MAD MEN’s DON DRAPER: NOWHERE MAN IN SEARCH OF TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

“Who is Don Draper?” is a question which is one of the central themes of the hit AMC series. A friend asked my opinion of this season’s finale and about how I thought the series would ultimately end. It got me to thinking about a lot more than Don’s dilemma and urge to confess. My confession is that I have a love/hate relationship with the show.

I grew up in the era that it depicts so well—what I hate is the mirror reflection of what I remember of that time as a child of divorce. But I what I love is the great dramatic craft and wonderful acting—even though, I did pick up one anachronism last year. In the offending episode, the ad guys celebrated on one occasion by breaking out a bottle of Stolichnaya—a gesture that certainly would not have gone over too well in the Cold War Era. I’ve subsequently seen bottles of Smirnoff in later episodes, which has righted the situation. That said, there is so much to admire about the art direction and attention to period detail that it almost makes you want to take off your fedora, take out a pack of Lucky Strikes, and reinstate the three-martini lunch ritual.

But getting back to my friend’s questions, I told her that I thought that the last scene of the finale was unnecessary. When I saw the masterful scene before it, I thought that it was a great open ending—after Don tells his ex-wife that he’s getting remarried, we see an empty bottle on the kitchen counter of their former family home, framed center stage like a dark, Courbet still life as the lights are shut off by the departing former couple in what I thought was a fade to black and end credits. The question becomes—is there a spark between them that will come between Don’s impending new marriage? We already should have reservations about the match knowing that he is an inveterate cad and his impulsive decision to marry his secretary does not auger well for faithfulness or longevity.

But the writers couldn’t resist the obvious and my enthusiasm was quickly dampened because it didn’t end there. They chose to continue, and cut to Don and his fiancée in bed with Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” playing in the background. Now, the inference here—and a rather heavy handed one I thought—whether it is subconscious or not—is that the duo singing on the soundtrack had a fairy book Hollywood marriage that ended in divorce—hence, the seemingly sentimental, hippie love song casts a foreboding shadow over the betrothed couple lounging in bed. This final scene seemed to lack the subtlety of the one beforehand—do we really have to spell everything out in TV America? The kitchen scene struck me as something you’d see in a foreign film. The bed scene, typical soap opera.

OK. I’ll stop producing the show. Let’s get back to Don. He’s got a secret that is now burning after the last season. The perfection of his character is written down to his Dickensian name—his “adopted” namesake of “Draper” lends itself to two meanings—his hidden identity is sequestered under the draping of what happened in the Korean War; the other, is that, in addition to hiding personal truths, he is the perfect Ad Man because he’s so adept at all the shadings of truth that his profession requires.

The well-spun phrase “Truth in Advertising” (actually a law) certainly has a different spin to it especially with the platform now offered by social media. Consumers can instantly flex their muscles and spark negative PR grassfires that can grow into the kind of outright conflagrations that have sometimes brought corporate giants to their knees—remember the Domino’s pizza disaster when several misbegotten pizza twirlers posted a video on YouTube showing them adorning their pies with toppings that were…shall we say, not on the menu, but definitely organic? There are countless other examples that have motivated most major corporations to preemptively hire legions of twenty-year-olds to maintain a vigilant watch in the blogosphere for negative consumer rumblings. Mad consumers can now be an activist virus.

Back in the 1960’s however, we were living the American Dream and drinking the Kool Aid that turned us into that consummate culture of consumption which has for the last several decades displaced our standing as a manufacturing country—the rest as they say, is subject of daily reports on the unemployment rate, foreclosures, and the general Fall of the Dow Jones and perhaps Empire. One of the many things that “Mad Men” gets so right is the way that we were sold and bought a bill of goods in the 50’s and 60’s from unfiltered cigarettes to the bomb shelters that we didn’t need. It all seemed so simple—merely “duck and cover” until the inconvenience of an atomic attack passed over and we could return to our regularly scheduled programming.

So, Don Draper is really the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” come several years early and in some respects, he is a reflection of several generations who lived through the post World War II era. He’s caught in between the sheets as a relationship train wreck that doesn’t know who he is and between the 50’s and the 60’s that are starting to explode as we see in the season just concluded.

Don is a hybrid archetype of both T.S. Eliot’s “hollow men”, and the discontented businessman captured by Sloan Wilson’s, “The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit”, a 50’s best seller and hit movie with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in 1956. Like this work, “Mad Men” has appropriately been celebrated as capturing the mid-century American “zeitgeist” just as “The Social Network” has been cited as doing the same for the Internet Era. The irony about Don’s secret is that he is about to enter a time period when his identity problem is
no longer be relevant.

Even though I enjoy the series, I hope that next season is the last. In America, the lifespan of a TV series is not motivated so much by its organic narrative shape and pulse, but by the economic imperative of reaching the magical goal of a syndicatable 65 episodes. This is the threshold for the number of episodes that can be “stripped” or be distributed as “repeats” five days a week for roughly half-a-year (26 weeks) before they have to recycle and repeat. One of the reasons that foreign, and in particular, British TV series seem to have an edge to them—take the seamlessness and naturally closed narrative arc of a classic series like “The Prisoner”, for example—is that rather than produce a show until it runs out of steam, foreign shows are written and produced as so-called “limited series”, a standard emulated well by some US cable network shows.

The end of “The Sopranos” was roundly criticized as a cop-out by many critics and fans, and is a prime example of how the American system is wanting at times. Sitcoms may be one thing to draw out as long as the stars stay the relative ages of their characters, but drama is better written as an entire story arc at the outset rather than running on tracks that have no final destination in sight—except having enough episodes to syndicate.

So, how should “Mad Men” end? Here’s my take: An energized client pitch is disrupted at the agency offices as a growing brouhaha emanates from the New York streets below. It's the sound of thousands of Peace Marchers parading to protest the Vietnam War and starting to fight with hooting construction workers. Maybe according to the series’ lifecycle, it’s a tad early for this and I’m committing my own anachronistic crime, but time lapse could help the series get through the inevitable relationship body counts which predictably lie ahead.

