If you’re only familiar with the Apple’s iTunes App Store — the sole marketplace where an iPhone or iPad owner can purchase apps for their devices — you may not be aware that, while Google runs an official app marketplace for devices running their Android platform, there are several other marketplaces where Android device owners can buy apps. In fact, Google has structured Android, their mobile operating system, to allow users and mobile device manufacturers a great deal of freedom when it comes to applications. This ethos that values flexibility and customization allows device makers to pre-install their own apps and, more relevantly for most of us, allows users to download Android apps from anywhere on the Internet that they please.

THE PROBLEM WITH BIG

Like the iTunes app store, the official Google app marketplace has been widely criticized as being difficult to shop. The number of apps available for mobile devices has grown so large that the simple but simplistic shopping strategies employed in both of these marketplaces are now insufficient to connect users with the apps they seek — assuming a user even knows that an app they might want exists. Only the editorially featured and most popular apps are easily surfaced for the consumer. For everything else, word-of-mouth, blogging, and advertising are the only real hope for an app to find its audience. An overhaul of these nascent app shopping experiences is long overdue. (I’m looking at you, iTunes.)

Additionally, because Google doesn’t stringently vet applications as part of the approval process, the Google Android Market has become known as a sort of Wild West. Malicious, buggy, or misleading applications seem to find their way onto the phones of unsuspecting users all too often. Apple takes advantage of this supposed side-effect of freedom to justify their highly-restricted-but-safe “walled garden” system. However, I am fairly certain it is possible for freedom and safety to coexist within an online community if it is given the right tools.

THE FUTURE

Since they don’t happen to own an operating system, Amazon’s mere presence in the app business suggests that there is room for a variety of storefronts in the app business — that apps, like cans of Coke, should be available not just in a Walmart, but from any store that wishes to sell them. I bet the Internet is full of app connoisseurs who would gladly evangelize their favorite apps in exchange for a little cash or a reward of some kind.

In the future, given enough consumer demand and developer support, opening a curated gallery of digital experiences for sale could be as easy as installing WordPress. Instead of just recommending apps, Gizmodo, New York Times, or your local Girl Scout Troop could offer their favorite apps for sale. A free market for digital experiences would be totally cool, and it would shift the power of app recommendations into the hands of those that do it best — friends, family, and brands whose values the consumer already sympathizes with. These specialized app shops may not have the breadth of apps that a super-store like Apple, Google or Amazon would, but they would be able to offer a trusted sensibility and inspiring curation.

Superstores are mega-profitable and efficient entities, so it looks like they are here to stay. However, besides offering low prices, they are rarely identified as delightful shopping experiences. In the real world, it was a long, slow, profits-driven journey from the neighborhood corner store to the mega mart. In the world of appstores, it appears that journey will be precisely the opposite, the power of commerce moving down from the big companies and out into the hands of the little guy. I’m betting it will happen because people will always demand boutique shopping experiences. One could argue it is this same love of the boutique sensitivity to purpose that has made apps a more popular experience on mobile devices than the web browser.

SEEKING EQUILIBRIUM

I believe e-commerce, like most cultural experiences, is constantly seeking equilibrium between efficiency and authenticity. The engineers of today’s Internet have plied the system with a lot of the former, but not so much of the latter. The contemporary shift toward more ‘social’ digital experiences is the inevitable result of the system trying to balance itself. Entrepreneurs and engineers now building software platforms and tools that give more than lip service to this shift will surely ingratiate themselves into the hearts and wallets of today’s humanity-starved Internet goers.

Apple is setting itself up as the Starbucks of mobile app retailers, increasingly offering a safe and efficient retail model tuned to a mass market scale. They are sure to remain a successful business that will always have its place. However, I believe Google’s Android will eventually see massive returns on the truly social experiences that are sure to result from the openness of the platform and their business model. For true authenticity to be expressed, you must empower the people not just as consumers, but also as implicit owners of a culture on all levels.

The revolution is coming to the way we buy, sell, and trade apps.

