The New Reference Dictionary: Cyber Stars and Beyond

Google is closely nipping at the heels of Yahoo, which took the lead in the early 2000s in promoting content generation and searches where millions of users can participate actively. Yahoo believes that user generated and tagged content will be varied, interesting, engaging, unique, and profuse -- something that not even the biggest media companies in the world can hope to deliver.

Yahoo also believes that the search process can similarly be improved and be made intensely appealing by engaging user communities in acts of providing helpful answers, tips, and advice.

Of course, errant, misleading, stupid and predatory acts can occur in settings where anonymous people provide answers and tips to anonymous others. Yahoo and others hope to control and nip such antisocial behaviors via carefully designed reputation engines.

If socially-aided searching takes off, decades of social and consumer research on opinion leadership, reference groups, and interpersonal influence processes could fall by the wayside.

In traditional settings, the opinion leaders are personally known to the consumers for their expertise. Opinion leaders are seen as credible and attractive. In most cases, for opinion leadership to work, proximity -- in terms of physical space or close relationship -- is essential.

Of course, celebrities and stars -- people who are not proximate but known widely through their media-aided renown -- can also be good reference points for consumers. People want to associate with their favorite movie or sports stars. The recommnedations and perceived usages of products by stars have a great impact. Marketers know this well. Celebrities command huge fees for endorsing and using products.

In socially-aided Internet searches, the popular advice givers do not have the achievements and aura of the typical celebrity stars. These online folks are community minded people who get their kicks out of the appreciation they get for their answers and advice. They are somewhat like "opinion leaders" but not proximate in any sense. These are persona "out there" in the cyberspace, and not the guys or gals in schools or workplaces that we admire for their expertise and advice.

In the long run, with reputation engines amassing "points" in favor of those who provide excellent answers and advice, it could be argued that a new type of entity -- the "cyber star" -- would emerge.

But there is a difference. The traditional celebrity-star is not in the business of giving answers, tips, or advice. Their accidental or paid endorsements are acts that are quite incidental to their main life roles of acting on stage and screen or performing in sports arenas.

The cyber stars, however, are stars precisely because of their life roles of giving advice. We would be witnessing a veritable explosion of "Dear Abby" and "Miss Manners" type persona in thousands of online settings.

Social and consumer researchers would need to revise their dictionaries to make room for the torrents of new online opinion, answer, and advice giving roles that are likely headed our way.

Nik Dholakia
Rhode Island, USA

Cysumers

A race is on between the increasingly numerous online persona of consumers and those technologies that seek to reassemble the electronically fragmented "humpty dumpty" into some semblance of the old-fashioned holistic consumer.

Captains of commerce and capital have torn loyalties in this race.

Technologies that enable consumers to access cyberspace in multiple and somewhat anonymous ways are perceived as empowering by the users. They lead to loyal users and, more importantly, motivate the users to create all manners of content -- made available at no or low cost to the technology platforms that support varied online persona.

On the other hand, conventional marketing wisdom demands the integration of these multiple online persona and to reach out to the "real person" behind them, to sell a variety of goods and services to him or her.

In most cases, the data-mined and cybernetically-assembled consumer -- the cysumer -- is not aware of being in the trained cross-hairs of target marketers. He or she is easy prey to the seductive darts hurled at him or her.

At the cutting edge, however, the tech-savvy consumer resents the intrusiveness of the target marketer. S/he may create more online persona and less penetrable screens to shield such persona.

Since the cyberworld is community minded, these online obfuscation and shielding strategies may be shared -- enabling the less-tech-savvy consumer to avail of these also.

Technologies of datamining and online avatar creation thus come to loggerheads.

If the technology provider is the same hydra-headed corporate monster -- such as Google or Yahoo -- it is a fair bet that, in the short run, the datamining, identity-reassembling side will triumph over the persona-obfuscating, avatar-multiplying side.

But in the long run, nothing is guaranteed. Consumers, cysumers, prosumers, avatars, and cyborgs -- these new "beings" -- will continue to innovate. There are already a billion of them (and they can "create" billions more) versus the few thousand smart brains in corporate labs.

Yep, the revolution will not be televised... and nor is it likely to be podcast.


Nik Dholakia
Rhode Island, USA

Existence is Commerce?

Technologies, especially those that are interactive and information oriented, are empowering consumers.

The consumer is increasingly knowledgeable, informed, hip, with-it, and savvy.

Or is she?

For decades now, the membrane separating the "visibly paid" media such as TV commercials and ways of communicating via "relatively invisible" publicity, placements, and planted content has been dissolving.

Whatever shreds are left of this membrane should disappear in a few years under contemporary conditions.

Movies and TV shows have been doing product placement for years.

Video, computer, and online games now allow commercial placement in a variety of ways. In the rich context of the "game world" are embedded signs, products, billboards, store fronts, logo-bearing apparel, and so on.

