The Medium is (Integral to) the Message

I hit NYC for the first time last weekend. Once I got over the elaborate spiderweb that passes for a subway (definitely a far cry from beloved BART), I fell all over myself.

New York is the living, breathing witness to America's industrialized history, stuffed to overflowing with contradictory messages and too many dreams. And like a splatter in the concrete, every once in awhile you find beauty again.

I'm accosted by ads I've reviewed, come to vivid life. It's like they were lying in wait and have leaped out to confront me, pulsing with energy and so much force. The press releases that tried to contain them simply never had a chance.

Since the awakening, so to speak, I've developed an almost superstitious aversion to PDFs. Generally speaking I don't mind them, but in the strange universe of ad critique I find them deceptive for two reasons:

1. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. Can you divorce the medium from the message? No. In PDF form, the ad lacks the impact and gravity its creators had in mind.
   
2. Press releases, which also come in PDFs, are like cheat-sheets. PR execs and agencies love to wax creative about ad particulars on a release. The problem is, your consumer doesn't get one. He or she has no chance of knowing why you picked that color, or why the giant talking tooth made a great inside joke. Fuck poetic license in a PR; it's supposed to be in your AD! (Have I mentioned I also hate reading them?)

I'd like to gauge the quality of an advertisement in almost the same way an art critic appraises some ancient or contemporary oeuvre.

It needs to be in front of me, larger than life, involved in my world. If it's a billboard, I want to be standing under it with my neck craned as far as it will go, trying to decide if it "pops."

If it's a print ad, I want to encounter it in a magazine or discover it hanging above me one drowsy day on the train. If it's a :30 spot, I want to find it appropriately adorning some TV show while I sit fooling with a Rubik's cube on the couch.

A version of an ad in a PDF, versus the one you come across on the street, is like the difference between a 20-foot Picasso and a JPEG, or the Louvre's Mona Lisa and a postcard.

You can never learn how your advertising moves a person - provided it does at all - until you can experience it in the intended format, whether it's hundreds of feet above you on a billboard, or posing as a coquettish interactive Flash corner on the digital edition of BusinessWeek.

There's simply no comparison.

Why Children Are Dangerous

I was thinking recently about how most of my relatives don't really understand what I do. A conversation with a dowager auntie typically falls something like this:

"You mean you make webpages?"

"No," I say. "I write ad and technology news for webpages that already exist."

"So if I am having trouble with my page, or if I want to put pictures on it, I call you?"

"No. I write and edit content. You know, like a magazine editor? Like that, except on the Internet."

"Oh." I can practically see the wheels turning: Magazine editor. Sounds successful. Dot com crash - not so much.

The cool thing about nobody understanding what you do is no one is ever really sure whether or not you can be counted among the successful. It's not like it's super obvious, like my cousin the doctor versus my cousin the car salesman.

So, reserving their surrogate proud-parent faces, my relatives just approach me with a look of polite perplexity. I can roll with perplexity.

But kids are trickier. They're not looking for bragging rights; they're looking for the meat of things. And it's their right: after all, this is the world they're about to acquire.

Last month before the move to Ithaca, I was sitting in my pyjamas at my parents' kitchen table, my ass welded there since five-to-the-AM and typing furiously. Around 8ish, which is when people chez Natividad start wandering out into the open, my 10-year-old sister Charysma appeared on the scene. She watched me tap, then dragged her little feet to the living room, where she typically waits for my father to wake up and make her garlic bread.

A break in the silence: "Angel?"

I stopped typing and turned to her. "Yes?"

"Why is blogging your job?"

Pause. Something in my brain was not clicking.

"What?" I said.

Charysma, patiently: "Why. Is it. Your job. To blog?"

This is one of those questions you should always be ready to answer. For some reason, I wasn't.

I faltered. She saw.

"I write about new things that happen in the world," I said stupidly.

Head-tilt. "Why?" she asked.

"Because people want to read them."

"Why?" she asked.

I didn't have a response prepared for that, either. Of course I know why, obliquely anyway. But point-blank like this, I need note cards or something. I just kept thinking, I don't want to be one of those adults who pushes a kid down a well for asking a valid question...

