Archive for the ‘ConsumerResearch’ Category

Artificial News Market Forecast 2012-2027

Posted: May 2, 2012 in authoritative, conflict of interest, ConsumerResearch, Google, InfoLit, misinformation, NewsMedia, PerceptionMeasurement, SocialCrit, TechHistory
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ImageThere’s a new storyteller on the horizon of human discourse. In May’s Wired, The Rise of Robot Reporters, Steven Levy chronicles the first tentative steps of a Chicago-based start-up called Narrative Science to dis-intermediate a news media in decline. Narrative Science, says board member and former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt, is a “company that turns numbers into words.” What it does with that contrivance is the news room equivalent for turning the post Gutenberg belief in movable typefaces into delusions of pure wish-fulfillment — and profit.

Why Narrative Science?

It’s cheaper to manufacture  stories by tweaking algorithms. How does Levy rationalize that “Ninety percent of a news” will be baked in huge software ovens by 2027? Intelligence engines like those of Narrative Science will expand the sense-making machinery of the market — not displace the last journalists standing. But what happens when the robonews creates press accounts of events now off the official storytelling radar? Will we cast ourselves as the protagonists in stories of our own making? In a customized news product will we even feign an interest in outcomes that don’t include us or the generic abstractions that fill up the media calendars of today? Think consumers, voters, fans, parishioners, and the faceless legions that don’t really “get us.”

And when our self-interested leaders and blowhard media step over the line, they lump us into these groups and we get defensive. Sometimes we even tune out at not-so-subtle recent suggestions that bad news made a personal appearance in places and people we know and love.

So we sequester ourselves in experiences we control. And in a market of one we prefer to curate our own media pages from a source that will remain blameless: It earns our trust by presenting our own acceptable truths within worlds of our choosing. And if Narrative Science releases an insemination product we are no longer mere readers, listeners, or viewers but receivers to signals we were born to host. We can we can select spheres of our influencing too. That’s something no self-respecting journalist could deliver without compromising personal dignity and the professional reputation needed to stay employed: their power to persuade.

Why the News Media?

They can only shrink to a former glory profile that cuts a running hum of temporal impressions. What does persuasion look like to the reporter in the street today? It’s a sharp elbow above our personal radars and into the realm of foreground noise. But do we really need the paparazzi in camouflage for celebrity safari? Do we care that news organizations are in the business of embedding their checkbooks into an improvised explosive called the corporate news exclusive? When the competition for attention shifts to sports, who’d really pine for the locker-slamming platitudes of the post game show? Do the players long to justify their mistakes to sensation-seeking error-prone reporters? The fantasy league stats can speak for themselves.

Why us?

It’s not that we can’t handle the truth. And it’s not that we turn away from bad news. It’s that we prefer not to face someone else’s truth — especially the kind that means bad news for us. How is this behavior written into code? Levy writes about a strict adherence to data patterns as a perceived bug in the program:

“[N]ot long after the contract began, a slight problem emerged: The stories tended to focus on the victors. When a Big Ten team got whipped by an out-of-conference rival, the resulting write-ups could be downright humiliating. Conference officials asked Narrative Science to find a way for the stories to praise the performance of the Big Ten players, even when they lost.”

In other words the new black media box couldn’t read the social cues. It couldn’t weight the institutional pecking order of big amateur athletics: that the elites lost to the lesser-thans. Other rewrites don’t address hierarchies but the airbrushed portraits of our personal histories:

“Likewise, when the company began covering Little League games, it quickly understood that parents didn’t want to read about their kids’ errors.”  

The Serialization of Personal Reality

So how does artificial news tune out the necessary realities? According to Levy all it takes is for a battery of meta-writers to “educate the system.” Meta-writers are the human-based interpreters who devise the templates for pre-assembling the scripts that the algorithms follow to spawn these production bylines:

  1. From the blatantly transactional: What are the best restaurants in X city?
  2. To the slightly obtuse: What are the best private tutors for my kid needing help in Y so she can get into $?
  3. To the downright conceptual: Do I let Z medication run its course or elect to do the surgery?

Having addressed human events the real growth in the twenties will hinge on accounts of events without direct human intervention. Think about a camera crew assigned to your fantasy league. Imagine a press junket angling to photo-op their way into the gamifications of your choosing? What may have passed for myopic in a lapsed media age will set the standard for the new authenticity. What could be more sincere than to place our own creations on news platforms staged by the likes of Narrative Science?

Authenticity needs to act in cahoots with a disinterest and elevated credibility in order to be taken seriously outside our own orbits. That’s where our flights of fancy are grounded in a fact base, no matter how self-selecting those data sets:

“They put a box core and play-by-play into the program, and in something close to 12 seconds it drew examples from 40 years of major league history, wrote a game account, located the best picture, and wrote a caption.”

Headless hedders. Scoops without digging. Instant analytical gratification. Sounds like these alternative realities are being packaged to go. And no one’s going to miss the classifieds.

Artificial News, Real Growth

The market potential for artificial news manufacture is limited less by 20th Century conventions like the public interest or journalism ethics than by legalities — specifically the likelihood of fraud that manifests in our unwillingness to think for ourselves. Here are three hypotheticals:

1) Synthetic People. Narrative Sciences can juice the Klout scores of skin deep fabrications. That means the marketers don’t have to pony up actual perks for the drones who tweet their praises.

The temptation to generate celebrity mannequins could falsify outcomes as much as personal appearances. Hammond foresees an appetite to flesh out the statistical accounts with off-the-field developments like player injuries or legal problems.” That’s right. The very thing purged from the news cycles of the little league press becomes fair game once the merchandise becomes eligible for demotions, endorsements, and all forms of a professional sport referred to by the Roberts Court as “free speech.” Factoring in these frailties may create a better system: (1) for not only detailing but (2) analyzing our games, and conversely (3), gaming these very same systems by tossing a single grenade-like insinuation into the contagions of tomorrow.

