Details Magazine has a cover story in its August edition.  Noting:

“Exalting the handmade, the painstakingly crafted, the authentic, is not just for hipsters in Portland and Brooklyn anymore—small-batch has mass appeal. How the artisanal movement became our national consumer religion.

Yes, indeed it has.  Of course if you’d downloaded and read Future: Present, you’d be well aware of that trend and its implications for your brand.  The eBook will be free only for a few more weeks– so download the pdf or the audio while it’s still free.

Much has been written about Miley Cyrus and her recent change to distance herself from her Hannah Montana character. It was ta terrible idea as the New York Times points out today.

So last month, when Ms. Cyrus released her post-adolescent anthem, “Can’t Be Tamed,” her once-adoring fan was unimpressed, unmoved by, among other things, the singer’s sexy music video.

“It was weird,” Perry said of Ms. Cyrus’s bird wings and black ribbon corset. “I feel like she acts 25. She looks so old. She is too old for herself.” She, like others her age, has had enough. First-week album sales for the more adult “Can’t Be Tamed” tallied a mere 102,389, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales. That was 72 percent less than her 2008 solo debut, “Breakout,” and 33 percent less than last year’s “Time of Our Lives,” both of which were popular with teenagers.

Readers of my book will recognize this failure to be utterly predictable.  Ms. Cyrus and her strategists should never have equated sexuality with maturity.  Kids are generally alienated by the quantity of sex in their media. The movement to conservatism continues on the young end.  Not only can Taylor Swift sing better– her style is more on pitch as well.

People don’t buy what you make they buy why you make them. Simon Sinek has a model for inspirational leadership starting with the question “Why?”. He discusses the diffusion of innovation model that I’m a big fan of Thanks to Jon Sinton for the link.

Here is a link to my web book.  Audio, links to full text, and complete pdf all here.  I really hope you like it.  I took me a while to finish it and get all the audio done.  Please email me if you find anything I can fix or do to make it better.  I tried to reduce the amount of clicks one must endure to get to the right content.

In 1993 AT&T gave a remarkably clear view of what things would be like in 2009. Remember these ads?

My friend Sheri posted a link to this video on twitter. Recently Wired magazine argued you should never forward a link to a page that’s gotten over half a million views. I’m continually reminded that is a dangerous rule to follow. I see a lot on-line, but I missed this. It’s good. Thanks Sheri!

Because this is my blog I get to put up stuff that is funny sometimes. There is of course much for the mediathinker here:

First, Cracked.com may be the funniest site on the web. Well-written, interesting, smart and more than just snarky. Notice the pre-roll ad from Google. Notice the crawl ads below the content when it plays and recall this blogs last post about Simpsons being more valuable on Hulu than on Fox.

The clutter police of much to complain about of course but, in the end, this is the state of the art in video content revenue generation.

A spoon-full of sugar always helps the medicine go down. Enjoy!

Everybody knows Lambert will win this season’s Idol but there may be some surprises in store none the less.

Mashable has a great story today from Adam Ostrow about ways to have a peek into the future of pop culture:

According to The New York Post “a glitch in the Apple software allowed fans a glimpse at which contestants are selling the most “Idol” download.” And, in what will come as a surprise to many Idol fans, Gokey was not the first or second most popular artist.

While Lambert, as expected, is the most downloaded artist so far with 6 of the top 10 top tracks, Kris Allen actually occupies 3 of the slots, while Gokey has just 1 song on the list. Of course, American Idol fans don’t vote on singing skills alone, and Gokey, as you might know, has a compelling backstory, which could make all of this irrelevant.

Kristof has an intersting piece in today’s NYT about Negroponte’s “Daily Me”  This is the future that we see in front of us today.  All Newspapers aren’t dying BTW– the super small hyper-local ones are doing just fine.  Newspaper reading has changed forever.

What concerns Kristof is Confirmation Bias–reading only the things that support your beliefs.  This is dangerous–but only for those who won’t admit its a threat to their understanding.

Here’s a hunk from my book– it’s been awhile.  Seemed relevant.

The Emperor’s New Prose
In 1996, New York University physics professor Allan Sokol wrote an article forbiddingly titled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” published in Social Text, an esteemed academic journal of cultural studies. Among other things, Sokol claimed, “physical ‘reality’ is at the bottom of a social and linguistic construct,” and that the concept of an external world subject to laws of nature is a mistaken piece of post-Enlightenment dogma.

Still with me? Sokol utilized scientific and mathematic principles to back up his argument. He threw around imposing concepts like the “morphogenetic field,” which he called “a cutting edge theory of quantum gravity.” Sokol’s article was so steeped in the language of rigorous academic inquiry that the magazine’s editors didn’t realize it was all a hoax.

