I think it’s a timely warning.

Article.

Ms. Crawford argues that the airwaves, the cable systems and even access to the Internet have been overtaken by monopolists who resist innovation and chronically overcharge consumers.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act, which was meant to lay down track to foster competition in a new age, allowed cable companies and telecoms to simply divide markets and merge their way to monopoly. If you are looking for the answer to why much of the developed world has cheap, reliable connections to the Internet while America seems just one step ahead of the dial-up era, her office — or her book — would be a good place to find out.

In a recent conversation, she explained that wired and wireless connections, building blocks of modern life, are now essentially controlled by four companies. Comcast and Time Warner have a complete lock on broadband in the markets they control, covering some 50 million American homes, while Verizon and AT&T own 64 percent of cellphone service. Don’t get her started on the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger unless you have some time on your hands. [Article]

Meritocracy is not a word derived from the ancient Greek.

Anne Carson:

On writing: “we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. . . . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me.”

On ice bats: “I made up ice bats, there is no such thing.”

On teaching: “when i began to be published, people got the idea that i should ‘teach writing,’ which i have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in. so now and then i find myself engaged by a ‘writing program’ (as at nyu, stanford) and have to bend my wits to deflect the official purpose.”

On contradiction: “i realize all this sounds both chaotic and dishonest and probably that is the case. contradiction is the test of reality, as Simone Weil says.”

On insects: “i admire the parsimony of ladybugs.”

Article

Autobiography of Red

Red doc>

At the beginning of each term at the University of Oregon I always begin my digital strategy class the same way, with a simple question for my students; Why, I ask, are you taking my class? Perhaps next term I will also ask them why they are attending University. And here’s why – after almost three years, I’ve shifted my approach from teaching “digital marketing,” which is as difficult for me as “teaching writing” is for Anne Carson, to simply getting them to a place where they understand they must turn things upside down, question everything, take nothing for granted. In a sense, I too have had to bend my wits to deflect the official purpose.

Technically I am leading a digital strategy class, yet simply leading one’s life requires strategy. By sprinkling anthropology and philosophy into the mix I hope to broaden the class’s scope – I’m not “teaching,” I’m just getting the students to learn how to think. Their job is harder – they have to, in Andrew Delbanco’s words, “embrace the knowledge of and from the past so they may draw upon it as a living resource in the future.” That insight is from his excellent book College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be

There are those, flapping their lips in the ears of anyone who cares to listen, that imply American colleges and universities are deteriorating. I think that is far-fetched but that’s not why I’m writing this. As befits my line of work I’m far more interested in the ‘user’ – in this case, the undergraduate student embarking on what could become a life changing event (one hopes); those four years that culminate in being awarded a degree. The faculty and administration at American colleges and universities are now feeling the pressure to look deep into their inner workings, to accept the challenge of improving their culture and their methodologies, to adapt their curricula to attract and engage the ‘digital youth’ who arrive in droves every Fall with jagged ambition and those with “knives in their brain” [Emerson], who will challenge the very concept of an education, of learning, of being “taught,” in an information age that is unparalleled in history; these students might well question the very idea of college. The thing is, they shouldn’t – college should challenge them. And here I’ll share one of David Foster Wallace’s insights, one he mentions in This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, the commencement speech he gave to his Alma Mater – “[...] the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

And muddying the waters further we now have MOOC’s. Here’s Andrew Delbanco again, writing this time in a New Republic article:

A new phenomenon requires a new name, and so MOOC—massive open online course—has now entered the lexicon. So far, MOOCs have been true to the first “o” in the acronym: Anyone can take these courses for free.

Many people outside academia—including New York Times columnists David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman—are gushing that MOOCs are the best thing to happen to learning since movable type. Inside academia, however, they have been met with widespread skepticism. As Joseph Harris, a writing professor at Duke, recently remarked in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I don’t see how a MOOC can be much more than a digitized textbook.”

In fact, MOOCs are the latest in a long series of efforts to use technology to make education more accessible. Sixty years ago, the Ford Foundation funded a group of academics to study what was then a cutting-edge technology: television. In language almost identical to that used today, a report on the project announced that television had the power to drive down costs, enable the collection of data on how students learn, and extend “the reach of the superior teacher to greater num- bers of students.” From 1957 to 1982, the local CBS channel in New York City broadcast a morning program of college lectures called “Sunrise Semester.” But the sun never rose on television as an educational “delivery system.”

In the 1990s, my own university, Columbia, started a venture called Fathom, using the relatively new technology of the Web. The idea was to sell online courses taught by star faculty such as Simon Schama and Brian Greene to throngs of supposedly eager customers. But the paying consumers never showed up in the anticipated numbers, and by the time it was shut down, Fathom had cost Columbia, according to some estimates, at least $20 million. Looking back, the project’s director, Ann Kirschner, concluded that she and her colleagues had arrived too soon—“pre-broadband, pre-videocasting and iPods, and all the rest.” [Link]

Isn’t it strange how a “new phenomenon” is never quite that these days? And it’s not because we are ‘pre-something’ or that we get ahead of ourselves – It’s because innovation requires taking risks and in the rush to innovate we forget to look to history. It appears that innovation in education has had a rather tardy history.

