David Barrie

Kerplunk!

In a sideways comment, the brilliant blog Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy puts some stuff shaking broadcasting in the U.K. just now in to perspective.

In a post entitled 'The Archaeology of Popism', the blogger lists Channel 4 alongside the New Universities and New Labour in a world of 'popism'.

The post describes 'Popist' moves as

the consummated and unconsummated affairs between intellectuals, the avant-garde and mass culture

and describes a history 

that gradually degenerates into mere cheerleading for capitalism

I hadn't ever linked Channel 4, independent production, Big Brother and all with the likes of Warhol, Venturi Scott-Brown and Archigram.

But now Kerplunk!

So what?

Well maybe one of the reasons why the Channel gets rapped so hard for its combination of pop and public service is because cultural snobbism can't bare the combination of the two.

Or maybe market fragmentation and cultural evolution dictate that the two today can neither meet nor match.

The answer matters not just for media navel-gazers.

For if pop is now just another category and mass culture no longer exists, where will intellectualism, the avant-garde and popular culture meet? And do we care?

And is this what film director - and deputy chairman of Channel 4 - David Puttnam was grappling with when he said that the station needed a new remit to make sure programme makers, currently obsessed with controversy, were also responsible and respected.

In a segmented market, is it impossible for innovation and controversy to line up beside responsibility and respect? I hope not.

Go on, open the box

Writing in property magazine Estates Gazette, veteran financial columnist Christopher Fildes draws important attention to the pricing of risk in recent boom times and how the forthcoming downturn could  hold nasty shocks.

It will be harder this time to discover where the risks have finished up. Banks have learned to slice and dice their loans, to wrap them up in little parcels and sell them on to others. No one knows who owns them now. No one can be sure (as the governer [of the Bank of England] has warned) that what is in the parcel lives up in every way to what is on the label. The only way to find out is to open the parcel.

Go on, open the box. Find those scissors. They're in the drawer with the kitchen knives, potato peelers, cheese grater, chopsticks, cake slice, three kinds of garlic crusher, the turkey baster, the four lumps of Blu Tac, the.......

More is less, or not

Is the future of business about selling more of less or less of more?

Since Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail, the idea of selling less of more has taken hold. It supports the idea that common culture is dead. It fits the idea of the fussy, individual, particularist consumer. It also lends hope to businesses whose shelves are heaving with immobile stock.

I haven't read Anderson's book - to be frank, I've avoided it like the plague, worried that it's a blueprint for  loss of focus and over-inflated valuation of businesses with a tired offer.

But it's interesting to read The Long Tail Internet Myth, an analysis by a Boston-based web analytics firm of internet traffic over the last five years - found via the technology blog of Kiwi writer Richard McManus. 

The research says that the Internet has grown by 77% in the last five years to over 5 million unique domains: so the Long Tail is very real.

But it also reveals that the top 10 domains are not shrinking - but proportionally increasing.

Top internet properties are accounting for a larger percentage of total page views across the web and are claiming proportionally more page views in 2006 than in 2001.

The driver of growth of the top domains is in social networks. If you were to remove MySpace, Facebook and the figures for their page views from the research, top domains would only account for 33% of total pageviews - basically on par with 2001.

This tells me two things:

First, the digital highway is not a place for sad, lonely Norman No-mates but supports a level of interaction, perhaps more interaction than we ever experienced in analogue space.

Second, tails may be lengthening but those who sell more of less seem to attract the larger proportion of the audience and hold on to them.

Take me to The Psychiatrist's Chair

Dear TV Producers:

Scandal rocks the British media with faked quiz-show contestants and faked documentary truth. The industry seems in meltdown.

The show must and will go on but neu-psychotherapist Derek Draper, former aide to Government minister Peter Mandelson seemed to capture something relevant in an article in the Observer newspaper.

Reviewing the diaries of Alastair Campbell, former press secretary to Tony Blair, Draper wrote:

The world Campbell describes is one where emotional connections are shallow and contingent; relationships are largely dysfunctional; aggression and adrenaline drive things forward, and feelings, and indeed thought, are crowded out by the imperative of action.

So take me to The Psychiatrist's Chair - or better still spin that Doors lyric....

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

:(

The Donald Trump of Light Refreshment

 

Megan is my sister-in-law's over-sized horse.

I thought of her the other day when I came across the wise sayings of  Lorenzo Marioni, the Italian owner of the formica-heavy New Picadilly cafe in Denman Street, London.

One of Marioni's key corporate vision statements:

L'occhio del padrone ingrassa il cavallo

or

"The eye of the owner makes the horse fat."

In other words, A business thrives under the eye of its owner.

Think of Megan if the London Financial Times is correct and private equity firm The Blackstone Group raises $40bn by selling 15% of its stock to Wall Street.

And think of Megan standing on your foot when you're running a project too far removed from the consumer.

The Ministry of the Bleedin Obvious

In the Ministry of the Bleedin' Obvious, there is a quiet, industrious office in the basement marked 'So Obvious it's Worth Remembering'.

