August 18, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I’m still planning to write some stuff about the CCT conference last month, but I just wanted to share something strange with you. As some of you know, I started this blog, and named it, based on the sense that what is missing from a lot of the discussions about marketing and consumer culture is a deeper appreciation for the sacred, even mystical, elements of marketplaces and consumption.

I’ve been writing a lot about this lately in my own idea journals, and will have a lot more of this topic to share with you in future blog postings and other writings. I think something is in the air. A number of my colleagues in England and Italy are researching and writing about the connection between magic (as in nature magic, paganism, witchcraft) and marketing. John Sherry and I have written a bit about neo-paganism and neo-shamanism, building on the work of anthropologists like Graham St. John (whose excellent blog is here).

We have barely even begun raising the topic of the mystical and magical side of markets, marketing, and consumption. Not in the “symbolic” or “consumers think this is sacred” sense, but in the way that Jung would write about the Mystical-as a genuine Force operating in the world.

This brings me to my little story.

Do you remember over a year ago I posted the original story that I wrote for the Brown and Sherry “Time, Space and the Market: Retroscapes Rising” volume? An unpublished science fiction story that combined my ethnographic research on Burning Man, but developed it within the literary framework of a science fiction story? Here’s an internal link to the beginning of that post on Super Hyper Ultra Post-postmodern Primitives.

Now, I had posted that post (and written that chapter, originally) as an illustration of the variety of resonant forms of representation that were possible in marketing and consumer research.

But something really pretty freakishly weird just happened.

In that story, written and submitted in December of 2001 (as John Sherry and Stephen Brown would attest), I set myself up autobiographically, as myself a professor in a Midwestern university (Northwestern’s Kellogg), but I cast the tale in the far future. I had been forcefully reincarnated using future technology, my consciousness and memory brought back into a physical body by people in the future who had need of my scholarly ability. These people, future groups of warring tribes, in fact, had need of my knowledge of Burning Man. Which sets up the tale and allow me to position my ethnographic reflections on Burning Man as a retroscape, a place that evokes the primitive past even though it also partakes in a timeless sense of the future.

Okay, that was kind of fun and I liked the result. Here’s the weird part.

I recently started reading the book Ilium by one of my favorite science fiction authors, Dan Simmons. In the book, godlike people in the future forcefully reincarnate a Midwestern professor in order to use his scholarly abilities for their own purposes.

Reading that was totally strange. It was almost the exact same idea of using professors from the past and bringing them into the future for the purposes of these future people. I was really struck by that Jungian synchronicity, that unexpected concordance.

Synchronicity, if you aren’t aware of the concept, was Carl Jung’s word for coincidences that are just too strange to be coincidences. Too weird, or repeating, patterned, or just so weirdly impossible that they give us a sense that everything in reality (”reality” or, maybe, Reality?) is connected somehow by forces larger than ourselves (cue Twilight Zone music, right?). It suggests a different notion of causality, a causality linked by meaning rather than brute physical elements.

The story gets odder.

As I’m reading this book about the reincarnated professor in the far future, I come across page 76. Some of the characters are trying to locate a strange, ancient woman, and are asking one character, named Daeman, about her.

“Where did you meet her?” asked Ada.

“The last Burning Man. A year and a half ago….Lost Age ceremonies never interested me very much, but there were many fascinating young women at this gathering.”

“I was there” Hannah said, her eyes bright. “About ten thousand people came.”

Burning Man? In the far future? I did a double, then a triple take when I read that, my heartbeat loud in my ears.

What the heck was going on here?

This was just a pileup of coincidences. A causal connection and concordance of meaning. Consider these facts:

1. Both science fiction stories are set in the far, far future.
2. The central character in the book is Thomas Hockenberry, a future-science reincarnated professor from the Midwest. My story’s central character is Robert Kozinets, a future science-reincarnated professor from the Midwest.
3. Both stories involve the idea of “posts.” In my story this is a post-postmodern primitivism that deeply involves the sacred. In Ilium “posts” are post-humans who sponsor a type of primitivism involving ancient gods.
4. Burning Man plays a peripheral role in Ilium, but a central role in my story. But this book is probably the only major science fiction book I know of that involve Burning Man at all. Burning Man in the far, far future. AND for some strange reason it occurs alongside the reincarnated Midwestern professor thing, just like my story.
5. The Ilium book was first published in 2003. That is two years after I wrote my story. There was no way I could have seen it before. The Retroscapes book was finally published in 2003 as well (with the edited, amended chapter, which had the science fiction elements excised.

Maybe the creepiest thing, the creepy coup de grace that sent a shiver down my spine is this. I started reading this book during the Olympics. Not intentionally, really, but maybe all of the Greek references in the book made it a bit more attractive to me during this time. It has lots of Olympian references, because it is about Greek gods living on Olympos Mons on Mars and an incredible re-enactment of the Homer’s Iliad.