Sports events are massive canvases for parading sponsorship logos.

Drug companies reward opinion-leading doctors who speak or write favorably about their brands.

Celebrities commit their auras in the service of brands.

Blogs, of course, are no exception. Recently, Nokia achieved a major commercial coup by sending its new model phone to about 50 influential tech bloggers. Their comments about the phone had such massive viral impact that Nokia servers crashed a few times.

Conceptually, the notions of commerce, culture, and life are commingling in ways such that their disentanglement is difficult, hopeless, even painful.

Sure, Ad Busters and others try various clever tactics of disentanglement, but these elite efforts have little mass impact. Besides, they are coopted fast in commercial service.

So, "I shop, therefore I am" is no longer a critically funny book title.

For ever-larger radiating swaths of humanity, existence IS commerce.

Resistance is Futile... Impossible is Nothing... Coke is it...

Nik Dholakia
Rhode Island, USA

My Capitalist "Dream"

Economists use the prosaic terminology of payment for the use of “factors” of production. Land demands rent. Capital seeks the payment for its application in the form of interest or appreciation – the only “factor” that seems capable of reproducing more of itself. And finally, for the remaining 99.99 percent of the laboring world that does not own excess land or capital, the return comes in the form of wages, salaries, “emoluments”, and so on.

In a somewhat simplified Marxian view of classic capitalism, labor got to keep only enough of its earnings to reproduce itself, ready for toiling again the next morning. Surplus value was siphoned off (blood-sucked away, if you want to rabble-rouse the angry masses) by capitalists and that is how capital accumulated and grew.

We have known for decades that the world as it works is more complex and different than this simplified view of the exploited and the exploiter. Especially in the affluent regions of the world, before globalization and outsourcing run amuck, the laboring folks – the so-called “labor aristocracy” – were able to snatch sizable chunks of the surplus in the form of good wages and accompanying benefits.

Globalization and outsourcing allow the slicing and dicing of work processes in increasingly creative ways and the transfer of work segments to various global locations based on cost, quality, and other managerial considerations. I have reflected on these issues elsewhere (http://electronicglobalization.blogspot.com/), and that is not the focus of this writing.

The focus here is on the work of the very top managers, especially in U.S. multinational corporations. Their earnings – in the form of salaries and other items, earnings that are apart from their capital-ownership related incomes – have zoomed to astronomical levels at the start of the 21^st century. Grants of stock by their employers, of course, have to be counted in this if such grants are made as a way to compensate for work done.

The questions of interest are these: For what work are these top managers compensated? What principles govern these stratospheric managerial earnings?

Copious academic writing as well as the common sense on Wall Street indicates that there is no clear relationship between top management compensation and things such as stock prices, corporate earnings, sales levels, profits, product quality, market share, or customer satisfaction. The pay is not for these things – at least not in terms of observable results.

So what do top managers get paid for? What is the “work” for which they receive sky-high compensations?

The labor these super-compensated CEOs and other top managers seem to be doing is that of “managing the corporate boards and big investors (such as pension funds and mutual funds) in ways that allow the hefty-rising pay packets to continue”. Their labor, it seems, is that “delinking reward from (mundane, measurable, observable) performance”. There is the mystical labor of “linking reward to some mythical quality of corporate leadership”.

In the broader global scheme of things, is seems the labor of top USA managers and their political allies is the labor of “intensifying the politics and economics of capitalism”. It is in fact labor in the service of keeping the “global inequality engine running and pumping at an ever higher rate”, including the labor of “political support to parties/politicians who will help this engine run faster”. Of course, the United States is no exception – these processes occur in all the rich and wanting-to-be-rich countries. It is just that the United States is far ahead of the rest of the world in this. It is even able to borrow from the rising currency coffers of the world, to create huge mountains of debt, to keep this intensive process going. It is able to borrow from its own future generations by gradually degrading and fraying the various social safety nets.

We are familiar with the TV commercial where the slick car salesman comes in front of the TV camera and shouts: “Bad Credit? No Credit? No Problem. Let us put You in Your Dream Car! Nothing Down, and 48 easy monthly payments!!” In my dream… er nightmare… the salesman is the smiling Big Brother Politburo in Beijing and the customer is the grinning Uncle Sam in Washington, DC.

Nik Dholakia

Rhode Island, USA

Welcome to CMGC

Four powerful notions -- consumers, markets, globalization, and culture -- are intersecting in novel ways and defining the world we live in.

These are shaping our world, our lifeworlds, our futures.

In contemporary settings, survival demands that we understand these and success demands that we navigate the turbulent cross-currents of these.

We hope the ideas in this blog will help you chart a course through the tumultous eddies of culture and globalization.

Nik Dholakia
Rhode Island, USA