For all we know, Don may have already dropped acid in a future episode, thus confusing his identity issue even further like so many who psychedelicized. Now, with a burgeoning Peace Movement and Hippie Scene converging on our Nowhere Man, he is overcome by curiosity as everyone in the pitch meeting is drawn in astonishment to the high window to look out over the spectacle of history in the making. Impulsive to the end, he bails on the pitch and descends to the street. On the ground, he is caught up in the crowd, looking unsure of himself as his tie is loosened and jacket pawed by hippie chicks who welcome the “straight”. We last see him as he looks around in disbelief, not knowing whether to join “the parade” or run for his life. What he realizes quickly is that his desire to confess and his problems, in the immortal words spoken by Humphrey Bogart at the end of “Casablanca”, don’t “amount to a hill of beans” compared to the march of history. And the audience doesn't know either. End of story.

That way, Don Draper represents a whole generation of Mad Men, who like my father, were all so convinced that they were defined by their work. Blame the Cold War or Madison Avenue. Don is only special because he had to deploy a mask to cover up an identity issue that is no longer a big deal when assassinations, LSD, and Vietnam ripped open the facade of the mythic 50's/60's “Ozzie and Harriet”/I Like Ike/Apple Pie/Take A Letter/Zone, and everyone was revealed as not knowing who they were, where they belonged, and what tribe was right for them...Ultimately, Don can only find the redemption we all hope for him once the women finally take over, so maybe he gets hit on the head at the end with all the secretaries’ burning bras as they fall from high out of the agency office windows like a snowy ticker tape parade over Madison Avenue.

And now, for these messages from our discorporate sponsors…

(With thanks to Sarah Kelley)

DEATH BY DATA

I just finished listening to the complete symphonies of Franz Josef Hadyn who is widely recognized as “the father of the symphony.” His achievement is incredible if only for its sizeable output—some 107 works in all. The reason I bring it up is not out of any odd feeling of accomplishment though the experience was filled with musical wonders—but because it’s made me think that before digital media came on the scene, it would not have been possible to listen to them all—unless, of course, I was able to sit through the four years of concerts that it took for the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester to record the 37 CD set.

The digital compact disc made available comprehensive box sets of individual artists, composers, and bands in diverse collections that encompass the history of music genres including the arcane as well. It may be kind of daunting to confront an artist’s complete works when they exhibit the scale of a Hadyn, for example. The Internet has also made it possible to expand one’s reach exponentially into the world of the consequential, in addition to burying us in minutiae and trivia. The question becomes—how do we go about discovery and finding meaning in this mirror maze of data?

It’s nothing new to say that we are suffering under the weight of information and the grip of technology. Jaron Lanier’s recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is as good as any in the list of jeremiads warning us about giving up our souls to silicon based-lifeforms. Personally, I experienced a tipping point this past summer with my inbox groaning for the mercy of the delete button and unsubscribe links which became my truest online friends.

The data available at a mere mouse click through search is imposing as well. Recently, my ten-year-old son expressed an interest in movies about World War II. He came to me frustrated by the wide range of choices offered by Netflix. It became apparent to me that his desire for discovery needed human intercession—and not the kind offered by several engines that pride themselves on non-robotic crawler solutions and even so-called "human search." Collaborative filtering and recommendation engines be damned, what he was asking for was curation.

The future of search is curation. I am convinced it will be at the foundation of many successful business enterprises and for individuals who can provide an editorial perspective on qualifying information. It’s not enough just to make the information available as we have been finding out. Say you were new to rock and roll—or Hadyn, for that matter. Where would you start? Google? Wikipedia? iTunes? And if so, how reliable are these methods? Google’s acquisition of metaweb last July speaks to emergent search methodologies that attempt to provide a layer of contextualization. Wolfram/Alpha is another that steps up the visual component of search.

In a conversation with Frank Zappa, he once pointed out to me that the binary mind behind modern computer technology is more limited than we think, particularly when taking into consideration the nature of time. He saw the conventional perspective of past, present, and future augmented by “never” and “eternity” and offered a vision of time as spherical and non-linear. He suggested that a computer that added these two features to the conventions of "on" and "off" switching would yield results that were more in keeping with the way that we live in time radially with our brains. Before he died in 1993, Frank joked that the Japanese “had probably already been working on it.”

The religious scholar, Mircea Eliade, once pointed out that the end of an era or great age often generates a popular belief that if all information were to be made available, that the Answer will then present itself. Of course, if Google were a religion, this idea would be the central tenet of the digital faith—and any entity whose corporate philosophy is “You can make money without doing evil” might arouse suspicions. Its mega initiatives like Google Earth and Project Gutenberg should raise an eyebrow at least. Who knows, maybe Google has already discovered the Answer to the Answer.

But, on the whole, I prefer to look for the answer in music, say in one of Bach’s inventions or in a John Coltrane solo, than in any old text-based search. It is here that we are presented with the age-old battle of what came first at the Creation—a subject of one of Hadyn’s master works as well—did the universe start with light as in a very special visual effect or was it in born of sound, mantra or "the Word"? I’ll place my bet on the sound of music any day because a Google search I just did yields 146,000,000 results for “Let there be light” versus a search for “The Big Note" which wins with 203,000,000--so it must be true...

JIMI B. GOODE

Anthony DeCurtis’ recent New York Times article, “Beyond The Jimi Hendrix Experience” (2/28/10) is refreshingly accurate, especially about the circumstances of the great guitarist’s death, which he attributes correctly to “misadventure” as opposed to a heroin overdose (so often reported as fact especially in anti-drug propaganda). However, his characterization that Jimi “never spoke out about the pressing civil rights issues (of his day) either in his lyrics or in interviews” is simply not accurate. A look at some of the facts reveals an essential part of the man, his music, and his times.

Though it may not reference them directly, his song “House Burning Down,” (which appeared on the “Electric Ladyland” album) was written following the 1967 Detroit riots and implores in one lyric, “Try to learn instead of burn, hear what I say.” In live performance, Jimi usually dedicated “I Don’t Live Today” to the “American Indian,” in part, as tribute to his Cherokee Grandmother and in a heartbreaking description of the blight of reservation life. Any listener interested in his attitude toward race should reference the lyrics to both of these songs.

The scorched earth instrumental “Midnight” is apocryphally said to have been an improvisation recorded in anger and outrage the night after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Transcending color is a major theme in much of his body of work. It is also a featured element in his legendary and as yet unreleased musical autobiography, “Black Gold.” He spoke about civil rights during many interviews as well including one in which he said, “I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.”

According to some of his closest friends, the fact that the African American community did not embrace him during his lifetime is said to have troubled Jimi. Despite his free street concerts in Harlem, promotion as the “Black Elvis,” attempts at recruitment of him by the Black Panthers, and his replacement of the original Experience with the all black, Band of Gypsies, Hendrix’s fan base remained largely middle-class and white—even though he greatly influenced contemporary black musicians like Miles Davis and Sly Stone. Among the biographies that treat this aspect of his life are David Henderson's well received, "'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Chile" and "Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy" by Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek (founder of the Hendrix Information Center).

Like the era with which he is so synonymous, Jimi Hendrix was complex, conflicted, and deeply indebted to African American musical tradition. His success—typified by the fact that he was the first rock performer of any color to earn $100,000 for a single concert—was the hard earned result of playing as Little Richard’s guitar player, working the chitlin’ circuit with the Isley Brothers and other major R & B artists, and in acknowledging still other forebears as he did with his definitive, non-chalant cover version of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (memorialized in the documentary, "Jimi Plays Berkeley").

Today, Jimi’s legacy as a fearless virtuoso is common wisdom. But, the part of his personal story that also needs to be told is that he was truly an artist beyond color—and that is why, as Mr. DeCurtis observes, he also continues to be “an enduring symbol of personal freedom.” His breakthrough as one the most celebrated rock stars of the sixties—and the only one “of color”—is an achievement that should be considered enough of a statement about race relations at that tumultuous time.

WHAT HAS CHANGED? KEY TRANSFORMERS IN HUMAN AND MEDIA BEHAVIORS

Traditional media brands and networks are playing catch-up with trends that have been in effect as a result of the Internet for several decades now. In particular, four distinct shifts in audience and consumer behavior have resulted from the influence of the Web and each should guide our thinking about media, marketing, content, and new technologies. These are:

1) Interactivity—audience members and consumers are called “users” with good reason in this medium where the expected experience is no longer the “lean-back” one of the television living room, but the “lean-forward” engagement of a user who expects to have a say and the ability to interact and manipulate his “personal” media environment

2) Personalization—from MySpace to the iPhone, digital media is now super-charged with the capability of incorporating the individual and personal—from branding and iconography to collaborative filtering, choice, and having options are the way of the digital world

3) Immediacy—the web offers the kind of instant gratification that can be addictive from enhanced shopping experiences a la Amazon’s “one-click” buy button to the streaming media of sites like Netflix.com and Hulu.com

4) Community—arguably the most compelling transformation wrought by the Web, the specialization of human experience is now capable of being channeled into affinities of every special interest imaginable where, through the power of networking, like-minded individuals can find each other by just a click-through in a search window

This last transformation is critical because of the way that community has now extended to social media and thereby, changed the very nature of what networks can produce virally. The advent of distributed computing over ten years ago is a tribute to the accelerated power of the networked individual. As part of its value proposition, any new network would have to offer the capability of accommodating and encouraging user generated content and feedback.

Additionally, the community aspect of building network presence should not be restricted to creating Facebook and MySpace pages—several cable networks, for example, have made investments in acquiring several online newsletters to aggregate communities of special interest in the arts, music, and culture, and to create cross-promotional programming opportunities for web content to be broadcast on television and vice versa.

The introduction of time shifting behavior through the use of PVRs and TIVO as well as VOD are all reflections of personalization and the ability of the user to interact with media on demand.

All of the above transformations caused a sea change shift in the nature of media distribution. From peer-to-peer and social network sharing to crowdsourcing and user generated content, the inmates are now running the asylum and distribution that was once in the hands of media companies is now being given a run for the money by game-changing “user distributors”. The trend toward distributed authority of the flat organizational model where decision-making authority is at the edge is just one corporate reaction to this new empowerment of the individual and what Malcolm Gladwell calls “outliers.” Even savvy brands like Amazon have been caught up in the grassfire of a negative blogging campaign, hence, the evolution of the corporate blog as pre-emptive brand strategy.

While conventional wisdom proclaims that the dominant forces that will transform media will come from the introduction of new technologies and changes in the means of distribution, the most powerful transformative agent of change will be a coming generational shift. First signs of such a shift were evident in the advent of multi-tasking and new television formats such as MTV’s experiments with three ten-minute segments making up a half-hour show as well as Nickelodeon’s innovating a programming wheel of five cartoons within a half-hour block of a single show. The shift from the large plasma and HD screen digital surround sound of the home movie theater to the small screen and mp3 of the web and mobile phone are another sign of differing generational appetites in the consumption of media.

The power of web video is also a reflection of how different generations are utilizing media. Six billion videos were viewed on YouTube in January, 2009. Twenty hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Between 150,000 and 200,000 videos are uploaded daily. The growth of short-form video viewing answers a seemingly insatiable appetite among younger audiences for entertainment. The challenge facing traditional long-form and series is that the new viewer is a non-sequential consumer who is apparently less interested in these kind of formats than in instant gratification of what’s hot right now and it does not have to be scripted, professionally produced “broadcast quality”.

There is also a short-form video revolution going on. The single-most influential trend influencing the creation of content is the evolving short-form program format. If YouTube is any indicator, the audience of the future will prefer short attention span theater to the half-hour and hour formats that still dominate traditional broadcast. The average YouTube video is two-minutes and forty-six seconds in duration.

The growth of Twitter should be seen as another indicator for the coming power of snack size media. 70% of its current users joined in 2009 demonstrating a 1400% growth between February, 2008 and February, 2009. An average of twenty million tweets are sent every day with 3.8 billion sent to date.

Short-form program formats are not new and have been around since the 1970’s and 80’s when program insert series such as “This Day in Sports” and “Today in Music History” were successful informational commercials of sixty-seconds in length. But, these formats are a very distant cousin to webisodes and mobisodes that last only several minutes. ABC’s first online experiment in offering its primetime hours for download offers another illustration of how the offline and online worlds differ. As measured by Nielsen, there were some forty million downloads of which the average time viewed was two-minutes. Clearly, the remote control’s cousin is the click of a mouse away.

Social media can now be leveraged to reach target audiences in their native, online environments. The power of online video syndication is that it can reach beyond video networks such as YouTube and Facebook, and engage users through tactics such as community and blogger outreach, featured video portal placement, content seeding, social applications, game development, and other methods. The potential reach of video syndication networks like dailymotion.com, metacafe.com, vimeo.com is expansive.

