In our last Sunday Family Home Evening (with my real family, not my apartment family), we watched this video.

You really should watch the video, but if you don’t have time to, the part that struck me most was this:

“It’s not our reality that shapes us, but the lens through which we view the world that determines if we will be happy.”

The speaker then goes on to recommend that we should find at least five things we’re grateful for every day, rewiring our brains to seek out the positive and be grateful for what we have. It really changes everything. I want to share a few, and since it’s my blog and I do whatever I want, I think I will.

An awkward beginning.

This is going to sound weird, but I’m grateful to come from a wealthy family. I don’t mean to say that in the sense that I’m happy to come home to a big house and sleep in a nice bed and drive a relatively nice car, although all this is true. My family is wealthy to me not just in the sense that we have nice things, but, as my mom always says, “We buy experiences.”

I grew up with a steady diet of art, piano, clarinet and saxophone lessons. My mom was always there to not only put up with my frustrations in school, but to push me beyond what I had previously been capable of. It was by no means out of the ordinary to hear her say, “Sure that will get you an A, but is that really the best you can do?” And then we’d go to work; we’d get creative, and we’d learn more than assignments could ever teach me. It’s interesting looking through the family library now and finding books with titles like, “Encouraging Your Child’s Writing Talent,” with notes about me penciled in the margin.

We traveled a lot, and perhaps that has given me the love for travel I have today. When we traveled it wasn’t just going to a new place and getting comfortable, we were there to experience and learn new things. When we were in Aruba we ate the Aruban pizza (I remember it had raisins and goat cheese) and went parasailing. We went scuba diving in the hollowed out shell of an old German U-boat that was sunk just off the coast, and in some strange way the animal life that had developed inside of it made me look at things differently.  When we went to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina we not only went kayaking with dolphins but we did everything we could to really understand what slavery was like.

I love that on Sunday evenings after family dinner we get together and talk, and it’s not just shooting the breeze. We have passionate, occasionally heated discussions about everything from the correct valuation of Facebook to the feasibility and practicality of government provided healthcare. We talk about the Gospel and how to become more charitable, and the nitty gritty details that you never hear at church about the lives of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. We talk about how to stay out of debt and file our taxes correctly and how to raise happy families.

I tweeted at my mom once making reference to a book that explained fairly well the details of my frustration with school. When I came home from college for the weekend she greeted me at the door and said, “I read that book you tweeted about; I’ve highlighted some sections I want to discuss with you.”

I could, as you can see, go on and on, but I’m already tearing up and we need to move on.

The Job Hunt

With nine months of no school, it was time for me to suck it up and get a “real” job for a little while. Having hired for a few job openings where I received about 50 job applications a day, I was less than excited to enter that flooded market. But you do what you have to do. The whole way was filled with support from nearly everyone I’ve ever met, beginning with when I texted one of the most legit entrepreneurs around and asked if I could use him as a reference. The response? “1000% yes.” It was a little thing, but the job search is frustrating for me, especially the waiting part, and I was very grateful for the encouragement.

Instead of going through and applying everywhere I saw, I created an infographic resume with a traditional resume at the bottom, and tweeted out a link to it at about midnight in the middle of the week. I stayed on Twitter for a few minutes and went to sleep.

I woke up at 8 AM by my phone which was ringing to schedule a job interview. Throughout the night some local entrepreneurs got behind me, and before I had woken up my resume had been tweeted to over 60,000 people (yes, I typed that right). I was CC’d on a dozen emails sent out to nearly every company I would be excited to work for in Utah with an email that contained my resume as an attachment and a message that usually said something like, “This kid is a rock star, you should hire him,” or “Austen would be the perfect fit for your company.” I set up eight interviews pretty quickly for the next week, and there are a couple that I’m really, really excited about. I could see myself working for those companies for a long, long time, and really learning a lot. The entrepreneurship community in Utah got behind me in a really, really cool way, and I couldn’t know a better group of people. Thanks again, guys.

