A short note on culturematics, social objects and communities…

Look | Palmer, Alaska | 2006

Grant McCrackern, in his post Culturematic: a device for making culture in two easy steps, discusses how people use culturematics to create culture by 1) creating pretexts and 2) carrying them out. Grant follows up with six points about culturematics; point #5 interested me in particular:

These culturematics produce a small, likable episode in the life for the writer and the reader. … And we get to go with them. … The episode is an arbitrary event with an arbitrary interval. It’s continuity without cost.

My comment:

And that continuity can also create resonance, value and meaning; the beauty of a culturematic is that they are meaningful on their own small scale, but if they resonate they can be copied, amended, adopted, spread. They organically scale into their own “addressable market” by simply being great, relevant, meaningful to more people.

An experience turned into a “social object”…

Perhaps the best culturematics are the ones we create organically, simply by following our passions, refusing to stop scratching that itch and eventually finding and joining forces with people that share the same itch?

Even though I’m an introvert, I still like people, and I love communities. I’ll explain why soon.

—

Plans, interrupted, my original photo selection already used on a previous post…

Traveling Obscured, Budapest, Hungary

In Budapest, Hungary…

In the summer (generally on the weekends) mostly young people go to [Margaret Island] at night to party in its terraces, or to recreate with a bottle of alcohol on a bench or on the grass (this form of entertainment is sometimes referred to as bench-partying).

I wonder if the term in Hungarian is more meaningful than its English translation “bench-partying”?

What is this form of entertainment called in other cultures and locations around the world, and how do their translations to English compare?

Sadly, while our tools for translating language are getting better, our tools for translating culture are still quite limited…

A short note highlighting how the economic incentives buried within culture leads to a different brand of entrepreneurship, using the difference between the USA and Japan as an example.

Chana R. Schoenberger in Forbes Asia Magazine, In Tokyo, a Rare Incubator for Startups:

Venture capitalists in the U.S. spend $30 billion annually, on average, funding startups, while Japanese funders kick in just one-tenth that amount. Midcareer managers and engineers don’t want to quit and forfeit their pensions to start companies. Risk-averse Japanese students, who rarely get M.B.A.s, prefer jobs at large, long-stable companies to starting their own firms. If they have the itch to launch a business, they aim for big trading companies, like Sumitomo or Itochu, which use on-staff “intrapreneurs” for new units. There’s also a social stigma about failing in business–an embarrassing loss of face. Successful company founders in the U.S. often have a string of crash-and-burn startups.

Not a surprise to anyone that understands the vast difference between American and Japanese culture. But it doesn’t mean that entrepreneurship is dead:

Into this lonesome entrepreneurial existence has stepped the mighty Mitsubishi Estate, Tokyo’s second-biggest business landlord. It started an entrepreneurs’ group, the Tokyo 21c Club, in 2000, trading rent and logistical support for stock options in the nascent companies. Snagging office space in the incubator requires a screening process that can take six months, but once entrepreneurs get in, they can rub shoulders with the 650 club members–venture capitalists, lawyers, accountants, other company founders–who stop by for coffee or to attend an evening business seminar. In addition to small, boxy offices for new companies, the club also offers workroom passes for $160 a month, as well as a mail drop that gets entrepreneurs a coveted Shin-Marunouchi building address.

Perhaps this isn’t “Entrepreneurship” in the sense that Silicon Valley promotes and rewards, but it’s “Entrepreneurship” in Japan, and understanding how to succeed in the local culture is a key for any new company.

Taking it a step further: what about the differences between (and within) Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia? Companies thrive in each region by playing the game according to the rules they face, yet we often highlight and glamorize one single type of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs exist throughout the world, and to neglect their lessons and insights is a failure of all of us, myself included.

Of course, to truly understand the lessons from entrepreneurs throughout the world we need to understand the cultures they operate within. Copying tactics without creating strategies is a route to failure, yet it’s often as deep as we get when analyzing lessons from abroad. Tactics translate easier than strategies, but the value is often lost in translation.

The economic incentives buried within culture plays a huge role in shaping the decisions of entrepreneurs and investors. In a more holistic sense of capitalism, it’s pretty easy to imagine how a different accounting of risk and reward would influence the decisions we make.

How? Start with the role of humanity in economics; but as always, I’m open to ideas.

Procrastination, interrupted by productivity; a link post to fill in the gaps…

• Tom Ewing in Pitchfork, Around the World in 84 Tweets:

  Endless disappointment is the cross the early adopter has to bear.

  Sad for early adopters, but true; early adopters simply aren’t great judges of what the rest of the world wants or needs. Ever wonder why crossing the chasm is so hard?

  What Twitter doesn’t have is much cyber-utopianism: Everyone knows now the web isn’t an equalizing force.

  Twitter amplifies your voice in proportion to how loud it was anyway. The rest is up to you.

  Evolution, not revolution.

• Upton Sinclair:
  

  It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

  (via Jay Parkinson)

• Micah Sifry, discussing Michael Wesch’s keynote at Personal Democracy Forum 2009 about YouTube culture and the politics of authenticity:
  

  [Wesch] artfully sketches a picture of modern culture, where individuals consume mass media, powerful institutions rule their lives from a distance, and anomie and disconnection are the norm … But then he asks whether the new mass practices of uploading, remixing, commenting and sharing media–where we ARE the media–might be enabling a different, more genuinely connected and hopeful culture to form.

  Personally, I think we don’t know the answer but Wesch’s talk both sharpened the question for me and helped frame more clearly how we think about this debate. His juxtaposition of the photo of his college lecture hall class sitting bored at their desks with a photo of hundreds of young people eagerly, desperately trying to get onto American Idol makes clear that whatever we PdFers may imagine is the new culture, it’s still mostly a marginal phenomenon.

  Meanwhile, check out the video for a couple points by Wesch:

  1) Starting at 6:20, the history of “whatever” and a couple Simpsons references to “eh” and “meh”.

  2) Starting at 18:05, about conversations through mediums, creating versions of ourselves and context collapse:

  Talking to a camera [a communication medium] creates a version of context collapse, which forces a certain amount of … self-consciousness that maybe isn’t evident in everyday conversation.

  3) And his closing question, at 30:46:

  How do we use this to conquer the narcissistic disengagement that we see today in a society still ruled by trivialities?

  Or better yet, can we?

  (via Charles Frith)