I missed an opportunity to bid on another great old photo postcard of Rosslyn’s dockhouse/boathouse in an eBay auction this weekend! The photograph shows the Essex-Charlotte ferry early in the 20th century and beyond the ferry boat the Rosslyn boathouse is distinctly visible and looking very much like it does today.
Do you recognize the circled dockhouse/boathouse in the blown-up image I grabbed from a current eBay auction? It’s a bit difficult to discern from the fuzzy photo, but that’s Rosslyn’s dockhouse fifty or sixty years ago. Historic photos and postcards of this unique building protruding out into Essex, New York’s North Bay are not uncommon on eBay and elsewhere. Soon enough I’ll be sharing some of those images over at the Rosslyn Redux website.
Social Media Success Process (graphic via Ripple100)
This graphic grabbed me. Irritated me. Fascinated me. Lead me to the Significant Objects Project… Eureka!
Let’s start with the grabbing. The graphic is titled, “Social Media Success Process” not “Process by which social media CAN drive increased market share.” There’s an implicit confidence, an assertion that collecting and sharing stories help a company. That humanizing a corporate entity through storytelling is beneficial. Amazing! Not everyone sees it that way. Some worry about the stories. Not the good ones. The other ones. Some worry about the loss of control. The potential damage to a brand. Of course, the near ubiquity of social media has changed so much for big corporations, not the least of which is that they can’t control and spin their message the way they once could. The consumer can access and share information readily, freely, easily, often. It’s easy enough to come up with the risk to companies today. Better play fair! But it’s even more intriguing to consider that stories of all sorts serve to humanize companies and therefore contribute kinship, community, value.
So, what irritated me? Perhaps this same confidence, er, hubris. Maybe it’s that third step: “Humanization Creates Kinship“. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it reinforces bias, distinctions, tribalism. Unless the stories are being curated carefully, thoughtfully, continually. But that’s not really the problem either, because I actually do believe that open storytelling will lead to open corporate culture which will lead to corporate consumables that have nothing to hide and nothing to spin. Some bumps and bruises might be incurred during the transition to this ideal model, but I’m confident it will happen. So maybe it makes sense to say that kinship will follow humanization, but it will be organic and gradual if storytelling and story sharing is truly open. Which leads me to the principle irritant: harvesting. In a model where we’re talking about humanizing a company, it is disingenuous to speak about harvesting stories. You harvest corn. Or apples. You don’t harvest people’s lives, people’s experiences, people’s memories, people’s emotions, people’s emotions, people’s stories. That would be dehumanizing. Make sense?
My fascination has already revealed itself. Stories and storytelling – at best – are not formulaic. Sure, we all learned the basic ingredients for a well crafted story as school children, but good stories invite us into an un-formulaic relationship with another person. Good storytelling is personal, authentic, intriguing, original. Good storytelling builds a unique bridge between story creator and audience. This is why we trust the storyteller, why we WANT to trust the storyteller. So it fascinates me to see this corporate storytelling model reduced to a tidy flow chart. A formula. Fascinates me largely because I think it is pretty accurate!
It lead me to writer and New York Times columnist Rob Walker, and the Significant Objects project. But first, let me connect a few dots. I got hooked up with Ripple100’s Andre Yap (@andreayap) a day or two ago in the magical jungles of Twitterlandia. Turns out we’re both story traffickers, albeit of slightly different stripes. This graphic was the top story on his blog, a good read if you’re a storytelling wonk, and after a little poking around while ruminating on the graphic, I learned about Rob Walker.
“Here is what Rob did. He purchased a bunch of random objects on Ebay. He then distributed the objects to his friends, asked them to write a short story about each. He then put the objects back up for sale on ebay, essentially sold $120 worth of objects for $3,612 – a 2,776% significance markup as he calls it. All based on stories.“(Ripple100)
Wow! That’s right. He turned $120 worth of knickknacks into $3,612 by adding a story to each auction item. Genius. Or is it? Maybe it’s just real world proof of what we already know. We love stories. Whether we realize it or not, part of our human nature is an appetite, possibly even a need for storytelling. And yet, it is difficult to put a value on stories. A book? Sure. A movie? Sure. A song? Sure. A short story published in a magazine. Sure. But in each of those cases, the value of the story gets muddled with the value of the storytelling vehicle.