2) Markets of One. The self-selecting machinery will reference a breadth of experience so shallow and constrained as to make our present day cable news echo chamber sounds as “fair and balanced” as the carnival barkers would have us believe:

“[T]he low cost of transforming data into stories makes it practical to write even for an audience of one.”

In today’s media climate all the pandering and hubris and alarmist jive in those opposition camps has been reduced to background noise. But there is no house divided in an audience of one. There are no deals to strike. There are no hard feelings to patch up. There is no further filtering or curatorship required. Our Google glasses have already filtered out all aspects of reality that hold no claims on us. And our narrative headsets bleed into our ears and bake a reaffirming acceptance into our tuning sections.

3) Disconnects. It’s one thing to draw from forty years of big major league data records to depict or simulate an event. It’s quite another to outsource its meaning — how it connects to us. To Hammond that’s the highest potential growth area — not recaps of little league games but packaging management reports or handicapping empty prophesies like this blog post for example.

Then again if we lose our independent streak, could we also lose some of our misplaced anxieties about a world too big to fathom, let alone shape? This may be just what the national health plan doctor ordered, whether through our own initiative or underwritten by our bankrupt Nanny State.

The real story behind Narrative Science isn’t about health care politics. It isn’t that robonews will replace journalists but that it will sell us on the worlds we don’t need to be sold on — the ones of our own design — until we can no longer detect where the authoring ends and our imaginings begin. No longer alerted, confused, entertained, or merely informed, we will be entranced. And it will take narcotics stronger than tomorrow’s news to distract us from the stories we’re told.

Are We Not Mets?

Posted: March 24, 2012 in ConsumerResearch, Mets, NewsMedia, PerceptionMeasurement, SocialCrit
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ImageMy dad didn’t hand down a few things. One is the ability to fix stuff. Another is his love of the New York football Giants.

One of my dad’s favorite stories features the fatherly advice of Archie Manning after completion of the Giants over Patriots Superbowl sequel. In the story Archie the Elder counsels first born Peyton to steer clear of New York in his own landing rights scouting reports. Eli, on the other hand, has the thickness of skin to labor under the media glare. It’s the younger Manning with fewer expectations and greater poise. The verdict? Eli now leads the National League of Manning in Super Bowl rings.

But here’s the latest chapter: With the Jets signing of suddenly displaced Tim Tebow, Manning family relocation plans have boomeranged back to the Big Apple .

If the Mannings are a football’s family dynasty, Tebow is an aura that anchors the t-bow(n) in a gridiron trinity. His heavenly father calls the plays. And when he huddles with his new teammates next year what kinds of formation-making will he be scrimmaging? What other earthly improbabilities are now within striking distance or even his passing range?

1) If I can make it here: This is a locality that trades in stocks, not flocks. Will Tebow’s charisma continue to attract the ardent following that he did in Denver? Is anyone even in the position of posing as a charisma transition authority here? This potential impasse makes the tug between Tom Brady’s allegiance to Giselle Bundchen of Hollywood and the townies of greater New England look like a resolvable quandary. The last time a U.S. President’s popularity reached 90% George W. Bush stood in the post 9-11 rubble with bullhorn firmly in hand. That was probably the last time anyone ever sampled Manhattan as American soil. New York is no more an All-American city as it is any town U.S.A. or a town for that matter. Ancestral soul mates can wander below 96th Street for lifetimes and never share the same checkout line, subway platform, or rain check from their local Apple stores.

2) Back pages to fill: The void that the Jets have hired Tebow to fill is not an actual vacancy at quarterback but the empty column inches of empty tabloid fodder. In this game of inches where New York comes down in the Giants or Jets column depends on whose competing stories hold the popular sports imagination. Jet coach Rex Ryan is one losing season away from rousing and brash to boring and blowhard. Can the aura of Tebow grow coattails that extend past the bellowing and shadowy girth of Friar Ryan?

3) Quarterback by committee: Assuming the stranger-things-than-Jeremy-Lin-have-happened scenario, Ryan platoons Tebow with his underachieving incumbent starter, Mark Sanchez. Yet in terms of the air game, the juries still out on whether Tebow even qualifies for his pilot license. He’s got that canon of an arm whose misfirings remind us city elders of the opening credits to F-Troop — and that’s without fortress Tebow even being knocked off his mountings.

So if there’s a questionable cultural fit and a non-vacancy for a loose canon-armed quarterback, maybe Tebow’s speed, strength, and agility can grace the number one hard luck New York franchise — even if that team already fields an entire staff of misfires by committee. After all, that athleticism includes winning the James E. Sullivan award as the nation’s most outstanding specimen — in any sport! His raw gifts prompted Joe Collier this week to Tweet…

“If Tebow played baseball, would he swing the bat or would the ball just go over the fence with his willpower?”

What if he was a pitcher? JimyYankee2 cast a sardonic eye at Tebow’s unflattering passing stats to predict a 2012 mark of 20-10 with a 5.55 ERA on a team that scores 4.0 runs per game.

Back to that hard luck curveball of a boomerang within boomer range — The New York Mets. Those post Madoff Mets will lead the majors in one important column — salary attrition. In fact the drop-off is so precipitous it may be sending super agents like Scott Boras to the poor house. Plead Boras:

“The major franchises who are getting the majority of revenues should provide a product, or an attempt at a product, that has the near-highest payrolls commensurate with the markets they are in.”

Translation: big market teams like the Mets can only buy destinies, not build them, for the betterment of the shareholders, the players, and Boras. Boras is especially irritated that lean times afflict his second largest market as well:

“The New York Times’ Vincent Mallozzi notes, Boras once noted that the Mets and Dodgers ‘used to shop in the steaks aisle and now they’re in the fruits and nuts section.’”

But Tebow is not going Hollywood.  Before home-school gave way to high school, he did once play baseball before his mortal passions were covered in pigskin. Full disclosure: is this really news to anyone in Manhattan or the rest of America?