So, as membership grows and the service weaves its way into more and more experiences, at what point does Facebook become too big to fail? It is projected that 50% of all Americans will be registered on Facebook by 2013. At this rate, does it begin to make sense that Facebook should become recognized as an integral part of our digital infrastructure, and its social databases regulated as a public resource? Should Facebook’s social web be commodified; becoming synonymous with ‘social network’ instead of merely being one example?

Though it’s the goal of most every startup, the true indispensability of a specific Internet service is a foreign concept; The Internet is simply too young, too unstable, and too marginalized as just one slice of everyday life. Our demands on this digital system are growing, however, and we can look for precedent in other industries and commodities, such as water. Clean and available drinking water is something that most of us see as a common right. It would would seem ridiculous if landowners were allowed to claim full rights over the water in a river that runs through their property, charging all those downstream for the right to drink. If a factory was allowed to pollute a river, harming everything and everyone later exposed to the water, most of us would agree the government should step in and stop them. While Facebook may not be as necessary to life as water (for a few of us, at least), at some point the availability of a free, secure, and universal source of social identity on the Internet will be necessary to create the meaningfully connected digital experiences we all dream of.

The transition of property from private to public resource is never a simple matter. We have a system of patent and copyright expiration for intellectual property, eventually allowing brilliant inventions like Mies Van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair or Pfizer’s Viagra (which goes generic in the US next year) to be made and sold by any manufacturer.  However, patent expiration and its terms are always bitterly debated by any affected parties. The digital industry most certainly sends lobbyists to Washington to make sure their concerns are heard on this and other relevant issues.

Of course, one of the primary hurdles for any unified social network is whether or not most people would actually want a singular online identity. Facebook offers complex permissions and groups settings, but personally I use LinkedIn for all my business connections and FourSquare to inform select friends of my partying whereabouts. Most of my other social dealings online are either borderline random or totally anonymous. It’s too tedious to keep recreating a new social network every time I join a new website. So, if the alternative to a unified system is that only three or four of my digital experiences are truly social, it strikes me that unification will eventually win. We’ll just have to figure out how to address best practices for permissions and privacy.

With no one new in the industry able to find a way to compete with Facebook in the social arena, there’s a lot of pressure to figure out how to best socialize new digital experiences. Promisingly, the not-quite-finished HTML5 standard lays the initial groundwork of a social web by including tags to identify the author of an article and of any linked pages. The more we live our lives digitally, the more we will need to continue to develop HTML in this direction. I believe the users of the Internet will eventually need a commodified social tool — a standardized, extensible, protected, and regulated personal identification and address book. With 600 million users (and growing), I am curious to see if Facebook will eventually offer itself (or part of itself) as a candidate for this standard before the government steps in and requests regulation on our behalf.

UPDATE: As I finished writing this article, the Obama administration announced a plan for a regulated marketplace of public and private Online identity providers — perhaps resulting in the very vision I just outlined. If this initiative goes forward, I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is counting on being the front-runner, thus cementing their place at the top of the social-web hill for the foreseeable future. Still, we have yet to discover whether people will trust any identification system officially sanctioned by the government.

Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Renoir — paintings by the world’s most famous artists are on the auction block, for sale to the highest bidder. How high will you bid before the tension and bluffing get to you? And how good’s your eye — can you spot a forgery when you buy one?

The MASTERPIECE game combines the excitement of a fast-paced board game with the glamour and sophistication of a game that deals with fine art. Some of the world’s greatest paintings, illustrated in full-color postcards, are an integral part of gameplay.

The high-stakes world of international art — and the power plays of an auction — will entertain and enlighten as you join a particularly eccentric group of collectors who’ve all come in search of a MASTERPIECE.

The version of the game that I played, the original, featured works from the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, including Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, and even relative newcomer Jackson Pollock’s Greyed Rainbow.

The game was designed for Parker Brothers by master toy design firm Marvin Glass Associates (in an office located, at the time, just a few blocks away from the Art Institute in downtown Chicago). The firm had recently created the classic bug flipping game Ants In The Pants and, with Masterpiece, someone at the firm apparently wanted to take things a few notches up the cultural ladder. You know, in order to teach young people about something culturally relevant… something like the concept of art as commodity.

