regarding The Abolition of Context October 1, 2009

I’ve had a fairly rough time conjuring up a response to  What’s Your Story?: Storytelling to Move Markets, Audiences, People, and Brands, by Ryan Matthews + Watts Wacker. I feel that I both agree and disagree with his idea of Abolition of Context. Although Abolition of Context seems all-encompassing, i feel that a lot of it is personal speculation and bizarre commentary masked as as theory.

I’ll start off with this bit, “The Abolition of Context – a phenomenon that negatively impacts every aspect of corporate life, from human resources to product development and from marketing to corporate governance. Modest, because, at its heart, a myth is nothing more or less than a simple story created to convey an even simpler truth or principle.” I understand the first half but disagree completely that marketers always, and only, create stories to “convey an even simpler truth or principle.” And for me, messages through advertisements are still messages. Messages are not principles or truths. I mean, c’mon. Truths and messages are different. Just because an advertiser plants a message into a commercial, tagline or viral campaign doesn’t mean I automatically intercept it as fact. I am not a robot. Cultures might differ and concepts or messages could be lost in translation (the idea of never really being able to relate to one context) but that doesn’t mean that sub-cultures aren’t thriving by breeding. If audiences weren’t intelligent, media and technology wouldn’t really ever need to advance much. As another classmate suggested, give us a little more credit. And do i think that its hard for people to actually, truly, relate and share the same context globally or even locally? Sure i do, but i also think that on some micro level that we do connect and that when a lack of context is present, there is an alertness of the viewers regarding their lack of context.

It’s hard to say how much of the Abolition of Context I agree, or disagree, with because I frankly find the concept to be contradicting. It was stated to “Think of context as a kind of referential frame that not only acts as a border for a picture, but in the process of providing that border actually becomes an integral element in what the viewer sees.” Yes, the VIEWER. Each of us with individual frames with which to watch sheep through, not impersonate.

This excerpt also makes the case to “Tell a good story, and you create a success. Tell a great story, and you create a movement. Wrap a great story around an iconic symbol, and you can sometimes create an industry.” I can’t say I agree entirely because I feel that Apple has busted this completely. Apple products don’t sell one particular story. The brand applies to all walks of people, and in fact is a brand with very sincere consumers. Apple seems to have no problem with brand loyalty whatsoever. Apple didn’t create a “great story” around any image. It gave you an iconic symbol as an image and you created your own story if you chose to do so.

Abolition of Context October 1, 2009

I guess I found something different from the reading than the others.  The biggest idea I took away from the piece was not the problem with the Romeo and Juliet example (which by the way, made me laugh.  I can’t believe their interpretation of the Muslim reaction.  I believe that they would react as any other human would after all, they have star-crossed lovers there as well).

To me the key idea in these chapters is found on page 13-14:  ”reliance on process and systems over content and imagination.”  I did look up Alfred P. Sloan and found that he was basically the man who invented planned obsolescence.  As the competitor of Henry Ford, who thought all car models should look alike and be the same color -Black, Sloan began advertising his General Motors products to women, using different colors and creating different styles for different income levels.

The advertising used to increase GM sales included story-telling at its worst – the “you can have everything your neighbor has and more if you just buy my product” myth.  And of course, as you made more money, the more/bigger you had to buy and don’t think it will last all that long either – you will soon be in buying a new model because your old one will break down.  How many times have you heard the saying – “They don’t make things like the used to!”

The fact that Big Business began following Sloan’s business model is what has led to the current economic crisis.  Greed: plain and simple!  The more people got the more they wanted.  We have been taught through story-telling that this is a good thing.

I can not address the accuracy of the media today.  Each venue has it’s own opinion or slant.  This has been going on since the beginning of communication.  As examples:  Luther nailing is proclamation to the Church door in protest of how the Catholic Church was run; yellow journalism; conservative versus liberal press; etc.  Each tells their own version of the truth.

I would use the cliche:  The more things change, the more they stay the same to make my point.  Just because there is more of it (access to media) doesn’t mean there are any fundamental changes in the world.  Until you read the book reviews by the same person in the NY Times Book Review, you will not know if you will like the critic’s recommendation.  On the web, you need to do the same thing.  Follow the reviewers advice to see if you agree with their recommendation.  If not, try another one until you are comfortable, and then keep going back to that site.  For me, that site is www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com.

