Pink Air

Post-absurd

When I saw this ad, I immediately thought, "It's Happy Fun Ball!" (And the You Tube comments show that I wasn't the first to have that reaction.)

Then I began to wonder, what comes after reductio ad absurdum? The reduction has gone all the way through absurdity and shot out the other side in a shower of hilariously deadpan side effect shrapnel.

Maybe the pharmaceutical industry is banking on (and the banking industry is farming) a simple familiarity effect. We see something over and over again and the rough edges and qualifiers get sanded away. What remains is a general sense that what is familiar has social authority and must be credible.

This is similar to, though not identical with, the findings of Norbert Schwartz and his colleagues who have found that repeated exposure to claims leads us to remember them as true even if they are clearly identified as false when presented. This effect is especially strong among older people which may help explain why drug warnings don't have the alarming, self-defeating, absurd effect that they might.

So, in summary:

• Do not taunt Farmosilec
• Farmosilec may cause genital deformation, kidney failure, death and cannibalism (in that order)
• Farmosilec should not be handled by carbon-based life forms
• Farmosilec may cause disorientation and temporary blindness to patent(ed) absurdity
• Ask your doctor if Farmosilec is right for you

EVERYTHING MUST POST!!!

I'm surprised to see that I haven't posted anything in three months. Surprised because I write posts every day. I just don't finish most of them because I can't torture them into something interesting. So this is my year-end clearance of peevish, parochial, pooped ideas destined to remain half-baked:

• I've been trying to get through Gödel, Escher, Bach for the tenth time in thirty years and I think it's finally beginning to sink in. Isomorphism, metaknowledge and the insidious worm of self-reference are all regular elements of interestingness.

• It seems that all three energy (née gasoline) companies have decided that pastel graphics make the best camouflage. I wish that at least one of them would cut the oily "Let's all join hands to find a solution" crap and try to make a case for what they actually do rather than pretending that they've been into this alternative energy thing all along. Alternatively, they might at least reconsider funding the American Petroleum Institute's ham-handed efforts to discredit global warming and protect the industry from the market forces they claim to champion.

• The New York Times regularly trips over the inherent conflict in being the newspaper of rich liberals. The angry and uncomfortable response to a recent memoir on hiring a maternal surrogate is just one of the visible blossoms of a tension lying dormant in the regular juxtaposition of complaints about Bush's Iraq policy and the Hampton Jitney schedule.

• The muted response to Obama's Nobel speech reminds me that no one wants to hear gray and that the "wisdom of the American people" (or any large group with the right to vote) is largely a statistical phenomenon based on hindsight and the damping effect of averages.

• The animated film voiced by celebrities has become the workhorse of the Hollywood economy. Abraham Ravid at Rutgers has written a number of interesting papers on the relationship between stars, costs, ratings and profits. One of the big takeaways is that while studios make their reputations with star-driven R-rated movies, they make more money from PG and G films.

• I notice that TypePad has changed its welcome message to "Share what's interesting to you." As with Twitter, interestingness is the most compressed way to measure the worth of communication. I'd also like to discern an implicit shoutout to the easily derided and incredibly undervalued habit of navel gazing.

• Like all great religious texts, the Ikea catalog inspires both microscopic devotion to detail and telescopic contemplation of a well-ordered universe. Schismatics struggle over which version of text or typeface most accurately represents The Wørd, but most of us are just looking for a guide to lead us between the sins of poverty and tastelessness. I recently purchased the Ikean Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of three founding works of modern Swedish design. Published between 1899 and 1931 by a cross-generational network of feminist socialist art historian architects (more or less), they lay out the assumptions and objectives behind Ikea and Swedish design in general.

• Winning the Nobel Prize, like being a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist, is not so much an individual achievement as a categorical denomination. Whatever they may have been before, Nobel winners immediately become "Great" whatever they were befores, and as their work  becomes History rather than work, they gradually lose the vestigial tail of "chemist" or "writer" and become simply "Great" or even "The Great (insert name here)". But frankly, I don't care. The Nobel means about as much to me as the Grammy since the Nobel Politburo let Jorge Luis Borges die without a trip to Stockholm.

• You don't often see Dutch examples on those lists of mistranslations like Ladies are requested not to have children in bar and The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. This poster outside de Bijenkorf department store is one of the rare English language errors I've seen in Dutch advertising. The lack of a "the" deflates the claim from "We have a lot of desirable brands" to "We have an indeterminate number of brands, each of which might be desirable."

• Walking through the mighty Powell's Books in Portland last week, I was reminded that browsing isn't always virtual. A great bookstore is an 3D, immersive interface for searching a universe of information and book covers are like small banner ads, each one using its  limited area to convince you that what's behind it is worth paying for and thinking about. Which makes bookstores a good place to think about interestingness and how to communicate it. I've noticed that different sections have different interestingness quotients.

Take horror. This is Waterstone's in Amsterdam. Nothing looks especially interesting because it all looks the same: black. If you peer into the darkness, what you see aren't individual books, but author franchise blocks: Barker, King, Hamilton, each with a common cover design, which gives the impression that all of any particular author's works are the same. Carrie, Christine and Cujo are just interchangeable King units.

The lack of differentiation makes the horror section look fairly uninteresting. It's difficult to find any attentional purchase on such a uniform surface. It also makes it seem that nothing new is happening in the field.You could say that genre fiction like horror or romance isn't really trying to interest anyone, but simply to meet the expectations of those already interested in the form.

• Trivia comes from Latin tri/three + via/road meaning the place where three roads meet, but the etymological route from "three way intersection" to "unimportant facts" isn't entirely clear. It could be that it came to mean vulgar and commonplace, literally "street." (as in "Damn, girl, those nasty hair extensions are so trivial!") It could also be based on the noticeboards at such intersections along the Roman road network where travelers could post notes and news tidbits. Or it could derive from the trivium, the three simpler elements of the liberal arts taught at medieval universities.

  They may be unimportant by definition, but trivia are often addictively interesting. And interest in the trivial can be appealing when expressed with a sense of humor and perspective. Perspective and humor indicate consciousness and consciousness is interesting. And the most reliable indicator I know is wit: contextual, non-literal humor.
  The problem for advertisers is, consciousness doesn't easily scale. Nor does wit (Stephen Fry's growing ubiquity and declining weight notwithstanding.) That's why wit is a sign of individuality. It is impossible for a committee to produce wit. And even harder (i.e. labor intensive) to produce it consistently and repeatedly. This is a problem that marketers should be interested in. Computers using filter combinations might be one approach. Neural networks another. In any case, the mass production goal of making one thing (one campaign idea, one product, one thought) over and over again in order to achieve consistency and economy of scale is less and less useful. Stock music, stock photos, stock anything is unconscious. It tells you: nobody home here.

• As Chuck Klosterman micro-famously noted, Billy Joel is an odd rock star because his greatness has nothing to do with coolness. Which means that you can like his music without wanting to be him. Joel's constant theme is loneliness: painfully sincere, grandiose, terribly uncool loneliness. I feel the same way about John Cougar Mellencamp. I don't identify with him. I don't wear denim. I don't think I'd ever even go to one of his concerts. But I think his bleak and hopeful songs are often magnificent. (Note to marketers: Stop showing me what you think I look like and start finding out what I'm interested in.)

• My official shortlist for the Pantheon of Interestingness. Not just people who were interesting, but champions, explicators, avatars and trailblazers of interestingness itself. We stand on their shoulders:
• • Montaigne. Navel-gazing leads to the invention of the meandering essay
  • Erasmus. Wit, perspective and gentleness in a time notably lacking in all three
  • Marcel Proust
  • Walter Benjamin
  • Brian Eno
  • Jorge Luis Borges