Murdoch Kicks off the Fight for the Future of Media

This New York Times story about Bing and News Corp. today kicked off what is sure to be a major narrative in Media Business news for the forseeable future.

Murdoch and News Corp want to de-index their content from Google’s search engine and sign an exclusive deal with Microsoft’s Bing to crawl their content. If it works, could enable a new revenue stream for the beleagured content industries and change the paradigm for monetizing news online.

Murdoch has been pretty much the sole voice of charging for access to content in the the internet age, erecting a subscription only wall for the Wall Street Journal online and promising to do the same with many of his other news organizations.

But he hasn’t done it yet. Not for a lack of ability, but because the internet news environement hasn’t been ready for it yet. Because doing so challenges the whole paradigm of the “free advertiser supported internet” to which we all, consciously or unconsciously, subscribe. Under this model you want your site crawled by as many searches as possible to drive eye-balls to drive advertising. Give it all away. More hits, more ads, more money. So restricting access doesn’t make sense.

The reason this is such a big deal story in media is that it represents the first real sign that the free-everything internet model could eventually be reigned back in to a more restricted, more effectively monetized model. It’s like the difference between your major metropolitan newspaper and your local free weekly.

The free weekly gives it all away in the hope of reaching as many eyeballs as possible for its advertisers. But, as anyone who’s read a free weekly on the bus for fifteen minutes and then tosses it away knows, this model doesn’t lend itself to quality content. If we lived in a world of only free weeklies, we might have plenty of concert reviews, but who would watch over public life?

By showing a willingness to pay for access, Bing is buying itself some great publicity and some important corporate friends. Microsoft is a powerful enough entity with enough money behind it that it can actively shape the future of the internet with deals like this one. But will it work?

It’s not clear how the proposition of Bing paying to crawl News Corp’s sites will combine with Murdoch’s earlier stated plan of erecting pay walls for content. Is Murdoch abandoning that plan and passing the buck on paying from the reader to the search engine? Or is he proposing both in combination, creating one revenue stream from subscribers and one from search engines?

Age in the Age of Wikipedia

It started, as most good things do, with an episode of “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” Watching Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the ex-Seinfeld star, carry her own show and thinking “she looks good” I began to wonder, how old is she?

So I checked on Wikipedia

Which is kinda old to be that hot.

Which got me thinking, should I be able to find that out so easily? Do I really want to know? What does age mean in the age of Wikipedia?

Age for actresses used to be a closely guarded secret. Sure people knew your age when you started out as a starlet, but once you dissapeared into the repetitive birthdays of 20’s and 30’s people lost track. To the public you were ageless, there was no particular number attached in anyone’s mind but perhaps your family.

But Julia Louis-Dreyfus is 48.

The Comeback of Construction

What do you see in this photograph? If you’re a fan of AMC’s period piece hit “Mad Men” you might recognize Don Draper and his wife Betty out for an evening of dinner and dancing. But you don’t have to be a fan of the show to look at this photograph and take in the dense layers of meaning and exquisite constructedness of this scene. This is more than a man and wife at dinner, it’s a picture of a vibrant culture in progress. Take some time to study this picture. Everything in this frame is loaded with connotation, a plethora of cultural information coded into visual symbols. This is the true genius at the crux of “Mad Men’s” high brow appeal – it takes us back to a culture that valued and communicated with these symbols. A pre-post-modern culture where signifiers had a clear association to signified. A culture of meaning.

In many ways “Mad Men” traces the fall of this perfectly constructed 1950’s society, reminding us as it nostalgizes that this straight-jacket society was far from perfect. “Mad Men” never forgets to show us that this culture was socially and behaviorally homogenized, racist, sexist, and severely limited opportunity for many. But it was something. A shared something hanging over everything, inflecting life by its mere presence, inescapably shaping you by your relationship to it. It was constructed and agreed upon and provided a stable narrative and worldview based on shared mythologies, dreams, and values.