What has changed (or what business wants us to think has changed) is the new business model that is currently being used by such companies as Starbucks and the Container Store.  Here is the link that I received this week from the Container Store: http://standfor.containerstore.com.  This is an unusual business model and I have no idea how accurate it is.

The context has not been abolished, it has merely been changed to protect the guilty.

The Difficulty of Finding Reliable Sources September 30, 2009

In Chapter 4 of our reading, Matthews and Wacker assert that the Internet has made it impossible for any one person to be the leading authority on a subject. The Internet moves information so quickly that we no longer know whom or what to trust.

For instance, the Internet has made the once simple task of finding a reliable book review difficult. Traditionally, newspapers and magazines were the dependable sources where the trustworthy voices of book reviewers could be heard. However, the Internet has changed this dramatically.

The book reviewers for newspapers are well established. If you read the same newspaper enough, you’ll know that you generally agree or disagree with the book reviewer. Or perhaps you agree with his or her opinion on a certain genre. Similarly, the publishing industry has always relied on reviews and on the commentary of great critics in newspapers to champion the new voices of literature. The reading public has gone to these venues to make discoveries. Now these people are turning to the Internet.

But how do these people know which sites to look at? If you do a search of “book review” on Yahoo.com, more than 80 pages full of links pop up at the press of a button. Some of these sites let a user enter a book title or author name to find a book review while others are blogs. Regardless of which link a user clicks on, the trouble is that one doesn’t know who the reviewer is or how accurate the review is. By not having a reliable source, the whole dynamic between the reader and reviewer changes. The sense of trust that is established with reliable sources is completely lost, and reviews become random and anonymous. Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but also to their readership. The guy sitting in his basement writing a blog does not have this.

This is not say that all book reviews that are online are untrustworthy. There are countless literary blogs, including Bookslut.com, maudnewton.com, and Beatrice.com that offer a mix of book news, debates, interviews and reviews. These blogs surely do not have the same influence or history as The New York Times Book Review, but one could discover a voice or a personality on one of these blogs that he or she relates to and therefore begins to trust. However, there needs to be a reliable, dependable online source for the general reader that used to turn to the newspapers and magazines for his or her reviews. Just like The New York Times and Publishers Weekly became the industry standards in print, comparable sites need to exist on the Internet. This needs to happen across the board, not just with book reviews. Internet users need to know what sites they can turn to for dependable information—they need to know what sites are the authority on different subjects.

“Who’s the authority in the Global Village?” (The same people it’s always been) September 30, 2009

My instinct was to take a practical approach to Ryan Matthews and Watts Wacker’s articles referring to the Abolition of Context, “the lines separating what’s true in a practical sense from contextual truth”. But being one of those millenials with ADD they’re quick to blame for the breakdown of context (and therefore, civilization) I was quickly sidetracked by their description of the behavior of online consumers:

“People are forming voluntary tribes, self-defining cohorts that cruise comfortably below the radar of too many marketers. The Internet is where you’ll find the mass of humanity at its digital and self-defining best.”

I felt oddly complimented by this statement — as I’ve actively skirted away from anyone who tries to pigeon-hole me into a group that can be sold Pepsi or a presidential candidate in equal measure and with equal ease. Yet, after careful review, I think Matthews and Wacker missed their own point by first blaming the users themselves and then the web (the context) itself for the breakdown of ideas in context and, therein, the authority on those ideas.

By Matthews and Wacker’s definition, the function of context is to serve as a “referential frame that not only acts as a border for a picture, but in the process of providing that border, actually becomes an integral element in what the viewer sees.” Frames, and therein context, accentuate the facts they display and provide a venue for them to be displayed, but do not inherently compete with the facts themselves. This is perhaps where the Internet unravels that definition: because of the billions of people plugged into the web, spending hours on it everyday, the digital medium both frames and stands apart from the material it provides as a unique phenomenon unto itself.

