Social Media, Community Engagement, Emerging Trends
Technology and Consciousness, Compassionate Marketing<

I spent a lot of time lately thinking about the ways in which many of the common narratives used to frame our perceptions of the present are being called into question.  The video above provides a simple illustration with implications for political oppression that seem somewhat obvious, but I think there is a more profound fragmentation going on as a result of fundamental economic breakdowns and subsequent changes in consumer behaviors and the election of the nation’s first black president.

A post on Rod 2.0 drew my attention to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz who recently called into question the objectivity of black women to effectively cover Michelle Obama, noting that they have a vested interest in her success and empowerment.  The American Prospect was quick to note in their blog

You would never ever see a media critic like Kurtz questioning the ability of white men to cover other white men objectively, or for that matter the ability of white men to cover women or people of color, despite the fact that if newsroom coverage were to be affected, it would be by the prevailing cultural biases of the better represented population in the newsroom

This reminded me of the coverage Jon Stewart provided on CNBC and their choice to consistently feature guests and so-called economy experts who unilaterally provided commentary in support of the banking and mortgage industry during the months leading to its collapse.  The call-out quote from Jon was, “If I’d only followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today — provided that I started with a hundred million dollars.”

Jon’s satirical critique is eerily reminiscent of the discourse about embedded reporters on the frontlines of the conflict in Iraq and the ways in which their “coverage” validated an offensive under the auspices of freedom and democracy with 90% civilian casualties.

All of this made me think about the emergence of new media channels and particularly the role Twitter has played in Iran to help facilitate the spread of information following the elections because it calls into question the authority of journalistic sources and their relationships to positions of power.  It will be interesting to see what the future holds.

Thanks to Yasmin Hamidi for recommending the Rod 2.0 article

Wes Anderson Trailer from Alex Cornell on Vimeo.

Quick edit: how tacky is it of Vimeo to put a line of text like the one above in their embed code?

I stumbled across a video yesterday that’s a part of a graduate design thesis by Alex Cornell.  It’s in Wes Anderson’s style about a hypothetical Wes Anderson film festival.  I also recently watched Planet B-Boy about how break dancing and B-boy culture has spread around the world, and independently of that had a couple of friends forward me hip-hop videos from Brazil and Japan.

All of this made me think about the creative use of forms in the context of cultural encounters and the ways in which people appropriate and make them stylistically and culturally their own while distinctly being part of a greater genre, art form, or movement.  In my Ph.D. studies in Religion we would call this syncretism to describe how religions and indigenous cultures blended to create a hybrid of something new, often to the dismay of colonialist powers.  Many Emerson scholars consider him the first writer to mobilize language in a similar fashion for cultural and political criticism.

But in a post-colonial world of global cultures where spacial distances disappear in the context of instant messaging, social networks, and online forums often times ownership of the form becomes a gray area as “outsiders” become dominant authorities to originators.   B-boy culture, while distinctly American in origins, clearly falls behind Japan, France, and Korea in pushing boundaries of the art, and hip-hop and graffiti art innovation continues to thrive worldwide while within the U.S. it has slightly stagnant due to domination by corporate label interests in radio and media.

These cross-cultural appropriations also need to be understood in the context of empowerment for the key actors – my sense is a continuity can be traced between motivations to transcend oppressive circumstances on the part of originators and the reasons why those in other countries identified with the form.

Japan – DJ Krush

Brazil meets Brooklyn – Kassiano & Sujihno in collaboration with Zuzuka Poderosa

This video cracks me up, thanks to my friend Brandon Haynes for posting this on his Facebook profile. It reminds me of a broader trend in the evolution of conceptions of beauty within the last 10 years. The lower back tattoo emerged within the same context of the public obsession with abs and the more private removal of body hair in areas where since literally the dawn of time it was considered a “normal” part of being human.

When we look back at the nude portraits of classical masters with modern eyes we see women that appear to be “fat” or “unattractive” relative to contemporary conceptions of beauty, failing to appreciate that their corpulence was a sign of wealth and in fact they were the pinnacle representation of what a perfect woman should look like in the eyes of the pre-modern masters.

I am curious what role media played in this shift, and as more people engage in social media how conceptions of the body will change and evolve in years to come

Academics are tasked to teach their students the requisite skills and knowledge required to perform professionally.  Often times this leads to heavy reliance upon theory at the expense of teaching practical ways to address and manage problems in the workplace.

The theoretical models often go through rigorous review and debate in journals and conferences before making it into the classroom, a process that from start to finish might take years.  I’m reminded here of a conversation I had recently with Shannon Arvizu, a doctoral candidate in Environmental Sociology at Columbia University, who published an article on new media that took almost 2 years to go to print.

The challenge our institutions of higher learning now face is that the world changes too fast – imagine, for example, you wrote an article on Twitter or Facebook, it would be completely irrelevant by the time it was ready to publish because of the field of social media is so rapidly evolving and changing.

I came across an excellent article by Andrew J. Hoffman called “Deconstructing the Ivory Tower: Business schools’ reliance on theory-driven research ignores the pressing needs of real-world managers.” Hoffman, Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, emphasizes the importance of bringing in professionals with relevant experience to teach MBA students, but I think there is an underlying greater issue which is that so much discourse about theory has led some of the world’s most brilliant people into a sollipsistic conversation with one another that may have no practical relevance to anyone outside of the academy.

It is not simply that practical wisdom must be imparted to students, but practical wisdom must be imparted to professors in scalable ways.  Particularly in my field of social media strategy there is very little that an academic could teach me who did not have tactical experience executing campaigns and intricate knowledge of how the technology worked.

It is my sincere hope that as Think Now Yes evolves it will help to fill some of these gaps with relevant insights from the trenches, and in the long run the Ivory Tower doesn’t have the same fate as the Tower of Babel.

I listen to podcasts every day on the subway – they transform my time between destinations into a period of reflection and contemplation.  One of my favorites is Buddhist Geeks – “totally Buddhist, totally Geeky,” to use their tagline.  Each show consists of 20 minute conversations with notable practitioners across Buddhist traditions that are both accessible to the non-practitioner and highly intellectual and thought provoking.

One discussion particularly struck me regarding how a strong conceptual background can be an impediment to listening to others’ ideas and following particular paths.  While said in the context of meditation practice I think it’s applicable to a broad array of things creative people face every day.

Our society has a tendency to place people into categories by profession – designer, artist, marketer, writer – and interest – music, art, travel – that it can be difficult to perceive people to be unique, creative, multifaceted individuals.  Times in the past that were characterized by innovation and creative discovery empowered people with the freedom to act outside their prescribed roles.

I intentionally created Think. Now. Yes. with the idea that it would defy such categorization and evolve based on the input of its readers and contributors.  Creativity doesn’t follow predetermined rules, it is a process of discovery.  I encourage you to spend 5 minutes a day reading something on a subject you know nothing about and you’ll find the horizon of your awareness slowly expand.  The list of links to the right is a great place to start.