And in the midst of our aggressively egalitarian politically correct efforts to erase society as our grandparents knew it, people are finding that they miss something about the good old days. The sophistication of a man in a suit and top hat, the elegance of a lady in an evening gown, the chivalry of a traditional date. The cultural codes that shaped our world for so long have been replaced by a one-size fits all code of jeans and whatever-you-want. A deconstructed, post-modern, supply-your-own meaning culture.

And it works. To an extent. Because it offers people ample freedom to do their own thing. But people are finding that they miss some of the benefits of construction. We are living in an age of overwhelming and disorienting freedom. Freedom is a great thing, but like music without measures there comes a point when the absence of structure leads to the dissolution of meaning. Music becomes noise.

And as a society we’re getting tired of the noise. Young people shaping culture today are making important efforts to bring back rhythm and meter from the void. Costumes, customs, ways of standing and moving and speaking, a return of construction is in progress all around us. In entertainment the recent popularity of pageantry flaunting shows like “Gossip Girl” and “Mad Men” remind us of the good and bad sides of construction. But there’s no denying there is a fascination with these shows, in large part because the worlds they take us into are heavily constructed and an appealing fantasy in a time when no such layers exist in most of our everyday lives.

I see this fascination as the early stages of a movement to re-embrace the construction of society, one that will hopefully learn from the mistakes of cultures past, respecting the importance of freedom and individual choice while steering away from the dangers of mindless, culture-less, Wal-Mart shopping sweat-pants wearing apathy.

The End of Advertising?

I work in big media. And everyone here is scared shitless. Ad dollars are being redistributed across multiple platforms all over the internet and the ad revenues of the old guard big media, the network television and major metropolitan newspapers that used to claim the vast majority of these dollars, are in a free fall.

The current thinking in big media is that ad dollars are 1) down because of the recession, and 2) migrating to the internet. Both of which are true. But big media also seems to think that things will get back to normal when 1) the economy bounces back and 2) internet advertising is effectively monetized to make up for the losses in on-air and print.

What big media seems to be missing is an understanding that the culture and our modes of consumption have fundamentally changed as a result of the internet, and things aren’t just going to go “back to normal”. The current structure of media and advertising is set up to promote MASS UNDIFFERENTIATED CONSUMPTION, based on an expectation (created and made true by advertising), that people will buy whatever you tell them to if you make them want it enough… whether they need it or not. And that philosophy helped shape just about everything in American culture for the past fifty years.

Driving consumer desire superseded design, quality, and innovation in American industry. Money spent on marketing and advertising rose and rose while money spent on research and development remained steady or fell. And it happened because the mass media and the cultural attitudes and consumption behavior it fostered made advertising the most important part of the product. It made sense at the time because it was working; companies were just putting their dollars where they were best spent.

Mass communication shaped our culture so much that access to it could be sold at a premium. Television stations and newspapers with big readerships could set their own price for ads and still turn away suitors because they controlled access to a great big desire machine that worked and converted ad dollars effectively into sales. Since they would be seen by so many people, companies wanted the best ads money could buy so million dollar accounts with prestigious ad agencies were born. We aggregated ourselves into mass audiences with similar tastes and needs and desires and allowed big companies to market to “us” as a very large group. And all of it worked as long as the great big desire machine kept churning away turning audiences into sales.

Nobody ever thought, “what if the machine stops working?”

I suspect that we are seeing the beginning of this now. Mass undifferentiated consumption was really only a phase, the adolescence of a relatively young consumer society. Now we are witnessing the emergence of the mature global consumer, a consumer that knows what it wants and is more aggressive about seeking it out, and a customer that the current infrastructure of big media and advertising is not prepared to serve.

