Published on
June 9, 2007 in
Music.
I had a rather shocking realization recently. My parents were visiting, and after dinner I was fiddling around on this blog when my dad rather innocently asked if he could turn on American Idol. I was shocked. The last I knew my dad liked classic rock. What did he get out of watching Idol? My mom went on to explain that he watches it every week, without fail. He talks about it, and he is even concerned that one of his favorites is the winner. Though she insisted that she didn’t really watch the show, she knew all of the contestants and certainly had an opinion about who should win. I have spoken with others since this event who have had similar epiphanies about their own parents or friends. It got me thinking about the people and ultimately the market that is happily consuming what is in my opinion, total rubbish.
After performing an informal research project, my conclusion is that the music that most people seem to love comes from a developmentally important part of their lives ( youth, adolescence, college, birth of a child ). Although this thought isn’t terribly original I think it is a provocative idea that people make a connection to music that lasts throughout their lives. Some scientists believe that appreciation for music is something that developed during evolution as a way to create and maintain communities. In addition, there is evidence that music stimulates the same highly sensitive part of our brain that reacts to food and sex. It is easy to understand people becoming very attached to music given all of the biological and pyschological force that it carries. If Idol were about the music, then this might — might! — explain my parents strange behavior.
What are the producers behind a show like American Idol tapping into that is getting my dad to watch it? It is the complete package, it is reinforcing and creating community AND playing up the chills factor by having contestants perform already beloved songs. Original content is an afterthought because it is unnecessary and might actually hinder audience adhesion.
There is a life span on the fame that comes as a result of something like American Idol. The results are too immediate. Producers and record companies are tapping too directly into the ethos of the competition and the community; not capitalizing on new found talent. The interest and the talent lose their luster as the memory of the choosing fades from public consciousness. Ultimately, it isn’t about the artist or the music. It is about the temporary community which is created, and if the science is to be believed, viewers are acting out programming that was designed to encourage group understanding. The problem is the community that it is creating has no survival value and it is, therefore, a manipulation that shouldn’t be tolerated.
I wonder if my parents were to read this, would they even care? It seems likely that the, as Chialdini suggests, the commitment and consistency principles would have them defending the show. This despite the fact that neither of them have closely followed the career of their chosen Idol. The music is truly not as important to them as being involved in the process. Money has changed hands, however. After a little digging, I found past idol albums in my parents’ music library. I just never hear them play it.
The weather today reminded me, somehow, of this photograph that I took a few years ago.
I spent the morning in literally bone numbing cold at my sister’s college graduation at SUNY Purchase. I will keep this short as I am still trying to restore feeling to my left hand, but I was simply aghast at the total lack of organization and horrendous “motivational” speakers.
The president of the school attempted, in vain, to make a point about how events in one’s life that seem inconsequential may in fact be consequential. He attempted to do this, apparently, without the aid of a thesaurus. This resulted in a speech nearly 10 minutes in length of which fully 4 minutes were devoted to the repetition of the words “consequential” and “inconsequential”. He made some allusion to the Vietnam War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but made no obvious connection between those events and the rest of his speech other than a vague and depressing one about how they represented the “real world”.
This masterful oration gave way to the introduction of NY State Senator Chuck Schumer who delivered an amazingly trite and self aggrandizing speech about the world and his contributions to NY State voters. The highlights of the speech were, as the title of the post suggests, a slip of the tongue which lead him to call the “Avian” or “Asiatic Bird” flu the “Asian flu” ( an ailment believed to cause the insatiable desire for General Tso’s Chicken ) and a completely ridiculous compound sentence which referred to “Rapid change”, “global warming” and “terrorism” as examples of things caused by technology. While there is probably a very erudite argument to be made for the relationship between technology and the activities of terrorism, I would doubt very highly that Chuck could either a) elaborate upon it or even less likely b) prove a causal relationship. This is representative voice of the people of New York? I refuse, at my young age, to believe that people in this state are truly that stupid and clumsy.
I seem to be able to move the small finger on my left hand again, so I am off to rejoice in a warm cup tea. I am left to wonder if the gradual numbing of my entire body was actually due to the cold, or the result of my brain shutting down in protest to the day’s barrage of banality.
At my last company ( MyPublisher ), I became very interested in what people were saying about our products and services. In order to research what was being said along with who was saying it, I started to collect a list of sites where people commonly posted about products in our category and searching for posts there etc. Every time someone linked to an external blog I would bookmark that so that I could check on it periodically. Finally, I used Google to search for a few key terms, including the company name, and would browse through the results. The issue with all of this was that there was no way to immediately tell if I had visited a link or not. Nor could I tell that I had forgotten to check one of my sources. I spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing old information only to realize 100 words in, that I had read it already.
Enter Google Alerts.
One day, I was clicking around in my Gmail account and I ran across the my services link. Right at the top of the list was the mysterious Google Alerts feature. Google describes them as:
… email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
The configuration only requires you to plug in a search term and select how often you want Google to tell you about new things that it has found that match. It literally saved me a couple of hours a month. Not a lot of time in abstract, but keep in mind that those hours were previously completely wasted and totally annoying. Now I use it to keep track of a bunch of companies and people who I like to keep tabs on.
Every once in a while, it really helps me at work by letting me know about something really good ( or really bad ) that is going on with our customers. By getting and staying informed, I am armed in the battle for excellent customer service with the weapon that is timely relevant information.
For example, I have a Google Alert configured to tell me once a day about anything new that references Fog Creek Software. Recently, it informed me of a blog post (one that I would very likely have never seen otherwise) which detailed the poor experience of one of our Copilot users. I used this information to reach out to a customer who rightfully complained about a bad experience that was the result of a bug in our software. He not only responded positively to my effort to apologize but also made himself available to troubleshoot the problem he experienced. I helped him by recognizing the issue and compensating him for the trouble. He is helping us by providing us with a source of information, should we need it, about a bug in our software. In addition, I would hope that it may lead to some repeat business for us in the future. In my opinion, it represents a small but important victory in an effort to ensure a truly enjoyable customer experience.
Published on
May 13, 2007 in
General.
I have had several blogs now, and they have fallen by the wayside or disappeared completely. I think the reason was that I tried very hard to write within a theme or with no theme at all. I wanted to make reading them enjoyable for people who were interested in my topic of choice, or I wanted to make them personally relevant.
Both of these approaches have failed to a certain degree. In the interest of a fresh start, I have decided to use a different format and just start recording ideas that could belong to both classifications. I have recently started work at Fog Creek Software and am, for the first time in a long while, being asked to think critically about ’stuff’. Some topics and thoughts seem important at the time, and some things don’t seem significant at all, and still others don’t seem salient until much later when I have my “Oh shit, I wish I could remember what we said…” moment. I hope that this will be a place for me, initially, and others, later, to collect and respond to ideas.
