Do you like Reggaeton?

This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California.

If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s:

A form of urban music that became popular with Latin American youth in the early 1990s, and, after mainstream exposure in 2004,  spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton blends the West-Indian music influences of reggae and dancehall with those of Latin America, such as bomba, plena, salsa, merengue, latin pop, cumbia and bachata as well as that of hip hop, contemporary R&B, and electronica, combined with rapping or singing in Spanish. While it takes influences from hip hop and Jamaican dancehall, it would be wrong to define reggaeton as the Hispanic or Latino version of either of these genres; reggaeton has its own specific beat and rhythm, whereas Latino hip hop is simply hip hop recorded by artists of Latino descent. Reggaeton’s origins represent a hybrid of many different musical genres and influences from various countries in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The genre of reggaeton however is most closely associated with Puerto Rico, as this is where the musical style became most famous, and where the vast majority of its current stars originated.

Here’s an example, Daddy Yankee’s “Rompe”:

I’d heard the term, Reggaeton, out at certain parties in L.A., but I didn’t really know what it was until KXOL-FM relaunched in 2005 as Latino 96.3, bringing the Reggaeton format to the airwaves. After a while, I’d been finding myself stopping the dial scan every so often at 96.3 to catch the end of some song even though I couldn’t understand the lyrics. My answer to my friend at the time was  that I didn’t think I’d heard it enough to fully like it yet, but I probably would.  It didn’t occur to me until my friend pointed it out, that it was a strange way to respond to a question of music taste.

Not too long after I fist started going to raves, back in high school, I discovered Jungle. If you don’t know what Jungle is, it’s a type of electronic dance music which emerged in the mid 1990’s as an offshoot of the UK rave scene. Encompassing drum and bass, oldschool jungle, and ragga,  the genre is characterized by fast breakbeats (typically between 160–190 bpm) and heavy sub-bass lines.

Here’s an example, Aphrodite’s “Bomber Style:”

When I discovered Jungle, I had only just gotten into a relationship with hip hop a few years prior, when I started 9th grade at a public, urban high school, and then fallen into the questionable companionship of entry-level rave trance (a la Paul Oakenfold, etc.), so when I first heard this stuff, it sounded way too fuckin’ cacophanous and chaotic and fast and just plain weird. I distinctly remember a time when I just didn’t get Jungle. I didn’t get how to understand it. I didn’t get how to like it. And I sure as hell didn’t get how to dance to it. Then my best friend at the time, who’d been going to raves before I started, and had once been a ballerina, showed me. You just had to move a different way. You had to get onto a different rhythm. And as soon as I figure it out, I started to really like, and then just completely LOVE Jungle. By the time I’d started hearing Reggaeton, I knew from past experience that if I listened long enough to start to understand the sound, I would come to like it.

It turns out the line between being unfamiliar with something, and not liking it is very slim, indeed. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell writes about how the Aeron chair, which would eventually redefine the entire office chair category, was originally despised and deemed ugly when it was first market tested. The Aeron was a complete departure from the office chair norm, and didn’t mesh with the prevailing cultural proclivities for seating comfort in general (think: La-Z-Boy recliner). But after two years, the Aeron became the most popular chair in Herman Miller history, and the most widely imitated office chair in general. How did something that was once considered ugly become beautiful?

Gladwell writes:

Office chairs in people’s minds had a certain aesthetic. They were cushioned and upholstered. The Aeron chair of course isn’t. There was nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for “different.” The people reporting their first impressions misinterpreted their own feelings. They said they hated it. But what they really meant was that the chair was so new and unusual that they weren’t used to it…. Buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us time to understand that we actually like them.

The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.

And perhaps nowhere is that nervousness more acute, or that distinction more obscure than when it comes to music.

In his recent New York Times piece about Pandora, the internet radio application based on the Music Genome Project, which decodes the essential components of songs as though they were bits of genetic information and suggests new music users might like based on strictly auditory criteria, author Rob Walker (whose book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, I’ve written about a quite a bit last year) references neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music:

Much depends on culture. Just as we’re hard-wired to learn a language, but not to speak English or French, our specific musical understanding, and thus taste, depends on context. If a piece of music sounds dissonant to you, it probably has to do with what sort of music you were exposed to growing up, because you were probably an “expert listener” in your culture’s music by about age 6, Levitin writes.

By the time I was six years old, 85% of the music I had heard was classical violin. My mother is a violinist, and when I was younger, performed with many orchestras and symphonies, both in the former Soviet Union, and then in Boston, where I grew up after we emigrated. She has also been teaching violin for longer than I’ve been alive, and as a child the sound violins was so constant and ubiquitous around the house that I developed the capacity, which I retain to this day, to sleep right through an afternoon full of violin lessons going on around me. The other 15% of the music of my early childhood consisted of Russian folk-rock music by the likes of Vladimir Vysotsky (imagine a  Russian sort of Bob Dylan — in fact, the genre Vysotsky defined is precisely what Gogol Bordello is currently perpetrating as a zany new indie sound, which I gotta say is pretty freakin’ weird to witness.) I didn’t really start hearing ANYTHING even remotely in the vicinity of contemporary popular American music until I got to the U.S. (by that time I was almost 7), in large part due to the efforts of the Soviet government to achieve that goal.