I’m not suggesting that consumption will stop, nor that people will stop conspicuous consumption and only buy the things they need to survive from now on. No, consumerism will survive, but the way me make our purchasing decisions has changed, and big media hasn’t kept up. The segment of society whose purchasing decisions can be easily influenced by the old advertising model is shrinking and will continue to shrink. Luxury consumption has long been governed more by word of mouth and branding rather than old-fashioned spot ads. Now middle class consumption is following the same trend.

And as the internet makes information cheap and infinitely accessible, consumer-to-consumer information sharing is threatening to make advertising irrelevant. People know that Toyota makes good cars at a reasonable price; one of your friends probably has one. People know Samsung makes good TV’s, I watched my roommate’s for hours before I bought mine. The word of mouth from satisfied customers created good reputations that spread in both cases and now exist as part of the unadvertised brand of each product. Consumer reviews for any type of product are easily found online. Yelp or Citysearch can tell you where to find a reliable mechanic or get a good haircut or buy a good cheeseburger in your neighborhood. Quality and service are what should matter when making decisions about what and where to spend your money, and increasingly consumers are learning how to bypass the illusions of advertising and get that information for themselves.

Effective mass media advertising demands a culture of mass undifferentiated consumption and relatively unchallenged assumptions, a culture Madison Avenue successfully created in consumers over the past sixty years. As the passive unquestioning consumer of the television age gives way to the active and aggressive consumer of the internet age, advertising will be faced with the challenge of reinventing itself to deliver sales to clients in a whole new ballgame. Most likely this will mean not the end of advertising, but the creative destruction of the old model and the evolution of a new system.

A new system that Old Media will scramble mightily to not be left out of.

The Psychology of Punditry

Glenn Beck is an idiot. But this article isn’t about that. Well, not just that. This article is about the cultural problem that is Glenn Beck, the latest installment in a long line of men (and women) like him. Bill O’Reilly. Sean Hannity. Ann Coulter. Rush Limbaugh. All the idiots. There must be a reason they keep rising and people keep listening. They’re not all dumb or evil. No, they’ve got to fit into the view of the world that I have that people are just normal self-interested people acting within incentive systems that guide their behavior. So I started at the beginning, I asked myself the question: where does a pundit come from?

 

How a pundit is made:

1 oz. average intellect
1 oz. healthy ambition
1 oz. checkered past / substance abuse / looking for answers
4 oz. discovering Jesus
8 oz. thinking you’re a genius
12 oz. self-important belief you’re personally saving the world

As you can see, the “thinking you’re a genius” and “believing you’re saving the world,” tend to overwhelm the dish very quickly. That’s really where the problem begins, because when you combine those two ingredients you very quickly begin to lose perspective. The self-importance from the sense of personal mission fuses with the ego creating a being that is temporarily animated with a powerful larger than life quality.

And in many cases the neophyte pundit was really onto something, tapping into a current of thought on a social issue that needed to be explored. Most pundits who make it originally did some minor social good by giving a voice to and making people pay attention to something they had previously been ignoring. But here’s where it gets ugly. Having tasted success and attention, having been imbued with that magical sense of personal mission, of “personally saving the world,” the pundit is now addicted.

In order to stay relevant the pundit has to keep taking issues, keep picking fights. But since he brought attention to that original issue that launched him other smarter people have gotten their hands on it. They’ve thought about it, analyzed it, and come to the conclusion that it’s a much more complex problem than shouting about it on the radio can solve. But the pundit is addicted. The thinker who started off giving voice to a legitimate issue has found a new identity, that of the mouthpiece rather than the brain. From now on the pundit will do whatever it takes to keep his audience, including (subconsciously) adjusting his own political and social views.

The whole thing gets even more complicated when you throw in a news organization with a clear agenda like Fox News. Now the pundit’s employer as well as his audience are calling the shots on his supposedly personal beliefs. Gradually the pundit is hollowed out from both sides, leaving less and less room for independent thought and reflection since his livelihood, as well as his sense of self and identity, are entirely dependent on satisfying someone else with the views and opinions he puts out on the airwaves. With his personal convictions out of the way the pundit remains for a time as a partisan mouthpiece broadcasting a message that is less and less his own until he slips at playing to his audience, his ratings fall and he falls into irrelevance.

