You know I'm no Starbucks hater, but I've got to admit that the SBUX
experience can be terribly uninteresting. Part of the reason I've
remained in this town is that it offers the more frequently engaging
likes of Coffee Cat, Daily Grind, French Press, Java Jones, etc.
But given Starbucks' still-behemothic resources, why can't it up the
interestingness? A recent Reason
piece points to a plausible cause:
My "takeaway" from the article — oh, and YHWH?
Please strike me down for using that term — is that Starbucks' dullness
comes from listening too closely to customers. Now, I realize full well
that that's not exactly the writer's angle; he argues that the chain's
recent financial stumbles are the result of not listening to them
closely enough. Starbucks, I will paraphrase him as saying, should
provide more pumpkin Frappuccinos and pipe more
slowed-by-five-percent Norah Jones tracks through the speakers, lest
they forget who's boss: Joe Public.
There's a certain democratic satisfaction in pushing this sort of line — take that, espresso-sipping purists — but it also showcases a facet of Reason that I consider its dimmest. "Hey out-of-touch executives," these articles implicitly groan, "check your fanciness at the door and do what the market tells you to. The really radical move, after all, is to satiate demands as efficiently as possible." Don't get me wrong; I understand that, if you want to produce the greatest good for the greatest number, you follow the signals of the free market and don't look back. I'm just willing to admit that I don't necessarily desire a society of the greatest good for the greatest number. (And I'm not even anti-market! But best of luck getting say, an avowed socialist to reveal that they don't want it either.)
This is what's driven me away from most libertarian media: it's got such a cultural tin ear, such a penchant for a certain uncomfortable low-level artistic and/or aesthetic luddism. Maybe it's not luddism; maybe it's just that the sort of person inclined to go libertarian doesn't generally care about these matters. But there's a reason I've always demurred from any alliance, declared or formalized, with libertarianism, even though I've found it to be the most convincing ideology out there (as ideologies go). It's not that I disagree with libertarians' principles; it's that I disagree with their socks under sandals, both real and metaphorical.
Know that this is not a blanket condemnation. I have quite a few libertarian friends to whom this doesn't apply — hell, you might be one! — and I can point to high-profile examples of same. (Tyler Cowen, for example, is a libertarian economist who also happens to be the most culturally aware man alive.) That doesn't change the fact that, taken as an averaged-out whole, the group's taste strikes me as atrocious. I don't necessarily mean that it's actively offensive. It's more like a lack of discernment, or rather, the lack of effort to discern — a willingness to just settle for whatever, culturally.
[PROLEPSIS:
There exists, of course, an opposite and almost equal condition. I
think specifically of the pathological, disdainful obscurantism that the
late Susan Sontag is said to have displayed, and flamboyantly. Given
the choice between views that (a) taste doesn't matter and (b)
taste is only the thing that matters, I'll take the latter — by virtue
of how I spend my life, I'm natively a lot closer to it anyway — but
both stances are deeply undesirable and more than a little ridiculous.]
Many a company has, historically, done quite well for itself by dishing out a lot of reasonably priced whatever. Scan most of Starbucks' menu and that feels like their mission statement. (Some knees might jerk at "reasonably priced," but cf. the offerings of comparable coffee shops and see how much difference you find.) It screams "focus grouped," whether or not it actually was. But Starbucks' team are just plugging into a hole, aren't they? They've iterated toward the discovery of something people just keep wanting, and they pump it out. No shame in that, but no interestingness 'neither.
I'm not sure if the sort of libertarian I'm talking about has internalized a difference between what's filling a need and what's — I don't know — pandering. Given its elitist associations, that's probably the wrong word, but I've committed. To my mind, there's a line, though perhaps one so fine or fuzzy as to barely merit the name, between supplying something to society as an act of creation and supplying something to society as an engineering problem. It's the latter that seems to produce the uninteresting stuff, the products/services/artworks that asymptotically approach the Skinner Box, the enclosure in which rats die of exhaustion after pounding day and night on the pleasure lever.
None of this would matter if, after finishing my day's writing, I hypocritically pound a few pumpkin Frappuccinos, buy a few Norah-Jones-slowed-by-five-percent compilations and complain that they weren't lighting up my reward centers as intensely as they used to. But I don't. I ask myself this: as a consumer, do I even want my desires listened and directly responded to? I'm not at all confident that I do. I'm even willing to argue that I actively don't. I increasingly seek out stuff that doesn't necessarily care about what I "want" — in fact, I'm reasonably certain my favorite artists don't give a damn about my wants — because that's the stuff that's going to surprise me, to delight me, to knock my worldview around. Iced chai, even a 55-gallon drum of it, can't aspire to that.