The cast of characters that you play in the game are gross caricatures of the wealthy “art collecting class”. You’ve got shady Barons, huffy intellectuals, and plenty of inherited or stolen wealth. I imagine in 1970, after a Hippie youth uprising and in the midst of a distinctly anti-establishment movement throughout the country, I too would be tempted to turn a few screws into the elite class — snobbish, self-possessed pricks throwing their ill-gotten money away on a bunch of old paint and canvas. Also, the way that the value of the paintings in the game get assigned randomly according to chance presents a similarly jaded viewpoint, and helps to reinforce the silliness and greed of the collectors themselves.

It is in this same spirit that contemporary artists like Andy Warhol were managing to both make fun of the art market and also to prosper within it. By 1971, Warhol’s Factory was openly taking commissions for silk-screened portraits at a price of $25,000 apiece, milking dough from these same tasteless collectors by giving them what they really wanted: pictures of themselves.

Artists would soon attempt to opt out of this system of commodification completely. So called ‘conceptual art’ was popularized in the 1970s, led by artists such as Sol LeWitt, who didn’t sell objects, but instead sold sets of directions that allowed his ideas to be realized by others. Ideas became valuable, simultaneously owned by everyone and no one. On Kawara made simple paintings that depicted simply the date of the work’s creation in white text on a black ground. He and others produced ideas and objects easily copied by whomever found them appealing. This body of work was a cry for freedom from a much more elite world of painterly talent, schooling, and expensive materials. Anyone with a love for ideas could feel free to collect without worrying much about things like money or rarity. However, the irony of this populist subversion was, of course, that the collection and subsequent high market value of such ‘immaterial’ work has served perhaps to alienate the general public from the art world even more.

In any case, games such as Masterpiece certainly don’t help to re-frame a dismissive opinion of art and its buyers. As much as this game no doubt served to introduce many people to beautiful works by renowned artists, it also primed them to understand the world of fine art with a veneer of contempt. Unfortunately, the “masterpiece” of the game turns out to be whatever random work gets randomly assigned the game’s only million dollar price tag. It seems sad that a whole generation of kids grew up with this slanted notion of artistic value, when they probably should have been taught that it is possible to have a real relationship with art — a meaningful and ongoing conversation based on their own ideas, empathy for artists and their historical environments, and maybe even a little wonder thrown in for good measure.

Back at the cabin, my curiosity got the better of me, and we ended up playing a round of Masterpiece. I felt a rush of satisfaction as I snatched up Mary Cassatt’s gorgeous The Child’s Bath, only to be immediately crestfallen to see that I had apparently overpaid. In the end, I must report that the game really wasn’t very much fun. In a real auction, you get to assert your love for a work of art by bidding on it. The amount you’re willing to pay becomes what the work is worth to you — what the work is worth in the real world. In the game, you are often forced to acknowledge that your love was misguided when the work turns out to be worth half of what you paid for it. Your confidence in your own taste and in the artist is deflated, and you try to trick someone else into taking the ‘dud’ off your hands. This dynamic kinda sucks.

Everyone at the table agreed that the game was lackluster, but we also saw promise in the basic premise of an art collecting game. If I were to redesign the game, I might encourage players to defend or steal the works they love from other players, designate their own ‘masterpiece’ to pursue, or at least award a bonus to the biggest collection of art at the end of the game. Though the game would still be unavoidably focused on art as a commodity, at least it would also consider the artistic tastes of the players themselves and give a value to the art itself as something more than a stand-in for cash.

The thrill of the sale must never usurp the much more significant and meaningful thrill that accompanies an association with beauty, vision, and genius. That’s the real trip of the art collector.

Well, as it turns out, these little awards resulted almost immediately in a marked increase in the amount of time gamers spent playing a game. Without doing anything, really, game designers had managed to make their games many times more engaging to the player. Result: now you’ll find achievements everywhere.

