The Flapdoodle over Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus

Anyone who’s taken Art History 101 has seen a lot of pictures of young naked women with a lot more flesh exposed than Annie Liebovitz’s controversial photo of Miley Cyrus draped in a bedsheet for the current issue of Vanity Fair.  What irks me is the artistic banality; the bared-back, over-the-shoulder, come-hither portrait of silent screen sirens was a staple of this magazine’s first iteration back in the 1920s.  But others are down right outraged by something else:  the contradiction between Disney’s good girl character Hannah Montana and Vanity Fair’s sexually charged photos of the actress who portrays her. 

Apparently, parents are worried that their pre-teen daughters who identify with the character will now identify with the actress.  Moms and dads should give their girls more credit; they’re smarter and stronger than this parental backlash implies.  I suspect this outrage has more to do with adult prurience than with teen-age sexuality and is one more instance in a very long history of adults working out–perhaps, acting out–their own desires and fears under the guise of protecting children. 

The useful lesson in this flapdoodle is that the clean-cut character and the sultry celebrity are both fictional and provide a widely known instance of a larger situation that’s engulfing each of us.  Thanks largely to the Internet, we’re entering an era in which each of us is responsbile for actively constructing public (albeit virtual) personas that reflect different facets of the same person but none of which captures the whole self.  

Younger generations are already pioneering the tasks and skills for managing an increasingly kaleidoscopic identity.  They protested loudly, for example, when Facebook started distributing without permission their profile updates and online purchases to their Facebook friends, and in both cases Facebook had to back off.  Although framed as a privacy issue, it’s better understood as a publicity issue–the right to control one’s public personas.  

Adults still hung up on old hang ups should wise up to the new challenges.  As for teenage sexuality, honi soit qui mal y pense.

 

America’s Skittish Psyche

Behaviors like that described below are often symptoms and portents.

According to Reuters| NY – Costco Wholesale Corp said on Tuesday that the warehouse club operator has seen some unusual demand for certain items like rice and flour as US customers, worried over global food shortages, look to stock up on basic items.  CEO James Sinegal told Reuters the retailer had seen increased demand in the past week and a half, and some of its stores, including certain locations in California’s Bay Area, had put limits on the sales of these items.

 ”There’s been an increase in purchasing but we think it’s manageable. At the moment, we think we have it relatively under control,” he said. 

Sinegal believes the surge in demand was prompted by media reports in recent weeks discussing rising global demand and shortages in some countries for basic food items like rice and flour.

The Reuters story is here.

Wall Street’s Cock-eyed Cyber-Optimist

Today’s Wall Street Journal introduced a weekly column, entitled “Information Age,” about the “ways in which digital technology is transforming business, politics and our society” and penned by the WSJ’s former publisher, L. Gordon Crovitz.  In his debut offering, entitled “Optimism and the Digital World,” Crovitz proudly admits that “My own bias is that as information becomes more accessible, individuals gain choice, control and freedom.”   Presumably the newly empowered will respond with many huzzahs and much rejoicing.

I have two huge problems with this framework.

First, what’s the context of this emancipation?  Choice among what–channels that all offer the same escapist content?  Control over what–the commercial messages to which we decide to pay our attention?  Freedom to do what–buy this or that product?  Praising the means (process) while neglecting the ends (substance) is an old and by now well recognized sin of omission.

Second, the optimism that Crovitz derives from “the accelerating impact of technology” is arguable.  Ray Kurzweil, pioneer of artificial intelligence, came to a different conclusion in The Singularity is Near (New York, 2005).  Simply put, Kurzweil argued that the increased speed with which new technology can solve humanity’s biggest problems has, ironically, created a heigthened frustration with the gap between what is and what could be.  Make no mistake: Kurzweil is a huge optimist about technology-based problem-solving; he’s just not a cock-eyed optimist.  Rather, he grasps our contradictory responses to progress; in many cases our simultaneously contradictory responses.  If “Optimism and the Digital World” typifies the content to come, a similarly nuanced understanding will not likely be found here.  I eagerly await Clovitz’ next offering but I’m not sanguine.  Caveat lector.

If 1 million seconds elapse in 11 days, 1 billion seconds…

Millions and billions are the units in which much of modern life is measured.  Unfortunately, humans have a hard time grasping large numbers and an even harder time grasping the relative size of large numbers.  Analogies help and here’s one I hope you’ll remember.

1 million seconds elapse in 11 days.
1 billion seconds elapse in 32 years.

44% Don’t Trust Any Company

Almost half of us (44%) don’t trust what any company in any industry says, according to a November survey of US consumers by Harris Interactive, and that’s grown worse in recent years.  The poll asked, “Which of these industries do you think are generally honest and trustworthy–so that you normally believe a statement by a company in that industry,” and then listed 17 industries. ”Supermarkets” did best: a third of us (32%) trust our grocery store.  We trust other industries even less.  Since 2003 those who don’t trust any industry has grown 7%. 

For the industry breakout and trend data, click industries-that-are-trustworthy.

Attention Nit

A recent IBM white paper on the future of adveretising makes a fundamental error about attention.  It states, “Consumers are increasingly exercising control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world.”

That’s just silly. The consumer has always had 100% control over her attention and has always exercised it whether going to the fridge, petting the dog, returning to her magazine etc.  What’s more, the consumer has always had 100% control over how she interprets the advertisement.  Finally, she’s always had 100% control over whether she applies the interpreted message. 

What has changed are media and marketing’s abilities to detect and measure attention, largely in the real-time two-way channels.  But new data does not mean new behavior, much less some new day of consumer empowerment. 

Both leftist and elitist critiques of “consumer culture” have assumed a passive, powerless and easily manipulated consumer but that was never true.  Every instance of communication, even in one-way media, is a two-way street, always contingent upon attention, interpretation and application.  The “com” in communication means “with” and while marketers may be loath to admit it, communication is always a collaboration.