This speaks to a psychodrama roiling in my mind. No doubt it also roils in the mind of anyone who's dedicated their life to making interesting things. What, this psychodrama asks, constitutes a healthy relationship between the interesting things you can get it up to supply and the pre-existing desires of the humanity you need to become your audience? How to steer between the Scylla of solipsistic irrelevance and the Charybdis of allowing your profession to resemble a certain much older one? Were I of the psychological profile they called "problem solver" in elementary school — i.e., one who gets off on the very act of defining and addressing problems, regardless of the content or context of those problems — this wouldn't be an issue. But I'm not one of those; I'm something else. I suspect you are, too. Otherwise, you'd have quit reading this eight paragraphs ago to go solve a problem.
I started down this road by asking how I could do better. Longtime readers know that I periodically express bewilderment about the low response drawn by my various projects. None draws less of a response than Podthoughts, the podcast review column I've written for The Sound of Young America's web site since May 2008. When Jesse Thorn put out the call for someone to take it over, I jumped at the chance, assuming it would be an ideal platform from which to post amusing, conversation-generating short pieces. It hasn't quite worked out that way — it turns out to be the exceptional Podthought indeed that I ever hear so much as a sentence about from anybody — and for that I blame myself.
Turning to the local forum for help, I received a number of smart suggestions — try producing a podcast about podcasts as a companion piece? Could work — but several slightly discomfiting ones as well:
Though I'd aimed to achieve a neat dialectical synthesis between my own vision and the demands of the audience, one fellow still had objections:
Part of me is
still that old-school public media guy — ironic, since I've never
worked in old-school public media — who wants to use his platform in the
noblest way possible: "inform, educate, entertain" and all that.
Another part of me is that former BBC Channel 4 executive who called
that Reithian mission "a paternalistic exercise in adult education by
the wing-collared classes." But as in all interesting endeavors, there's
a balance to be attained. As in all worthwhile endeavors, it's not an
easy one, and any slip can renders the whole project futile. Even in a
line as lowly as podcast reviewing, the belletrist who has fallen to the
level of a reader-pleasing functionary might as well pack it in.
I take comfort in the fact that Adam Carolla, a sharp dude but one never accused of membership in the high-handed intellectual elite, said this by way of a mission statement in his inaugural podcast:
In 1989, [Howard Schultz] initially balked at providing non-fat milk for customers — it wasn’t how the Italians did it. When word trickled up to him that rival stores in Santa Monica were doing big business in the summer months selling blended iced coffee drinks, he initially dismissed the idea as something that “sounded more like a fast-food shake than something a true coffee lover would enjoy.”
[ ... ]
The chain’s customers have played a substantial role in determining the Starbucks experience. They asked for non-fat milk, and they got it. They asked for Frappuccino, and they got it. What they haven’t been so interested in is Starbucks’ efforts to carry on the European coffeehouse tradition of creative interaction and spirited public discourse.
Over the years, Starbucks has tried various ways to foster an intellectual environment. In 1996 it tried selling a paper version of Slate and failed. In 1999 it introduced its own magazine, Joe. “Life is interesting. Discuss,” its tagline encouraged, but whatever discussions Joe prompted could sustain only three issues. In 2000 Starbucks opened Circadia, an upscale venue in San Francisco that Fortune described as an attempt to “resurrect the feel of the 1960s coffee shops of Greenwich Village.” The poetry readings didn’t work because customers weren’t sure if they were allowed to chat during the proceedings. The majority of Starbucks patrons, it seems, are happy to leave the European coffeehouse tradition to other retailers.
There's a certain democratic satisfaction in pushing this sort of line — take that, espresso-sipping purists — but it also showcases a facet of Reason that I consider its dimmest. "Hey out-of-touch executives," these articles implicitly groan, "check your fanciness at the door and do what the market tells you to. The really radical move, after all, is to satiate demands as efficiently as possible." Don't get me wrong; I understand that, if you want to produce the greatest good for the greatest number, you follow the signals of the free market and don't look back. I'm just willing to admit that I don't necessarily desire a society of the greatest good for the greatest number. (And I'm not even anti-market! But best of luck getting say, an avowed socialist to reveal that they don't want it either.)
This is what's driven me away from most libertarian media: it's got such a cultural tin ear, such a penchant for a certain uncomfortable low-level artistic and/or aesthetic luddism. Maybe it's not luddism; maybe it's just that the sort of person inclined to go libertarian doesn't generally care about these matters. But there's a reason I've always demurred from any alliance, declared or formalized, with libertarianism, even though I've found it to be the most convincing ideology out there (as ideologies go). It's not that I disagree with libertarians' principles; it's that I disagree with their socks under sandals, both real and metaphorical.
