Back in the 1970s, in the darkest days of mass media, we were all still presumed to be industrial age workers looking for life-long jobs. After a tough day at the office or factory, we might come home and watch TV or listen to music by privileged, aging, post-hippie rock bands still selling us dreams of sex, drugs, rock and roll and liberation -- provided to us by the music companies. As a young musician (vocalist) in a small town, the idea that you could get together and write and perform original music was simply unthinkable. One of my talented friends became a clone of Todd Rundgren and played nothing but Todd music, occasionally performing in a Rundgren/Utopia clone band. Another friend played nothing but Frank Zappa. That kid was so talented on the guitar that he couldn’t find anybody else to play with. Another friend of mine became Keith Richard (you can just imagine), and he played that shit better than Ron Woods does! That suited my vocal style (Mick-like) so we learned every song in the catalogue, but performed only once.
I wrote lots of song lyrics myself but nobody in Binghamton, New York could even imagine starting an original band. Neither, no doubt, could anyone imagine making an independent film or video that anyone would actually see, etc.
If you weren’t there, it’s hard to get across the complete lack of a sense of confidence and power that those of us with a creative streak had in those days. You had to go out and make it really big or you had to give up. You could go out and become a monstrously popular band worthy of a recording contract or move to Hollywood and navigate the TV and film industries. Most likely, you decided that the creative life – where your voice would be heard – was beyond reach, and you accepted your silencing with bitter resignation.
What changed that wasn’t the Internet. What changed it was a bunch of frantic young weirdos with spiky hair and anarchy on their minds. Starting in around 1977, a Do It Yourself (DIY) ethic appeared around punk rock (the music style had been going on in NYC since about 1974). Slowly but surely, young people everywhere got the idea that they could pick up the cheapest tools available to them, learn to play a few chords, start a band, start a small independent music label, start a music club, start a punk “zine”, make punk clothes, ad infinitum.
When I returned to Binghamton New York for a visit in the mid-1980s, all of those friends had been in bands that played original music. They’d made their own records. The “Keith Richards” guy had gotten into making small films and had wound up hanging out with Jack Nicholson in LA. Nobody really made much money, but everybody got a sense of self and a sense of agency in the world. In the context of contemporary culture, THIS is where the “long tail” started.
Of course, one can’t go back and rerun history to see what would have happened if punk rock hadn’t risen up from some strange place in the American and British psyche. But the generations after punk never had any doubts that if they had something to express, there was a way to go out and express it. They new that they didn’t have to be media consumers only. They could be creators (or prosumers.) It is my contention that the entire distributed, participatory internet culture with its YouTubers and bloggers ad infinitum would have gone through a very long slow birth if the new generations hadn’t grown up just assuming that they could “Do It Yourself.” The early adopters would have been far fewer – the ramp up would have been much slower. It’s even conceivable that a more corporate vision of the internet – internet as shopping mall – might have become dominant.
Today, as we decentralize and distribute everything, including jobs and business, we are all punk rockers.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Micro-Branding
Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog linked recently to a fascinating essay by Mohammed Iqbal of Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. At the start of the essay, Iqbal writes about a “celebrated speech at Cannes last year” delivered by Lord Maurice Saatchi. Saatchi told the audience that “To succeed in a world of message fragmentation, media fragmentation, continuous partial attention (CPA), and non-existent day-after-recalls (DAR), one has to hone the brand positioning relentlessly, until only one word – yes, one measly word remained. Two words were one word too many, as Lord Saatchi reminded those pleading for lenience.”
And then Iqbal goes ahead and tears Saatchi a new one. (Maybe Saatchi should stick to sponsoring shocking post-Duchampian art exhibits.) The article goes on to refute the premise and proposes that more is better – people want richer content, information and memes that suit them personally, and even branding games that they can participate in. In the distributed word Pajama People are demanding more, not less.