The latest addition to the files here has to be  a paper from the Harvard Business School with the fabulous title Film Rentals and Procrastination.

This is a study in to the behavior of people renting DVDs from an online rental company in Australia - and part on an ongoing research program by Todd Rogers and Katy Milkman.

One of its totally unsurprising conclusions is that:

The more "should watch" characteristics and the fewer "want to watch" characteristics a DVD has, the longer an individual will postpone watching that DVD.

In other words, you're more likely to put something off if you should do it than if you want to.  

Now this is obvious.

But it reminded me of the army of people who maintain that things will happen because they ought to, rather than because they or others want them to.

And how the challenge is to take people through processes to a point where they want to do something and just can't deny themselves the opportunity to do it.

This is one of the earliest modules in the unwritten training for working in the media. But a principal of sales and demand  management that many can forget.

Art and mother's milk

I had dinner the other night with an abstract artist. Thankfully there were others around, so I could remain Cubist.

Inevitably, I tried to bring my training in History of Art by an heir of Anthony Blunt to bear upon our conversation - not least  to make her feel that I wasn't a complete bozo!

But then, inevitably again, all sorts of mother's milk anxieties came out linked to my love for trash, meaningless, gestural art and that nagging feeling of being left out of the circus that surrounds art.

If there was ever an art form designed to give you a chip on your shoulder, it has to be visual art.

But, you know, it has its own crosses to bear.

There's probably a very long German word for it ending in 'keit' or 'zeit' but art has this strange kind of superiority/inferiority complex. It seems forever beaten up by the combination of the perfect and the imperfect, being victorious but then defeated. 

The British grafitti artist Banksy started to sum it up for me in a recent article in the New Yorker.

On the one hand, Banksy is quoted as saying

Like most people, I have this fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together....that all the vermin will get some good equipment and then the underground will go overground and tear this city apart.

Then on the other, err, hand

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious and the weak.

I leapt for joy when I read that last comment. Then thought for a moment that the struggle between the two must be more than tiring.

Maybe that's why  artists and art lovers stick to their own.

And  why I enjoyed abstract conversation for a short while but then moved elsewhere for dessert.

Very now, very knowledge economy

God how I laughed on the underground this morning!

Last week, I sat in a two-and-a-half-hour meeting full of intense conversation only for the chair at the close to conclude by saying: "Thank you everyone for a most interesting dialogue. We should go away now and think some more because this has all been rather fuzzy."

Then I think of all of the angst-ridden dialogue currently going on in the U.K. on the theme of 'community cohesion', only for two immigrant doctors to attempt a Baghdad manoeuvre at Glasgow Airport.

Then I see the pile of conference name-badges piling up on my desk from over-sized encounter groups, high on animated slide transitions, mezzanine manners and chicken satay on a stick.

Then on the Tube I read Hari Kunzru's great article on Gordon Brown in the New Statesman magazine.

In the piece, Kunzru joins the premier-in-waiting at a conference of global Muslim leaders in London. Brown arrives late and makes a speech. According to Kunzru:

He claims that "there's no more important dialogue than the dialogue we've had today" and throws in a quick statistic. Apparently this year there will be "250 interfaith or multifaith dialogues, covering the whole country". This will, apparently, be "50 up on last year". I have no idea what he means, but it sounds very now, very knowledge economy. Production of dialogue is exceeding the levels set in the five-year plan.

 Is there a moment when we can come in from the fields, rest our weary feet and minds and say that we have truly achieved our quota of dialogue for the year?

New Gold Dream

Big Shiny Thing blogs about a vision for life and work coming true in which

rather than existing as long-term corporate entities, groups of highly-skilled freelancers would be assembled for the life of a specific project, at the completion of which they would pack their bags and head of to the next one.

This is the way in which I've been working for the last, err (!), twenty years.

Nowadays, the post continues, through our connection to others via Facebook and other communities

We’re building structures which accumulate and expose opportunity, knowledge, income.

And the constant nudge, tweak, positioning and re-positioning of our professional and social brands marks the fact that

We’re also in the flux of transmutation...making our own individual and collective land grabs for authority, influence, status and respect. We’re building a colony, out in the unmapped places, and things don’t need to be the same way they were back home at the centre of Empire.

This is so correct - and it is a f**king exciting place to be.

Though I'm not sure where the centre of Empire is - so am not quite clear on the mythic Manifest Destiny of it all. Transmutation is an exciting idea but it can entail firesales of value - in this case intellectual property. And there's a danger that as we expand our circle via networks, we create rootless, transnational tribes.

On one level, I don't mind this. In fact I love it. Tribes can suck.

But then I can't quite forget writer Peter Drucker's stress on the need for roots in his book on post-capitalist society - and the need for this in the face of the transnational demands of environment, terrorism and private armies.

So let's live and love the New Gold Dream but not forget the need for community. And enjoy working in small, hi-fi creative groups but hold on to each other's number, just in case we need to mobilise.