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AM I AN EXPERT?
Last week on Classic Business, a
dotcommer was waxing lyrically on saying that, “Our
customers know that we add value and they want to help us
attain critical mass so that we can continue adding value
exponentially.” Have you ever heard such rubbish in all your
life?
I am often
introduced as an “expert” in media, and a “guru”.
I hate the word
“guru”. When people do use the word "guru" with respect to
me, I always quote Peter Drucker: "I have been saying for
many years that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because
‘charlatan’ is too long to fit into a headline.”
I am also scared of
the word “expert”. I have always been a devotee of the late
Neil Postman, whose “Amusing ourselves to death” influenced
me more than any other book on media. He has harsh words to
say about “experts”:
“The role of the
expert is to concentrate on one field of knowledge, sift
through all that is available, eliminate that which has no
bearing on a problem, and use what is left to assist in
solving a problem. This process works fairly well in
situations where only a technical solution is required and
there is no conflict with human purposes—for example, in
space rocketry or the construction of a sewer system. It
works less well in situations where technical requirements
may conflict with human purposes, as in medicine or
architecture. And it is disastrous when applied to
situations that cannot be solved by technical means and
where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in
education, law, family life, and problems of personal
maladjustment. I assume I do not need to convince the reader
that there are no experts—there can be no experts—in
child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making. All of this
is a figment of the Technopolist's imagination, made
plausible by the use of technical machinery, without which
the expert would be totally disarmed and exposed as an
intruder and an ignoramus.”
Then he goes on
point out that the “expert” always relies on science and
technology to prove that he is right. When he cannot find
science, he resorts to opinion surveys. Here the laws of
science can be formulated according to a sample of people
who make their marks on either “I approve” or “I
disapprove”.
An opinion survey is
NEVER the truth. These surveys mould truth out of data in
the same way as my child moulds Michelangelo’s Pieta out of
Crazy-Do.
They consist of what
people think across a wide spectrum, ranging from the most
dishonest, to the most stupid.
There are new
surveys every year, sampling the world’s top media CEO’s on
where media will go in the next two to three years.
They make great
reading, but all they are, is a composite of how the
respondent thinks the market can be manipulated to his
specific agendas, and to disadvantage his competitors to the
greatest degree.
Regardless of the
source of these surveys, (and they come from the most
respectable of sources), they cannot possibly be anything
else but a potpourri of what the CEO do not want to reveal.
No CEO has any philanthropic feelings towards his
competitors (who are the people to whom these surveys are
directed.) The most stupid who take part in them are those
who honestly think that CEO’s are spirit-filled prophets
dedicated to the good of mankind.
Experts are also
those people who use the words “business science” and “media
science”. There are no such things. They themselves are a
contradiction in terms (like “military intelligence”,
“banking ethics” and “sports personality”).
There cannot ever be
anything such as “media science”. Sure, there is an
ever-increasing use of the word “scientific” in radio and
TV. Experts claim that media is a social science, as is
political science, economics, sociology, psychology,
business, management and media.
The word
“scientific” as applied to these does not, and can never,
mean “exact”, “precise”, measurable” and “predictable”.
*
As George Bernard Shaw once
said, “If you laid all the economists in the world end to
end, they still would not reach a conclusion.”
*
As Clive Barnes said,
“Television is the first truly democratic culture – the
first culture available to everybody and entirely governed
by what people want. The most terrifying thing is what
people want.”
*
As John Dos Passos said,
“Radio: the triumph of illiteracy”.
You never get people
saying this about science.
You cannot and will
never be able to apply pure science to people. That is why
we have applied the loose and very misleading term “social
science”.
These “social
sciences” involve method, system, discipline, quantification
and qualification.
They do NOT mean
laws and formulae.
People are
unpredictable. There are things about hem that we still do
not know, like how the brain works.
The most difficult
thing about people is that we can never know what is going
on inside their heads, and what they are truly feeling, yet
people do not act of logic and reason, they act on feelings
and emotions.
The only way we can
detect what people feel is by analysing heir behaviour. Yet
people can just as easily use their behaviour to disguise
their feelings.
