ICONSMASHER

India is Having A Moment

(L to R: Kal Penn, Nikki Haley, Aziz Ansari, Bobby Jindal)

Not since Apu stormed these shores in 1990 have we seen such a surge in Indians in the popular consciousness.  I’m talking about Kal Penn on House (and later in the Obama White House), Aziz Ansari on Parks and Recreation, Bobby Jindal back to national prominence in New Orleans, and most recently, Nikki Haley as GOP candidate for governor of South Carolina.  What distinguishes all these Indians is that they’re portrayed as American first.  No “thank you, come again” accents, no jokes about all being engineers or 7-11 managers.  It’s like all of a sudden they’re the go-to ethnic group to demonstrate how far we’ve come in the post-Obama, post-racial America.

Then there’s the counter-directional examples. First MetroPCS’s bizarre Tech & Talk ads featuring Ranjit and Chad, two walking racial stereotypes. The first spot ran during the Superbowl, and I think The Richards Group is walking a very fine line. And then in the Fall we can look forward to Outsourced, an NBC show from the creator of The Office that plays the immigrant fish-out-water story for laughs (a la Balki from Perfect Strangers) - in this case it’s a gang of (heavily accented) call center workers and a well-meaning, white call-center manager teaching them the ropes of American culture. It’s like Indians are the last ethnic group that’s safe to make fun of.

So which is it?  I think India is in a very interesting place in the American consciousness- simultaneously exotic (Slumdog Millionaire) and familiar (Jay Sean).

Making Sense of Chat Roulette

Is Chat Roulette a milestone in Web history or is it destined to become a footnote that will be forgotten as fast as the Winter Olympics?

A quick recap of the site (and you should definitely visit Chat Roulette yourself): a Russian teenager named Andrey Ternovskiy has created a simple interface that connects your webcam to a random series of strangers from across the world. You or the stranger have the power to move on to the next random encounter at the click of a mouse. It’s populated with bored teenagers, sexual thrill-seekers, and some genuinely creative and interesting people exploring a new medium. You can guess at the rough ratios of each.

Is this the next big thing? I don’t think so, but here are a few thoughts on what Chat Roulette is telling us:

Publicity on Internet time

Ternovskiy launched the site in late 2009 for his friends to mess around with, it was featured in New York Magazine on February 5^th, and it reached some kind of apex of publicity with a front page article in yesterday’s New York Times Style section. In between, it’s been reviewed by everyone from hipster satire site LATFH (where I first heard about it) to late middle-aged blogger Claudia Feldman of The Middle Lane: Between Adult Kids and Aging Parents (“I’m not sure what I make of all this except I’m not big on depravity or extremists, and I like our special spot in the Middle Lane.”). From the teen perspective, by the time it gets to this point, it’s so over. I think the more popular the site becomes, the less interesting it will be. When I’ve been back, I see a lot of bored people on the site, waiting to be entertained.

Teens, Sex, and Technology

There’s no question that the focus of this site is on sex. Whether it’s good for anonymous sexualized interactions and therefore has drawn teens, or if it started with teens and they naturally gravitate towards sexual themes is open for debate. But I don’t think Chat Roulette is going to evolve significantly away from this central focus. This is speed dating, Craigslist Casual Encounters style. I think most non-teens are shocked at how explicit it is, but it opens a window into the way teens use technology to express their sexuality to their peers away from the prying eyes of their parents. CosmoGirl and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancies completed a national survey on Sex and Tech in 2008 showing that 21% of teen girls and 18% of teen boys have sent/ posted nude or semi-nude images of themselves. Stickam, “sexting”, and now Chat Roulette all reflect a modern teen’s view of their sexuality – a casual, hook-up culture where anonymous nudity is not that big a deal.

Internet Ageism

Chat Roulette is one the first technologies that I have encountered on the Internet where ageism has come into play. The kinds of people who typically blog about technology- white men in their 30s and 40s – have shall we say not been so warmly received by the younger Chat Roulette “community”. The democratization of Facebook didn’t create this kind of backlash because college 20-somethings could maintain their own closed networks within the community. But Chat Roulette is open by design. Look for Chat Roulette (or a competitor) to add an age filter – the equivalent of tying registration to a college domain on the early Facebook. I wonder too if looking back we won’t see this as the start of a more general trend toward segregated “neighborhoods” online after many years of all-ages sites.

