"Keeper of cool"

Sometimes I'll go to the Web to see if something is bothering others the way it bugs me; in effect, I'm pathetically looking for support in my dissatisfaction. I don't know if other people do that, but I rather suspect they do. I would think there were Google searches for "michael jackson too much coverage" from people who were attempting to discover that others felt that the "news" outlets were focusing overly much on a less-than-that-important story (I suspect that, had Jackson passed away during fall premiere season that the number of hours devoted to it would have been far less).

Anyway, I've been irritated for some time by the radio commercials for Cisco's WebEx product. It's a teleconferencing product, and the campaign has featured at least two spots starring a businessman who uses WebEx to enhance his ability to do presentations and hold internal meetings. The facts behind the campaign aren't bad; I'm a big believer that teleconferencing is going to become ever more important, that at some point it will curtail the rosy forecasts of ever-increasing business air travel (even if fact is lagging the enthusiastic projections of those who sell these systems).

What I don't like is the narrator - I've taken a visceral dislike to this guy. In the first spot, he talks about how he can appear all over the world making presentations, yet still be available for tonight's date with "the very lovely Rachel," and I just find something smug and smarmy about the way he delivers the phrase.

The newer ad demonstrates how this guy can pull his creative team together to implement some idea he had (perhaps on a date with tvlR, I don't know). His idea bounces from his head to various other cities, and the other members testify as to their contributions, and our main guy comes back to tell how his great idea was instantly translated into reality because of WebEx. (This is a pretty rosy picture of innovation, but it is an ad, I suppose.)

In this case, it's not Rachel's boyfriend who bugs me as much as "Logan in Cambridge," who proclaims himself, "I'm kind of the keeper of cool." And he's more smug than the Rachel guy, and it all just rubs me the wrong way.

So this morning I get on the Web to see if anyone else is as bugged by these ads as I am, and the answer is, apparently not. But here's the funny thing: There seems to be one transcript of this commercial that has been replicated numerous times, so it propagates the same funny errors. (Oddly, the transcripts aren't exactly the same, so is it using some kind of voice recognition software?)

First, we have "so I gathered my eighteen to meet online using WebEx," which is not what he says at all; it's "gathered my A team." Then comes Cool Boy, and his segment is transcribed as, "Logan in Cambridge Canada keeper of cool." As I've already pointed out, it's "I'm kind of the," not "Canada."

So I've gone from being nettled at an ad that just sticks in me to being perturbed by an Internet mystery: why these strange renditions, and why are they spreading (and another, why isn't anyone else bugged by these ads, but maybe I'm just going to have to accept that it's my own pathology being measured here)?

Journo-gurus?

(The term I reference in the title is one that I fervently hope doesn't catch on.)

Andrew Sullivan points us to an article by Adrian Wooldridge that discusses "journo-gurus," the superstars who are flouting the failing-newspaper trend:

But amid all this gloom a few hacks are doing better than ever. These are the first-class passengers of the journalistic world--sitting on upholstered thrones, surrounded by adoring hostesses, while the rest of the profession is crowded into cattle class or getting hurled off the plane. These are the journo-gurus. They focus on business rather than the usual staple of high-profile journalism, politics. And they specialise in big, bold, brave ideas about world-changing trends.

To what can be no one's surprise, Exhibit A in this trend is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who has "chronicled" globalization "as artfully as anyone." Now, I tend to be slightly more willing than some to give Friedman some credit, but it's hard to think of the word "art" in conjunction with his overheated prose. (Wooldridge pretty much takes Friedman's arguments at face value, meaning that he misses that the essential idea, the "flatness" of the world, is profoundly wrong. The competition is not on a level playing surface as long as it is based on price, not competence. How often do I have to write this?) He then gives Friedman credit for his superior (and earlier) book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but fails to chastise him for forgetting it when writing The World is Flat.

Exhibit B in the journo-guru trend is Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker, who is credited for producing a string of "big ideas." Actually, Gladwell takes fairly little ideas and extrapolates them beyond all recognition, falsely claiming significance (though doing so quite entertainingly). And his final example is Chris Anderson of Wired, who I've discussed twice before (here and here; in each case, I deferred to Hank Williams, and I suggest you follow my links), and I'll forgo further comment.