Know that this is not a blanket condemnation. I have quite a few libertarian friends to whom this doesn't apply — hell, you might be one! — and I can point to high-profile examples of same. (Tyler Cowen, for example, is a libertarian economist who also happens to be the most culturally aware man alive.) That doesn't change the fact that, taken as an averaged-out whole, the group's taste strikes me as atrocious. I don't necessarily mean that it's actively offensive. It's more like a lack of discernment, or rather, the lack of effort to discern — a willingness to just settle for whatever, culturally.
[PROLEPSIS:
There exists, of course, an opposite and almost equal condition. I
think specifically of the pathological, disdainful obscurantism that the
late Susan Sontag is said to have displayed, and flamboyantly. Given
the choice between views that (a) taste doesn't matter and (b)
taste is only the thing that matters, I'll take the latter — by virtue
of how I spend my life, I'm natively a lot closer to it anyway — but
both stances are deeply undesirable and more than a little ridiculous.]Many a company has, historically, done quite well for itself by dishing out a lot of reasonably priced whatever. Scan most of Starbucks' menu and that feels like their mission statement. (Some knees might jerk at "reasonably priced," but cf. the offerings of comparable coffee shops and see how much difference you find.) It screams "focus grouped," whether or not it actually was. But Starbucks' team are just plugging into a hole, aren't they? They've iterated toward the discovery of something people just keep wanting, and they pump it out. No shame in that, but no interestingness 'neither.
I'm not sure if the sort of libertarian I'm talking about has internalized a difference between what's filling a need and what's — I don't know — pandering. Given its elitist associations, that's probably the wrong word, but I've committed. To my mind, there's a line, though perhaps one so fine or fuzzy as to barely merit the name, between supplying something to society as an act of creation and supplying something to society as an engineering problem. It's the latter that seems to produce the uninteresting stuff, the products/services/artworks that asymptotically approach the Skinner Box, the enclosure in which rats die of exhaustion after pounding day and night on the pleasure lever.
None of this would matter if, after finishing my day's writing, I hypocritically pound a few pumpkin Frappuccinos, buy a few Norah-Jones-slowed-by-five-percent compilations and complain that they weren't lighting up my reward centers as intensely as they used to. But I don't. I ask myself this: as a consumer, do I even want my desires listened and directly responded to? I'm not at all confident that I do. I'm even willing to argue that I actively don't. I increasingly seek out stuff that doesn't necessarily care about what I "want" — in fact, I'm reasonably certain my favorite artists don't give a damn about my wants — because that's the stuff that's going to surprise me, to delight me, to knock my worldview around. Iced chai, even a 55-gallon drum of it, can't aspire to that.
This speaks to a psychodrama roiling in my mind. No doubt it also roils in the mind of anyone who's dedicated their life to making interesting things. What, this psychodrama asks, constitutes a healthy relationship between the interesting things you can get it up to supply and the pre-existing desires of the humanity you need to become your audience? How to steer between the Scylla of solipsistic irrelevance and the Charybdis of allowing your profession to resemble a certain much older one? Were I of the psychological profile they called "problem solver" in elementary school — i.e., one who gets off on the very act of defining and addressing problems, regardless of the content or context of those problems — this wouldn't be an issue. But I'm not one of those; I'm something else. I suspect you are, too. Otherwise, you'd have quit reading this eight paragraphs ago to go solve a problem.
I started down this road by asking how I could do better. Longtime readers know that I periodically express bewilderment about the low response drawn by my various projects. None draws less of a response than Podthoughts, the podcast review column I've written for The Sound of Young America's web site since May 2008. When Jesse Thorn put out the call for someone to take it over, I jumped at the chance, assuming it would be an ideal platform from which to post amusing, conversation-generating short pieces. It hasn't quite worked out that way — it turns out to be the exceptional Podthought indeed that I ever hear so much as a sentence about from anybody — and for that I blame myself.
Turning to the local forum for help, I received a number of smart suggestions — try producing a podcast about podcasts as a companion piece? Could work — but several slightly discomfiting ones as well:
- I haven't heard
of the show you're talking about, I don't read that far into the column.
- I
don't read an article if I haven't heard of the podcast.
- Give
me the punchiest lines at the beginning. And what about ratings?
- You
have a lovely and lyrical command of the english language, but trying
to get through the first paragraph is very difficult.
