Jonothan Stribling

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

When Marx wrote the great line above he was describing the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgious for control of the means of production; he was describing capitalism and the paradoxical desire for continual change and improvement.

For Marx capitalism is a disruptive historical event that shatters existing social structures and illusions. Life is chaotic and fleeting. To survive, one must face up to the ‘reality’ of the world and ones place in it. You either have access to incredible wealth and resources by controlling the means of production or you earn a wage.

Whether you agree with the labour dialectic and historical materialism I think the idea of owning the means of production has particular relevance for how the Internet has changed cultural production.

That this modest blog can be easily published and made available to anyone foolish enough to read it is a great example of the liberalisation of cultural production. With the Internet, anyone with access to the Internet via a computer or mobile phone can publish stuff; anything they like.

Traditionally, the means, if you like, of cultural production have been owned and controlled by institutions and agitators. Institutions like the church, the media, corporations, and governments had the money and influence to publish and promote using newspapers, pamphlets, TV, radio and movies. Having exclusive access to the only mass communication tools is a very effective way of control and manipulation. The average punter was restricted to writing the odd letter to the paper, standing on a soapbox like a freak, publishing their own pamphlets, or calling the local radio station. The relationship was very much a passive relationship with the institutions calling the shots.

Without being too dramatic, the Internet changed the whole model. Suddenly
consumers could produce and distribute their own content on their own terms. A small business could be as visible as a large multi-national. The solid structure of cultural production had indeed melted into the air. This has caused much angst for traditional owners of the means of cultural production. Profits have been eroded as advertising has migrated online.

During the recent election protests in Iran, foreign journalists were expelled or restricted to their hotels. All information about the protests, some wildly inaccurate, came from Twitter and YouTube. This was then published by the traditional media.

Whilst there is much published on the Internet that is tabloid, inaccurate, racist, stupid, fanciful and grotesque the revolution means that previously passive consumers now have a voice.

I am positive that Marx was more into the labour dialectic than the digital dialectice but he would be impressed by the chaos and profanity ensuing from folks on the Internet finding their voices.

There was once a bar unique amongst others in Melbourne – Le Monde.

For a start it was a bar. The drinking culture in the old days was pubs and nightclubs; barns for drinking beer and getting messy. I spent many a happy night drinking, dancing and indulging in bad pickup lines. I was an expert at the bad pickup lines.

Le Monde was a tiny little place, dark and sleek it bought a European sensibility to the top end of the city.

I was lucky enough to work at Le Monde for a 6 months, the 7am to 12pm shift. It was perfect for a relaxing shift with great coffee followed by a knock-off Miller beer. I was told to order the Miller because it was the most expensive beer in the bar.

Now the same building houses a generic fast food outlet.

Once the canny business folk saw how successful Le Monde was the building next to Le Monde was renovated to create identical small bar spaces. Soon there were many small European style bars in the top end of the city. And Le Monde closed. What once was unique had become the norm.

Every innovator faces this problem. A visionary creates a new business from the spark of an idea, courage and a firm belief in the market need for something new, something amazing.

Then, should the idea be successful, the new space is populated with similar ideas all competing to do something better, something unique but still kinda the same. And the new market is commoditised.

What was once visionary is seen as old fashioned, boring.

Being a leader and innovator is hard. The risk is that having created a business in a clear fresh space, the innovator stops evolving and trying new things. They start to believe in what they tell themselves rather than what the market is telling them. Small signs are ignored; it may be declining sales, shorter visits, less buzz. They convince themselves that they are right, that they are still innovative in a clouded market.

And their copy-cat competitors win. They are expert observers of the market, of the strange dynamic between human desire and greed, and are geared to capitalise on every opportunity.

So the answer in my view is to never believe what you tell yourself but seek answers from your customers, the market and your competitors.

After all, being the local blacksmith was once a lucrative trade.

When I was in Romania about 10 years ago I had some drinks with a local Optician and a Romanian rock star. We enjoyed many drinks and Raresh, the Optician, invited my girlfriend and I back to his apartment after the bar closed.