Grasswire

Before we move out of business mode (which if you know me, happens rarely), things are finally coming along for Grasswire. Since I developed a passion for journalism and saw how it needed to change when reading state controlled papers in China or dissecting the New York Times back home, the problem that Grasswire seeks to solve has kept me up for a couple dozen nights just pacing and thinking. It probably drives my parents crazy if they ever hear me.

And now the pieces are finally coming together. We have a pretty sick team working on it in the after-school/work hours, and we were sought out by a pretty legit investor last week who wants to see more of our vision. It’s still a long way from becoming a profitable company (we’re biting off a lot for sure — hopefully it’s not more than we can chew), but this is my corner and I plan to be kicking at for a long, long time to see if I can change/save an industry.

Moving

Speaking of the team, I’ll not only be sharing an office with Grasswire’s cofounder (the new Provo Startup Dojo is another thing to be grateful for), but we’ll be sharing an apartment. We lucked out and are moving into the new place “The Village” on 600 North and 600 East. Walking distance, private room, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, new everything… I’m excited. One of the things I’m most excited for is to have a completely new ward. Everyone will be new and in the same boat, which is neat to someone who has moved every four months or so since 2008.

Living

Speaking of roommates, I have a pretty solid set of them right now. When I moved to China last summer, I had a pretty striking realization, that was this (if I can find my gmail chats I had with a friend): “Nothing you could ever do alone will ever make you happy as doing anything with the people you love.”

So I was a little bit anxious to move back home without very many friends my age around me. As you’ve already read, I love my family, but there’s a difference. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to be as lonely as I had felt at times in China (before Chris, Alyssa and Nate moved to Shanghai — we still need to hang out, guys).

But I was in luck. Not only were Drew and Spence going to move back to Mapleton and Springville, but it turned out that all of my roommates/mission buddies were going to move back to Mapleton with me — after we chilled in a condo on a private beach in California for a week.

I love my mission buddies. Not just in the sense that we all lived in Ukraine together and we can all make borsch and speak Russian, but they’re always so… thoughtful. It’s rare that you find people who have played college football and will get bent out of shape about the 49ers game on Saturday and geek out about science fiction on Sunday; it’s very refreshing to see people live the lives they want to without regard for what is normal or accepted or expected, and to not have to fall into any stereotype.

It’s nice that they’ll put up with you on the golf course and help you improve your swing (slowly but surely, I’m getting there), and then have very serious discussions about the lives of Benjamin Fanklin and Victor Frankl on the way home.

You grow pretty close after having lived with each other in Ukraine and Provo, and then closer as you watch one of those people practice proposing in the basement. Also, it’s adorable.

This went way longer than I had planned on it going, but I hope you can see why I feel so blessed. More importantly, I hope you can see why you are so blessed, and make it a way of life to seek out the good things and be appreciative for everything you’ve been given, because it’s a lot.

Posted under Thoughts

Zuckerberg’s Hoodie a ‘Mark of Immaturity,’ Says Analyst Some Schmuck Who Has Never Built a Company

It’s difficult for me to sum up everything that I hate about corporate business in one video, but I think this one pretty much does it. I don’t blame this analyst, per se, about the fact that he simply does not get what it takes to create a successful company. To quote one of my favorite books, Founders at Work,

The striking thing about [the startup phase] is that it’s completely different from most people’s idea of what business is like. If you looked in people’s heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing “business,” you’d get images of people dressed up in suits, groups sitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpoint presentations, people producing thick reports for one another to read. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And yet they’re probably the most productive part of the whole economy.

Why the disconnect? I think there’s a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the “sports” model of some production car to get the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut of all the crap the manufacturer had bolted to the car to make it look fast.

That’s exactly it. What is Mark Zuckerberg wearing? Whatever the heck he wants to. The man took a few lines of code and turned it into one of the most valuable companies in the word in a few years in his early twenties. If you do that you can wear a loin cloth. You can show up late to a meeting with one of the largest venture capital firms in the world wearing pajamas and they will still beg to fund you, because it’s not about how you package your company.