Matthews and Wacker abolition of context points an angry finger at Marshall McLuhan’s prophesized “global village” as the one responsible for the accelerated deterioration of the actual village: the place where people “used to” form ideas based on the social constructs established by their neighborhood church, schools and local institutions. The evolution of technology, the unlimited access to outside ideas — and alleged cognitive dissonance — provided by Web 2.0 is, according to them, responsible for the further delineation of these social institutions and therefore the confusion of authority.

I disagree.

The transformation from the local neighborhood to the digital neighborhood does not elimate the context by which people judge authority — it merely expands it, providing readers with access to a more broad amount of source material. Conversations on topics as varied as Francis Bacon, Schopenhauer and the nature of the sublime, Pauline Reage vs. Jean de Berg, Sulu trolls and the Flying Spaghetti Monster inevitably end in the same verbal paradigm: “Google it.”

In this context, Google itself is not the authority, but merely the referential frame by which the user can access source material on their chosen subject made available electronically. It’s then up to the reader to decide what is a credible source. Common sense would tell the average person that user-modified sources like Wikipedia are not credible sources for fact-based knowledge (if it’s not good enough for your English professor, it’s probably not good enough for your editor, marketing analyst or the housewife in your book club who used to BE an editor or a marketing analyst). Also, social institutions such as the church and local government are increasing their reach by creating their own accessible electronic presence in the digital medium: building websites and online forums, posting information tailored to their users (i.e. parishoners, constituents).

McLuhan, in his seminal book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, summarized that “In operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed.” Applied to this case, McLuhan would likely agree that the wide dispersal of the internet, the manner in which it makes material accessible has changed society and how we research and gain our knowledge, but focusing on isolated, individual content and the confusion over who is the inherent authority of said content, he would probably say it was wasted breath (as well as ink, time, etc.). With regard to how program content changes its users, he warned that ”those who are concerned with the program ‘content’ of media and not with the medium proper appear to be in the position of physicians who ignore the ‘symptons of just being sick.’”

Rhetoric as Storytelling September 30, 2009

I found the Ryan/Walker text hilarious for all the wrong reasons. It was like Dilbert, except Dilbert is intentionally funny. I enjoyed reading as these guys were trying to turn a phrase and playing cliched business buzzword bingo in the text to make themselves sound savvy and competant. From the start, the two authors have confused rhetoric for storytelling. While there are similarities in the definitions, storytelling usually isn’t trying to sell you something. Storytelling is usually intended to entertain.  When a company/CEO tells you their/his story, it usually has this message — “I came up with this idea so I can make money and need to inspire all of you to help me make more money.”

In their “analysis,” such as Al Gore’s loss to GW Bush was in 2000, not 2004, and the “first English translation of Faust” when Faust was written by an Englishman, their definition of “Abolition of Content” is confusing and covuluted. How does mythology negatively impact every aspect of corporate life? The myth of  company I work for, as told by the CEO, that our company is not hemoraging money like a bloody nosed hemophiliac, keeps me employed for the time being. Their segues are even more hilarious — going from great writers of antiquity to the DaVinci Code to Flomax? Flomax, really? Take a writing class, guys. Maybe this book should have been titled The Myth of Credibility.

A blog by any other name. September 30, 2009

Ryan and Walker’s “abolition of context” is an appropriate assumption concerning today’s consumer.  The idea of demographic marketing is that everything is not going to appeal to everyone – therefore why not sell to a select demographic and take a hold of that market share?  As I was reading all the previous posts on this topic of the Abolition of Context, I saw that Ryan and Walker’s example of Romeo and Juliet was striking a collective nerve.  I’d like to argue that the way in which different demographic groups interpret Romeo and Juliet are comparable to “young suburban teenage Americans” and “traditional conservative Muslims.”  These two groups are stereotypically on two far ends of the spectrum so it follows that their interpretations should be different, or as the authors say “the impact of the story, therefore, is completely dependent on the context in which the audience hears or views it.”  I am not going to deny that the story is not a universal one – just that there are as many ways to understand it as there are individuals.