Will we be talking about Chat Roulette three months from now? A couple of years down the road? What else makes Chat Roulette significant, fascinating, or trivial?

EVB/Facebook Connect Juiciness

I have no idea what this has to do with contact lenses or eye exams or whatever the hell this is for, but as an execution it’s awesome:

http://thegreatbernie.com/

Full Screen Video
Really nice retro cinematography
So-so use of Facebook Connect data

Building a Profitable iPhone App

This is one of the better and more to-the-point presentations on building a successful iPhone app that I’ve seen. A few highlights

• Exposure is crucial: it pays to make the Top 100 /Top 25/ Top 10 apps lists, by an order of magnitude
• The App store is designed for maximum turnover, so the best strategy is a burst of maximum exposure, knowing that downloads are going to fade.  Price cuts can juice paid apps (duh), especially if they are well-timed, but you can’t pull this lever with a free application
• Usage of free apps drops precipitously after one or two days (slide 12).  Paid retains their audiences longer- probably because of consumer investment in the product. Long term audiences are 1% of total downloads on average
• Majority of free applications are run at most 12 times after first download

iPhone AppStore Secrets - Pinch Media

Latest Guilty Pleasure

Cobra Starship!

Diversity Days

Race is a topic on everyone’s mind again with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, the beer summit, and (Justice) Sonia Sotomayor’s “Wise Latina” comments, which by now may have even become a catchphrase like “Black is beautiful”.

Here at my advertising agency we coincidentally had a “Diversity Job Fair” where a number of woman- and minority-owned vendors came in to talk to us about potential partnerships. It had the empty feel-good vibe of a top-down corporate initiative, and the awkward intensity of an episode of The Office.  Twenty or so vendors from around the country shuffled through the office for a series of short meetings.  I met a guy who specializes in recruiting micro-communities for research (Hmong in Minnesota, anyone?), an LA-based political consulting firm that specializes in turning out the vote in the black community, and inexplicably, the heads of an economic development not-for-profit in Oakland.

Minority groups are historically under-represented in advertising, and the matchmaking was well-intentioned if not totally effective.  What was great is that it gave me an opportunity to think about race in the context of business relationships, and I had a couple of observations.

First, these vendors really stuck out.  I don’t mean because of their race (and ironically many of them were white men representing minority firms).  It was more that they were clearly out of their element.  For a start to a person they were all over-dressed (suits) - which reminded me that there’s a certain arrogance required to dress down.  As in, we in the creative class are so confident in our abilities that we have transcended the need to dress up for other people.  The political consultants, who create marketing campaigns of their own, didn’t understand the way our business works and had a hard time articulating their value to a big ad agency.  The Hmong guy kept talking about how hot or cold various places he recruited from were.  These vendors weren’t smooth like advertising people.  They didn’t seem like peers, they seemed like people from some other part of the economy, some other walk of life.  (Assuming I had the need anyway), it would require a major leap of faith to partner with them.

It all came together for me when I read this commentary on the current race debates by Helene Cooper, an NYT White House Correspondant and a Liberian immigrant.  Writing on Sotomayor and Gates, she reminds us that these folks are cultural elites- products of affirmative action yes, but also products of Yale, Princeton, and the vaguely meritocratic machine that grooms America’s leaders.  Our diversity vendors were not elites, at least not advertising elites, and it made it very hard for them to bridge the gap to become potential partners.

Writing about her own experience as an affirmative action student at UNC, Cooper says “the principal thing I learned was how to make [white friends] feel at ease around me”. This blew my mind, because I think the ability to blend in to mainstream cultural norms - what Nicholas Lemann of Columbia calls the “double consciousness” of minority elites - is too rarely part of the dialogue on race.

Thoughts From Comic Con

I attended my first Comic Con this year and came home wanting more. If I have one impression from the show, it was how incredibly diverse the offers are. From comic books (duh) to toys to LARPers to anime to costuming to movies, what holds the whole thing together nowadays.  It’s about fantasy and an escape from the mundane.