So Zuckerberg will wear a hoodie and flip flops, and Steve Jobs will wear a black turtleneck, jeans and running shoes. That’s them. They not only create wealth, some reports say each of the them have, by the means of their respective companies, created more than 1,000 millionaires. Yes, over 1,000 separate people who had stock in each company are now millionaires. How’s that for a lack of maturity?

This is what I hate about big business. I loathe it. You’re nothing but an empty shell. Corporate and cold, looking at people as numbers and acting important. When the founders of YouTube sold their company to Google for $1.6 Billion (with a B), the entire process took less than a week, and was negotiated in a freaking Denny’s.

People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn’t fit with what they already know.

I don’t care how much money there is on Wall Street, the real value of the world and the greatest economic growth is created by people wearing jeans in garages and dorm rooms. Wear a suit if you want to, but don’t force others to.

Posted under Entrepreneurship

I just finished my last final (presenting my Shakespeare project doesn’t count), and I’m so excited for summer. I don’t go back to school unti January (the Communications program is structured in a really odd way), so I’m a free bird. Why am I so excited?

1. I’m going home

No international travels this year (three cheers for my first summer in the United States since 2008). I’m super excited to move back into my house in Mapleton. That’s partially because I’m taking my three roommates with me (at least until two of them go on their International Marketing study abroad tour which I’m not at all jealous about). We’re starting a book club. We’ll probably combine it for a meeting or two with the book club that’s starting in Provo, but I’m sure the books in our book club will be very non-fiction and business oriented (since one is an accounting major and the other two are business management majors).

2. Las Vegas/California Trip

With the aforementioned roommates, we’re heading to Las Vegas/California this weekend (one of the roommates is from Vegas and we’ll pass through to California. I hear a root beer tasting contest will probably be involved, and if there’s one thing I love in life it’s drinking specialty sodas from glass bottles. OK, that’s probably overstated, but I do like it.

3. California Trip

I’ll have a little while to keep job hunting when I get back (until then I’ll just keep money coming in through RedWrit) and then there will be another California trip. This time with Dr. Hansen and the crew. The agenda includes rock climbing, surfing, and bowling with Dr. Hansen’s grandma.

4. Grasswire 

I’ll finally have the time that the new business deserves to devote to it. Garrett has been awesome on the tech side of things, but my customer validation and business development has been slacking. Seeing as he starts school spring semester, I’m hoping to make that flip-flop. We’ll be getting an office at the Provo Startup Dojo, where I will be spending most of my after-work hours. (A very rough, static preview is here, sign up for the beta here)

5. Programming

The single best investment I’ve made in my educational career (with the possible exception of my frequent use of the Khan Academy) was a subscription to Lynda. Lynda is a software training website, and although it runs me $25/month, I learn twice as much there as I do from school… wait, how much am I paying for tuition? By January I plan to be a beast at HTML/CSS/JavaScript, at least enough to be able to do most front-end development on my own. And since front-end development is something that isn’t really taught at BYU, even in the ISYS or CS programs (another post coming on how ridiculous that is).

Posted under Uncategorized

So I was messing around on Pinterest today (experiment for guys: create a Pinterest account and follow only guys and maybe a few close girls… it’s awesome). I just thought you might like to know someone went into the future and found a picture of my future child.

Source: tumblr.com via Austen on Pinterest

Posted under Media, Technology

My response to Francisco Dao’s, “What would happen if we kill big media?” Part of his remarks are below.

As much as I would hate to lose movies, the demise of newspapers is an even more frightening prospect. Investigative journalism, the kind that uncovered Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, costs money. And as newspapers have been forced to cut staff, so too has their ability to perform this type of work.

