Xark!

Kindle Fire & "direct-to-consumer" marketing

Martin Langeveld (Neiman/Harvard) came out this morning with a big prediction for the new Amazon Fire tablet:

The advent of the Kindle Fire will impact every business engaged in advertising, from your local weekly newspaper to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Groupon, because it will vastly accelerate the transformation to direct-to-consumer marketing by merchants, manufacturers, and service providers, without the traditional interpolation of advertisements to drive buyers to sellers.

It's a good piece, worth reading.

But there's a logic to commercial information in this Media Interregnum that I need to keep emphasizing, because it's as true now as it was when I began beating this drum six years ago.

1. Advertising (renting the attention of consumers to sellers) puts publishers in the business of representing the interest of the seller;
2. As consumer attention fragments and advertising becomes ubiquitous, basic market principles will continue to drive down the ad rates that publishers receive;
3. Commercial media saturation creates a new problem for buyers.They need help cutting through the low-value sales-pitch clutter to find products (CNET) and services (Angie's List) that actually suit their individual needs;
4. Businesses that recognize this opportunity move from representing the interests of the seller (help me sell the thing I want to sell) to representing the interests of the buyer (help me select the right thing for me).
5. By adding the option of moving directly from research to purchasing ("My Shopping Cart"), businesses generate revenue by adding value for the user (comparing products in useful ways), the seller (providing quality commercial information about the seller's product)  and both buyer and seller (by handling the transaction). The result is a virtual marketplace in which a share of every transaction belongs to the business that brings buyer and seller together;.
6. Internet-era businesses following this logic have created successful digital marketplaces for products that are the same no matter where you buy them (Amazon), products that can be hard to find in your town (HuckNroll), discounted products (O.co), and products that can be shipped cheaply and returned easily (Zappos); 
7. The challenge for publishers who serve specific physical communities (news of interest only to this town or that one) is to organize efficient, tailored virtual marketplaces for brick-and-mortar businesses in those communities. These transactions are often more complex than buying books online, but they are also more valuable because they are more complex;
8. To capture that value, local publishers must shift from publishing and structuring information solely on behalf of sellers and put the user at the center of their business model. Only then can they create marketplaces in which they receive a cut of every transaction;
9. Doing this will not only create a more profitable business model, it will improve the trust that individual users give to the non-commercial information a publisher provides;
10. And, finally, by doing this, they will begin to reap higher advertising rates. Because if you're a car dealer, whose attention do you really want to rent? The person who just wants to watch a ball game, or the person who is -- today, right now -- actively looking to buy a car?

What is truly conservative?

This is Henry Wallace, a Republican businessman, agricultural scientist and newspaper editor who -- despite his party affiliation -- became Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. For more than seven years, Wallace did that job so well that Roosevelt named him as his as his vice-presidential running mate in 1940. Had it not been for a revolt among Democratic delegates at their 1944 convention, Vice President Wallace would have become the 33rd President of the United States instead of Harry S. Truman.

There are all sorts of interesting facts about Wallace, an Iowan whose research into crop yields changed the way we grow corn today and later led to the first genetic corn hybrids, which have done wonders to increase food production around the world.

But here's what's truly remarkable about the man from my perspective. As Wallace arrived in Washington in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, America's heartland had become a radical place. Midwestern farmers had been suffering through their own recession for years before the stock crash in 1929, and the Depression only made their already desperate crisis worse. By the time Wallace took office, American farmers -- generally considered then as now a practical and conservative bunch -- were on the brink of open, violent rebellion. Not right-wing rebellion, mind you. Left-wing, socialist, communist rebellion.

On writing, and other forms of bullshit

Once upon a time, maybe as recently as 2006, I loved writing. I'd always hoped to earn my living by putting words together, and to be a professional writer and editor, in a community of professional writers and editors, thrilled me. Sometimes it thrilled me several times a week.

For instance, in 2000 I helped launch an anonymous newspaper column called Good Morning Lowcountry, which ran half a page, seven days a week, in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. GMLc was the work of no single writer in its early years, so several of us shared the duties, churning through local topics and mild obsessions and odd bits of Lowcountry trivia like a pack of raccoons rooting through trailer park garbage cans. Every now and then we'd even pause between deadlines to talk about the experience and its process, prompting me once to write a GMLc with the self-absorbed subhead "This Writing Life," in which I attempted to share the good-humored, arty, third-person-objective camaraderie of it all.

Now, of course, I just wish everyone would shut up and get on with it.

There is no more thoroughly boring topic than writing, and if you doubt this, listen to a public radio interviewer ask a Famous Author to talk about his or her process, or even worse, his or her deeper thoughts on language or storytelling..

The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger (script)

 

If you haven't seen this one before, where have you been? And even if you have seen it, you might not have noticed how it's taken over the world, selling more T-shirts than Old Navy and prompting half the people in America under the age of 30 to say at least once, "honey badger don't care." Based solely on his access to the brains of our young, this guy Randall, who does new voiceovers for old nature videos, is one of the most influential men in the United States.

But what else does he say? Since I couldn't find a script online, I decided to transcribe it. So I do all the work, like the honey badger, and you come around and pick up the scraps."Thanks for the script, stupid!"

This is the honey badger. Watch it run in slow motion.

It's pretty badass. Look. It runs all over the place. "Whoa! Watch out!" says that bird.

Eew, it's got a snake! Oh! It's chasing a jackal! Oh my gosh!

Intent, art and the 21st century

So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared in Arts Magazine -- as a work of art -- with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit:

1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist" in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded fo him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode -- and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture... and came out the other side as Art Theory!... Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision inivisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975

The tragedy of re-reading Wolfe's short masterpiece today, 29 years after I first encountered it, is its sad failure in predicting the future of artistic taste. Back in the mid-seventies, The Man in the White Suit felt confident that the world would come to its senses by the year 2000, that artists and collectors and writers would look back on the artistic period 1945-1975 with head-shaking wonder. "What happy hours await them all!" he wrote. "With what sniggers, laughter and good-humored amazement will they look back upon the era of the Painted Word!"

Sadly, Old Tom failed to appreciate the gravity of our 20th century intellectual failures, for we remain incapable of escaping their black-hole pull. The Grand Duchy of Art Theory that Wolfe skewered wasn't some post-war aberration: it was an Event Horizon, a point-of-no-return from which a once-cohesive culture doesn't simply recover. From art to literature to political science, the intellectuals of the mid-to-late 20th century pursued abstraction for the sake of theoretical purity, rendered their fields impotent and irrelevant, and then hid the keys to understanding within an arcane codex of self-referential gibberish that only members of their self-selecting academy could hope to understand.

It is this reason more than any other -- more than mass media, more than politics, more than economics, science or religion -- that accounts for the fraying of our current culture. As I wrote in 2005: