“You’re just perpetuating the stereotype by acting all stereotypical.”
– deleted line from tony scott’s domino
i have no idea about the racial background of the individual(s) that publish stuff white people like, but does it even matter?
as lenny bruce said, it’s not the word itself, but the censorship of the word that gives it its power, so it’s not necessarily the people that buy a brand or product, but the perceived people who buy it that defines its identity.
as in, you may happen to LOVE rocking out to justin timberlake on your ipod, but would NEVER under ANY circumstances go to his concert (and subject yourself to dealing with the kind of people that would buy tickets to a justin timberlake concert.) i think this kind of disconnect is also what undermines a whole lot of consumer insight research. expecting people to consciously recognize what influences their purchase decisions is like expecting them to recognize, admit to, deny, not deny, accept, not accept, a whole lot of pressures and social expectations that masquerade as personal preference. as far as most people are concerned, all they’re really aware of is looking for a way to express themselves, not of the incessant negotiation of their compliance with and/or rebellion against barrage of cultural stereotypes.
we may buy the products or brands that express aspects of who we are, but in most cases the options we’re choosing from in the fist place have already been pre-selected for us by the purchase decisions of other people like ourselves. the question then isn’t, why did i make the choice to buy this or that, but rather does this or that seem like the kind of thing that someone like me would buy? the “why” is: because people like me buy it.
after mentioning him in the previous post, i ended up going on what can only be described as an eddie izzard bender.
a self-identified “male lesbian,” and “action transvestite” (you know… “running, jumping, climbing trees… putting on makeup while you’re up there”: action transvestite), izzard is also fluent enough in english and french to do standup in both. so clearly the man understands a thing or two about the intricacies of hybridity and cross-cultural communication–phenomena that likewise are pretty fascinating for me.
i first saw dress to kill in 2002, and what forever earned my respect for izzard’s genius is when, during the encore, he actually performs a bit in french and manages to get everyone in the audience–and me watching–laughing hysterically. i don’t know french. neither does most of the rest of the english-speaking, san francisco audience where the show was recorded. yet in a feat of linguistic alchemy he somehow is able to completely pull it off. we’re watching him in a different language, and we totally get it. it’s such a bewildering display of how little a language barrier might actually matter in the process of understanding people who are unlike us that it feels like you’ve just witnessed a magician perform rather than a comic.
so somewhere in the course of the haze induced by binge consumption of every glorious, sexie, eddie izzard clip on youtube last weekend, i stumbled onto his website. i’m not entirely sure i remember how i got there, but i do remember flashes of what happened after. (note: this will be way funnier if you’ve actually seen eddie’s shows. since i had just watched several years of them before i arrived at the site, it was completely hilarious to me.)
when i went to sign up for eddie’s email list, i was faced with the following options:
Send me news and info about Eddie via Email
Only send me gig & appearance emails for my chosen country Cake OR Death
when was the last time you were asked THAT before joining a mailing list?
and furthermore, what’s a nav. section called gonna lead you to?
click on it and an audio clip of izzard’s voice admits, “well, it was the pressy-makey-doey-things page…but that didn’t really fit it.”
…where you drag words eddie utters during his show onto the jam smear on the fridge and then play them back to hear him say customized nonsense. (“jamtart arthur squeezy fishburger murderers catapult” is a good one).
but let’s back up for a second. maybe you’ve never seen eddie’s standup. maybe you came here because you’ve seen eddie in a movie, or on his TV show, the riches, and you’re trying to find out more about that. then you want the page. and when you click on it, eddie’s relentless, adlibbing audio which follows you around–as in real life so on the internet–announces in a tone of sophistication, “this is the acting page. it is a very serious page.” it, in fact, does look very serious. with a vogue-y black and white glamour shot of izzard. but when you look in the corner there’s a little purple beehive just below eddie’s face with bees buzzing all around it. drag your cursor over to it to find out what the hell that’s all about, and your mouse gets covered in bees!
you may have seen glorious. you may not. you may think that’s hilarious. you may not. but either way, at least there’s something different going on here. something unexpected. and it’s not some kind of slick design-gasm. it’s not trying to wow you with unprecedented feats of programming. no. the site actually comes off as a pretty uncomplicated bit of online real estate, but with these absurd little pressy makey doey game-y bits. and it’s great!
i think the most important question for anyone creating a website to answer has to be “what do you want the website to do?” and at the basic level this question is pretty easy to answer. sure you want it to provide information, to sell something, to connect people, to encourage participation, whatever. all that’s well and good, but as soon as it gets beyond the level of “what do you want it to do beyond simply function,” the vision for what’s possible becomes kind of polarized and discordant.
on one side of this mania there’s:
make more features!
make it slicker!
make it cleaner!
make it cooler!
make it bigger…
and on the other side is something my friend jesse shannon calls the “myspacification of websites,” where content management systems are churning out the online equivalent of cookie-cutter suburban tract homes. sure it might be super intuitive and user-friendly, and you might know where your neighbor’s bathroom is located when you come to visit without anyone ever having to tell you, but….isn’t there anything else to an online experience beyond features or navigability? beyond flash or content management?
how about “i want the website to entertain people.” or “i want it to make people laugh.” creating a FUN experience is just as valid as an easily-navigable, informative one, but between the designer, the developer, the information architect, and everyone else…. whose job is it to make sure a site is FUN?
i once got asked if the “this is not a trend” in masthead image on this site is supposed to be a reference to magritte’s “this is not a pipe.”
and while we may not all be looking for subliminal surrealist messages in our online experience, i think we are definitely looking for that kind of element of surprise, for unexpected juxtapositions, and even for non sequiturs sometimes, the same qualities that made the surrealist movement’s artistic expression so different from what had come before it. check out whateverlife.com on that note. the whole thing was originally created by a teenage girl who taught herself all the necessary design skills. not surprisingly, since there was no formal training which could instill upon her what a website SHOULD look or operate like, it looks completely different from any typical site.
perhaps it’s because we’ve always thought of the online experience as “browsing” that all we’ve been doing so far has just been making different versions of that one experience. maybe it’s time to re-imagine the whole thing. to integrate fun into its very functioning (as opposed to relying solely on the content), to reclaim it from its current humorless condition–and i mean, beyond just with LOLcats or cute hipster tech geek colloquialisms in dialogue boxes and error messages. if you’re looking at whateverlife and thinking, oh, so does this signify the next stage of a website experience?
instead think: maybe it just seemed like it would be fun.
The goal of all human activity can’t be reduced to the leaving of descendants. Once human culture was firmly in place it acquired new goals.
– Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee
right as i was in the process of rereading the third chimpanzee (i had to read it in college for sociobiology, and recently realized i’d forgotten half of it), a friend of mine forwarded me this NYmagazine article, The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School. “it’s very interesting in terms of trend ideas and stuff,” he told me. “i thought of you.”
the article follows a particular clique of kids (primarily girls) up at NYC’s stuyvesant high school, a magnet public school for some of the city’s créme de la créme teens (similar to my high school alma mater, boston latin). i read this piece in the same week as the NYTimes feature on the girls of newton north high (a suburb right outside of boston). the article was called For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too. it’s funny that i read these two articles in such proximity, because they actually came out within two months of each other and couldn’t be more divergent in what they present as the focus of the elite-educated, east coast, teenage girl experience.
the NYTimes says:
To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.
It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college.
The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.
….If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé.
two months earlier the NYMagazine article presented the findings of its own investigation into the workings of the contemporary teen female search for self:
Alair is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle,” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys and guys petting guys. She dives into the undulating heap of backpacks and blue jeans and emerges between her two best friends, Jane and Elle, whose names have been changed at their request. They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching, cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys—sometimes the same boys. But it’s not that they’re gay or bisexual, not exactly. Not always.
while the “amazing girls” of newton north (it’s what their teachers and classmates call them) talk about lives overwhelmed sometimes to the point of nervous breakdown by the amount of work all their accelerated classes and extra curriculars demand, education is put into a completely different context by the girls of stuy’s cuddle puddle: because of their school’s superior education, one of the girls says, the students are more open-minded.
just as the intense academic pressure that is the focus of the NYTimes article is barely assigned an impact in the after-school lives documented by the NYMagazine article (“Sure, they drink and smoke and party, but in a couple of years, they’ll be drinking and smoking and partying at Princeton or MIT. They had to be pretty serious students to even get into Stuyvesant, which accepts only about 3 percent of its applicants.”) sexual identity exploration is completely brushed aside in the lives of the newton north girls.
