Jay Leno Ratings and Post-Modernism
It’s not easy to find real world and easy-to-understand instances of the post-modern but here’s one. Examining the declining, increasingly dismal ratings of Jay Leno in the 10PM prime-time spot, Simon Dumenco, “Top 10 Lessons from NBC’s Failed Leno Strategy” in today’s AdAge suggests that “Late-night Leno functioned as a sort of utility: an easy, default pre-bedtime diversion.” It’s a post-jmodern premise that the receiver as much as the sender determines the meaning of the communication, and whether or not Dumenco intended, he makes a good case that this pov applies here. Specifically, users detemine the program’s function (pre-bedtime diversion) which figures in his “lessons” 5, 6 and 7 as well as the evaluation criteria appropriate to that function (“pleasantly sedative,” “not-too-taxing”) which figure in his “lessons” 4 and 8. I don’t think the hypothesis is provable but I do find it plausible as an instance. Moreover, I think it’s an especially sharp example of the PoMo pov because the user here is the passive television viewer without any kind of technological empowerment. So, I’m sharing and saving for future reference as an example of how the meaning of communication is co-created and situational.
Imaginative Hedonism
Review: Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism
This important book aspires to complement Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Specifically, just as Weber provided an historical account for the rise of “instrumental rationality” that drives the sphere of production, Campbell offers an historical account of the rise of “imaginative hedonism” that drives modern consumption.
His central theme is that pleasure itself was redefined in the 18th century. In former times, it was sought through the senses: food, sex, music, laughter. Thus, elites had banquets, harems, musicians, and clowns while the masses had carnivals, their annual taste of the same. The modern economy, according to Campbell, replaced the sensory experience of the body with the emotional experience of the imagination – daydreams of finer lifestyles, novel consumer goods, exotic experiences et al. Centrally important, these images are created or modified by the individual for self-consumption. In other words, it is not the buying, owning or consuming but the imagining – “the ability to create an illusion known to be false but felt to be true” – that pleasures us. Moderns became adept at what Campbell calls “autonomous imaginative hedonism” long before there was media or advertising; it’s not our wants but our wanting that is insatiable.
The book is organized in two parts. The first half is critical and dissects the inadequacies of economic explanations of wants and their origins in terms of increasing population, increasing standards of living and other macro trends and of sociological explanations that rely on emulation effects. The second half is historical. Like Weber Campbell anchors his account in the Calvinist strain of 17th century Protestantism but the legacy that he follows leads to the 18th century pietistic cults of sensibility and melancholy, then on to Sentimentalism (sensibility + Christian benevolence), culminating in 19th century Romanticism and finally democratizing as bohemianism in the early 20th century.
Densely argued and quite long, this is not an easy read. Moreover, those who prefer their historical explanations anchored in a society’s organization of power and wealth will not likely be convinced by a history of ideas based sermons, novels and philosophy. Finally, the scope is limited largely to Great Britain with some attention to France and Germany.
Those weaknesses pale when compared with this volume’s three important contributions. First, the argument makes room for the pursuit of pleasure along side the pursuit of wealth in understanding the evolution of modern society. Similarly, it makes room for emotion along side reason in that evolution. Second, it explains why we embrace rather than reject an everyday life diffused by the shimmers of advertising. Finally, it puts the consumer as the active and creative force at the center of consumerism.
The Pooping Philosopher
Classic collections one can pick up and put down.
Aesop, The Complete Fables (Penguin Classics)
Clever, caustic, often cruel
Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol I (Loeb Classical No. 184)
0% philosophy, 100% anecdotes, often LOL
Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
Niccolo Machiavelli meets Dale Carnegie
Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims (Oxford Classics)
Wit from modernity’s infancy
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (Penguin Classics)
Acid commentaries on a broad range of topics
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books (NYRB Classics)
Pricks pretensions, esp. learning, sometimes disconcerting, often LOL
Giacomo Leopardi, Thoughts (Hesperus Classics)
Cutting observations, occasional stark emptiness, beautiful prose
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Bite-size nuggets plus poems and songs, often LOL, sometimes hilarious
Humans Inside Machines
Review: Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Post-Structuralism and Social Context
Everyone who wants to understand how subjectivity, the “in here” of each of us, is shaped in the late modern age must read two chapters of this book. What McLuhan did for media, Poster does for information; he explains how databases and computer science set us up and bring us forth in their own distinctive ways. Saying he “explains” is perhaps too strong; the shaping of our “in here” is an elusive matter. But if you’re looking to understand critics who complain that our everyday life is “informatized” and that the self is “multiplied by databases,” these chapters are superior to anything I’ve read eleswhere, especially given their brevity. The remainder –an introduction to post-industrial society and chapters on TV commercials and electronic writing–are excellent and will be useful to many.
Poster’s perspective is commonly known as “post-modern,” and he enlists four seminal thinkers to do the heavy lifting: Jean Baudrillard (TV commercials), Michel Foucault (databases), Jacques Derrida (electronic writing) and Francois Lyotard (computer science). Readers who are not familiar with this perspective or these authors may find themselves befuddled. Poster doesn’t do much handholding; the book is a terse 150+ pages. To remedy this situation, readers may want to bone up with Robert Hollinger Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach (Contemporary Social Theory) and/or Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences.
Once you’re up to speed, anyone thinking hard about how the self, the hero of modernism, emerges within post-modern or more modestly late modern conditions will find Poster’s slender volume an important contribution.
Three Cheers for Cyber-sociology
Review: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (New York: Penguin, 2008)
Three virtues–sociological, political and historical–make this book important.