Anyway, the point is, the music that I was acculturated to became wholly irrelevant in the new culture I found myself in just at the moment when I had become an “expert listener.” When everything sounds dissonant, nothing sounds dissonant. Not any more dissonant than anything else, anyway. I suspect, much in the same way new languages become a lot easier to learn if you’d had to learn a new one when you were little, new music sounds and genres, for me anyway, are a lot easier to learn to understand, and ultimately appreciate because of this history. It’s why the question “What kind of music do you like?” has always made me uncomfortable. I have watched as other people draw on instantly accessible answers, but for me, sentences like  “I like hip hop” or “I like electronic music,” have become learned responses, like fragments memorized from a phrase-book for emergencies in a foreign country. The answer to that question is never really about what kind of music you happen to find structurally, acoustically, or thematically appealing, anyway. No, what that question is actually asking is: “What kind of music do your friends like?”

As Walker writes:

It’s the “social” theories of music-liking that get most of the attention these days: systems that connect you with friends with similar tastes, or that rely on “collaborative filtering” strategies that cross-match your music-consumption habits with those of like-minded strangers. These popular approaches marginalize traditional gatekeepers; instead of trusting the talent scout, the radio programmer or the music critic, you trust your friends (actual or virtual), or maybe just “the crowd.”Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

One of my co-workers, a married dude, loves the Calvin Harris station on Pandora, which is basically straight up Gay House (that’s Gay House as in the music genre, not the epithet). Were the station defined by its cultural information, as opposed to strictly by sound, it’s much more probable he’d simply assume this wasn’t for him, and not venture any further. Which, as Walker writes, raises some interesting questions:

Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out — like what’s considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?

What Pandora’s system largely ignores is, in a word, taste. The way that [Pandora founder Tim] Westergren might put this is that it minimizes the influence of other people’s taste. Music-liking becomes a matter decided by the listener, and the intrinsic elements of what is heard. Early on, Westergren actually pushed for the idea that Pandora would not even reveal who the artist was until the listener asked. He thought maybe that structure would give users a kind of permission to evaluate music without even the most minimal cultural baggage. “We’re so insecure about our tastes,” he says.

(Or as Gladwell might put it, “nervous.”)

While his partners talked him out of that approach, Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice.

He likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’”

This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”

Much as cultural information attaches to music, music attaches information to culture. Piggybacked like parasites onto unwitting sound-waves are all manner of cultural and identity definitions. The “What music do you like?” question is also intended to be responded to as: “What scene are you in?” After all, you don’t just like hip hop or punk or emo, you ARE hip hop or punk or emo.  And even with mainstream artists, saying you’re a fan of Garth Brooks or Adam Lambert or Muse or Jay-Z is more than simply giving an example of the sort of musical style you enjoy, it’s an admission of your cultural affiliation, of your individual and social identity.

As Walker writes:

The cliché that our musical tastes are generally refined in our teens and solidify by our early 20s seems largely to be true. For better or worse, peers frequently have a lot to do with that. Levitin recalled to me having moved at age 14 and falling in with a new set of friends who listened to music he hadn’t heard before. “The reason I like Queen — and I love Queen — is that I was introduced to Queen by my social group,” he says. He’s not saying that the intrinsic qualities of the music are irrelevant, and he says Pandora has done some very clever and impressive things in its approach. But part of what we like is, in fact, based on cultural information. “To some degree we might say that personality characteristics are associated with, or predictive of, the kind of music that people like,” he has written. “But to a large degree it is determined by more or less chance factors: where you went to school, who you hung out with, what music they happened to be listening to.”

Basically, what “scene” you were in. And social groups tend to very easily become self-selecting, especially online. In a recent NPR story, “Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines,” social media researcher danah boyd talks about the findings she’d first brought to light two years ago on the way the online social world is dividing up — just like the real world — into self-segregated communities: “The fact is that young people, and for the most part adults as well, don’t really interact online with strangers. They talk to people they already know. And when you have environments in which people are divided by race, they’re divided by class, they’re divided by lifestyle, when they go online, those are also who they’re going to interact with,” says boyd.

As I have long asserted, myself, from my contrasting experiences in the worlds of independent music and corporate marketing, boyd suggests that one of the reasons so many business analysts are writing off Myspace is because THEY don’t belong to the social groups that use it. “Millions of daily users are still logging in [to Myspace],” she says, “and it’s really interesting how many people in very privileged environments know not a single one of them.”

In his book “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” Nicholas Carr talks about this exact phenomenon, and sees a far darker possible outcome:

Not only will the process of polarization tend to play out in virtual communities in the same way it does in neighborhoods, but it seems likely to proceed much more quickly online. In the real world, with its mortgages and schools and jobs, the mechanical forces of segregation move slowly. There are brakes on the speed with which we pull up stakes and move to a new house. Internet communities have no such constraints. Making a community-defining decision is as simple as clicking a link. Every time we subscribe to a blog, add a friend to our social network, categorize an email message as spam, or even choose a site from a list of search results, we are making a decision that defines, in a small way, whom we associate with and what information we pay attention to. Given the presence of even a slight bias to be connected with people similar to ourselves – ones who share, say, our political views or our cultural preferences –

(or our musical tastes)

we would end up in ever more polarized and homogeneous communities. We would click our way to a fractured society.

