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Re: Irony
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Doc Searls
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Jul 02, 2001 17:13 PDT
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Good stuff.
My friend, the Nigerian biblical scholar Sayo Ajiboye, says we can
understand markets in terms of two different metaphorical frameworks:
in terms of exchange, or in terms of relationship.
In the first world we actually depend a great deal on both, but we
defer to the mechanical, the measurable, the automatable. So when we
talk about business, and about markets, we speak in the language of
exchange. And we about economics, even its relationships, in exchange
terms -- the money-measurable 'relationship' between 'supply' and
'demand,' for example. In the third world, where traditional markets
are still the center of civilization (in Yoruba they say "Life is a
market"), what really matters is relationship, Sayo tells me.
Relationship is the context for exchange, not vice versa. When you
haggle with a vendor in a third world market, he says, we
first-worlders only *seem* to be a conversation about price, he says.
The vendor will do his best to confine the conversation to the only
thing we seem to understand. But to others within the culture, market
conversations are primarily around relationship. Much of that has to
do with the many qualities of the goods: Who made (or grew) them?
Where did they come from? When did they get in? How does so-and-so's
style differ from such-and-such's? When did she stop using
so-and-so's leather or wool? And so on. These are the kinds of
conversations that happen best at the personal level. Nothing
"strategic" about it.
Anyway, that's what the Net fosters, whether the bottom-liners like it or not.
Doc
| | I don't know where to begin with all of this. On a purely emotional
level, I agree with Marek in his frustration with corporatespeak and
"corporate" behavior. The hierarchical, command and control methods
employed in corporate organization have depersonalized commerce to a
greater degree than anyone would ever have contemplated a few hundred
years ago. Yet, many of the very things we demand have also bee the
consequence of this flawed structure.
Mass production, high quality goods, abundant food, plenty of toys,
communications, transportation, and many other mixed blessings of our
commercial society strain the historic American tension manifested by
the simultaneous notion of community coupled with the undeniable pull of
individualism. Corporate organization speaks to neither of these poles.
Instead what we get is an ersatz community and a facsimile of
individualism.
Mass communications play to this tension with an ironic spirit. The
appeal to the individual made by brand merchants attempts to have us
purchase a mass produced product in a way that somehow enhances our
individuality. And, to the degree that the advertising "works" more
virtually identical goods are sold to more individuals, undermining the
premise of the sale.
This and other obvious disconnected phenomena make us cynical, and
renders irony as the order of the day. Some people cannot shrug off the
ironic disconnect, however, and become angry and upset at the impersonal
inherent in many of our commercial practices. I would suggest that anger
is misdirected, and cynicism is self-destructive. Things are what they
are because we as humans made them that way. Accept what you can. Change
what you must (including yourself, if that's necessary) to accommodate
the essence of your being.
The web is changing this entire dynamic. Individual scale and human
voice is returning to networked multinodal communication. It remains to
be seen how the structure of commerce will evolve in response.
Tim Cunningham
http://www.cluetrain.com
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Doc Searls do-@searls.com http://www.searls.com
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