The real serum test for any future apparitions of Monsignor Met will be about what happens in the clutch. The one legacy bridging the team’s recent success with its more immediate failures is the inability to execute under pressure. Perhaps this is that thundering glide path in the deliverance of Tebow to Broadway: The shear theatricality of his unscripted rescues; his analytically-defying finishes in the face of accomplished stat-hounds.

This spring the Mets will move the fences in at forbidding Citi Field and ask their fans for a forbearance that dwarfs the size of the original TARP package. Tebow, on the other hand, can reign down the boomerangs. And he has only his savior to credit.

Now Accepting Business Facebook Applications

Posted: March 15, 2012 in authoritative, cloud, conflict of interest, ConsumerResearch, implement, SharePoint, SocialMedia, TechHistory
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Such a deal!

Psst … hey … yeah you.

You social engineers getting certified in Business Facebook applications!

Remember what-you-see-is-what-you-get? Probably not unless reinventing yourself for a living is measured in decades. For you digital natives I’m describing how dinosaurs like me once crawled out of our darkened caves of DOS. Back in the late eighties the notion that our interfaces would actually reflect our dot matrix print-outs was an epiphany (that’s where our documents were all headed back then, right?)

The great thing about it was you knew where you stood. The outcome on your screen was reproducible. Park that file on a floppy and your friend with the 10 MEG hard drive could see it too. It was the infancy of a new kind of printing press. What we didn’t know about the paperless void that awaited us is the security that the paper gave us. We knew how many copies we’d run off, where they’d been circulated, and roughly the profile of the folks who had your layouts, graphics, and arguments in their hands. It wasn’t world-wide or moving or making sounds but it was a level of control and transparency that packed the staying power of a flowering Polaroid.

Flash forward to the dawn of “the” Facebook circa 2005:

The moment we decode our thoughts the only thing standing between our expressiveness and the cryogenics archives is the indifference of our colossal and anonymous communities. Until keyboards come equipped with ears for tuning into keystrokes of genius, we’ll be banished to “the new dark.” Together alone. Old messages. New bottles. Voiceless discoveries wondering whether the people in our social orbits can share in our experience. Quick answer: ‘course not! In social media what you see is what you interpret. These are not static inventories of text any more than our connections are a recessive flock of lurkers or even receptive band of onlookers.

Message from 2020 to 2005: There is no audience. If you’re looking for distinctions, think engagement levels — not content consumers.

Okay, back to the here and now.

It’s in this cacophony of muffled experiences and tentative expectations that the social media curtain was raised within the confines of large services firms. From one extreme of tight-fisted control, we have leapt to the opposite extreme of unrehearsed community-building. No script. No change management roadmap baked into the recipe for success or even defining what success means.

One critical success factor? WYSIWYG 2.0 gets my knod. If those tentative steps off the social business platform are any indication the number one confronting our reluctant late-comers is not about brushing up on the latest apps and features but preening and probing in that new hall of mirrors:

What can you see that I don’t?
What can I conduct in private and then invite a select group of team members at my discretion?  

These are not just passing hesitations for a bashful user base. These are no just executive-level insecurities surfacing as personal vanities. These questions push ahead of any potential opportunity gains or the most basic community-building efforts. Is my avatar out of focus? Are the views I share in my blog out of step with firm policies? Honestly, they can miss the next update cycle if I’m not clear on my WYSIWYG bearings:

“Basically, who can see what? Otherwise I can’t tell the noise from the knowledge. Otherwise how do I figure out what’s worth investing a part of my work day towards understanding?

There is no single recipe for baking change management into the cultural traditions of a large services organization. But if the adoption of SharePoint 2010 as the de facto enterprise content platform is any indication, then governance is the single biggest ingredient. Of course nothing has forced the issue of who-sees-what out of the maintenance closet  more than SharePoint governance. Chiefly: the deliberations around how corporate policies play out around what gets dragged into or dropped from enterprise interfaces.

If we want to deal with the inevitable as a force for good I would transition what we’ve learned from our SharePoint deployments. These lessons underscore three overriding factors in the bottom-up adoption of social business media:

1) COMING AND GOING: Connections

Big, impersonal enterprises are famous for counting “who you know” as the way to unblock bottlenecks and transcend their own bureaucracies. Large organizations can be clumsy around the question of how you come to know them. Did you work your way up through the ranks together? Did you stop along the way to sample the broader organization and how smart leaders piece together solutions falling outside the standard portfolio? Did you punch the most direct ticket to partnership, staying closer to the rails and to the exclusion of colleagues with complementary skills and often interdependent needs and resources? The ability of social media savvy managers to self-select their working communities is the most sweeping panoramic view into organizational needs and assets since the invention of the org chart — and a trifle less static — no?

2) EXIT: Internal Hierarchies

Remember George W. Bush and the megaphone at Ground Zero. Allies and critics agree. It symbolized the high water mark of his two administrations. My point here? Nothing promotes teamwork better than a big shot tossing off his suit jacket and joining in a bucket brigade. In the case of social business that means pitching in to answer a question or address a concern voiced in an activity stream. In WYSIWYG 2.0 the whole stigma around who should “be seen” with whom  doesn’t disappear completely. But a CXO in search of a gut check can now wade into the weeds from the privacy of his corner office or from the primacy of his bully pulpit.

3) ENTER: Market Realities

See the pecking order exiting by the rear door? It’s taking another time-honored game not worthy of winning along with it. It’s called fixating on internal customers to the exclusion of focusing on actual clients. When the market speaks, it’s more eloquent than the most thoughtful governance or the most resolute leadership. It’s the clarifying resolution of a win or a sale or a revenue bounce.

Even those porous borders between our work identities and our social media selves can attest to that. After all, if a prospective buyer is looking for guidance on our products and services, who is she going to listen to — our CEO in the press release or the irate customers sounding off on Twitter? The marketplace has spoken. And it’s not waiting for our keyboards to grow ears.

What you see is not necessarily what you get. And what you hear is not necessarily what was said. Unless you hosted what was posted on your social business platform.