As the entire web becomes one ever-expanding, amoebic social application, it becomes increasingly harder and harder to “log out” of this cultural segregation that seems built in to the very nature digital space. In a recent New Yorker article on Google, Ken Auletta, writes:

The more “personalized” [the consumer data that Google collects each day], as [CEO] Eric Schmidt said, the better the search answers. “The more we know who you are, the more we can tailor the search results.” [Google co-founders, Larry] Page and [Sergey] Brin often say that their ideal is to devise a program that provides a single perfect answer.

This preoccupation with mathematical efficiencies triggers various alarms. In “The Big Switch,” Nicholas Carr writes that Google would like to store as much information as possible about each individual — what might be referred to as “transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to “choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. “A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible  social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr writes. “They impose homogeneity on the Internet’s wild heterogeneity…. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences.” Carr believes that people will narrow their frame of reference, gravitate towards those whose opinions they share, and perhaps be less willing o compromise, because the narrow information we receive will magnify our difference, making it harder to reach agreement.

As much as there is a conservative pull within us to seek out the familiar and the safe, the example of Pandora shows there is an equally as great liberal a pull to discover and explore the new (altho that balance may be different from one individual to another). There are  already so many social sites and applications being developed to enable the former, what we need now are more UNsocial ones. Applications that offer us the opportunity to discover and explore the new and unfamiliar, applications that allow us to confront diversity, and offer us new ways to expand our tastes and define ourselves.

presented by:

The Alternative Apparel Catalogue

Burner:

(playa dust for your face sold separately)

.
Circus:

ahem.

.

Hippie:

.

Hipster:

also,

Skater, Raver, Goth:

(all separate categories;  you get the idea.)

and here’s a throwback–

Heroin Chic:

Any questions?

Like this? Share it on:

]]> http://social-creature.com/these-are-your-alternatives/feed 5 http://social-creature.com/two-kinds-of-people http://social-creature.com/two-kinds-of-people#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:09:57 +0000 jenks http://social-creature.com/?p=524 “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.”
– Robert Benchley

This election process is driving me crazy. I wish we could just pick someone already, and get the fuck on with it. I mean, yes, I do hope a particular someone gets picked, but the longer that keeps not happening, the more disturbing this whole having to root for “my” side, and having to hate the other side, and having to bear witness to an ever increasing enmity widening the divide between the two sides, thing is becoming. Is anyone else feeling worn out, here? And it’s no longer relegated just to the 24-hour news cycle anymore. It’s in, like, everything. Video games, porn, pumpkins! Tried choosing a cup at 7-11 lately?

It’s like Bloods vs. Crips gone wild out there!

Binary battle lines are permeating the atmosphere, and they’ve been seeping into everything I seem to be writing recently, too. From the “sluts” vs. “virgins” pop-culture war, to the schism in conservative vs. liberal moral psychology, to PCs vs. Macs even. That’s all within the past month. It feels like everything is being forced to become a dichotomy. Which is a really dangerous kind of trap to get stuck in, and it’s prompted me to take a step back, and examine this phenomenon itself, rather than end up writing yet another post that would inadvertently fall into the same pattern. What I’ve realized is–surprise surprise!–I have two very powerfully conflicting reactions to this polarization that will be holding our reality hostage officially for 3 more weeks, but whose legacy will linger much, much longer.

Wait, before I get in to that, I just want to say that I realize that it’s not like this election invented the social/cultural/psychological divide between liberals and conservatives that politics has been exploiting since who knows when, but I really do think this particular election season has galvanized it to a degree that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in the United States in my lifetime. A few weeks ago on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart suggested to guest, Bill Clinton, that “This election has apparently taken us all the way back to 1968 and the Nixonian and McGovern culture divide.” So it’s clearly not new, what’s going on today, but its degree of vehemence is not particularly familiar to anyone under 40, either.

Watching the preceding two elections go down, it had become increasingly clear that the left simply wasn’t getting it. It was like the nature of the electoral playing field had changed in some very crucial way, and the Democrats hadn’t gotten the memo. Which is why it feels like Barack Obama has offered a total departure from the kind of democratic nominees we’d gotten used to. People aren’t for Obama just because he’s the non-republican option. They are actually for what HE represents (which is, amazingly, a myriad of things to a broad spectrum of people, which he has, nonetheless, managed to bring together into a miraculously unified concept, and that unto itself is yet another aspect to his appeal), and they are for him in a fervent, decisive way that for the past 8 years has seemed to be the sole province of Republican candidates. So yeah, on the one hand, I can definitely say it’s been pretty gratifying to all of us who’d gotten tired of losing during that time, to watch the Democrats pull their shit together, and run a seriously strategized, legitimately competitive campaign. Booya. Bring it on. Go, team, go!

But here is what I personally find incredibly dismaying–even more than the right’s recent effort to cast Obama as a Muslim terrorist (I’m kind of surprised it took them this long), even more than the prospect of Sarah Palin possibly getting to make decisions about…. anything whatsoever (well, ok, dismaying on par with that)–is it’s precisely because Obama has been so successful at mobilizing the left, and the right has been forced to stake out even more desperately polarizing territory in response, that we’ve now gotten to a point where the cost of an election involves tearing the country limb from limb, first.

