I feel almost like Jesse Jackson, with my tittle’s rhyming.
Joseph and New Marketing
Today I’m going to tell you a tiny bit about about Joseph Jaffe. Joseph is a kind of mentor to me. He does a “new marketing podcast” now known as Jaffe Juice, formally Across The Sound. New marketing would be marketing in, basically, the interactive / digital / social media space. Why is this subject important? To big business and brands, they way consumers interact with brands is changing. The world is changing at an amazingly fast pace, the disruption is huge, and the question of what this might mean to the marketing profession, and business in general, is an important question. In marketing, Joseph is one of the folks leading the charge.
Why Joseph Jaffe and New Marketing Matters to Us
Now why is it important to us? I suppose there’s the question of “who exactly is us?” I have no real idea, of who my readers are at this point… so “us” will be an imaginary idea, having more to do with my idea of what I’m doing here, then what you’re actually doing here, reading me.
I’m interested in, among other things, the future of culture. I’m particularly interest in culture from the artists / content creator’s perspective. The relationship between the way markets operate, and the culture they help drive, is a long story in media criticism. It seems to me that new marketing offers us something new. Artists have a new opportunity for thinking about new existential relationships between content and markets. This is, in my view, insainly exciting for the future of culture.
A kind of 101 of it runs something like this: Social media marketing’s biggest expense is the time and energy it takes to do it. Anyone can do it, with barely any budget at all. Consequently social media marketing is very well suited to the guerrilla. If you’re an artist, and you learn to do this well, the implications could be great: In music as a mass media art form, it #1 costs about a million dollars to bring a band to market, which is to say to build there brand. #2 In order to recoup the expense of bringing the band to market, the record label/artists have to sell a hell of a lot of cd’s to recoup there investment. This has many effects like the subtext of the question “does this music have commercial potential” and what that means to what sorta music we we hear on the radio. Are you bored with what’s on the radio today?
If you do your own social media marketing and, as a solo artist, are able to sell the equivalent of 6,000 CDs per product cycle, you are now eking out a living. Of course most revenue is probably not coming from CD or download sales, and of course selling 6,000 CDs is not an easy thing, but it does “change everything.” Also, let us not forget that we are still in the early days of this transformation.
So, my suggestion to artists and content creators is to tune into the conversation, that’s going on in podcasts and blogs like Joseph Jaffe’s Jaffe Juice.
More Places to Turn for Information on Marketing and Communications In New Media
Here’s a quick list of other podcasts I highly recommend you check out:
My Participation in the Join the Conversation Project
So why am I talking about Joseph Jaffe today? Well Joseph has a new book out called “Join the Conversation” which would have something to do with “conversational marketing.” There is a somewhat new-ish idea, in the world of marketing and business, that markets “are conversations.” I’m not saying everyone buys into this idea, but it is something worth thinking about, though I’m not going to go exploring that rabbit hole today..
As a part of promoting his book, Joseph is giving away books to anyone who has a business / marketing / media related blog or podcast, if you agree to write a review on it. I forget how many copies he’s giving away, I want to say 150? (click here to find out more)
I want to get my butt in gear, as far as executing my own social media strategy, on multiple fronts, and for working with other people in the social media space. For this reason, reading a book on the subject, is something I want to do. Being a fan of Joseph makes we want to read his book in particular, and being an artist of limited means… well how could I pass up an opportunity to participate in Joseph’s efforts?
No Really, I’m a Truth Teller
At this point you may well ask, “just what sort of objectivity can we realistically expect from Matt on this subject.” My first answer is “I have no idea,” a more considered answer runs as follows… or better yet, this is what I plan to do:
This blog is dedicated to meditations on whatever subject I’m meditating on, at the time I write and post stuff. I expect that as I read Join the Conversation, I will be reacting to it, in one way or another. I am not an uncritical consumer of information, as a cursory review of this blog will no doubt show, so I suspect what you’ll get from this blog will be nothing but my honest, authentic, reactions. Even if they should be colored one way or another, I want to be transparent enough so as to provide to you, what you need in order to be critical, in your consumption of what I have to say.
Ok, so that’s about it for this post, lists end on some related links:
I wouldn’t say I have writers block.. I couldn’t say that really: I write soooo much shit. Trouble is I don’t post. Why? Well, it seems like.. to write something worth while, I feel I need to push on it hard enough to get it some place interesting. By the time I get there, it’s a long post, and with my writing as bad as it is, there’s a need for heavy editing. If a long post is poorly written, why in hell would you go to the trouble to read it?
This and there are certain subjects that are a little difficult, like lets say… race, politics, religion… subjects that… I suppose could get you in trouble, depending on how you write on them. Well not trouble exactly but.. I mean I want to be respectful of wherever a reader might be coming from, and sometimes I wonder if my positions might inherently not be, somehow, depending on where you’re coming from. Well, I suppose that’s what comments are for, so feel free to bitch slap me, should it be necessary.
A component of this problem is.. I have some strange ideas about things. Some of these strange ideas, at least on the surface, might look a little crazy. In some cases I’m not sure if they’re crazy myself. In my toy chest of ideas, there’s a set of ideas that.. well they are old.. from another time in my life. Ideas I haven’t picked up since.. well whenever. The result is, whatever certainty I had of them, back in the day, today they hold certain question marks, at least for me. Yet, at the same time, these ideas are not without a certain weight in how I live my life.
It’s sorta like.. what we do with our lives today, that builds the foundation for who we are tomorrow. So I suppose there’s a need for some foundation inspections, ha?
One set of ideas I call “the God concept.” These are ideas that could be shelved under “mysticism.” At one point in my life, I was searching for something akin to “a scientific proof of the existence of God.” The “experience” surrounding this, shall we call it an intellectual journey?, was one that defined the future direction of my life. Where I’m standing today, comes out of that.
The ground I’m standing on is not a certain ground. There are deep questions surrounding where I’m standing. Are these questions the force of damage sustained at earlier points in my life, or is there something real in them?
There is this force of socialization in our lives: There is this way that the world tries to define us. Seems like a bad idea to let it. So many of my questions seem to stem from this sort of thing. Perhaps this is a monster I should slay?