For part of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, the role of groups in our collective life has been on the wane. Modernism is anchored in individuality; consumerism is centered in self-expression; privatism promotes social isolation. Books such as The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Bowling Alone (2000) have ably documented this situation. Clay Shirky argues that digital media counter-balance this historical trend because they enable groups to organize easily and autonomously and for both short and long term goals. IMHO that is the big picture import of this book: it’s a pioneering sociological exploration of this empowerment.
Shirky thinks that the resulting groups will in general improve our lives if only because these groups form autonomously around their own members’ goals. There’s logic but not necessity in that view, as Shirky knows. Each group will have its own impacts—greater and lesser benefits as well as unintended consequences, positive and/or negative—that could, moreover, extend beyond its members. Only time will tell where this empowerment nets out at the societal level. Still, his politics lean in a power-to-the-people direction and the book’s second virtue is to present this potential as an opportunity available to all today with some leanings en passant about how to leverage it.
Decades from now, this book will be important for an historical reason: it’s an eyewitness account of a dynamic situation. Shirky does propose basic principles that underlie successful group formation and they have practical “how to” value. But he does not serve up some neat and tidy model. Quite the contrary, he describes with enthusiasm the diversity—on many dimensions—of the groups being formed today via this empowerment. This first-hand account by an informed observer, conscious of his biases and comfortable with the messiness of reality, has value on that score alone.
In short, three cheers for three virtues.
Kalehoff is Human
Thanks, Max. for making clear and owning up to the human factors that co-create the problem, e.g., your preference for sacred darkness, your experience of status updates as annoying, your reliance on focused attention to achieve your intended experience. Humans need to speak up for themselves as we assimilate with machines.
Originally posted as a comment by lenellis on AttentionMax using Disqus.
Word Map App from Thinkmap
The Visual Thesaurus (R) is developed and published by Thinkmap Inc., nee Plumb Design established in 1997. From day one, a great data visualization app and the novel use is worth a look here — http://www.visualthesaurus.com/howitworks/. Re the biz model, we’ll see.
Housing Meltdown and Data Breaches Have Same Flaw
The housing meltdown and data breaches share the same fundamental flaw: risk and reward are not connected.
In the housing market two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Federal National Mortgage Association and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) — hold half of all mortgages. Their business — buying mortgages and then issuing mortgage-backed securities — succeeded in many ways and in large part because everyone believed the US government stood behind these loans in case of default. With risk transferred to the government, Fannie and Freddie focused solely on reward, making profits by accepting debt from borrowers whom I wouldn’t trust to hold my groceries, and when these subprime and Alt-A mortgage debtors defaulted, triggering the larger meltdown, the Treasury—that would be you and me, bucko—had to step in.
Data security has the same problem. Publicly disclosed data breaches are rising rapidly. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were 449 disclosed breaches by August 22 compared with a 446 total for all of 2007. When these breaches occur, the harm falls on the consumer — that would be you and me, bucko – but not on the companies responsible. Some 44 states do require them to disclose data breaches but there are loopholes, e.g., only business in certain industries, only if a business suspects the data will be used to commit fraud etc. and there’s rarely a penalty as long as the breach is disclosed. In fact, there’s rarely a penalty for not disclosing – even though that’s a crime – and even when there is a penalty it’s minor — $10,000 in Arizona, for example. The only way to curb data breaches is to connect risk to reward – either allow individuals to hold businesses liable in court or introduce regulations that would impose stronger criminal and civil penalties
The threat of risk disciplines the pursuit of reward. Without risk, someone is certain to get screwed — that would be you and me, bucko.
W.H. Auden on Datamining
The Unknown Citizen
W.H. Auden
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
The Value of You: Not Much, Says US Law
Consumer data is big business. Leading aggregators like Acxiom, Experian and others make hundreds of milions each year, but the individuals about whom this information pertains don’t get a penny. In legal terms, we have a right of privacy in order to prevent harm but no corresponding right of publicity to ensure benefit from our profiles in the datascape.
Because business and government make decisions about individuals based on the personal information about them stored in databases, society’s protections have focused on restricting the collection and disclosure of that information and ensuring its truthfulness, largely to prevent institutions from making harmful decisions, e.g., about job offers, insurance rates, bank loans etc. on the basis of incomplete, outdated or erroneous data. Accordingly, the rights that individuals need—and are increasingly getting–are notice that the institution is collecting information, an explanation of the uses to which the institution will put that information, access to the individual record in the institution’s database, the ability to correct inaccuracies in that record, etc.
Designed to protect the individual from harm, the privacy framework does nothing to ensure the individual can benefit from her personal data. That’s a matter for tort law, and decisions in that arena have largely denied consumers any interest in the exploitation of the own data for their own benefit.
The tort of appropriation occurs when one “appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another.” For an appropriate tort to be actionable, the likeness must be complete and generally recognizable. Consumer profiles in the datascape are never complete—they’re always partial by design—and the courts have upheld the tort of appreciation only for celebrities. Similarly, the right of publicity—to own, protect and commercially exploit one’s own name and likeness—has been confined to celebrities.
In fact, the courts have ruled that the individual’s personal information has no commercial value. Specifically, American Express was exonerated for selling its card-members names to merchants because “an individual name has value only when it is associated with the defendant’s lists.” That is, the aggregator by compiling and categorizing our personal information had created all the value.
Since aggregators are not alchemists, however, the value of the individual data they aggregate cannot be zero. Accordingly, some legal scholars have argued that the value of the individual data is determined by how much it takes for a person to relinquish it. Since millions of us readily give up our information for supermarket discounts, ring tones and other trifles, its value to us must be low, they argue and then conclude that we’re already adequately compensated by the marketplace.
I don’t think it’s adequate and hope some clever entrepreneur figures out a way for me to get a bigger piece of the consumer information business. After all, I generated that data, it describes me and I’d like to get paid for the use of my likeness.
