Blogger Book Club III: Little Boxes

I think it is worth adding a temporal factor to the the juvenile names and the depth-defying limitations of emerging social networking technologies. Time will tell which ones take hold, which ones die off, which ones make money and which ones offer value beyond shareholder ROI.

As an arts professional, I'm tempted at times to be a cranky old geezer, but I prefer to assume the role of patient observer. To date the arts have gained little by jumping on the social networking bandwagon and we've probably lost no more than we would have otherwise - anecdotes notwithstanding.

My limited understanding of Hegel suggests that any initial proposition or 'thesis' carries with it an opposing thesis, and that resolution of these opposites requires a trial and error process that unfolds over time. If youthful, shallow technology fads are the thesis, I'll happily offer up the arts as a mature, deep, time-tested antitheses.

Personally, I'm rooting for a synthesis that leans toward the latter.

Hi Matthew,

I hear all that you say. While a great deal of Ms. Hunt's thesis is as applicable to those of us in the arts as it is to those running a construction company, there are some points she makes that do not cross the lines as readily. The quote you pulled from p. 86 happens to be one that does not translate well outside of business. The very definition of art lies in the personal, emotional, and creative decisions we make to present our clients what WE feel is worthy and true. That which Tara describes in this quote (cameras with lots of features, in this case), has far more to do with craft, and with addressing the limitation of what the market wants. As artists, we are not about limitation, we are about endless sky. We push the edges of the boundaries of what the market wants, and sometimes, care little about what it wants at all.

Regarding your skepticism about how whuffie = profit, how many anecdotal case studies are enough? Maybe there are not scads of them yet in the arts because artists have been slow to adopt this new technology. Give it time. Some of us are very definitely reaping the benefits: the two most recent 5-figures-in-front-of-the-decimal-point commissions I have received this year have come directly from MySpace, from two clients who would otherwise never have found me. My bank account and I have found this rather significant, and this is what drives me to shout from the rafters about the power of social networking: I want all of my colleagues to experience the same delight. Few things make us feel better than when we are discovered and appreciated for what we do, rather than asked to alter it in some way to suit someone else. This is the purity of what I observe on the web, professionally. I am a true believer when it comes to imagining that many more artists can have these results with their quirky work, too. Give it time!

Matthew, Matthew, Matthew. How could you go so wrong? Social networking isn't about something so boring as profit, it's about pizzazz, flash, bling-o, whatever you want to call it, that indefineable thingness that makes people want to hang with you! And maybe once they really trust you, they'll buy something. But first you have to dazzle them with your slick interactive web 200.0 combination bell-whistle.

Alex: Just so I'm clear, I think that there are opportunities with the whole whuffie thing, it's just that the book kind of assumes that how it will translate over will become obvious once you have it. But I think also that, somewhat contrary to the book's tone, there's plenty of opportunity left outside social networks as well.

The anecdotal thing wasn't so much the number of cases as the lack of numbers therein. For example, she mentions that Zappos is a billion-dollar company—but how much of that worth has been created with tweets as opposed to just shoes? I would love to see some crunching of the amount a company has spent on marketing via social networks, and how many customers or how much revenue that translates into (incoming traffic, increased sales, &c.), which would then give a good comparison with more traditional online customer acquisition costs. (I can't believe we're already talking about "traditional" online business models.) I did a little hunting around for such evidence, but the discourse around whuffie still seems to be in the "telling example" stage rather than the "cumulative data" stage. Like you say, give it time.

Trevor: Believe me, cranky old geezer is totally fun. As a side effect, you get a real taste for scotch.

The Hegelian dialectic is a little more subtle (the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model actually comes from Fichte): one way to think about it is that the nature of historical progress is such that turns of the odometer tend towards whatever will render the internal contradictions of the previous epoch irrelevant. The drawback to Hegelian thought is that it logically tends to put one in the situation of defending the power status quo as an inevitable outcome. But I like your idea of looking at the technology that way—if you judged the technology from a Hegelian standpoint, you'd value it in as much as it makes, say, the conflict between artistic integrity and commercial value a meaningless way of looking at things. I don't know that I see that in the Internet yet, except maybe in the possibility of creating large enough stylistically-like-minded communities that artistic integrity and commercial value are the same thing—a sort of virtually-local kind of whuffie posited around genre.

Damn, all we patient observers get to drink is green tea.

I must say I like the path-of-diminished-contradictions idea. But every time I hear someone suggesting that real time program notes should be tweeted to audience members' phones, or that it's good buzz when audiences text friends from their theatre seats or that arts patrons can be magically transformed into online communities, I suspect the synthesis will favor technology over art. What's to stop it?

As for virtually-local kinds of whuffies posited around genre, I think I'll have that scotch now please...

Matthew, I get what you're saying. But, while it's quite clear where this social-capital equation doesn't work with artists and arts organizations (your example being a good one), the book provides examples that are applicable.

No one claimed the book is fully suited to the endeavors of artists. It's the applicable that's essential. In the pursuit expanding the audience for an artist or an arts organization, there are various tools that the potential audience is already making use of. All that the book (goofy word aside) is suggesting, at the bare-bones level, is that artists and arts organizations make use of those technologies.

Just a few examples:

-- tie in concert-ticketing with Last.Fm and Pandora usage

-- create fan bases on Facebook (etc.), to easily get information about upcoming events

-- use the geo-coding of various social networks to send announcements related to touring

-- study the geo-coding of those same social networks when planning tours, looking for local support, etc.

-- fill the gap between events/releases by communicating with fans via Twitter, a blog, etc.

Those are just a few.