In the location-based check-in application FourSquare, achievements such as the “I’m On A Boat” badge are awarded for, what else, checking into a location that happens to be a boat. Foursquare users actually will seek out certain locations just so they are awarded the badge. These badges don’t get the user anything except for whatever feeling of pride that comes with cultivating a collection of colorful badges. Yet, take them away and FourSquare loses a big part of its charm. Genius.

However, as with most things new under the sun — this same concept has been used before as a way to raise consumer consumption of a product. I refer, of course, to Panini Sticker Books — the addiction of my youth.

Panini stickers were sold in packs like baseball cards, except they came in practically every flavor of game and children’s movie franchise known to man. The special thing about these sticker cards, though, was that you were also supposed to buy a special book in which you pasted the stickers you collected. For each card in the set, an empty box with a description of the missing sticker taunted you until you managed to serendipitously purchase the sticker to fill it. You would keep buying these stupid little packs of stickers long after it started being repetitive and the fun was drained from the whole endeavor just so that you could fill all the empty spots in your book. As you see below, there were even large empty spaces that required you to find multiple stickers that added up to make a complete picture. This is the Panini equivalent of unlocking special levels in your video game after filling your badge collection.

Adding a compelling structure to inane and often repetitive collecting is basically ‘achievements’ in a nutshell.

What is questionable is that now achievements are being hailed as a legitimate way to gamify the world. Simple game mechanics like scoring and achievements are being tacked on to everything from websites to brushing your teeth (watch this great video of Jesse Schell at the DICE conference). There’s no question that it works, but it does start to seem psychologically manipulative. It might be the cheapest possible route to engagement, and, as such, is ripe for abuse. Experience designers should make sure that there are adequate rewards for engagement beyond obsessive collecting, or I think we risk creating disillusioned users and a real loss of fun. Time with our websites, apps, and devices is real time in real people’s lives that we’re borrowing to make a dollar. We should be careful we’re not imprisoning people inside the outmoded and lame parts of human nature.

If only we could get Foursquare badges to add up to a giant picture of Megatron… then we’d be just rosy.

Since I was a kid, when my dad brought home a new Apple LC III, I’ve been a Mac guy. Every computer I’ve ever owned, all six of them, has been made by Apple. I am typing this on a Mac Pro, my iPhone is resting in my pocket, and my little red iPod Mini is sitting there neglected on the bookshelf in the corner. I also have quite a history with Flash. I started out nearly ten years ago animating things in Director and Flash. I now design and build complex experiences in Flash using AS3, Flash’s powerful programming language. I respect both companies for the great user-centric digital experiences they’ve enabled over the years, but I’m stewing over the philosophical direction that Apple seems to be taking with their newest portable devices — a direction that could set the stage for some very lame industry practices.

I’ve taken part in many-a-heated debate lately over Apple’s campaign to exclude Flash from all of their portable devices. Apple’s position on the topic, as is clearly evidenced in a letter released yesterday by Steve Jobs, is that Flash is a misguided proprietary software platform that is best replaced by other technologies. He, and many angry bloggers, point to a still-in-development revision to HTML (the programming language that makes up the foundation of the Internet) called HTML5 as providing a viable replacement for Flash. HTML5 won’t be finished until an estimated 2022, but one of the features that is stable now is video playback within the browser itself. HTML5 uses a technology called H.264 (a video codec that itself is proprietary) to play high quality video. You can try it out on many sites already, including YouTube and Vimeo. But does this new technology replace Flash?

One of the big problems with HTML5′s H.264 video playback is that it doesn’t support ads, annotations, or any other “interactive” elements within the video player. It just plays back video. This is great for video watchers, and if all Flash did was play video, I would totally jump on the “Kill Flash” bandwagon. However, if content makers are unable to make any money from offering video online, many of them simply won’t offer video online. Gone will be popular sites like HULU that depend on in-video commercials to pay for the content that users can now watch for free. If television stations couldn’t put ads between their programs, all that TV would offer us for entertainment would be the public access channel. The whole reason TV exists as it does today is because of ads. People hate ads, but it is how the people that make the shows we love pay the bills. Imagine television with no Lost, no House, no Seinfeld, no Doogie Howser MD… it would be pretty sad.