Any number of answers would have worked. Because it's useful to others' jobs. Because the material is interesting. Because even grown-ups need to hear stories.

"Because I want to," I said.

Pause.

"Oh," she said. Then, thankfully, Pops appeared. "I want garlic bread," she commanded, changing tacks immediately.

Sweet relief.

On Gates, and the Market at Large

"Can a dude break free and still get honored at home?"

- Common

It's easy to forget on days like this that, once upon a time, Microsoft was a breath of fresh air.

I once had a teacher who said, "Tell me Bill Gates doesn't deserve to be the richest man in the world. Can you develop something to top DOS? I guarantee you - the day we're using hovercrafts to get around, we're still going to be using DOS to power them."

A popular rebuttal to this argument is, "Well, Bill Gates didn't develop DOS - he stole and monetized it."

Regardless of whether or not Gates himself developed DOS, it was, without argument, Gates who monetized it. That means he took a technology available to a few and turned it into a tool whose benefits we all have the luxury of taking for granted today.

What is more revolutionary than that?

So with that in mind, why is Bill Gates perceived as any different from the Robin Hoods and Horatio Algers of the world?

Maybe the reason why the devvies who make major contributions, then sell out, is because they're not selling out. Maybe the market is rewarding their efforts - and justly so.

That's not to say the market doesn't make mistakes, and that people with bad agendas or counterproductive ideas don't get wealthy. But the market also has an uncanny ability to correct its mistakes over time - and without remorse.

Consider Enron.

And consider the way Microsoft, long past its prime, is flailing today.

The mighty fall hard...

Graphic Tee in the Make

Via Bash.org:

dsully: please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.
jwb: you make all the content. they keep all the revenue.

Castaway Delirium

16 hours and counting since I have been stuck at O'Hare. Dude. Thunderstorms? What?!

My last ad:tech Miami post:

For a Bonafide Web Two-dot-O Experience, Get Stranded

This entry can alternatively be called, "Why American Airlines Sucks."

Before leaving ad:tech I had a conversation with a blogger who lamented learning little of value at the conference. He wasn't the only one who complained; surface-skimming conversation with a few girls at last night's Batanga party betrayed a pattern.

I hate to file yet another complaint into the ether. But after some serious thought, it occurred to me that you can't really learn about how people are communicating - manipulating brands, and media, in the process - unless you're sharing their space, communicating right along with them. That's not the kind of thing you can really be taught at a seminar.

Which leads me to why American Airlines sucks.

If you've ever wondered why the American Airlines logo has a suspiciously shaft-shaped embellishment, it's because it subjects frequent flyers to inappropriate back-door molestation.

Recall the drama of my ad:tech arrival.

At present I'm sitting at O'Hare International. In all fairness I should be home by now. But American has canceled at least 9 of its flights this evening and, insult to injury, will not cover a hotel stay.

So I'm here until at least 7 AM tomorrow morning.

Considering ad:tech Miami didn't exist before this year, I think it was great for what it was. Latin media populators share the same struggles, concerns and insights the marketing and advertising community at large do, which is perhaps a better revelation than any myth of exotic difference.

Like some mega-church, maybe ad:tech is meant only to bring the like-minded together for inspiration, motivation and a spirit-lift, even as it reinforces - on a grand scale - what we as an industry already take for gospel.

In an increasingly smaller world, it goes without saying that industry pros, no matter where they're from, all march to the same beat. (The only difference is, in Miami, the beat's got hotter drummers.)

To get a real feel for what's happening out there media-wise, however, you need an education that can perhaps only be forced upon you by getting stranded at O'Hare.

I'm sitting at a computer hub, which is essentially a long table with some seats and a series of plugs across it. I'm video-chatting my roommate in Ithaca, who's offered to help me find a nearby hotel while I relate the tale of my suffering.

Bleary-eyed from writing, I look at the dude to my left. He's a few years younger than me, and his left hand is flipping lazily across the keyboard. The other hand holds a gigantic set of BOSE headphones over one ear. He's on a program called Fruity Loops, making a beat.

I look to my right. Here's a man in glasses, suffering from programmer's pallor, watching some kind of full-screen video of himself and another guy braving the ocean waves on a vessel. Onscreen, they are smiling and tanned.