I said that this kind of social division that makes the air itself feel dense with tension is like nothing I’ve ever experienced in the U.S., but I have felt it somewhere else before: Jerusalem. There is a word in Hebrew that’s used for how Jerusalem feels–”Lachatz.” It literally translates to “pressure.” And in that city, that’s had contention in the air for millennia, that is, indeed, the right word. Like something intensely volatile, tenuously bottled up. In Jerusalem the binary conflict is ingrained, literally, into the walls, and it demands a constant vigilance of one’s affiliation. There are certain sections of the city where you are not allowed to go if you are Jewish, and others you cannot go to if you are Arab. Making sure you’re staying on your team’s side is not just a matter of politics, it’s how everyday life plays out. That’s what this election season, which has turned even regular, every-day actions into declarations of allegiance, is reminding me of. There’s this incessant perpetuation from all directions, whether it’s the media, or our friends, or slushie cups, of an us-vs.-them mentality, and I feel like it’s affecting how we think about everything right now, political or not.

Obviously, this is more or less inevitable when you’ve got a two-party election, and while it’s not like there’s anything that can be done about that situation now, I think it’s important to be aware, while we’re cheering our team on, of the underlying hazard in enjoying the polarization too much. Our human proclivity for this kind of binary divide is one of the most dangerous social situations that we can–and perpetually do–get ourselves into, and the massive eagerness with which both sides are relishing this particular battle is a little bit freaking me out.

Maybe it’s making me lose my sense of humor, too, cuz I totally can’t seem to find stuff like “McCain Be Old” to be funny… Or useful, for that matter. On that same episode of the Daily Show, Clinton said, “I’m glad [Obama]’s got people that love him that much. But those are not the people that hold this election.The people that hold this election are the people that think that he is on their side, and he loves them.” In other words, is it really necessary to incite alienation of people who could hold the swing vote, like, oh… you know… old people? Why not take a cue from Sarah Silverman instead, and shlep over to see your grandparents down in make-or-break-an-election state Florida? As Silverman says, “There’s nobody more important or influential over their grandparents than their grand-kids. You. If they vote for Barack Obama, they’re gonna get another visit this year. If not….”

As a marketer, I think one of the most crucial things to understand about people is just how diverse and nuanced the spectrum of identity and culture and personality is. In this long-tailed, custom-tailored, niched-up world we’re living in now, understanding the importance of approaching different groups on their own terms is the difference between success and irrelevance. Less than a month out from what I fully admit is the most important presidential race of my lifetime, may not be the time to start preaching plurality or diversity, or anything that could be undermining to in-group solidarity, but I think even through this process we do need to remember that with people things are not just black and white, or blue and red, or binary at all. One of the things that makes Barack Obama so appealing for me is that, as he himself acknowledges, as the product a Kenyan father, and an American mom, who was born in Hawaii, grew up in Indonesia, and became a Senator in Chicago, his mixed heritage has given him an understanding of America that is informed by a global, and uniquely modern perspective. That’s the kind of perspective that makes sense for the president of the United States when I think about the 21st century future not just of America, but the world.

Now, if we could just get through this election already…..

I have, and it kinda looked a little bit like this…

That’s a still from the latest ads developed by Crispin Porter & Bogusky in Microsoft’s new campaign to–essentially–regain control of their identity, and it’s a pretty accurate depiction of how I’ve seen that PC-in-a-room-full-of-Macs situation play out. (Clearly, it must not be an isolated incident). In the ad, when the diver flips the white board over, the other side reads, “And I’m Kinda Scared.”

Now, I’m a Mac now, but the computer I had before this one was a PC. I’m just as comfortable using either, and I’ve got Microsoft programs running on this computer right now. I could even get a Mac that comes with the option of running Windows, anyway, if I want, so even though I’m a Mac user, I clearly don’t see my identification with the brand in terms like this–

But many clearly do. And perhaps nothing has helped to articulate the contemporary Mac superiority complex quite like those Mac Vs. PC ads. In the iconic spots created by TBWA/Media Arts Lab, which began in 2006 and new iterations are still being developed now, a casually-dressed, attractive, 20-something guy introduces himself as “Hello, I’m a Mac…” while an older, slightly overweight guy, wearing glasses and a cheap lookin’ suit-and-tie combo introduces himself as “… And I’m a PC.” The two then act out little vignettes against a stark white background in which the capabilities and attributes of “Mac” and “PC” are compared. Often the spots end up presenting various legitimate PC shortcomings in an entertaining, glib way, but just as often the focus is on the two machine-characters’ personalities, and the feature comparison ends up being almost beside the point. Mac is always self-assured and easy-going. PC is resentful and awkward. The great success of these ads, especially when considered as a series, has been not in positioning the Mac vs. the PC, but in defining Mac vs. PC users.

The subtext of these ads, which has also become the subtext of the Mac user community, is that this isn’t just a tool for enabling a certain kind of lifestyle, it’s a badge of it. A Mac isn’t just about helping you BE creative, it MEANS you are creative. A PC, on the other hand, means you are a stiff, unimaginative, frustrated tool, overly concerned with work, and incapable of doing anything interesting. At least not as good as a Mac can. Oh, and furthermore, if you’re  a PC user, then you may as well know that this is what other people are thinking about you, too.