We may need a steadier hand on the tiller. As Delbanco points out, college provides society with economic benefits over the long run, and provides for individuals in calculable and incalculable ways. An additional benefit is political. An educated citizenry is key to democracy – “the best chance we have to maintain a functioning democracy is a citizenry that can tell the difference between demagoguery and responsible arguments.” In 2013 under our current political climate I’d say this is a big deal. And my favorite quote is: “[...] we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter. It’s a technology that will never become obsolete.” I’m guessing that even the best of students won’t get insights and witty takeaways like that from a MOOC.

And then there is the modern classroom. It’s instructive to take a look at photographs of classrooms from the 60′s and 70′s and compare them to contemporary classrooms. Other than design materials used in furniture or infrastructure they tend to look eerily alike – a nondescript room, a person standing in front of a black or whiteboard, students pinned behind rows of desks or tables. A new twist is that textbooks on the tables are now replaced by laptop computers.

This set up is not the best. The focal point in the room is at odds with what college is and should be – collaborative. After all, going to college, leaving the safe-house of home behind, gaining independence from one’s parents, meeting new people – that’s a large part of college life right?

And so to what extent is the institution responsible for ensuring that real collaboration happens? To what extent is it responsible for ensuring that students take the correct courses that will ensure that they have a well-rounded education, an education that will be very useful for applying for the jobs that we don’t yet have titles for, or have yet to be created?

And when will educational institutes break the silo model? As I teach in the J-School at U of O, I very rarely have MBA students in my class, but the ones that have taken my class turn in exemplary and stellar work. It makes perfect sense to me that a business student should take my digital strategy class, as should design students and architecture students etc, etc. – but there are silos.

Meanwhile the push into “new” keeps going:

Keeping Tabs on Students’ E-Reading

Educators from nine universities are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up company, CourseSmart, allowing them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks, David Streitfeld reports in The New York Times.
Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class – a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.
In the old days, teachers knew if students understood the course from the expressions on their faces. Now some classes are entirely virtual. Engagement information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole class is falling behind. Eventually, the data will flow back to the publishers to help prepare new editions.
Academic and popular publishers, as well as some authors, have dreamed for years of such feedback to direct sales and editorial efforts more efficiently. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are presumed to be collecting a trove of data from readers, although they decline to say what, if anything, they will do with it.
The predigital era, when writers wrote and publishers published, is seen as an amazingly ignorant time. “Before this, the publisher never knew if Chapter 3 was even looked at,” said Sean Devine, CourseSmart’s chief executive.
More than 3.5 million students and educators use CourseSmart textbooks and are already generating reams of data about Chapter 3. Among the colleges experimenting this semester are Clemson, Central Carolina Technical College and the State University at Stony Brook, as well as Texas A&M University-San Antonio. [Article]

And there’s more:

Essay-grading software offers Profs a break

Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.

And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks. [Article]

Sometimes digital breaks things…

And then there’s Enstitute, where young people get on-the-job training and are taught skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. This I like, especially as they begin recruiting at High schools:

JASMINE GAO, who is 19, just wasn’t the classroom type. So instead of languishing in college, she dropped out after her freshman year.

Ms. Gao decided that she didn’t want to continue studying at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. At first she considered transferring to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, but she changed her mind when she saw that her tuition bill would be around $44,000 a year, with only a small amount of financial aid available. “I didn’t want to come out of college with $200,000 in debt and have to spend 10 years paying it off,” she said.

Yet she still sought a way to nurture her interest in technology. A year later, Ms. Gao holds the title of data strategist at Bitly, the URL-shortening service based in New York.

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.” [Article]

So what am I saying or asking for? Well, real-world experience is incredibly valuable, especially today in an ever-shifting job landscape. Mixed classes, less silos, or something more akin to conferencing where students of different disciplines mingle and share ideas. No “social media” classes – I’m not kidding, what a waste of time. An awareness that today’s students and future graduates have grown up ‘digital.’

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A preamble.
Lately I’ve taken to sitting down and starting to write an essay with no particular subject in mind. This is one of those, one that has moved beyond the digital version of crumpled up sheets of paper tossed in the wastepaper basket. Why that is so I have no idea, other than to say it kept writing itself – a cliché I know, but I’m going with it.

