Catch and Release in the Stream

I recently had the opportunity to take an extended break from work. Well, not voluntarily; I seriously injured my arm and had to take short term disability. I don’t want to get into how I hurt myself (saving school children from a mugging, volunteering in Pakistan, defending a maiden’s honor). But the upshot was that I had two weeks to heal and basically do nothing.

It’s a funny thing when you go from a completely plugged in life, to one in which you can’t really indulge in much typing (casts make it difficult). I slowed down, read several books, and I fell in love. I fell in love with the stream.

The first object of my affection was my Roku streaming Netflix on demand hooked up to my HDTV. Months ago I paid $150 for the box that sits on the shelf above my TV and streams thousands of movies wirelessly to my TV for $10 a month. But I didn’t really realize how amazing it is until I had hours to kill. I went deep into the catalog, becoming an armchair cineaste.

And then I discovered Rhapsody. I don’t mean that I somehow reached a state of eternal bliss. Rather, I realized that I could plug in my wi-fi enabled iPod into my stereo and listen to millions of songs on demand for $10 a month. All of the music that I would have to pay iTunes $1 to own, and eat up my hard drive, became basically free because I was sitting at an all-you-can-eat buffet of music. And anyone who knows me knows what a good listener I am. I’m wearing my Bose headphones right now, and not paying attention to the colleagues at my door. Like I said, I am a good listener.

I’m not an owner of the movies and the music I consumed on break and continue to consume. I’m a renter.  And in this economy, why would you own when you can rent, and thereby benefit from an endless variety of experiences? Not only is the supply greater than what I could reasonably afford to pay for all the media I am consuming, it’s incredibly easy to access this content.

Right before my accident, I made a mixed CD for a friend, and asked her to rip it so she could return the CD to me. She looked at me like I was asking her to play an eight track cassette. Michael, she said, I don’t even know how to rip from a CD, no one plays CDs anymore. I was taken aback at my twenty-something friend, because the very concept of having a tangible form of music was alien to her.

And all of this got me thinking about ownership, new economic models, and ease of use. The truth is that we don’t listen to iPods; we listen to music. And we don’t watch the Roku, or Netflix on Demand on the iPhone app, we watch movies.

The best devices/services/apps provide instant access to content and the best delivery of the content. The best devices catch and release seamlessly – they disappear as we use them and meld with the experience. Who can tell the dancer from the dance?

I don’t want to get metaphysical on you, but there’s something to the idea of taking something, enjoying it, and then passing it along. They say that holding things up inside you only causes grief, and that the constant need to consume bigger, better, faster things is an unfulfilling life. The possessions, what George Carlin called stuff, keep us tied down instead of freeing us. I learned the hard way from my accident that not all things can pass through me without inflicting some harm. But I started healing when I stopped forcing things open, started going with the flow, and opening my mind to trying new things in the stream. And now that I have access to my hands, I’m back to swimming in the social stream.    

The Skittle Fairey…Yum!

This past weekend I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston to see the Shepard Fairey exhibit Supply & Demand. You know him for his Obama portrait, a pop cultural icon that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. For someone who came up in the art world by graffiti tagging and plastering stickers with the face of Andre the Giant and the word “Obey” just about everywhere, being featured at the ICA and National Portrait Gallery is a sign that what was once street is now truly mainstream.

And when you think about it, what’s really happening in the world today, from a communications standpoint, is that the Shepard Faireys are taking over. Before there was a Facebook wall for you to write on, Fairey was tagging walls with his graffiti art, and spreading his stickers virally. His “Obey” stickers preceded the Internet age and became so ubiquitous that they’re the precursors to those “Original Irish Gifts” and other Facebook flotsam and jetsam that is seriously clogging up my information arteries (not that I don’t love a virtual Guinness as much as the next guy).

In the way that Fairey is subversive by taking traditional images of propaganda (Mao, Stalin, Bobby Seale) and giving them an ironic (and often hilarious!) twist, marketers are using the power of social networks to have you, the consumer, mess with their brand and help to define it anew, remix it, make of it what you will. Consider Skittles, the bite-sized candy in a rainbow of fruit flavors. I love them because they’re delicious. And as someone in marketing, I also love them because the brand is going outside of its safe zone. With its “Interweb the Rainbow” campaign, they’ve created a widget that floats from Facebook page, to YouTube channel, to Twitter, to product page so you can seamlessly experience their brand as a participant. Like Shep Fairey, you can “tag” Skittles by tweeting about them, creating a video and uploading it to YouTube, write on the FB wall, etc. Skittles is opening themselves up wide for all that YOU have to say about them.

We’ve all heard the joke about the bad blind date who talks on and on about his many accomplishments to his companion, and then pauses to say, “Well, enough about me, what do you think of me?” In our increasingly digital age, where self-publishing and social networking technology is free to everyone with a smart phone or an Internet connection, who you are isn’t what you tell the world, it’s what the world tells you. Now go have a Skittle.