Manual Google

Posted: February 27, 2012 in conflict of interest, ConsumerResearch, Google, Learning, misinformation, PerceptionMeasurement, privacy, SocialCrit, TechHistory
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Are you looking through a broken pair of eyes? Are you ill-equipped to hear me?”

“Are you one of the cogs

Too busy probing the pleasure centres of dogs to get near me?

- Kevin Godley, Lol Creme| Random Brainwave, 1979

What happens when human curiosity is reduced to an engineering exercise?

Some major efficiencies happen like instant road maps and opt-in spell checkers. Who would ever want to predate a world devoid of “did you mean…?” But whether we meant to or not Google has assigned a demand-side value to the answers it provides and the way it provides them. That is a powerful and compromising brokerage.

Our passions and concerns are channeled into a need for certainty that only seems to increase with the lack of closure. We are not just hard-coded for self-containing narratives of a self-concluding nature. We will skip ahead and miss the good bits because we’ll be too stressed out to appreciate them if it all turns out for naught. Such behaviors turn out well for Google. We’re addicted to answers. Google is not a vehicle. It is the verb. It does not own the road. It stores the potholes below the crevices of its membranes. To deny that is to take away free advertising for a search media giant and our own self-expression in the same bated breath.

The problem is not that Google and the self-proclaimed ‘beauty’ of its new privacy policy is big brother in a barely disguisable ruse: “[A] simple, intuitive user experience across Google.” If anything Google is big bystander. Google doesn’t want to crawl inside our heads and decode our inner confessionals — that last veil of hesitation that tells us not to visit our untested assumptions on inscrutable Google. They want to bucket our articulations: (1) First into IP addresses, and then, (2) into groupings of indulgences and shadowings of flash-points. Just the very products of our experience that cause us to take notice and give money. They don’t call us users for nothing:

Google: “We never sell personal information.”
Subtext: “We always sell impersonal information.”

Okay, you’re thinking. So I’m a consumer. They package me up and send me off as a nameless aggregate into the awaiting clutches of their material witnesses: The Procters and Gambles, the seasonal influenza indices, the local pizzerias … all riding on the outcome of my reflexive back and forth with Google. I got my toppings, and my meds, and my brand name discount. Just pay the man and move on, right?

Less Why for the Ware

The problem is not spyware but literally why-ware — the analytical nature of motivation. These are temperments, not transactions. These are the understandings reached through interconnecting events, inwardly wired impulses, and group + personal dynamics that factor into our actions and rationale for the outcomes they deliver. There is no GPS on God’s green Google Earth that reconciles these complexities with our circumstances, decisions, and their consequences.

Google would be the first search media giant to tell you they are not in the business of telling us what to do. But what they trademark behind that steel trap of engineers and lawyers is the newly franchisable power of suggestion. That means that a post millennial tween who straps on her Google glasses will be free to experience that mediated tunnel of contraption-induced toolbars and pulldown menus that jog along-side the shoulders of these driverless thoroughfares. She will have no need for prior knowledge or personal experience or the need to remember her impressions or with whom she chooses to share them. As the latest FAQ on Google’s new privacy policy intones:

Google: “We can treat you as a single user across all our products.”

Yes, that is intended to be a consoling message to us memory-challenged users. Perhaps the real threat would have been to caveat that emptor:

Subtext: “We can treat you as a multiple product across all our customer segments.”

Birth of a Pathology

The biggest eyebrow raising to date is that Google’s bid at reality augmentation is what stoners in the seventies used to say about their sober counterparts:

1975: “Reality is for people who can’t face drugs.”
2015: “Hiding publicly behind an interface is like viewing the world through Google-colored glasses.”  

Us ivory-towered elites can’t have that. We retreat to our own 20th century safety zones. We condemn this intervention! It is a container devoid of serendipitous discovery! It is way too interesting for our kids to tune us back in again. We are so gone.

It is also the shortest distance between points she’ll no longer be capable of making — mostly why did she climb in her Google car and where did it drop her? That’s assuming the passenger will have the curbside capacity to reboot the override.

Will they resume the itinerary on the driver’s side? That’s assuming they can drive a manual as well as read one. That’s insinuating she can trick the Google car into telling her what she need to know and not what the car is programmed to disclose. That will be a hard truth from our user and a soft landing disclosed by Google. That’s assuming one can take this all in. They seem to be talking over one another.

And down will come civilization, cradle and all.

Time and Space Curriculum

Posted: February 4, 2012 in authoritative, ConsumerResearch, music
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I was taking a walk through the old neighborhood and out spilled Jimm’s bouquet of albums released between early October 1979 and early October 1980:

  • David Bowie: Scary Monsters
  • The B-52′s: Wild Planet
  • The Boomtown Rats: The Fine Art Of Surfacing
  • The Clash: London Calling
  • Elvis Costello: Get Happy | Taking Liberties (only the 9 songs not released prior to Oct. 1979)
  • The English Beat: I Just Can’t Stop It
  • Marianne Faithful: Broken English
  • The Police: Reggatta De Blanc | Zenyatta Mondatta
  • The Pretenders: The Pretenders (first album)
  • Paul Simon: One-Trick Pony (one of his best, though nobody but me thinks so)
  • The Specials: The Specials (first album)
  • Squeeze: Argybargy
  • Talking Heads: Remain In Light
  • X: Los Angeles (first album)
  • XTC: Black Sea

This block party rocked with a resonance that made all the other musical enclaves wish they could move to this neighborhood. OK. At least bid up the price of the late nineties tribute album in some discovered exurban-gated-ghetto league.

This notion of a stroll around the time block rings more true than my first piece of direct AARP mail that came this week. The proximity of Jimm’s dream list occupies the same cul-de-sac as a framework suggested to me by fellow Hampshirite Arthur Simons. The contextual underpinnings of Simons’ theory lines: (1) his living room, (2) this post, and, (3) the brimming tidal pools of his flash brain floods.