Wooldridge goes on to express his big theory, that these journo-gurus are overthrowing two standard categories:

These journo-gurus have overturned two established hierarchies. The first is the billion-dollar management theory industry, hitherto ruled by business professors and management consultants who produced books and then turned those books into business fads. Alas, the books were often dismally written, the fads a recipe for disaster. This created an opportunity for those with sharper pens and more dispassionate attitudes. A recent Wall Street Journal ranking of management gurus, based on Google hits, newspaper mentions and academic citations, included two journalists in the top five (Friedman at two, Gladwell at four) and only one traditional management guru, Gary Hamel. The New Yorker is now a bigger generator of management fads than the Harvard Business Review.

The second overturned hierarchy is that of journalism. This used to be dominated by political journalists who hogged the front pages and secured the best book deals. But the most successful of those--Bob Woodward, George Will--are all getting long in the tooth. And younger political writers are finding it almost impossible to talk their way into the first-class cabin. The big money goes to TV journalists whose grinning faces launch a dozen worthless bestsellers. Political partisanship is tempting political writers to turn themselves into ideological water carriers rather than serious reporters. And the internet is multiplying the number of voices while diminishing the impact of any of them.

I agree that these "established hierarchies" are being overturned, but the connection between the rise of such as Friedman and this upheaval seems far more sketchy. If they are knocking such unadulterated garbage as Who Moved My Cheese? off the best-seller list, they deserve credit for that public service, but their "big ideas" hardly represent real management advice. And the contention that Friedman and his ilk have "dispassionate attitudes"? That's far more of a dream than a reality, these guys are pure advocates for their ideas.

The second paragraph, which essentially suggests that journalism is giving way to political advocacy, may well be true, but it isn't Friedman and Gladwell who are making that happen. That's the result of a desire for celebrity and passion and all those things which pop up in the Q ratings.

Wooldridge finishes with a couple of confounding paragraphs:

These superstar hacks have inevitably provoked criticism, not least from the people stuck in cattle class. Some of it is sour grapes--Friedman, jealous hacks whisper, lives in a palatial mansion in Bethesda; Gladwell collected a $1m advance for his first book.
But some of it has merit. There are legitimate worries that the journo-gurus see too little of the downside of a system that is treating them so conspicuously well. There are also concerns about substance. All these writers follow the old axiom about simplifying and exaggerating: they take one idea and illustrate it with endless examples rather than address complications. The idea at the heart of each book is as much a brand as an analytical tool. "Blink" has been the subject of an amusing send-up, "Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All". Richard Posner, one of America's public intellectuals, dismissed it as "written like a book intended for people who do not read books."

But it would be churlish not to admire these hacks for thriving in hard times. They produce big ideas that throw light on profound changes. And their books are manna from heaven for a global business class grappling with dizzying challenges. Once the height of journalistic ambition was to shape political events. Now the cleverest journalists are shaping the business world as well. Not bad for a profession in terminal decline.

I'll let the reader try to parse this mess. If there are legitimate "concerns about substance," doesn't that imply that they are not "big ideas"? Well, yes. The global business class doesn't really get much out of the idea that people make snap judgments (the subject of Gladwell's Blink); the entire field of advertising is devoted to shaping those judgments, and they were doing so long before Gladwell was born. These "big ideas" are reflective of thinking that is already happening, not work that shapes that thinking.

There's a reason that these grand thinkers engender such backlash (and it's not simply schadenfreude at the personal financial travails of Mr. Friedman) - they give philosophical cover to extant ideas that perpetuate or exacerbate some of our most ruinous trends. How can globalization be bad if Guru Friedman blesses it? How can we criticize the shallowness of commercials when Guru Gladwell tells us that it's a natural part of being human? It would be good to see more articles that work a little less hard to puff up the egos of this new pundit class.

Semi-spam?

We all know what spam is, and we've all received some. But is there a term for semi-spam, an unwanted piece of e-mail that has at least a small justification for being sent?

Back in April, I wrote a post about one of the Democratic debates in which I referred to an excerpt from a sports book. I took issue with one of the statements in the excerpt, but I was generally positive about the book based on what I had read.

