with all the interesting ideas Dave Rogers brings up in his criticisms of the Cluetrain Manifesto, but I had to get one thought out of my head and caged in cyberspace before it could run away with the circus.

This quote leaped out at me:

The problem is that more and more of our language is being influenced by the methods of marketing, where explicit meaning is deprecated in favor of an emotional impression. Where the truth of the assertion is less important than how you feel about it.

It’s pretty much how I, in my own mind, defined the concept of flashbaking in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - a wholesale impression or essence of something, without actually being that thing. It’s interesting to think about marketing transforming our language into something similar. I’d argue that it’s not language that’s being co-opted - language is a tool, and even when we think we’ve forgotten what real communication sounds like, we have a visceral reaction to honest truth. No, I’d say that culture, art, media, and even abstract thought - the once-removed, yet still very honest and personal interpretations of the truth - are what we’re losing. It’s taking ever-more cognitive power to discern between one person’s expression of themself and a manufactured expression. And there are fewer and fewer people with the brain power, will, and time to even bother making the distinction.

I should know, having recently been in the business of creating such things. To be clear, I don’t think it’s wrong or bad, or even done in any purposeful way. In fact, I think it’s a necessary part of a process. It’s the culmination of the 20th century playing itself out - the endgame of mass media before it collapses in on itself. It will, of course, contribute to the collapse, by alienating people even more, though it may take longer than a lot of us would like to reach that tipping point. (And, yes, I’m aware of the irony of saying that having just moved from one dying industry, marketing, to another, mass media.)

And then there’s the whole notion that authority and attention are what place us in the heirarchy, which is really what defines the market, rather than the conversation. This makes intuitive sense to me, in that attention and authority can easily be mapped to a familiar economic model, whereas Cluetrain was always harder to grok in terms of exchange of value. I like it, there’s definitely some truth in it, and it’s a fun metaphor to bandy about, but I have to let it sink in a bit more before I really have an opinion.