The Skeptic in the Room

Most people think I am an asshole due to my opinions and therefore this might be my new anthem.

H/T to PZ

Job Vs. Vocation

Is your job your vocation? Mine isn't.

I've worked for the past 10 years in advertising as an Account Planner. That's been my job.

The past year I've gotten back to my vocation, playwriting.

I've come to see the difference between a job and a vocation because even though my job title is a Group Planning Director; I now work in scientific communications and promote regulated science and therefore no longer need to entertain the idea that the pseudo-science driving most consumer advertising "insight" is real. I work more as a scientific communications strategist working within strict guidelines and the limits of science rather than the "science" of account planning. See this for an example of said account planning "science".

I've also gotten back to practicing my first vocation, playwriting, by becoming a network playwright at Chicago Dramatists Theater and understand the vast difference between creativity and advertising.

Creativity tries to solve cultural problems that seem apparent.

Consumer advertising (or branding, or changing the conversation, or motivating talk between brands and people, or disrupting category conventions) invents problems to motivate corporate profits.

The former demands introspection, intellectualism, an appreciation for others while concerning oneself with the history of great ideas.

The latter demands jargon often based on ill-defined portmanteau and a pair of hipster eye-glasses.

I was drawn to the field of planning because the guy I worked for during a survival job stint between theater gigs ten years ago at a big Chicago ad agency was smart and kind.

I thought that he represented a job that invited an opportunity for humanism in business.

What I didn't understand was that this boss is what marketing people would call an "outlier".

He offered support when I tired of auditioning and financed my MBA while talking to me of things like Shakespeare and the history of mathematics.

Subsequent planning jobs have put me into situations where similarly smart and humane people in the practice have often longed to do something else.

One boss who hired me primarily because I was a playwright told me during a particularly frustrating day that he was looking to deter his daughter from pursuing advertising and how he wished he still sold skis in Aspen.

Another boss said to me when she was leaving the ad agency where she hired me, "In theory, planning is interesting . . ." (she expressed to me that in reality she probably would enjoy being a Pilates instructor).

The person I know who projects an air of necessity within account planning (and seems to enjoy it in almost a manic way) has admitted to never reading anything other than Good Magazine and likes to collect non-traditional versions of marketing collateral. He also expresses chagrin with a hint of self-deprecating pride when people comment on his combo outfit made up of ironic t-shirts he buys from Target over button down dress shirts.

He also repositioned an agency around a "social media theory" based on what he admitted was bad math to validate his opinion that brands that make friends are successful. When I pointed out to him that his theory seems to enable the post-hoc fallacy (mistaking correlation for causation) he responded by sending me to his slide share deck (because sharing ideas is cool) but didn't realize that the content in the deck validated the reality he enjoys the post-hoc fallacy.

I'd suggest you check out any major ad agency web-site right now and ask yourself if the personalties projected there don't remind you of the Soma-stuffed idiots from Huxley's dystopian vision in "Brave New World" (for those band planners reading this, "Brave New World" is a novel written by a man named Aldous Huxley who looked to understand applied ethics using the genre of science fiction. A novel is a book which is sort of like a trend-report only longer with no pictures. And genre means a type of story, sort of like the intellect's version of an SKU.)

I'm grateful for my job and I like many of the people I work with now that I get to deal with real rather than invented science but have revisited the world of consumer advertising recently, by joining a couple of account planning groups on social media sites, and realize that the joy planners have with their fuzzy reality is something I think is unreal.

I can only hope that those who celebrate the efficacy of account planning will be made to validate their european eye-glasses and show how their trend mining into the social media eco-system actually leads to real results.

I have a feeling however that it will be exposed for the hucksterism it is and be regulated to the world of dousing and homeopathy.

I expect an ironic t-shirt coming to your nearest Target to announce this.

Reinforcing Taboos Worries Me

What makes "New Atheism" novel is not its atheism but its desire to hold religious truth assertions up to the same method of higher criticism we hold other truth assertions.

Sam Harris makes mention of this when he says,

"It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization."

It is the willingness to address taboo due to founded worry in the actions of believers that is "new" in "New Atheism". When I investigated Harris's arguments I recognized I agreed with this and wondered why I called myself religious.

Andrew Sullivan, a gay Roman Catholic political conservative (I wonder if the accidents of the Eucharist and material dualism of transubstantiation makes one proud of such incoherent titles), tries to make a case for the defense of faith as distinct from religion by linking to an Economist article decrying the British Humanist Society's campaign to get the non-religious to report with honesty their non-belief.

He seems to only reinforce the deep entrenchment of the taboo against religious criticism. The article seems to suggest that there is a form of bullying even in the most mild form of suggesting that non-belief in one's childhood religion is in reality non-belief. It isn't. It is an invitation to honesty and fact.

The fact that an atheist journalist would dismiss the distinction seems very much evidence of a need to reinforce taboos and It is worrying.

