Erstwhile made the headlines...in Salt Lake City. Our favorite word appears in a Salt Lake Tribune headline about a former High School football player now a race car driver. Sports and a headline today.
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Thursday, May 8, 2008
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
May 7, 2008 Erstwhile Sighting
Angie Everhart, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, was arrested for DUI recently. E! News referred to her as an erstwhile swimsuit model. I imagine that she could still model swimsuits if she wanted to. Hell, for that matter I guess we all could. Some of us would just look better doing it.
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Tuesday, May 6, 2008
A Very Scary Documentary
Cripes, I know I'm getting old when I'm posting PBS documentaries on here. Next week it'll be a retrospective on ABBA. Anyway...
The following link is to a PBS documentary on the discovering and marketing of what's cool. It's the scariest thing I've seen in while.
The usurpation of what finding an identity in our youth today may be the biggest contributor to the vapidness of the teenagers that I am starting to encounter. And the scary thing is that I didn't pick up on this before.
I just sort of assumed it was the usual as I get older they seem dumber kind of thing, that parents have been saying since Og watched his son, Thag, bang two black rocks together instead of two white rocks. I suspect that this is different. Finding your identity as a youth used to be more about a slow process of trial and lots of errors. It was painful at times but instructive and served as a good training ground for the roles that you would play later in life. Now there are no pecking orders in adolescence. There is only a morass of moderate coolness.
With the pre-packaging and marketing of identities now it is almost too easy to catch the tail end of a "cool trend" and be able to acclimate it to your life. The fact that it is being marketed as heavily as it is is the scary part of it. It is said that the marketing exists because it is a $150B industry. I imagine it is a $150B industry because it is marketed so heavily.
Where I am encountering it is in seeing young people come out of high school and college and enter the workplace. I regularly run into people who have little initiative and imagination in projects because they seem to simply be waiting for someone to tell them what to do in each and every step. If you never have to go out and impress someone with a new idea or a peculiar variation on an existing idea because all of your imagination forming years are being spent processing marketing you stand little chance of success in modern business. We may not be falling behind China and India because we lack engineers; it may be because the cool kids in Manhattan and Santa Monica are having Madison Avenue market the wrong things to the rest of us.
PBS Frontline Documentary
Oh, and while your watching it...stay off of my lawn.
The following link is to a PBS documentary on the discovering and marketing of what's cool. It's the scariest thing I've seen in while.
The usurpation of what finding an identity in our youth today may be the biggest contributor to the vapidness of the teenagers that I am starting to encounter. And the scary thing is that I didn't pick up on this before.
I just sort of assumed it was the usual as I get older they seem dumber kind of thing, that parents have been saying since Og watched his son, Thag, bang two black rocks together instead of two white rocks. I suspect that this is different. Finding your identity as a youth used to be more about a slow process of trial and lots of errors. It was painful at times but instructive and served as a good training ground for the roles that you would play later in life. Now there are no pecking orders in adolescence. There is only a morass of moderate coolness.
With the pre-packaging and marketing of identities now it is almost too easy to catch the tail end of a "cool trend" and be able to acclimate it to your life. The fact that it is being marketed as heavily as it is is the scary part of it. It is said that the marketing exists because it is a $150B industry. I imagine it is a $150B industry because it is marketed so heavily.
Where I am encountering it is in seeing young people come out of high school and college and enter the workplace. I regularly run into people who have little initiative and imagination in projects because they seem to simply be waiting for someone to tell them what to do in each and every step. If you never have to go out and impress someone with a new idea or a peculiar variation on an existing idea because all of your imagination forming years are being spent processing marketing you stand little chance of success in modern business. We may not be falling behind China and India because we lack engineers; it may be because the cool kids in Manhattan and Santa Monica are having Madison Avenue market the wrong things to the rest of us.
PBS Frontline Documentary
Oh, and while your watching it...stay off of my lawn.
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