I remember as a small child, having almost like imaginary friends. Somewhere in here the idea of imaginary bands, or armies, or whatever. And I remember one idea was something like “monster slayers.” What is the relationship between the consciousness of children, and adult consciousness? What I mean is, being so little, wanting to kill the monsters of humanity, are those monsters not the anxieties of adult life? Anxieties that drive collective evolution? Anxieties that steer the life of our times?
It’s funny to look at it this way: like a childhood fear of the dark, or a monster in the closet, or under your bed, is a monster that grows up as you grow up.
I remember my parents seeming rather odd to me. I think much of this must come from being adopted. I still don’t really understand my parents.
Since my mom died, I have a lot more experience of my dad. In someways my mom’s passing actually makes things easier: My mom had a certain need to control, and in that need to control was a certain amount of anxiety. Anxiety often keeps us from seeing things as they are, and adversely effects our abilities to adapt. It seems like this must be a cause of my early life’s trauma, after all so much of a child’s psychology is the product of there parents.
But the monster slayers: it seems like this childhood idea has evolved into an adult idea. The idea that I should do battle with our collective anxieties, try to pass through the shadow worlds, and come out the other side, with all our lost gold.
Perhaps my trouble, when it comes to blogging, has to do with speaking from inside the shadow’s dark wood?
I’ve expressed some uncertainty about this blog, and then last night I read some of the entries, found it to be much better then I thought it to be: it would seem my powers of self criticism are limited.
A little while ago I read a blog entry, as a result of a tweet link from Chip Griffin, on the subject of writing and public relations. The gist of it was on the importance of writing simply, the complexity of the task, and how to do it.
I feel as though I’m lucky if I can write at all. Lots of people tell me, wether its a blog or podcast of mine, that I’m talking over there heads. This would seem to be a bad sign. This is particularly true if I’m viewing blogging and podcasting as communications tools.
On the other hand, when we are talking about blogging and podcasting, there is the importance of speaking in your own voice. (This would be a slightly different challenge then if we are writing a press releases.) My voice is, I think we can all agree, a rather intellectual voice. Still, I don’t want to be unaccessible.
All this is made a little more challenging if we are talking about a kind of developmental stage, where in experimentation is key. Experimentation is something you don’t usually manage from a user centric perspective. The experimentation, in my case, is at least partly about finding my voice. There’s also self exploration: How do you build a personal brand when your notion of who you are is in flux?
In many ways what I think I’m trying to do is to create something, and then see what it is. For the thing I’m creating, I have no idea who the audience is. The process is more one where you listen to your inner voice, and see where that takes you. The voice is leading you in the direction of becoming, the process is one of exploring an inward mystery. So, this would all seem to bring certain challenges to the communications process.
Then a few days back, I was listening to some of my older podcast episodes, and tweeted on them. I don’t remember what episode it was, but essential the sound was awesome and my talking was terrible. My friend Greg PC, who also happens to be in public relations, commented on my tweet. His comment was something to the effect of “scripts can be a good thing, though sometimes unnatural.” I only picked up on his comment, do to Google Alerts, today. I suppose here’s my response:
Listening to some of my podcasts, there’s clearly problems, and something needs to be done if I’m to take my podcast projects seriously. I’ll give you my basic thinking, and process, and then go from there:
Process
What I’m trying to do is “capture the magic.” If there’s no magic to be captured, as is frankly the case in some of my episodes, this process wont work so well. The idea is, I have a portable recorder that I take with me most everywhere, and if I have a thought, I record it. The recordings then reside on a hard drive. When it comes time to put together an episode, I go through the recordings, and do a kind of production where in those recordings are regarded as elements of the episode. The elements are bought in, along with music, and whatever else.. and a certain amount of creative mixing, editing, and general production, happens.
This kind of a production is a lot more labor intensive then that of most podcasts. In many ways, I would regard it as a kind of exploratory process: Interesting things can happen in various places: #1 The actual recording, #2 The editorial process of selecting clips from the recordings, #3 The other sonic elements that are selected to be a part of the episode, #4 musical elements that are custom composed / produced for that episode, and #5: the way all of these elements are mixed together.
Theoretically, you could have a recording that was kind of bad, lets say in terms of content, and via the rest of the process, it could be turned into something good. So, the exploration comes in how all of these parts of the process interplay: It’s really about both the parts and the ecology.
Aesthetics
Now there’s the matter of my aesthetic thinking. For better or worse, I have some strange ideas. I’m interested in a recording aesthetic that basically makes the microphone a kind of stand in for Freud, with the idea that we can pear into the soul of whomever is talking. (This is a complex matter I deal with else where)
Another part of this aesthetic thinking, borrowed from Andre Bazin (an important film critic in post WWII france), is to preserve the “spacial temporal integrity of the event.” In terms of sound, the idea is that sound production is largely a manipulation of reality, which has large effects on how we interpret what we are hearing. If you listen to a 1940’s Jazz recording, you know those guys are really playing, but in modern music you may be listening to “a good take,” or perhaps what you were listening to has the performances digitally “fixed,” so everyone is playing perfectly on the beat. There is also the fact that the sound you are hearing is not one you’d ever hear in reality, everything has been miced in such a way so as to produce an “ideal sound.”
Deeper in my philosophical thinking, there’s no such thing as an ideal.. or all things are ideals. Ideals have to do with underlying questions, they are ideal resolutions to questions or conflicts, so that an ideal is a part of a relationship, and not an independent thing or idea. So it’s somewhat of a Buddhist idea to go explore what a thing is, and find its inherent perfection.
Without going into it here, this ties into bigger cultural criticism. To get to the point, how music is produced effects how we appreciate the music. This having to do with age old philosophical questions like “how do we know what we know.”
This then becomes a central subject of my art. Wether we are talking Andre Bazin, or microphone as stand in for Freud, we are really talking about a kind of ultra realism. In my work we have, on the one hand, ultra realism, and on the other extreme manipulations.. and so my work explores these interrelationships.
