May 2011
Random Person at Party: So, what do you do?
Ylva: I work in media.
RPaP: Oh, that must be fun.

May 2012
Random Person at Party: So, what do you do?
Ylva: I work in media.
RPaP: Oh, that must be challenging. You know, [insert one or more of the following, albeit in much longer version: I will never pay for any kind of media again (+ apologetic smile). | My children won't pay for any kind of media, but I do like the smell of print on paper (+ equally apologetic smile, illogically). | Other people's children won't pay for any kind of media, and should be put down.]
Ylva, trying to break through rant: …. digital… exciting… opportunities… business models… consumer-centred… etc…
RPaP: So to sum up, challenging, very challenging, Armageddon basically.
Ylva: Actually, I was going to get a glass of wine, so…
RPaP: Well, you do need it.

May 2013
Random Person at Party: So, what do you do?
Ylva: I work in media.
RPaP: That must be…
Ylva, trying to avoid the unavoidable: YES! IT IS REWARDING, INTERESTING AND HIGHLY ENJOYABLE to be in media at the moment, really perfect for someone who likes doing business creatively, the internet and people making magic in equal measures.
RPaP: No, no, I meant to say challenging. You see, I will never pay for any kind of media again, my children won’t pay for any kind of media, and I hear that other people’s children now expect to be paid for being arsed to consume media.
Ylva, trying to break through rant: …. innovate… mobile… new… thrilling… disruptive, in a good way… etc…
RPaP: So to sum up, you will be out of work any day now. Perhaps tonight even, check your phone for messages.
Ylva: Actually, I was going to get a glass of wine, so…
RPaP: Can you afford that? Under the circumstances.

May 2014
Random Person at Party: So, what do you do?
Ylva: I’m on temporary release actually, just for the weekend. Normally I’m doing time at Hinseberg, Sweden’s largest women’s prison. 25 to life.
RPaP: Aha. What, if you don’t mind me asking…?
Ylva: It’s no secret. I had a nervous breakdown and killed a Random Person at a party, after s/he had pestered me with anecdotal evidence of the decline of legacy media and some misguided pity. You see, I used to work in media, and I loved it but this endless monologue repeated from various RPaP:s just made me lose it. So, I bludgeoned him/her to death with a triple magnum bottle of wine I had just ordered to make a point. And here I am, now.
RPaP: Oh. Well, at least it got you out of the media industry.
Because that must have been really challenging.

The Swedish Social Democrats have a new pin for 1st of May.
It’s a QR code.
It would be too predictable to write something ironic about this, so I refrain. However, here’s the fun part: The Swedish Social Democratic Youth League, in a brave act of resistance, made their own instead.

“It’s fine for them“, the Youth League’s communication strategist, Juan-Pablo Roa, sneered to media industry magazine Dagens Media. “But our target group is trend sensitive.” (To be fair, I added the sneering and italics to entertain you. Unbiased quotations is for journalists, I feel. I’m an account director, I have no conscience.)

Which is why, quite brilliantly, their 1st of May mark instead treats the idea of Social Democracy like it was thought out by a fashion editor on Instagram speed. “It feels, you know, really NOW with this whole vintage Solidarity/Olof Palme/Nude make-up/Holding meetings under bad fluorescent lighting/Being a young parent without being regarded as white trash/8 mm aesthetics thing. Can we do something with that?”

Yes indeed: a symbol inspired by a 1960 election poster according to the Art Director Simon Röder – who apparently is confident (and rightly so, I say) that in a culture of Constant Now, it’s not ironic that a blatantly retro sign bears the message “Politics in Motion”. “The Right stands still, but a society in transition needs politics that move forward constantly”, he says.

Now look at that. Instead of an uncomfortable symbol of reverence to the deity IT with a faint smell of “I should really learn how to tweet”, a sign created right from inside mediated, aestheticized, fragmented (digital) 2010′s culture. Aha!

The other week, I attended a marketing conference. Not one of ours, mind you. What I’m about to describe would never happen at a Bonnier conference, as we employ professional medieval style huntsmen who hold raised bows at speakers and panel members. Specially trained to detect the smallest indication of a marketing conference cliché about to be spoken (apparently, like diabetes dogs, they sense an altered smell from a person’s breath), and instructed to shoot immediately before the damage is done, they keep this sort of thing in check.

Some say old media companies will never adapt to the digital age

I realise that in these uncertain times, many other media conglomerates – not to mention other organisers such as those humble, struggling marketing trade organisations – cannot afford the luxury of archers. But can you find another way to make your speakers stop saying these things? Or by all means, they can say them – it’s not like most of these statements aren’t at least mostly true – but not like they are news.

These are just the tip of a pre-global warming style iceberg, obviously. But still, here are five statements you can feel confident that a conference audience with normal cognitive function don’t particularly need to hear again.

