Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

In my part-time alternate life as a consultant, I have often pondered why a person chooses to buy a Billabong sweatshirt as opposed to a Quiksilver one. The choice is not an obvious one. The products themselves are essentially the same. The name is the only real difference. The gradient between one and the other is an infinitesimal pattern of grey, yet the decision — and millions more exactly like it — happen everyday.

Jonah Lehrer has emerged over the past few years as neuroscience’s strongest and most interesting voice. His Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) is as smart and fun a mix of the Two Cultures as you’re likely to find. With his spot as Seed Magazine’s Editor at Large and a contributing editor gig at Wired, Lehrer is poised and positioned to inform the public about brain science like few others ever have been.

With How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), Lehrer turns his attention to the marketplace and how our brain power influences our buying power. Peter Merholz wrote that it was clear that Lehrer had “attended the Gladwell school of non-fiction writing, anchoring his facts in stories.” Maybe it was a compliment, but having recently read Gladwell’s latest book (the sometimes quite interesting but ultimately nearly pointless Outliers), I prefer Lehrer’s prose. It’s clear, concise, and lyrical, and at least I know there’s some science behind it.

The traditional wisdom says that we make important decisions by relying on the rationality of the logical brain to override the “animal stuff” (as Howard Bloom calls it) of our emotions and instinctual drives. In How We Decide, Lehrer contends that the process is a bit more nuanced than that. It’s a subtle dance, a process of bend and blend that depends on the situation. Well, it’s not quite that simple either, but Lehrer’s book often makes it all seem so. It ends with a “taxonomy of decision-making,” which helpfully applies many of the book’s anecdotal dilemmas to practical, real-world situations.

Coming to the brain and purchasing decisions from a different angle, Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Customer Behavior (Viking, 2009) argues that it’s all just so many peacock feathers. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, so his lens is longer than Lehrer’s, but doesn’t mean he sees the situation any clearer or in higher relief. Like Lehrer, he writes to be read, but where Lehrer;s prose is positive, Miller’s negativity seeps into his sentences. His wit is by turns playful and biting, veiling and betraying a deep-seated cynicism toward the consumer capitalism he’s analyzing.

Miller writes like he’s the first academic to discover the field of marketing, as if Stewart Ewen, Douglas Rushkoff, and Marshall McLuhan (!), among many, many others hadn’t already upturned similar soil. In addition, his arguments smack of psychoanalytic reasoning (i.e., many of our purchasing decisions are driven by the libido and thereby illustrate material sublimation, many others are driven by narcissism, etc.) dressed up in evolutionary garb: We buy stuff to advertise our potential to each other as possible mates, sexual and Platonic. It’s certainly not all bad or bland though. Miller’s idea of “fitness faking” (about which I’ve written before) makes a brief appearance, and his “Exercises for the Reader” (similar to Lehrer’s concluding taxonomy) are a nice touch of pragmatism more science books could use.

After having read both of these books, I don’t feel any closer to understanding the Billabong/Quiksilver dilemma, but as Miller writes on the very first page of Spent, echoing McLuhan, “consumerism is hard to describe when it’s the ocean and we’re the plankton.”

Spin The Black Circle

McLuhan and Vinyl? I know – I sometimes stretch an idea to its snapping point but isn’t that why I bother to type all day?

Here goes – As I sit on the panels I’m invited to I often forget to remind myself that at the heart of all my discussions about music and technology the root of it is about my enduring passion for music.

Computer technology, especially web 2.0, has fooled many of us into thinking that we now have a “new” way of communicating. That is simply not true; we forget that Marshall McLuhan pointed out decades ago new technologies simply create new environments – the old environment then becomes the content of the new environment; Facebook simply allows us to digitize our Rolodex. The computer and its keyboard are the medium in this particular message. Our constant need to remain in touch with friends and family endures, and still will well beyond technology.

We should really be considering technology’s effect on the individual and society. Remember, e.e. cummings warned that “progress is a comfortable disease.” So where does music with its myriad genres and forms, its emotions and passionate responses, its common currency, fit into a “technological” culture?

Well consider this – Music is the medium is the message; bear with me here.
If music is the message then in McLuhan’s terms the vinyl record can be described as a technological extension [the medium] of the musicians body. The medium then creates the environment that produces effects [the media.] This then has an effect on society and culture where the starting point is always the individual – that is, you and me. McLuhan also advised against a rigid separation of the physical from the psychological.

If we then consider that the physics of media have changed yet the media that provides the atmospheres has not, and we understand that the effect is still psychological and can not be separated, do McLuhan’s ideas help us unravel the mystery of what innately binds us to the rhythms and lilts of music around the globe? [My argument carries over into live performance too where the instruments are extensions of the players bodies.]

Vinyl racks at Music Millennium Portland

Anyway, on to my thoughts about vinyl.

In a world of 320kb MP3s, FLAC, loss-less this that and the other files, I’m going to take a leap of faith here and hope that many of you jump in too – my premise is that a vinyl record surely has to be the purest embodiment of our universal love for music. It’s the closest thing to experiencing music live that I have heard. When compared to A to B, with A being an analog record and B being a CD, A wins every time for me. I share Neil Young’s comments in the digital vs analog wars – Young has acknowledged the benefit of hiss-free recording that digital technology offers, with the caveat that “along with the hiss went depth of sound and the myriad possibilities of the high end where everything is like the cosmos, exploding stars, echo.” [Read more of this discussion here.]

Digitizing music has made music more affordable and provided ease of use in portability but at the huge expense of having the emotional range, the highs the lows the rumbles, removed in the process. What we have been hearing on CD is a compressed version of a digital slice of the possible range of sound available to our ears. At live shows the bass sub woofers in the PA system allow you to literally ‘feel’ the bottom end, on CD or MP3 that experience is simply not available to you. Yet, when you play a vinyl record through a great hi-fi system you can experience it in a recording.
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For anyone who has been aware of Marshall McLuhan’s life and work and who have read his many books and essays, he is perhaps best remembered for the slogan The Medium is the Message upon which he elaborated in his 1964 book, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’

For those who know the slogan but not the man or meaning behind it a timely book published by Mark Batty Publisher came out late last year entitled Everyman’s McLuhan written by W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji and Jacob Albert. It’s basically a primer for those interested in McLuhan and who are ready to plunge into his work.

This is a pocket-sized book that’s handy to have around; you can pick up this book and start at any page, you can jump around too without losing the thread and it’s also worth having just for the graphic design. The writers also provide the back story to some of McLuhan’s writings including the slogans. For instance they flesh out his thinking behind “The Medium Is The Message.” They ask “How can the medium be the message? How can the television circuits, screen etc. be the ad coaxing us to buy?” They let us know that McLuhan never intended his phrase to have such a literal meaning. He often rephrased the slogan to fit different audiences and those paraphrases are not that well know. Here’s one – “The medium is the message, but the user of the medium is the content of the medium, in the sense that any medium is an extension of the human body.” By that he could mean that a mobile phone is an extension of our ears. The idea then extends itself to this – “The medium is an environment that produces effects.” I recommend picking up this fascinating book, it’s a mere $12.71 at Amazon right now.