Personally, I’ve always been completely impressed that Mac has been able to brand a conformist white box into a symbol of creative and individual expression. But the idea is that your white box gives you entry into a whole network of other creative individuals, (just like you), and it’s that community association that bestows identity. A good friend of mine, who is a fashion designer, belly-dancer, serial entrepreneur, and has more tattoos and crazy hairstyles than the majority of the creative class, is a dedicated PC, and one of the major reasons for her choice is that she finds the idea inherent in a Mac–that you need this thing in order to express that you’re “hip”–to be a huge turnoff. A Mac doesn’t just bestow hipness to its users, it kind of subsumes it from them too. Perhaps she’s wary of this kind of  accessory watering down or co-opting her own particular kind of hip. Either way, she says she feels like no one else has this line of thinking. It’s a turnoff  “Only only to me,” She says, “I think PCs are just fine, and a lot more bang for your buck,” but everyone else she knows seems to have no problem with this aspect of their Macs.

It’s to let people like her know that there’s more of their kind out there, and to establish that their computers can, in fact, represent their creative, dynamic, interesting identities, that CPB took the direction they did with the new Microsoft ads.

Here’s one. You should watch it before reading further:

I think what’s really interesting here is that the ads say NOTHING about the product, or the features, or anything technical whatsoever. The sole purpose of the ad is to explore the diversity of PC users. I’m trying to think of another example of an entity trying to redefine its own identity by working to undo the stereotype of its “fans,” and I can’t think of one. (Anyone got one?) It’s pretty intense.

In a post titled, “Huh. Those Mac Ads Aren’t As Funny Any More,” Michael Arrington wrote:

Those Microsoft commercials aren’t particularly engaging, and they don’t make me want to go out and buy a copy of Vista. But what they do is show lots of fascinating people saying that they use PCs. They highlight the fact that many people may be somewhat offended by the idea that they can’t be interesting or cool if they don’t use a Mac.

Suddenly, Apple looks a little elitist. I mean, they were elitist before, but in a way that made you want to be a part of the club. Now, they just seem a little snobby.

If that’s what Microsoft and their pushing clients to the edge advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky were aiming for, it’s brilliant.

According to the New York Times, CPB “Relishes efforts to transform perceived negatives into positives.” (See also announcing the onset of an “SUV Backlash” to help promote the US launch of the Mini Cooper–before any such backlash had yet begun at all, positioning the Mini’s uber-compactness as an alternative to the gas-guzzling hegemony.)

More from the New York Times:

Apple executives have been “using a lot of their money to de-position our brand and tell people what we stand for,” said David Webster, general manager for brand marketing at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.

“They’ve made a caricature out of the PC,” he added, which was unacceptable because “you always want to own your own story.”

The campaign illustrates “a strong desire” among Microsoft managers “to take back that narrative,” Mr. Webster said, and “have a conversation about the real PC.”

The celebration of PC users is intended to show them “connected to this community,” added [Rob Reilly, partner and co-executive creative director at Crispin Porter], “of people who are creative, who are passionate.”

Every single person featured in this ad is somehow compelling and enigmatic. Perhaps it’s because they’re all so different. You have no idea who is coming next. They challenge not only the expectations of who a PC is, but the assumption that you’re supposed know everything about who someone is just based on the kind of computer brand they use. (Talk about “Think Different,” huh?) If the Mac community is “alternative,” the one depicted in the Microsoft ad is global. If the Mac community is elitist, this one is accepting. Beyond “creative and passionate,” this community has a real sense humanity. It’s worldly and smart and open-minded and profoundly diverse. It’s approachable and philosophical. A community that’s out to change the world, and enjoy the world; a community that’s what the world might look like if everyone in it got along. And regardless of whether you’re a Mac or a PC…what kind of progressive human being (not a human doing, or a human thinking) wouldn’t want to be a part of a community like that?

The next time I need a new computer, maybe it’ll be a Mac, and maybe it’ll be a PC, but either way, I find it comforting and heartening to know that this is the kind of community a company like Microsoft sees–and wants the rest of us to see–as its own ideal.

It used to be that the way you would stay connected to your industry was through your job. Whether it was access to news about industry developments, or access to participating in the course of those developments, it was all pretty much granted by your employment. Once you retired–or were laid off at a certain age and couldn’t get rehired–your access was essentially denied. Perhaps, for a lot of people, who might not have been particularly thrilled about the careers they had ended up in, this would sound like a fantastic relief, but for those folks that had spent their lives passionately engaged with, and consummately fascinated by their field of work, being suddenly cut off from that entire world wouldn’t be quite so wonderful.

I’m not an expert on the institution of retirement, nor does my knowledge of the general senior citizen population extend beyond my parents and their friends, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that we have been living in a society where the options for what people over the age of 65 are expected be interested in are SLIM. They have definitely not been encouraged in any way to retain the interests they had when they were younger, or to think that they ought to. It’s as if once individuals hit senior citizen age it’s assumed they will simply want to trade in the things that had been exciting to them before, like handing back an access card to security once you’ve left a building, and instead discover their new interests lie within a finite selection of age-appropriate leisurely diversions they’d had nothing to do with before. To me the idea that an infinitely diverse array of identities would develop uniformly homogeneous interests simply by virtue of having lived to a certain age is about as accurate for teenagers as it is for senior citizens, and I think that this misconception will be completely undone by the social media generation.

