Branding and Symbolism
Business Plan Research
Electronic Commerce
Innovation

John Fraim, GreatHouse Company

"Wilderness is an instrument for enabling us to recover our lost capacity for religious experience...The churches and great cathedrals are really, in the time scale of human history, just tents on the journey somewhere else."

Sir Laurens van der Post
A Testament to the Wilderness

Place has played a crucial role in the development of America but in the electronic world of cyberspace, place has almost disappeared. Once it was associated with the freedom and individualism of the frontier and the unexplored wilderness of the New World. With the passing of the frontier place became homogenized by a consumer culture that makes everything the same. The result is a strange deja-vu recognition of places in America so that even new places always seem strangely familiar. We know we've been there before but can't quit put our finger on it. Was it that web site we visited? Was it the setting in the television program or film or music video? Was it that ad we briefly glanced at in the magazine, the television commercial that went spinning by?

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Pointing The Finger ...

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Who or what is the culprit in the demise of place? Is it the conscious efforts of Madison Avenue and Hollywood to "homogenize" everything that's unique and different in the world? Is it the mergers of media companies into fewer and fewer giant generators of American culture? Is it a by-product of an electric medium that makes messages easier to send while, at the same time in their bland sameness, makes them easier to forget? (The "medium" may be the "message" but in the era of electric media all messages are the same). Is it in fact our own acquiescence by a type of collective "trance" state the electronic "fireplace" lulls us into? Is it part of a symbolic cycle that swings back and forth through history between the two great paradoxes of America in the concepts of freedom (place, individuality) and equality (space, commonality)?

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Advertising?

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Certainly a large part of the blame can be placed at the foot (altar?) of the American advertising industry and its role in inventing the culture of mass consumption to consume the products from an economy of mass production. The critical years of invention were in the 1920s and 1940s when the ad industry shaped mass consumption into the American dream.

In Captains of Consciousness and Advertising The American Dream, authors Stuart Ewen and Roland Marchand Roland note a primary goal of advertising was to sell Americans on a consumer culture, to turn them from mass producers into mass consumers. As Ewen remarks, "Ad men attempted to convey a picture of the world in which small groups were no longer proper realms for the communication of values - it was within the corporation and the mass-industrial context that people might find a replacement for outdated communities and the sustenance they afforded." With the destruction of small groups came the destruction of separate place.

In the years between the 1920s and the 1940s, advertising discovered powerful new ways to play on consumer's anxieties and to create powerful symbols of the American dream. As American society became more urban, more complex, and more dominated by large bureaucracies, the old American Dream seemed threatened. Advertising found a method to recreate this dream and continue to sell it. Largely, it accomplished this by expounding the thesis that by purchasing a product the promise of this dream could be obtained. The dream, though, became a homogenized, common dream amenable to the persuasion of a few television networks, a handful of huge radio stations and large national circulation magazines.

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Electronic Technology?

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But advertising can't take all the blame for the destruction of a sense of place in America. The impact of electronic technology has also played a major role. This point was eloquently made in 1985 by communications professor Joshua Myrowitz in a brilliant book titled "No Sense of Place" which argued that electronic media, specifically television, destroys sense of place.

Meyrowitz focused on television in the 80s but the electronic culprit in the 90s has become the internet and its elimination of place in that hazy, undefinable void called cyberspace. We gaze into it each day through software conveniently labeled "windows" to trick us into believing we are looking out at the world when we are really gazing Narcissus-like inward at our own reflection in the mirror-like screen of the computer. We fool ourselves into believing we have once again found that lost American wilderness land of place in the "virtual communities" we inhabit but they are really little more than ghost towns full of shadowy shapes with inhabitants merely hiding behind more screens.

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Global Rather Than Local Concerns?

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We seem to care more about the global economy than our local community, worrying about the rise and fall of the Yen ten thousand miles away more than the gridlock traffic on the way to the local supermarket.

Our local newspapers, once a spirited bunch of idiosyncratic cheerleaders for a sense of community, are now little more than pasted up collections of AP wire pick-up stories. In the new environment, newspapers like the Mendocino Beacon, the Ukiah Daily Journal and the Pueblo Colorado Chieftain become dying breeds replaced by internet portals and electronic homogenizers with names like Sidewalk, CitySearch, Digital City, Around Town and People Connection. None of these have the least idea what place is all about. None of them would know a local community even if it came up and bit them.

We need to take heed to the wise words of Dennis Wilson, Publisher of the Ukiah, California Daily Journal who writes the following in the "About Us Section" from the December 1998 web site of the paper. "We have a commitment to the community in which we do business; that is our highest charge. In doing this, we need the help of the citizens who live and work here. The newspaper in any community needs information. In reality, that's what we do: provide information to our subscribers about the area in which they live. You might say we generate a historic record. If someone read the Ukiah Daily Journal 100 from now, we would want them to know the flavor of the town and surrounding areas, without wondering if it was the imagination of a fiction writer of the era."

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Signs Of An Emerging Concern For Place

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In the enveloping dark sea of equalized hyperspace there are a few beacons of light indicating land in the distance. It might not be the "promised" land but then land anywhere might be better than cyberspace everywhere.

Interestingly, light comes not from the usual early warning detectors "artists" of culture but rather from the unlikely direction of the business community. A changing perspective seems to be growing and may have more sticking power than the myriad business fads and buzzwords being spun out by branded management firms, business schools and entrepreneurial gurus.