Some suggest that newspapers will be replaced by citizen journalism. But social media is largely a distribution tool. The BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post account for 80% of the links from bloggers. What happens when the source material (these four properties) can no longer afford to provide the reporting? Does anyone really think a Huffington Post Top 10 list is a replacement for the NY Times? Who will act as the Fourth Estate, and what credibility will they have when they are more obligated to self-promotion than journalistic integrity?

Social media at the current point is largely a method of distribution, and that’s exactly what needs to change. We are now connected in novel ways that lets us distribute and comment on mainstream media, but there are too few producing it. Not because we don’t have the ability or the will or the incentives, but rather because the barriers to entry are too high.

If I want to be an investigative journalist and produce journalistic material, the barriers to entry are just too high. I have to write on speculation, and then spend about 50% of my time (from the journalists I’ve talked to) finding placement for/someone to pay for those articles. The sales process is too involved and there’s no marketplace. Not everyone has five years to pull an Arianna Huffington and not make a profit while building up one’s fan base. Nor do many have the knowledge, ability, or even desire to do so.

The future of journalism is grassroots (call it citizen if you must) journalism. It’s the only place where the incentives can be right; it’s OK to let your writer base be fragmented, sporadic, and (gasp!) even without formal journalistic training. Any editor can take well-written content and place it under AP guidelines. The difference between “Obama said” and “said Obama” are very small, but knowing all of the minutia of AP styling is painful and takes years of training, only to be broken by virtually every New York Times journalist at his or her will.

The claim is often made that investigative journalism is expensive and with the demise of the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Chicago Tribune will come the inevitable downfall of investigative journalism. My question to anyone who is making this argument is, “Have you actually read any of those newspapers recently?” The investigative journalism in them is barely existent. If your definition of investigative journalism is, “Obama said this, but Republicans said this, and AlQueida said this,” you’re right, it’s chalk full of it. But by my definition that isn’t investigative journalism; that’s he-said-she-said journalism, and it’s virtually all we have anymore.

So what of the fourth estate of government that is journalism? Who will be the watchdog that will keep the government in line?

All of us. We can all be journalists, we can all be reporters, we can all participate, we can all edit, and we can all fact check, as soon as there’s a marketplace that will allow us to do so. Regardless of the platform it’s delivered on.

The debate of print vs. online needs to end. The average age of newspaper readers is in the 50s and climbing. The target market will soon literally start dying. I speak on behalf of my generation to say we’re willing and able to contribute and participate, but the barriers to entry for our doing so need to be lowered. No longer is writing a comment at the end of an article enough. We need to be involved in every process for journalism to be saved. We need to be able to fact check, submit edits, and submit entire stories. If done right, “crowdsourcing” (although I despise the word in a journalistic context for how often it is used incorrectly) truly is the answer.

So there you have it. The same thing that is the “problem” is really the untapped solution, but as a public and as media professionals we’re too stubborn to let it happen and speed it along. Lower the barriers to entry for participation, let anyone write/edit and fact check as well as curate, and the industry will be changed forever. Get the incentives right and the industry will be shifted in the same way e-commerce changed big-box stores and in the same way Napster, iTunes and Spotify changed the music industry.

Posted under Media, News

I’m trying to learn how to program computers. It’s not going too well. Perhaps that’s because I’m so bad at making decisions I get divided between different languages. I’m currently working on PHP, Python and JavaScript at the same time.

It doesn’t come naturally to me at all; going through a script to find the one symbol I missed is not exactly my cup of tea, but it’s something that has to happen.

Knowing how to program is the literacy of the 21st century. Now we have stories about men who taught themselves to read to lift themselves out of poverty. In 30 years we’ll have stories about men who taught themselves how to program.

We had a discussion after family dinner about whether or not we would allow our future children to have video games. We weren’t allowed to have them, primarily because I would play them all day and become aggressive (which is ironic since now I can’t even stand to play them for 10 minutes). Dallen and I came to the same conclusion: We will let our kids play any computer games they program themselves. “Here’s a computer, it has DOS. Go nuts.”

The world cannot have enough computer engineers. Politicians are fighting to retain manufacturing jobs in the United States. I say let them go, let us bring up more engineers to empower the future of science and technology. That’s where jobs and growth truly come from — entrepreneurship and technology. The technical skills that can create those things are math, science, and programming. That’s where the sure jobs are in the coming years.

Yet that’s what schools are the worst at. Because the educational system is 20 years behind the economy.

 

Posted under Uncategorized

I was looking at the media I consume from traditional sources for my Comms class, and I realized something.

Q: What radio station do you spend the most time listening to?
A: NPR

Q: What TV station do you watch the most?
A: C-Span

Q: What is your preferred way to consume the news?
A: The New York Times print edition (hey, they give it away for free in the Brimhall Building).

I’m officially a boring person.

I consume traditional media like I’m 80 years old. It’s a good thing I spend most of my time consuming non-traditional media.

Posted under Media

I hope I don’t get in trouble for putting this online, or for procrastinating my homework a wee bit more, but you all need to know:

Chloe won Valentine’s Day.

For those of you that have never met Chloe, you should. She’s in my Shakespeare class and in the ol’ ward at Liberty Square — she lives just a hop skip and a javelin throw away from our apartment, actually. I might get in trouble with her for telling you all how awesome she really is, but let’s be honest, she doesn’t have much room to talk after certain posts on her new blog (which has been officially added to the sidebar blogroll).

The Story

Last night I had one of Chloe’s roommates sneak over to my apartment with her computer, and I downloaded Spotify Unlimited. When I told Chloe, she came over to chill for a bit before she took off to a concert. She was all, “Oh, Aust, THANK YOU!” I was pleased.

After a while she mentioned that she had bought tickets to go to the Real Salt Lake home opener with her little brothers. I was more than a little jealous, yet excited to talk with Chloe about her real-life RSL experience.

Then I realized Chloe’s entire story was built on a foundation of falsehood and deceit.

She pulled out a receipt for two tickets out of her pocket, which confused me, because two brothers + a Chloe = 3 people. Then she informed me she had actually bought the tickets so that we could go to the RSL game. And not only did she get tickets, she got them in section 1, like she’d been buying tickets her whole life.

So opening night vs. Red Bull New York, Chloe and I will be singing this song in the Riot (Rio Tinto Stadium):

(Yes, there will most certainly be drums not far from us all game long — we’re not far from the Rogue Cavaliers Brigade or Barra Real).

So then I decided it was time to get to my homework as Chloe took off to her concert. A couple hours into an odd combination of Shakespeare and economics, and I get a text that says,

“Oh P.S. if you need a break from homework… you might want to make a trip to your office.”

I walked down to the office (dead car battery) and found this on my desk.

Chloe knows me well.

So there you have it. Chloe wins. Here’s to waiting until March.

Oh, Chloe, by the way — soccer tradition says you have to wear your team’s scarf to their games. Don’t worry, she’s on her way.

Posted under Women

It was my little sister’s birthday today (happy birthday, Whip!)

I can neither confirm nor deny allegations that I remembered today was her birthday as a result of one of my friends posting on her Facebook wall last night.

For part of her birthday present tonight, she requested that we don’t talk about business or politics for a whole family dinner. That’s quite the feat for my family — how do you get through a whole dinner without talking smack about Newt Gingrich?

We definitely like politics — we were happy to hear that the New York Giants won the Super Bowl, because that means Jon Stewart will be happy, and that just might have a slight impact on how funny The Daily Show is. This shows you about where professional football falls on my list of priorities.

This week was awesome and jam-packed with entrepreneurship. Friday I spent the day at the Lean Startup Lunch. It was awesome — Steve Blank, Alex Osterwalder and Nathan Furr all in the same room — for those of you that aren’t very business oriented, that’s like… John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams being in the same room, except instead of forming a new nation they’re forming a new paradigm of business where business models replace business plans. It will take over the business world, as exhibited by Harvard and Stanford fighting over who will host the International Business Model Competition next year and are considering completely shutting down their illustrious Business Plan Competitions.