Simons posits that a place visited in childhood lies between two locations. Our sense of adult place lies between the intersection of two or more memories. In essence the first path is commuter-induced bike, car, stroller, or transit travel. The other is memory-powered time travel whether your propulsion is via jet pack or propeller head.

A bunch of corollaries spring from this vantage:

  1. “Tiny” playgrounds we remember as major theme parks –
    Is that because we’re physically larger or because the memories  never shrank but continued to satiate on these spongy vibes?
  2. The first legs of trips seeming to take twice as long as the returning trip –
    Is it that the certainty of the way back closes the perceived distance?
  3. We’re all too aware of the flash forward effect of middle age that lends our earliest imaginings their engulfing stature –
    i.e. the advent of the web until now captures fewer cultural shifts than say the heyday Beatles between haircuts.

I arrive at three conclusions from these time bubbles of musical release formulas:

  1. The return trip is instantaneous while the slog up the ’79-80 hill takes an eternity. (“It’ll be alright.”)
  2. That proximity of inspirations is as much a “place” as any physical landmark, (i.e. we frequented the same musical neighborhoods as teens and that is a basis for endless conjecture and jousting).
  3. Big memories take up lots of room — the further the visitation distance, the bulkier they get.

The curbside appeal of clustering albums into timelines is boundless and reveals …

  • What our musical heroes were listening to at the time — jamming frequencies factor
  • What we were in the act of sweating through or celebrating at the time — soundtrack of our lives appeal
  • What about our childhoods has swelled to larger-than-life stature and what deserves to shrivel and die — always a roll of the musical dice we are willing to rock

Release Party Push back

Garo however, was having none of this — at least the part about appropriating our back yard vanity checks as signifying any real inflections, cultural shifts, or accumulated post collective event wisdom:

“I admit that as much I love wallowing in the filth of my own past, I generally try to steer clear of such list-o-mania. An excellent period it was (particularly in the sceptr’d isle), but of course we’d all think that; it’s when we were paying the most attention. We bought albums the moment they arrived in stores, and we knew what it was up against. (Or as Dish used to put it: My God, it’s Thursday! Isn’t it time for a new Donna Summer album??)”

Garo equated the ubiquity of distribution with the commoditization of experience:

“Now  music arrives to (most of) us after it’s been long-vetted by YouTube users, radio stations, Saturday Night Live bookers, and a topsoil of people much younger than us at least 20 feet deep. By the time we receive it, it’s been out for months, maybe years; we’re therefore no more able to connect it to a specific time and place and zeitgeist than we are to keep straight the various Justins and Selenas and hyphenated rapper sobriquets that buzz around us like lighters at a Blue Oyster Cult concert.”

Me knowing that Garo never ran off to join any Blue Oyster cults allows me to duck behind my own naivete.

And whether we opt for Jimm’s elevated lanes of memory or Garo’s mania cross-offs, I still have appointments to keep. Increasingly the place and time are one because the place I’m headed IS that stitch in time. And that time is not waiting in line for next Thursday’s Donna Summer or Ruby Tuesday’s Edgar Winter. That all expenses paid vacation knows every rhyme and season. And that’s the commiseration of the tunes in our heads and the songs that pulse to the hearts we’ve developed to contain and express those sounds.

The time-lines are a map. And the only thing more fun than plotting future trips is getting lost completely. Yesterday and tomorrow can move into my musical neighborhood any time they like.

Self-Reliance and Its Many Dissenters

Posted: January 5, 2012 in authoritative, ConsumerResearch, Learning, misinformation, politics, SocialCrit, SourceConjugation
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It’s hard to fathom an hour clad and out of bed better spent than last Thursday’s OnPoint from WBUR. A spirited forum led host, guests, and callers to philosophize between pragmatism and our perfect worlds.

I’ll take my inspirations from internal quandaries over debating public policies and handicapping horse races any day. Inside, looking out, and taking in a crisp and resonating distance. The broader business of our daily practices and how they present in our public American discourse is much more interesting than arriving at these meanings through the mundane abstractions of our fetishistic tax laws, per capita pollution levels, “good” cholesterol counts, and aggregations buried in the algorithms of Google and Facebook. That’s what OnPoint listeners witnessed in a zeitgeist-popping and enigmatic question of Too much self-reliance?

For the panel, host Tom Ashbrook snagged literary critic Benjamin Anastas. Ashbrook was justifiably smitten with Anastas’s New York Time Magazine essay, The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’, which raked Ralph Waldo over the “looking-out-for-#1″ coals in the December 4th issue.

To Emerson’s defenders, self-reliance was never a vehicle for piety or privilege but a reaction to conformity. Professor Alex Zakaris of the University of Vermont described Emerson’s rejection of his fellow New Englanders and their casual materialism as a loophole into “moral thoughtlessness.” He cited the travesty of obeying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by returning these inventory turnovers to their receipt-bearing masters.

Emerson did not write blank checks to the future from unquestioning urge “to speak what you think now in hard words.” His approach was to purge the unreflective gratifications, clear the head. His humility divined this critical self-scrutiny to be arduous work without deadlines to meet: Specifically, the act of learning how to detect our own thoughts free of social conditioning. that’s nearly has hard to fathom for some of us as human inventories. We’re more anxious being offline than subjected to the zealotry of our now permanent campaigns.

Back to Emerson now — the pay-off of self-reflection was quite the windfall:

* Dividends of inner peace

* Triumphal, universalist connection of cosmic-like romance: “every heart vibrates to a reservoir of divinely ordained goodwill.”

* Did we mention self-reliance as a throw-in?

This is the note he sounds of a consciousness that regulates what comes into our hearts.

But hearts being what they are can clench themselves into thick, over-sized muscles. In the naval-gazing myopic absorptions of our day, we recoil at the stiff price on believing in ourselves at all costs:

* The little CPA in my soul tells me that the one percent are hoarders whose craven capitalism arranged for the decapitation of the middle class.

* The Paul Revere replica in my driveway is revving to defy any law that expands the rolls to make health care a civil right (and a social responsibility).