Should you begin the essay below, you might be inclined to scratch your head and ask “what the hell has any of this got to do with advertising?” Well, other than the obvious references to Mad Men, the answer might appear to be, not much. Yet if you get all the way to the end of it, I would hope that you’ll unearth a few relevant points of reference along the way, as I attempt to weave the Classics, Mad Men, shifts in the social construct, and the travails of “digital” advertising, into a single tapestry. (There are many clues throughout but I decided not to highlight them.) It has been two decades now since the beginning of the great shifts in our culture brought on by the advent of the World Wide Web (and now, Mobile,) and one can often find historical parallels to these cultural shifts everywhere if one cares to look: i.e. technology has been disruptive throughout the ages.

The essay’s underlying subtext, one that I hope meanders as an undercurrent throughout, also has contemporary inspiration – Iain Tait‘s idea of “shaping the connected-world,” of how, with his work at Google Labs he wants to get into “the shaping of products and services, showing people the life-enhancing potential of technology, and helping to get those things into people’s hands,” as outlined in his letter of farewell to Wieden + Kennedy. And Iain is not alone in understanding how society is gradually moving towards “products that do good” and away from standard advertising (we may soon have to find a different descriptor than “advertising”.)

Dan Hon who still works at W+K posted to Medium recently, The Tyranny of Digital Advertising, where he writes, “I’ve done a lot of doing, thinking and trying about what it means to be “interactive,” “digital,” or “non-traditional” at an advertising agency. And man is this shit complicated.” Reading between the lines of Hon’s post, it reads like a prequel to a goodbye letter, maybe he too wants to join Google Labs? Anyway, it’s easy to agree with his “it’s complicated” statement, but it shouldn’t be that way as agencies have had two decades of the Web to sort that shit out. (Dan actually gives a good example of “product thinking” when he links to what Russell Davies, formerly of W+K, is doing with the British Government.)

I’m not absolutely certain, but I believe one of the problems is still that anything that doesn’t look like marketing or advertising confuses marketers, and good digital “advertising” doesn’t always look right to brand CMO’s, who tend to want to see something that looks like a duck, and walks like a duck. Obviously we have seen some great digital work coming from all corners of the advertising world, but when you see advertising executives moving from their storied perches at ad agencies to “product” companies such as Google or even Facebook, you have to wonder what’s up. (Who will Yahoo! be hiring, for instance?)

In other words, Dan may be pushing the right rock up the wrong hill. It might be time for him to switch hills.

Ultimately, I’d say it comes down to three things: Are we asking the right questions? Can we make it better? What does the audience/consumer/user choose to use?

There are analogies to be had in what Google’s Larry Page said from the stage at the recent Google I/O conference: “As an engineer, a technologist, go to first principles and say, ‘What is the real issue around our power grids?’ or ‘What is the real issue around manufacturing?’ I think people don’t usually answer those questions, and as a result, most of the work done is very incremental and we don’t make the progress we need to.”

So, yeah, referencing Soren Kierkegaard in this essay may seem absurd, but at least he asked, and wrestled with, the right questions. So what is the real issue around digital marketing?

[A quick note about the essay's title: Daniel Mendelsohn points out that Barbarian was the ancient Greek word for people (mainly Persians) who didn't speak Greek, their language sounded like bar bar bar to them. So, language as barrier.]
_ _

The staff at the agency Cranford Johnson Robinson Woods dressed as Mad Men characters [via]

Hubris
It is Sunday evening and somewhere in the USA a TV is burning Mad Men into the retinas and synapses of an audience. I haven’t been watching for one simple reason: I never became attached to the series; I understand its appeal but I’ve never been a fan of soap operas.

As it happens, I am currently working through another book of essays, a book in which a review of Mad Men appears – Waiting For the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture by Daniel Mendelsohn. The book’s back-flap notes, his “reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.” Let’s just say that he is an exceptionally smart man; after digesting the first six essays that incisively dissect the works of James Cameron (Avatar,) Philip Glass (Einstein On The Beach and Satyagraha,) Julie Taymor (Spider-man,) Aleksandr Sokurov (The Sun,) and Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, and after re-reading the first essay in Classica, Battle Lines, a review of a “slimmer, faster Iliad,” one realizes rather quickly the breadth of Mendelsohn’s intellect, his lyrical prose, and his ability to avoid the unnecessary rancor and polemics of many critics.

Those first six essays I mention above fall under the rubric Spectacles and should you read them you might be reminded of the parallels of contemporary media culture and the writings of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. For decades, writers and producers of films and TV shows have written scripts that deeply reference and/or re-shape Shakespeare’s plays or the writings, epic poems and myths of the Ancients – nothing new there, in other words.