- If
i'm not grabbed by the opening, i might skip it.
- I'd
probably like it if you gave a Rating ("I give this two pod people up")
- Too
much text in the posts. I see that giant wall and I usually don't read
it.
- I guess because podcasting hasn't exactly reached maturation as an artistic medium, I'm not interested in a critical evaluation of them as an artform.
Though I'd aimed to achieve a neat dialectical synthesis between my own vision and the demands of the audience, one fellow still had objections:
You just don't get it.Now, that would be a pretty awesome tone, but it is not, for the moment, to be. This got me thinking about a whole array of big, hairy New Media Landscape issues. The standard line about the broader ongoing change in media is that creators and audiences have gotten smushed into a much closer relationship. Creators can more easily reach audiences, but audiences can way more easily voice their complaints or, more likely, click over to one of the other hojillion creators vying for their precious, precious attention. Gone are the days of so few outlets that at least some sort of audience was essentially guaranteed for whatever media people wanted to put out.
[ ... ]
What it smacks of is someone who is used to the old media world of broadcaster to audience who doesn't understand why this whole new media world doesn't work for them. Why aren't your comments coming in? Why isn't what you are doing more remarked upon, aka 'remarkable?" If you want to build your 'purple cow,' I doubt Godin would think blaming the audience for lacking the sophistication to stay with you would be the productive way to go.
What your reaction to the commentary here said to me was that you believe what you are doing with your column is fine, and that it's our problem that we aren't on board. How do you think our - my - 'tone' should be? Thank you, Mr. Marshall, for allowing us to help make your hopes and dreams come true?
Part of me is
still that old-school public media guy — ironic, since I've never
worked in old-school public media — who wants to use his platform in the
noblest way possible: "inform, educate, entertain" and all that.
Another part of me is that former BBC Channel 4 executive who called
that Reithian mission "a paternalistic exercise in adult education by
the wing-collared classes." But as in all interesting endeavors, there's
a balance to be attained. As in all worthwhile endeavors, it's not an
easy one, and any slip can renders the whole project futile. Even in a
line as lowly as podcast reviewing, the belletrist who has fallen to the
level of a reader-pleasing functionary might as well pack it in.I take comfort in the fact that Adam Carolla, a sharp dude but one never accused of membership in the high-handed intellectual elite, said this by way of a mission statement in his inaugural podcast:
If I had a microphone and it was hooked up to ten Rose Bowls that were filled to capacity and I had it for four hours a day, I would spend half the time watching morbidly obese guys eat hot wings? It seems ridiculous to me, yet that's the direction. That's where we're heading. And then it becomes one of these negative spirals, because it's like, are we just keeping up with the dumbasses, or we causing the demise of the intelligent people? Are we causing them to be dumb? Think about it. That's the logic in radio: "Look, you're smart, fine, but everyone who's listening to you is dumb, so dumb it up for them," as opposed to try to raise their awareness a little and have them come up and meet you.Or, put another way, here's an e-mail that Moby wrote to Bob Lefsetz (which would score mass points from me anyway, but whose reference to Lynch sends it to the bonus levels):
see, i had a quasi-epiphany last year when i heard david lynch talking about creativity (and forgive me if this sounds new age or hokey).In conclusion: bring back the toffee almond bar, Starbucks. YOU NEED ME
he talked about how creativity in and of itself is great, and i realized that he was right.
and i realized that, ideally, the market should accommodate art, but that art shouldn't accommodate the market.
i know, it sounds idealistic.
i had been trying to make myself happy and make radio happy and make the label happy and make press happy and etc.
and it made me miserable.
and i also don't really aspire to selling too many records.
see, my friends who are writers sell 20,000 books and they're happy.
my friends who are theater directors sell 5,000 tickets during a run and they're happy.
i like the idea of humble and reasonable metrics for determining the success of a record.
and i like the idea of respecting the sacred bond that exists between musician and listener.
again, i know this sounds hokey, but it's where i am at present.
These posts, in which you wonder why you get so few comments and what that might mean, always make me anxious.
There's some fundamental, unspoken assumptions behind these posts, and I find myself reacting against those assumptions, even though they're unspoken and I'm probably even wrong about them. For example, I've subscribed to podcasts you've reviewed on Podthoughts, although I've never commented. As you know, I'm not shy about commenting, but on the other hand, why bother?
I post essays and what amount to blog posts on my Facebook page. Zero comments. But these are my friends, people I see frequently, and it inevitably turns out that everyone has read what I've written closely, has strong opinions about it, and they eventually will bring up some long-forgotten piece in conversation apropos of something related. And, of course, I post this crap because I want them to know me and what I'm thinking. Commenting amounts to another art form -- I'm a poet, I'm a musician, I comment on people's blog posts.
