Deer peeps, due to the impending arrival of my baby daughter, I may be offline for a few weeks. Never fear, I shall be back!
Archive for May, 2007
An interesting review of some current arguments about the state of feminism. I’ve been somewhat intrigued by “postfeminsim,” not because I agree with it, but because it traffics in the same language as “postirony.” In other words, when young women where T-shirts with “babe” or hot pants with crude sexual language printed on their butt, one wonders if this is “empowerment” (as some suggest) and if our resistance to such things represents a generation gap of Old Lefties who don’t get young people. Admittedly, I don’t mean to sound stodgy but I do feel that rampant “hooking up” (it’s not just a female issue, mind you) is not a sign of a healthy culture. Everything done in balance.
I enjoyed the following article because it showed that the arguments are neither black or white, but as usual, marketers are the wild card in the mix. Amanda Marcotte connects “princes” marketing to children with the Pussycat phenom of older kids. Complicated stuff!
AlterNet: Feminism in the Era of ‘Girls Gone Wild’:
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteIf young women are doing fine by themselves by picking up the books and working hard and presenting a very real challenge to male dominance, then what should we make of the “Girls Gone Wild” stereotype? The notion that college age women are wasting their potential somehow by acting like nothing more than sex objects is paralleled neatly by the notion that the kindergarten set of girls that are supposedly rejecting their feminist parents in order to embrace the fluffy princess phenomenon, pushed mostly by the Disney company. In fact, the princess marketing has something of a “gotcha” element to it, as if the miles of pink and lace present an irresistible temptation for the inner delicate flowers of young girls. The more likely story is that the relentless drumbeat of marketing the Princess line has made girls feel that they’re missing out if they aren’t a part of it.
The grown-up version of Disney’s Princess line is the TV show “The Pussycat Dolls,” where the symbol of belonging is not a pink lace princess dress, but a feather boa. Granted, the Pussycat Dolls are highly sexualized, but the marketing push is the same as the Princess line, the story being one about how women and girls find themselves irresistibly drawn away from participation in the real world and towards feminine accoutrements and being on display rather than being active. And these messages are coming, as they always have, from marketers that are more interested in protecting male privilege and making money than everything else. The co-option of words like “empowering” from feminists should be taken for what it is, a backlash wolf in feminist sheep clothing.
An example of Mexicans playing with Poly Identity
I feel bad for advertisers (OK, not really) because I often here industry pundits complain that the media audiences are too scattered, and have too much ADD to focus on their messages. Too bad, I’m crying crocodile tears. You see, part of the problem concerning people’s inability to focus on brand messages is a) there are too many of them, b) advertising is partly responsible for the scattered attention span, and c) who cares. Now another interesting problem: poly identities. As multiple worlds proliferate the Web, people are developing multiple personalities. I should know, I have the same problem. I often get confused about which tone and approach to use on this blog, and have found it difficult on some occasions to restrain myself as do not do in the comments sections of other people’s blogs. As a Latino, I have also had to traverse multiple identities. It’s part of life in the border world. My suggestion, if anyone is listening, is that if marketers want to know how to deal with poly identity, then they should take a bus down to Juarez or Tijuana and check out the scene there.
Media archeologist Jonathan Crary interprets the problem perception and identity as a double bind. This, he says, results from conflicting modes of mental engagement originally required of industrial work’s tight focus and the multisensory shock created by exploding urban environments and new media. This is at the root of our contemporary predominance, if not false, diagnosis of ADD:
In a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the generalized ethic of ‘getting ahead,’ and on the celebration of aggressiveness, it is nonsensical to pathologize these forms of behavior or look for the causes of this imaginary disorder in neurochemistry, brain anatomy, and genetic predisposition… [T]he behavior categorized as ADD is merely one of many manifestations resulting from this cultural double bind, from the contradictory modes of performance and cognition that are continually demanded or incited (Suspensions of Perception> p. 36-7).
He further laments “the sweeping use of potent neurochemicals as a strategy of behavior management” (Ibid p. 37). Amen.
For a clearer picture of what brand developers are thinking in regards to Poly Identity, read on…
Gen Y is getting pretty clever at proliferating many different identities for one life. Certainly the Internet invites all of us to generate multiple brands of ourselves, but this generation knows how to work their identities. Each allows for the many facets of one person and lets them escape where they are at or enter new worlds.
Where a brand sits in relation to these broad-ranging identities is critical. If the responsibility of a brand is to reflect and mirror culture, a brand has to ask “What good am I?†a few times over. The more complex and creative one’s web of identities become, the more clever that consumer will be at snuffing out “poser†brands.
Technorati Tags: poly identity
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The corporate media world loves to lock you out of sharing files. There have been more insidious acts of control as well, such as designating region codes for DVDs so that you are forced to buy media only for the region you live in. This has been a huge pain for me because after moving to Europe from the US none of the DVDs I bought at home can play on machines made in Europe. It is ridiculous that I would have to buy something twice. It’s highway robbery.
Anyhow, there have been efforts to control HD-TV programming through an encryption code, but it has been hacked and now authors are posting to Digg the code so anyone who needs to can use it. Knowing the encryption code is not just about facilitating privacy. It’s also about enabling users to to save and back-up their files, but more importantly have control over their own content. At first Digg took down the articles with the code, but a rebellion ensued, with users adding the code to articles posted to the site. Digg’s staff decided to side with its users, and is now allowing people to post the code. Incidentally, if you want to Digg the encryption code, click here.
To explain what is happening, Digg’s Kevin Ross writes the following…
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…
In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin
I saw Paul Hawken give a talk at the 2006 Bioneeers conference, The Other Superpower (you can download an iPod version here). He recently scribed a book based on the ideas he presented called, Blessed Unrest. His basic argument, which is highlighted below in an article for Orion Magazine, is that there is a massive, unparalleled movement of unofficial organizations around the globe that are working for justice and environmental causes. To make his point during the Bioneers talk he made a video that listed all the organization names in his database and ran them like a movie credit roll. He said that it would have to play continuously for several days to run the entire list.
What he describes reminds me of the international day of protest when over ten million people around the world contested Bush’s efforts to attack Iraq. I recall how astonishing it was that so many people could coordinate on the same day in a singular voice to stop the war. Clearly these people were far more correct than the warmongering pundits paraded on television, and the fact that they could all do it simultaneously around the world on the same day still astounds me. So don’t give up hope, my friends. Please read Hawken’s book and article for further inspiration.
To Remake the World | Orion magazine:
Historically, social movements have arisen primarily because of injustice, inequalities, and corruption. Those woes remain legion, but a new condition exists that has no precedent: the planet has a life-threatening disease that is marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change. It crossed my mind that perhaps I was seeing something organic, if not biologic. Rather than a movement in the conventional sense, is it a collective response to threat? Is it splintered for reasons that are innate to its purpose? Or is it simply disorganized? More questions followed. How does it function? How fast is it growing? How is it connected? Why is it largely ignored?
After spending years researching this phenomenon, including creating with my colleagues a global database of these organizations, I have come to these conclusions: this is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye.
What does meet the eye is compelling: tens of millions of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
Technorati Tags: bioneers, ecology, Paul Hawken, Orion Magazine
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