Iqbal writes: “Russell Davies, planner provocateur and ex-world wide planning head of Nike, wrote on his blog (though not directly in response to Lord Saatchi’s speech) : “What people actually want is stuff with some complexity, some meat, some richness. Stuff that has depth, humour, tension, drama etc etc. Not stuff that's distilled to a simple essence or refined to a single compelling truth. No one ever came out of a movie and said "I really liked that. It was really clear." Clarity is important to our research methodologies, not to our consumers.
“Judging by the reaction to this post and by the Mexican wave of blog posts and comments criticizing One Word Equity, it was obvious this idea of brand polyphony (as Russell calls it) was infectious and appealing. It’s appealing because we ourselves as consumers seek it. We find fault in movie-characters for being too uni-dimensional. We say people are uninteresting (or boring) if their range of interests or conversations are too narrow.”
The piece is worth quoting from extensively.
“The fragmentation and abundance of media has now helped lower the barriers to connecting the supply and demand of more brand messages – theoretically of all possible brand messages.
“For eg, Volvo’s primary brand proposition could continue to be safety. But if there’re people out there who relate to it as a stylish car, you can create communication tailor-made for them. Simultaneously, another bunch of people might actually like a Volvo for its European-ness. No longer will they have to ignore that connection and only seek ‘safety’ in Volvos.”
“In a long tail world, the real opportunity is not in pre-filtering what’s available but in making everything available to everybody. And providing the aggregated audience the tools to sort out what’s good from what’s not (like Flickr does for photos with its folksonomy, for eg.)”
“In a long tail brand communication, all possible brand messages are simultaneously available in the market.”
“When you have infinite choice, context is more important than content. For too long advertisers and communicators have focused only on what they are saying and not enough on who they are speaking to and where the conversation is happening. And even when they do so, they have almost always painted the picture with broad and all-encompassing brushstrokes.”
Read the entire essay (WARNING: pdf file)
http://blaiq.typepad.com/occams_razor/files/the_elongating_tail_of_brand_communication_by_mohammed_iqbal.pdf
And then Iqbal goes ahead and tears Saatchi a new one. (Maybe Saatchi should stick to sponsoring shocking post-Duchampian art exhibits.) The article goes on to refute the premise and proposes that more is better – people want richer content, information and memes that suit them personally, and even branding games that they can participate in. In the distributed word Pajama People are demanding more, not less.
Iqbal writes: “Russell Davies, planner provocateur and ex-world wide planning head of Nike, wrote on his blog (though not directly in response to Lord Saatchi’s speech) : “What people actually want is stuff with some complexity, some meat, some richness. Stuff that has depth, humour, tension, drama etc etc. Not stuff that's distilled to a simple essence or refined to a single compelling truth. No one ever came out of a movie and said "I really liked that. It was really clear." Clarity is important to our research methodologies, not to our consumers.
“Judging by the reaction to this post and by the Mexican wave of blog posts and comments criticizing One Word Equity, it was obvious this idea of brand polyphony (as Russell calls it) was infectious and appealing. It’s appealing because we ourselves as consumers seek it. We find fault in movie-characters for being too uni-dimensional. We say people are uninteresting (or boring) if their range of interests or conversations are too narrow.”
The piece is worth quoting from extensively.
“The fragmentation and abundance of media has now helped lower the barriers to connecting the supply and demand of more brand messages – theoretically of all possible brand messages.
“For eg, Volvo’s primary brand proposition could continue to be safety. But if there’re people out there who relate to it as a stylish car, you can create communication tailor-made for them. Simultaneously, another bunch of people might actually like a Volvo for its European-ness. No longer will they have to ignore that connection and only seek ‘safety’ in Volvos.”
“In a long tail world, the real opportunity is not in pre-filtering what’s available but in making everything available to everybody. And providing the aggregated audience the tools to sort out what’s good from what’s not (like Flickr does for photos with its folksonomy, for eg.)”
“In a long tail brand communication, all possible brand messages are simultaneously available in the market.”