Friendster, the first social network site I ever knew, can’t be older than six or seven years. Myspace is even younger. Youtube can’t be more than four of five. Facebook wasn’t even a serious contender in this space until like two years ago. And already, according to Universal McCann’s Comparative Study on Social Media Trends, April 2008:

57% of active online users (people using the internet every day or every other day) have joined a social network

73%  have read a blog

45% have started their own blog

39% subscribe to an RSS feed

Social Security might be nonexistent by the time my generation retires, but all these tools for social connection and personal expression available already–and who even knows what future iterations are coming in our lifetime–mean that what we will have are the resources to facilitate continuing our specific interests, and to retain our individual identities far beyond what was ever an option for the general populations of a certain age before us.

According to boomj.com, a social network site geared specifically for folks born in the two generations from the mid-1940’s to mid-1960’s, right now 41 – 64 year-olds comprise about 80 million people in the US. These are arguably the oldest generations to have already been affected by social media, and there is no doubt that they will expect a dramatically different kind of experience once they “retire,” than the generations before them. All those people joining social networks and writing and reading blogs will continue to expect access to pursuing the interests which shaped our identities and, perhaps the course of our lives,  well past where our grandparents could expect to get cut off. (Not to mention, access to pursuing new interests that previoulsy weren’t accommodated for “old folks.”)

Clay Shirky, In his 2005 TED Talk, pointed out that the #1 most popular interest group on meetup.com–a service that allows people to find others in their local area who share their same interests and affinities, and organize offline group “meetups”–is stay-at-home moms. When the site was first founded its creators had NO idea that this would become the most active group on the site, with the most members and the most chapters. But as Shirky explains, “In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay at home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods, so they they are reinventing it using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure.” (After watching that TED Talk I actually helped my Dad find some science-y/tech-y meetups in Boston–and if anyone knows of others, give me a shout, I’d love to pass the info on).

Whether it’s stay-at-home moms or seniors, no doubt the impact of these kinds of tools is just as meaningful to any group that has been lacking the social structure and access to stay connected to both their interests, and to other people who share them. As the social media generation matures perhaps the very concept of what our “golden years” are all about will be altered.

And on that note, meet Ivy, at 102, the oldest person on Facebook. From The Daily Mail:

Ivy Bean is a great-grandmother with a difference. At 102 years old she has joined the social networking revolution and become the oldest person on Facebook.

The former mill worker, who was born in Bradford in 1905, showed an interest in the website, after hearing care workers at her home talk about the phenomenon.

Although Mrs Bean currently only has nine Facebook friends, she said she ‘loves being online’ and is hoping for many more.

The world has changed radically during Ivy’s lifetime. When she was born Henry Campbell-Bannerman was Prime Minister of Britain – the first to ever officially hold the title.

At that time telegrams were the fastest way of communicating and a national telephone network was still seven years away. Ivy would have to wait 46 years until the first computer was invented.

Ivy retired at 73, a few years after her husband passed away, aged 75. She is living at Hillside Manor care home in Bradford which she moved to at the grand age of 101 after her last care home closed down.

Care home manager Pat Wright said: ‘We try to keep all our residents independent by letting them use the computer.’

Ivy, second from left, competed in the Bradford Over 75s’ Olympics.

While I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, it came to my attention that hipsters had managed to really piss Adbusters off. If you don’t happen to know what “hipsters” are, or if perhaps you are assuming it’s just a generic term that can simply be tossed around as a synonym for the even more meaningless ideas of “cool kids” or “tastemakers,” or something, and doesn’t actually refer to any specific kind of identity or lifestyle, then perhaps you might want to check out Dougals Haddow’s informative rant ethnographic report on the subject, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization“:

Take a stroll down the street in any major North American or European city and you’ll be sure to see a speckle of fashion-conscious twentysomethings hanging about and sporting a number of predictable stylistic trademarks: skinny jeans, cotton spandex leggings, fixed-gear bikes, vintage flannel, fake eyeglasses and a keffiyeh – initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory.

The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.

Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the ”Hipster.”

Haddow’s thesis is that “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum,” and hipsterdom, “the end product of all prior countercultures,” represents nothing short of “the end of Western civilization.”

In a certain way, he might be on to something.

In chapter 11 of The Long Tail, titled, “Niche Culture,” Chris Anderson quotes the writing of media analyst Vin Crosbie to help explain the origins of this phenomenon:

Each individual listener, viewer, or reader is, and has always been, a unique mix of generic interests and specific interests. Although many of these individuals might share some generic interest, such as the weather, most, if not all of them, have very different specific interests. And each individual is truly a unique mix of generic and specific interests.

As of 30 years ago, Crosbie writes, with the improvements in offset lithography that led to a boom in specialty magazines (the 1970s saw newsstand offerings explode from a couple dozen magazines to hundreds, and most about specific topics), media technologies began to evolve in ways that could satisfy individuals’ specific interests:

The result of this is that more and more individuals, who had been using only the (generic) mass medium because that’s all they had, have gravitated to specialty publications, channels, or websites. More and more use the mass media less and less. And more and more will soon be most. The individuals haven’t changed; they’ve always been fragmented. What’s changing is their media habits. They’re now simply satisfying the fragmented interests that they’ve always had.

Anderson adds: “The shift from the generic to the specific is a rebalancing of the equation, an evolution from an ‘Or’ era of hits or niches (mainstream culture vs. subcultures) to an ‘AND’ era. Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass. And niche culture will get less obscure.”