Certain applications now offer the capability of identifying influencer activity on the Web. Usually, web site and blogs are ranked by popularity. Increasingly, tools like those provided by Buzzlogic and Visible Technologies offer the ability to actually reverse engineer networks of specialized interest. By identifying such nodes of audience concentration that appeal to a particular media brand’s core value proposition and program content, it would be possible to reverse engineer an online component to a vertically integrated network.

Mobile is the fastest growing channel in the world, offering new and exciting opportunities for marketing, advertising and content distribution. Mobile provides a conduit between media outlets, entertainment, e-commerce, and consumers. Mobile data capable phones reached a social tipping point with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

The market for mobile video content is growing at a rate of 20% a month. While they were only introduced a year ago, video ringtones and video screensavers account for approximately 10,000 downloads a month at a price point between $2.50 and $4 (on Tier 1 North American Carriers). Given consumer adoption rates for mobile data and the fact that the music download market still accounts for five million downloads per month (between $2-3), all next generation of handsets will support this type of content and will drive the expansion of this market. As such, the media network of the future will be well advised to create a mobile beach-head to take advantage of the platform for distribution of its content.

What kind of world is this transformative media environment creating? I have written before in this blog ("Is Personalization Really That Personal?", "National Nano Memory", "It's A Short Form World After All", "Why The Web Is Like A Time Machine") about the fact that there is no free lunch and that the allure of new technologies always carries a price, particularly in what may be lost as the result of supposed advantages in efficiency, ease of use, choice, and other features dangled like shiny carrots by new gadgetry. Automation and its impact on the declining of the Industrial Age workforce is one example of the trade-off in human terms that "better machines" have wrought. If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. Or as the Zen Buddhists would say, "Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise."

Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who coined the term “virtual reality”, has written a new manifesto which is essential reading called “You Are Not A Gadget”, which describes at length the perils invited by our increased love affair and reliance on technology, particularly the Internet and social media. Hardly a neo-Luddite, Lanier is not the kind of voice in the wilderness that one might expect to sound the Cassandra call to action and for conscious use of technology. Maybe that’s what makes his beautifully written argument so compelling. Or as Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs once so poetically put it, “I now pronounce you man and…machine.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, Rudolf Steiner predicted that by the end of the century a non-biological lifeform would develop in parallel through a parasitic relationship with biological life. I think that he was prescient in describing our present day silicon-based lifeforms. Anyone who has sat at a keyboard for hours or been pulled by the strange attractor of the Blackberry keypad or iPhone apps knows that feeling of losing control and all sense of time. We might ask in our spare time in between Facebook and texting, who is actually being served here? Are we the digital canaries in the proverbial silicon coal mine?

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the singularity theory (the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence), remembering that the HAL 9000 onboard computer was incapable of lying in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and that he failed when he became paranoid through cognitive dissonance when his instructions were compromised by conflicting instructions as supplied by the NSC and White House—“people who lie for a living”—according to the script in Arthur C. Clarke’s sequel, "2010: The Year We Make Contact."

Perhaps the singularity is not near as Ray Kurzweil has supposed in his recent tome, but is already here. At least, I think that HAL probably had wisdom beyond his circuits when he said, “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” ...OK, already. I hear you. So, why not get off my soap box and let’s just change the channel and see what else is on—after all, we have over five-hundred channels now on TV at least and we’re just getting started on the Web and mobile…

Special thanks for Liz Gebhardt—http://www.thinkingoutloud.com—for the YouTube and Twitter metrics.

FINDING THE CENTER

Where are you? It seems like a simple enough question at first. I’m here writing at home. I’m at work. I’m in a meeting. In LA. In the USA. In my hometown at First and Main. And if in doubt, there’s always GPS. But, are any or all of these answers really accurate ways of describing place in space/time? We may have come a long way locating ourselves in the last several centuries. Amazingly enough, it had been in estimated in 1740 that there were as few as 120 countries that were actually mapped in the entire world according to David Grann in “The Lost City of Z.” That left enormous regions of its landmass labeled with the captivating, but elusive description as “unexplored.”

Not only were there famously areas of the sea that were illuminated on early maps with dragons, sea serpents, and other monsters, but most people—whether navigators or just ordinary landlubbers—believed that if you ventured too far into the unknown, you would fall off of the edge of the world. The invention of the chronometer in 1773 did a lot to help maps along by providing the key measure of time.

Prior to that, the so-called Age of Discovery and Exploration may not have seemed so grand to the “discovered” tribal peoples who were doing quite well, thank you, without the intrusion of the conquering, gold and spice seeking boat peoples. It did much, however, to cure the notion that you’d fall off of a flat earth into the abyss. But, it wasn’t until the expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century that the lands and wild countries of the planet were finally mapped.

Google Earth has recently “mapped” areas that persisted as “unknowns”—like an area the size of Texas described in the best-selling, “Morning of the Magicians”, between Amazonian tributaries, the Xingu and Tapajos Rivers that was unmapped going into the 1950s—or the infamous location of Area 51, the top secret test facility whose existence has been denied by the US Air Force, now “mapped” using handy Soviet Spy photographs. Still, our recent sense of security in thinking that we know where we are with such tools as Google Earth and GPS may turn out to be false.

A recent NY Times article about a new scientific study indicated that the increased use of GPS is having a deleterious impact on the spatial abilities of humans. It may be one more example of how McLuhan’s celebrated perspective that saw media and technology as “extensions of man” extending the senses, are having quite the opposite effect. Could it be that sensory systems developed thousands of years ago are being deadened by the use of technology?

The difference between men and women’s sense of direction, for example, is the subject of many jokes and popular culture. Evolutionary biologists offer theories that there may be a basis in truth to differing navigational abilities of the sexes. They have theorized that women--who were stuck back in the cave raising clans and cooking--did not need to develop the same spatial acuity as their hirsute, club carrying mates who needed to remember geographical features for hunting purposes.

Our world--where we may be losing our compass, so to speak--is sharply contrasted by the tribal world. Take for example, the American Plains Indian ceremony known as the “smoke sacrifice.” First of all, the so-called “peace pipe” was the real deal. The tobacco that filled those pipes was the uncured variety, a highly potent hallucinogen. This is precisely why it spawned so many peace treaties that were not remembered by white men in the hungover hazy light of the following day. It is also the reason why tobacco was used ceremonially by native smokers in contrast to its convenient, addictive commercial form today.