Actually, the TV analogy is a pretty useful one to illustrate the real reasons why Apple would want Flash blocked on their devices. Picture Apple as a Pay-Per-View television company. When you turn on your television, you would pay $1 for each sitcom and $4 for each movie that you wanted to watch. If this system of pay-per-play was the only way that TV shows could make any money, and it was the only way you could get access to content – Apple would be in a very strong position indeed. They would be gatekeeper – deciding which shows you could watch – and they would profit from everything you saw on your TV. If Flash came along and offered television producers a way to get their content to viewers that enabled them to pay their bills by selling their own advertising – bypassing Apple’s Pay-Per-View system and basically turning your TV into the experience it is today – you can see very easily why Apple would be balk at the prospect. Getting back to the real matter at hand – it almost doesn’t matter that HTML5 allows browsers to play back video at a quality equal to Flash. No websites will be able to afford to offer you any decent content if they can’t make money from its consumption. This is why the HTML5 argument is merely a diversion from the real truth: that Apple needs to ensure that iTunes is the only way that you can conveniently access premium media on your iPhone and iPad. This is how they make money.

Now, this business decision makes a fair amount of sense – and I don’t blame Apple for making it. I would want to keep making as much money as I could if I developed a rad device like the iPhone or iPad. I would probably feel entitled to it as the maker of what are arguably the best portable consumer electronics in the world. However, since Google and Microsoft are both promising excellent mobile experiences that will allow Flash into their ecosystem, I think that this protectionist decision by Apple is shortsighted, and I certainly think that many of their public reasons for excluding Flash are disingenuous.

So – what’s the big deal? Why do I care if Flash is allowed on a phone or not? While we’re at it, why should YOU care? Like I said before, Flash isn’t just a video player. Even if you didn’t value the relative freedom of a system that allows content creators to make money from streaming video without charging the consumer – allowing both popular and unpopular video content to survive and subsist online – you should examine what else Flash has to offer. As it turns out, Flash is the most powerful and easy-to-use cross-platform multimedia-friendly software authoring tool that currently exists. This means that people can make a compelling multimedia experience – a game, a video player, an art project, whatever – and it will work on nearly any device that has a web browser. This is very, very good both for people who make and people who enjoy these experiences. It means that authors don’t have to develop a different version of their experience in a different programming language for every single device that a user might own. When the New York Times makes an app for the iPhone – only owners of an iPhone can use that app. The New York Times has to make a whole new app for someone that owns a different phone. You can see why this isn’t ideal for anyone else other than the phone manufacturers – each of whom are competing for a developer’s attention at the cost of all the other potential users interested in the content. For the New York Times, developing multiple version of their apps might not be a big deal, but to the average developer, it is a huge roadblock. Don’t make me choose who has access to my ideas – this seems backwards.

I chose to learn to make experiences in Flash because it allows me to make really interesting, fun digital experiences that are accessible to nearly anyone. Dreaming up and designing these websites is very enjoyable, but programming them can be quite tedious and time consuming. If the future of multimedia experiences means having to develop an experience for half a dozen different phones in as many programming languages (or choosing one and alienating everyone else), then I’m not so interested in making a project anymore. This is why we need Flash, or something just as powerful – so that we can make an app once and have it go out to all the available platforms. This is ideal for developers, and it ensures that users have access to all the cool things we make.

However, all these dreams of powerful web standards aside, we know that the real way that Apple makes money is by differentiating its products from everything else on the market. They need you to think that the iPhone is unique – that the apps that essentially define its functionality can’t be found anywhere else. The fear that we will lose out on some sort of compelling and unique experience keeps us paying a lot for an expensive phone with an expensive monthly fee.

