How the Powerful Influence Culture

Signification, which is the only function of a word admitted by semantics, reaches perfection in the sign. Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning speed. The American expression “fad,” used for fashions which appear like epidemics – that is, inflamed by highly-concentrated ec...

 Branding Encourages You to be "More Yourself"

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don�...

 Old Media is Text-Centric; New Media is a Collage

Modern literacy has always meant being able to both read and write narrative in the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. Just being able to read is not sufficient. For centuries, this has meant being able to consume and produce words through reading and writing and, to a lesser extent, listening and speaking. But the world of digital expression has changed all of this in three respects: New media demand new literacies. Because of inexpensive, easy-to-use, widely distributed new med...

 Everything Won't Become Free at Once

Maybe the coolest technology could get very good and cheap, while at the same time crucial fundamentals for survival could become expensive. The calculi of digital utopias and man-made disasters don’t contradict each other. They can coexist. This is the heading of the darkest and funniest science fiction, such as the work of Philip K. Dick. Basics like water and food could soar in cost even as intensely sophisticated gadgets, like automated nanorobotic heart surgeons, float about as dust i...

 Celebrity Economy

This century's last great trend was noted by acute observers in 1996, yet most people failed to appreciate it. While business gurus were proclaiming the new dominance of creativity and innovation over mere production, the growing ease with which information was transmitted and reproduced made it harder for creators to profit from their creations. Nowadays, if you develop a marvelous piece of software, everyone will have downloaded a free copy from the Net the next day. If you record a magnifi...