Pity the poor pundit, for he is a pawn who does not know it.

Masculinity’s Delayed Adolesence

Though women’s issues tend to get the majority of media attention in this country, in the book “Guyland” sociologist Michael Kimmel elegantly elicits his thesis that young men are silently struggling, especially in the 18-30 “delayed adolescence” age group, with the puzzle of post-modern masculinity in a post-feminist world.

First of all, as a sort of disclaimer, anything I write here is going to be an oversimplification; but an oversimplification for the sake of illustrating an idea. Let’s start with this one: on the whole women have adapted to the rapidly changing cultural landscape more effectively than men. That’s because women, collectively reacting to men in power through generations upon generations of society, have had to develop psychological and social flexibility to survive and empower themselves as a class. When those efforts finally became organized at the broad social level in the 20th century, real change in society resulted. Real change that affected men every bit as much as women, but for men without any sense of ownership. Thus the troubling sense for many men that feminism “happened to them,” the state of confusion and loss of identity that followed. A state for men that society is still frankly reeling from.

* * *

Men as a whole have never gone through “feminism,” because there has never been a stage of men collectively discovering and asserting their power to overcome repression. That makes women, as a whole, much more developmentally (in the sense of culture and their place in it) advanced than men.

It’s a little like adolescence. Sometime around the ages of twelve to fifteen the child begins to challenge the authority of their parents in an effort to make an identity separate from them. The battles of identity, rebellion and self-definition that ensue from this urge to individuate drive most parents crazy, but are a critical step in the psychological transition from childhood to adulthood.

“Womankind,” to use a term that I dislike as a writer but find oddly accurate for conveying this sense of a class or group, collectively went through adolescence in the 20th century, the most dramatic battles of civil rights for women, and identity for the parallel teenage girl, having been fought by the time the first digit struck two.

As any fan of my thinking knows, I’m always one for an ongoing analogy, so why stop there. Any parent of teenagers could tell you that teenage girls seem to experience adolescence both much earlier and much more acutely than males. Part of this is biological, girls start physically developing around thirteen and slow down significantly by age eighteen. Men on the other hand don’t begin developing physically until fifteen, and for many men it can go on into their early-twenties. The end result of this pattern of development is that by the time a man and a women each reach the age of twenty-five the woman has been in her body for close to seven years, and the man is just getting comfortable.

And, you’ve no doubt already guessed where I’m going with this, so goes the story of masculinity’s emerging maturity. As usual, we are just a few years behind the girls.

While feminism rocked our culture throughout the second half of the 20th century like a sixteen year old girl’s cigarette-smoking-goth-rock phase, masculine development will likely more resemble young male development: after so many years of pounding light beer and playing Rock Band with no particular achievements to his name the twenty-something boy decides it’s time to make a little money and gradually, over the course of many more years than the dramatic and condensed female version, grows into a man by imitating the mature male role models in his life.

Which means we probably won’t see a broad scale “Masculinism” emerge as dramatically and publicly as Feminism. But make no mistake, the maturity of masculinity, like the boyish twenty-four-year-olds who populate Kimmel’s Guyland, is long overdue. Ladies, fear not: mature masculinity will be much more compatible with the current stage of female development. Mature masculinity will not mean a return to repression, but an embrace of the differences between men and women and the fun we can have with them.

New Media in a Culture of Stolen Time

We are all living, and surfing the web, on borrowed time. Maybe the time is our employer’s, who technically isn’t paying us to watch funny YouTube videos at work. Or maybe the time is our family’s, who certainly deserve the time and attention more than playing a computer game. Or maybe the time belongs to our aspirations: the time that could be invested in bettering ourselves in some way or another by hitting the gym, attending that workshop or going for that next degree or credential. Any way you slice it, the way we’ve set up the demands on our time in modern society our time feels less and less our own.
We are haunted at all times by that which we “could” or “should” be doing, even if what we are doing is truly important. This “I should be doing something else” feeling is increasingly affecting our entertainment consumption and communication behavior.