The Smoke Sacrifice is illustrative of an orientation in the world and cosmos that tribal peoples have shared throughout time. The cardinal directions were not just points on the compass, but sacred points of origin which were associated with spirits, colors, animals, and other significators that defined the human world as allies. Anthropologist Dennis Tedlock has aptly called this orientation, specifically with respect to the Maya as “finding the center.”

The first puff of smoke that a modern cigarette, cigar or pipe smoker takes is usually pulled greedily into the mouth and lungs. The Smoke Sacrifice is initiated when the smoker blows six puffs of smoke in an offering toward the cardinal points on the compass and to the axis described by the nadir and the midheaven which runs up the spinal column. When this has been accomplished, the final puff is inhaled, thereby completing the ceremony by establishing the smoker as the center of the universe circumscribed by the sphere of smoke. In effect, one’s heart becomes that nodal, essential point of being. The ceremonial smoker is centered by paying respect to the sacred directions and is ready to move out into greater world of creation that always surrounds us wherever we are. Now that is GPS!

So, the next time someone asks, “Where are you?”, think on how many responses a truly accurate answer might have—because even without the smoke, the heart is our only guide in finding the center which is everywhere that we find consciousness.

THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

Last month, while American consumers were being prepped and primed by media outlets and marketers for the 40th Anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, another anniversary was taking place at the beginning of August. I don’t want to be some kind of killjoy and take away from the nostalgic image blitz of stoned-out youth frolicking in the New England mud bathed in the electric rain of rock gods and demigods, many of whom I still worship. But, as Frank Zappa once said to me, “The world will end in nostalgia,” so it seems logical that I can’t get thoughts of August 6, 1945 out of my mind. Maybe it’s because the hills above my house have been on fire for the last several weeks, raining down ash and producing atmospheric conditions around us that resemble the smoky, yellow eclipse lit haze of some other planet. Driving back home from San Diego, I could see the giant mushroom cloud pluming over Pasadena from over a hundred miles away.

At 8:15 AM on that August morning 64 years ago, a B-29 bomber dropped a single-bomb with the charming nickname “Little Boy” over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On August 9, a second bomb called “Fat Man” was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. These particular targets were chosen according to Stephen M. Younger in his book, "The Bomb: A New History", because they “had not suffered from the devastating bombing raids that had reduced Tokyo and other cities to little more than smoldering ruins. The hills that surrounded Hiroshima and Nagasaki would focus the effect of the blast, further increasing the destruction caused by the bombs.”

“Little Boy” dropped in forty-three seconds to nineteen-hundred feet above Hiroshima and exploded. The height had been chosen “to maximize the damage produced by the expanding nuclear fireball.” Its detonation created an intense flash that was called “brighter than a thousand suns.” Within seconds, an immense shock wave and firestorm swept the city destroying everything in its wake including some 68,000 buildings. Three days later, as Younger reports, “the United States demonstrated to Japan and the world that Hiroshima was not a one-off event” when it completely destroyed Nagasaki with a second atom bomb.

I heard a recent, breathless radio promo for a show called “Surviving Disaster” on Spike TV that described it this way—you have 20 seconds to cover your eyes and about 20 minutes to take cover from radioactive fallout. The promo ponderously warned, “It’s not a question of whether it will happen, but when.”

Just how the show is drawing the conclusion of inevitability is unclear, but the leap from the catastrophic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to nuclear attack as entertainment value is a mind-boggling, but not necessarily American impulse. Godzilla is not only an iconic film monster, but is held in Japan with an almost religious reverence. One reason why is that Godzilla, Rodan, and other Japanese monster movies have been seen as a symbolic, subliminal response, inspired by the Japanese experience with the atomic attacks. Godzilla awakes in the film as the result of French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Despite its grave delivery, the Spike promo is completely removed from the terrible reality of what actually occurred in August, 1945.

Estimates for the death toll from both bombings has been estimated at well over one-hundred times the casualties from the 9/11 attacks. This figure includes an estimated from sixty-six-thousand to one-hundred-forty thousand instant deaths in Hiroshima and an estimated forty-thousand in Nagasaki. We know that in the immediate five years following, one-quarter of a million more died with untold hundreds of thousands more in the decades following the bombings from radioactive related diseases. But statistics remove us from the human factor of disaster and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is beyond human imagination.

Hiroshima has been called “the exclamation point of the twentieth century”, but two perspectives from survivors are more than enough to tattoo the pictures forever in one’s brain. Stephanie Cooke tells of one in her recent book, "In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age": “…a nineteen-year-old girl who survived reported a remarkable sight near a public garden. Amid the bodily remains, burned black and immobilized at the moment of impact, there was, she said, ‘a charred body of a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her arms.’”

In "Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World", Tom Zoellner describes how Japanese writer, Yoko Ota, remembers the white flash as “the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world.”

Zoellner continues, “Even President Truman, who was famously coolheaded about the decision to use the weapon on Japan, wondered in his diary if the act he would soon authorize was ‘the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous ark.’"

When news of the successful atom bombing of Hiroshima reached the team of scientists behind its invention in Los Alamos, New Mexico, “there was a general excitement, and scientists rushed to book tables at Santa Fe’s best restaurant to celebrate the achievement. But that night’s party on the mesa was a grim affair. Almost nobody danced, and people sat in quiet conversation, discussing the damage reports on the other side of the world. When J. Robert Oppenheimer left the party, he saw one of his colleagues—cold sober—vomiting in the bushes.”

The decision to drop the atom bomb is a controversy that will remain unsettled and is examined at length by Richard Rhodes in his books about the nuclear age. One school of thought is that the Japanese doctrine of "defense at all costs" was a bluff; another indicates that they had already expressed a willingness to negotiate a cease-fire through Russian back channels. According to the Russians, the atom bomb was secondary and it was the declaration of war against Japan by Moscow that was the deciding factor in ending of the war.

In her illuminating book, "Troubled Apologies: Among Japan, Korea, and the United States", Alexis Dudden describes both US media censorship and outright fabrication about the bombing of Japan as propelling “the basic story line for Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Americans would come to cling to as history at the cost of learning what was actually going on: ‘the bombs saved lives.’…the US government and its officially placed mouthpiece at the New York Times established as a fact that no one in Hiroshima had died from radiation and that only foreign lies (British or Japanese) suggested otherwise.”