Yet, there has been
a tendency for people to drop the word “social” from “social
science”, and start referring to things like “management
science” and “media science”.
There are no laws
about how to use words, People are free to use them as they
like. It’s a pity when they are used to deceive people.
Media and
entertainment are only sciences in that we try to qualify
and qualify them, and we try to be consistent in how we go
about it.
The conclusions that
we draw from these measurements are always subjective.
That is why I refer
to method and system in entertainment and the media as
“informed instinct”.
However, there is
technology which is systematic and usually precise.
Technology does help us to interpret. If we leave
technology to interpret, then we may as well give up
broadcasting to audiences.
The word “science”
is often used to “sell” the new digital environment. And
who “sells” it? Equipment salesmen. If you want to see
pseudo science in action, read the so-called “white papers”
published by equipment marketers under the guise of academic
treatises.
Postman goes
further: “When Catholic priests use wine, wafers, and
incantations to embody spiritual ideas, they acknowledge the
mystery and the metaphor being used. But experts of
Technopoly acknowledge no such overtones or nuances when
they use forms, standardized tests, polls, and other
machinery to give technical reality to ideas about
intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, emotional imbalance,
social deviance, or political opinion. They would have us
believe that technology can plainly reveal the true nature
of some human condition or belief because the score,
statistic, or taxonomy has given it technical form.”
No, I am not an
expert. I am the opposite. I don’t focus in to sift
through everything that is written about the media, and
exclude anything deemed to be irrelevant. I don’t ignore
the world around the media.
I do not look
through a microscope. I wear a wide angle lens. I see the
media, and I see it as if I were on a high hill. I am
looking down on the world below, and the media is
represented by the small village nestling at the foot of the
hill. Surrounding the village, affecting the village and
being affected by that village, is the rest of the world.
The media is the picture. The world is the frame, the wall
and the whole art gallery.
I see things in
terms of contexts. I always ask “why”, and when someone has
answered, I ask “Why?” again, and I keep asking “Why?” until
everyone else is screaming “Stop! Stop!”
I do this, because I
know that where people are concerned, there is no end to
asking Why?”, and there are actually no answers at all.
That’s the magic of the human race, and the magic of the
media, because without people, there are no media.
You cannot “know the
media” as an expert is expected to know the subject. You
cannot ever predict it; you can’t even examine it in
retrospect without doing another one of those surveys. The
media is all about the way audiences react to it.
All you can do is to
develop an instinct for the media. Instinct is second
nature. It’s something you feel inside. And, you can only
feel it inside, when you have developed a feeling for a mass
audience. A mass audience is not you, your mother and the
folks who live down the street. It’s a mass of people
distributed far and wide, covering every possible type of
personality, belief, value and interest. You cannot target
a segment of the audience, until you know the whole
audience.
You have to get to
know people as creatures who FEEL. There are some
scientific laws about people, but experts won’t like them.
They go like this:
ü
“People do things for their
reasons, and not yours.”
ü
“People never go out of
their way to do a job badly.”
ü
“Media success is measured
by for long individuals remember it, and keep talking
about.”
ü
“Entertainment and the
media are all about illusion. So much so, that eventually
they become an illusion”.
Hardly scientific.
I am certainly not a scientist. I am certainly NOT an
expert.
"We are in the world
of the worldwide web; twenty-four hour banking; satellite
television; sound bitten and spin doctored politics; mobile
phoneophilia; three-minute culture; pick ‘n mix lifestyles;
and serial monogamy.
It’s a world of ephemerality; instability;
proliferation; fragmentation; hallucination, and, above all,
chaos. It is a world where the beating of a
butterfly’s wings in South America can cause a stock market
crash in Hong Kong. It is a world of unexpected,
unpredictable, incontrollable, unremitting - some would say
unnecessary, upheaval"[4]
Peter
Drucker, (quoted in D James, "Peter Drucker, the man
who changed the world", Business Review Weekly, 15
September 1997, p.49) Retrieved from
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Guru
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