Hubris looms large in Mendelsohn’s telling of Julie Taymor’s failed Spider-man excursion, where working with two rock musicians to bring a super hero to Broadway turns out to be much harder than producing the circle of life. And Mendelsohn, in his critique of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, mentions Don Draper’s hubris often – this is my favorite passage from the Mad Men essay, a paragraph that delves into the “irrational reasons” for the show’s curious, magnetic appeal:

“I am dwelling on the deeper, almost irrational reasons for the series’ appeal – to which I will return later, and to which I am not at all immune, having myself been a child in the 1960s – because after watching the fifty-two episodes of Mad Men that have aired thus far, I find little else to justify it. We are currently living in a new golden age of television, a medium that has been liberated by cable broadcasting to explore both fantasy and reality with greater frankness and originality than ever before: as witness shows as different as the now-iconic crime dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci-fi hit Battlestar Galactica, which among other things is a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid; and the perennially underappreciated small-town drama Friday Night Lights, which offers, to my mind, the finest representation of middle-class marriage in popular culture.”

Do you see what Mendelsohn does there? In one short paragraph we come across Aeschylus and by association, his contemporaries Sophocles and Euripides, then there’s reference to the Aeneid, Virgil’s poem that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy where he became the ancestor of the Romans [reference], and all of this is before Mendelsohn gets to the Classics! In short, he challenges the very idea of Mad Men as a television show when it is held up against others, in this “new golden age of television…”

I’ll circle back to Mad Men but I’d like to stick with the Ancients (as it were) for a couple of paragraphs.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing
Meet Anne Carson, the renowned classical scholar, poet and sometime performance artist who also teaches ancient Greek. Carson appears in Mendelsohn’s essay “In Search of Sappho” where he discusses her book If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. She happens to have published a new book recently: Red Doc>. The author’s description on Amazon reads:

“Some years ago I wrote a book about a boy named Geryon who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles. Recently I began to wonder what happened to them in later life. Red Doc> continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”

The poet Daisy Fried wrote a lovely review of Red Doc>:

Geryon and Herakles reunite in “Red Doc>,” middle-aged. Geryon is now G, still a cattle-herder (of sorts) if not much of an artist, though he reads Proust and Daniil Kharms, the Russian Soviet-era surrealist-absurdist. Herakles is now called Sad But Great — “Sad,” for short. Sad is a traumatized veteran of a recent war. This adds a welcome political dimension rarely seen elsewhere in Carson’s work. G and Sad take a road trip, ending up at a strange clinic in an icy northland. A handful of other characters derive — nominally — from Greek mythology. Hermes is a mysterious man in a silver tuxedo who shows up every now and then to guide them. Io — the nymph turned into a cow by Zeus, then maddened by Hera’s gadfly — is the loveliest member of G’s herd, a sexy musk ox:

She is a beast
constructed for smooth
striding. Now long pelvic
muscles organize her and
the vast loosejointed
shoulders glide forward
into movement.

I’m new to Carson’s work and I’m just now digging in to Red Doc> which is a delight, because, as Fried says: “Each new Carson project comes with new parameters [edit]. Here’s what else she gets away with: Most of the poems in “Red Doc>” are delivered in narrow strips of type, justified at both margins like newspaper columns. It’s a format that counterintuitively speeds you down the page, as if creating a chute for language. It also constricts in ways that put useful pressure on the poems’ wild music and wilder state of mind.” And also of what Mendelsohn points out in his In Search of Sappho essay: “There are other details in Carson’s rendering of Fragment 31 that show a praiseworthy sensitivity to the original: “puts the heart in my chest on wings” is a stunning solution for the Greek eptoaisen, a word that conveys both a fearful shuddering and the airborne intention of beating wings; [...]

Carson pulls from her deep knowledge of the ancient Greek culture and delivers her prose-poem in a new way, bound in an old format, a book, one that doesn’t scream “Look at me, I AM NEW, AND MODERN.” An aside: The artist Karen Green appears to have done something similar in her new book, Bough Down, where she tells of her four short years married to David Foster Wallace.

Don Draper as Antigone? [A stretch]
Once more to Mad Men, and here I refer to Emily Nussbaum’s recap of Mad Men, one that focuses on Don Draper as the show’s “anchor,” not as in foundational rock but this – “[...] Don, instead of being the show’s engine, has become its anchor—heavy, even in the sixties sense.”

To recap: Don’s real name is Dick Whitman. His prostitute mother died in childbirth; his dad, her john, beat him. His fundamentalist stepmother called him a “whore’s child.” Then his father got kicked in the head by a horse, and the stepmother moved in with her sister, herself a prostitute, living in a brothel. The stepmother, heavily pregnant with Don’s half brother, prostituted herself to her brother-in-law, as the teen-age Don knelt outside her door. He watched them, through the keyhole, have sex. C’mon, now. This is no longer the backstory of a serial adulterer; it’s the backstory of a serial killer.

