There's a great photograph in the current issues of the always entertaining Adbusters
magazine. It's taken by James Mollison and entitled ‘Likole Refugee Camp,
Tanzania’. It shows the shoes of someone at the refugee camp, a pair of
battered no-name trainers on which the Nike Air brand name and Swoosh logo
have been drawn on crudely with what looks like magic marker. There are lots
of ways to interpret this: it could be the desperately sad attempt of the
owner to make their shoes look cooler by brand association. It might also be
a funny, knowing gag about the stupidity of valuing consumer products for
intangibles like brand.
Either way, the image gets a reaction because of the way it asks questions
about value, wealth and aspiration. I had a Californian friend who drove a
very modest car, the Ford Aspire, and found its name immensely amusing: the
rather ordinary looking subcompact was to him a useful A-to-B device, and
didn’t represent anything to which he 'aspired.' When we're not seduced by
this stuff, it can seem absurd. Brands sneak up on you when you're not
looking. They're fine when you see them coming, like the tragic Ford Aspire.
On the other hand, I really can't write with any pen but the Pilot
Hi-Tecpoint V5 Extra Fine, but that's a rational decision, right? Uh,
completely.
We all play with brands in our own way. For example, I've always regarded
clothes from Gap as being useful because they don't have logos on and they
usually have jeans that will accommodate my disappointingly short legs and
rapidly expanding waist line. But that's about it. To me they're a vanilla
brand: useful but lacking any style or glamour. I remember being very struck
to discover that in many parts of the American Midwest over the last decade
it was considered an aspirational brand. The clothes are actually pretty
expensive compared to what you can get in the cheaper US discount stores,
and I was ashamed to realise that my unconscious privilege was actually
someone else's very conscious and heartfelt desire – a luxury brand like
Chanel or Rolls Royce, something to which people aspired.
Virtual consumption and consumer aspiration are at the heart of Sony's plans
for Home, a new virtual world which will be released as a downloadable
application for the PS3. Sony has shown off some footage of the world, which
allows users to interact with their friends online using avatars who look
very much like the mall rats you see in Gap adverts, trainered and T-shirted
babes and hunks posing about in casual attitudes with faux-skater cool. It's
all very clean-cut, corporate and safe. Users can furnish virtual
apartments, invite their friends around to watch videos and game footage,
and do simpler versions of many of the things already available in existing
virtual worlds such as There.com, Second Life, and Kaneva.
I was fascinated to watch Home being dismissed by one of the editors on the
1UP show, a brilliant video podcast on gaming. The 1UP show is a delight: a
well written, cleverly crafted, funny and entertaining soap opera that
wittily frames excellent video game reviews within amusing vignettes and
scenes about the games-mad twentysomethings who are livin' the dream as
full-time games reviewers in the US. They're young, hip, and in San
Francisco, and have all the appropriate geek obsessions: relentlessly
informed and passionate about games, in a world in which people stage
interventions because you've not been playing World of Warcraft
enough.
In the latest episode one of the characters in the show is extremely
dismissive of Sony's Home. There is nothing exciting or glamorous to her
about these unimpressive "mall wandering douche bags" she has seen
in the demo footage. In fact, she says, "If I saw these people in real
life I would walk the other way." This made me want to wave my hands
about in frustration. Of course she feels that way: she's got one of the
hippest gigs in town, and the world that Sony is offering in Home couldn't
be more vanilla or boring to her. It's as tragic in its way as that image of
the fake Nike sneakers or the forlorn excitement of the Ford Aspire, a
fantasy of unironic suburban cool. But to a teenager in Japan, or China, or
Eastern Germany, or Russia, or Penrith for that matter, Home may end up
representing everything that is sharp and exciting and engaging about truth,
justice and the American way: a chance to turn into one of the characters on The
O.C., if only virtually, for a few hours a night, in the privacy of your
bedroom or at a desk in an internet café.
There's a kind of virtual consumption involved in writing Nike on your no-name
sneakers – you can't have the thing, but you do your best to manifest the
notion or idea of the thing. Virtual worlds like Home and MTV's Virtual
Laguna Beach may enable people who can't afford the experience of being hip
young Californians or wealthy suburban teenagers to get some virtual real
estate in the empire of cool – to write Nike on their sneakers, if you will.
There will be teething problems and technical issues, it will bump along and
nobody will notice for a while, but my guess is eventually Sony or someone
else will figure it out, on a shocking, massive, global scale.
At this point these platforms will become hugely important as a way for
teenagers all over the world to participate in the American fantasy life at
a fraction of the cost of the real thing. We all know that the world doesn't
have enough resources to allow everyone to pimp their own ride or grab their
own condo, but it only costs a few cents to enable people to pimp a virtual
ride or build a virtual condo. The rich and the spoiled in the West won't
see this coming: we're too distracted by our real toys to see the deep
hunger in the world, a hunger that perhaps only virtual toys will be able to
satisfy. It may be sad, or it may be ironic: but think for a moment about
Sony's language here. The company is offering the children of the world a
virtual Home, and it is one that will ultimately exist to define them by
their consumption. Is that really the kind of home we want them to dwell in?
---
Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk,
was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five
years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be
reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk
