Post-humans Sighted

I’ve exorcised my demons and put them between covers under the title Silicon Simulacra: Post-humans of the Machines Worlds.   If you don’t want to buy, you can download PDF files of individual chapters at www.lenellis.com/books.  An abstract is below. 

Abstract

The assimilation of humans into machines, once science fiction, is a well advanced reality today.  Each of us has virtual versions inside the two great machines of the late modern age.  In the datascape, the vast array of databases in which the details of our daily lives are recorded and analyzed, we appear as profiles.  In cyberspace, the global network of computers in which everyone can connect with everyone, we appear as personas.  Both are part human.  We continually update both machines, passively and actively, and, as we do, our simulacra change in tandem.  Both are part machine.  The profile is a probabilistic portrait, conjured up by others to inform their decision making; it’s an informational output.  The persona is a pattern of connections, created as we present ourselves to and interact with others; it’s a network effect.  Drawing upon humans in near real time but manifested inside machines, neither looks like the continuous, whole and bounded self of the modern tradition.  Rather, these hybrid entities are contingent, relative and open.  Silicon Simulacra describes how these two semblances come to be, how each represents us and what opportunities and challenges each poses and suggests they are the post-human forms of humans assimilated into these machine worlds

Web Sites 2.0

Pete Blackshaw has written a hugely important–and helpful!–think-piece on the role of web sites in a 2.0 world here.   I will only add that it illustrates a very basic lesson: Don’t ask consumers to come to you.  Go to wherever they are.  That’s what P&G CEO Ed Arzt told ad agencies back in 1995 when they pooh-poohed the web.  That still applies and will apply.  Wherever consumers go, marketers and their agencies had better follow, and quickly.

Crisis as the New Normal

The only appropriate response to any crisis is always the same:  Regret, restitution and reform.  We’re sorry this happened.  We’ll make whole anyone who’s been harmed.  We’ll change so this won’t happen again. 

Craig Reiss in Entrepreneur.com provides a thorough and insightful “PR playbook” for how to implement the three R’s.  Here, I will only add and advocate that response readiness should become the new normal for most companies.

Four factors contribute to this assessment.

First, the Internet has enabled activists, investigators, regulators, analysts and others including disgruntled employees and unsatisfied customers with easier and faster access to company documents.  In short, more eyes are prying more often.

Second, the recent spread of Web 2.0 tools has created an “attention economy” that encourages the reporting of not only mishaps, misdeeds and misrepresentations but also miscues, missteps and mistakes, all with investigative fervor and headlines to match.  In short, every errant action is now suspect.

At the same time and for the same reason, there are no more news cycles and thus no interim time periods during which to prepare a response.  Operating 24/7 means both all the time and at any time.  In short, preparedness is too slow.

Fourth and most recently, the volatility of the equity markets means that more errant events will be reflected in a company’s stock price and thus qualify as “material” events. To such events regulations require companies respond with appropriate disclosures. 

In summary, attacks on a company’s reputation are becoming easier, broader and faster with material impacts more likely.  To me those conditions suggest that response-readiness needs to be the steady state of a company’s communications capabilities.

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.

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.

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.

Marketers (Still) Don’t Count

“INEFFECTIVE MARKETING” is the misleading headline on eMarketer’s report of a survey of 3,000 global marketers released today.

Yes, the respondents did say that 65% of their marketing spend had no discernible effect on consumers.  Only later does the reader learn that few had any solid basis for that assessment.  Here’ the ugly truth:

• 45% do not even bother trying to track the results of their spending.
• 45%  do it manually, spending hours gathering and analyzing data. 
• 10% have automated systems to track their spend’s effectiveness.

The headline this data supports is “Marketers (Still) Don’t Count.”  But acknowledging the difficulty of reegineering the marketing function would not advance eMarketer’s boosterism for online marketing.   Frankly, I’d rather address the hard realities than salute the flag for the umpteenth time, but that’s just me.

Online Gambling

In order to prevent US citizens from gambling at European betting sites, the US gave EU companies new trade opportunities in four service sectors: postal and courier, research and development, storage and warehousing, and testing and analysis. The US wouldn’t estimate the value of these market openings but it sure is a lot to give up just to protect a blue law. The sacrifice of jobs for morality got little coverage. The Reuters story on the deal is here.

 

Full Disclosure: I’m involved with a online start-up that enables users to create odds on future events and am a bit sensitive on this topic.