The Model is Message
Simon Dumenco did a great interview with Bill Wasik about his new book And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
My two favorite quotes from the article: “The Attention Economy is (mostly) a sorry excuse for a (predictable, rational) economy.” I have been waiting for so long for someone to agree with me on this one. While I get the theory and used to subscribe to the attention ideology, at this point I don’t understand how it’s any different. Quote number two is under the heading “the model is what matters” and says, “Our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing the chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself.” That one made my head spin a little. It’s so true. As a culture we’ve become more obsessed with understanding how things spread than the things themselves. The model itself is the content. (Or, as McLuhan would say, the medium is the message.)
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RE: “we’ve become more obsessed with understanding how things spread than the things themselves”
This is one of the reasons why I’m so into Henry Jenkins & Co.’s spreadable media approach. They remind us that the substance of the content is at the heart of who, why, where, how, something spreads. Things don’t just spread on their own. Real live human beings choose to spread them. And we do so because of the thing’s cultural significance to us and our lives.
@Mike: Sure, but I think Wasik would argue that the fact Henry Jenkins wrote a book and has a popular blog about how and why content spreads is even more interesting. The single biggest meme of the last 10 years is the meme itself.
There’s a subtle cultural-economic logic to the global ‘spread’ of the meta meme manufactory.
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On those meta people:
“… these are the weird ones—the convergence culture people. They will play your game all right, but they play it while using six or seven other kinds of media. They don’t make any distinction between the media they use. They use the networks as a meta-medium. They don’t play the roles in your role-playing games. Convergence people are metamedia people who are looking for meta-fun. Not your fun. Their meta- fun. Why are they important? Because they are you. You’re outside the game because you developed it, and they want to be in the same space that you are in. They’re super-knowledgeable game fanatics. They’re the people from whom you recruit your own talent.”
Bruce Sterling — “Computer Entertainment,” Flurb #6
http://www.flurb.net/6/6sterling.htm
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On meta manufacture:
Brian Holmes argues that these meta people arise from a generation schooled (tooled) in cultural and media studies, and finding that their ‘education’ fitted rather too neatly with the needs of industry, use meta analysis to wrest some semblance of creative autonomy from the cultural-industral-complex that serially abuses them with precarious working conditions and one-way ‘professional’ relationships.
Of course, the self promotional manufacture of meta memes can signal to the complex both at once an awareness of and willingness to participate in this abuse (if only at an advanced level), whilst also ‘capturing’ an audience of fellow meta-memers to be seeded with the corporate content that inevitably follows from working on a paid gig. It’s the classic stockholm syndrome phenomenon where people begin aggrandize the seduction of their captors.
Brian Holmes — The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique
http://www.16beavergroup.org/brian
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On meta business:
Douglas Rushkoff is wagging his finger of shame at the pseudo-science of popular intellectuals who offer business self-congratulatory theories that neatly brush over cracks in the status quo:
“So Steven Johnson ends up leaning, perhaps more than he should, on the corporate-friendly evidence that commercial TV and video games are actually healthy. (Think of how many corporations would hire a speaker who argued that everything bad — like marketing and media — is actually bad for you.) Likewise, Malcolm Gladwell finds himself repeatedly using recent discoveries from neuroscience to argue that higher human cognition is more than trumped by reptilian impulse; we may as well be guided by advertising professionals, since we’re just acting mindlessly in response to crude stimuli, anyway. Everything becomes about business — and that’s more than okay.”
“Write books that business likes, and you do better business. The cycle is self-perpetuating. But just because it pays the mortgage doesn’t make it true.”
Douglas Rushkoff — ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rushkoff09/rushkoff09_index.html
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On technoutopian metafest destiny:
“Wired married an admirable American can-do spirit to the techno-utopianism of earlier media prophets such as Alvin Toffler, a former associate editor of Forbes magazine who has been writing since the 1960s about technology’s future and its impact. But Wired also inherited Toffler’s bossy, declamatory tone. The future wouldn’t just be different, it would be unrecognisable; history would be erased, and existing businesses must leap out of the way. The necessity to preach “rewriting the rules of business” in every issue set Wired on the path to hubris. …perhaps the Wired era is over, departing like a snake-oil salesman at a medicine show who – having poisoned the town – can’t leave quickly enough.”
New Statesmen — We were so keen to believe that Web 2.0 would make the world fairer that we rejected all evidence to the contrary
http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2009/05/anderson-wired-business
Curiouser and curiouser; how deep does the meta hole go?
Apologies for bombarding you with links, but this one is monumental!
Rob Horning –’Your Brain is the New Factory Floor’
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/109584-your-brain-is-the-new-factory-floor/