* I will deny the existence of global warming sooner than I’ll acknowledge the disappearance of the North Pole.

Can our swollen egos, bruised by the bumps of social conditioning, fit snugly inside these principles? That we can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the self and its final say on these earthly arguments?

The compromises that manifest in partisanship happens on the group level. You know the groupings. You mean you weren’t invited to the shotgun wedding where the bride was given away for the unholy price of a Faustian bargain? We can’t pass a normal news cycle without the co-opting of the public interest by parties beholden to interest, or rather the self-interest of groups. Would Emerson say that corporations are people too? What is a more sincere expression of democracy than that?

I can think of one. That’s the passions harbored in the festering disaffections of tea parties and occupiers. We’re all on the authentic side of the majorities in our distrustful minds. The hypocrisies of autonomous libertarians queue on the receiving end of our reliable beltway punching bags and petty tyrannies: Big Government? Out of my tiny entitlements.

And you can have the FEMA trailer back, honest.

But it’s not about the money either. There’s another corruption summoned from the death of God — specifically the departure of the sacred from public life and the language of a higher calling that is not merely mutual but universal. Our essayist Mr. Anastas pushes back, brandishing Sarah Palin’s brew of “mavericky charisma.” The irony here is that these women and men of God use their direct channels into gated kingdoms, emerging with an endorsement, a charter franchise of “the chosen,” and new priorities and roles: now, Gods of women and men.

So many of these internal compasses point vehemently towards righteousness and away from “volumes of evidence” and “stubborn facts.” Is that Emerson talking, or the political discourse growling in the belly of our appetites for cable news?

Heart news is fair and balanced!

In guts we trust, and, gut the basis for trusting others.

When does rugged, two-fisted self-reliance decay into a defrauding of the Treasury? The pulpits of the heart are certainly authentic. But is that the stuff of the integrity envisioned by Emerson? If not, the bedrock of the American spirit may just be begging for a quake-induced fracking. What spills into our streets and leeches into our water tables would change us from the outside in.

That’s when climate change may arrive at our better selves. And we’ll take credit for a hotter sun coming up in the mornings of tomorrow.

Theme Parks of Future: The Food Museum

Posted: December 8, 2011 in ConsumerResearch, implement, politics, recipe, TradeShow
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Copyright All rights reserved by JennaU

I recently caught up with a winter hibernation guide to imbibing in the stylized aura of shimmering Mad Men cocktails. It reminded me of the lingerings of respectable grown-ups drinking with impunity. They maintain their own obliviousness when the tumbler is shaken by the vaunted fictions of the camera. And what of their children? Are we still smarting from their own pungent tipsiness?

What characters sense and taste in memories and cinema is the ultimate stirring. It is an enterprise bursting to infect the communications pathways of entire marketing planets. Ladies and gents: from our gaping doors to your devouring eyes we bring you the Museum of Food.

That’s the taste we smell through our sights — the entrees and spirits captured in the evocative restaurants of film and the eat-in kitchens of classic sitcoms. The Food Network, the literal version of eye candy, has spawned a foodie offspring on most of its rivaling channels. The contents of those 2D sauce pans and table settings jettison chefs into a select crowd of scientific entertainers. Imagine when you swap out the kitchen help for the celebrated dining scenes, staffed by fully established franchises of fame. Who needs to reheat yesterday’s leftovers when you’re rolling out the specials on today’s menu?

Knowing one’s audience is to understand its taste for celebrity appetites. The campaign is zipless in its execution. No introductions are necessary. The script writes itself. The credit goes to that recipe — the one insisted on by the audience. Which audience? Do you need to ask, dear? We’re all on a first name basis here.

The familiar ingredients free us to portion control our connections to food events (formerly known as meals). They situate us in places (formerly known as physical locations). These seasonings could only be conjured up by our shared emotional histories with the actors we park under our cultural limelights.

So what does this have to do with more posts about museums and food?

A food museum would be the showcase for the re-enactment of celebrity meal scenes. From a tourism angle the concept is eminently franchisable. Each licensed property answers to the expectation of aromatic exhibitionism. The gift shop is the cafeteria. The advertising and the photo gallery are one in the same. Each chapter would festoon their cultural watersheds, local flavors, and neighborhoods of community food rituals. In effect, the first food chain set to endless variation. That’s the pull of culinary sensuality in the food court of public opinion.

How could this play out theme-by-theme among the planet’s food enthusiasts in the great dining halls of any Cosmo city of our vast global village?

  • Science wing: Food as medicine, nutritional supplements (friend or faux), organics v. industrial farming …
  • Sports arena: Ticketed bake-offs between master chefs, gaming concessions since the Romans …
  • Spiritual chapel: Biblical scenes and customary rituals …
  • Fashion runway: Dinner jackets, cocktail dresses, bulking up of American XXL …
  • Design pavilion: Interiors of watering holes from neighborhood taverns to western saloons, and Irish pubs …
  • Philanthropy: A percent of the proceeds go to local food pantries …

Apart from the charitable donations I haven’t landed a single loaded insinuation on the inflammatory minefields of food policy. Sure I’m letting obesity suit up as its own fashion statement. But do you hear me leafleting here for animal rights? How about the subsidizing of empty, cheap, diabetic-inducing calories? We’re going to have to take that fight outside our 501c3 status, food museum goers!

We’re going to have to stock those future flame wars in the freezer section and score brownie points on what we know. That would not be hunger but appetites — especially the gurgling bellies of stars from stage, screen, tables and bar stools. Hey bub — I can still see their mugs on the wall while I’m waiting for my own table to clear.