It’s true that Adobe also benefits from people adopting their product to develop applications, and that it also represent proprietary technologies and unique experiences. However, Adobe makes their money by ensuring that apps made with Flash are available to whomever the author chooses, while Apple makes their money by ensuring that authors only offer their creations in one place: on Apple devices. I will evangelize the philosophy and practice of the former over the latter any day of the week.

My girlfriend bought me this plant, a striking Calathea Lancifolia, from the Volunteer Park Conservatory here in Seattle. If you live in Seattle and haven’t been, the Conservatory is a classic paradise well worth an hour of your afternoon. They have a few of these little guys integrated into their tropical exhibit, and it is perhaps my favorite species in a room filled to the brim with incredibly beautiful and curious flora.

Why do I like this little plant so much? Several reasons should be fairly obvious from the photos above. Besides the fact that it is simply a visually stunning plant — with contrasting green variegation, a gradient green, gently waved edge, and a bold purple underside — my favorite aspect is how the markings on the top of the leaf appear as if the silhouette of a different sort of plant has been imprinted over top. It makes me think of a plant wearing a plant suit, which amuses my easy-to-amuse mind to no end.

Speaking of plant-within-a-plant, the notion of self-reflexivity is also at the heart of this particular fancy. Within the realm of the arts, the aspect of High Modernism that I always respected was how closely form and philosophy are married. If you were in art grad school in the 60′s, you probably would have been evangelized to the notion that a piece of artwork is most true to itself — most correct — when all of its visual, objective qualities reflect both the reason for and action of its creation. This notion began with abstract artists like Josef Albers (below left) who was interested in light and color and whose painted forms echoed the shape of the canvas they were painted on. This idea reached it’s apex with artists like Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella (below right). Stella made works where each mark was the width of the brush he painted it with, and whose canvases where sized to efficiently house the number of marks needed to complete the composition. Pollock’s work looks crazier, but his dynamic sloshing of paint is just as much an overt index of the painting process. They are very simply paintings about the act of making a painting.

So, while it might be tempting to see Calathea Lancifolia as a particularly Modernist plant because of the way that its appearance echoes its meta reality as a plant, it turns out that there something hindering this interpretation. There is an alternate way of spinning the appearance of plant-like markings on Calathea Lancifolia’s foliage. They can be seen not as a self reflection, but instead as a mask. While there is a certain self-consciousness — a redundancy of selves — to the wearing of a mask, any deeper reality must acknowledge the falseness of a second face. Once the train of thought turns towards the issue of costume, we enter into the realm of the Post-Modernists.

Starting with Marcel Duchamp, whose Rrose Selavy and Monte Carlo Bond characters set his reputation as the early father of Post-Modernism, and finding it’s full concentration within the work of Cindy Sherman (above), using disguise became a means of subverting the rules and exposing the artifice of Modernist ideals. It’s fun to think of Sherman as the anti-Stella, as her work exposed photography not as a reflector of any sort of truth, but as an agent for boundless uncertainty.

So, at the the end of the day, I think that within my little Calathea Lancifolia, I get both a modernist masterpiece and a post-modernist schizophrenic. Either that, or its just a really cool looking plant. Only time will tell how this little plant is to positioned by art historians within the hallowed canon of fine art.

(plant photos courtesy of Sara Lawrence at Soft Dimension, Albers and Stella images courtesy the unexpectedly excellent Saint Louis Art Museum, and Cindy Sherman images courtesy the Internets)

It seems entirely natural for young people to yearn to be a little bit older. A teen may even heroize the high-school dropout that lives in a van down by the river (as Farley would put it) simply because the vagrant represents that most anticipated attribute of adulthood: the pervasive freedom to choose. Seeking control of one’s destiny is a central theme of life, but it is in the young that it is most exaggerated. Rock and punk music, promiscuous sex, flash mobs, driving fast, throwing big rocks into the river — they all exaggerate one’s presence in the world in order to demonstrate mastery over that world. We reject our parent’s generation so that we can feel like we are able to direct our own. All of this acting out serves as practice — so that we may take our parent’s place one day as the keepers of ourselves and our own families.

