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Mythic Brands and Dangerous Books
By Corvus | December 13, 2006
Seth Godin chatted a bit about the elusive marketing power of myth the other day (link). You may remember that some time ago I wrote (link and link and link) about our personal and cultural myths and touched on the fact that we, by and large, leave a lot of our myth-making to corporations these days. From Bond and Barbie to Mc Donalds and Pfizer, we seem to be content living in a mythic landscape of corporate logos, shallow consumerist characters (Friends, anyone?), and product placement.
This may seem, upon casual inspection, to be a completely unrelated topic, but Undercrypt also recently posted some very interesting thoughts on Dangerous Books (link). Given his particular bent, his focus is on tomes of a religious nature but I found several points he made to strike quite close to home. Most notable:
The DB is either explicitly or indirectly self-referential.
The DB is a prison of the mind. It reframes the experience of the world to conform to its own reference set (belief structure, point of view).
Of course, it doesn’t have to be a book per se, but it does need to fit the “container of information” role somehow.
As a Thelemite, I of course define “danger” as a loss of autonomy or identity.
The books in question are considered to be static objects. They do not self-modify, they do not adapt to their environment, they do not change over time – except as such things can be accomplished through written language.
There’s a certain minimum level of complexity that seems to be required. Interestingly, I don’t believe there’s a maximum level of complexity.
Initially upon reading his post, I couldn’t detach the acronym DB from database and reattach it to Dangerous Book. Given that databases are nothing more than “containers of information” however, it took on a particular (or should that be peculiar) significance for me.
Firstly, I’m going to reframe UC’s post a bit, to bring it squarely onto my territory. A Dangerous Book is a mythological atlas/compass/guidebook/dictionary. Encoded, compressed, and distilled mythology. This mythology is often the stories told by generations of people recorded against the eventuality that some future generation might drop the ball and let the mythology die out. Alternately, it could be a mythology crafted by a person, or persons, with an eye toward seeding a new mythological pattern within their culture. Of course, as is the case with the Bible, it might be a bit of both. I’m willing to agree (for the sake of argument) that the Bible was writ by the hand of God without the interference of man, if the person I’m arguing with will admit that every subsequent translation was writ by the hand of man, with more interference from their culture and psycho-social perspective than from God. Regardless, the act of codifying a mythic structure in the pages of a book is always done with an agenda and typically it is done, from what I can see, with an earthly agenda. Almost as if the book were a metaphor-sponge, soaking up the living myths and storing them in a comparatively static form where they can easily be controlled (by the keeper(s) of the book, naturally). As I said, a metaphoric map.
Secondly, I find the concept of book as static object to be highly suspect. UC is communicating that dynamic systems such as programs and people don’t qualify as dangerous book. But to focus on the delivery method of the text might be overlooking something important. Texts, particularly open texts, change. They change with every reading, they change with every passing fad, they change every new piece of information in their audience’s awareness, they change with every experience their audience has, they change with every generation. The power of mythology/metaphor is such that the very act of translating it renders it new, layers it with more current myth structures. This could easily be interpreted as adaptation and even self-modification, as the translator might have the purest of motivations and not consciously adapt the text with specific intent. Properly crafted mythologies… excuse me, dangerous books, are written to remain open to the experience of reading it and to have greater meaning and depth than can be foreseen by their original author(s).
So what do dangerous books and marketing myths have in common?
The goal of marketing is much the same as the goal of a dangerous book – to take a company, person, or product, or idea and encode them in some fashion that will overwrite an existing piece of the culture’s mythological structure. Google, for example, did such a good job at encoding their brand that I don’t think I’ve been the target of more than two Yahoo! searches all year, yet Google drops at least a dozen, and quite often many more, people at my doorstep daily. Apple has done such a good job at encoding Steve Jobs that people perceive him as much less an anathema than Bill Gates, despite many similarities of approach, and Gate’s staggering beneficence. The list goes on and on, from Nike to Martha Stewart. Marketing strategies are ever evolving, adapting, growing, self modifying, dangerous books, vying for control of our cultural myths.
Whoops. That’s it for time this morning. There will quite possibly be some follow up to this post, including one on the possibilities of Games as Dangerous Books.
[Edit] I just realized that I left the “Myth as Virus” sub title on the post, even though I didn’t have time to write that bit. Oops! Rather than mess with your feed readers, I’ll leave it in the URL, but you can expect the follow up post to explore that portion of things in more depth!
Tagged:marketing, Mythology. | 1 Comment »
December 18th, 2006 at 11:10 am
Oh, there are certainly a lot of important elements if you extend the definition, as you point out, and many of them are most definitely Dangerous. I think there’s more there than a difference in delivery system, though, I think they’re entirely separate classes of things.
It seems to me that what you’re talking about is akin to Story. What I’m talking about is something more like a Catalyst. Or, for a more poetic version, you’re comparing a host of pearls in their varying displays of beauty, and I’m poking at the near-identical specks of dirt that found their way into oysters.
I keep forgetting my <irony> tags.