Production Values Problems
The trouble, from the point of view of sound production, is the further something gets away from the microphone “the worse it sounds.” Some of this has to do with distinctions between the way we listen to natural events, versus what the recording and production process does to sound, and how we hear this. This all being a part of psychoacoustics. The result then, of a naturalistic approach to the problem, of having sound sources far away from a microphone so as to preserve a spacial integrity of an event, is that you’re sound quality suffers.
Yet another issue is that I’m interested in capturing both the sound of the people speaking, and the sound of the space the people are speaking in. The latter part greatly complicates how you can manipulate the sounds.
Strategic Considerations
We have a lot of ideas on the table here, and while these ideas are all well and good, we also have the demands of “the market place.” Even if content is free, we are still talking about “economies of attention,” and how media aesthetics plays into people’s consumption patterns. How do we balance the deeper ideas of the work with our strategic considerations?
It seems to me that these are the questions I must explore moving forward. Allow me to give you some examples:
Dynamic compression compresses the dynamic range (variations from loud to soft) of sounds into a smaller range then we were originally at. You can then turn up the volume of your compressed audio in the mix, and it will sound louder then the original. To our mind and ears, louder equals better, a result being that modern music if often over compressed.
You will no doubt notice that dynamic compression manipulates the dynamic range of the original recording, and thus removes us one step from the original event. If reality is what you’re after, then dynamic compression might carry some problems with it.
On the other hand, if a podcast listeners is listening to your podcast while riding a bike through traffic, any sound that is lower then the sound of the traffic will not be heard. So, if you look at your episode, you can ask the following question: “structurally, what must be heard in order for this episode to work?” You could then compress, and pump up those parts, while allowing the other elements to exist in a fuller dynamic range.
Scripts
I have an inner anarchist that’s not much in favor of scripts, and then there’s the problems scripts present to my aesthetic ideas. That said, just as there are many ways to skin your cat, there are many types of scripts:
One type of script is one where you write out, word for word, everything you are going to say. Particularly if you’re a podcaster, the trick here is to write as you speak, so it might all sound natural. The next trick is in how you read and perform that script. The challenge is to both be in the moment, and really feel everything you are saying. (It probably wouldn’t hurt if you committed it to memory to.)
Another type of script involves bullet points: These are the topics we are going to talk about, and we’ll just improvise on each topic. An advantage this has over fully scripting every word is that it’s much easier to be in the moment.
The next type of script, I’d like to tell you about, I call “the avant guard script.” Generally, these scripts are more like “strategies for interesting results,” then they are traditional scripts. I take this idea from people like John Cage, whom composed with chance and indeterminacy.
How about a short 2 part thing on Cage, to help give you a sense of where I’m coming from?
There are two things I should like this video to drive home here: #1 Cage is, one way or another, dealing with many of the same questions, problems, and issues I’m dealing with, and #2: Cage is a very different artist then I am. A third thing you might note, is his untraditional looking scores. A score is, after all, a script.
Besides all of the above types of script, there is also the subject of improvisation. Sure, improvisation is making things up as you go along, but it is also true that improvisation can happen inside a limited set of parameters, which could then allow for certain types of structural ideas to be work out on a compositional or “script” level.
For instance, one approach to acting involves a strict adherence to a script, but free improvisation as to how you deliver that script. This can both be a means to explore the possibilities in that script, and of delivering a performance.
Beyond Scripts
Ok, enough about scripts. Do you remember how I was talking about “trying to capture the magic?” This is a documentary process, which is to say, one where we are documenting the unfolding of life / reality / something or other. My inner anarchist, the same one who doesn’t like scripts, is again making rules against scripts, even if that would seem to be incompatible with a documentary process.
Still, I can tell you how I think some of my most successful episodes were created: Before the episode was made I would mediate on it’s subject. When I went to record the episode, the subject would be fully thoughts out, and I would just take you through my thinking. The episodes were often powerful, simply because my thoughts would take you to a whole new way of thinking about the subject.
I guess where all this leaves me is with one question “where should I go from here?” Hmm.. well before we address this, how about we get to broader subject of communications:
Communications
I don’t have a communications background. I don’t really regard myself as too great a writer, though with the help of a really good editor, there could be some hope for me. If I put my mind to it, I’m sure I could write a decent press release.
This blog is about complex ideas. This is it’s virtue. The virtue is in trying to illuminate subjects in new ways: I provide a take on this that is unique.. It’s a take that is hopefully thought provoking. Even in this entry, where I discuss the various issues of my social media aesthetics, and what not, as backwards as my positions may or may not be, they are hopefully at least interesting to think about.
There is, of course, the question of intended audiences. I don’t think my intention is really to communicate to an 8th grade level, as is the case with so much modern communications. I mean, anyone who’s interested in what I have to say, you’re probably pretty smart / well educated to begin with. If you were not, why would you be interested? And of course, when philosophy takes such a prominent roll in things, I believe there’s got to be some license for my going off the deep end here and there.
Still I do want to try and break down, my more complex ideas, into simple bite sized chunks that anyone can understand. The trouble is, understanding some of my more complex ideas is contingent on understanding lots of other ideas.
For this reason it seems that each entry of mine is full of various puzzle pieces. The puzzle pieces, at least to me, sometimes look to be full of loose ends, or at least unestablished points. These unestablished points are a problem, when they outline positions that are contrary to the readers position, at least in some cases. I’m specifically thinking of times when, from the surface, it could look like this or that part of my thought isn’t well thought out. The way the puzzle piece system works is.. sooner or latter I’ll get into that point, and properly establish it. Of course, while this might be a grand process for artifice building, it’s probably not ideal for communications.
Ok, now to the “where do we go from here” problem:
I think I basically just need to put more energy into my podcasts. It may very well be that my process is too labor and energy intensive, given all the directions my energies seems to be going, in which case there’s a need to economize, which means different strategies.
Latter still:
I’m just now attempting to edit this entry. Dear lord is it long! Too long I think! And how much of it was really self criticism anyway? Ahh, screw it. It’s something.