“When you have infinite choice, context is more important than content. For too long advertisers and communicators have focused only on what they are saying and not enough on who they are speaking to and where the conversation is happening. And even when they do so, they have almost always painted the picture with broad and all-encompassing brushstrokes.”
Read the entire essay (WARNING: pdf file)
http://blaiq.typepad.com/occams_razor/files/the_elongating_tail_of_brand_communication_by_mohammed_iqbal.pdf
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
PajamaManufacturing
You are ready for the homeworker revolution. But are you ready for the home manufacturer revolution?
Over the last couple of years, some of us have been hearing about MIT’s FabLab (officially “The Center for Bits and Atoms”). Professor Neil Gershenfeld has been leading a potential revolution in desktop manufacturing (the fab in fabrication). The idea is that a PC could “drive a printer that deposits material in layers to form three-dimensional objects.” For the moment, this is useful primarily for prototypes or mini-manufacturing (manufacturing of object with limited public demand), but let your imagination wander.
The most advanced desktop fabricators are also known as 3-D printers. They cost about $25,000 - $35,000 and they fit comfortably into a home office.They’ve been used for a wide variety of things including architecture and medicine. According to Bruce Sterling, most of them work “by assembling bits of powder and glue or depositing layer upon layer of ceramic, paper, or plastic.”
Now, Cornell University is joining into the 3-D manufacturer-printer world. A home manufacturing free-for-all can’t be to far away.
To quote an article from the “New Science Tech” website, “Some day, Lipson believes, every home will have a ‘fabber,’ a machine that replicates objects from plans supplied by a computer. Such devices could change how we acquire common products, he suggests: Instead of buying an iPod, you would download the plans over the Internet and the fabber would make one for you.
Read entire article.
Over the last couple of years, some of us have been hearing about MIT’s FabLab (officially “The Center for Bits and Atoms”). Professor Neil Gershenfeld has been leading a potential revolution in desktop manufacturing (the fab in fabrication). The idea is that a PC could “drive a printer that deposits material in layers to form three-dimensional objects.” For the moment, this is useful primarily for prototypes or mini-manufacturing (manufacturing of object with limited public demand), but let your imagination wander.
The most advanced desktop fabricators are also known as 3-D printers. They cost about $25,000 - $35,000 and they fit comfortably into a home office.They’ve been used for a wide variety of things including architecture and medicine. According to Bruce Sterling, most of them work “by assembling bits of powder and glue or depositing layer upon layer of ceramic, paper, or plastic.”
Now, Cornell University is joining into the 3-D manufacturer-printer world. A home manufacturing free-for-all can’t be to far away.
To quote an article from the “New Science Tech” website, “Some day, Lipson believes, every home will have a ‘fabber,’ a machine that replicates objects from plans supplied by a computer. Such devices could change how we acquire common products, he suggests: Instead of buying an iPod, you would download the plans over the Internet and the fabber would make one for you.
Read entire article.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
PajamaJournalism
An exciting piece in Wired News today about a project called Assignment Zero, a project that could also be called “PajamaJournalism.” We all know that some of the better bloggers out there have been correcting false news reports and factchecking the mainstream media for the last several years. But Assignment Zero is the first project we know of – with any seriousness of intention -- that tries to organize itself as a sort-of open source, decentralized news service.
And their first area of investigation is right up PajamaNation’s alley:
"We're going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler's complete term is "commons-based peer production.") This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they're paid to assist."
Read the entire piece
And their first area of investigation is right up PajamaNation’s alley:
"We're going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler's complete term is "commons-based peer production.") This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they're paid to assist."
Read the entire piece
Famous To 15 People
It’s not my intention here to brag, but back in 1989 I published a tribute to Andy Warhol where I predicted that in the digital age, every individual would be a multimedia corporation – an “art factory.” “In the future,” I wrote, “everybody will be famous to fifteen people.” That’s the Long Tail!