Raresh lived in a Soviet style apartment that was very very clean. It was disturbingly ordered. All that was missing ware the plastic sheets to protect the furniture.

He hated Romania and his low socio-economic status. He declaimed “I hate my country!” and told the rock star that he wished he has his life.

The life of an Optician was not a comfortable middle-class life in Romania. It was a life of struggle and worry.

As a result Raresh hung out in the bar where we met him.

The man did know about taxonomies though. He asked us if we wanted to listen to some music and handed us a collection of exercise books that contained a hand-written index of his collection. It was a magnificent thing and Raresh’s logical ordered mind was wonderfully evident in the careful scrawls of music from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Each entry contained a code which mapped to a tape in his collection. It was better ordered than my Ipod. And by hand!

The desire to organise and classify is a uniquely human activity. Imposing systems on a chaotic world makes us feel like we’re in control, that we’re managing to keep our heads above the water that threatens to drown us in a beautifully fluid and disorganised way.

It is also how we expect to find stuff on the Internet.

We visit a website looking for a trace, a scent of something that relates to our need. Clothing, shoes, belts, books, musical devices, portable storage devices. Each might relate to something that we’re looking for, something that makes us think “yeah, that’s it”. And then we click a link and somewhere someone pours a Gin and Tonic happy that there’s been a micro-conversion.

Finding the right words to describe the right stuff or the right actions is the key to conversion.

The great thing about Google’s AdWords is that it reduces all the fluff and bubble of the creative process to a headline, 2 descriptions and a display URL. No pictures, no logos, no pictures of babies smiling coyly at the camera; just good old fashioned words.

The only tricks you can play are with words and the right words can deliver lots of clicks.

Too often people get obsessed with the glitz and forget the words that order the chaotic disorganised world of their buyer.

I reckon start with the words and add the sparkle later. Test the words in AdWords or Yahoo. Test them on your customers.

Like Raresh, build a beautiful framework to structure the world of your buyer.

Raresh wasn’t distracted by the colourful tape cases, they were kept hidden until his visitor had made a choice.

I like to think that Raresh is happily married now with kids and a business thriving as the Romanian economy improves.

He deserves it.

When I was 15 my chief concerns were sneaking cigarettes and my hair. I didn’t read the newspaper, rather I watched the TV news with my parents as bored as hell.

The Berlin Wall was to stand for another 5 years and Ronald Reagan was talking about God a lot, even though he didn’t go to church.

I was opinionated and selfish. Like most teenagers.

The announcement last week that some research about how teenagers consume media released by Morgan Stanley and written by a 15 year old intern was received with breathless excitement.

This kid had apparently clearly and succinctly identified the problem with media and worried European analysts who may or may not have just bought social media stock.

The kid, I may call him the savant, had claimed that teenagers do not read newspapers. Wow! Apparently they watch TV or get their news on the Internet.

Also, the savant and his friends reckon that advertising is “pointless”. Another amazing revelation!

He also claimed that Twitter is for old people not 15-year-olds.

The kids these days do not buy music, the download it for free – because they can.

They also love texting, or sexting if teenagers are still obsessed with sex the way I was.

The “old” media of TV, radio and newspapers are doomed according to the report. Shocking!

The young have always been cynical consumers of media. The fact that the “old” businesses are not relevant to them is a reflection of the short-sightedness of analysts and journalists. I know plenty of twenty, thirty and even forty year-olds who would consume media in the same way that our spoilt son of a banker.

The real issue is that newspapers, radio and to a lessor extent TV do not engage and entertain as much as You Tube, fmylife.com, the XBox or PlayStation or movies.

The “new” media places me in the centre of the universe, firmly in control of what I choose to engage with.

The old media could never offer this. It functions according to an elitist model of control and delivery. All consumers are passive subject, not active participants.

And the process has been happening for at least 10 years when our savant couldn’t spell consume, media or overblown hyperbole.