[Wittrs] the nature of an ad campaign
- From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2011 11:21:13 -0700
So in my posts on W's philo, I've often peppered or
otherwise spiced it with allusions to advertising.
Advertising grammatically mounts "campaigns" in this
culture, meaning it's not unusual or extraordinary to read,
hear or be the unwitting target of, some company's
advertising blitz aimed at recruiting more brand-loyal
customers or clients. A colloquialism for "ad" is also
"PR", short for "public relations". "Ad" is from "advert"
of course, but don't dismiss "advocacy" as a source
root for "ad". Also think of "vertex" when thinking of
"vert", as in "a radiating source of" (a message, a
broadcast).
The "meaning as use" meme reminds us of the many
operational dimensions, somewhat independent of
"denotation" (naive picture theory fits here), all of which
have to do with the "spin" of said particle, or fragment
of meaning.
Take "Pepsi" for example: sure it's a colored carbonated
sugar water, per denotative meaning, but it's also "the
choice of a new generation", with lots of expensive media
to back that up. Later, "Pepsi" seemed to get mixed up
in the Obama Campaign, in some kind of language game,
as I have discussed here before.
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=pepsi+obama
(maybe next time it'll be Coke?)
In my own line of work, I've been campaigning for Python,
a computer language. That may seem like a strange thing
to do, but actually languages in rather general terms
seem to include memes that facilitate their own propagation,
such as ways of teaching themselves to children and/or
encapsulating themselves in myths and/or codes.
In ancient Greek civilization, the Python maps to the
Oracle of Delphi, a venerable institution associated with
Athens, a city named for Athena, to whom the Oracle
pledged allegiance to until Apollo came along and took
it over (stories vary, some saying Apollo slew that Python,
but my lineage saying, no, she escaped to Nashville).
Athena's other friend and helper is Nike, and my region is
home to Phil Knight and the Nike company. Their famous
ad campaign, 'Just Do It', is an inspiration for the
'Python: Just Use It' campaign. Emulation is a sincere
form of flattery as they say, and here's another way of
keeping the family together (Athena & Co.).
Phil also got involved in the "Portland as ToonTown" vision
and brought us the company Laika and its debut movie
'Coraline'. http://www.laika.com/entertainment/
Another piece in this puzzle is the O'Reilly School of
Technology, and the ethnography of "distance learning".
Collaboration at a distance is a fine art in itself, a kind
of diplomacy. In having OST be a source of the 'Just
Use It' campaign (pro Python), we're opening the door
to companies using their assets and clout to freely
advertise tools of their trade, including free and open
source tools and aren't in and of themselves "deep
pocket" enterprises (it's a free computer language, go
download a copy if you wish: python.org ).
OST has links to Wolfram who in turn represents the
rise of Chaos Mathematics, or a new kind of science as
he calls it. Whereas cellular automata generate awesome
visuals, there's no reason to neglect a core discovery that
got the whole ball rolling in the first place: the fractal.
The Julia Set gave birth to Mandelbrot's and the rest is
history.
Other obvious ingredients were plainness and simplicity,
good Quaker values. I've played around with the theme of
Python Nation being good Quaker folk. That's just a myth,
but not entirely, as these communities do overlap. You
get Python users forming a kind of ethnicity, a science
fiction development most writers didn't foresee. But in
retrospect it stands to reason: Perl, COBOL, Scheme,
Python... these languages would come to represent
ethnicities in some degree, and not just in isolation but
in relation to each other. Like COBOL links us to Grace
Hopper, who, like Ada Byron, is one of our celebrity-greats.
Compsci tilts towards women, to needlepoint, to sewing,
as well as toward ninja pirates, or at least Python seems
to, perhaps for obvious mythic reasons.
Part of my work was to sketch a fictional landscape in
which these "tribes" might place themselves. The
Programming Republic of Perl, for example (not my invention)
sometimes shows a windmill in the background. As Ali G.
might put it, "that's Guido's house", it's near proximity
proving the intimate closeness of the Python and Perl
using communities (nations), Guido being our benevolent
dictator (we also have a chairman).
There's also a dash of patriotism though not too flag wavy.
The blank_canvas.txt is like the stars and stripes in some
way, in being all stars, organized in stripes, in a matte of
110 x 48 asterisks, an ascii art Mandelbrot Set once the
code has been run. The idea is the USA is like ancient
Rome in leaving the "working ruins" we call the Internet,
and its American Standard Code for Information Interchange
(also known as Latin-1 in this Unicode Era).
Here are three "billboards" already out there in GPL world
(Gnu public art):
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2011/04/just-use-it.html
(click on pix for larger views).
Kirby
Related links:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/3945853819/
(Athena with Nike and Python)
http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/gis_2009_workshop.pdf
(takes awhile to load but worth every minute if you're into
geek esoterica -- show's 'Guido's House', also shows off
fashionable Quaker garb (e.g. black hat) at Pycon). A
Fine Grind Production (commercial ending).
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