The change involves a movement from an inward focus on concerns such as excellence, matrix systems and re-engineering to outward concerns like differentiation, positioning, open-source systems and boundaryless corporations. The shift in the outward focus is one based on a new recognition of place in the business community. It is much different from the perpetual starry-eyed introversion of the internet business community.

The new battle cry is represented by no-less than the legendary inventor of management theory Peter Drucker with the following observation in the August 1998 Forbes magazine. "We can already discern and define the next, and perhaps even more important task in developing an effective information system for top management: the collection and organization of outside-focused information. All the data we have so far, including those provided by the new tools, focus inward. But inside an enterprise - indeed even inside the entire economic chain - there are only costs. Results are only on the outside."

The new concern for place is central to the emerging "cluster" concept of industries propounded by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, the world's leading strategist on competition. In a breakthrough article from the November/December 1998 issue of the Harvard Business Review "Clusters and the New Economics of Competition" Porter notes that paradoxically the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things such as knowledge, relationships, and motivation that distant rivals cannot match. With his interest in clusters, Porter moves the direction of his considerable focus from global competition among nations to local cooperation among clusters. Business needs to take note of Porter's striking new paradigm.

Porter notes that in theory, more open global markets and faster transportation and communication should diminish the role of location in competition. "But if location matters less," he says, "why, then, is it true that the odds of finding a world-class mutual-fund company in Boston are much higher than in most any other place? Why could the same be said of textile-related companies in North Carolina and South Carolina, of high performance auto companies in southern Germany, or of fashion shoe companies in northern Italy?"

The outward focus can also be discerned in the concept of the "boundaryless corporation" exemplified by CEO Jack Welch's General Electric. The term "boundaryless" is Welch's term for breaking down barriers that divide employees (such as hierarchy, job function, and geography), and that distance companies from suppliers and customers. As he says, "Our dream for the 1990s is a boundaryless Company, a Company where we knock down the walls that separate us from each other on the inside, and from our key constituencies on the outside."

While Welch's metaphor of boundaryless was mainly intended to describe a corporate environment, one notes that the metaphor has really been extended beyond the individual corporation. In effect the metaphor of the "boundaryless corporation" is being replaced perhaps with the metaphor of "open source" software code or architecture. The metaphor has recently gained a lot of publicity in the battle between "open source" (Linux and its international free-lance developer community) and "closed source" (Microsoft and its corporate army of developers). In effect, might all the developers in the world be viewed as one great invisible corporation working to free software code from corporate ownership?

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The Internet And The Establishment Of A New Sense Of Place

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Ironically, that which has been a major factor in destroying place has the potential to play a key role in restoring and reinventing it. Up until now, the internet has preferred the meandering vagueness of space to the domesticated particularity of place.

The vague formlessness of space may be alright for some but it becomes difficult for those of us who surf the web a good part of the day trying to get a sense of just where we are. Where is that sexy, killer web site located? Is it where the "action" is on the Las Vegas Strip surrounded by hundred foot tall neon signs? Is it in some great retro-highrise above the San Francisco and the fog rolling in off the bay? More likely than not its some lonely little server sitting in the backroom of some discount furniture store in south LA. Or a little Wizard-of-Ozish old man pulling our chain behind another screen.

After awhile, the whole internet can take on the feeling of a some Hollywood backlot filled with the props of false-front buildings. Those sexy killer sites. All that Java dancing around the screen like a bunch of miniature Times Square Rockettes. Those instant billionaires behind the skyrocket growth new web companies. Can the whole thing suddenly blow over like a movie set with a quick gust of wind? Or blow away like dried out tumbleweed through a ghost town? Where's the beef? Is there any "there" there?

So far, the web has been a great formless electric force expanding outward like a strange type of receding universe. But might there be a reversal and an implosion rather than an explosion? Might the power of the web become focused locally? On clusters of businesses? On local real life communities? On real life places? On real people rather than "virtual" ones inside or behind screens?

With the demise of local newspapers and TV stations into a "twilight zone" of happy baby-talk "news" fed like pablum to them from New York or Washington, there is a window of opportunity. The time is right. Not for another Sidewalk type relational database controlled from afar by big web companies but for a new type of community building service which uses the internet to build a new sense of local place. The metaphor centers around ideas like a "community intranet," a value-added network servicing a local cluster of businesses, an "open source" type structure where every citizen might be a "reporter" rather than the "closed source" few on the payroll of the local paper. The metaphor uses concepts like Amazon's associate program but the referrals are to locally based business rather than distant web sites in hyperspace.

The community becomes a unified producer working towards the common goal of "homegrown" services rather then another zip code consumer market for the big boys who ride into town like a gang from a John Ford western, killing off the last vestiges of community and place. The local community gains a sense of its own place. And too, its citizens also gain a sense of place. It becomes that rare island of individualism in the bland post-modern American ocean of equality of place. In effect, it becomes a type of gold rush boomtown on a new frontier wilderness.

The old wilderness which played such a central role in making America the world's greatest nation is gone. Paved over by Walmarts, Home Shopping Depots, the Las Vegas casinos and the lots of the Hollywood film studios. But as long as that inner flame of individuality still flickers, as long as there is an interest in setting out to start something new and different, there will always be wilderness in the world. As the famous writer and adventurer Sir Laurens van der Post wrote "The vision of wilderness is not very complicated. We try to give it elaborate definitions, but we all know what wilderness really is, because we have it inside ourselves."

© Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 John Fraim - Greathouse Company
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