I bought a Mac Pro from Apple, via there website, on January 18th. In a grumpy tone, I wrote about this is this blog entry. Apples website said at the time, and still says “ships within 24 hours.” It is now January 24th, 6 days latter, and it still hasn’t shipped. Sooo… I check my order status. Guess what it says? ”Ships by Feb 26, delivers by March 8th!”
So here I am, not knowing this.. My whole life is on hold, waiting for this thing to arrive. I need this computer before I can know what the hell is going on in the financial situation, as I need to run windows to do that.. and can’t on this old computer. I need it to start my work. I was planning on using it to help me work out the taxes for my parents…
So Apple has officially put a very bad taste in my mouth.
There’s a number of videos I’d like to show you, but C-Span’s not as great as it once was, as far as having old programs online.
Ok, with that, allow me to share my thoughts and feelings on race in America, and all this lovely stuff. It has been said that race in America is the canary in the coal mine. The idea here being that there are all sorts of toxins in our country, forces of darkness, lets call it the night side of America: The American Shadow, to go Jungian on you.
Listen, we all have a shadow side, all have a dark side. The shadow is essentially the Freudian unconscious. It is that part of our soul where the light don’t shine so much. We give a lot of attention to the development of a certain part of our potential, as a result the other parts stay in a more immature form, and thus act immaturely. Still in us, they exert and influence that goes largely unnoticed.
The notion of the canary in the cold mine is that race effects how we are effected by the shadow side of the American Soul, to put it a certain kind of way. It would seem that as a result of this, we see in the African American population a stronger ability to wrestle with our night side then we see in the culture at large.
If you don’t wrestle with your shadow you become a vehicle of that shadow in the world: If we, as American’s, fail to wrestle with our own darkness, then America becomes a force of darkness in the world. For this reason I look to race politics to help save our collective soul.
So how how do we wrestle with the shadow?
A nice little clip on the subject:
When we get into Howard Zinn vill, we are getting into a radical politics of a far left variety. This is a politics that is not terribly polite, and is not well received by main stream media, culture, and especially not politically speaking: This is controversial stuff. Controversial enough that my speaking of it might be provocative to some readers. So I must try to talk to those readers:
The subject of race, as we all know, can be a divisive one, as is also true for these radical politics. On this subject, there are various ways I can come at it, where I believe I might be able to speak to you in a way that transcends the subject’s divisive character:
One way is to talk about forces in our society in a way that, on a certain level, deemphasizes the roll an individual plays in the shaping of his or her own destiny, from how we might normally see it. For starters we live inside complex webs of interdependence, and we can see this on multiple levels. Economics is, among other things, a kind of study of economic interdependence. Ecology is a study of interdependency. What roll do the people in our lives play in shaping our lives? What roll does the society we live in play in shaping our lives? Our parents? Our culture? Media? Diet? Our social economic strata? Education?
In addition, though still part of the subject of interdependency, there is the way that our very decision making process is not as rational as often believed and often has to do with unconscious factors. These unconscious factors are a combination of biology and “programing” (both of which are products of interdependency.)
In psychoanalysis there is the subject of the channels thoughts have to travel before they can dawn on the conscious mind. These channels play a significant roll in shaping the form of the thoughts we think. These channels are shaped in an interplay between our wills, our biological impulses, and our societies value system; over the course of a life time but particularly so in early youth. (This having everything to do with the shadow I was talking about earlier) There is the story of how our life’s scripts are formed in early childhood. Nietzsche has a wonderful thing he says about free will: He says you’re will isn’t really free, you have many wills and whatever will takes the dominant roll you then identify with and call it “my will.”
How About another video? This time Alan Watts, which is to say a little eastern philosophy. Eastern philosophy tends to be a little more collectivist then western philosophy, and thus has dealt with these kinds of issues in a more depth then our wester philosophy:
Ok, now we are getting deep. Suddenly the subject of interdependence leads to God. Well lets pull out of this depth, to get back to our original aims of making a more radical politics, more palatable. I haven’t quite given this thread it’s full treatment, but we’ve probably gone far enough so that you’ve seen the iceberg’s tip.
Our next little thread, related to our earlier thread, has something to do with statistics. We can look at statistics through out history, and from these gleam some understanding of hidden orders. We can see that in year X there was Y number of killings by knives, and Z number of killings by guns. We can look at these statistics over time and see trends. We can ask questions about why and how: the numbers point to hidden orders. Conventionally we often take a view of ‘good and bad people,’ “you are in this situation because it’s your own damn fault!” We segregate people into the conceptual boxes of “good” and “bad.”
The trouble here is that conceptual boxes are a product of the mind, not of reality. The world is not full of things! The differentiation between things, that we make, is simply a matter of how we frame things. On a collective level, in particular, the framing up of reality is in large measure driven by power relationships. A function of state power is to divide groups up into criminals and non criminals.
At this point it might be good to share another, though this time shorter, Alan Watts Clip.
All this leads into very complicated waters. For now I merely want to suggest that one can appreciate that there are hidden systemic forces at work that order society, and that it might be possible to effect how society is ordered in such a way to create a more ideal situation.
I’ve gone on for a while now, there’s still more threads to explore, but I think these will have to wait for another time. For now lets travel back to the African American experience.
Is there, in the American Shadow, unconscious and systemic racism? It seems at this point a good time to turn to Bill Cosby:
What Bill Cosby is saying, no doubt, makes some sense. But there are a couple things that I would like to bring to your attention: #1 He is emphasizing personal responsibility aka the individual, and #2 his appreciation for hip hop culture is not very deep. For a deeper look at hip hop culture, allow me to recommend the links at the top of this entry from Poet Nikki Giovanni, and black intellectual Michael Eric Dyson.
In fact, lets take a moment to look at a bit of hip hop culture, one that illustrates it’s strength in wrestling with the American shadow. How about a little Public Enemy?:
Ok, now that we’ve had a taste for that, how about we go to two videos with Michael Eric Dyson commenting on Bill Cosby:
And our second video:
You will no doubt note that Michael Eric Dyson is talking about the systemic forces, and contextualizing Bill Cosby into that context.