Perhaps some teenagers think suicide is a little over the top as a way of coping with boyfriend/girlfriend/familial drama (like, omg, like, i totally can’t live without them!), but so do I think that High School Musical and all the marketing and branding is over the top.  The point is that kids get that and relate to it but it is essentially the plot of Romeo and Juliet reworked for their demographic just as Baz Luhrmann’s rendition was reworked for mine just as West Side Story was reworked for the teenage demographic of the early 60’s.  Countless remakes/retellings of Shakespeare can be found throughout popular culture (see Julia Stile’s acting career from 1999-2001, or Google “Shakespeare adaptations and cultural references”).  Ryan and Walker are on to something when they say the story remains the same but the way in which it is interpreted changes depending in context it is heard or told.

I’ve come to understand that the decline in social institutions happened at more or less during the (post)modern age, which includes the wide distribution of mass media, the increase of a consumer culture, and the anxiety of the individual.  I don’t think any of these necessarily caused the other, but rather happened in tandem.  Social institutions have declined because of a collected way of thinking that questions the reality and investigates the bureaucracy of everything that we could trust before (at least that is what I think Baudrillard says).  In the (post)modern age, this collective and individual anxiety can lead to a very ‘me-first’ way of thinking – i need this product to give some kind of meaning to my life, to make it easier, to make me more comfortable with who i am, and so that others perceive me in a good light.  Admen and women began to understand the anxiety of the individual and were able to sell products that appease these fears, but do so, had to capture the interest of the viewer/consumer.  Text, image and design are elements that can give substance and help tell a story that will resonate with the audience.  Ryan and Walker write stories are “capable of taking on new meanings over time.”  It is these old myths, stories and folklore that are being retold in the digital age in various ways that make today’s culture and communities different, which is not to say better or worse.

In Which I Take Issue September 30, 2009

It’s not as dramatic as it sounds; I’m mostly in agreement with what has been written by my fellow classmates. When I first learned that we were reading something called “The Abolition of Context” I thought somehow that it would have more to do with the coming of the internet and it’s annhilation of attention spans; how information, entertainment, etc, moves too quickly for us to keep up with, therefore destroying any kind of context. It’s all cheap, instant pleasure. There is nothing greater achieved by, say, a YouTube video, than the moment I press “play” and laugh and forget about it. Have a watched “chubby kid pretending to be a jedi” since 2001? No.

Come to find out, our chapters are more concerned in turning what one might see as a positive (diversity) into a negative (Gah! We’re all so different that we can’t understand what’s happening in this story!). This is fundementally untrue, as they themselves put forth in the earlier chapters. People tell stories because it brings us together and defines our purpose as a species. We all tell the same stories, just different versions. Doomed love is not a story that can’t be understood by white American teenagers and Orthodox Muslims alike. Over simplification. From a marketers stand point, I suppose there is a problem, as in “Oh god, which target market do I appeal to right now?”  But i understood this was already part of the job description for someone in marketing. So…what’s the problem?

Our authors here seem to ignore, for their own purposes, that in no other time has there been a population that has shared so much information. With the the web, global transit, etc, at our disposal, the world’s populations are more in touch with each other than ever. And I really think it’s a serious oversight to assume that your audience can’t understand the same bland, overused stories that seem to be constantly churned out by P.R. and marketing departments the world over.

Greater Expression through Technology September 30, 2009

Technology is changing the pace of our society.  And this change of pace is leading to a breakdown of our traditional social institutions—the newspaper is no longer the first to publish a story, the publishing house is no longer the only one to unveil a new author, and the schoolteacher is no longer the only person a child learns from.  Technology is taking power away from some of the traditional social institutions that once controlled what we read, what we did, and wrote about—but is that such a bad thing?

New technology not creating a need it is just filling one—enabling more people to be creative, share ideas, and express thoughts, which we naturally want to do as humans.  It even allows us to express these thoughts and ideas to people outside of our close-knit networks.  We are being exposed to a world of stories and perspectives instead of just the few that were pushed out to us.

