This weeks post is mid-story. To get the backdrop, you can visit the previous entries in this series if you wish:
Tomorrow, we’ll post the latest details for the Nov 28th event. The records are due to be shipped on the 24rth…cutting it real close….the vinyl should still be warm…
How could something so successful fail so quickly? Why did the TV industrial complex diminish, and what were the implications for us? I spent the greater part of the year figuring this out. A new direction revealed itself: we had to become architects for our creative work. The chief builder of all the paths it would follow to and from the public city square, the library, and the Baths of Diocletian. The concept of a TV industrial complex, that shaped and manipulated our attention, and instilled the ‘norms’ for how one could introduce and gain acceptance for new music, trends, or anything else, was eye opening. This dominant system is dying, and currently, there are only individual efforts that exist to replace it. This idea compelled us to concede a simple fact: we had more pre-production to do.
Pre-production is a province one must visit, resulting in the formation of your earliest music. We demo, sketch, create, then tear it down if need be, to get the final creative push right. The final push must be legitimate in all the ways that matter, or you are forced to walk away from that particular piece of music, usually for good. To be architects for our music, we had to forget the common sense instilled within us. The seemingly legitimate instincts that would have you build mini malls around your work must be forgotten, so the blueprint for the mausoleum can be set in its place. Instead of planning gigs, getting management, or tweaking MySpace to amass a billion “friends – thx for the add”, we skittered into deriving solutions for the new, recently discovered structural disputes that we faced. Bracing the individual efforts required from us, because the TV complex tanked.
For the TV complex to work, there had to exist a sea of attention. This attention was for sale. Our attention could be likened to a renewable resource, that could be exploited by whoever paid the right price, or paid off the right people. You could buy peoples attention, and for a time, it was win-win, because we were willing to be attended to in this way. The ability to reliably and regularly capture simultaneous attention from hundreds of thousands of people was a special, and in retrospect, a transient phenomenon, that must at first seemed to be a natural function of an increasingly connected population. However, as it turned out, our increasing ability to connect is also correlated with a splintering of attention. According to Godin (1999), when we use our attention, we pay for it in time. Time is now perceived as a scarce, valuable commodity. We’ve got way more things to pay attention too, a lot more choices to make, and less time to evaluate those choices. This results in a type of social and economic pressure, that has changed our behaviour and expectations with respect to new introductions into our lives. This has direct bearing on how our artistic work should be introduced, and how it will be perceived.
Think about the way people interface with their environment today as compared to twenty years ago. Back then, there was usually one, maybe two phones in the average suburban home, attached to a base with spiral squiggly cord. Juno’s hamburger phone wasn’t just indie quirky cool, it was just common place. The phone sat on the counter, parked next to an appliance, or had its own telephone table; if you search Ebay you will find some pretty sweet mid century modern examples. An essential procedure was to call the big monopoly phone company, and get them to come over to wire in and activate a new phone line into the privacy of your own room. In suburbia, the TV was stuck in the “family room”. If your family didn’t get along a lot of the time, then eventually every room in the house had its own TV, so you could tune out in different rooms. By an large, everyone watched the same shows, and there was a concept of prime time, in which shows would jockey intensely for positions. To be moved up or down by a critical half hour could spell doom and gloom for show ratings. It was prime time, because we were all eating dinner, watching TV by the masses. The newspaper, or local news channel was the major source for up to date news (up to date defined as day old), and if you were into something unique, or some kind of hobby, there probably was one or two magazines dedicated to it, and maybe a store that catered to those needs, if you were lucky. You had to wait one to two months for a new magazine to get published. Slow and steady she went.
Pure hyper-saturation is upon us. I was sitting in Marty’s apartment this past April. We had just run the Vancouver half marathon, and began a weeks worth of post running laziness and sloth. Sitting in his living room, there was a laptop always within reachable distance, and I was scrolling through my email with my crappy HTC touch windows based smart phone in my hands (I almost choked on this phone once – its little memory card slot broke the day after I bought the phone. When you go to tinker with it, there is this little spring that shoots the memory card out at high velocity. Like one of those spring loaded dart guns. Mid-tinker, the memory card in my cell phone launched into the air, and hit my tonsils). It’s a clunker compared to the iPod Touch, which was sitting in my other pocket, loaded with twenty movies, nine albums, and all my song demos, some of which were recorded five years prior. Marty’s got cable, with infinite channels, an X-box, and a Nintendo Wii hooked up to the flat screen. There were two books on the floor. One was the “The Simpsons and Philosophy”, and the other was an encyclopedic examination of the back story of the Star Wars trilogy. Finally, there was random newspapers and magazines strewn around. So, while sitting there, in an exhausted, buzzed, non-moving conformation, I realized that I had about 95% more choices as to where I could voluntarily place my attention, as I would have had 10 years ago sitting in the very same room. No big deal, right? Well that’s exactly it. Its no big deal. Today, you don’t have to be doing anything, or be going anywhere in particular to be saturated with what seems to be infinite attention choices. Dareck does a great parody of the speed of life that this level of “attention choice” allows. He lives in Toronto, and he will make fun of his own Toronto-dude lifestyle thing. He’ll walk, talk, text, comment, eat, drink, then give the appropriate preoccupied facial expression all in rapid fire circular succession. It’s funny to watch, cause its true.
We are a culture saturated with choices, and we have opportunities to make many choices at any given moment in time. According to Godin (1999; 2003), the TV industrial complex and distraction marketing is no longer a model that fits our culture, because time is one of the most valuable resources within our culture today. Since we are increasingly valuing our time, we will automatically assume or evolve certain behaviours to avoid things or situations that try to steal it from us. In other words, the constant interruptions required for distraction marketing to be successful wastes one of our most important commodities, our time, and therefore, in economic terms, the “cost” to the consumer becomes greater than they are willing to pay (Godin 2003). Unsolicited, and perhaps even certain “invited” introductions, regardless of the form they take (and there are many) are now a form of theft. People have learned how to become quite good at ignoring much of the saturation, to keep sovereignty over their time, and thus distraction marketing is failing as a marketing tool. In essence, trying buy attention is useless, unless you operate within a rare situation that can still garner simultaneous attention from hundreds of thousands of people (e.g. the Olympics, Superbowl, and anything to do with the pope).
As artists, we now launch our latest work into a culture that is saturated for choices, and limited in perceived time. Many efforts to introduce our work, that can be traditionally viewed as applications of good old common sense, are now instinctively viewed as a theft of time. This is essential knowledge, because the techniques for generating awareness and acceptance must respect this reality. What worked for artists of the past may have little to zero relevance for what we need to do today. When we figured this out, we got to work on changing out instincts, by understanding a certain metaphor that spelled out the new rules…
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