Nothing encapsulated this better than a long conversation I had with this lady, a noblewomen from The Adrian Empire, which is “like SCA, but we fight with steel”.  She was intelligent, passionate, and articulate.  But what I most got from her was a sense of longing about how things might be in the world, as opposed to how they are.  The community for her represents an opportunity to reshape the world. She told me how the Emperor of The Adrian Empire is a janitor “in the mundane world”.  She started to tear up when we talked about how it was too bad that he wasn’t able to apply his obvious leadership talents in his day job.  I heard the same sentiment in Darkon, an excellent documentary about The Darkon Wargaming Club, a LARPing group (they use magic so it’s not strictly a reenactment; she hadn’t heard of it).

Comicon is for people who, for one reason or another, find fault with mundane world and want to escape to a better one.

A Navy SEAL and the Power of Self Possession

I was down in LA last week listening to a former Navy Seal talk about what it takes to be a “Tier 1 Operator”- an elite Special Forces soldier who does the most dangerous counter-terrorism, insurgency, and behind-enemy-lines work.  I’m not the kind of person who closely follows the military or knows a lot about soldiering.  But man, was this guy impressive.

He is working as a special advisor on the latest installment of a military shooter game.  He didn’t spend much time regaling us with war stories.  Maybe that added to the mystique.  No, most of what he said had to do with the mindset of being a Tier 1 operator.  Bascially, you have to believe in yourself totally from the outset of selection, or you will fail.  You’ll fail because the physical and psychological demands of training will break you otherwise. You’ll fail because the other guys competing with you for a spot will sense that weakness and attack it, like animals in a wolf pack. You’ll fail because it takes a certain arrogance even to dare to dream of being an elite soldier when you first sign up.   “It’s a test of mettle that is harder than anything I could find in the civilian world.  I needed to find it in myself first”

He was addressing about 30 of us and he had the whole room rapt. It was like listening to a fireman when you’re seven years old.  I think his physical presence helped - he was handsome and poised with the strapping build of a pro linebacker. But he took pains to emphasize that the biggest misconception about his profession is that everyone is built like Superman: “we’re all shapes and sizes”.   I think what worked is that he didn’t bother trying to establish himself or his credentials- he just started talking from a position of authority.  Quiet confidence, not ego.  If there’s one lesson I learned from all this, it’s the power of self-possession.  Listening to him talk was what I imagine it’s like listening to an elite athlete like Michael Phelps or a world class musician.  Someone who has such supreme confidence that they are at the top of their game that they have nothing to prove to an audience of mere mortals.  I’d love to bring some of that mojo to my own work.

Designing The Future of Medicine

My mother-in-law is on the outer edge of the boomer generation. At 65 give or take, she just had double knee replacement surgery.  Even five years ago, knee surgery was considered so invasive that you would never do both knees at once.  Now here she is goign to a specialist clinic, the Center for Joint Replacement in Fremont that’s basically a factory of new knees for seniors.  She was in hospital for a total of only THREE DAYS.  She was carrying my daughter around within a month.

I really enjoyed the experience of going to visit her, because it seemed to me to be a glimpse into the future of medicine.  A very narrow clinical focus. Exclusively immigrant care-givers.  A tight age range of White patients between maybe 55 and 75, with a mean of 65.  And as much a therapy session as a surgical clinic.

Post surgery, all the patients were wheeled into a common room twice a day for mandatory group physical therapy.  There was no coddling here.  Everyone had to do their exercises, and if they complained that they were too old, too weak etc., the response was consistently; “look at others in the circle, they’re doing it. And if you want to get out of here soon, you will do it too!”  It was amazing to see the power of peer pressure being used on seniors! Another part of the magic was that you see the progression of recovery around the room- it was obvious who was there on Day 1 following surgery vs Day 2 vs Day 3, no just from the amount of bandaging etc. on their needs, but on how fit and hearty they looked.  I think getting your knees replaced has the potential to be profoundly depressing- you’re old and weak and you will never walk properly again.  But in fact you have to push through the pain immediately in order to get full range of motion back. It reminded me of birthing classes, but for seniors.