by Ben Atlas on 12.31.2009.6:37pm
Few weeks back I had a pleasure of getting together with the America’s Rabbi Shmuley Boteach at the Carlebach Shule in Manhattan, the famous place where they mastered the melodic lip service to getting high. I don’t think I have ever met a person in my life who can drop that many names per minute, but this is not what I would like to write about. As I was listening to Shmuley it suddenly dawned on me. I was wondering why the average thinkers such as Malcolm Cladwell are so popular and then I read the article about Malcolm in the Guardian where he says: “I’m interested in the slightly dumb and obvious, not the deeply weird and obscure” and “I like to think I’m on the high side of the middle. Upper-middlebrow…” So there, Malcolm Cladwell admits the mediocrity of his populist work but at least he reserves the claim to the effort required in the dumbing down.
As I was listening to Shmuley Boteach I realized this he doesn’t have to lower himself to the low-middlebrow. He is a natural. Why mediocrity of this sort attracts that much attention? When I would tell people – “the merchandise is thin”, they would reply: “I like him because he really means it, he is sincere”. Indeed he is sincere, earnest and enthusiastic in his pedestrian populism. This is really the secret of the popularity of all the “speakers” in that universe. The bar is so low, yet an intellectual midget still walks under it holding his head high. It’s that middlebrow affirmation that the crowds seek so desperately and Shmuley Boteach delivers the smackdown uppercut under the middlebrow effortlessly.
by Ben Atlas on 12.22.2009.12:32am
Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Google – The meaning of open. Worth reading closely.
by Ben Atlas on 12.20.2009.4:30pm
Susan Blond is the sister of Laurel Blond AKA the Rebbetzin Leba Tropper. Here is the promotional clip for her PR agency where she tells about her days with Andy Warhol. I think Susan Blond is super cool! ►►►read more
Expanding on my thesis A Book as a Souvenir Michael Wolff writes:
“Books are a sales tool. They’re propaganda.
And they’re fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue.
It’s a sleight of hand. A bait and switch. It’s not that there is anything wrong, or at least out of the ordinary, with salesmanship or promotional copy, or with even saying you wrote what your ghostwriter wrote. This is the stuff of speeches, advertising, and testimonials. What’s insidious here is that these forms, which are understood to be insincere and a confection, are now in the guise of a book, which is understood to be genuine and substantial.
And, indeed, people are fooled. And, to the extent that readers are not fooled (and reading just a few paragraphs of these books, if you do read them, ought to raise questions), the form of the book itself is undermined. Books lose value and meaning. Real readers come to understand there are fewer and fewer real books.
Publishers publish fake books because, if you have an “author” who has some larger cause to promote, the publisher gets free promotion. What the publisher has traded for such an abundance of promotion is its own brand. HarperCollins does not really believe Sarah Palin has written a valuable book—or even that it is really a book, not in the way that HarperCollins has historically understood books, or in the way that people have counted on HarperCollins to have understood a book. But, these are desperate times and real books are an increasingly equivocal proposition anyway, so almost all publishers are willing to engage in the strategic mix-up between real books and fake books.
This really isn’t quibbling. We have created a giant system of national agitprop, in which books and the book business have become one of the most effective tools.”
Read the rest there, but I think I have a better proposal in my original post.
Edwin Tofslie created this Evolution of Apple (1976-2009) image [click to enlarge]. This is how everything should be designed, a multi-step, multi-year process of trial and error. The world of the “one off” products is fundamentally flawed. Just look at the house you live in.
I thought this wast a joke, evidently not. Actually a series of images with the new upper case “A”, lower case “ol” and a dot. I guess that “com” thingie is not that cool anymore, just the period. And to be sure the iconic topographic image is passé they are coming out with six equally silly logos. I guess the brand consultants smell a breakthrough, dozens of new “innovative” cartoonish swooshes instead of a pure symbol. How come I don’t see 50 floppy disks with “Aol. .IN.side” or something? The press release and rest of the logos – Silicon Insider – AOL Unveils New Brand, New Logos.
The golden fish would have been nice if the dot was actually the eye. And what is that in the middle of the second row? Is there a color consultant with Wolff Olins? OK, deliberately fluorescent range. Ugly is the new beautiful.
I have to confess though, I like the dot at the end, there is something fresh about this. Perhaps a logo is redefined in front of our eyes. In the age of cascading visual stimuli a single image feels confining. The underlying idea of a theme instead of a traditional icon is the breakthrough we have been waiting for. Just to complete the theme they should add one with the middle finger! Now can we have a sound to go with the logos, I miss the dial-up modem static and the busy signals…
Human Stature of Liberty. 18,000 officers and soldiers at Camp Dodge in Des Moines
The BBC series The Century of the Self created by Adam Curtis, first screened in 2002. Top reason to watch the series:
- Probably the most significant TV documentary ever made.
- It sheds light on Sigmund Freud’s American nephew Edward Bernays who created PR as we know it.
- The rare video footage of Sigmund Freud.
- It explains the obscure but powerful undercurrents of the American and world history.
This is a film of unprecedented significance. I don’t think I ever watched a documentary that is so enlightening and far reaching. Truly life changing in a meaningful way. ►►►read more
Publishing:
- Find yesterday’s trend or yesteryear idea
- Ghost write a book
- Spam the world pimping it
- Try to sell the book to max people who don’t know who you are (since people who know you either already read this crap on your blog or know better)
- Tell your girlfriend your book is better that the last one from Donald Trump
- Spend at least 8 hours a day monitoring Amazon ranking
- Introduce yourself as an “author”
- Put the book at top of your online bio
- Make people feel cheated again and even more turned off from reading
Faris Yakob writes in Brands as Modern Myths about the quote:
“…he is conflating myths here with lies, and he knows it – because later on in the article he says: ‘this isn’t to say stories aren’t important’ and ‘it’s still storytelling – just done differently’.”
Faris piles on:
Duckworth points out, “brands enable us to make sense and create meanings for ourselves in the socia world of consumption in which we participate.”
Right… and what is the definition myth? …My point exactly. Speaking of ads and myths, what happened to the good old ads like this 1968 one from the American Airlines? ►►►read more
On the subject of my post Free for All Permission Sharing, predictably irrational Dan Ariely contributes an important measurement to the debate:
“Both books reference our Hershey’s Kiss experiment that is described in Chapter 3 of Predictably Irrational. If you recall, in one trial of one study we offered students a Lindt Truffle for 26 cents and a Hershey’s Kiss for 1 cent and observed the buying behavior: 40 percent went with the truffle and 40 percent with the Kiss. When we dropped the price of both chocolates by just 1 cent, we observed that suddenly 90 percent of participants opted for the free Kiss, even though the relative price between the two was the same. We concluded that FREE! is indeed a very powerful force.”
As Dan pointed out there are nuances in the experiments and perhaps there are other factors when you move away from the chocolates. Yet it is clear that when you start charging, it’s a whole different ball game.
This is a year old video from a software conference in Boston. For many of us, who follow Seth Godin, there is a familiar core of his ideas. Still you always learn somehting new. ►►►read more