WFCR Responds to Vocal Valley

Posted: November 5, 2011 in ConsumerResearch, EventTriggers, Pioneer Valley, politics
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Since online discussion threads appeared like those from the offline wakeup call there are signs of a signal shift — both in terms of local station policies and their infrastructures. While I don’t believe in once-in-a-hundred-years prophesies or the “perfection” of storms, I do believe a change is in the air and may well land “on” the air before the next perfect storm appears.  Here’s a response from Helen Barrington of local NPR affiliate WFCR that Marcia Yudkin shared through the Hidden.tech list:

++++++++++++++++++++

We, at New England Public Radio, sadly, have learned much from this storm and are actively updating and revising our approach to be ready for the next event. This was the “perfect storm,” and has challenged every service from the media to utility companies.

Sunday, we lost power at the studios on the UMass campus. WFCR’s transmitter is on Mt. Lincoln in Pelham. When the power fails (which it did), it’s often because Route 202 is impassable (with trees down), as is the road to the transmitter site itself. We have not been able to purchase a generator due to concerns about fuel storage at the site and access to that remote area where the transmitter is, in bad weather. But, we’re working on those problems…quickly and actively.

Now that we own WNNZ, we hope to purchase a generator for it (which is also thousands of dollars, a major capital expense), to become our primary broadcast source when WFCR is off. It, too, was the victim until this Wednesday afternoon, of a commercial power failure in Westfield. We’re again trying to see if we can get some grants or do some quick fundraising to get generators for both stations (though, once obtained, the weather may impede installing them until spring, but we’ll see).

And on top of that, due to the constraints of our budget, we have a small staff trying to cover this immense region. If we could have gone live all day Sunday, we would have, and we will find a way to do this in the future. We will be prepared to go live locally for as long as is necessary, to get critical information out. We will provide better service in the next storm(s), as we know there will be one or many this fall/winter.

We were trying to reach everyone we could with the web and phone info, realizing that some people may not have been able to access either (I live in Belchertown and only had cell service restored Tuesday night, as well as no landline; I still have no power). The size of the region makes this piece very complex, figuring out the best way to get info to people. But we now know – more than ever before – that the radio is the thing just about everyone can access in such situations.

All of the above led to a great many frustrations and impeded our ability to adequately serve the public. We are working on solutions.

Thanks so much for your comment and for listening.

Helen Barrington
Executive Director for Programming and Content
New England Public Radio/nepr.net
Phone: 413-577-0541
Please note my new email address: hbarrington@nepr.net

Learning how to Learn

Posted: October 10, 2011 in ConsumerResearch, InfoLit, Knowledge-ABLE, Learning, politics, SocialCrit, SocialMedia
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All rights reserved by The Whistling Monkey

Last week I drove two-thirds of the way through Massachusetts and back in the middle of a work week. My mission was for my son and me to take a non-credit workshop offered by Greenfield Community College. The topic was about using Facebook as a genealogical  tool — certainly not what Facebook’s forebears had in mind. Apparently that oversight was shared by the rest of the Greenfield community. Not only were we the only ones to sign up but no one informed us that the class was cancelled until we got to campus. In tough economic times we cling to the bedrock of family and to our own frugal resources. What could be a better match than social media for ancestors?

The gap between this proposition and the follow-through reminds me all too well of my own marketing efforts to teach Internet research tools and techniques — something we all, few do well, and nearly all of us do alone. You know you’ve got a major rebranding effort on your hands when there’s a gaping hole between an information surplus and a knowledge deficit. I say rebranding because the chasm represents both a black hole and a golden opportunity. When that deficit has a clear direction the answer can be engineered into a customizable package. In fact any binary problem is reducible to an “applification-in-progress.”

The biggest riddle is not about the closest pizzeria for vegans or the cheapest flight out-of-town next weekend. It’s about the trappings — which data supplier dancing on whose interface and how to carve up the winnings at the close of each transaction. That’s the information supplier tail wagging the market demand dog. It is a short tail and the dog needn’t learn new tricks.

Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who said: “It’s not the consumers’ job to figure out what they want.”

That’s certainly true when it comes to designing and perfecting elegant gadgets. We’re no likelier to build the next killer smartphone than the market research rationale for keeping Apple one step ahead of a jittery market. We’re consumers. As such our participation is limited to parting with our assets or squirreling them away.  When will the future arrive and what will it look like?

1. Dunno.

2. I’ll know it when I see it.

Problem is … the market has only half-spoken.

Social Problems without Business Models

Now what happens when a question runs on more dimensions than zeroes and ones — an objectified and reproducible set of truths and falsehoods?The engineering math is less persuasive when responding to half-truths: What’s the consequence if it is true? The severity if it’s not? These are two-step problems that require a higher form of reasoning than shadowing a users’ intention in a search bar. These questions are no less pressing if they don’t map to the still-life webcams that play on beneath the skin of Facebook.

It requires that the user exists for more than click patterns and one-sided transactions involving word choice. But what if the model was reversed? What if those knowledge deficits were answered by an online republic of producers (who also happened to consume)? And they would use information — not simply be used by it in the quest to plant a suggestion or prompt a purchase.

There is no obvious business model for solving abstractions that can’t end up in actual inventories and find their way to literal doorsteps. Does the consumer still benefit from a passive acceptance of supplier-sided engineering?  Before the costs were driven out there was a direct line between higher consumer spending and a tighter labor market. There was originality to the questions forming before user curiosity was placated by Google Suggest. Nowadays shopping is feeling a lot less patriotic than in the wake of 9-11. There is no Peoria play here. The American middle-class has lost its credit line faster than you can see the swelling ranks of independent voters. Where is the next breadbasket of packaged fare? That’s a supply problem (and it’s a sack of rice).

The demand problem is that we need to teach folks how to looks after their own interests. That’s the only way to dial back the simmering resentments which spark disenfranchisees in search of a franchise and a bargaining chip called name-your-price. In the Arab Spring it was political freedom. In the Bank of America fall the tipping point is ATM fees. But whether it evolves to a substantive movement or a meandering bitch list, one demand side factor is unequivocal: the power is ceded to noisy minorities. There is increasingly scarce upside to continuing along in the role of unquestioning consumers. That’s the future nearly here where a once silent majority is on the receiving end of the predator drones released by Google | Facebook | Amazon | Apple: the four horsemen of the holy platform grail.

Can you guess the predators from the drones? Once you do I have a course I’d like to sell you. It’s called self-education and it’s being taught by the experience of doing your own homework. Otherwise I’m sure there’s a search engine that will sell you the answers — the ones which work for them.

The Smiley Face-ification of Social Media

Posted: June 6, 2011 in authoritative, conflict of interest, ConsumerResearch, Google, misinformation, PerceptionMeasurement, politics, privacy, SocialCrit, SocialMedia
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All thumbs all the time

“Thumbs can tilt at many angles.” – Terrence Patrick Canade

I posted a recent entry in the AIIM blogger community about the compromised state of social media to deliver on many of the essential building blocks of information quality such as transparency, integrity, credibility, and authenticity. This is typified best by the toggle that flips us on / off through the planet’s most awesome wall switch — the “I like” button on Facebook.

The dumb-downed thumbs-up is the only vestige of personal judgement passing for an experience worth repeating beyond our own browser boundaries. All of the preceding attributes are measurable in a world where information once cost something to obtain. However, that calculation is no longer valid in the land of content too cheap to meter.

How do we yank us back into a world of standards? Do we offload our suspended disbeliefs to the algorithmic chefs slaving in the kitchens of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, etal.? Is it naive even to believe in standards where all experience is unique — subjected to the limitations of our direct Internet experience. These are our own private showrooms expressed in search logs, site histories, and browser settings? Uhhh … no. (They are private, right?)

The failure to develop universal information standards ignores our universal claims on social media. It’s not about organizing people. As a business model the “social” tag papers over the shopping model so that social media consultants can collect their rent checks. But it was never about that. Information quality in a social media world is something more primal and self-centered. It’s about organizing ourselves. We need to tap a containable set of information within a set period of time in the service of certain favorable outcomes. We express these as our priorities, our deal-breakers, and our worthiness as self-taught nodes in this network of smiley faces and closely-guarded ranking formulas.

Hardly Containing Ourselves

One way to close ranks is to treat the world’s information supply like a resource instead of a raw content sewage pipe bleeding into the digital landfill of unlimited capacity. But ours is a supply-based business model. It’s according to who-wants-in — not according to why-do-you-need to-find-out. Demand could be manufactured without ever needing to contain this need-to-know why. No explanations necessary. All Google holds are the word patterns which most deftly intervene in a user forming a question. It is in every party’s interest to play their role correctly. Unfortunately for most users that means little regard that the terms Google is throwing them are deceptively simple:

The moment you aspire to confide in a search engine you are being shown an exit of someone else’s choosing.

These magically inventive search suggestions? They are ads. Let me say it again, only more to the point. Suggestions don’t only answer to us. They answer to advertisers. We are purchasing Ad Words by clicking on the Google set of suggestion terms. Yes, Google has pioneered the art of click-free commerce. You drop down to their dropdown and you’ve ordered from right off the menu!  The inventory is not a catalog. Don’t touch the merchandise — even if we are the demand side of the equation.

I’m not arguing on moral or even legal grounds that a change of policy is in order. Yes, its brilliance cascades across the sky. But we don’t pay Google for use of their search engine. Google gets paid by monetizing our usage of their service. Anyone who loses sight of that is at risk of being used in ways by Google that are not communicated to Google users — namely, that your attention has been preemptively purchased by one or several Adwords sponsors: “And now that I’m inside your head I can always see myself out without an escort…”

No matter how many gadgets reference our schedules, the number of hours in a day has not increased. Cognitively speaking, our personal attention spans are fixed on a lunar cycle. Anyone with more attention to spend than the claims on their calendar is either incapable of self-direction, independently wealthy, living without a smart phone or auditioning for the next post crash pilot episode of Survivor, the prequel.

Fixed Scale Attention Settings

One time-tested way to channel attention on a meaningful focus is to set attention to a fixed scale. That enables the virtual voter to carve out her own sets of priorities without any heed for what her peers or elites have insisted she hold to the exclusion of everything else. Instead she can focus on multiple concerns and address those concerns as a percentage of her “total concerns.”

Let’s pretend that the tax debate is run like a popular election with 6-8 political parties instead of the 1-2 parties operating here. Let’s take a system where a vested member of a non-elite group, (say U.S. taxpayer?) could express their policy preferences by directing their tax dollars in percentage form. This flies in the face of our current fight-or-flight two-headed party predicament. We could make it more competitive to thicken the cable gumbo news soup. Let’s say the host would send the losers home who don’t coalesce around the top five tally-getters. That lops off the long, scraggly tail of marginal, overlapping services programs, right?

The tea party would love it because slicing up the treasury into line items would finally acquaint the sleepy and disaffected with the freak out show they seem to have missed the last ten years — how 43% of our voting rights revert to the Chinese before we even begin to dole things out. Corporate lobbies would climb on-board because it lights up their board like no two-party election campaign ever will.

Defense contractors will reacquaint us with the fact that while much of our assembly work has gone overseas we are still the world beater in fear manufacturing. Just to make sure that social services can’t defeat the Military / Medicare complex we can have defense contractors using their Citizens v. United speech-making write-offs to tell America why:

  • A vote for HUD, Headstart, CHIPS or AmeriCorps is a vote against keeping America the biggest, baddest, gunslinger in the global neighborhood.

The pharma giants could out-suggest any keyword campaign with a massive spending rationale that …

  • Doing away with Medicare means losing the all-expense paid trip to an elective nursing home that we have today.

What’s going to happen when our wet suits begin to wet themselves? That’s the foreign invader the health care lobby will implant into our national discussion.

Perhaps the most popular feature of a percentage-based ratings system is that every 10 millionth taxpayer would win a reprieve — that’s right. Tax forgiveness for an entire payment cycle! No lottery could ever hold a candle to shaking Uncle Sam down before he fumbles for our own pockets, right?

That’s how information standards emerge. Carve up the beast and then let’s compare recipes.

Payments accepted.

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