Sokol later cheerfully admitted that he purposely wrote the article “so that any competent physicist or mathematician, or undergraduate physics or math major, would realize it was a spoof.” Why? To see if the journal would run an article “liberally salted with nonsense if it sounded good and flattered the editors’ ideological pre-conceptions.” In short, Sokol wanted to test the confirmation bias of the editors of Social Text.

Sokol’s prank shows that often things are not as they appear. That principle applies as much to popular culture as it does to scientific inquiry. While there is likely such a thing as objective reality, any two people in the universe will look at objective reality and see entirely different things. And they could both be right. A dollar may be a dollar, but its value varies around the world on a daily basis.

We don’t all experience the same event or the same picture and draw the same conclusions. Each of us tends to cherry-pick objective events that make it easy for us to “prove” the logic of our opinions. Get used to it. Embrace it. Love it. Considering and accepting your confirmation bias will free you to face it and start to change how often you are trapped by it. Each of us uses the greater events that make up our worldview to prove our confirmation bias. Heck, I’ve done it writing this book. I’ve chosen to count on readers to challenge the examples I’ve described and to which I ascribe meaning to manage my confirmation biases.

Anyone who considers himself immune to this kind of biased thinking should look at mean annual temperatures in Cheraw, South Carolina, where between 1930 and 2000, it cooled by 1.5 degrees. The temperature drop could be seen as an open-and-shut debunking of the concept of global warming, and that might be right if we were talking only about Cheraw, South Carolina. Globally, the last dozen years have yielded the highest temperatures in recorded history. To a dedicated Greenpeace warrior, that fact would underscore the core theme of Al Gore’s messianic film road show, An Inconvenient Truth. Global warming is here, it exists, and we’d better do several things about it, now.
For purposes of this chapter, it doesn’t really matter if the adherents of either viewpoint could be proved right or wrong. What both sides in the global warming debate are doing with their respective scientific facts is exhibiting confirmation bias.

Wason, Come Here…We Need You
Confirmation bias is the brainchild of British psychologist Peter Wason, who observed like many before him that people use information to support their view of the world. Wason distinguished himself by testing the idea that people attach a tremendous amount of subconscious importance to proving a cherished assumption. They seize on examples that back up their ideas and ignore the rest. A sports fan may remember statistics that put his team in a favorable light while ignoring or even forgetting anything that casts doubt on his team’s lauded status.
According to Wikipedians, Wason conducted experiments in which he asked subjects to look at a numerical sequence, such as 2-4-6.  He then asked subjects to devise numerical triplets of their own until they could correctly guess the rule behind the original progression of numbers. Most people were wrong at least once or never right at all. But instead of admitting their error, they kept devising triplets to prove their own erroneous hypotheses. Here’s the amazing part: Participants avoided triplets that could eliminate incorrect rules, and resisted coming up with variable hypotheses! Paging Adam Smith.
The responses proved to Wason that people would go to great lengths to avoid considering that they might be wrong. “In the real world, the fixated, obsessive behavior of some of the subjects would be analogous to that of a person who is thinking in a closed system, a system which defies refutation such as existentialism or the majority of religions,” he wrote. “These experiments demonstrate how dogmatic thinking and the refusal to entertain the possibility of alternatives can easily result in error.” Even when staring at facts that contradict their positions, people tend to concede much less of an inconvenient truth than the facts would otherwise support.
Now recall Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who showed that what people choose is determined mostly by the way the choice is framed. People will look for an anchor point to cling to, so that any opinion adjustments they make in the direction of truth will be severely limited. The anchor might be as mobile as Tony Hawk’s skateboard, but folks will hew to it nonetheless. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has made a killing caricaturing confirmation bias through the bizarro-world ravings of characters like Wally, Dogbert, and especially his comic strips’ pointy-haired CEO. “The irrational part of your brain reinterprets reality in a way that lets you keep your dumb viewpoint against all common sense and evidence,” Adams writes succinctly in his blog.

Go Along to Get Along
No one is immune to seeking validation for their views from their peers. This is true at all levels of the Diffusion of Innovation model, innovators included. The vulnerability exists for everyone; it just differs by degrees. Confirmation bias isn’t just for individuals; it is essential for tribes too. Reinforcing bias often helps build and sustain them.