The guy glares at me, and I set my eyes back onto my own computer.

Picture us three at this little hub in Chicago, stranded with our media. Just a couple of years ago, this scenario wasn't even possible.

The dude on my right is a recent implant. Before him I was sitting next to a man named Barry from Arkansas. His flight has long since left. The friendly Southerner was in town for a conference on transitioning from print publishing to digital.

Here's his gazette.

Before he departed, we shook hands and lauded the perpetuity of content across any platform, the ones we know and those that have yet to unveil themselves.

The meeting of traditional publisher and online content furnisher occurred like that of a war ship and a flying saucer in the night. Our languages are similar but different, but we both seek to convey messages that don't quite belong to us, to audiences broader than our own voices can reach.

In the end, we're two soldiers of the same struggle, aren't we?

On Divine Delusion, or Revisiting the Pythia

A major benefit to creating your own hours is you get to read when the moment suits. I've just begun The Oracle by William J. Broad, which at heart seeks to understand why the Oracle's influence in ancient Greece was so significant she transcended centuries and, perhaps more surprisingly, the onslaught of rationalism, winning the deference of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch and Socrates.

The Oracle, otherwise known as the Pythia, was a critical voice in Greek society. Her word was sought for matters of state, coming war, governmental development and everyday questions of love, marriage, sex and legal adoption.

The final word of the Oracle can be traced back to an early democratic government and even the military success of Sparta: It was she who discouraged the Spartans from pursuing love of luxury, so they moved in the opposite direction, foregoing the precious metals in favour of iron as currency, and developing that Spartan endurance for which they later became famous.

Contrary to depictions of the Pythia as young, comely and scantily-clad, early in the Oracle tradition it was decided the position be held by a seasoned woman in her 40s or 50s, who, far from virginal, had already put matters of flesh and family behind her.

This decision was made to protect her virtue, but an older woman's experience probably also contributed to her soundness of judgment, despite the state of intoxication she had to achieve for divination.

I'm only halfway through the book, so the question of why her word was so powerful hasn't yet been answered. But according to experts of the time, a major source of the Oracle's power was a mysterious sweet-smelling pneuma that rose out of a chasm at her feet (just beneath her tripod). This mist caused a kind of divine delirium, into which she had to succumb before ultimately taking her post.

The myth of the Apollonian pneuma and the chasm below the tripod were dismissed in the late 1800s by French archaeologists, which were the first to excavate the site after Delphi, long luster-lost, had been home to a small Christian village for centuries. (Christianity became the vogue religion shortly after the Pax Romana, which was blamed, among other things, for indirectly silencing the Oracle.)

In the late 1990s, however, the pneuma - and the chasm under the Oracle's feet - were validated by archaeologist Hale of Yale and geologist De Boer of Wesleyan.

The mysterious pneuma was ethylene, which stimulates the central nervous system. In the Pythia's time it rose by nature out of two seismic faults, one spanning N-S and the other spanning E-W, crossing beneath the temple site. It was the perfect condition for psychedelic euphoria - better still, ethylene emits a sweet smell, and its effects virtually vanish minutes after contact with the gas has ended.

Ethylene gas visited the site of the Pythia each year for the warmest nine months (she rested the rest of the year), long enough for the intoxicated priestess to develop a good thousand years or so of influence - then it vanished, also quite naturally, around the time of the Pax Romana, silencing her voice in deference to the notion of the One God.

Under the right conditions it's normal for gas to rise out of the earth, especially in places where violent tectonic impacts are still young, as in Greece. Ethylene in particular was a tough gas to pin to the site as it doesn't quite survive once it's gone - it vanishes into the air or sets the stage for other gases over time. Methane and ethane are two gases whose presence is easiest to marry to the site.

That's as far as I've gotten. And I've probably slaughtered all the research. In any case, this book is neat. And if nothing else, it's just another example of how far drugs can get you in life. Ask a surrealist (hallucinogens were pretty modish).

I, for one, am a huge fan of the transcendent effects of black coffee coupled with the complete absence of sleep in the Circadian rhythm. It's a lifestyle, baby.