We haven’t even got to the part where Whitman goes to fight in Korea, accidentally blows up his superior officer, Don Draper, steals his identity, forms a secret relationship with his widow (she’s motherly, yet also somewhat prostitute-like, since he pays for her upkeep), becomes a greaser, and seduces a model who is also concerned primarily with appearances. Eventually, he gets into advertising, and when his half brother, Adam, finds him, Don rejects him, and Adam hangs himself. It’s not that none of this makes sense, or could make sense; it’s just too much, overdetermined. None of the other characters has this sort of reverse-engineered psychology, and for good reason: it’s a lazy way to impose meaning. Nested among better scenes, the flashbacks feel like a high-school production of “The Grapes of Wrath.” (Back in Season 1, when Don was canoodling with the department-store heiress Rachel Menken and reading “Exodus,” I wondered if his dark secret was that his mother was a Jew. Life was so much simpler then!)

Well, Nussbaum holds no punches there; she makes Don sound like a male version of Antigone.

In an opinion piece recently, on the occasion of Soren Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday, Yale graduate student, Ulrika Carlsonn writes: “[...] the most central theme in Soren Kierkegaard’s religious thought is the doctrine of original sin: the idea that we share in some essential human guilt simply by being born.” Hello, Don Draper? Does Dick Whitman’s re-birth as Don Draper condemn him to the curse of heredity guilt, which, as Carlsonn points out, Kierkegaard translated to mean “inheritance-guilt,” that is “especially appropriate for his modern Antigone, who considers the curse on her father not so much a disease as a birthright.”

Don’s heredity guilt runs deep. Deeper than him.

Daniel Mendelsohn points to more of Mad Men’s weaknesses:

The show’s directorial style is static, airless. Scenes tend to be boxed: actors will be arranged within a frame – sitting in a car, at a desk, on a bed – and then they recite their lines, and that’s that. Characters seldom enter (or leave) the frame while already engaged in some activity, already talking about something – a useful technique, which strongly gives the textured sense of the characters’ reality, that they exist outside of the script. As for the acting, it is unexceptional in general and occasionally downright amateurish. (The baby-doll performance of the porcelain-beautiful January Jones, as Mrs. Don Draper, is an embarrassment.) I am not one of those critics who admires the performance of Jon Hamm as Don, which seems to me to emblematize the glossy inauthenticity of the show in general. There is a long tradition of American actors who excel at suggesting the unconventional and sometimes unpleasant currents coursing beneath their appealing all-American looks: James Stewart was one; Matt Damon is, now, another. By contrast, you sometimes have the impression that Hamm was hired because he reminds you of advertisements, and after all the show is about advertising – he’s a foursquare, square-jawed fellow whose tormented interior we are constantly told about but never really feel. With rare exceptions (notably Robert Morse in an amusing cameo as the eccentric Japanophile partner Bert Cooper), the other actors in this show are “acting the atmosphere,” as directors like to say: they’re playing “Sixties people” rather than inhabiting this or that character, making him or her specific. Coupled with the fact that most of them are so awful, your sense of the characters as mere types – the loner with a secret, the prep, the philanderer, the bored housewife – short-circuits any possible connection to them. I cared more about what happened to the people in Friday Night Lights after one episode than I did for anyone in Mad Men after four seasons.

[Edit]

In its glossy, semaphoric style, its tendency to invoke rather than unravel this or that issue, the way it uses a certain visual allure to blind rather than to enlighten, Mad Men reminds you of nothing so much as a successful advertisement. Indeed, the great irony of Mad Men may be that it functions the way that ads function, rather than the way that serious drama functions: it’s suggestive rather than discursive, juxtaposing some potent pictures and words and hoping you’ll make the connection.

Mendelsohn’s big takeaway after all of his digging, is very simple: the show’s viewers tend to be “in their forties or early fifties…” and “…it occurs to you that this is, after all, how the adult world often looks to children.”

“The better a piece of art, the more rejection it will receive in its moment” – Seneca

Is Don Draper now living beyond his myth? Does anyone care? I think it’s worth noting that there is a bubble effect around this show – less than three million viewers watch Mad Men and according to Inside TV, it’s a modest hit. Compare that to Fonzie “Jumping the shark” – 30 million people saw that episode.

As a TV character we don’t really have to care about Don, (and I suspect a large part of the audience for Mad Men who may care, works in and around the advertising agency world anyway, and as Mendelsohn points out, given the timeline of the show, back to the sixties, those children on the show are actually us, today,) but is Mendelsohn missing something in his critique? Is the show not actually prescient about the future of advertising? Is Weiner looking backwards to move the plot forwards, showing us these heinous, unlovable characters as the dark side of advertising, a side that the children on the show see and understand, and in future would not want to be a part of an industry that doesn’t actually work toward “the shaping of products and services, showing people the life-enhancing potential of technology, and helping to get those things into people’s hands”? I can speak to this anecdotally, as each year I see a greater percentage of the students I teach in the SOJC at the University of Oregon, not wanting to join “advertising” companies.