The innovator is the one who tribe members look to for clues about what should interest them. The innovators themselves don’t often get reciprocal feedback from the tribe. Instead, for validation, they refer to external media and other tribes. The world is often a cold and lonely place for innovators, who constitute less than three percent of any tribe. Confirmation is hard to come by. All of the innovators’ contact with outside influences is indirect, not personal. This may make confirmation bias rarer, but it makes it much stronger. Being lonely causes one to question reality a bit more, but the need to anchor onto something reliable becomes very attractive.

The newness of something is especially compelling to innovators who pride themselves on discovering and embracing things before anybody else. Their personal identity is established by recognizing innovation at its most pristine, so proof of newness or novelty is essential. But the attraction to that which is new can become a trap for innovators. They risk credibility and their own cultural currency by making quick attachments to things simply because they are new. If the phenomenon doesn’t live up to expectations (as it often doesn’t), the innovator may lose influence. To paraphrase the old saying,  “No one remembers when you’re right, but everyone remembers when you’re wrong.”

By comparison, early adopters bring confirmation bias from inside the tribe. They are leaders in their own right, with a lot of influence, but unlike innovators, they run their preferences by their friends because they care how other members of the tribe view them. Their credibility for taking a position on a new idea or product comes from their ability to channel (think like) their friends and associates.

Both innovators and early adopters have power to confirm their own opinions. People relinquish this power the further down the diffusion scale they reside, such that early and late majorities seek stronger confirmation from their friends, while laggards essentially can’t approve anything on their own. Laggard behavior confirms tastes and opinions through the affirmation of the peer group.
It may be tough for a nation with a pioneer mentality like that of the United States to accept this concept, but “the vision thing” that has become a litmus test for presidential candidates eludes a lot of people. Studies have shown that only about 16 percent of people have a self-generated vision of what they want. For the rest, peers within the tribe inevitably color and drive their choices.
The less logical and more visceral one’s allegiance is to a tribe’s core purpose, the greater the degree to which peer consensus will be a factor. Fans of college and pro sports teams in America can be very insular in their opinions about opposing teams and players. Fans will even project their own unresolved real-life conflicts onto those rivalries—for instance, sitting with their faces painted in their team’s colors—to attempt to validate their views. Tribal reinforcement of confirmation bias can get really heavy-handed. You wouldn’t dare walk into the Dog Pound at a Cleveland Browns game wearing a John Elway jersey. Likewise, there weren’t many vocal Yankees fans in the South before major league baseball expanded beyond two 16-team leagues in 1961 (and before northeasterners began their southward migration in the ’70s).

Buried  in the December 23 NYT was an article showing an interesting counter-trend to our seemingly endless-spiraling-out-of-control economy–Namely that the popularity of handmade crafts are bucking the weak retailing trend.  Can technology benefit from this trend?  yep.

If this surprises you than I have a book for you.  The “artisan” trend is one of the most important trend in contemporary consumer culture.  It will dominate the rest of the decade and into the first half of the next.

Small is the new big.  Still even big brands can be artisanal (look at Apple).

Here’s an extended peek from the aforementioned book Extreme to Mainstream:

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that markets are rational, an idea widely referred to as Smith’s “invisible hand.” Rationality, however, is not always the key driver of human economic behavior, as we’ll see in the Kahneman experiments, discussed in Section 6.9. Software’s future is in open source, freely accessible software code built to be just that, free—free to use and to fix. What would Adam Smith say about open source? Who works for free and gives it away? Is that rational or not? Well, actually, highly skilled innovators do it for the cultural currency of being seen as innovators—and to give their boredom a good thrashing. The well-written piece of code bequeaths rock-star status to its writer amongst his peers.
At a 2004 open-source conference held at the University of Toronto, Red Hat (one of the larger and more recognized companies dedicated to open-source software) founder Bob Young connected theories of Adam Smith with the concept of coders working and improving software for free. “The Adam Smith view of the world is that a whole bunch of self-centered, selfish human beings, working in their own vested self-interest, can make the world a better place faster than the most benevolent king,” Young said. He argued that the Internet validated Adam Smith’s theories, as did the growth of the Linux operating system itself. The Internet is a distribution system to which multiple folks contribute. We see Young’s observation affirmed in social sites like YouTube, Digg, and even MySpace, as well as in enterprise adoption of Apache Server DNS and Sendmail, all open-source software. Open-source software fosters social communication, something humans must do. Most of us must connect, communicate, and document our lives. It is a human need, essential to defining oneself and affirming one’s very existence. We generate content because we have to, not only for money. And our need to create results in something better than any one individual, company, or government could have ever created, despite the desire of corporations and governments to control and profit from it.
Open-source code represents one of the foundational concepts you need to understand if you want to be successful at forecasting: the artisanal impulse to innovate.
For something to be authentic, it must have artisanal—that is, handmade—roots. The roots of a visionary individual or tribe allow an innovation to scale. This is the quality that people striving for authenticity are truly seeking, and when a product’s artisanal sensibility can be retained while scaling to a mass audience, it has the potential become a cultural icon. Witness the iPod—the rare product that has been able to scale on a massive level without losing its cool. That’s artisanal.
The artisanal nature of open-source code, which is generated by those dedicated to the cause and continually tweaked until it best serves the needs of its users, leads to its utility as a tool for those simply looking for the best software. When a musician buys an antique guitar to add to his collection, it is the instrument’s flaws he values as much as its sound—it is the authenticity of the object that lends it value, not simply its utilitarian function. Authentic code, however, has almost no utility. No one wants the first version of a code. Its true value doesn’t become apparent until its utility is paramount—that is, until it works.