“What is the actual value of a story? Are people prepared to pay more for something if there is a story attached to it? It turns out that they are. That is the outcome of a very original experiment by writer / NYT columnist Rob Walker… So people were prepared to pay a lot more than the initial value of the storyless object. In fact the difference was so big that Rob concluded that the real value was in the story – the object was merely the vehicle for the story.” (DoubleThink)
So it would seem that the value of each story was the difference between the original price of the object and the final price paid for the object and the story. You can review the experimental data, but it only tells part of the story. Remember that the storytellers intentionally or inadvertantly promoted the experiment, as did the organizers, bidders, etc. In other words, the experiment developed a story of its own. So not only were the objects vehicles for stories, but the entire project became a metastory. It bridged people, connecting them, creating meaning, memories, emotions. In short, the items, the storytellers and the project organizers were “humanized” by virtue of telling stories and weaving others into those stories. Or am I pushing the formula too far? You decide.
“What are people really buying? … There are no easy patterns to sort of say, like, well, this is exactly the answer… Every single object sold for more than we paid for it… The project itself became a story and what, in some ways, people were buying was a souvenier of this experiment.” (Rob Walker)
Just smiled familiarly through Josh Marshal’s lighthearted reflection “Adventures in Obsolescence” on Talking Points Memo. He acknowledges his inability to dispose of dated gadgets event once he’s replaced them, and the condition (who’ll be the first to clinically diagnose it?) is all too familiar. He’s responding to a friend who’s in need of a second hand iPod since hers gave up the ghost and he decides to gift her his dinosaur, “one of those early all-white, physical scroll wheel, boxy archeo-Pods that probably many of you had at one point or another.”
Easy generosity, right? Give away something you no longer need or use, a gadget that’s already well into artifact-dom that nevertheless can help out a friend. True. And yet there is a funny compulsion which I admit to sharing that makes it difficult to part with these relics. Josh explains:
“So even after some gadget is well into its planned obsolescence and I’ve replaced it and it’s clear I’m never going to use it again, I just can’t manage to toss something I once found so cool and also dropped a decent amount of money on. And because of that, I have a small tribe of old i-Gadgets totally unused, sitting in boxes or drawers, living on borrowed time, or perhaps subsisting in suspended animation on borrowed time, because I can’t get myself to treat them as worthless and toss them in the trash.”
I periodically manage to pass these on, but generally they just collect and collect. I recently gave an older Sony Vaio laptop to a tech buddy who wiped all the memory and donated it to a charity that refurbishes computers for people who can’t afford to buy one. Cool idea. But all too often inertia prevails and the gadget graveyard fills up. So I’m making a resolution that when I return from Shanghai — and before I head off to San Franciso for DrupalCon — I’m going to eBay, fiverr, freecycle and craigslist my backlog of geriatric gadgets. If you’re in need, keep me honest!
Main Street, Essex, New York (Photograph via ebay.com )
It never ceases to amaze me how many antique photos and postcards of Historic Essex make it onto eBay. This old photo of Main Street is the most recent example. I should have long ago set up a flickr gallery to collect them. This postcard appears to be looking north with the Essex Inn on the left hand side in the foreground. If you’re feeling like you just can’t live without it, you can find it for sale on eBay (item 260559292272 end time Mar-04-10 05:12:54 PST).
Every month or two I find a good image of our house on eBay, mostly old postcards from the first half of the 20th century when it was an inn, restaurant and bar. (Called the Sherwood Inn.) Kind of a weird feeling actually, so I try to win the auctions for our collection and to take them out of circulation.
Although the porch was removed a couple of decades ago, and the big maple trees have mostly succumbed, much of the house looks the same today.
Auction time. Ever used voice recognition software? It’s amazing. Quite simply it revolutionizes the way we interact with out machines, folks. You’ll want to try it. Soon. I’ve just upgraded my Dragon Naturally Speaking software, so I’m passing my previous version (v2.02) along to some lucky eBayer. Interested? Going cheap. No reserve. I’ve done a week-long auction during Christmas, probably not the smartest of all possible times to list. But I didn’t really think about it before putting it up. Have so much to offload after my relocation from Paris back to the US… Just starting to motivate to Yard Sale another big batch once Christmas holidays are past. For now, it’s Christmas eve, and I think I’ll wrap this up and head off to enjoy myself. Merry Christmas to one and all.