This is closely related to the idea behind Pajamanation. But you don’t have to be in media to participate in this sociocultural shift, you just need to have a skill or service to offer and a way to get online regularly.
As Thomas Friedman has written, communications and other technologies have made the world “flat” – it’s put us all into the same space, provided we are able to get online. And it’s increasingly distributed the desktop tools that we need to produce work at the same level as large institutions. For example, the editing power that used to cost a video filmmaker $500,000 now comes in software that can cost as little as $500 or in some cases can be had for free.
Anyway, if you’re here, you probably already know about this paradigm shift. Over the weeks, months and years to come, I will be blogging here about this new world that Pajamanation is here to service. I will post about – and link to – not only materials directly related to micro-entrepreneurialism and the decentralization of work, but the decentralization of all aspects of social relations, whether it involves people getting their entertainment on YouTube or their gourmet foods at a specialty shop instead of sticking with the supermarket.
I will also be exploring the economics and politics of the flat world 10, 20, 30 years out… (all in good time)
For starters, I think you will find this piece on San Francisco’s Neo-Nomads or Cyber-Bedouins a vivid reflection of our PajamaCulture. It is all about people who have turned our local coffee shops into their home offices.
Not that this is terribly new. The San Francisco Chronicle has run this same basic story every three years since 1994. It’s just that the convenience and the ease and the transportable digital power keeps growing exponentially, so more people can nomadize their work activity better.
RU Sirius
This is closely related to the idea behind Pajamanation. But you don’t have to be in media to participate in this sociocultural shift, you just need to have a skill or service to offer and a way to get online regularly.
As Thomas Friedman has written, communications and other technologies have made the world “flat” – it’s put us all into the same space, provided we are able to get online. And it’s increasingly distributed the desktop tools that we need to produce work at the same level as large institutions. For example, the editing power that used to cost a video filmmaker $500,000 now comes in software that can cost as little as $500 or in some cases can be had for free.
Anyway, if you’re here, you probably already know about this paradigm shift. Over the weeks, months and years to come, I will be blogging here about this new world that Pajamanation is here to service. I will post about – and link to – not only materials directly related to micro-entrepreneurialism and the decentralization of work, but the decentralization of all aspects of social relations, whether it involves people getting their entertainment on YouTube or their gourmet foods at a specialty shop instead of sticking with the supermarket.
I will also be exploring the economics and politics of the flat world 10, 20, 30 years out… (all in good time)
For starters, I think you will find this piece on San Francisco’s Neo-Nomads or Cyber-Bedouins a vivid reflection of our PajamaCulture. It is all about people who have turned our local coffee shops into their home offices.
Not that this is terribly new. The San Francisco Chronicle has run this same basic story every three years since 1994. It’s just that the convenience and the ease and the transportable digital power keeps growing exponentially, so more people can nomadize their work activity better.
RU Sirius
Thursday, March 8, 2007
I did not do it!
Sometimes a minute of inattentiveness can change your life forever.
Yesterday, my friend and management team member, the incomparable RU Sirius, America's Cultural Icon, wrote me a mail saying that he had copy-edited our pajamanation website. RU has some subtle manoeuvers in semantic darkness that make a text suddenly seem reaching out to you. He also asked me to pay a small bill on penpal. I had not heard about penpal before, but thought it was probably something San Francisco like, that was the writer's or artist version of paypal. So I logged into the site, accessed and immediately registered. It asked for my name, my day of birth, my year of birth, my month of birth, my address and it went into a new screen. I was expecting it to ask for my credit card when an extraordinary question popped up: have you finished high school or more? As I was just having a telephone conversation on the other end, I just indicated that I had 'more' and then the second question came: what sort of friends are you looking for? I did not really know what to reply, so thinking of Ken I said, 'writers'. Then I was logged in.