Perhaps at the end of the day it all comes down to this: Hubris, also hybris, from ancient Greek ὕβρις, means extreme pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s own competence or capabilities.

So, no more Bar bar bar – we should all be speaking the same language.

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Karen Green was married to David Foster Wallace for four years. She has written a book, her first, one that Maggie Nelson says “[...] is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read.” I have ordered my own copy and it will arrive on Monday. I’m not sure that I will have the strength to read it.

A description from the book’s publisher:

With fearlessness and grace, Bough Down reports from deep inside the maelstrom of grief. In this profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the inscrutable space of love and loss, clarity and contradiction, sense and madness. She summons memory and the machination of the interior mind with the emotional acuity of music as she charts her passage through the devastation of her husband’s suicide. In crystalline fragments of text, Green’s voice is paradoxically confessional and non-confessional: moments in her journey are devastating but also luminous, exacting in sensation but also ambiguous and layered in meaning. Her world is haunted by the unnameable, and yet she renders that world with poetic precision in her struggle to make sense of not only of death but of living. In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, each made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world-pages torn from books, bits of paper refuse, drawings and photographs, old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Each collage–and the creative act of making it–evinces the reassembling of life. A breathtaking lyric elegy, Bough Down uses music and silence, color and its absence, authority of experience and the doubt that trembles at its center to fulfill a humane artistic vision. This is a lapidary, keenly observed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.

And Maggie Nelson has written a wonderful review.

KAREN GREEN’S NEW — and incredibly, her first — book Bough Down, from Siglio Press, is an astonishment. It is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read. The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, and its harrowing aftermath for Green. The book feels like an instant classic, but without any of the aggrandizement that can attend such a thing. Instead it is suffused throughout with the dissonant, private richness of the minor, while also managing to be a major achievement.

Upon first read, Bough Down feels disorienting and surreal — like entering a drugged wormhole of grief, pills, and barely tolerable engrams and emotions, which appear via allegory, hallucination, synecdoche, and blur. Upon rereading, however, the bones of the book’s structure become admirably clear. “June, black // Does it begin like this?” Green hovers at the start, before plunging into the day of Wallace’s death, her experience of finding his body, her dealings with the police, and the haze of public commemorations. (I’m feeling free in this review to use “Green” and “Wallace” instead of the more formalist/distanced “the speaker” and “her husband,” even though the text of the book avoids proper names.)

As the “support guys” become scarce, as they eventually must, we stay with Green — now alone, and haunted — in her house, her garden, her “village,” her mind, her body, her heart. We also bear witness to her own deepening relationship with psychiatrists and pharmaceuticals, which takes place in something of an echo chamber left by her husband, who struggled mightily to treat the depression which precipitated his suicide. The book charts the passage of time by moving through the seasons and stations of Green’s “non-linear, inelegant progress” of grief. Green smartly ends the book (spoiler alert!) “I can’t wrap this up” (how could she?), but nonetheless there is a real sense of progression and resolution in Bough Down, one that feels earned and wise, never cheap.

Indeed, while Bough Down is a memoir of grief, part of what keeps it from playing “the grief castanets” (to borrow Wayne Koestenbaum’s phrase) is the acuteness of Green’s sensibility. She suffers no fools, and instinctively calls out and rejects any trope that feels easy or predictable. She is never mean per se, but she is keen, as when she describes a “doppelganger widow” in town (presumably a woman who performs “outliving” almost professionally): “The doppelganger widow shows up at the most prestigious service draped on the most smartest and meanest support guy. She does not totter in her heels; she branches out with the graceful invulnerability of a coastal cypress.”

Full review here.

via Daring Fireball

Facebook Home isn’t an iPhone idea. It’s just a bad idea. Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or service, not just one.

There is a dogfooding lesson here, though. Does Mark Zuckerberg carry an HTC First, or any other Android phone with Facebook Home installed? Does Mike Matas? (Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets.) Why not?

It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself. Why does everyone I know who works at Apple carry an iPhone? Every single one? Not because they have to. It’s because they want to.

Turn Facebook Home into an interface that Facebook designers and engineers want to use, not merely feel obligated to use, and then they’ll have something. But if it remains something that even Facebook’s own designers and engineers do not prefer over the iPhone (or stock Android, or any other platform), if it remains something that the company needs propaganda posters to promote even among its own employees, then Facebook Home will remain what it is now. A dud.

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Agency of record + integrated campaign = win!

Just over a year ago we started a small experiment that we named SLAB, which is short for Social Lab. A year later we are proud to say that last night we won two awards at the 2013 Social Media Awards show: Best Agency, which is self explanatory, and Best Breaking Social, awarded for “Most innovative or unique use of a social tool, platform or application.” We want to say thanks to the SoMe awards judges for voting for us. I personally want to say thanks to Jessica Williams (center in the image above) and Alison Reilly (right in image) for their hard work and innovative ideas, not just on this campaign but on all of our client campaigns.