This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better….. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends. I mean, girlfriends last longer.”
just to be clear, that’s “girlfriends” in a completely platonic sense, but the sentiment is at least the one bit of common ground between these two seemingly wholly divergent worlds. “Relationships are a bitch, dude,” says Alair, the 16-year old “punk-rock queen bee” of the NYMagazine piece. relationships also play a huge role in the process of defining one’s sexual identity, and they seem to be going out of style.
while the gauntlet of college acceptance is now more competitive than ever, i think the process of navigating sexual identity has now likewise become infinitely more complicated. and for the latter there is no standardized test prep-course.
from NYMagazine:
These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.
the irony in this, of course, being that the very IDEA that “sexuality doesn’t have to define me” itself comes to define a particular identity. a particularly modern kind of identity that previous generations are ill-equipped to understand what the hell to do with.
“My mom’s like, ‘Alair, I don’t understand you. I want to be a parent to you but I have no control at all . . . As a person you’re awesome. You’re hilarious, you entertain me, you’re so cool. I would totally be your friend. But as your mother, I’m worried.’ ”
“To some it may sound like a sexual Utopia,” says the NYMagazine article. “Where labels have been banned and traditional gender roles surpassed, but it’s a complicated place to be.” it’s one thing to grow up in the suburbs, discover your personal non-status quo sexual identity, and move to some open-minded metropolitan place where you can create a community around this shared lifestyle-identity. it’s quite another to grow up in an environment where the very definition of sexual identity itself is the status quo you’re rebelling against. and though manhattan may be an island it is by no means isolated in this respect.
The Stuyvesant cuddle puddle is emblematic of the changing landscape of high-school sexuality across the country. This past September, when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories.
….It practically takes a diagram to plot all the various hookups and connections within the cuddle puddle. Elle’s kissed Jane and Jane’s kissed Alair and Alair’s kissed Elle. And then from time to time Elle hooks up with Nathan, but really only at parties, and only when Bethany isn’t around, because Nathan really likes Bethany, who doesn’t have a thing for girls but doesn’t have a problem with girls who do, either. Alair’s hooking up with Jason (who “kind of” went out with Jane once), even though she sort of also has a thing for Hector, who Jane likes, too—though Jane thinks it’s totally boring when people date people of the same gender. Ilia has a serious girlfriend, but girls were hooking up at his last party, which was awesome. Molly has kissed Alair, and Jane’s ex-girlfriend first decided she was bi while staying at Molly’s beach house on Fire Island. Sarah sometimes kisses Elle, although she has a boyfriend—he doesn’t care if she hooks up with other girls, since she’s straight anyway. And so on.
the article asks the question, how will this teenage experimentation eventually affect the way they choose to live their adult lives?
and i’m wondering how will it affect the way marketers talk to them?
a couple of months ago there was a bit of talk going on about Levi’s “Innovative Gay Marketing Move,” where levis produced two different versions of the same ad, one for a straight male audience, and one for a gay one. while the gay version premiered exclusively on MTV’s Logo network, whose programming is aimed at the gay community, the actual “innovation” in this dual-ad strategy that everyone latched on to seems to be simply the fact that the gay community was acknowledged at all on their own terms side by side with an approach to the straight demo. (so that only took about 40 years). levis, essentially, letting everyone know that they’re hip to the differing desires of these two identities as defined by sexual orientation. congratulations.
the question now is: how do you approach an identity that is defined not by gay or straight or even bisexual, but by its shared distaste for defining its new hybridity in those binary terms at all?
