blackrimglasses

So I promised that I was going to write about this, based on Web 2.0. I want to basically write about persnal branding. So lets do it. Last week when I was at Web 2.0, there was talk from the group of teenagers there about music, what they bought, what they liked. What it amounted to was that these kids did not want to pay for music.

But they did want to pay for ringtones.

So why is it that a kid will pay the equivalent of ten dollars for a song as a ringtone, but will not for the life of them pay that for an album (at .99 a song)? My theory involves what amounts to concepts of branding both internal and external. When I was growing up, my saturation to media extended to the point that I did not have a differentiation of media to any extent. I was raised, and I worked in an era of convergence, conglomeration and the collapsing of formerly held hierarchies. There was a time when Tuesday release cycles meant something, and the difference between media forms, advertising/editorial and popular culture and hard media were distinct. Those days ended around August 9, 1981.

Now, with the collapse of media hierarchy has come the lack of discinction on what amounts to marketing vs. personal voice. A blog is the same structurally as MTV, and the production of “brand” has infiltrated all the way to sources of what used to be information (the Internet). Thus the consumption of brand and its externalization has become the same thing.

We are subjects to branding not so much as a consumer, but also as production machines through our own extensions into the media-verse. While I can wear a Nike swoosh, I can also adopt my own brand through hybridization and mashups of other brand identities to create a disctinct sense of self as a self-controled, self producing media entitty.

So what is the role of actual media in this? When I have the power to brand myself through a hybrid mix of my own media voice and my own adoption of other brands, what matters less to me is the internalization of other peoples brand identities. Listening to music on the ipod hence is that internalization. By reducing music to a singular experience, I am making my like for said music not an way of self-branding, but internalizing culture. Culture has zero value. Culture doesn’t exist, it is something that lost its relevance long ago.

Instead what exists is the appropriation of the simulacrum of culture to create a mashup between media and personal identity: a personal brand. Ringtones extend this, as they serve as an audio reminder of internalized culture and branding. It is a way of signifying something publically what is otherwise only enjoyed privately in an aural fashion.

A key part of this is treating content as an agnostic entity with multiple egress points into a form of reprsentation. What used to be something tied to media is now tied only to devices capible of bit-for-bit representation in any format necessary. If it wans’t ringtones, it would be polyphonic pagers.

We have reached the point where data is agnostic enough to be used in an agnostic fashion. So this begs the question: if I can represent the data of my music through ringtones, how will I represent publically as a personal brand the data of my favorite RSS feed? My favorite movie? My favorite blog?