Tom Coates reveals authentic version of Peter Saville sticker
Friday, 14 September 2007
For the last couple of weeks there’s been a lot of chatter about Tom Coates’s authenticity shtick:
“There has to be one place in your life where you’re absolutely resolutely not for sale. For me, that place is my personal site, the representation of me online.”
Hear that crackle of vintage vinyl on the 48-track recording? Nice effect, isn’t it?
What’s really surprising about the “super spat” is that anyone at all buys Coates’s notion that bloggers are somehow authentic, while PR is fake.
Get real: every “representation of me online” is mediated, public and more or less carefully planned (the way PR campaigns are planned).
Social networks — blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it — are where you learn how to present yourself, shape your profile and market your brand (w/thanks to Mercedes Bunz).
Nice photo, though — and nothing to do, surely, with the sticker that Peter Saville did for “Creative Review” way back in January — dead authentic.
Sunday, 16 September 2007 at 1:16 pm
You know sometimes I write things on my site and people read them and they don’t believe me. They can’t believe that anyone would hold such positions. And yet here we are once again.
Your position as I understand it is that every representation of a person online is mediated and planned—essentially ‘fake’—and that since PR does exactly the same thing, it is therefore as real or legitimate or authentic.
I understand where these arguments come from - any intelligent person running through a humanities degree is trained to explore the contingency of belief, self-representation and to question ideas of ‘truth’ - but they are there to undermine our faith in certainties, to give us tools to work with, not to dismantle everything down to some kind of moral relativistic mush.
Your position is utterly cynical. It sees people as engines to shill where the product is themselves. It removes any sense that they might believe things honestly and the sense that attempting to express a legitimate argument is anything other than a marketing pitch.
I’ve written a piece about this before. It’s here: The Vatican and the Ethics of Advertising. Here is a (long) excerpt… [which I've edited out, as it really did go on for a bit; see The Vatican and the Ethics of Advertising for the original piece in full -- sidneystencil]
Sunday, 16 September 2007 at 1:21 pm
And while we’re at it, the sticker that Peter Saville put in Creative Review was based on this sign in Soho! I took a photo of the sign, that—yes—I became aware of because of Peter Saville’s sticker. I don’t understand though how finding out about something in a magazine and go and taking a picture of it to make a point is somehow ‘inauthentic’.
Sunday, 16 September 2007 at 2:41 pm
What? Bloggers and people on social networks are projecting themselves in whatever way they choose, with all the passion, messiness, stupidity and dissembling that may involve. But they are doing it directly. AFAIK, PR involves paying others (intermediaries) to fake these emotions on behalf of a client or otherwise “spread the message”.
Even if you believe the outcome is the same (I don’t), the process is very different.
Surely you don’t think it is sustainable or desirable for companies to pay PR hacks to annoy bloggers like Tom with their marketing material in the hope that eventually he will be fooled into re-broadcasting it? Hasn’t PR got any better tools in its box?
Monday, 17 September 2007 at 10:32 am
“Authenticity shtick”. Nice. Not original, though.
There’s a fundamental dishonesty to this argument. To use the word ’shtick’ in the first place you have to define it in terms of what it isn’t: you can’t call something ’shtick’ without acknowledging the existence of sincere, unmanipulative, unroutinised communication. (If all communication is ’shtick’, the word ceases to have any meaning - & hence ceases to be usable as a criticism.)
So if you’re saying that Tom is simply selling a line, you can’t base that argument on the assumption that everyone is selling a line all the time. (Not least because if you did start from that assumption it would leave the world unchanged - there would still be more and less sincere, more and less manipulative communications.) For your charge to stand there has to be something identifiably manipulative and insincere in Tom’s denunciation of manipulation and insincerity. Is there?
Monday, 17 September 2007 at 11:50 am
Tom — “I took a photo of the sign, that–yes–I became aware of because of Peter Saville’s sticker.” The theme of February’s “Creative Review” was selling out, integrity, and the extent to which creatives “prostitute” themselves, and one of the best things about the social web is how easy it is to credit those who inspire us.
Lee — You’re absolutely right: PR agencies shouldn’t spam bloggers (or anyone else) with marketing material. But that’s what happens when you simply, desperately transfer old-media techniques to the web. Still, to make that the basis for a theory of light vs darkness, authentic vs fake, good vs evil — and to even side with the Vatican — seems a little over the top.
Tuesday, 18 September 2007 at 10:52 pm
Phil — Yes, there is. Well, I think there is. What I’m trying to say — but, judging by your response, I may have got this wrong — is that someone who passes off others’ ideas as his own might not be the best authority on integrity and authenticity, and that it’s
hypocriticalodd for a Yahoo! employee to rail against advertising. And that’s before we get into “fundamentally dishonest” and “utterly cynical” and moral outrage as a way to discourage questions.Wednesday, 19 September 2007 at 10:04 am
Firstly, a credit to Peter Saville might have been nice, but I don’t think it’s that big a deal - it’s not as if Tom used Saville’s actual sticker or claimed to have discovered the sign himself.
Secondly, I agree that it’s odd for a Yahoo! employee to rail against advertising; being one of those old-school anti-marketing Luddites myself, I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic when Tom went to Y!. But, as you acknowledge yourself, ‘odd’ doesn’t equal ‘hypocritical’.
Thirdly, what’s happened to the argument you were actually making?
Get real: every “representation of me online” is mediated, public and more or less carefully planned (the way PR campaigns are planned). Social networks — blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it — are where you learn how to present yourself, shape your profile and market your brand
It’s all shtick, in other words. As I said above, I don’t think it’s actually possible to believe this: if everything’s stage-managed, insincere and manipulative, nothing is. In any case, there’s a big difference between “bloggers are all selling something” and “it’s OK for other people to use bloggers to sell something”, which is the assumption Tom was actually challenging.