101 Reykajavik and The Sea?: Iceland the cinematic brand?

For our delectation:

Blogging from a listserv, email on branding a disaster

I begin with the assumption that our blogs become newsertainment. That’s where I started with my blog: i intended to document all mentions of Iceland in the media, suspecting (correctly, it turns out) that most of them would be comedic. It’s ost recent reference: subject of a round of questions on NPR’s weekly comedy news quiz show, “Wait wait, don’t tell me” was fairly paradigmatic: a series of questions emphasizing the strangeness of fermented Icelandic dairy and seafood, Bjork, the new Prime Minister, and its nose-bleed inducing rise and fall as a world banking center. Interesting side note: NPR recently saw its highest ratings, ever– a 9% rise in audience size in an era where other media outlets are collapsing. Perhaps there is a future for the news to become a viable entertainment brand identity and shared experience of community and mild superiority (see also: every satire of NPR listeners ever.)

As far as my own disaster is concerned, I wonder how to blog it so that I can “”choreograph” my visitor’s experiences through what is an incredibly, dizzyingly complex process of a local example of a global process and is compelling precisely because of its reach. This poses certain challenges, especially in light of some of Klingman’s comments on the benefits of experience architecture:

“When such an environment is experienced while moving through it, however, one begins to understand the eloquence of an organization that is based entirely on a dynamic choreography of a coherent narrative.  This animated reading of architecture operates under the assumption that structures are never experienced in their totality but rather as a series of still pictures that are linked and completed in the imagination of the visitor, similar to what occurs when one watches a movie”. (approx. 210?)

For me, I wonder if perhaps an image that can foster empathy (for iceland) or protest (at global capital) would be a way to think through the process. Narrative space needn’t necessarily be incompatible with polemical intentions, although these intentions will have to be reshaped and communicated via affect rather than logic. The point of our consultancy, afterall, is an inquiry into values, and I think that one I would choose to foreground is imaginative engagement. Perhaps the blog is the best enactment possible for my particular disaster, given that it is a literal manifestation of the failure of totality: no one knew what was happening where in the flows of capital and thus a design (i.e. economy) predicated on a totalizing heuristic (i.e. invisible hand) must be radically rethought, even rejected. As you all can no doubt tell by now, this is all still rather tentative.

News for End Times

The blog below provides an interesting example of an attempt to explicitly develop “new means of end times entertainment”: the revolution may not be blogged, but the apocalypse may certainly well be– and YouTube-d for the cockroaches, as well.  If the task of this blog were to analyze this blog as a cultural artifact, indicative of cultural anxieties,  I would suggest to myself thinking about Biel’s thoughts on Titanic enthusiasts of the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton year. Their fervor for the Titanic came from the urge to be a part of what they felt–through imagination–to be a “real” historical moment in which the risks, benefits, and players are clearly understood. Perhaps today the “blog for end times” has the same appeal– the experience of an imagined crisis via preparing for it does reduce whatever is going wrong in the world to the collection of water filters, first aid materials, and perhaps a gas mask.

http://www.newsforendtimes.com/

The end times are intelligible now as a “branded experience” (apologies to Klingman):

“As a result, Bittner concludes that the construction of identity based on lifestyles has engendered a heterogenous culture composed of different attitudes, in which each social group develops specific semantic fields of reference and norm expectations according to which everyone assesses everyone else and through which interaction and communication develop on a basis of mutually perceived similarities and preferences. Consequently, virtually every act of consumption and every activity is turned into a signifier…every activity becomes part of a larger value system composes of lifestyle attitudes that include almost anything..” (Bittner qtd. in Klingman 43)