Another thing that’s worth mentioning here is that there are generational divisions between the Civil Rights generation and the Hip Hop generation. These are probably well expressed in the Gap between what Cosby is saying and what Hip Hop is saying.
In all this I don’t discredit all of what Cosby is saying, there is no doubt that in Hip Hop there are all types of negative forces at play, right along with the positive ones. Personal responsibility is not unimportant.
To get deep into this will no doubt take another blog entry, so I’ll just leave you here.. Where I hope I’ve showed something of how all of this stuff informs modern debate.
I suppose this blog entry is just me trying to work out where I should go from here: Career and Business. Don’t know if you’ll get much from it, but it surely is a part of my unfolding story.
I think, basically, where I want to go career wise is as follows: In marketing you have this range where marketers often fall: on the one side you have graphic designers and on the other you have analytic marketing folks, though this might be overstating the matter, this is at least an understanding I have.
Given the disruptive force of social media, and the nature of the space, I see an evolution coming: My skill sets are such that I can do design as well as media arts.. everything form interactive, music, video, animation, and whatever. This plus being obsessed with social media, I would imagine, might position me well for our little disruption’s out come. So everything I ought to do ought to be focused around this kind of direction.
As I see it, there are probably multiple paths through this wilderness: One path is to work on my social media presence and actually make it good. Adjacent to this effort is an effort to use this social media presence as a means of getting the word out / promoting my art and music. I have that plan, its just a matter of executing.
Another path through the wilderness is to help other people in the social media space with similar activities. Can I help bloggers and podcaster’s think about there strategy? Perhaps I could help them with a little design work, or little of this that or the other thing: The advantage of this path is that it involves networking and developing good relationships with other people in this space. Networking with people who have a social media presence, and helping them to be successful, is probably a bitch’n way to help me get where I need to go…
Another things is, if you have a promotional campaign you’re working on.. having these kinds of relationships are going to help.. If an employer is looking for someone to fill the sort of job I’m targeting, a part of that job will be influencer outreach, which involves developing relationships with influencers in this space.. and having gone on the project of helping people in the space, I will both already have some of those relationships, and I’ll be better prepared for the influencer out reach. The final advantage of such a course is it’s just good karma.
The next big question is, given my financial situation, how much time do I have before I NEED to have a job? This isn’t entirely clear to me at this point.. but depending on how much or little I invest in my studio, I ought to have a good deal of time before disaster strikes… And with any luck I ought to be able to get some work prior to such disaster.. so as to extend the runway a little bit.
So… what might I look to put in my studio moving forward? Where might I like to go?
My preference is to, in all things, develop strategies that work on the cheap. It’s all about getting the most bang for your buck.. Plus I’m very interested in a guerrilla approach to all this. And after all, this would be an approach most applicable to other people trying to use social media for there strategy.. which is to say independent artists / content creators of all stripes, and general social media folks.
All that said, I do want to be a step apart.. I’m all for embracing a Do It Your Self aesthetic, but I also want to be a pro in all these areas. So it’s a question of specializing in how to get pro results on the cheap.
I’m still a little skittish about spending a lot of money, but lets look at a possible budget. This will be a rough drafted version, a kind of brain storming effort where the results are a lot more then you’d like to spend, so I imagine I should pull back from this a bit but.
I’m thinking lighting rig for video, along with microphones, something for chroma key.. including some software.. and a camera thats good for that. Maybe a DSLR to.
Latter that night:
I think the best thing to do is just play with these ideas and let them roll over in my head. The budget stuff that is. Other then the computer, and to get some sound stuff going on it, there’s not really that much that’s real pressing to get on top of at this point.
A Project Already In the Making:
Several years ago I bought a Mini DV camcorder. It was one of the first to cost less then $700. I’m not totally sure when this was exactly, but at the time I had a computer to do a little video work on. Trouble was that I never really had enough disk space to really work, and never the money for the drives, not to mention that hard drives were a lot more expensive in those days.
The plan was to take the camera around with me and shoot stuff.. shoot my life. Shoot whatever… and then eventually turn it into something. I now have a library of video shot over several years. The project is.. to turn that into something.
Beyond the new computer, what I need to do is invest in some drives.
Here’s the basic plan for the project: Go through tapes and digitize stuff. I even have tapes going all the way back to college.. raw footage shot for who knows what end or purpose. The plan would be to go through this old tape and start editing stuff into stuff. Mainly just little sequences.
These sequences get exported and scored. Or.. brought into the DAW and played with.
What I want is a process that allows me to play with stuff over time. A process where you’re basically mining the old footage. Trying to create strong sequences. But the work it’s self… it could be about sound, it could be about what’s going on in the video, it could be about anything.
Next day sometime:
As I let my ideas roll around my head I start to think my way through to possible ways to get what I want for less.
One idea I have is called “the punk rock approach.” By punk rock I mean you’re not really doing things “the right way.” My gut instinct, on a certain level, is instead of buying an expensive lighting rig, expensive camera, chorma screen system.. is to just go ahead and get an uber cheap camera. The trouble, of course, is you can’t do good keying on the uber cheap camera. This having something to do with technical issues surround how camcorders work. All this said, After Effects, which is probably going into my tool kit anyway, has animated masking tools that might allow me to compensate for not being able to do proper keys.
How good is this compensation? This is a question to be explored, but there’s no reason why I can’t take the time to explore prior to making a larger investment.
The trick to getting good results with bad cameras is generally “good lighting.” Indeed, lighting is a huge part of how you go about getting good production values, and how you develop an aesthetic. In the biz we call it “painting with light.”
There is arguably a hell of a lot that goes into a “cinematic conception:” Where you put your camera, how you light the scene, all this sorta thing. This is an area I should jump into, as far as I can, on as low a budget as is possible.
A feeling I have is.. you create a home studio / portable rig system.. In my case on the cheap.. Something that’s enough to get you starting to explore this stuff. In the social media context you don’t really need a convention idea of production values in the same way you do for TV and Film. As a general rule of thumb, one can get away with doing this stuff on the cheap. Then, if you get a client, and that client has a budget, you can rent the more expensive gear for as long as it takes to do the shooting. At this point you are in a better position to take advantage of what that sort of route has to offer, plus you’re saving money.
