Being In Sync With Culture Shifts Will Determine The Next Winners & Losers...And The Freedom Of A Healthy Sinus

Well, had Sinus surgery to clear out a stuffed nose. Not too bad except that you can't do anything for a week. So--I sat at home...all week. No phones. Isolated. At one point I got so bored, I wrote an update to the staff--hoping for sympathy. Not medical sympathy...boredom sympathy....

Other than that it was all about:

*Missing the Megadeth Artist Confidential and a performance from Patrick Moraz at the XM Performance Theater

*Attempting to stay up-to-date via email.

*Unlocking the secret crevasses of the Internet.

*Sleeping.

*Addiction to DirecTV which has XM AND Major League Baseball

*Listening to our competitor as...a listener.

*Reading every imaginable newspaper. www.newseum.org has "Headiness" from newspapers around the World. Kind of cool. Otherwise dispatching family members to Borders.

*Watching instructional DVD's....airplane stuff mostly

*Watching Dr. Strangelove six times....learning new respect for the Andy Griffith show.

*Cringing at the Junk Culture TV (though much of it IS so bad it's good...or at least mildly entertaining in a scummy way) -- But there's something disturbing about the popularity of watching how stupid other people are as witnessed by the "Judge" shows. But, it's it's junk food and is what it is...I think it's about "getting the joke"--- Springer's show is actually hilarious.

*Writing down stuff...ideas, plans, and the like. Most were unreadable later. Generally 70% interesting (to me anyways) but undoable, 20% the pain pills talking, 10% keepers.

*Reading thousands of Wikipedia articles

*Watching some really strange You Tube stuff (check out the Radio Controlled Jets)


Oddly enough I was only out for 8 days but it felt like an eternity. The good news is that I can breathe and smell again...I've never felt as great. Amazing....like this giant wall lifted off your head. Wow. The energy rush is fantastic. The feeling is amazing.

Now...for something a bit more important. Some look at this stuff as Bullshit...others as secondary to more immediate pressures....some try to tackle it with data...others don't get it at all. Personally, I think this "reading the culture" stuff is paramount. If you look historically, some successful people luck into reading culture right...others are in the right place at the right time...others make themselves understand it. Look at radio programmers---Anyone who has lasted through generations, probably understands the flexibility of culture, or any technocrat that continually re-invents themselves and their product is probably doing the right thing. THEN--look at the failures. SO often, it’s NOT corruption or mis management---its failure of staying IN SYNC with the culture. The best management team on earth will not save an entity that is too far head of or too far behind the cultural flow.

I think it touches everything...not just politics, content and entertainment. You'd be amazed that in the years I've been doing this, how many people write this stuff off as BS. Pretty much all of those people are nowhere to be found these days. For some this all comes naturally, others have to work at it, but in any case an awareness and keen sense of READING the culture and ACTING on the read is what drives relevancy and success.

....one article that I found interesting I wanted to pass along below is very much in sync with the "Junk Culture/Anti Dumbing Down" message I'm fixated on. Not as a political thing---but a a mega trend that I am convinced is happening NOW and will continue to develop as we are in a cyclical cultural low period and about to rebound out of it--or at least the public stage is SET for a mass cultural thinking shift. It has been happening like this for over 100 years. Tap into it and you are relevant...fail to tap in or "get it" and you are behind the curve and vulnerable. Culture and every aspect of it--especially in an electronically charged world is constantly flexing. Media tends to reflect for awhile and gets comfortable and rich...then there are some bold thinkers that AT THE RIGHT TIME challenge the comfort which by now is out of sync, and create the next generation of media and popular thinking. BEING IN SYNC WITH CULTURE SHIFTS has never been more critical because we are AT a time where the old school is reflecting and regurgitating rather than stimulating and involving. Those who get it and ACT on it and inspire it are the next winners. It's a challenge for XM...it's a challenge for....everyone dealing with reaching people.