Speaking of the International Business Model Competition, that evening there was the International Business Model Competition at BYU. Xoompark absolutely dominated the competition (a team from Harvard came in second and the other Universities got pounded). Hats off to Ken and the guys from Xoompark. You nailed it. It was also nice to hear Steve Blank say things like, “If you’re serious about running this business, you need to stop entering competitions.” Finally, somebody understands that investment money and competitions aren’t the end goal of entrepreneurship.

Speaking of the end goal of entrepreneurship, Saturday was the Startup Weekend awards ceremony, and there were some pretty rad teams and businesses (the premise is you get together a team and build a business in three days; the code that was put together in those two days was astounding). Chloe, who is probably one of the coolest people ever, came along, stepping a bit out of her comfort zone to try and understand a bit of “my world.” She was a champ, and picked up on stuff super fast. She even sat through my droning on about back end development and Google.

After Startup Weekend Chloe and went out for dinner, and I made one of the greatest discoveries of my post-China existance. There actually is (contrary to popular belief) authentic Chinese food in Provo. Wild Ginger on 366 North University was great. Flip to the back to the stuff that’s written in Mandarin — I recommend the Tan Tan Noodles and the Chicken Dry Pot.

So to sum up – Janna’s birthday, Two full days of entrepreneurship, authentic Chinese food, Chloe, and new Super Bowl commercials. Er, I mean, the Super Bowl.

Seriously, though, those commercials…

Posted under Entrepreneurship, Politics, Week in Review, Women

It’s been a difficult month for the Internet. First there was the whole SOPA and PIPA fiasco (I apologize for filling your Facebook and Twitter news feeds with politics, but it was really really important), and now Google and Twitter are selling out.

Google

Google is introducing what it calls, “Google + Your World” to its search results, which it claims will make search results more personalized. What it will really do is incorporate (only) Google+ posts into its search results, forcing people to use/switch to Google+. In the past, Google’s search results have been sacred. Even with the introduction of AdWords and AdSense (Google’s pay-per-click advertising arms) it was not simply a “buy the top spot” system; Google evaluated your bid price, how relevant your site was, how you used certain keywords, etc. to determine where you would appear in the sponsored results. Now Google is showing that it is willing to sell the integrity of its search in an attempt to gain more traction with Google+. In other words, Google sold out.

Twitter

Not to be outdone, Twitter began searching for new markets and new users for its micro-blogging service; the same service that was behind much of the arab spring, that was the tool that has been used to topple governments, and that has proved to be the voice of the people 140 characters at a time in fighting against tyranny.

Yet Twitter has found it difficult expanding into some new markets, since some governments are used to controlling everything people see, read and hear. Governments (rightfully) realize that if people are able to communicate without using their funneled and warped systems, the truths they are trying to suppress may leak out and start causing problems.

So how does Twitter go about solving this problem? It recently released a policy that individual countries could censor, tweet by tweet, what was deemed unlawful in that country. Instead of Twitter changing countries, countries are changing Twitter. In other words, Twitter sold free speech in exchange for new users.

I fear the reality is that we are waiting for another organization brave enough to not sell its integrity when it comes to changing the world, even if, for companies like Twitter and Google, selling great ideals might be extremely lucrative. We are waiting for new forms of media and news so as to not be held down by the “big six” media conglomerates that hold a vast majority of the means of communication in the United States. We’re waiting for new forms of communication that will not allow themselves to be tarnished in order to make an additional buck.

New Business

In my loads of spare time (har), I’m now building a new business. Our goal is to democratize the news — to take the power of publishing journalism out of the hands of organizational structures and “the big six,” and to give it, for the first time ever, to ordinary people at the grassroots of the world. There are a lot of obstacles to doing so, as well as many that I’m positive we’re yet to see (they say sometimes naïveté is your greatest strategic advantage), but more than anything I’ve ever done in business I’m hellbent on fixing this one. It feels like everything I’ve always loved and been passionate about is coming together into one product, into one opportunity.

