thinking is the new black

I love Steven Fry’s new column in The Guardian.

I came across current TV the other day at work and I was most impressed, but it sparked a bit of discussion with colleagues about the idea of a dot com style bust in the future for social media. I have found this discussion at work really inspiring & am crazy in love that I can see the relationship between what I am doing for Spannerworks and my own academic work at university. Also for the 2nd time in a few months Habermas has raised his head in errrr my head. ( see rervious entry on cake)

This is the headline

“business + counterculture = big profit”

Al Gorewho is behind Current TV is not stupid and he’s usually on the money (apart from not winning the election but wasn’t really his fault). Current TV has purpose beyond networking for the sake of networking, which IMHO has been the fall down of some of the big names. What is friends reunited for once you have contacted all the people you once knew? –Whereas with current TV there is a political agenda and purpose. I shall say it again, purpose. It is politics with a little p rather than a big P though, and by that I mean not party politics but engagement with social issues and community conscious – which is where Habermas comes in…

Habermas is a living legend. Check this out http://www.kyotoprize.org/prizewinners_2004.htm

Here he is…

For the uninitiated he comes from a tradition of neo-marxist ‘critical thinkers’ critical thinkers being an Americanism for people who use Marx’s theories not to spread communism and bring on the revolution, but to understand what is happening in society, with a focus on political economy. When he was a humble PhD student writing his thesis on the public sphere his supervisor was none other than Theodore Adorno who wrote the dialectic of enlightenment – an amazing critique of the culture industry at the beginning of the 20th Century who’s influence on social science, communications, philosophy and cultural theory I can’t even begin to put into words without feeling emotional. Anyway you can grab the basics of their theories on wikipedia – I have checked the entries and they’re OK, not too scholastic.

In the forthcoming ‘Branding the Information Society?™ , I discuss in depth the basic Marxism for capitalism M-C-M (money in exchange for commodity then exchange for profit) in relation to the idea of ‘The Rebel Sell’ – where companies such as Apple try to market the idea of a counterculture when in actual fact they are the basis for the capitalist system. Still awake? Good.

What will make Current TV endure I think is that Gore and his commercial cohorts (Sky?) are doing the same thing. They are blending business + counterculture and that = big profit.

When people stop engaging with a social media and migrate, as has been the case recently with myspace to face-book, the site struggles to pull in the revenue and the old M-C-M goes bad. Commercial social spaces need engagement to work, but people eventually get bored of engaging without the magic ingredient… here we go again… PURPOSE. Current TV has purpose in the guise of being ever so slightly ‘left of centre, and right on’ and if the last 50 year of western culture have shown anything it is that people don’t ever get bored of engaging with opposing things.

But what about everyone else –how are they going to stop users migrating and loosing commercial interest as a result? I think the answer does lie with Marx and the old M-C-M and this is what I am still thinking on. Marx came up with the communist model of economics, which clearly does not work, see current poverty rates in Cuba, or Vietnam for an example & I am running on this theory of MCM for my next instalment! However I am very interested and inspired by what I have seen through a tangent I took in my research for a client I’m working with what is happening with social banking. Social banking I fear will have the same down fall as (bless him) Marx – but there are clues there.

Give me time….

Like Slim Shady I’m back, back again, in fact I’m the slim shady I’m the real slim shady – in truth I am a slim lady.

Now there are several very good reasons for my departure for the months of September and October and for semantic economics I shall resort to a bullet points

• It was my birthday in September and my birthday lasts a whole month
• All manner of upheaval with the long suffering b.f who decided to suffer the PhD and myself no more
• I was writing a new draft of my literature review – this is the sum of 2 years worth of reading folks

And now most excitingly I have gone over to the dark side. Yes readers, I am in the commercial world of work, I am indeed, a paid employee. But have no fear I have retained my strong hold in all things technology and social shaping having taken up a position as a content and media analyst with a digital marketing agency in an exciting and visionary team – doing social media audits for big brands and am now finishing up the thesis PT. Rather ironically then social networking has kept me from social networking!

For these reasons and for transparency I feel it is necessary to rename the blog as my escapades are now not solely in academia. Escapades in the office just doesn’t have the same ring to it, but I promise the content of the blog will still have the same heady mix of intellectual fodder and glamorous lifestyle comment – to that end I have decided to call it

Thinking is the new black.