Among the keys include:

Balance. Yeah--can't stress this one enough. Art and Business...Cultural awareness with operating processes. Got art and no business people to execute on that level? Good luck. Then-Arts & Crafts need a rudder too or it'll never get off the pier. Corporate hell needs to ride the right creative wind to sail it in the right direction....that's the art part, otherwise it'll collapse under its own bureaucratic weight. It's SO simple: Balance. Unfashionable and often viewed as esoteric...but reality in changing times to have it BALANCED. In a very general way, great lasting bands are like that: Soulful expression and creativity, backed with a team of mo-fo's that work the system. Balanced. When the artists start trying to do the business part-not good. When the business team starts dictating the creative-Not good. A simple basic balance that keeps creative and business in check usually leads to the freedom of flexing with the culture without going off the deep end.

Look at who has it. Apple sure does---the art of their packaging and vibe with their obvious corporate muscle. HBO gets it. Southwest Airlines gets it (actually I love studying their history--an exercise in balancing eccentricity with operational excellence. And for an airline!----Airlines are rooted in maverick but nowadays are among the most conservative operations around with immense challenges--The Southwest story is a remarkable one, for its combination of street smarts and sky efficiencies. Then there's Huffingtonpost.com and drudgereport.com --- this is where relevancy is happening, certainly more than traditional media!

Look who lost it. MTV. Doesn't get any more obvious than that. One of the great brands hanging in on strong fumes, but the magic is....over. Some record companies. I remember walking into labels and feeling this distinct intense street driven creative buzz...and then on another floor, an intense lawyer-driven business buzz. The buzzes seemed to be well defined and in harmony.

Time Compression. Things happen at an electronically inspired compressed rate. The most obvious is in the Internet world. You can go from cool to lame in days. Used to take years to lose "it".

Look at INSTITUTIONS that lost it. Local Newspapers. People still read, but they haven't reinvented themselves in 75 years! They're like railroads...some have (painfully) re-invented themselves and are giants as in BNSF, others never quite made the transition though railroads used to have THE coolest names & logos. (Gulf, Mobile & Ohio; Wabash; Frisco....)

The power of cool is critical just as the power of lame...and these terms affect EVERY demographic. Cool and lame ARE part of our culture's evaluation process...it's also something that happens because of actions. TRY too hard to be cool without getting why and you are lame. That’s part of the problem for some. TRYING to be cool but just not getting the "why".

Timing: Having a feel for when to ride the wave and when to change the wave. Tricky because you can get lulled into complacency when things are going well, but the underground is about to explode into mainstream thinking. I liken it to radio in the 90's. Terrestrial radio was SO focused on themselves that the idea of Satellite, Internet, MP3 and other emerging challenges took a back seat. Its part of that junk culture thing---when does the joke part of it become "OK, enough already..."?

I KNOW there's a shift happenning...a new awareness on a mass scale. It is a mission that I hope is more people's mission. You can either take advantage of it and get in sync...or not. Living in omnivision--trying to figure it out. Living it. Everything from the way people TALK these days (notice how so many people talk in questions? Like "I was thinking about going to the store today"? Interesting to watch how talking evolves. The 30's, 60's, 80's and today all have their own speech patterns.


Check the article—it’s not about politics or weather changes-at least that's NOT why I'm pasting it...just another "junk culture" evaluation with some interesting points:


By Al Gore
Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."
Why was the Senate silent?
In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.
A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.
To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.
American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.
While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.
Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd's incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money—much of it from special interests—to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore—not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.
Our Founders' faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point—in the First Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.
Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day—90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.
In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience." Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America.
In practice, what television's dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics—and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role. That is also why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources.
When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls."
I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the "consent of the governed" was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.
As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.
The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to "psychographic" categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.
As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.
And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush's economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president's controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.
To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the "vividness" experienced by readers. Marshall McLuhan's description of television as a "cool" medium—as opposed to the "hot" medium of print—was hard for me to understand when I read it 40 years ago, because the source of "heat" in his metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of reading. But McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.
As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that "the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people." Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America's self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their "consent" to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they're interested in receiving from citizens—feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.
Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.
Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.
So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.
Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.
The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.
The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy