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September 30, 2008
Barnyard Animals, Social Commentary, and DVD Exclusives
No Impact Man lamented today that his daughter is acquiring a taste for shopping. He reckons little kids ought to be playing with barnyard animals instead.
Or something. Anything. As long as it's not TV or the mall. No binge consumption for little kids. It's a bad cultural habit.
Step Brothers leapt to mind, and I commented:
Or something. Anything. As long as it's not TV or the mall. No binge consumption for little kids. It's a bad cultural habit.
Step Brothers leapt to mind, and I commented:
I think one reason we like watching TV and going to the mall is that, when we hit a certain age, those things become what we're culturally expected to like.
At a certain point in childhood, it becomes less cool to say your favorite thing to do when you go home from school is draw or build with legos or wrestle with the dog or put on a silly hat and pretend to be Robin Hood. At a certain point, it becomes less cool to be creative in your spare time, less cool to let your imagination entertain you.
Unless, of course, you're the main characters of Step Brothers. And, maybe I'm crazy, but I think that movie was brilliant social commentary, intentional or not.
(Also tangentially relevant here might be Clay Shirky's thoughts on our cognitive surplus and the future of media: we grew up consuming, but the barriers preventing us from producing and sharing are crumbling, so the days of TV as we know it might be over.)
A little off topic with the Clay Shirky there, but I'm glad to have at least tried to spread some Step Brothers love.
My only complaint about that movie is that they didn't show us any Talladega Nights style outtakes during the credits. I suspect they're saving them for the DVD, which, while certainly a good way to sell DVDs, makes me love the movie a little less. It makes me love it a little more again, however, to know that there are some deleted scenes on Funny or Die.
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September 07, 2008
The Inevitable Dissolution of POWER
After a day of DjangoCon and an evening of storytelling with a NASA sysadmin and a dangerously dressed Silicon Valley lawyer (who may or may not have been joking when she told us she likes heroin in moderation), Wiley and I started talking about politics, The Carrot Project, and the book he's reading.
He read me this excerpt about The Final Call (a newspaper published by the Nation of Islam), an attempt to change consumer behavior, and the realities of market economics:
The paper also carried a health section, complete with Minister Farrakhan's pork-free recipes; advertisements for minister Farrakhan's speeches on videocassette (VISA or MasterCard accepted); and promotions for a line of toiletries - toothpaste and the like - that the Nation had launched under the brand name POWER, part of a strategy to encourage blacks to keep their money within their own community.He read me this excerpt about The Final Call (a newspaper published by the Nation of Islam), an attempt to change consumer behavior, and the realities of market economics:
After a time, the ads for POWER products grew less prominent in The Final Call; it seems that many who enjoyed Minister Farrakhan's speeches continued to brush their teeth with Crest. That the POWER campaign sputtered said something about the difficulty that faced any black business - the barriers to entry, the lack of finance, the leg up that your competitors possessed after having kept you out of the game for over three hundred years.
But I suspected that it also reflected the inevitable tension that arose when Minister Farrakhan's message was reduced to the mundane realities of buying toothpaste. I tried to imagine POWER's product manager looking over his sales projections. He might briefly wonder whether it made sense to distribute the brand in national supermarket chains where blacks preferred to shop. If he rejected that idea, he might consider whether any black-owned supermarket trying to compete against the national chains could afford to give shelf space to a product that guaranteed to alienate potential white customers. Would black consumers buy toothpaste through the mail? And what of the likelihood that the cheapest supplier of whatever it was that went into making toothpaste was white?
Wiley has always been worried about this. He thinks it's all about those mundane realities, all about fundamental economics. Farrakhan's message didn't fail because of ideological flaws. The old Buy American campaign didn't fail because of ideological flaws. They failed because of the practical realities of the marketplace.
The Carrot Project has to face that same marketplace. And, in Wiley's opinion, i