But I digress. The thing that I think about a lot now is the intersection of values and monetary potential. In other words, how much is X worth to you?

I used to think this was largely an issue created by those who didn’t understand how business and economics work; that when the art school kids say, “The businessmen drink my blood,” that was just because they didn’t understand. Then, slowly but surely, I began to see the real/dark side of the communications industry, as well as many others (including search engine marketing and the secondary ticket market).

From media moguls knowingly pushing laws through Congress that would be harmful to creativity and society as a whole but protecting their intellectual holdings to companies that look strikingly like what we’re trying to do be bought out by one of the big six for $10 Million and subsequently dismantled and shut down the next day, you constantly have to ask yourself what something is worth to you.

Sufjan Stevens

Maybe that’s part of why my favorite song lately has been, “Come On, Feel the Illinoise!” by Sufjan Stevens. The lyrics are incredible, and the song seems speaks to me on a different level somehow. I’ll leave you to ponder on the interpretation, and to wonder what (fill-in-the-blank) is worth to you. For Sufjan, (as well as for many of those who, like me, are studying advertising), it’s art. But it could be anything.

The two parts of this song explore the tension between art and commerce. The first part, by examining the 1893 World’s Fair, questions whether we have progressed through our creations or actually taken steps back due to our obsessions with consumption. The second part becomes more introspective by looking at artists themselves and how they fit.

For a little background, the World’s Fair of 1893 was very influential on American consumerism. The fair was a look back at the 400 years since Columbus’s voyage to the New World, and it attempted to show just how far we had come. By imitating the architectural style in Europe, it created the White City, which tried to show Americans that the U.S. could compete with Europe on a cultural level while at the same time be celebrated as a leader in technology and education. The Fair offered scholarly exhibits with great thinkers and educators of the time (Dewey, for instance), but Americans who visited (over 27 million) were more impressed with the Midway — an amusement park with Ferris Wheels, international singers and performers and new products such as Cream of Wheat, Pabst beer, Aunt Jemima syrup and soft drinks. In a sense, the fair ushered in the idea that enjoying oneself was done through the consumption of material goods. Everything in today’s culture, from the power of advertising to Disney to amusement parks, can easily be traced back to the World’s Columbian Exposition.

In the song, Sufjan mentions in the first line having some motivation to comment on society, but when he spots the advertising he is taken over by it. In the next line, the speaker is calling for, in the midst of great confusion and anxiety, entrepreneurs to lead us to the promised line instead of solely seeking for the profits that are the result of promoting this consumeristic attitude and lifestyle.

In the next set of lines, he seems to be asking, “Can’t our dialogue with each other better connect us rather than advertising and products?” It emphasizes the question by urging us to think on our own (“put it to your head”).

In the next set of lines, Sufjan specifically refers to products introduced at the fair but then points out in the lines beginning with, “Oh Great Intentions” that these advertisers seem to have no knowledge about the ramifications of the kinds of images they create. “Have you degraded us?” the speaker asks. Again, the speaker is thinking hard about what image is presented and what consumerism has done.

The reference to Frank Lloyd Wright drives home the point, because his creations were independent of the mainstream architects of his time. He attempted to show us what we had forgotten — that the true sign of progress is our ability to think on our own. He reminded us that we should constantly work to advance our current thinking not imitate what’s already been done.

In Part II, the speaker moves to his own art, mainly his writing, and through his visit with the ghost of Carl Sandburg, begins to think about how his art should come from his heart, not from what’s already been done.

The two parts try to show how all of us need to look within ourselves and think on our own, rather than try to be taken by the loads of advertising, products and profits that may come our way.

 

Posted under Entrepreneurship, Technology