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Achieving scale is difficult, deceptively so, because as any innovation diffuses, it changes, often forfeiting its artisanal nature in the pursuit of growth. If that change causes costs to go up or values to be diminished or meanings to be diluted, the idea, product, or cultural movement won’t scale and will lose its momentum. The cultural currency evaporates and the idea, product, or movement fades into memory. Products, services, and ideas can become too popular too quickly as well. AOL had this problem at the end of the last century when it gained too many new customers too quickly. It happens more than you think, and if you think it’s a problem you’d like to have, ask someone who’s been through it. It’s a situation only slightly better than seeing no demand at all.
On these two phenomena, diffusion and scale (and the rates associated with them), rests the fate of trends and the prestige and believability of pop culture forecasts. As a matter of dollars and cents, diffusion models and scalability can tell you how and when a brand matters and how it matures. It can also tell if and when an idea will reach its saturation point and begin to lose its value. As you can imagine, that kind of data is essential to developing accurate pricing and communication strategies.
Tribes dictate change in popular culture. When the number of people adopting an idea or innovation reaches critical mass, the new sensation becomes a cultural inevitability. But while the early majority, late majority, and laggards ride in the car, somebody has to start it. Innovations need those who value them to risk their tribal status and cultural currency to drive the innovation’s adoption. They are innovators too—even if they haven’t invented anything.
As scale is achieved, concentric circles of interest or devotion create the “network effect” such that a trend (anything from art and music to politics and culture) gathers the necessary momentum to race around the world. Both Wikipedia and Answers.com credit DJ Grand Wizard Theodore for creating the rhythmic patterns of rap music, but Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and Grandmaster Flash were all innovators who adopted it, contributed their cultural currency to accelerate its scale, and made rap a musical and cultural benchmark.

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The artisanal is important to youth culture too.
Of course, credible alienation isn’t new. It’s about youth culture finding inspiration in alienated subcultures of outcasts and unappreciated visionaries who cling to the lower social rungs of society, and who are hipper and closer to truth; they “keep it real” in an effort to avoid the hypocrisy of compromise that plagues the mature. That indifference to authority makes outcasts credible when they talk about life on the edge and describe zero-sum-game conflicts between themselves and that authority. They appear to have the genuine rage of violated innocents who speak truth to power. That’s why hip-hop culture, and the stars who populate it, work feverishly to retain their street “cred” in the eyes of their fans. They work overtime—and at great risk—to keep the façade that they’ve still got the dangerous edginess that exploded them out of the ghetto in lyrical form when their career was launched and only the alienated dug what they said. They instinctively know what I’ve been telling you: The more artisanal sensibility they can retain, the more powerful their brand becomes.
There’s a genuine history behind the hype: The alienation of the contemporary tribe grows out of a past that validates it. But what, then, gives the complaint manifest power, where everybody literally gets the message? With a nod to Marx, it is access to or control of the means of production—the DJs, record labels, radio stations with prime position on the dial, MTV and VH1 rotation time, and merchandising on iTunes and the wireless carriers. The totems of alienation must be easily recognized, otherwise they have no real power. That’s the great irony and the art of alienation. The authentically alienated go utterly unnoticed and completely misunderstood, while utilitarian authenticity seeks simply to identify with the alienated experience rather than actually being alienated.
The Rolling Stones found credible alienation in both black America and lovers of the blues. Hippies retooled the beatniks, and so on. Youth borrow from disaffected cultures and choose those totems that reflect their own tribal principles and identities so as to create something new from the old—neo soul, neo grunge, neo blues, neo punk—you get the point.”

Of course nothing says “artisanal” technology like iPhone apps–and I think it’s safe to say they are scaling.  Many of The best one are built by small scappy shops led by people super-passionate about their app.  The takeaway: Set standards to communicate the values of the artisan and “authenticity” takes care of itself.