1.) ‘Every employee carries the brand’ | ‘You build the brand in every contact with the consumer’ | ‘Frontline employees are a brand’s most important asset’ | ETC

2.) ‘We have just seen the beginning of how digital will revolutionize how we live.’
[Particularly when it's illustrated by a screen shot of a very, very niche site existing solely because of a VC's folly]

3.) ‘People don’t act like they say they do.’
[By ethnographer slash consultant]

A panel.

4.) ‘It used to be that your identity was determined by family and the place where you were born. Now, it is a constant project through which you can construct your Self any way you like.’
[Again by said ethnographer]

5.) Any statistic on babies/young children and technology, designed to titillate, scare or shock a middle-aged audience. 

Thank you in advance.

There’s nothing wrong with putting on a sweater just because someone else says that it looks good. It’s a nice thing, having heroes. To always know best yourself is just limiting.
Madelaine Levy

Last year I wrote a Master’s thesis. It started out as a simple enough digital ethnographic study of 20-something consumers, and ended up as a long, winding discussion on the post-modern consumer as creator and destructor of value in the 21st century. To spare you from actually having to read its 100+ pages of academic prose (it contains the term liminoid), I have put its main points in reasonably short, reasonably to-the-point (I hope) chunks. Here you are.

Even in the aesthetic economy, a man has to eat.

The aesthetic economy in short

There is no shortage of on-line commentary that informs you that the future in general, and the digital future in particular, is visual. Indeed, bewildered men (mostly) have been repeating this catchphrase endlessly, trying to make sense of this scary prospect by making it some kind of a mantra. Look! this-and-that-visual-site’s selling for a senseless amount of money! The future is visual. And so on. Last week, our marketing director showed me the Instagrammed behind of Kim Kardashian. Look!

What this breathless excitement implies is that the aesthetic as a driver of business is something new. Which of course is isn’t. Instead, it can be traced back to the birth of modernity, where the modern urban experience featured a new stress on looking and displaying (department stores, etc) – and in the middle of the 20th century, this visual emphasis in consumption made folks like Baudrillard go raving mad with doomsday gloom. In post-modernity, you see, there is the process of aestheticization of everyday life. It means that every object – no matter how mundane – can become an object of desire. This makes almost any kind of consumption – from appliances to cutlery to food – to be a part of the fashion system, and the design and aesthetic of all objects becomes crucial.

The term aesthetic economy, which by the way is coined by a German by the name of Gernot Böhme, tells us that aestheticization has consequences not just for the consumer’s everyday experiences, but also for how business works. In the aesthetic economy, and now it gets a bit academic but bear with me, aesthetic, or staging value is a third kind of value complementing use and exchange value in commodities. Staging value represents those qualities that serve to ‘stage, costume and intensify life’, that is, to aestheticize experience. An increasing part of labour is now, according to said German and others, aesthetic labour that produces staging value – both by professional symbol producers (stylists, designers, etc) and by consumers themselves. Keeping up with these codes of consumption, being arbiters of taste and aesthetics, has traditionally been women’s work, explaining perhaps partly why it has been largely overseen as a driver of economic value over the years.

Admittedly, before visual blogging took hold, things had looked a little grim for aesthetics for a while at least in the Internet economy. Google and Facebook, for example, are both prime examples of companies that have eschewed aesthetics in the building of their brands, with the defiantly shock ugly Google logotype the ultimate symbol of technocrat victory. And with the Internet being seen generally as the cutting edge, you would be forgiven to think that the flimsiness of the Look of Things had finally been taking over by the rationality of endless Google user tests, producing endless rational ugliness in a data-driven future. The computer engineer’s wet dream, in fact.

So when Tumblr, Pinterest and the like put aesthetics on top of the agenda again, no wonder that some (again, yes, men) were a bit confused. For others, by which I mean myself, seeing the visual rising as such a strong force in the digital economy opened up a lot of interesting questions about economics, brands and consumption/production. Because even if the aesthetic economy has been a long time coming, the technologically driven disruptive power it has today makes it very interesting. Simply put: What happens when the value of the it bag lies in the photograph of the bag? And when the creator of that value is a consumer?

But the massive hype of the visual economy (like, unfortunately, so many things in the blogosphere) stays, no pun intended, shallow. Further commentary on the aesthetic economy limits itself to the Five-ways-to- formula that the collective consciousness of the Internet loves to write and read. (A personal favourite from entrepreneur.com: Should You Create Your Business Plan on Pinterest?)

What I felt were missing, however, were reflections of what a digital aesthetic economy really means – to the relationship between companies and consumers, to the economic power of brands, and to the way we view the world in general. Which is what I started to think about last year, leading up to a study where I interviewed and interacted with a number of 20-something owners of visual Tumblr blogs from all over the world. And what I found actually surprised me a little. But with a classic cliffhanger ending: more about that next week.