I just went back to bookmark and re-read the sections on the story that I posted on the blog. And then I find Renan Wagner’s old comment post at the end of my story where he talk about being “in ancient Olympia” taking a course on “Olympic Studies.” And then he links up the Olympic Games, a giant burn, the lack of a marketplace, and Burning Man. Just like the book does.

This is just too weird.

Now, if you believe me that I did indeed write this story in 2001, and that I didn’t read Ilium before I wrote it, how would you explain these convergences? Doesn’t this seem to be too much intersection and patterning of meaning to be a random coincidence?

What’s your explanation? Am I missing something? Or is this just the way the universe winks at us and tells us that there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye?

Posted in Fandom, Burning Man, Mysteries and Spirituality, Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Science | No Comments »

July 22, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

So following up on yesterday’s discussion of the otaku, and a rethinking of what it means to be otaku, let’s first consider what else, besides entertainment industry products, can one be deeply devoted to, as an otaku?

Why, technology of course.

• pasokon otaku: a person deeply devoted to personal computers

• g_mu otaku: a devoted fan of the video game world

Then there are

• Wota: (pronounced ‘ota’, an abbreviation of otaku): devoted fans of pop media “idols”

Wota are media figure otaku, so called hardcore or “extreme fans” (there are those stigmatizing connotations again) of “idols,” who are heavily promoted singing girls.

Now we get to some marginal, obscure hobbies.

• tetsud_ otaku (metrophiles/ fans of subways/undergrounds)

• gunji otaku (military geeks).

The term otaku has been applied to music, martial arts, cooking, coin collecting, automobiles, and so on (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku). That raises the question, I suppose, of what it doesn’t apply to? Let’s ponder that in a different way.

I was especially glad to find the adjective term “otakki” to describe something that is okatu-like (note: Otaki is city in New Zealand; I’m talking about otakki here). I find otakki is a preferable adjective than the terms derived from the word fan, like fannish, or fanlike (or I’ve even seen “fanny). It just rolls off the tongue better. It sounds a little like “tacky” and not so much like “crazy.”

So consider now the expository remarks Gibson made in an April 2001 edition of The Observer, where he said:

“The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. . . Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.“–William Gibson, 2001

There is no question that the term otaku has just as many unfortunate obsessive and negative connotations in Japanese as it does in American-English. It was associated first with a sort of nerdy culture (the term originally came from a form of verbal address that fans adopted, almost like the “live long and prosper” hand-sign of Star Trek fans). Then it became associated with a Japanese serial killer who had a thing for pornographic manga and anime, popularly known as hentai.

Although he starts out talking about otaku from a technically-accurate and stigmatizing distance, I think it is very noteworthy that William Gibson ends up talking about them as us, about all of us having these otaku drives. It’s not just the avid anime collectors and the Star Trek geeks. Citizens of information and consumption world, we are in our daily lives collectors, archivists, cleaning our desktops, marking our favorite pages, filing our favorite pictures. Many of us are otaku, or at least, at times, otakki.

We have these needs to latch on emotionally, to categorize, evaluate, collect, archive, and share. Of course, otaku are also active creators-both of symbolic meaning itself as well as of new things of substance like written fiction, serializations, movies, and so on.

In fact, I think this is directly on target. There is a very otaku-like (”otakki”) nature to contemporary existence, enabled by widespread digital information and communications technology, is what is creating radical shifts in consumption, and causing the shocks to the industrial system of intellectual “property” “rights.” It’s behind a lot of the fan conflicts I’ve written about (many others have too). For instance, consider the recent Rowling versus RDR Harry Potter case I wrote about in a past posting. This legal case is all about classic otaku behavior. And the jury is still, literally, out on this one.

I’d like to propose here and now a redefinition of the otakki.
I’d love to move otaku, otakki, and fan based definitions away from some of the nerdy, geeky, stalker-obsessive, creepy serial killer stereotypes that hinder our understanding of subcultures. I’d like to suggest that we have much to gain in terms of general understanding in recognizes the universality of the otakki way in our contemporary consumer culture. I’d also like to suggest that we continue to broaden and think about a science of the otaku, a science of the fan, that recognizes the universality and also the variety of manifestations of the forms of personal and cultural engagement that we have with commercial culture.

Here is the definition—academic style.

Otakki is herein defined as a way of being in contemporary human society characterized by a deep emotional and intellectual engagement with the products of commercial culture. The mode commonly manifests in intelligent interaction with consumption object “texts” of varying sorts, with the collection of various objects or forms of information, with critique and sensemaking efforts, and its commitments can also extend to include many types of creativity and communal interaction. The “texts” tend to be linked together into systems or related webs of consumption—such as “coffee consumption,” “connoisseur lifestyle,” or “media fan” and have complex linkages to other lifestyles, consumption activities, and ideologies.

This otakki engagement with commercial culture manifests in multifarious ways. It can range from sporadic activity to nearly constant questing and discourse. It can span products that are allegedly functional to those which are entirely ritual or symbolic. It can engage culture that is exclusively local or it can expand to encompass global culture.

