Addendum: "Generation Sell"

Serendipitously, just hours after I wrote the previous blog post, I sat down at Starbucks and read "Generation Sell" in the Sunday New York Times. Here's a link to the article online, but I don't know if it will work--oftentimes, they don't. You have to go to the site and do a search.

The article, by William Deresiewicz, is about the current generation. We had the hippies and the beatniks, the punks and the slackers. (He goes on at some length about this. Not very riveting.) What interested me, though, was the part about how this current generation--the hipsters--and their focus on small business ownership, their worship of the entrepreneur, has spilled over to the rest of us.  He writes about how showbiz people are always affable and cheerful, never knowing who may later be helpful to their career, and says, "Well, we're all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We're all selling something today because even if we aren't literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial idea, more and more of us are), we're always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product--to create a brand--and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted. The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that's packaged to be sold."

Sound about right? It does to me, too. Scarily so.

Something else about what I wrote yesterday. Whenever I write anything about any of the magazines, people jump in to criticize them, complaining about the content, the ads, the price. I understand, but here's something to keep in mind, and it's why I don't rant against them: if we didn't have those mixed-media magazines, we wouldn't have anything. They started before the rise of the internet, and they sparked the idea among their readers that, hey: we're not alone. Before that, there was no sense of community. People were making stuff, sure; but they were making it in their houses, often without access to supplies and often without any support from friends or family who just thought they were weird. Because the editors took a risk and launched the magazines, people saw the potential, and now look: videos, workshops, books, ebooks, online shops. Etsy. Can you remember before Etsy? I sure can--I was one of the ones they contacted when they started it, before anyone knew if it would fly, back when it was a completely odd idea and no one could have foreseen the boon it would be to thousands of working artists.

So while you can rail against the magazines, please keep in mind that they've done a huge thing for many, many people. Sure, now many of those people can find a community online, but not all of them: you'd be surprised how many people don't spend hours and hours a day online, how many people still love to have something made out of paper that they can sit down and hold in their hands. And like any periodical, these don't set the trends; they reflect the trends. They publish what they receive from contributors, and if you're seeing lots of any one kind of thing, that's because that's what people are sending in.

People are always talking about trend-spotting. They ask me what trends I see, and I never have a clue. I talk about this with my editors. You think they set the trends? You think we have some inside scoop on what's going to be hot? No. Just like everyone else, we're waiting to see what's going to take off. Who knows why birds were hot, and nests? You can trace things back to one artist or another, but you can't say what caused it to spread out from there and take off. Who knows?

So when you see a magazine that seems to be focusing on growing a business and personal branding, you can be pretty sure that the magazine isn't setting the trend but reflecting it. And that's scary, if it's a trend that's kind of creepy, because it means there are already a lot of people out there who are on top of it.

I feel like I need to create a logo for myself. Seriously. I think about other people's logos and think, "Gee, I maybe need to make one of those." Then I smack myself upside the head and go take a walk, which is what I'm going to do now.