So a day or two ago, I receive an e-mail from a PR firm which says (appropriately edited so as not to give any more publicity to this book):

Dear blogger--

I'd like to thank you on behalf of [the author] for helping spread the word about his book on your blog. If you find the time, we'd greatly appreciate any more words you could post for your readers to remind or encourage them to read this book.

Thanks for any and everything you can do.

All best,

This isn't exactly spam, I suppose, since I did write something about this book. It does share some characteristics with spam, in that it is unwanted, and almost certainly comes from an automated process. But semi-spam doesn't seem like a clever enough term; maybe I should put Barbara Wallraff on it.

I did respond to the flack:

Offer to send me a copy, and I'll be happy to review it on my blog.

Androcass

I'll let you know when I hear something.

Some links

A busy day today, so I'll just provide some links of interest with minimal commentary:

1) Steven Pinker writes interesting books on language and cognition. They're pitched at the general audience, and they're full of pop culture references and links to current research, but not at a highly technical level. So little is really known about how the brain works, particularly with respect to which aspects of it are hard-wired through evolution and which are flexible, able to be shaped by environment, that there can be huge controversy over each of the schools.

Such is a current dustup over bioethics, as Pinker responds to a report from the President's Council on Bioethics, then becomes subject to criticism himself (article here containing links to the original report and more commentary).

I won't wade into the specifics today, but I worry when someone who is strong in one field starts using that reputation to make claims in another. That's not to say I disagree with Pinker here, just that there's a danger of his becoming another Chomsky, whose controversial views have overshadowed his groundbreaking work in linguistics.

2) Kevin Drum writes a week ago about the trouble that the conservative movement has found, that it has exhausted itself and needs to find something new. Ezra Klein argues that "the moment isn't providing the problems" that conservatives need (apparently feeling that life is a matter of faddish problems that arise, and one side or another is positioned to deal with them). His conclusion is that, once the old problems re-emerge, conservatives will once again be in the ascendancy.

I hope they're both wrong, that we see Americans come together to fix problems that are real, that are pervasive, that won't go away when the media gets tired of them. Medicare and Social Security, competitiveness in the face of foreign efforts, lack of affordable health care, global warming, reduction in the supply of petroleum, even a definition of what this nation actually is and should be - none of these are fads, to be dealt with by whichever party feels like dealing with them. We need all hands on deck working on these.

3) Hank Williams writes about how the Internet is contributing to a lack of focus, tying that to the ineffectiveness of advertising. It's certainly true that, if you see one ad a day, you tend to remember it; if you see a thousand, you don't remember any. And we see more than a thousand, just look around. One certainly has to wonder how many of the ad-supported sites and blogs will survive when they run up against people's need to eat.

4) Tom Friedman continues his new-found concern about the state of America, citing the power we've handed to the petroleum countries. He also refers to the new books by Fareed Zakaria and David Rothkopf, each of which predicts massive changes that will take away from America's influence on the world. As before, I await Friedman's recognition of his own contribution to this effort, how his cheerleading for globalization covered up the very real problems that quite a few of us foresaw.

Sandwiches...mmmmmmm

Is there anything more bizarre in the history of advertising than the Jared arc with Subway Restaurants?

Jared is the guy who lost 240 pounds, ostensibly by eating nothing but low-fat Subway sandwiches. He got some press attention, Subway initially disclaimed it (not wanting to promote themselves as a diet fad), eventually put Jared in commercials, replaced him in 2005 with remarkably putrid ads, then brought him back, culminating in the current campaign in which celebrities pay tribute to the great man in extolling his 10 years of keeping the weight off.

And Jared is not particularly attractive or charismatic. He's a fairly normal seeming guy, which may be the attraction, but he seems totally unlikely to be the focus of a decade-long ad strategy. Are there really people who say, "Hey, that's Subway, where Jared eats - let's go there!"? There must be.

I don't have a larger point, except that I doubt that anyone at Subway saw this lasting into 2008 and, probably, beyond. All the self-promoting businesspeople who like to portray their success as based on skill and hard work, luck not playing a factor, are full of it; Jared may not prove that you can lose weight eating Subway, but he does prove the old adage that, "Nobody knows anything."