But, there will always be a unit of time, a unit of anything really, that is individually beneath counting or caring. That could be three minutes, eighty-nine cents, one more bite, one more wedding guest. Individually there is always room for this unit, just beneath the “Threshold of Care.”

Beneath the Threshold of Care, anything goes. That’s why ninety-nine cents was pioneered as a marketing device (and later as folks got wise to the ninety-nine cent phenomenon, the ninety-five-cent and eighty-nine cent innovations).

But time doesn’t break down quite so easily. In fact, when it comes to time the Threshold of Care is fluid. It changes based on your life situation, career and family demands. But it also responds to time demands on entire cultures. With the rapid industrialization and technologicalization of a global society determined to do more in less time, the threshold has been driven down.

And that’s where the new age of internet/mobile entertainment and communication comes in. While a phone conversation runs the risk of going over the Threshold of Care, a text stays comfortably beneath it. Even an exchange of texts over the course of an hour can remain, at least in our minds, beneath the threshold, like those six eighty-nine cent burritos you just ate at Taco Bell ($5.34 + tax).

Besides, who doesn’t have time to read a-hundred-and-forty-character tweet. Or for that matter to write one. A whole article seems an unacceptable commitment, but a string of headlines and blurbs is fine. And an image can be digested in significantly less time than a sentence.

And the phenomenon logically makes its way from consumption to production. Consider that in the heyday of print a 1,000 word newspaper article would have been considered unusually short, now 1,000 words is average for online, if not leaning toward the long side in many publications.

Short form video has wound it’s way into our culture for the same reason. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, the way information is produced and consumed on the internet; these are all reflections of this culture of stolen time and the evolution of the Threshold of Care.

And for the first time in history the Threshold of Care, the medium or format itself rather than the choice of content, is the primary criteria on which many consumers will make their choices.

There have always been good books and bad books, good movies and bad movies, good television shows and bad ones. The same applies to new media content. There are, of course, good YouTube videos and bad ones, good Tweeters and bad ones, but the ability of consumers to discern quality is only now evolving. As long as the medium is new the bad content will continue to free ride on the novelty, but over time as we become familiar and more confident consumers of new media, our expectations of content and ability to discern quality will evolve.

The winners in the new time-compressed age will be the producers of content that stretch the boundaries by marketing products beneath the Threshold of Care and over-delivering on content in the bubble of time we’ve deemed acceptable and then stretching that bubble of time from within. You log in to Facebook to check a quick message and before you know it you’ve messaged, poked, posted, and spent an hour consuming content on different people’s walls.

As for the culture of stolen time that makes this an increasingly common behavior, the guilt and the “I should be’s” we’re all coping with, the only solution is as obvious as it is challenging: making good decisions about how we spend our time and accepting our time use for what it is.

Haterism

Haters. It’s the next big thing the world needs to address. Haters stop millions of would be success stories from happening, and hold back hundreds of thousands of already successful people from attaining even greater heights of success. Haters (probably) cost the economy billions of (theoretical) dollars in lost productivity every year. Obama’s biggest obstacle? Not the economy, not unemployment, not terrorism…you guessed it. Haters. Haterism is a disease that costs society dearly.

People often ask me, how does the Culture Wharf know about all the important socio-cultural flashpoints before they hit the mainstream pages of Newsweek? It’s easy. Watch the black people. Hip-hop for years has been dominated by the trope of “rising above the haters,” a major reason for the ostentatious displays of wealth so favored by the rap community. The reason the theme has been so extensively explored in this genre should be obvious, whenever any drug dealer and/or rapper climbed out of the poverty of his surroundings there was jealousy, anger, hate.

