Personality and Corporatism

Okay, two points along the theme of personality and corporatism:

GOOGLE

If you go to Youtube right now and look up any video (I suggest Diego Maradona's goal of the century), you'll see a little soccer ball icon next to the volume control (sadly unavailable on embedded videos). If you click it, it turns on the vuvuzelas.

Needless to say, this is funny.

What it indicates, though, is that someone at Google's Youtube division went up to their boss and said, "Hey wouldn't it be funny if we put a little button that put on the sound of vuvuzelas?" And their boss said, "Yes."

Obviously, this is a product of their much-lauded "twenty percent time." But separate to that, it indicates that Google is a company which values humor. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a love note to Google -- Google is a large enough company to encapsulate both the best and worst of everything -- but this is one aspect that seems ancillary, but is actually a big part of their success. After all, I think one of Google's greatest successes aren't the big things they do ("hey look at us we're going to revolutionize communication with Google Wave... no? anyone?"), but rather the small usability things they incorporate.

For instance, I laughed incredibly hard after I noticed that Google Labs has a little widget that checks your outgoing email for the word "Attached" or "Attachment," and if you use that word but don't attach anything, it says, "It looks like you forgot to attach something..." It's like an actually helpful version of Clippy, minus the annoying avatar. And I can bet you 100% that this feature started as a joke, because before someone did it it seemed like a joke.

I say this because at the company where I work at, there's the same sort of sense of humor. Back when it was a small company, the humor got expressed in the product -- the word "Cubulator" was used, for instance, as was the name "Shazzam" and a few meaningless acronyms.

But as the company has grown, we work with a lot of big, heavy-hitting clients now. And they have very little senses of humor when it comes to the product. This is not to say that the individuals we work with don't have a sense of humor, they're great guys -- it's just that humor in a product gives them the impression that the product is un-serious. They don't want an un-serious product made by a company that doesn't take their concerns seriously.

It comes up a lot in terms of process maturity. We do things loosely, because we're a small company that doesn't need a lot of formal processes the way that a multibillion dollar multinational might need to. But they have requirements that people they work with conform to certain processes. So slowly, over time, they try to remake the companies they work with or contract from in their own image.

And thus, programmers wind up keeping their humor to themselves, because they're focusing on delivering a serious product. I'm glad that Google continues to fight for the right of humor to remain not just part of employee culture but part of the public face of the company.

KAGAN

Which brings me to Elana Kagan, just to say that I find her to be a very corporate person -- she's really, really gone out of her way not to leave a paper trail of any wild opinions or anything. So I was expecting a cold, ironclad stance towards questioning. Instead, she went with humor a number of times:

Diversity VII: Death of Monoculture

This is going to be a short post because I'm starting to come down with a bad cold and my brain is getting fuzzy, but to tack on to my last post, where I talked about how diversity in theater is also going to be partly about diversity in audience.

I happened to re-look over Isaac's recent post about the death of monoculture in response to an NPR segment which I happened to hear as well, when it aired.

Isaac uses the death of monoculture meme to talk about our frustration that theater isn't changing fast enough, and briefly at the end gets to what the death of monoculture meme is really about:

We experience (To some extent) this sea change going on all over the place and wonder why the art form we love the most, that we are the most dedicated to, isn't changing at the pace of everything else. It's frustrating. And meanwhile, those who do not care about or are actively opposed, particularly those who define "good" as "coming out of the aesthetics of white male majoritarian culture" feel particularly threatened. With everything else changing, there's something comforting about institutional theater to those attached to that monoculture.

I think that's what 99Seats and Scott Walters mean when they talk about the "quality dodge." They're assuming that we're all rallying behind the artistic director in terms of perpetuating the monoculture (or, if you'd prefer, the "European patriarchal system" if you're in the 1960s). Some people are, but some of us aren't, in the same way that some opponents of the Single-Payer System are against health-care reform and other opponents of the Single-Payer System just don't think it's the most effective form of health-care reform.

If you reread Scott's post, it makes a lot more sense if you rephrase the argument as "Quality is irrelevant if you define quality as matching the whims of monoculture. Quality is relevant if you define quality as relevant to the local culture." That's a statement I could definitely get behind. I still would disagree with him that a lottery system would accomplish that shift, but it'd be nice to have common ground.

It doesn't surprise me, by the way, that after Isaac talked about monoculture, he reflected on why the Audience Matters.

So maybe what we need to do is figure out how our culture became mono-culture and take aim at that. The MFA-problem is one aspect of that, the New York centrism is another aspect of that, the inequity in access to arts education from an early age is (I think the most important) aspect of that.

And whereas Isaac is correct in his post that YouTube doesn't making doing theater any cheaper, one of his commenters (Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist!) points out:

People worry that the art of theatre and live performances are dying, but I disagree. In fact, I would argue that youtube (and Vimeo) have helped people to have a better appreciation for the arts and would introduce them to something new, something different. Now all you have to do is look up "Kabuki theatre" or "Bali puppet show" and you'll find a clip. This, in turn, will inspire people to read up on this and even get involved.

In a way, what technology leverages to us is an audience that has equal access to culture. Hopefully that'll be a more diverse audience, and then we'll start to turn the tide on this.