So I did it, took the plunge, bought a New Mac Pro. I’ll tell you it was a little scary. You see the Mac Pro is an expensive computer.. There’s a lot of power but only some software fully takes advantage of that.. should I have gotten a MacBook Pro? I’m still questioning my purchase…
Yesterday it was off to the Apple store. I had just gotten my Visa Check card set up so I could use it, checked to make sure I could take money out of our CD without penalty with a death certificate, and with that headed to the Natick Mall.
The Mac Pro is the only computer line at Apple to which there is only one model, with the idea that you configure it to your specifications. You do this via the Apple’s website. Generally you can’t buy custom configurations of Apple’s computers at there retail stores. This said, they have always had a couple Mac Pro configurations to choose from. I figured I’d rather not have to wait a week for it to come in the mail so I would at least check out the Apple store, see what it was going on with it.
The sales guy sorta annoyed me in a way. He thought there was another configuration there to, but that wasn’t what annoyed me. When I made some half joking comment about wishing I didn’t have to buy from Apple’s website he said “well, they gotta built it first.” Yeah, ok, but shouldn’t Apple have an idea of “what are the popular configurations” and couldn’t they have a few of those at the store? I mean I don’t know how all this works, but it seems like you could have some configurations there.. Not that this is anything to be too annoyed about, but if Apple’s supposed to be king of experience design, and really really really think about the experience of buying a Mac, you’d think they’d do that! Not only that but.. it’s clear for the type of computer user I am that I would never buy a computer from the Apple retail store.. and you know what? I’d kinda like to have that experience.
It’s a little gripe to be sure.. And I suppose I was just in a bad mood for it not being there plus…
On leaving I’m on a cross walk leaving for the parking garage, and some idiot has decides to honk at me. I’m not usually this type of person.. but I give him the finger. He follows up with “look where you’re going” to which I’m like “Dude, it’s a freaking cross walk.” This plus the parking lots at the Natick Mall is… well there’s signs “parking this way” which lead you down one way “streets” the wrong way.. and you got these dumb asses who don’t bother to stop at stop signs so you almost get in an accident. I suppose it’s just teenagers on Friday nights who don’t know how to drive but…
LOL, man, I’ll tell you, kids today!!!
Anyway, let me leave you with some related links to entries that have lead up to buying the Mac Pro:
MacWorld Drama, Steve’s Job’s Speech Leaks? – Id been hoping Apple might update the MacBook Pro at MacWorld.. that was the computer I really wanted, so this was like the heavy anticipation of that.
Beyond these, there’s a couple entries still in draft form that explore the Mac Pro in greater depth, and give some analysis of Steve Jobs’s MacWorld Keynote… so stay tuned, I might actually post one!
This is a story of what my life looks like after my mom died.
The day before last I was buying a Mac Pro on Apple’s website. When it came time to put in the credit card information, I figured it was time to go check the various credit card statements to see what sorta credit limit what cards had, after all Mac Pro’s are big chunks of change! Well, in that hasty process I discovered a $130,00o credit card bill.
A credit card bill like that means something like “time to think about selling the house and moving into a trailer home.” Not that I would really mind the trailer home shtick so much… as long as I’ve got a bitch’n computer and studio set up, and good internet, I’m a happy camper.. But my dad has dementia you understand.. and folks with his kind of dementia do much better in familiar settings… thus I’d like to hold onto the house as long as I can.
Not only that but I haven’t really acclimated to all the new responsibilities that my mom’s pass has brought to me… So everything can get very overwhelming fast. So as a result.. the idea of having to figure out things like “how do we sell our house” is just more then I’d want to deal with anytime soon.
Anyway, this morning I look at the credit card bill again and realize it’s not a credit card bill but a loan…. So the interest is like.. less then half what I feared, and isn’t compounded monthly.. its annual.. which makes it more like… well it’s what we call in the biz “good debt” as a pose to “bad debt” which is what credit card bills are.
This doesn’t mean I’m in a good financial situation.. after all I got a pretty big loan there.. but it’s as if I had a crazy weight over my head for a couple days, and now it just lifted… and now I can probably get that computer after all!
This seems sorta narcissistic, but it seems worth talking about. So as you no doubt know, I’ve recently started a blog. Ages and ages ago I had a blog. This was what I like to call “a real blog” which is like.. well I’m not sure.. but one hosted on a server I was paying for. And that blog got crazy traffic. I don’t know why it got crazy human traffic, I think a lot of it was spam or something.. but it eventually got to something like 30,000 visits a day.. at about that time the host pulled the script behind the blog, and so then I had no blog.
So now I’m starting a new blog.. which is supposed to be mostly a podcast, but i seem to be doing a lot of blogging. You’re supposed to try and blog daily if you want to get to some place of influence.. and I’m sorta finding that groove.. Though I should tell you that I blog a lot that I don’t post, or at least haven’t posted yet. The result being that I’m writing constantly. The good news is that this makes me better at writing.. And I surely need to get better at it if I’m going to make a blog worth your time to read!
So lets talk stats a little: Stats for blogs are different then stats for other types of sites.. or at least you want to read them with a different eye. The reason being that people’s “behavior” is different around them. Hmm, that’s a somewhat complex topic. See traditionally web strategy involves metrics.. well all business strategy really. Metrics allow you to measure your success.. and a lot of business, if you study business, is about trying to quantify things. But what about that which is not easily quantifiable? Indeed there’s a certain metaphysics to stats, you might say, which is to say “that which you measure you get more of..” just cause you’re measuring it.. and using it as the measure of success.. There for, before you start measuring.. you ought to have some sense of what your values are, what your goals are, what’s your big picture objectives.
Anyway… behavior is a generally difficult thing analyze, or its a new thing.. but lets not get into that..
My objectives and strategy is both complex and always in flux. Right now my life is one of.. well I have a heavy weight over my head in the form of financial problems.. and I need to find a way out of it. I figure blogging / podcasting / social media.. might help along this path, but I’m not really sure how.