Of course companies will continue to use the power of storytelling and other strategies to lure more customers in.  But in today’s age, we are no longer at the whim of companies’ catchy campaigns to decide what next product to buy or restaurant to go to.  Of course we have to be careful about what information we read and advice we take, but at least it is out there for us.  Companies will always have the ‘about us’ telling their story.  But today we know better.  With a few quick clicks, we get the real story behind a company, beyond their marketing and advertising.

We have Yelp to learn the real stories behind our local restaurants; Mint to create transparency around our finances and the tricks of our financial institutions; and Kayak to search all the airfares so we get the best rates.

Indeed, the pace is changing in our new web 2.0 environment, but empowering the everyday people to be more informeed, creative, expressive, and resourceful is to be embraced—not feared.

Um. No. September 30, 2009

Going through the first two chapters of the Ryan/Walker text, I didn’t see much to scoff at.  Of course referencing commonly known points – literary, historical, or otherwise – is an effective way of not only telling a story but also making sure that story adheres to a loose outline of what you may want as the storyteller.  And if we’re perfectly honest with ourselves, we can say that many people only know who Oedipus and Electra are because someone started talking about Daddy Issues – not because Sophocles is particularly high ranking on quite a few public school reading lists.

That said, I (too) hit a brick wall at the exact moment I read:

[Regarding Romeo and Juliet] Two audiences: the first a group of young suburban teenage Americans used to casual “hooking up” over a weekend; the second made up of traditional conservative Muslims from the Middle East, who understand exactly what it would mean (in the most literal terms) to defy their family’s idea of who they should (or shouldn’t) marry.

No.  Just, no.  Ryan and Walker are over simplifying the societal and cultural differences and underestimating the empathies of teenagers (and I’m guessing kids and adults) as a whole.  ”Our teenage audience might understand that parents are always a drag”…really?  That’s what Ryan and Walker take out of Romeo and Juliet? In all my many scholastic readings of Shakespeare, never have any semblance of those words or the gist of those words come across the lips of any of my classmates. I support generalizing comments about Americans being stupid – but this just annoys me.

Brand loyalty has not declined because neighborhoods and churches have brokendown, loyalty declines because there is heightened competition and increasingly fast improvements on similar products.  There are a million versions of the personal MP3 player, QWERTY cellular phones and PDAs each with its own customer base evolving with the products and the price tags.  If companies are upset about the loss of market share, they should consider improving their products before their competition does.

The same can be said for the apparent decline of the employer and employee.  It is true that past generations of working Americans have stayed at a particular company for their entire lives, working their way from the bottom up.  The crumbling of the family-like corporation is the root of why today we jump ship every few years – you can’t blame it on the diminished identity of the community.  When corporations begin to stop treating their employees with respect they stop earning the loyalty of the same people.  Plus, the digital age has changed how people interact with the world, making them feel more comfortable to seek jobs without the judging eyes of their current employers.  No, really: http://www.kentburnsonline.com/paper1.pdf.

It’s Not Easy Being Green September 30, 2009

I understood what the author was getting at, and while I agree that it is true, and that businesses consciously come up with stories to create an image for their product, I think there’s a deeper, more insidious side to it.

At some time previous to modern branding, someone came up with the “Myth of Consumerism,” wherein the general public was convinced that we ought to be indebted to businesses for the products and services they provide, and we ought to be grateful for the opportunity to consume until we are past full.

Companies brand themselves in order to play into this “Consumer Myth,” because they have something to hide. If we as consumers chose to see through what is at heart a transparent attempt at mystification, our desire to consume would diminish. Businesses as a whole benefit from this collective myth, which they created and we as consumers actively sustain.

Regarding the 7th Function of Storytelling: Preservation of Values

This is also a myth perpetrated on the consuming public. Take, for example, the current trend of “Going Green.” Being “Green” existed long before business, before manufacturing, at least to the time of the American Indians, and probably to the beginning of human existence, where rational people decided it was universally beneficial to not waste; but businesses have decided to cash in on a buzzword that essentially means: “We will try to fuck up the world a little less, and you should thank us for it.”

In conclusion, a myth only gains power if it is assimilated by the general public. We ought to actively remove this “veil of maya” (if you will), and show producers that we don’t need them, by–you guessed it–not needing them.