A quick blip, then off to bed. Much news. Plenty. Busier than a hive full of bumblebees. But nicer.
First of all, snowed like hell this weekend. Two feet of fluffy white stuff in about 24 hours. They’d told us we’d miss the snow. Or it would miss us. Then they said 1″-4″ which they later upgraded to 4″-6″ but we got slam-oed anyway, meteorologists be damned! And now we’ve enjoyed two splendid sunshine-y days. Snow’s intact. Air’s cold. The world’s a beautiful, happy place. For now.
In other good news, got the first every ShipStore.com Beacon out on Sunday. Pretty impressive response too. Hoping it continues to be more positive than negative feedback, though both kinds will help us figure out what we need to improve upon. And eBay auction numero uno for the Psion Revo™ is wrapped up. Sold as well or better than I had hoped, and payment has been quickly wrapped up. Now it’s my turn to ship out the goods. And several more auctions wrapping up soon… Good night, world.
Another absolutely sublime morning. I awoke in the midst of a snowstorm, as if someone had upended a vast container full of the lightest, whitest down. As I drank my tea and set up some more eBay auctions, the snow ceased and the sun burst out. Almost an hour later, the ground is covered in fluffy white snow and the sky is blue. This magnificent weather reminds me of my winters in the Southwest. It would snow hard and fast, then the clouds would vanish, leaving a magnificent day to play in the snow and sun…
So today I’ve worked on getting some software listed. It’s funny, as I finally get around to listing all of the things that I’ve unpacked from Paris and no longer need, I’m getting more and more motivated to really “clean house”. There’s just so much I need to get rid of, and eBay may just be the perfect virtual-yard-sale-venue for me to do it. We’ll just have to wait and see how it goes. I’m getting the hang of listing, doing it all in HTML to avoid using the rather rudimentary template eBay provides. But it still is not such a quick process. Actually, the listing is pretty quick, but the content creation takes some time. Perhaps just a bit more dull to do it for software, but some of the future items will be more fun to write about, I imagine.
So what’re the latest listings? Four software programs:
Okay. Enough procrastination. Back to work on the newsletter, then out to enjoy the splendid day.
First snowfall of the year! Not much stuck on the ground now, but for a couple of hours it was a whirling white blizzard outside. Of course it came at exactly the same time that I need to drive into Elizabethtown for my vehicle inspection. Good opportunity to test out the Subaru AWD and the verdict is… She’s a beaut! Hauled me through the slippery roads in time to dump the car and head out for a blustery 3.5 mile run.
Then home again to discovery that we won’t be riding today. Too slippery for the horses despite the fact that snow has stopped falling and is already mostly melted.
Other news: Email Forward of the Day. Like most every other soul existing in cyber universe, I detest email forwards, chain letters, etc. But every once in a while a really nifty one comes along. Today was one of those days. Actually a double header, but I’ll only post the one funny stab at Uncle Sam. Who knows where these things are born. If I knew the author’s name, I’d credit her (him?) but I don’t so I won’t.
Here goes: “The U.S. government announced today that it is changing its emblem to a condom because it more clearly reflects the government’s political stance. A condom stands up to inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of security while you’re being screwed. It just doesn’t get more accurate than that.” Yowzer!
And in final news, twenty five visitors to my eBay auction. Ce-le-bra-tion Time, come on! Bidding has totally stalled out after the first one. Hmmm… Obviously I need to be patient to see what’s going to happen. Excited to watch this play out, but sure would enjoy having some competitive bidding. I’ll keep you posted.
Still haven’t been able to get the Blogger.com upgrade to work so that I can begin adding pictures here. Not sure what the ongoing problem is, but my brother’s had some good luck getting hold of support. Maybe technicolor images will start appearing soon. Hang in there, I’m working on it.
That image above is one of the “picture poems” I included in 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed and it combines contour drawings that I made in 1994 during my final year in college with abstractions from photographs that I took in Peru in 2011. I’ve previously posted elements of “Contours & Artifacts” in Choice (June 4, 2012) and Wonder (December […]