Perhaps urban dictionary said it best:

Haterism (n.) – Displaying hate for another individual’s success as a result of ones own shortcomings.

From user Markus Levell Price on UrbanDictionary.com

In this article I want to take a closer look at the concept of haterism, break it down to it’s psychological components and expose the cultural dynamics that give rise to haterism and give it its power.

Why is haterism so important right now? Haterism is quickly approaching the point where it becomes so obviously dysfunctional that society will have no choice but to wake up and address it. Obama’s presidency is going to put haterism front and center. In fact it already has. When Rush Limbaugh said he hopes Obama fails, classic haterism, and you’d better believe there’s more where that came from. Obama will face this kind of hate in everything he does in this presidency, and while it will come from many different sources each of them will be speaking from the same place of weakness and fear. Weakness and fear are where haterism has it’s roots.

Haterism is part of a larger family of psychological processes known as projection:

Projection is a defense mechanism that involves taking our own unacceptable qualities or feelings and ascribing them to other people. For example, if you have a strong dislike for someone, you might instead believe that he or she does not like you. Projection functions to allow the expression of the desire or impulse, but in a way that the ego cannot recognize, therefore reducing anxiety.

http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/ss/defensemech_5.htm

Haterism isn’t exactly projection, but it works pretty much the same way. In haterism the unacceptable quality is the motivation, drive, or success of another person. The hater has unconsciously rejected these qualities in himself in order to explain his situation to himself. In our black communities the hater blames society, white people, public schools, big corporations and any third party they can think of, thus projecting their own limitations outward (not that there aren’t plenty of problems facing black communities, but the distinction here is in taking responsibility). Here’s where haterism really begins: once you’ve psychologically projected these limitations outward, anyone who transcends them is violating your sense of what is possible. These success stories challenge your reality, and very few people respond to that challenge with an open mind. The knee jerk reaction to any violation of your reality is to reject it. So, back to our example of black communities, very often instead of holding up successes as examples to inspire, successful people are rejected and hated on by the community that they rose out of (see “black middle class identity,” “Tyler Perry,” “Kanye West”).

But I don’t want to make it sound like haterism is limited to African American issues. If anything because haterism has been a part of the discussion in African American culture for so long these communities have better identified it and dealt with it than majority culture has. Now who could be so blind and lacking in self-awareness as to miss this phenomenon entirely? Entitled. White. Males. See “The Republican Party”. More on that to come.

Bon Mot: “Frenemy” and “Bromance”

Editorial note: Bon Mot is an occasional column by Culture Wharf contributor and UC Berkeley vocabularist Jacob Mushin that focuses on the relationship between emerging pop-culture vocabulary and the social trends they reflect.
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I opened the Boston Globe sports page this morning and read that the Jets are the Patriots are “football frenemies”, outlining the AFC-playoff picture that has New England fans pulling for New York this weekend (Root Canal).

Frenemy is not however, according to the red underline on my computer as I write this, an actual word in the dictionary.

But it is a word in the hallowed tome that is the Urban Dictionary and has notched itself a few pieces of high profile pop-culture. including Sex and the City and The Colbert Report. The word is now used in journalistic prose, not exactly with regularity, but without explanation – another sign that it has entered the public’s vocabulary.

The word Bromance occupies a similar space in today’s landscape of emerging vocabulary. “Bromance,” referring to the “complicated love and affection shared by two straight males” (Urban Dictionary) will be the title of a new MTV reality show featuring bro-dating for dudes and starring The Hill’s Brody Jenner. Bromance, like Frenemy, has also seen increasing use in print in recent years Here’s to ‘bromance’

Try a Google News search for each term to gauge the current level of journalistic and pop-culture usage.

No longer a joke, but not quite real words, these two linguistic anomalies persist because they capture something in a single word that used to require a paragraph’s explanation: “well she’s kind of my friend but there’s a long history there, I mean we used to be really close like freshman year but then she started dating my ex and I was like ‘I’m not going to be your friend anymore you slut’ but then we were sort of part of the same group so we keep up the appearance of friendship for social reasons.”