Did you catch that last part? ”I’m not really sure how.” This is one of the things I LOVE about social media and technology. We are somehow closer to mystery then in other fields. There’s an important question that I think business should be looking at which is “how do you manage mystery.” This is perhaps a way of saying how do you measure the unquantifiable.. which is like.. well a strange question to ask. What sort of answer are you looking for anyway? But my point is… sometimes all this obsession with ROI (return on investment) and all this, seems a little crazy to me. Crazy because what you get back from this stuff is not all in the form of monetization.
Now when you hear me tell you that you might think I’m some new breed of technocratic hippie.. but.. if you really think about it “what’s your measure of success.” I’m not against money, but what do you want your money for? If you’re getting back from what you give.. there’s lots of things that could contribute towards ideas of success that are other then monetary. Can you dig that? You’re not going to accuse me of being a communist are ya?
Ok.. so my status. One interesting stat is that 27.7 percent of my visitors have added me to there favorites. This is sorta mind blowing to me as I tend to assume that reading what I have to say is something you do in order to learn that it’s best to stay away from this strange fellow who calls himself a “mystic prophet philosopher artist.” But apparently 27.7% of my visitors are in fact masochists. Who would have thunk it?
A less encouraging stat is that 79.8% of my visitors leave in under 30 seconds. This would be what we call in the bizz “the bounce rate.” Generally blogs have higher bounce rates then regular websites as you just stop by to read a little something, or look at a little something.. not navigate a site. But when we are talking under 30 seconds, considering how long my entries often are, I kinda figure those are people who figured this wasn’t what they were looking for.
Some more interesting stats: The average visitor visits 2.84 times, so far this month anyway. My take on this is the number is probably higher if you consider that includes bounces… That is the number of the people who bother to read what I’m saying.. you must come back a number of times, so I’m digging that!
The average visitor visits 3.52 pages per visit. Again this includes the bouncers.. but on a blog.. man you can just scroll down.. wonder why they’re going to all those pages!?
The status you probably really want is the number of visitors I have? Well frankly I feel a little shy about telling you because the numbers are pretty small, and I wouldn’t want to ruin the illusion that I’m “really happening.” Not that anyone reading this would ever be under such an illusion, but I can dream, right?
Well I will tell you that I think I have some upward momentum going for me, which I’m a little excited about. It’s hard to get a real clear idea of it, but it does look this way.
You know its not just false modesty when I say…. well things like I don’t think my writing is so read hot, or that I’m surprised that there are a lot of people visiting, and apparently spending time here.. or that this site has various issues. The real truth of the matter is I feel like I’m in a very early stage of trying to find my voice here. I feel like… I could turn this blog into something great, but I’m just very unsure of myself at the moment. So long story short I’m very thankful for your visits.
One example is that I tend to like to write long blog entries. I think most people would rather read something sorta short. I don’t know if long works for blogging.. but here I am with all these long posts. Another thing is that there’s a lot of strategy that can go into blogging. This is strategy that I’m not currently following too closely. I know of a good deal of it, but I’m not really bothering with too much of it. The reason being that I’m trying focus on finding my voice before I try and find an audience.. for the simple reason that I don’t want to turn people off if my stuff sucks.
Man, I can’t even tell you how much I agonize over feeling like this stuff sucks. I say this though I’m starting to feel like.. like maybe I’m onto something.
What’s the something? Well my feeling is that I have a highly original voice, even if I haven’t entirely found it yet. What I have found is.. Well that I’ve studied all this stuff in great depth and gone about the process of synthesizing a lot of stuff and thus am able to make connections that others wouldn’t be able to make.
I also think I’m sorta strong. I mean a lot of people sorta parrot what others are saying.. or its just common knowledge stuff or.. what have you. I mean there are these blogging / podcasting / what have you.. rock stars out there that get a lot of attention. It’s sorta natural to look up to these folks and… in one way or another play to that.
To travel a little deeper down this path.. I’m someone who’s had the freedom to think deeply about a lot of stuff, and read widely.. a lot of people have jobs that force them to be focused rather narrowly.. the result being that we become like children… when we wonder onto a subject… where we don’t really know all that much, but we kinda sorta think we do? I don’t mean to judge people for that, it’s a very human thing but…
Well.. lets talk education levels, I guess. Education gives us tools for understanding stuff. What happens if you don’t have those tools? Where you’re education is, there you have your tools. Most people navigate life in a somewhat conventional sorta way. If I were to say “I’m a web designer” whenever someone asked me what I did for a living… not that I do web design as a living at this moment.. but I mean if that was my principle occupation.. I would probably be inclined to hang out with a lot of other web designers.. as a part of my “career furthermost program” other wise known as “networking” or “professional development.” What I would find in that world is a whole lot of norms.. and as I build my identity, it would be in large part measured against that norm.
So inside the web design industry you will find a lot of norms surrounding what people are like. Who knows what these norms are.. I mean I’m not just talking about stuff that directly relates to there jobs.. I’m talking more about the whole human being. In these norms you’d see where there education is… maybe relative to a broad selection of topics. If your identity is built, at least in part, in relationship to these norms.. then if all web designer’s are X you can be X without standing out.. so X could be positive or negative..
So.. of the totality of our potential as human beings.. if you imagined that as a circle.. you could then draw some lines in that circle to indicate what is the norm for web designers in relationship to the cultivation of that potential, as you could with the people from any other sorta career path.
So to get back to what I was originally trying to say is: the reason I feel strong is because what I’m looking to cultivate is the whole, and it more or less doesn’t matter where you turn, your going to find that people are not really cultivating the whole, they are cultivating parts. So what does that mean for your discourse on X, Y, or Z subject? Thus, I hope at least, the idiosyncratic nature of my path through life might yield strategic advantages in the social media space. Or that’s what I sorta believe anyway.
Well I’m tired, and though I do have some misgivings about this entry, think I’ll post it anyway.