As the agency of record for KEEN footwear, the NORTH Social Lab was deployed in March 2012 to increase awareness and drive traffic to a campaign microsite. We quickly expanded our SLAB role and partnered with KEEN on social strategic direction, community management, campaign development, and analytics. Across KEEN’s social landscape we took on a wide scope of work, from a strategic advisory role to the introduction and maintenance of KEEN’s presence on social channels as follows.

– In 2012 KEEN expanded into three new social platforms: Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.

– After eleven months on Instagram, KEEN now has over 21,000 followers.

– KEEN reached its goal of making the Outdoor Industry Association’s Top Outdoor Brands on their Twitter list.

– KEEN currently resides at #8 on that list with over 33K followers, gaining 7K followers over the past six months.

– KEEN’s Pinterest, which was officially announced on May 15, boasts over 2.8M followers.

– KEEN’s Facebook fans have increased 65% over the course of the year.

– Blogger outreach efforts resulted in more than 500 contacts.

As with everything about the social web, collaboration and team work is important and the combined efforts of SLAB and KEEN’s Chris Enlow and Eric King came to fruition resulting in success for all involved. Also we want to give a shout out to Postano whose engagement platform we used to great effect on our Worldwide Recess Day campaign.

In a straightforward Digital Strategy sense, the goal of the NORTH Social Lab is to test and analyze across all the social web platforms, helping us to understand which platform results in the greatest success for our clients. It’s an ongoing experiment as the audience, especially young people, keeps shifting platforms. As more and more users transition to mobile-only platform access one of our insights is this: It’s not the device that is mobile; it’s the User. This means that more than ever we are focusing on our five “W’s” – Who, What, Why, When, Where?

We look forward to continuing to create more successful social web campaigns for our clients in 2013.

For those of you who are interested in our Social Media Awards submission, you will find everything here.

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This article titled “Daft Punk’s retro album Random Access Memories gets Shard debut” was written by Dorian Lynskey, for The Guardian on Tuesday 14th May 2013 16.12 UTC

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Shortly before sunset on Monday night dozens of guests made their way up to the top of the Shard for the UK launch of Daft Punk’s latest album, Random Access Memories.

Guests in the landmark skyscraper at London Bridge were heard to remark that it felt like a throwback to a more affluent era, when record labels could regularly afford such flamboyant gestures.

Everything about Daft Punk’s fourth album stands out from the rest of the modern industry like the Shard does from the London skyline: bold, divisive, unfeasibly big and impossible to ignore.

Daft Punk’s feverishly debated promotional campaign would be spectacular coming from an established superstar. It is the more remarkable for being conceived by two shy Frenchmen who have not been photographed without their robot helmets since the 90s and who made their previous three albums (Homework, Discovery and Human After All) at their homes on modest budgets.
Only David Bowie’s comeback has generated equivalent excitement this year. It is typical of the attention to detail and insistence on creative independence that has defined Daft Punk’s career since their first single 20 years ago.

"The only secret to being in control is to have it in the start," Thomas Bangalter, one half of the Daft Punk band, tells the Observer Magazine this Sunday. "Retaining control is still hard but obtaining control is virtually impossible."

Daft Punk have said that Random Access Memories is an attempt to revive the "magic" of the event albums that soundtracked their childhoods. Professing themselves bored with electronic music, they worked with crack session musicians and some musical heroes in various studios and cities.

The promotional campaign is similarly interested in looking back in order to go forward. A teaser video released on Monday – showing a robot lovingly dropping the needle onto a vinyl copy of the album – sums up the duo’s retro-futurist aesthetic.

Daft Punk’s sense of heritage explains their alliance with Columbia Records, which celebrates its 125th birthday this year. They approached Columbia last summer – having already financed the recording of the album themselves – with detailed promotional plans, including vast billboards on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

"We wanted it to be a campaign of weight, like when record companies had the confidence that they had a big, big, record," Columbia Records’ chief executive, Rob Stringer, recently told Billboard magazine.

Secrecy was enforced by withholding key information and making everyone who came into contact with the record sign strict non-disclosure agreements.

A fascination with enduring American cultural institutions led the duo to break the news of the album with an advertisement on Saturday Night Live, on 2 March, featuring a 15-second loop of the single Get Lucky. Eager fans quickly posted their own extended versions on YouTube.

"The internet allows for a very interactive and playful connection with the audience," said Bangalter. "It’s almost like a striptease where you see something gradually instead of uncovering it as a whole."

There has been little traditional promotion by the pair themselves, who dislike interviews and have decided not to tour. They outsourced much of the press publicity to guest performers such as Pharrell Williams and the loquacious Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers.

