Digital Manipulation

To be a society so poorly versed in things mathematical, we sure are obsessed with numbers. Just look at what’s happened in our sports culture. We like high scores (because scores are easy to compare to one another), and we like statistics. Football, with high scoring and punctuated violence made perfect for stats is the national pastime, no matter what the baseball purists might say. Baseball skates by on the statistical merits, even if most fans couldn’t compute a WHIP to save their fantasy teams. Even boxing – the simplest mano-a-mano science around – is now monitored with CompuPunch counters and statistics.

At the end of the day, we like to follow the numbers, even if we don’t know what they mean. Look at the swooning over the Dow by television reporters who couldn’t name more than one Dow Jones Industrial stock. (Bonus if you know how many there are.) Look at the obsession for manipulating credit scores, even if they are more arcane than anyone knows. And then cast an eye at marketing.

The big hype today is “Web 2.0,” signifying the transition to a culture of online societies and connections. And hype is what it is. (At least until my paperwork on ‘Web 3.0’ comes back from the Trademark office.) Besides, can we really know for sure when we’ve truly made it to 2.0? Doesn’t that require a historical hindsight?

As a matter of fact, no one had really considered that we had a “World War I” until another epic-sized conflict arose. What we know as WWI was known as “The War to End All Wars” up through the 1920s and 1930s. You really have to have the Second before being the First has any meaning. (Chin up, Buzz Aldrin.)

The pressure rears its head in marketing. Look at the latest salvos in the video-game console wars. The PS3 vs. the Xbox 360. The Playstation 3 was to come out around the same time as the next-generation Xbox – but Microsoft didn’t want to be sporting “Xbox 2 while Sony had a 3 on the shelf next to it. So the marketing whizzes came up with “360“, putting you “in the middle of the experience.” (And ironically enough, what was supposed to be WWII for videogames was won by Wii. I loves me the symmetry.)

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed the phenomenon. One brand of hair gel had different strengths. I almost bought the “Extra Hold,” until I saw it next to the “Super Extra Hold” and the “Ultra Extra Hold.” To emphasize the point, there was a series of numbers to help me figure out which I needed:

• 6 7 8 9 10 – Extra Hold
• 6 7 8 9 10 – Super Extra Hold
• 6 7 8 9 10 – Ultra Extra Hold

As cheesy as this sounds, I’m glad someone bothered to make those labels comprehensible. I would hate to think what confusion would reign if I found Mega or Omni Hold versions. (I didn’t spend very long looking, but something tells me that an exhaustive search for versions 1 through 7 would yield nothing but frustration.)

Products are now not only competing with each other, but with their own sister brands. Eras compete against each other, even if we lack the wisdom to know when one ends and the next begins. (Unless you think the Greek poets came up with Iron and Bronze age appellations all by themselves.) The hype is more important that ever, because numbers don’t lie, do they?

When the history of this era is written, there’s a good chance that the coming of “Web 2.0” will be reserved for some drastic change or revolution that we can’t yet foresee. It might be distributed computing. It might be the movement of business work back to servers, and web-based applications. It might be some type of interface that truly opens us to grand new possibilities. Or maybe future historians will just be lazy, and rely on our judgment by counting the number of references to Web 2.0 (note to self: quit screwing around and file that Trademark petition already!)

So, please share!  What is your favorite example of digital manipulation?

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Xbox, Playstation, Wii, marketing, language, history, mathematics[/tags]