I’ve been having email conversations with David Tames, of the Art Film Talk Podcast and Kino-eye.com, that have involved a fair amount of philosophy, and lead me to take some of my thought more seriously.. and to think I should probably blog / podcast about them more. Besides this blog and podcast I also do the Asymmetric Biz Cult podcast which is basically “A New Philosophy of Art Mind and Business.” The Asymmetric Biz Cult does explores similar territory as this entry… though it tends to be in the context of “business for artists.” Here, the philosophy bit of it, seems to be about providing new conceptual frameworks for thinking about the business of culture creation, to put it a certain sort of way.
Thinking for me; ideas, philosophy, psychology: they’ve always figured deeply in my life… one way or another. Today I realize that these ideas give me a conceptual framework for understanding and interacting with reality. They also have a huge influence on my creative process. I don’t know if this is 100% true or not, but I feel a little as if these ideas might be the biggest achievement I’ve made thus far in my life. Whatever the story, to appreciate myself, my art, my music, my whatever.. I think these ideas are a key. I also think that this key might open doors for you. So lets get on with this adventure.
My ideas have a certain rich complexity to them, and one of the challenges one confronts when trying to understand them is the level of interdependency they have in my larger body of thought. To understand one thing you often have to understand 5 other things.. At some points, I suppose one could argue, that these ideas come dangerously close to a circular argument, I don’t know that they really do, but this does mean that we have to travel through a lot of ideas before the big picture emerges.
I play with ideas as if they were 3 dimensional objects: I think visually, the geometric form that make up of the object is in part how we understand it’s “truthieness.” Another words we say geometry is true because of the math that makes it up, I mean you can test stuff via the math. I’m not big on math, but from the geometry of the idea, from the ideas shape, you can sort of see the truth of the shape. So the way I think is to manipulate these 3 dimensional ideas.
What this provides the task of trying to understand my philosophy is, at least as far as I know, a unique set of challenges. It means you must understand the object, the idea.. but it is not merely a matter of understanding the object… the object is like a basketball… one can understand the ball, but one must understand how to use the ball in the game of basketball. The object is perhaps like a move in martial arts, where many moves are tied together, practiced over and over again, until it is all like breathing, it is all muscle memory. So its not just understanding the object onto its self, its about understanding how to play with the ideas.
At best I would say I’m a kind of improviser in the life of the mind: I have this huge toy chest filled with all these toys, all these ideas.. that I can bring out and apply to anything…
A part of my process we could call “toy acquisition.” This involves looking at art, listening to music, reading books, watching tv and movies.. It involves conversations, it involves thinking. Some toys come from the outer world, and some come from the inner world of my own imagination. Even when in possession of a toy, there is work involved in crafting that toy into a better toy: You walk around the world of ideas and you pick up the toys that other folks have been playing with. First you have to interrogate the toy; How does this toy work, how is it constructed? You question the toy.
Now you must understand that I’m a little crazy! I have ways of thinking that are more about how I manipulate toys then it’s about the toys them selves. My true genius, assuming I have one at all, is really a child like ability to play. It is a kind of grand master ju-jitsu of a 2 year old gone too far. They say guns don’t kill people, Chuck Norris Kills people, well what if Chuck was a 2 year old? A 2 year old can make a grown adult, a parent for instance, go insane with a toy as simple as the question “why?” Now imagine that 2 year old takes on the inherited value system of our society with that simple question? I suppose the moral of the story is “don’t mess with my inner child.”
Most children grow out of this, but I was a strong willed child, to put it mildly. I was eventually thrown out of high school for questioning authority a little more then that insecure high school authority could bare. Dear lord, I am a monster!
To get back to a point I was trying to make earlier, my behavior of thought is a part of my toy analysis. Nietzsche is famous for questioning things more deeply then anyone else, as a part of dethroning religion as the central value system of our society. I dare say I question toys just as deeply. What you find when you question a toy this far is the toy transmuting into something new. The ideas we find lying around in our world have evolved out of a kind of use value, lets say, so that there construction has to do with the particulars of there use. But lets say you wanted to use that toy in a different context? Perhaps a good way of explaining this is the notion of “best practices” that we see in business, and just about everything else. These best practices are guidelines for success that have the wonderful benefit of allowing you to succeed without too much thought, yet the true master does not use these best practices in a dogmatic way. The best practices have evolved as a kind of crystallization of issues surrounding whatever it is that you’re trying to do. The trouble, of course, is that we are living in a world with an ever accelorating rate of change, so that the surrounding issues and factors are forever in flux. The effect of this is that the utility of best practices is forever limited.
If you think about this for a little while you can see in the history of human values a similar sort of problem. Its as if morality where a best practice, and when change comes to upheave old moral orders it is to expose the limitations of the application of now outmoded “best practices.” The trouble, it would seem, is in a failure to recognize the limitations of the best practices.. It is in a failure to recognize how they worked outside of there particular context.
So my toy building process is one of moving beyond contextually dependent best practices. Its one of taking a deep look at the ecology inside which a best practice operates and understanding the shapes of the interdependent relationships that make it work. The shapes, can then be transplanted to any place where those shapes might work. The shape here, is the idea, the toy.
So what I do, essentially, is to try to understand ecologies. At a certain point “it pops,” which is to say it becomes clear that you have come to understand all the shapes of that ecology.. I can look at any sorta psychological phenomenon and deconstruct it into is component parts, and understand what’s going on there. In art school, when I used to be given to a certain amount of partying.. we would be doing the standard art school philosophizing.. many of us stoned off our gourd of course, and whatever it was that was going on in our worlds, I would deconstruct in this way… In such a way that we were all sort of wide eyed in awe of what we were seeing.
A few latter:
There is a tyranny to our inherited values. It is the problem of best practices being apply outside of there effective range. This made all the more problematic by the change that’s happened since those old values came into being. As modernity creeps on forward, the problem grows. So I believe a powerful utility to what I have to offer comes in the form of change management. In the world of social media, one assumes the value of this utility would be very great indeed.
All this talk about a philosophical process and no philosophy at all? Or maybe a philosophy of philosophy but.. Well I guess you’ll just have to stay tuned.