Each key musician on the record filmed an interview for the Collaborators series on the band’s website, shot using 16mm film stock by the veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman.

On 14 April, a clip from the video for Get Lucky was debuted at the Coachella festival in California, inspiring more buzz in 90 seconds than most of the bands on the bill.

Get Lucky, an unusually straightforward disco anthem, had the hardest job of all: setting up the album with a bona fide hit single.

So far it has topped the UK charts for three weeks and broken Spotify’s record for the most streams in a single day, attracting the kind of new listener who does not get excited about Saturday Night Live commercials.

The only apparent deviation from Daft Punk’s plan was the worldwide streaming of the album on Monday, which replaced an eccentric scheme to debut it at the Wee Waa annual show in New South Wales, Australia, on Friday.

It is uncertain what lessons the industry will draw from the success of Random Access Memories, because no other band has Daft Punk’s influence (on other performers such as Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Kanye West) and mystique.

The pair’s last album, in 2005 and entitled Human After All, flopped; their 2007 art movie Electroma was little seen, and their score for the 2010 sci-fi film Tron: Legacy, had mixed reviews.

Only their groundbreaking 2006-7 tour, a pivotal influence on America’s subsequent electronic dance music boom, was an unmitigated triumph.

Yet here they are in 2013, looking very much like one of the biggest bands in the world. Perhaps the only lesson is that it is, after all, possible to make a huge impact by being bold and doing things differently.

Critics of the industry dismiss hype as a kind of brainwashing imposed from above, but hype only works if the excitement is widely and genuinely shared.

Guests at the Shard party wondered whether Daft Punk themselves were there – anonymous without their helmets.

They were not, but then they did not need to be. In an era obsessed with celebrity, these two canny Frenchmen have somehow managed to create an unprecedented sense of occasion while staying in the shadows.

Read an exclusive interview with Daft Punk in the Observer Magazine this Sunday.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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//

Today I am testing the repost service to bring you this somewhat hyperbolic article from Pando Daily, written by Brandon Mendelson.

I’ve often written about the social media shell game, for e.g. Social Media Marketing Sells Social Media, but refrained from going after the proponents – Mendelson is happy to fire on all cylinders and seems to have ruffled the feathers of Gary Vaynerchuk. In between the flying lead he makes some good points about what those “social media proponents” brought down upon their own heads, and how they are attempting to change the messaging around the term “social media” and push the idea of “real-time marketing” as the new sell.

Let’s face it, we could talk about this until the cows come home, but really danah boyd summed it up best when she wrote “[...] when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption.”

Social media may finally be dying, but the BS around it hasn’t (via Pando Daily)

By Brandon Mendelson On May 13, 2013. Editor’s note: Gary Vaynerchuk disputes three points in the story. He says he never used a book-buying service like ResultSource. That is, he says, a “categorical lie.” Gary says he appeared on Conan and Ellen before being represented by CAA, and says…

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In a post last week I pointed to an article by Ryan Holiday that had a sub-header titled “Native Ads Are the Next Advertising Hustle.” Holiday’s article mentioned the debacle that ensued when The Atlantic partnered with the Church of Scientology, allowing the church to run a content piece disguised as op-ed. Jack Shafer has some good insights into that story and on “native advertising” and “sponsored content” in general here.

Here’s an extract:

When Web publishers deliberately blur the visual and textual divide that separates editorial from advertising, as The Atlantic did, they force readers to judge whether a page is news/opinion or a commercial advertisement. But they’re not confused; it’s the publisher and the advertiser who are confused. The publishers and advertisers have polluted their own tradition by erasing the traditional line. Suddenly, it’s completely reasonable for readers to blame controversial news stories directly on advertisers and blame controversial advertisements directly on reporters and editors, because publishers and advertisers have essentially merged operations. Such calamities injure both publisher and advertiser, even already controversial advertisers like Scientology. (In The Atlantic‘s defense, it should be noted that it ultimately conceded that it “screwed up” the presentation of its advertisers message and promised to do better in the future.)

The Atlantic debacle hasn’t stilled the enthusiasm of Web publishers for sponsored content. Lewis DVorkin of Forbes, an early promulgator of sponsored content, continues to bang his drum for it. He claims 20 partners (SAP, UPS, Harris Bank, et al.) for Forbes‘s “BrandVoice.” It’s enough to make you barricade yourself behind Orwell’s collected works when DVorkin approvingly quotes his chief revenue officer’s quip about BrandVoice: “It’s not an ad, it’s thought leadership.”

No, Lewis. If money moved from the client’s hand to that of Forbes, and Forbes posted the client’s copy, it’s an ad.

Robert Cringely has some thoughts too in his post Here lies Web Journalism: Dead at the hand of the almighty advertiser.

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a hullabaloo over online ads masquerading as editorial on the Web these days. I’m here to tell you that the situation is actually much worse than you might think.

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