In a related article, the reason this type of acquiescence to taboo is troubling can be seen in the actions of the Republican party and their committed anti-science efforts with legislative power.

Not criticizing privileged myth encourages ignorance and pretending that religion and faith are somehow distinct is dishonest.

Tweeting, The Loss of Surprise, Modesty and Common Enterprise

My friend Lori shared a column yesterday by David Brooks entitled "The Modesty Manifesto".

Brooks's point is that our current social ills might be an effect caused by our inflated sense of our selves. I balked at this notion at first but changed my mind. I think Brooks is right.

My mind was changed when I considered his premise relative to another day within the advertising community and the adoration for the increase in unoriginal observation facilitated by Twitter and Facebook status updates.

I remember when being "followed" was a sign of paranoia or a federal investigation not a pretense to importance based on 140 characters.

Brooks writes,

"In short, there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me — to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion."

My sensitivities to this may be enhanced by the surfeit of pride exhibited by social media strategists who speak of consumer "eco-systems" in tones that can only honestly be defined as pseudo-intellectual. I mean when did "people-pleasing" become an avenue for insight into human nature? My survival job too often sacrifices intellectual rumination and deep thought to the acronym adorned altar of social media.

The providing philosophy of the industry is predicated on normalizing the self-erosion found in popularity contests.

Which of course is driven by the fallacy that everyone is an individual as long as everyone's individuality mirrors the individuality of everyone else.

It seems that the level of scrutiny that empowered the parachute pants rage in my teens is now the considered form of self and social reflection. Fads will always be a constant in our lives because we are social animals and our evolved survival instinct makes us want to be accepted by the herd but today the time horizon for fad adoption and rejection is measured in hours rather than months.

Does the lack of privacy we invite with every social experience we encounter lead us to a damaged sense of modesty which deprives us of the level of idiosyncratic joy that inspired the first parachute pants wearer to don his pseudo-military garb and "pop and lock" at the back-to-school dance?

I love social media and am addicted to Facebook and have a Twitter account (which I use as a news feed mostly) but think it might be healthy for our culture to investigate the encroachment on modesty and privacy these technologies have and how the instantaneous publishing possibilities they render keep us from paying attention when new ideas demand reflection rather than tweeting.

I was researching depression yesterday which led me to listen to Nirvana and that reminded me of their acoustic gig on MTV where Cobain finished the set with the Leadbelly tune "Where did you Sleep Last Night". I YouTubed the performance and watched it.

Two things struck me.

Everyone in the audience was staring at this grunge god croaking out a folk-song about murder (no one was tweeting) and the performance made me long for the time when an artist might make the "F-it" adjustment and share a real risk based in a long-held private love that informed his entertainment (but might have contradicted his expected brand image).

The former observation is simply a recognition of the innovation adoption curve with MTV as an artifact but the latter seems to me evidence of why I think instantaneous reach for everyone is troubling.

Cobain loved folk music and if you listen beneath the dropped D tunings and distortion peddles of his grunge hits you will hear the same melodious rumble that drives great story songs.

That love demands time, awe, and modesty enjoyed in a very private space where the inspiration for the affection can become personalized with rumination.

I don't think we have the same sense of slowness today but instead are addicted to the speed at which we can emoticon our every nano-second and somehow think this is allowing us an honest understanding of our selves.

My industry of course encourages this behavior because the shape of the flock and its density is all that matters when considering the price of bird-feed.

But the thing we are missing when chasing after all of our tweets is that true evolutionary adaptation happens at the local level.

Richard Dawkins speaks of this rather well in his book "The Greatest Show on Earth" using an example of starling flock behavior.

From the outside it looks like starling group flight is the work of a grand choreographer and the beauty of its design is rooted in the sameness of its constituents.

It isn't.

The flock only occurs because local biological laws within individual birds correspond to the environment in such a way to create the flock.

The real beauty is the individual adaptation made at the organism, even cellular level, not the product of these local laws.

The flock of starlings that offer grand geometric predictability is predicated on an individual bird's response mechanism to her immediate surroundings.

Cobain's passionate performance was predicated on his local response to his immediate surroundings.

Both adaptations take an appreciation of time working on individuals that seems ill-afforded in our current media space.

When I consider the emphasis we place on our personal uniqueness and desire to be followed I worry about our common good and the ideas we miss for the desire to be the first to announce how special we are.

Or as Brooks says,

"Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise."

Religion and Dissonance Theory

My latest interest is dissonance theory.

Phil Zuckerman has a great piece at Huffington Post that does a nice job of illustrating the theory at work.

He focuses on the contradicting practice and theory of modern American Christian theology and its seeming hatred towards the positions taken by the man, Jesus, believers call their "Lord and Savior".

He illuminates how this hatred isn't really a conscience contempt but rather it reveals a confirmation bias that ameliorates the prosperity American Evangelicals enjoy which would be anathema to the eschatology of Jesus's 1st C. Apocalyptic Judaism.

