Grant McCracken's Blog, page 25

My Culturematic talk given at TEDxHarlem

[image error]

Here's my TEDxHarlem presentation.  I talk about the state of cultural innovation, how its changing and how Culturematics are one way to do this innovation now.  

CLICK HERE.#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }

 

Fed Ex as a game engine

[image error]

This is the delivery schedule I got this morning from Amazon.  I'm waiting for a pair of headphones.  As you can see, these are "out for delivery" and should arrive today.

I looked at this and thought, "but surely there's a game waiting to happen here."  It would take a detailed knowledge of Amazon delivery routes and membership in Amazon's "free delivery" club, but it should be possible to game the system.  (I should leave this to the likes of Kevin Slavin and Jamin Warren, but lets see how far I can get on my own.)

Using FedEx as a game engine opens several possibilities.  For instance, we would see how close we could come to making two packages pass in transit.  Could we make two packages run through Maspeth, New York at the same time?

Here's what we know:

1) The system is out there and moving packages in any case.

2) We can discover where a package was at any given moment.

3) We can use this data to work the delivery system.

4) This mechanical system could be used for some other purpose.  We can set objectives and competitions.  

This is a culturematic in the spirit of Bill Winkenbach's Fantasy sports invention.  Bill said, look, the NFL throws off all this data.  Let's use it for another purpose.  Let's use to create an alternate sports reality.  

So working the system as a system is really just the beginning.  We could treat packages as game pieces on a chess board.  We could treat them as balls in a pinball machine.  We could set up one of those flash boards that pinball machines have and run up numbers as someone succeeds in sending a package to Maspeth, then Hartford.  Oh, damn, he missed Stratford!

FedEx as a game engine.  That's the idea, I think.  

Ethnographic Walk-About (or, what to do with the rest of your summer)

[image error]

A former student is searching for what to do next.  With her summer...or her life.  She's flexible.  

Here is the reply I sent her this morning:

Dear Jennifer (not her real name):

Thanks for your note.  Great to hear your voice again.

It feels to me that you are more or less uniquely positioned to do an ethnographic walk-about.

You have a great eye, a great voice, you are not wedded to any particular ideology or cultural camp, you have a breadth of experience, you are mobile in almost every sense of the term.

It feels to me like everyone is burrowing, sticking to what and who they know. There is stuff happening "out there," but people are so shocked by the new that they can't manage the novelty. So they are not mobile.

I would get someone to give you a mandate and just go looking. My hero her is Frances FitzGerald's 1986. Cities on a Hill, A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures. Simon and Schuster. She doesn't make the mistake that hobbles a good deal of American journalism and scholarship, the mistake that supposes that only on the margin are we going to find something new and interesting. She casts the net wide.  And that's especially important now, because cultural innovation is taking place everywhere.  The avant-garde no longer owns the ingenuity or courage necessary to reimagine the world.  

Go have a look! Most people are not looking. And most of those who are, are looking through lens so particular that they ALWAYS find what they are looking for, and miss what is really going on.  All we know for certain is that Americans are as usual reinvented themselves as a furious pitch and pace.  We don't have a clear idea of who and what they are becoming.  And that's probably a bad thing.

Good luck and keep me posted.

Best, Grant

Purchase FitzGerald at Amazon by clicking here.  

Photo: Ms. FitzGerald from her wikipedia entry.  

Suits

[image error]

Suits, the USA Network show (Thursday at 10:00), deputed it's second season this week. It's promises to be as good as last year and then some.  

I think it's fair to say that this show has better scripts and acting than Mad Men.  It certainly does more interesting things with the law than Mad Men does with advertising.  

The thing that strikes me most about this show is the casting.  None of the actors here come from big projects or grand careers. It took someone with a particular gift to see the greatness (ok, goodness) of which they were capable.  (Greatness will leave for season 3.) 

Hats off to Rachel Rose Oginsky and the following producers and executive producers:

David Bartis

Gavin Barclay

Nathan Perkins

Jon Cowan

Chevy Chen

Igor Srubshchik

Aaron Korsh

Doug Liman

Gene Klein

Post script.

This scene will show you how Mike got this job.  He is chased into an interview room by men looking for the pot in his briefcase.  And so a new life, and show, begins. CLICK HERE.

Saving Boston from Bostonians!

[image error]

I have a post up at the HBR blog today that suggests a way we might use an operation called Thank Bank and social media to make Boston a friendlier place.  Please come have a look. 

Please click here.  

Local history as a potluck potlatch

[image error]

Thousands of communities in the US nurture a community within the community. This is all the people who care about local history.  

And there is the community within this community.  That's all the things the community knows, or thinks it knows, about itself.

Most of these local history societies stage a speaker's series.  They invite someone who is, say, expert in the civil war to come share their knowledge in a 40 minute talk, with drinks afterward.  It's convivial and interesting.  If the gods are kind, the speaker knows her stuff and how to communicate it.  

There is another possibility.  Call it Potluck or Potlatch.  In this event we canvas and compile the historical knowledge of locals in a real time event.  Everyone brings what they know and shares.  

The way to run this is in the manner of a Harvard Business School classroom, drawing people into the discussion and organizing information as we go.

Naturally, we would want to begin with the declaration that we have the utmost respect for formal history and professional historians, and that we won't ever want to challenge or diminish this kind of history.

But we also want to say that we want to see how much history we have in our community that qualities as "living history" and "informal knowledge."

There is after all a larger trend that says our culture is moving from passive recipients of knowledge to active participants in the assembly of knowledge.

And in any case, the local historical society has always had an extra-academic purpose: a chance to meet and engage with your neighbors in shared enthusiasms.  

Community-assembled history would give me a much more vivid sense of my neighbors than the sometimes dreary process of watching them as they listen to an expert.  

There are several potential problems with this scheme.  One is that local blow hards will try to commandeer the proceedings, grasping it as an opportunity to show how very knowledgable they are. But it is up to the person is leading things to step in and gently encourage them to give way that others might participate!

The far graver problem is that the community would encourage and perpetuate local falsehoods and misconceptions.  All part of the fun.  Everyone wants to be credulous and scrupulous in equal proportions.  (This too is a trend.)  No one should come to a local history potluck / potlatch with the idea that the history will be definitive.  No one should leave with the conviction that they have certain knowledge.  

The idea is to share and to celebrate what the community believes to be true about itself. Everyone is free, indeed they are encouraged, to repair to their studies, consult the masters, and determine just how much false currency circulates in their home town.  

I propose the HBS model but of course there are lots of ways of solving the problem.  The idea is to have a facilitator who is good at drawing people out, getting historical assertions up on the board, leading the discussion as a discussion, gentling stick handling the puck away from the blow hards, making everyone feel welcome, and otherwise making this bonfire of knowledge burst into flame.  

If someone says, "Sir, how dare you trivial with something so sacred as our history," you may reply, "History is much too important to be left to the historians.  This is a living trust, richer when shared, aerated and given voice."