The New York Times’ science writer who was an eyewitness over Nagasaki, William “Atomic Bill” Laurence, won a Pulitzer Prize for his early, evangelical coverage of atomic weapons. His account of the event demonstrates that he was not only distant from the event by mere altitude, but close to some kind of atomic rapture:

“Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural…Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

Historically, not everyone was sold. Harvard physicist George B. Kistiakowsky witnessed the Trinity test in July, 1945 only several weeks before the atomic bombing raid on Japan and called it, “the nearest thing to Doomsday that one could possible imagine. I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond—the last man will see what we have just seen.”

John Hersey was the first to write of the human factor in his long August 1946 New Yorker essay profiling regular people on the ground in Hiroshima. The day after the Trinity test sixty-eight scientists at the University of Chicago signed a confidential letter to Harry Truman urging him not to use the device. They wrote presciently: “If after the war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of this new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation.”

Leo Szilard, the scientist who persuaded his colleagues to write the letter, and the man who conceived of the chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project later referred to himself and other atomic scientists as “mass murderers.”

“Why did they have to go and drop another?" a wife of one of the atomic scientists asked upon hearing the news of Nagasaki. “The first one would have finished the war off.” Short of an apology, this kind of self-reflection on the part of civilians as well as the scientists—including Einstein—who were behind the creation of the Atomic Era, leads one to wonder what we can do to make amends today.

There is a long tradition—if not ritual—of apology in Asian cultures. It is one that seems to have been adopted for some time by Americans, who are now accustomed to press conference scenes where morally straying politicians apologize to the nation, their constituents, wives, and families for errant behavior. More recently, other kinds of less predictable apologies have appeared.

Last February, the Senate apologized to Native Americans for atrocities committed during the opening and seizing of their lands. On July 29, the US House of Representatives issued a resolution formally apologizing to black Americans for slavery one-hundred forty years after its abolition. After forty years of silence, at a local Columbus, Georgia Kiwanis Club on August 21, Lt. William Calley (the only Army officer convicted of the 1968 My Lai massacre), in an extraordinary and unexpected apology, expressed his “remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."

Twenty years ago, Congress apologized for the World War II interning of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Why not Hiroshima? None other than the author of "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World" said the following in 1995: “The United States owes no apology to Japan for having dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Bill Clinton was just towing a bipartisan line.

Alexis Dudden traveled with President George W. Bush on a trip to Tokyo during 2002 on a mission, among other things, to thank the Japanese government for its support of the War on Terror and to launch plans to celebrate the 150-year anniversary of Japanese-American relations. Dudden relates that she “had an unexpected, theatrical education in one of the trajectories of Hiroshima’s history during (a) routine walk.” As she passed down the main boulevard near the Japanese Parliament and National Library, “several of the notorious black trucks popular with the country’s extreme right wing passed…with the lead van blaring the customary martial songs. This was not unusual, but the message pouring from the loud speakers stopped me flat—‘Welcome to Japan, President Bush of the United States of America! Apologize for Hiroshima and enjoy your stay!’”

She goes on to say, “Throughout the recent era of apologies all around—or maybe in spite of it—there has remained one matter on which Washington holds firm, regardless of who is in office—there will be no apology for Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”

Originally, the lowest projection of how many American lives would have been saved by avoiding a costly land invasion of Japan by using the bomb was twenty-six thousand casualties. Dudden observes, “Americans transferred what happened—the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—for an event that never took place—the proposed land invasion of Japan—to stand in for history. By the early 1950s, the imagined truth was American myth, and in 1959, President Truman wrote for the record that the bombs spared 'half a million' American lives, and that he 'never lost any sleep over the decision.' Over the years…American storytelling has come to count the number of ‘saved’ Americans as high as 1 million. (This number appeared squarely in David McCullough’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Truman, despite abundant evidence to the contrary at the time.)”

Apologies are more complicated than they appear. Dudden’s book details the way that formal apologies can be used to cloak deeper strategy to avoid restitution and financial penalties. As to the US government’s obdurate stance, Dudden concludes, “The chronic inability to confront how America’s use of nuclear weapons against Japanese people in 1945 might constitute the kind of history for which survivors would seek an apology, let alone why the use of such weapons might represent a crime against humanity, is sustained by Washington’s determination to maintain these weapons as the once and future legitimate tools of the national arsenal. It is not at all by chance that among weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological—only nuclear weapons are not prohibited by international law. Were it otherwise, the likelihood that the history of America’s use of them on Japan would generate changes of attempted genocide against the United States or Harry Truman would increase exponentially.”

Last April, President Obama made strong statements during a visit to Prague about his commitment to abolish nuclear weapons. His speech called for an international summit on the subject by the end of the year. The Mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba said, “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act, defining U.S. responsibility in a historical context." Akiba asked Obama to hold the summit in Hiroshima.

Our family had a Japanese exchange student staying with us for a year. After she had been living with us for a while, I felt compelled to speak with her about her hometown of Hiroshima and to apologize in my own way for what had happened before either of us had been born. She seemed surprised at my gesture and we spoke about the event in the abstract—her parents had been children at the time and spoke little to her, if at all, about their memories. I suppose that the American generation preceding mine who experienced the direct consequences of World War II might argue with my stance on apology citing my distance from the events that defined them, in many cases, for the rest of their lives.

I find it interesting that the word “apology” and “apocalypse” have the same prefix. Apology is said to be rooted in words originally meaning “regret, defense, or justification” and giving an account or story of oneself. Apocalypse is rooted in the Latin word meaning “revelation” and the Ancient Greek meaning “to uncover” as in to lift a veil. The prefix “apo” means “from, away, off”. Perhaps there is a connection between the act of apologizing and the avoiding of apocalypse—by this logic, if we lift the veil that hides our own truth, then revelation might follow. A year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the esteemed Indian yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, reflected on the discovery of uranium: “The human mind can and must liberate within itself energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction.”

With the first new ruling party now established in Japan in over fifty years, an appropriate overture to the new government from the American President whose campaign mantra was “change” should be to agree to hold the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in Hiroshima and take the world stage by opening his remarks with an apology to the people of Japan. Think about it the next time you are being served sushi—these people were our enemies? Or as Allen Ginsberg might say, “We are the Japan.”

IT'S LIKE, TRULY AWESOME, DUDE!