What do we do, though, when our parents are the generation of rejection, of revolution? What happens when we know full well that our parents smoked pot, rode glittering motorcycles, threw rocks at ‘the man’, had ratty long hair, and wandered barefoot through a field while Zeppelin echoed through the trees? How do young people rebel against rebellion?

Apparently, the answer is: by becoming our grandparents.

Yes, many young people are expressing themselves by appropriating the traditional European symbols of power and wisdom that their hippie/grunge parents fought long and hard to abolish. For men, this means donning earnestly dandy getups such as flannel suits, patterned ties, daintily kempt mustaches, parted hair, and vintage tattoos. We’ve also developed a real love of gadgets, and are proud to admit we work in real estate or *cough*advertising*cough*. Popular street fashion sites like The Sartorialist champion a return to the rolled sleeves, bespoke tailoring, and tailored suits your grandfather wore. Visit bastions of hip such as Brooklyn, Silver Lake, or Seattle and you’ll see these kids everywhere.

For women, the phenomenon is more specific. It’s all about the hair. Power is rarely defined within the fairer gender by appearing older than you are, but the photo collection above shows that even women are not immune from the mystical allure of the elderly. For young women, going gray is now sort of a cool ‘fuck you‘ to the status quo. Pixie Geldof (upper left) is a British fashionista, and Tavi Gevinson (lower left) is only 14, looks 65, and she writes one of the most read style blogs around. Doing the unexpected will always be a great way to get noticed, and it certainly helps to have good timing with these things. So, if you’re looking for a bold hair move — and bleach blonde looks too trashy and jet black looks too goth — maybe you should go granny.

So, what is behind all this preemptive old? Why now? The expression of power story seems key for the guys. Especially in this recession, the old adage ‘dress for the job you want, not the job you’ve got‘ seems to have struck a nerve in the population. Alternately, from the rebellious youth perspective, young people haven’t been left many avenues of taboo to explore. The internet has flattened time, in a way, to make the last 60 years seem like one big Best Of record. Old may be the last remaining realm that young people can claim as a new territory for differentiated self expression. I mean, you’ve got babies in skull T-Shirts, little kids with mohawks, preteens dressing slutty, and your parents are smoking grass in the den. Drastic measures must be taken! So everyone act now before your local drug store is sold out of mustache wax and gray hair dye.

EDIT: The New York Times, as usual, is right on top of this phenomenon. As I prepare to publish this article, I see they have a report on girls gone gray. Great minds think alike, it seems. :)

An outbreak of personal adventure has recently spread among my friends in the form of a book. Anthropologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, the true account of his ride across the Pacific on a balsa raft, is a page-turner. This little paperback epic is easy to recommend because the tale seems to speak directly to that innate part of people that secretly (or not so secretly) wants to commune directly with the unknown—and unknowable—forces of nature. Aligning yourself with this wild spirit just feels right.

The story of the journey itself— a tapestry of jungle headhunters, whale sharks, naysayers, miracles, and the sparkling beauty of a perpetual ocean horizon—makes this work a compelling one, for sure; but it is important to understand that Heyerdahl wasn’t just a thrill-seeker. He undertook the whole brine-soaked affair to prove to his colleagues that an anthropological assertion he had made in a paper wasn’t an impossibility. He staked he and his crew’s lives on his belief that the Polynesian Islands had been populated thousands of years prior by ancient peoples from South America. The story of Kon-Tiki is most interesting to me because it is the story of a man’s sense of duty to his ideas.

What Heyerdahl understood is that people must want to be a part of an idea before they will stand behind it. Time after time during the book, people offer their help with the expedition solely because of the “courage and enterprise” of the whole affair. So, what makes people get swept up in an idea? According to a study of the New York Time’s most e-mailed articles, stories which inspired a sense of awe in their readers were among the most viral of any in the paper. Likewise, those individuals most highly regarded in our society are those that seem to actually embody their big ideas; People such as Heyerdahl, Gandhi, Dorothy Parker, or even Prince, are inspirations to many. We reward their commitment with a deeper appreciation of their message. Other idea-men, like Steve Jobs or TV’s Don Draper, are most admired for being able to tell a story like no one else, even if we don’t always like their personality. Either way, the takeaway here is that storytelling, not just story, is king.

