kip/bot/blog

From this week’s Nation, I learned the word prosopopeia:

One such device is prosopopeia, a rather literary term for what happens when the Pillsbury Doughboy persuades you to buy a bread product by giggling so charmingly after that poke to his puffy little tummy. Prosopopeia is the personification of an abstraction. As theorist Barbara Johnson says in her book Persons and Things, “A speaking thing can sell itself; if the purchaser responds to the speech of the object, he or she feels uninfluenced by human manipulation and therefore somehow not duped. We are supposed not to notice how absurd it is to be addressed by the Maalox Max bottle, or Mr. Clean, or Mrs. Butterworth.”

This is, of course, a fun, left pomo way to talk about Sarah Palin (and the Mrs. Butterworth reference is priceless). The article, which has some interesting cultural stuff in it, highlights the fact that Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech had been written weeks before she was even a serious choice for the VP slot. The article argues that the speech was waiting for someone who could personify it — Sarah Palin.

While I’m not enjoying the cheap shots being taken at the Dems, and I like even less the condescending way Dems are talking about how dumb she is and how dumb, by extension, her supporters therefore are, there is another interesting nugget in the column if you look past the ‘recall’ gag:

In the few weeks since Sarah Palin has become a household name, she’s often been glibly compared to a Barbie doll–and certainly her lack of knowledge of the Bush doctrine, or her comments about not knowing what the vice president does, make me wish she’d been recalled as fast as that talking Barbie who complained that “Math class is tough.” But I think the analogy is more apt when thinking about how Palin has been mass-marketed. As Barbara Johnson says, “The packaging is part of what the consumer buys: not only can Barbie not stand without the box, but in it she is positioned for maximum effect. Some dolls come in boxes that almost function like mirrors: the commodity is surrounded by a gleaming aura that adds glamour to its appeal.”

Leaving politics aside now, there is an interesting thing about the packaging support the product, or the packaging being the message, which covers public figures and even some of Apple’s appeal.

Anyway, it’s a nifty word.
Anyway a nifty word.

PZ has a post about McCain’s background visuals that goes a little deeper than the general pile-on. The best bit is this:

MSNBC reported that when asked about the middle school image, McCain’s campaign replied that “it’s simply a generic photo, like others used and it had no specific meaning.” But here’s the rub: images always have meaning, though it may be different from what you intended. The term “generic photo” is just one step away from “clip art,” both of which should be avoided by serious presenters.

Images always have meaning. It’s amazing to me how often the same “picture is worth a thousand words” people just drop in pictures whose meaning or value they can’t explain.

This looks like an interesting way to taint content. My understanding of the “may contain inaccuracies warning” is that it’s a way to highlight deliberately false, or rank amateur content. This warning over a highly-Digged US News and World Report article feels off of that purpose.

From today’s NY Times:

Fun to see the ratio of D:R on “four more years” and “Sept 11″. Curious that they didn’t look at liberal and conservative as words given the ongoing management of how and when they got really partisan.

From AfroMusing’s photostream on flickr, a program that allows people to report violence through SMS. The objectives for reporting, listed in the poster below are: mobilization, study and tracking, assistance, awareness- and fund-raising.

UnitedforAfrica maps reported incidents:

“Join the stuggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away”

After looking at the Obama brand, the NYT gets around to the McCain brand. Best comment about the use of Optima comes from Seymour Chwast of Pushpin Studio:

Optima is one of the worst pre-computer typefaces ever designed. It was created to satisfy everybody’s needs. A straightforward, no-nonsense, no-embellishment face, it comes in regular and bold but little character can be found in either weight.

Optima is not inappropriate for use by Senator McCain.

Reminds me of the voice-over at the beginning of the movie Helvetica that goes something like: “Helvetica is the McDonalds of typefaces. It’s what you have when you don’t care what you’re eating, so you just eat crap.”

Yet another look at the branding elements behind Obama’s success. I get kind of impatient with the analysis that the brand is driving the success of the candidate. My take is that the candidate has always been different (people have been reading and enjoying Obama’s writing for years, because the thinking is different, feels new and free of baby boomer politics), and that the brand shows the difference. The focus on Gotham in the Obama campaign fetishizes the font (in the sociological sense, not the more interesting erotic sense(*)). Gotham is portrayed as having a power of its own, rather than being a reflection of the content:

Q: What is it about the typeface Gotham that adds personality to the Obama brand?

A: I don’t think that Gotham adds any personality to Senator Obama’s brand. I think it just amplifies the personality that’s already there. In fact, the typeface would work just as well for John McCain or Hillary Clinton, for that matter.

That’s kind of a messy statement and one that drifts into fetishism. Yes, Gotham amplifies the Obama brand, but then how could it work just as well for Clinton or McCain? McCain and Clinton are running classic strategies in which they secure a large part of their traditional base (which are seen as roughly equal) and fight over the center. By design, their campaigns are moderate American. Their brands need to look familiarly American. In Clinton’s case, it’s red, white, and blue, wavy flag curves and stars, and strong American typefaces. This is the standard political band:

McCain, the oft-described maverick, makes an interesting move away from the vernacular:

It’s US armed forces America, a familiar, centrist America.