just came across the mixed chicks line of hair products, and thought it was awesome. kind of like the same way that i find my best friend (whose mom is white and dad black) ordering a half vanilla half chocolate milkshake at a diner awesome. (i’m telling you, should hear HOW she orders it. that shit NEVER gets old!) kind of like the way i find products and messages that speak to people with complex identities awesome.
we all want to feel that our particular problems and unique desires are genuinely understood–whether it’s about hair, a sweet tooth, or anything else, really.
after all, you realize the big secret is that EVERYONE feels they have a complex identity, right?
marshall herskovitz and edward zwick aren’t simply geniuses, they are CONSISTENTLY the only ones creating television programming that reflects the real struggles of an entire generation.
thirtysomething was before my time, (though i do know it as the series that went down in history as the first to feature a gay relationship on TV, so that already says something about the creative team’s cultural prescience), but a decade later my so-called life was RIGHT on schedule. what made that show so great wasn’t that it was incredible television (though it was–winning 6 golden globes and 7 nods in its two short seasons on TV), but because it felt like it was ABOUT ME!
well, it’s been a decade since claire danes became the vicarious incarnation of manic-paniced, post-grunge-era high school girls everywhere, and this november herskovitz and zwick are launching “quarterlife” an internet series and social network.
from the quarterlife site:
A show about a group of twentysomethings coming of age in the digital generation. And a social network about what it means to be creative, to pursue a passion, to make a difference in the world — or just to find a place in it.
From Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creative team behind “My So-Called Life,” quarterlife is the first Internet series that is as high quality as any film or television show.
quarterlife is premiering on myspace on november 11, and on quarterlife.com on november 12–but IMDB still insists it’s a TV series. hello? IMDB? might be time for a new category?
before i launch into my little speech about how amazing i think this show (which, unless you’re in the right demo for it, you’re probably going to find incredibly hokey; ahem: the demo is in high school and college, it’s not ACTUALLY 20-somethings) has the potential to be, i’d just like to point out that this move perfectly exemplifies what i mean when i say that “culture” is the next “community”–i.e. we’re all social networked out. we’re all connected and commented and poked to death. stick a fork in it. we’re done. we’re ready for social networks to become channels for cultural content, rather than JUST mind-numbing social drama timesucks.
it’s an incredible talent to be able to put a finger on the very pulse of a demographic, and use that rhythm to broadcast a beat that invokes the identification of a generation. (i swear to god, in the quarterlife trailer, it looks like one of the characters is directing a scion commercial! ok. i think it’s time now for an official word all unto itself, that does not involve several iterations of the prefix “post,” for the word “post-postmodern.” can someone get on this?)
marketing would kill for this, but herskovitz and zwick live and breathe it. the same qualities of curiosity and understanding that would allow a team of television producers to create content that bespeaks an unyielding fascination not just with generational cohorts, but with, essentially, the impacts of cultural shifts in general, are equally as crucial not just to the process of creating relevant marketing, but to generating greater cultural understanding.
god damn, that was a long sentence– but boy, it was worth it!
but wait! it gets BETTER!
in case you’re wondering what they’re gonna do in few years when the show’s characters grow out of their quarterlife crisis:
quarterlife.com is a social networking site for creative people. Whatever your interest – photography, writing, music, filmmaking, dance, design – quarterlife.com will help you go to the next level. Connect with like-minded people, gather information about schools, grants, and internships. It’s a place to explore the issues in your life, where changing the world is as real as the friends you meet.
damn. this might actually make up for the fact that the only network my so-called life had was a TV network. not that i think myspace is necessarily the right venue to launch this through anyway, but then again MSCL started out on ABC and became salvaged into cult perpetuity on MTV, so there’s always room to find where the right audience is really at. now more than ever. so we’ll, no doubt, see how it goes. Quarterlife Trailer
aside from that, the only other thing i think they could have possibly done better is the casting. in 2007 it kinda seems really strange for a contemporary show to have an all-white cast (this isn’t facebook, after all–badumching!). it’s not just me, is it? i mean… is it weirdly anachronistic looking to anyone else?