Later Ken send me a mail saying, of course, that he meant Paypal. To my amazement I went back to the site I registered in and found myself between teens and preteens from Alabama who exchange extraordinary items of information such as : 'hi I am josh and I have a cat.' Then I saw myself, a white male from Belgium, 50 years old (!) saying 'I am looking for writer penpals' please respond to my address w@pajamanation.com. There was also an automatic mention 'yes I am availalable in a chat room'. Oh my God.
Ken, man, I could go to jail for this. The site is in Texas!!
Yesterday, my friend and management team member, the incomparable RU Sirius, America's Cultural Icon, wrote me a mail saying that he had copy-edited our pajamanation website. RU has some subtle manoeuvers in semantic darkness that make a text suddenly seem reaching out to you. He also asked me to pay a small bill on penpal. I had not heard about penpal before, but thought it was probably something San Francisco like, that was the writer's or artist version of paypal. So I logged into the site, accessed and immediately registered. It asked for my name, my day of birth, my year of birth, my month of birth, my address and it went into a new screen. I was expecting it to ask for my credit card when an extraordinary question popped up: have you finished high school or more? As I was just having a telephone conversation on the other end, I just indicated that I had 'more' and then the second question came: what sort of friends are you looking for? I did not really know what to reply, so thinking of Ken I said, 'writers'. Then I was logged in.
Later Ken send me a mail saying, of course, that he meant Paypal. To my amazement I went back to the site I registered in and found myself between teens and preteens from Alabama who exchange extraordinary items of information such as : 'hi I am josh and I have a cat.' Then I saw myself, a white male from Belgium, 50 years old (!) saying 'I am looking for writer penpals' please respond to my address w@pajamanation.com. There was also an automatic mention 'yes I am availalable in a chat room'. Oh my God.
Ken, man, I could go to jail for this. The site is in Texas!!
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Me, My skills and I
A few years ago, I made a radical change in my way of thinking. I suddenly realized it had taken my partner 15 years to delete 20 years of education my parents and the system had given me. I am french and under the pretext of being leftish, in favor of a world of solidarity and equality they taught me to play the cards life had given me the best I could. I was allowed sometimes to change the combination of the cards but that was it, never the cards itself.
But what if the cards are not good no matter what the combination is? What if this configuration is just not in harmony with your skills and your need of self-realization? What if you need other cards and you actually even don't know it? And worse, you don't how to get those cards because you have nor the courage nor the knowledge to do so.
Well this is what my partner taught me: you don't like your cards, get others! It is very fashionable to be assertieve, but in reality, the voices of mummies and daddies are hard-wired and sound through walls: be careful don't lose your job... Be careful or you will lose your job... Dont' say that or you will not have the job... Keep your job or you will have no pension!
Well here is the bad news and the good news at once: my generation will not have a pension.
We must try to start our own business, from home, at our ease. We must take care of ourselves, of our lives, of our destiny, we have to try. No more mummies and daddies whispering 'I told you so' every time you have a bad day, or your income is less than expected. All that rebellion and assertiveness was finally worth it but now I need a second step. I need a community. There is no government on earth coming to rescue me. It is up to me, my skills and I.
Sam
But what if the cards are not good no matter what the combination is? What if this configuration is just not in harmony with your skills and your need of self-realization? What if you need other cards and you actually even don't know it? And worse, you don't how to get those cards because you have nor the courage nor the knowledge to do so.
Well this is what my partner taught me: you don't like your cards, get others! It is very fashionable to be assertieve, but in reality, the voices of mummies and daddies are hard-wired and sound through walls: be careful don't lose your job... Be careful or you will lose your job... Dont' say that or you will not have the job... Keep your job or you will have no pension!
Well here is the bad news and the good news at once: my generation will not have a pension.
We must try to start our own business, from home, at our ease. We must take care of ourselves, of our lives, of our destiny, we have to try. No more mummies and daddies whispering 'I told you so' every time you have a bad day, or your income is less than expected. All that rebellion and assertiveness was finally worth it but now I need a second step. I need a community. There is no government on earth coming to rescue me. It is up to me, my skills and I.
Sam
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