The key to otakki culture is in its emotional engagement and the connoisseur discernment in interaction with the productions of contemporary corporations and their market offerings as against traditional religious or cultural offerings, although in contemporary capitalist economies these boundaries between art and culture, business and culture, and politics and business, often break down.

[Okay, I can’t resist ending on an otakki note about William Gibson’s novel, Idoru. Idoru is a great novel that is far less known, appreciated and cited than Gibson’s blockbuster Neuromancer; Idoru offers some profound insights on media and fandom and the way they are linked into consumer and information culture (which are themselves, in Idoru’s perspicacious vision of our near-future, interlinked). One of the things I love about the trajectory of Gibson’s work is the way his vision of the future has moved gradually from the cyber-punk near future to increasingly recent settings with their attendant social satirizing views. His latest book, 2007’s intriguing Spook Country, was actually set in the timeless time of 1999, our future-as-already-past. I’ve already written about the consumption research revelations of Philip K. Dick’s work. In the future, I’m hoping to expand this into some conjecture about the consumption worlds and insights revealed by other speculative fiction and science fiction authors such as William Gibson, Olaf Stapledon, Osamu Tezuka, Frederick Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling’s works.]

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | No Comments »

July 21, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

I had the glorious opportunity to spend most of last Saturday hanging around Tokyo’s Shibuya districts.

I spent the morning in Ginza. Here’s a picture I like a lot of me with one of my wonderful hosts, Professor Junko Kimura of Tokyo’s Hosei University. We are at the Nissan Showroom in Ginza, standing next to one of the most coveted objects in the automotive fan world, the new Nissan GT-R, a very exclusive performance car that has been until very recently cloaked in mystery.

Although Shibuya is known more for its centrality as a location for youth culture and fashion, and Akihabara is often cited as a center of otaku-culture, I found that there was plenty in Shibuya to send my mind reeling about the wonders of Okatu-hood.

‘What is an otaku?,’ you may be wondering. Well, the original meaning of otaku is that it is the Japanese word for a fan, and the term has gathered many of the same unfortunate and denigrating connotations as fan has in the English language.

According to Wikipedia, a highly fannish undertaking of its own, which, in matters such as these (which involve fans of many stripes and non-fans talking about things fannish), and many others, is wrong more often than it is right, the term’s popularity in English is owed to its frequent mention and use in William Gibson’s 1996 Idoru.

In one part of Gibson’s Idoru, the term was defined in the stereotypical and stereotyping way: as a ‘pathological techno-fetishist with-social-deficit.’ The Wikipedia entry, of course, misses the context, irony, and satire in the remark, and seems to offer it up as an actual serious definition. Sort of like going to the dictionary and finding the word fandom described as “just a bunch of geeky, nerdy, obsessive losers.”

According to the Wikipedia entry, “In modern Japanese slang, the term otaku refers to a fan of a particular theme, topic, or hobby.” That’s a pretty all-encompassing definition. Let’s explore it.
Here are the two most common uses:

• anime otaku: a devoted fan of anime

• manga otaku: a devoted fan of Japanese comic books or manga-these are targeted at adults, and some are literature of a very high order, like the masterful work of Osamu Tezuka, the graduated M.D. who never practiced medicine, widely hailed as the creator of manga and anime.

Those are probably the two core, original uses of the term otaku. And there is no downplaying their central importance to the term. Just as the term fan has begun spreading in our cultural vocabulary from the world of entertainment—TV show fan, movie fan, music fan, celebrity fan, videogame fan, and so on—to the world of general consumption, so too has the term otaku been anchored in its entertainment industry origins.

And apparently the officials at the Japanese cultural ministry still not quite woken up to the significance of manga and anime. A major, recent two-page story in the English language “Japan Times” began by stating:

“It’s a fact that has long puzzled devotees and plain old tourists alike. Japan’s manga and anime arts have been wowing the world for more than a decade, and yet the national government still hasn’t got around to setting up a proper museum for their enjoyment, preservation and study. After so many years of inaction, though, it is surprising to note that two days ago on Friday, a minor breakthrough occurred. The head of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Tamotsu Aoki, announced that the advisory panel he had tasked with finding ways to improve Japan’s “dissemination of culture abroad” had come out and stated the obvious. In an interim report, Aoki’s panel made six recommendations “requiring prompt attention.” Number two on the list was that the establishment of a ‘facility for the collection, preservation and provision of information regarding the media-arts (manga, anime and video games) be considered.’”

Some much-needed appreciation, as the objects of otaku desire move into the mainstream, the trajectory I have noted above, and which was in many ways the basis of the insight behind the pop art movement of the mid-1950. And certainly Takashi Murakami’s work in Japan is an interesting combination of both otaku culture and pop art.

Tomorrow, let’s take this deeper by digging into the ways that otaku-hood expresses something integral to consumer culture today.

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Marketing Science | 1 Comment »