Maybe we should give the word “awesome” some rest. I mean, is there anyone else out there who thinks that the word “awesome” is becoming a tad overused? This was all brought into high relief during a recent visit to Starbucks. My tendering of exact change was met by a hearty “awesome!” from the barista. Shortly after, I heard about the first twitter from space—one of the astronauts simply messaged, “Launch was awesome!” Well, there are literally miles apart in the way that this exhausted exclamation was used in both cases and I think it’s probably quite telling.

Afterwards, I happened to be speaking with Peter Merlin, who is the base archivist at Edwards Air Force Base and works for NASA. I mentioned the launch tweet and said, “Now, you guys really do know the meaning of ‘awesome’—take those Hubble images peering back to the edge of time some 13.4 billion years and almost to the Big Bang—now that’s a truly awesome feat, dude.” He’d just seen the space shuttle take off from Edwards piggybacked on top of its tricked-out 747 ride, and for anyone who’s ever seen the shuttle take off or land—well, you know that it is an experience that dwarfs one’s self—and is truly an awesome sight to behold.

How did a surfer’s exclamation like “awesome” become today’s unequivocal, number one superlative? This is a word that was traditionally reserved for approximating the transcendental—historically, its use is far from common because it has been generally used as a description of the indescribable—the mystical, psychedelic experiences, seeing into other worlds, the streaking of a UFO over Roswell, New Mexico, the vast impact crater of a meteor near Winslow Arizona, the majestic heights of the Himalayas, perhaps the mile deep expanse of the Grand Canyon or merely the jaw-dropping sight of contemplating infinite space in the sprawl of stars in a clear night sky.

No matter, the adaptation and morphing of words into popular culture provides a fascinating window into the evolution of language, class structure, and the evolution or devolution of consciousness. Let’s not only take it out on poor “awesome.” There are some other offenders that are equally annoying--and revealing. Take for example, the word “like”, another vastly overused, overwrought word that now has multiple uses beyond its original sense and some that no longer mean anything at all. That’s where meaning gets really interesting for my money.

Casual eavesdropping at a high school, local mall or watching any reality or celebrity talk show will reveal the word “like” abounding, crashing into consciousness in wave upon wave onto the shore of one's mind until it makes you submit to white noise like a jargonaut jingle—“It’s just like, well it’s sort of like unbelievable, you know—I’m like, well, he said to me that he’s not like, in love with me—like, not at all! And I’m like, if it’s not like, ‘love’, then is it like, a deep feeling, at least? Like it really hurts, you know. Like, oh, whatever!”

How did a word that was once charmed lower class Elizabethan popular theater goers when utilized discretely by the likes of William Shakespeare become the province of the stoned-out, 50's beatnik or hippie, watered down, safe for 60's TV version of the Maynard G. Krebs character in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" or 70's version of Shaggy on "Scoobie Doo"?

In this latter usage, it has evolved into some kind of verbal placeholder to mark time while the speaker scrambles to find the words and articulate a response. No one is saying here that natural speech is the same as prepared remarks—we don’t expect that our daily conversations demonstrate the same stilted flow as those based on using handy teleprompters and speechwriters. As such, our everyday dialogues are filled with placeholders of one kind of another—“um” is probably most common example in the US and UK, and one that is profiled in the wonderful book, "Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean" by Michael Erard.

Prior use of the word “like” (before it was appropriated by today’s teenagers), was traditionally as a preposition or as a figure of speech. In this use, it is still known as a “simile” and seeks to compare two unlike things in the reader or listener’s mind. Shakespeare used one when he lamented of the dead Julius Caesar, “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”

Perhaps what we are seeing in its new usage is the sad result of the modern mind becoming less capable of holding two separate ideas simultaneously. I’ve written before about the losses that can be associated with technology and its influence on behavior such as personalization.

Multi-tasking, much ballyhooed as an emergent asset of so-called millennials and other techno-savvy youth, also must have a downside if it is just a downsizing of the attention span of the user. And it’s not just restricted to exuberant digerati. Studies of cell phone use among drivers have shown that accidents are far more likely when activities are combined—in the case of men, they are 40% more likely to have an accident, and women 60% more likely to have a mishap—one of the reasons that many states now have laws about texting and handheld calling while driving.

Shortly after beginning to write this post, I bumped into Barry Sanders, author of the classic popular study of literacy and media, "A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age". His book provides an in-depth look at what we are losing as a society as we struggle to extract ourselves from the La Brea Tar Pits of daily media immersion. I told Barry that I’d recently become obsessed with the “awesome” phenomenon and was busy exorcizing myself through a blog post. He cheerily replied, “Oh, ‘awesome’ is a word from my century—the 14th!”

Consideration of the word’s origin in the distant past does shed some light on how far we’ve come in the evolution of the word. Actually, the first historically referenced use is probably before 1300 in “Arthour and Merlin” which was developed from an earlier age, when it was used around 1250 in “The Story of Genesis and Exodus”. Apparently, it had been borrowed from the Scandinavian, aghe or the Old Icelandic agi, both meaning “fear”. Interestingly, the Greek achos is similar and means “distress and pain”. Discovering its etymology, I was beginning to lessen my angst by hearing of its reference to pain. By Barry’s era in the 1400's, the Middle English word had spawned “aweful”, meaning “to inspire fear and terror” and by 1598, we see the first use of “awesome.” I was finally feeling like I was getting home.

But in 1997, I left my home in Hollywood and started working for a Bay Area startup. It was then that I was introduced to another word I hadn’t heard since watching Kookie Burns on “77 Sunset Strip”—the word was “cool”. Again, it’s another superlative and like so many slang terms and phrases that jump into youth culture—again, superlatives like “dope”, “tight”, “fat”—it comes primarily from African American jazz diction, where it originally described a genre as well as a state of artistry that audiences tried to mimic. "Juba To Jive", a dictionary of African American slang indicates that it’s been in use from 1650 or so, derived originally from Mandingo and entering into popular usage in England as early as the 1590's. By the 1930's, American gangsters and tramps were using it to refer to killing someone, or someone who was "a stiff". It also came to refer to a person who displayed “great self control”.