If your goal -- and you know, Colin, how cagey you are about discussing your "goals" -- is to generate comments, I'd be inclined to ask commenters why they comment, rather than asking people who don't comment what might motivate them to comment. Also, since I'm convinced that the number of comments is driven solely by the number of page views, I'd research high-comment blogs to look at that ratio. Casnocha must have an order of magnitude more page-views than you, but his comment count is, shall we say, modest at best.
But, on a deeper level, if creating art in a vacuum is a problem for you, hoping for comments in a world of people who don't comment strikes me as an ineffective strategy. Hoping as a strategy: what are you, Cinderella? What's the problem here? Is there even a problem? This posts concludes, like most if not all of the others you do on this topic, with the artist's battle cry: I think I'll keep doing what I'm doing and see what happens.
I was in a Starbucks a few weeks ago and listened to a woman patiently breaking up with her boyfriend. It took a Frappucino and forty minutes. I suspect that management at the Bucks hates the seating area: why put tables and chairs there when they could fill it with t-shirt racks and greeting cards with YouTube screen caps of kittens? The only people I know who don't want their neighborhood Starbucks to be different than it is are the homeless people who sit in the arm chairs and repack their shopping bags.
No more Moby quotes. I'm tired of hearing multi-millionaires opining that money, adulation, and a huge audience are over-rated. He is a beauty queen telling Oprah that true beauty is on the inside. When these humble superstars take a vow of poverty, I will begin to take something other than their art seriously.
By the way, your work in Podthoughts functions as a filter for me: I like much of what you like, so I pay attention to what you recommend. But your reviews are highly abstract, caught between recommendations and essays. I skim them, trying to get a sense of the actual content of the podcast. It's hard. It's not David Denby reviewing a movie, but that's what I'm hoping for, I think -- but that may only be that that's what I like, or learned to like, or like out of habit, or because something better hasn't come along, or .... You see the problem? In your general blog writing you are good at opening up a theme with your patient, inexorable on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand approach. There's some incongruence in the overlay of that style with the subject of podcasts.
Posted by: Dan Owen | March 24, 2010 at 01:08 PM
I agree with Dan regarding your feedback anxiety. There are several mundane reasons I can think of for why you haven't gotten much of a response to Podthoughts:
-No Obvious Venue: Comment on your MaxFun blog post? The blog has a no-comment culture: there's like 6 comments a month on all the posts combined. Email you? I've emailed strangers feedback on their work roughly twice in my life. The MaxFun forum? Where's the thread for it? Post at PodthoughtsReview.com? Hmmm, that has promise...
-No Obvious Pressure: Up until your forum thread, I wasn't even aware that you were looking for feedback.
-No Obvious Reason: I've never once thought of getting in touch with, say, Anthony Lane about one of his reviews... even though I've had several conversations with my friends about them. Maybe I'm misconstruing the reviewer/reader relationship, but I rarely view it as a dialogue I get to participate in.
So I think a lack of feedback isn't good evidence that you're doing something wrong.
Posted by: Sean | March 24, 2010 at 03:25 PM
I think you have a style and tone that appeals to a very specific audience and the "Podthoughts" article concept also draws a niche audience. When you combine the two, that is not a recipe for huge numbers.
If you want to appeal to more people, you might want to change your style and/or tone. Some of the suggestions in the MaxFun forums would work.
On the other hand, you said you don't want to compromise using big words and overly complex sentences, and other things that will make some readers shy away, but allow you to scratch your own itch to write something you like yourself. I get that, I really do. I happen to enjoy the column, but like others have said, commenting seemed unnecessary.
Another way to think about driving comments is to try to elicit feedback in the post. Somehow encourage a discussion, such as:
"In the episode of Night Waves I listened to, they were discussing New Atheism vs. Religion. Do you think that new atheists have an agenda, or that some of them just feel more comfortable speaking in public?"
This is a somewhat controversial topic and you are explicitly asking people to comment. Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one and they love showing it off (I'm pretty sure that's not a real saying).
Anyways, your articles are good, but have a niche audience. You can be more populist and get more readers, but then you compromise. Such is the life of an artist.
Posted by: Nathan | March 24, 2010 at 10:55 PM
There's some fundamental, unspoken assumptions behind these posts, and I find myself reacting against those assumptions, even though they're unspoken and I'm probably your own itch to write something you like yourself. I get that, I really do. I happen to enjoy the column, but like others have said, commenting seemed unnecessary.
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