Friends of mine are doing this right now in upstate New York.)  Major international cities like New York will become more and more expensive, sterile, and artificial, and the work done in them will become more and more abstract and business-oriented.  Perhaps a time will eventually come when the rural creative workers storm the rich cities, demanding their share of the glitz and glamour.  Or maybe the opposite will happen, and the new exciting passion will be not to make it in New York, but to make it out.