As the opposite of “hot”, it grew in the 1940's as an adjective to mean someone who was aloof, detached, unflappable and unflustered, but also a hip cat or chick who was as fashionable as the cool jazz, martini soundtrack of the times—as in “Cool, Daddy-o!” During the hippie era, it came to mean, “I don’t have any dope on me, officer!” as in “”I’m cool” or in the way that the Dennis Hopper character tries to reassure Martin Sheen’s in "Apocalypse Now" that Col. Kurtz (as portrayed by Marlon Brando), is “cool” despite the fact that his jungle camp is festooned willy-nilly with decapitated bodies and chopped off heads.

Perhaps more telling than common superlatives is another word in the commons, particularly among teenage vocabulary—“whatever”. Kind of the contemporary version of what The Sex Pistols once described in the chorus of “God Save The Queen” as “No future”, it takes the placeholder status of “like” one step further and can be seen as the ultimate dodge of having an opinion one way or the other. Like the color black that is favored by punks and inspired by the same boutique as The Sex Pistols, it is an expression of no color or opinion. What we may be bearing witness to is a media saturated generation with expanded options, information overload served in snack size bytes, but having no real power of choice.

In a fascinating piece by media writer, Paul Parton called "The Consumer: Adjusting To Internet Time", which appeared in Mediapost in 2007, he points us to what may be the crux of the matter: “Now, with the Web, there’s often no lag time between stimulus and response…an entirely new dynamic with significant implications for the way we create marketing communications and build brands…It’s advertising’s ‘butterfly effect’.”

The point is that previously, short attention span was a bad thing for building connections or creating a “cultural bond” between brands and consumers. Now, with Amazon's one-click, instantaneous purchasing app, impulse buying—long the province of convenience store counters and infomercials only—is now the industry standard. So, if advertising traditionally relied on what Robert Heath wrote in "The Hidden Power of Advertising" as “implicit” or long term memory, where brand messages work over time in the subconscious—is advertising now dead? That may be a subject for debate or at least a future post, but in this case, what is important is that, if the loop is closed so tightly in time, what becomes of the decision process if there is no lag time between stimulus and response?

What you get is not only “cool”, but another phrase I first heard in Silicon Valley—“cool stuff”. What exactly is “stuff” anyway? It’s in common use as a sort of come-on—as in “and other cool stuff!” As such, it sounds somewhat similar to “whatever”—just more…things of some non-descript, description. “Stuff” originally meant the kind of quilted material that was placed underneath chain mail in the Middle Ages—hence, it’s slang use as someone who is described as a “stuffed shirt”.

In 2005, there were a number of results published by scientists for experiments that showed human beings were still evolving. In particular, genetic research has led to conclusions that homo sapiens' brains have added or “selected” versions of genes over time that may have influenced cognition, and therefore, changes in capability of making what Terence McKenna once called, “organized mouth noises” or language.

But, as Christine Kenneally says in “The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language,”: “Not all change is good. As much as language enables us to control nature and keep our environments stable, it also makes possible the dramatic altering of our environment in unexpected and dangerous ways. The same language skills that promote technological innovations like water irrigation, road building, and air conditioning also produce the ozone destroying pollution and countless other ecological dangers of the modern age. Any of these phenomena could result in a sharp left turn for the human genome. And perhaps the same linguistic skills that give us science and currently some control over DNA, will lead to our own extinction in less obvious ways. Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world’s population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogenous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem…for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct.”

Perhaps we are beginning to see this homogenization factor in language. Is understanding a brand logo the same as identifying with a clan symbol or totem? What is missing in the former is a connection to personal as opposed to corporate history. The latter fulfills the need for story in the myths of tribes and cultures. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that marketers have been speaking for the last several years about a brand telling a story and emphasizing narrative in testimonials and association with celebrities whose endorsements come with their own attendant PR mythologies.

We live in dangerous times for not only our environment, but language, too—when text becomes a verb as in “texting” and now ‘twitter”. The June 11 edition of Daily Finance, just announced that “Twitter Breaks the Verb Barrier”:

“It may be reducing us all to a bunch of semi-literate, hashtag-spewing teenagers, but Twitter's influence on the English language can't be ignored, in the view of the Associated Press. The microblogging service has reached a new milestone, earning a promotion from noun to verb in the new edition of the AP Stylebook.

That means AP writers (and others who observe the news collective's style guidelines) can now, without shame or censure, use the phrase "to Twitter" in place of the wordier "to post a Twitter update." Tweet, the preferred term for a Twitter post, also works as a verb, per AP. The timing is appropriate, coming a day after the Global Language Monitor declared "Web 2.0" the millionth word to enter the English language.

Think having your brand name recognized as a verb isn't a big deal? Tell that to Microsoft, which chose the name "Bing" for its revamped search engine in part because it thinks the moniker will "verb up" in the manner of Google.”

Is complexity of language a sign of evolution or devolution? Latin, a highly complex tongue, has long been considered a “dead language”. Many languages are going extinct as discussed in an earlier post. With some six thousand languages remaining on Earth, about half of the world’s population speaks only ten of them with English the most dominant one.

According to Kenneally, every two weeks, the world loses another language. She observes, “When a language dies, we lost the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo or Tyrannosaurus rex. Unfortunately, even if we, and our languages, are still evolving, we still don’t know where we’re heading.”

The retired professor of physics at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, Freeman Dyson, is more optimistic: “When teenagers become as fluent in the language of genomes as they are today in the language of blogs, they will be designing and growing all kinds of works for fun and profit.” Now, that's a scary notion which gets me right back to the original meaning of “awesome”—what a terror inspiring concept!

If we no longer know the origins of words that we are using continuously, almost automatically, is something already extinct in us? And do words lose their new meaning if they are beaten to death? If everything is “awesome”, then what words can we use to describe the truly awesome? But, things could be really bad—I mean, we could end up like the Hopi people who have no tenses because they have no word for the concept of "time". Does having a really short attention span lead to time travel or living in the moment of instant gratification?

Seriously though, the Hopi were onto something truly awesome in what the linguist Benjamin Whorf called “Hopi Time” as are the Inuit people who famously have scores of words to describe what we civilized folks shrink wrap to “snow”. Who are the primitives now? Are we downsizing not only our vocabularies, but our consciousness by shrink wrapping language for convenience sake? Where is the expansive, future hybrid lexicon of the youth tribes in "A Clockwork Orange" when you need it? Maybe a reference to this tribal linguistic superiority can motivate us to dig down into our own war chest and find some new superlatives or perhaps we can just go back to using the word “great” or some other expression of exclamation. Now that would be truly awesome, dude...