It’s maverick (and I have loads of respect for McCain), but it’s grounded in the centrist strategy.

Obama’s strategy is based on game-changing (and I don’t say that as an endorsement, it’s a risky strategy), redefining traditional values, re-casting conversations Moving away from the American political vernacular that most other candidates use represents that.

There’s much more to the brand going on here than just the typeface. It runs the risk of not looking American, or at least not centrist, world leader America. The blues are measurably different, the curves connote countries and the planet, not flags.

Abandoning what I guess I’m calling the centrist America idiom is not unique to Obama or new. Gary Hart in 1984, my first political campaign, had a very high-tech typeface which Walter Mondale could never have used. What’s different is that Obama is still in the race so we have to look at the campaign to see why he’s winning when he shouldn’t be.

Gotham is not a force unto itself, rather it is a typeface that reflects the content of the campaign. As Robert Bringhurst so elegantly reminds in The Elements of Typographic Style:

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet, in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say must therefore aspire to a kind of statuesque transparency.

That said, there’s a nice bit about Gotham’s growing popularity:

there’s an oxymoronic quality to Gotham, which is why I think it’s become so popular. It has a blunt, geometric simplicity, which usually makes words feel cold and analytical (like Univers), but it also feels warm. It’s substantial yet friendly. Up-to-date yet familiar. That’s a tough hat trick. And Gotham has another quality that makes it succeed: it just looks matter-of-fact. But perhaps any typeface inspired by signs at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City — as Gotham is — will look like that.

If I had time, it would be interesting to switch the blues between Clinton’s and Obama’s materials above, and put Gotham under McCain’s military star and gold accents. My guess is that it would work about as well as dropping helvetica into the Marlboro logo:

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(*) Fetishism in the sociological sense comes from Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. His argument, vastly oversimplified, was that economists were talking about commodities (goods bought and sold in the marketplace) as entities abstracted from their physical realities (specifically, how much labor time went into their production) and turned into near-magical objects with prices that function in a world of maths and models.

I loved seeing this in the NYT yesterday:

It’s nice to be in suspense about the results of a primary this late in the year, to see voters mobilizing voters, and to have the pollsters twiddling their thumbs while, forgive me, the people decide.

Terrific TNR article referred to me by Todd Walker describes how the Obama team uses data and wonky policy techniques in a way that seems relevant for many of us in an increasingly number-rich, -doused, -drenched, -dictated world.

The article starts with a description of the influence of neo-classical refiner Richard Thaler:

Behaviorists like Thaler believed that the perfectly rational, utterly self-interested maximizers of economists’ imaginations had little in common with actual human beings, who frequently err when making simple calculations, who have trouble with self-control, who often act out of altruism or spite.

But what’s really interesting is how Thaler and his fellow behaviorists responded to this fairly critical insight. Though rational self-interest was the central tenet of neoclassical (i.e., modern) economics, they didn’t take a wrecking ball to the field and replace it with some equally sweeping theory of human behavior. Instead, they labored to bring economics closer in line with how the world actually works, one small adjustment at a time. “‘Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly,’” Thaler wrote in the introduction to The Winner’s Curse, quoting the philosopher Thomas Kuhn. “I hope to accomplish that first step–awareness of anomaly. Perhaps at that point we can start to see the development of the new, improved version of economic theory.”

One of my biggest gripes with data and marketing models (funnels) is that people tend to approach them as rules to live by. When faced with an anomaly, there are two responses: 1) wave it off as an anomaly; or 2) try to force the anomaly into the ‘model’. It’s a bit like the retrograde motion of planets: when the observational data pointed to non-circular motion of the planets, retrenching astronomers created these weird circle-within-circle movements that had no plausible explanation, but preserved the pretty circles. A third approach would be to evolve the model, soften its hard edges, add some dynamics to it.

The divide in economics between numbers and working models is becoming a chasm. What’s great about Thaler’s approach is that it functions somewhere between the wrecking ball of a new model, but avoids retrograde techniques. The thinking embraces the anomaly and allows for a punctuated equilibrous burst in the development of the model. “Like their intellectual godfather Thaler, the Obama wonks aren’t particularly interested in tearing down existing paradigms, just adjusting and extending them when they become outdated. (Thaler urges his students to master the same traditional, mathematical models their colleagues do if they want to be taken seriously.)”

Another nice passage highlights that there is still something along the lines of expertise and judgement that can live well with numbers:

The second difference is that the Obama hands tend to feel less hemmed in by establishment opinion. As one Obama adviser puts it, “Democrats want to be just a little bit different from Republicans, but not so different that they get attacked for being weak.” Like Hamilton, the Obamanauts generally reject this calculus–not because they favor some radical alternative, but because clinging to received foreign policy wisdom can preclude highly practical courses of action.

Of course, here they’re talking about foreign policy, which is not numbers-based. But the idea of “practical courses of action” — things which just make sense or feel right, pass the sniff test, resonate with a highly trained neerve ending have a place in their discussions, agenda, and plans.

It also allows for leadership without ignoring the polls, or innovation without ignoring the data.