What this means then is that “counterculture,” as the construct we, and Adbusters, have known it to be, is disappearing. Maybe gone. We are becoming a united niche culture, where we can all appreciate that none of us need to endure listening to music we don’t like, and that that holds true even for people who don’t like our music. If mass and niche culture can meet each other in the middle and make room for both sides, what is there to be “counter” to?

This dead end of “mass culture” seems like a concept Adbusters should have been rejoicing, no? Unless they were confused as to what the end of “mass culture” might look like.

“When mass culture breaks apart,” Anderson writes, “it doesn’t re-form into a different mass. Instead it turns into millions of microcultures, which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways.” In this landscape of, as Anderson calls it, “massively parallel culture,” there’s not really a place for “mass rebellion.” Instead, we have specific, niche rebellions.

Haddow writes: “This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.” So much so, in fact, that, “It is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaim it.” Perhaps one of the specific rebellions of niche culture might be against the labels of stereotypical identity definition themselves. No doubt, especially if that definition is being used as a lifestyle slur. In the article, Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of Vice Magazine explains: “I’ve always found that word ["hipster"] is used with such disdain. [It] always smell of an agenda.”

At the end of the Adbusters piece Haddow writes, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” In the conclusion of The Pirate’s Dillema (which presents an exuberant, revolutionary potential for youth culture’s future that is in stark opposition to Adbusters’ depiction of its “dead-end” present by a journalist from, ironically the same publication Adbusters claims defines the doomed hipster generaion, Vice Magazine) Matt Mason writes: “Youth movements become successful when social change is desperately needed. They gain traction if they express society’s collective desire for change.”

Is this something that really applies to the West’s united niche culture so much these days?

On the other hand, as Mason writes:

The source of future youth movements will just as likely be the rage, desperation, and hope transmitted from the medinas, favelas, and shanty cities of the southern hemisphere. According to a 2005 report commissioned by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine on trends affecting youth in developing countries, there are currently 1.5 billion ten- to twenty-four-year-olds on Earth, and 86 percent of them live in a developing country. In many places in Asia and Africa, this generation is the first generation of teenagers their countries have known. As their economic and political power grows, new sounds, movements, and ideas will grow, too.

This is where the new youth cultures will be.

Deal with it. Rock’n Roll.

I always find it fascinating when movies do things that executives didn’t expect. Entertainment, particularly the kind with narratives and characters, is like a Rorschach test where what we have to say about the inkblot and what the inkblot has to say about us are equally as meaningful. Thus when a movie manages to find an appeal beyond what was expected it can illuminate new cultural insight.

Here is the point at which I admit I love Sex And The City. And while I can’t say I’m a “huge” fan not because I don’t feel like I am one, but because I don’t think I am one in comparison to ACTUAL “huge” SATC fans, I will say I’m pretty excited to have a reason to be writing about it.

The series premiered on HBO in 1998, when I hadn’t even graduated high school yet, and at the time the show had absolutely no way to compete for relevance in my life against My So-Called Life. But then a couple of years ago an old friend of mine (who you should know is male, and straight, and works in real estate finance in NY) got me to watch a couple of episodes cuz he loved the show, and long before I went to see the Sex and the City movie this weekend, I’d actually managed to see every single episode of the show (thanks, Netflix).

It’s not just cuz the main character is a writer, and all the episodes were filtered through the perspective of a woman whose job was about observing and writing about social behavior (though, yeah, I did really dig that aspect). It’s because she was clever enough to make even cynicism charming, hopeful enough to still be curious, difficult enough to give her gravity beyond the frenetic giddy fashionableness. It’s because there’s not too many shows where four friends hanging out is consistently some of the funniest dialogue on a screen, and where decent, relatively normal people, dealing with lives complicated by emotions and nuance and relationships–rather than intrigue or crime or the paranormal–could continue to be genuinely interesting enough to be watchable for six years.

Of course, these decent, relatively normal people happen to be four urban, sassy, sexually uninhibited women, and the show happened to be on a cable network that blazed the trail on you-can’t-do-that-on-television television. So it’s no surprise that two weeks before the movie opened, the LA Times prophesied “Sex and the City” movie may lack wide appeal,” proclaiming:

Few films have polarized audiences more than May 30’s long-awaited cinematic adaptation of the influential HBO show. It’s easier to find $2-a-gallon gas than a straight man eager to see the movie. Older women (in Hollywood’s youth-obsessed view of the world, this means older than 30) hold a dramatically different view: When they are not posting online about their love of the series — “addicted” pops up with frightening frequency — they are organizing ladies’ night viewing parties around the film’s opening….

If “Sex and the City” can start attracting more teenage girls (and appeal to audiences in smaller cities), it just might have a shot at turning into a hit.”

The polarized reactions to Sex and the City–not just the movie, or the HBO series, but really the entire franchise–is not based just on gender, or even on age. When I asked a friend of mine if she wanted to go see the movie, she replied she didn’t think she could for “moral” reasons. Another texted back, “I never took you for that type.”

You’d think digging a show about smart, quick-witted, modern women, half hopelessly jaded half hopelessly romantic, talking about love, sex, and relationships over brunch, and reaping the sexual benefits and pitfalls of having happened to be post-feminist females wouldn’t be a bad type to be taken for. Especially by anyone else that fits that exact same profile. Yet that watching Sex and the City would seem somehow “immoral” even to another educated, liberal, sophisticated girl, speaks to a dramatic dissonance in the movie’s expected demographic.