Frenemy says it all in one.

Language is always evolving to more accurately represent reality. The more complex and intensely social reality human beings now occupy demands succinct conceptualizations for heretofore un-baptized social phenomena.

So perhaps frenemy and bromance aren’t headed to Merriam and Webster’s dictionary just yet, but the social relationships they represent aren’t likely to dissapear anytime soon.

Politically Correct Native Americans Have Globalization to Thank

Mandatory background reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports_team_names_and_mascots_derived_from_indigenous_peoples

The people that were here before European settlers arrived used to be Indians.

Anyone who has ever taken an elementary school social studies class could tell you that Columbus mistakenly declared the natives “Indians” because he thought he had succesfully sailed around the world to the south-Asian subcontinent.

And the name just kind of stuck.

Of course I had always heard that technically they were “Native Americans,” but like not calling women “broads” I always thought it was something you only had to do when one of them was around. So for me and most of the people I knew, Indians were Indians.

Growing up in Cleveland under the watchful eye of “Chief Wahoo” I have witnessed the cultural battleground over the term Indian first hand. It seemed like every year at least one group of over-educated white people from places with names like Wesleyan and Swarthmore had a problem with the term Indian or the Chief Wahoo logo. Editorials would be written in the Plain Dealer, intelligent sounding discussions would occur at dinners among the Cleveland elite, but the name Indians and our red-faced feather-sporting chieftan persisted through it all. Year in and year out, for all the agitation of the post-colonial studies PhD’s, Cleveland stuck with the Indians. And so did America.

Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians

Because in America the word Indian has been used for hundreds of years to refer to the native inhabitants of this continent and that word is a part of our cultural heritage. Even when overbearing linguistic political correctness took hold in the 90’s we learned to separate formal from private speech. We taught our kids to say “Native Americans”  when raising their hand in social studies and yet they were giving eachother Indian burns at recess and their parents were taking off to Indian casinos on an Indian reservation for the weekend.

But culturally-sensitive linguistic warriors everywhere are finally seeing the tide turning in their favor, against the word Indian as a label for natives of this country. Globalization is inadvertently bringing an end to Columbus’s famous misnomer by bringing us… real Indians.

Because until a few years ago we didn’t care much about the other Indians in some poor country in Asia, Indians was safely tethered in meaning to North-American natives.

Today real India is usurping, or rather reclaiming, their rightful moniker because of the cultural significance of real India in the era of Globalization.

Walk into any hospital, med-school, or engineering department anywhere in the country and you’ll see why. As orinary Americans come face to face with (brown) Indians more often in every day life, the term Indian as applied to native Americans makes less and less sense. The 1492 mistake that we’ve stood by for centuries now seems inconvenient. Ever since I’ve had a friend from Kerela whom I acknowledge as “Indian” I haven’t known what to call native Americans…  hell I guess native Americans isn’t such a bad descriptor when it’s not being forced on me by the PC police.

I laughed when I heard that Dartmouth College abandoned the Indian as their mascot in a typically 70’s frenzy of self-congratulatory white linguistic bombast and ridiculed the attempts of the National Congress of American Indians to ban Indian names from NCAA sports.

I was the last person I would ever expect to drop the term Indian from my casually racist vocabulary, but it’s simply a matter of utility in the 21st century. Now when I hear Indian I don’t think of feathers and arrows, I think of Tiki Masala, Kelly Kapur from The Office, and Axe deodorant body-spray. When I hear “Indian casino” my first thought isn’t of a tribal reservation with animal skins on the walls — it’s that some international Indian financier from Bangalore is buying up space in Vegas.

Indians have replaced Indians as the primary Indians in American culture, which has accomplished what the “Native American” terminologists never could, and might just prompt Cleveland to re-think the name of their baseball franchise.