May we all make the journey that must be made to support the ideas we believe in, both in our lives and in our work.

—

For those of you prepared to see how it’s done, watch the Academy Award Winning documentary of Heyerdahl’s journey, made with footage taken on the voyage itself.

This may explain how we ended up this year with a large group of commercials that the New York Times and many others are calling misogynistic. However these ads may signal anything but a trend towards male dominance. If most expressions of aggression come from a place of insecurity, then ads that lash out at the world in the name of Men most definitely indicate a weakness in the squarer sex. I have read countless articles lately about how more women than men go to college, how it is becoming more common for women to earn more money than their husbands, and how young men are increasingly without ambition in general. If I were working in an ad agency eager to channel the minds of young men and identify where they are feeling vulnerable, I suppose the realm of gender dynamics might be a good place to start.

Does our gender really feel this compromised, though? Should we all be worried? The problem clearly isn’t that women are feeling more empowered to pursue their interests, but that men somehow feel divested from wanting any sort of responsibility at all. What happens when people follow their dreams, as they’ve been encouraged to do their whole life, and their dream is to hang out and watch TV? Even worse, do modern men feel like they are sleepwalking through a life of job, family, and responsibility, only to be temporarily reinvigorated by recreation, sex, and spending? I can only hope that these advertisements are off base — that they don’t really resonate with their intended audience — because they truly paint a bleak psychological picture of the American male. This first ad, for Dodge, presents what is perhaps the most depressing of all messages: life is one giant sucking compromise, but at least you can drive a fast car.

Dodge: Man’s Last Stand
Wieden + Kennedy, Portland


Bridgestone: Your Tires or Your Wife
The Richards Group, Dallas


Budwieser: Women’s Book Club
Cannonball, St. Louis


Dockers: Men Wear the Pants
Draftfcb, San Francisco


Dove For Men
Ogilvy & Mather, New York


Well, like many, I was disappointed with the well-made but annoyingly locked-down media consumption device that Apple delivered. I ranted for two days about how the iPad was more a business avenue than a computer. That it was a media buying appliance dressed up as a lifestyle device. Basically, I was pissed that the device encourages the consumption of media over the creation and sharing of ideas. The iPhone managed to support both consumption AND communication. I had assumed that surely the tablet would build on both of these pillars, while using its increased screen size and power to allow for even more creative ways of making and sharing. Portable devices are supposed to be social, right?

However, the avenues for getting media onto this machine seem to be few and far between unless you’re going through an Apple approved venue. The browser doesn’t support Flash, so there will be virtually no alternative music or video services online. Pretty much all the music, movies, and books you consume have to come through the iTunes Store. There is no camera, so there isn’t a way to share photos of the things you see or video chat with friends. There is also no phone, so you can’t send text messages or talk. Where’s the rebellious creative fun!

After grumbling for a while, I came to an epiphany that has put me at ease and lulled me into a state of acceptance of this, the next big gadget. We, the People, deserve the iPad. We deserve the inherent restrictions of our benevolent big brother Steve looking out for us. We’ve had more than a decade of wild romping through the world of interconnectivity online and we’ve proven ourselves incredibly irresponsible. We steal music. We steal movies. We steal whatever intellectual property we have the good fortune to hear about on Twitter. Our society is like a teenager who wrecks his parents car, and now we have to deal with the consequences or there won’t be a car to drive by the time Prom rolls around…or something…

So, the iPad represents a new Internet paradigm. It is a curated, safe world where the people are shepherded to the media experience they desire for a fair price. You won’t be able to do whatever you want or share whatever you want, but you’ll find what you’re looking for really quickly — and with a host of suggested related materials to enjoy later without ever getting out of bed. I guess I can live with that.