LA Times movie critic, Carina Chocano, began her review of the film by admitting:

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to talk about the new “Sex and the City” movie without first mentioning… the rabid fan devotion [the HBO series] enjoyed; or the equally fervent antipathy (female and male) it inspired on socio-political grounds (sort of like the late-’90s equivalent of not letting your daughter play with Barbies)….

Which is too bad, because Michael Patrick King, who executive produced the show (with series creator Darren Star) and wrote and directed the movie, has done some brave, surprising things with it, mining territory that’s been all but abandoned by Hollywood….

“Sex and the City” can’t rightly be called a romantic comedy in the dismal, contemporary sense, though it is at times romantic and is consistently very funny. It’s also emotionally realistic, even brutal….

Yet despite the fact that for the majority of it’s 2 1/2 hours this is not a happy story, yesterday morning Marketing Daily proclaimed, “‘Sex/City’ Poised To Become Era’s ‘Feel-Good’ Movie.” And I, and no doubt everyone else who cheered when the usher at the Arclight who’d introduced the movie yelled, “Let’s escape reality!” as the lights went down, would agree:

Brands looking to sweep consumers off their feet to escape the recession, global warming and the war in Iraq might want to take a closer look at Carrie Bradshaw and friends.

“Sex and the City” is poised to become the new Depression Era feel-good movie that makes cash registers ring in shopping malls and along Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive. Such films tend to make consumers feel upbeat and not overly cautious about spending, according to marketing experts.

…Faith Popcorn, a trend spotter and founder of marketing consultancy BrainReserve, believes the “Sex and the City” movie comes at the perfect time for a nation exhausted politically, emotionally and financially. Marketers can use the good feeling gained from the movie to their advantage, she says, helping consumers temporarily escape tough times. The movie joins “My Man Godfrey,” “The Women” and other Depression Era classics that provided weary audiences with high-style fantasy relief.

Of course, as Chocano says:

The clothes, the restaurants, the apartments, the shoes — they’re all there, but then, even on the show, they were always the fantasy element, the sugar that helped the sometimes harsh emotional reality go down….

For a film that delights in indulging in frivolity at every possible turn, it examines subjects that most movies don’t dare graze for their terrifying seriousness. [How should women live their lives in a society that constantly limits them while pretending not to? What is the function of forgiveness, and why is it necessary for living?] And when it does, the movie handles them with surprising grace, wit and maturity. In other words, it’s a movie for grown-ups of all ages.

The Marketing Daily piece mentions how, “During the run of “Sex and the City” on TV, even women who couldn’t afford Jimmy Choo shoes bonded to an image that had them skipping lunch for two months so they could buy them. In one TV show episode, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character is about to lose her apartment and she recognizes that $40,000 went into buying shoes.”

These anecdotes, of both real and dramatized women, speak not so much to a childish frivolousness as to a rudderless adulthood. Cuz it’s a funny thing, this idea of a contemporary “adult”–whatever that is. We are the generation that won the fight for our right to party, after all, did we not? So that we could stay boys and girls for longer than anyone ever before. And so we have!

Then perhaps that is what it looks like now, adulthood: It doesn’t always have its priorities straight. It makes some bad choices, it has to confront compromise and make sacrifices. It fucks up and has to face the consequ–

Wait a second….

Oh, god damn it! That sounds just like OLD version of adult! What the hell?!

Beyond the frosted fashion glaze, and the wonderfully fantasy ending we can only truly appreciate after having first been taken through some nasty emotional lows, what is, in fact, quite shocking about Sex and the City, is the apparent movie-going hunger it’s revealed for characters that can reflect maturity with a right to style and joi de vivre. And there is perhaps nothing more timelessly “feel-good” than a concept like that.

After just three days, the movie that by some estimates was only expected to make $20 million its opening weekend, whose appeal to anyone but 30+ year old women seemed incomprehensible, that unflinchingly staked its flag in that grown-up territory Hollywood had pretty much abandoned, now “Ranks as the biggest R-rated comedy opening of all time,” According to the LA Times. “Among all R-rated films, it ranks at No. 5 behind largely male-driven films like “The Matrix” and “300.”

Chocano concludes her review saying:

As far as big Hollywood movies go, the idea that we might watch movies to empathize with characters whose lives are different from ours but whose humanity links them to us is all but lost.

That’s why it feels unnatural to say that what feels most remarkable about the movie is its unapologetic embrace of middle-aged women…. The fact that Carrie et al. are allowed to be funny, independent, complicated, sexual, cynical and happy still comes across as a delightful surprise.

She adds that what really made the show so loved by its fans is that despite whatever moments of silliness or cliche, ultimately, the show reflected a vision of real life, “one which doesn’t require its characters being frozen in amber after a fairy tale ending and allows life to go on, happily and unconventionally.”

I think to have considered Sex and the City as having no greater appeal than merely a poshed up “chick flick,” is just as erroneous as to consider it to be some un-PC farce “immorally” portraying women as ludicrous cartoons.

All of us who went to high school in the late 90’s had to look a decade back to find the movies (Heathers, Pump Up the Volume, Sixteen Candles) that defined a generation’s adolescence. (American Pie, aside, of course). Now in the next decade, I wonder if Sex and The City might pave the way for new stories and characters that can fill the void in contemporary cinema for movies that can define a generation’s coming to terms with its adulthood.