Zuckerman:

"Evangelicals don't exactly hate Jesus -- as we've provocatively asserted in the title of this piece. They do love him dearly. But not because of what he tried to teach humanity. Rather, Evangelicals love Jesus for what he does for them. Through his magical grace, and by shedding his precious blood, Jesus saves Evangelicals from everlasting torture in hell, and guarantees them a premium, luxury villa in heaven. For this, and this only, they love him. They can't stop thanking him. And yet, as for Jesus himself -- his core values of peace, his core teachings of social justice, his core commandments of goodwill -- most Evangelicals seem to have nothing but disdain."

If Social Media is High School I need a Guidance Counselor

My wife is an introvert and I am a misanthrope so in this age of social media that means she is often AWOL on common forms of communication and I am hostile.

SmartBlog on Social Media has a recent post on 10 tips for social media introverts. This trips off some dissonance for me. I had hopes that social media meant that I didn't need to worry about the pretty people and the nerds might win.

For the love of Kurt Cobain's shot-gun blasted ghost can't we all just enjoy flying our individual freak flags rather than using the creative power of social media to conform?

Here's what they say:

1. Pick your playground. Decide how you want to position yourself on the social media platforms you wish to participate in. Do you want to keep your professional and personal lives separate? Position yourself for where you want to be.
2. Wear the uniform. Stake out your name on various social media platforms. If you have a common name, consider how you will distinguish yourself. How will you brand yourself on social media? Think tag lines, background colors, photographs, videos and links.
3. Realize that you’re not alone. On each platform, find your family and friends for personal interactions and customers and colleagues for business engagement. Reach out to them on these platforms and personalize your communications. This is an easy way to develop a social media tribe and catch up at the same time.
4. Mind your manners. Social media is small talk on a public online platform that has a very long memory. Remember people’s birthdays to show you care. Comment on people’s walls, the social media equivalent of chit-chat. But don’t overshare — even your mother doesn’t want to know everything you’re doing.
5. Learn the lingo. Remember how the cool kids had their own verbal shorthand? So do social media networks such as Twitter. It’s just the social media version of pig Latin. Also, note that some social media platforms allow many-to-many communications in addition to one-to-one and one-to-many.
6. Join extracurricular activities. Like in high school, here’s where the action is. This is the path to joining the in-crowd. Among the places to look are Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twitter Chats. Here, I strongly recommend #UsGuys and #TweetDiner since they’re welcoming to new members.
7. Share your knowledge. Like helping others during study hall, here’s where you can contribute to the community and show what you know. While no one likes a show-off, social media networks have the goal of sharing useful information and entertaining content. For example, provide insights on LinkedIn Questions and Answers, or add your feedback on ratings and review sites like TripAdvisor.
8. Pay it forward. Get over yourself! Social media’s about the community, not you. To this end, help others with targeted information, retweet other people’s more interesting tweets, and comment on other people’s blogs. Also, think about recommending former and current colleagues, staff and bosses on LinkedIn.
9. Be the star of your social media story. Use videos and photographs to build an online version of yourself that’s more engaging and outgoing. Invite others to engage with you and your business.
10. Make a date to get together. Unlike all of the above-mentioned actions that you can do from the comfort of your desk, this means actually getting out from behind your computer and meeting people in real life. Use MeetUp to find other like-minded people and activities that are fun and helpful to your business. Meeting your social media buddies face to face is a great way to strengthen relationships.

In fairness, these seem like good ideas to play nice on the 'net but what if High School was a time where popularity seemed elusive and bred contempt? I guess if you are like me then you will have to wait for the 10 tips for social media misfits.

Why I Love the Theatre - Its Humanism

When I am not expressing political or religious opinions that enflame others and alienate my friends I spend my time writing plays.

I've had a few plays produced and have had some staged readings of other scripts and I study writing at Chicago Dramatists Theater.

I also attend as much theater as I can afford to see (being the Dad of a 9 and 1/2 month old limits my time and discretionary income).

I fell in love with the theater while in college where I experienced an interpretation of Spalding Gray's adaptation of Chekhov's Rivkala's Ring. I was amazed by the willingness of an actor (Jay Magee, who later became my friend and mentor) to stand in an empty space and have a conversation with strangers sitting in the dark.

Theater does what no other medium can do because of its transitory reality. When it is done it is done. No two theater performances are alike and if you have ever worked on a show you will know this (for good and bad). You will also know that despite the attention the actor's receive, the entire company holds a level of mutual respect for one another that I have yet to experience anywhere else. I think this exists because without any one of the many crafts-people that conspire to create theater the transitory moments that make up its magic could not be realized.

David Brooks has an interesting column today in the New York Times where he identifies the nature of humanism science is uncovering comprised of a mash-up between reason and emotion. Brooks's commentary reflects for me the magic of theatre and why I am drawn to it. He writes:

"You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others."

I urge you to go to the theater (or better yet work on a show) and feel the full effects of your own humanism.

H/T Pat Foltz