[MUSIC PLAYING]
In last week's episode, we talked about whether or not
brands have become mythological.
Let's see what you had to say.
Keith Heart-Star writes a comment
about the relationship between the United
States and mythmaking.
And I think it is absolutely fair to claim that there
is a love of mythologizing much of the past of the United
States, for better or worse.
But then a great conversation follows
as to discussing whether or not or to what degree that
is a particular characteristic of the United States
versus just people.
And I would love to know what everybody else thinks
about this, that is there from the outside of the US,
is there a sense that we tend to mythologize our past more
so than other countries?
I want to say yes, but I also live here, so I'm biased.
In last week's episode, I talked about how brands might not
fulfill those first two sort of mythological purposes,
the first one being a kind of celebration of agency
and possibility in life.
And on the subreddit, Kass18K# talked about how you could view
brands as having progressed from a set of ideas about practical
purpose-- that you build a brand around things in the early days
of commercialism to communicate with people that this thing
solves this problem.
It does this practically.
But that now we can view them not as responding
to needs but to aspirations and ideals and ethics
and that they provide, maybe, something
of a pathway, maybe something of a mark on the horizon,
or maybe just a completely invented thing for people
to orient themselves towards, for people to aspire to.
And I think that this is such a great read
on this selection of things.
And there are a bunch of really great links in this comment.
So links to this and all of the others in the doobly doo.
Private Chicken, also on a subreddit,
talks about a kind of dialogic creation of myths
and that insofar as we might talk about brands
as being mythological, they are not only
responding to the culture at large--
that big feedback loop that we talked
about at the end of the episode--
but they're also responding to one another,
that the way that they construct their stories and messages
is not only taking into account the way
that the consumer or the public at large might respond
but how other brands, other messages, other contexts
are being created and responded to.
And I think this is also a really astute and really great
point.
And I would be curious to know whether or not
this applies to classical myth outside
of the scope of mythologies.
Like sets of myths are clearly sets
of stories that are responding to one another.
But I wonder if they respond to one another
in this same sort of-- like not using the same characters,
but responding and contextualizing
the same information or attitude.
But yeah, this is neat.
Max Valoretzo and a couple other people
pointed out that there has been a recent slang
in Brazilian Portuguese, which is to use their word for myth,
mito, which I'm probably mispronouncing totally
to describe someone who has done something
awesome or unbelievable and that you would
say that they have mythed.
And I think that this is great and awesome
and also makes me think about the stereotypical British slang
of calling someone a ledge, that they are legendary.
And so they're an absolute ledge.
And I would love to do a really deep dive
on the tiny detailed differences between what
is meant to say that someone has mythed
and then to call someone a ledge and whether or not
they align with the differences between myths and legends.
Jonathan Sneed writes a really insightful comment
about the way that brands are made and controlled or managed
by sets of other people, whereas classically, myths
or legends are more thought to be kind of owned by the people.
It is a thing that is distributed across a community,
that the sense of ownership is very strong and very communal.
And I think that this is a great point
and, I think, also ties back to what we talked about regarding
Marshall McLuhan in the literally
me episode from a couple weeks ago,
that when we use these things to learn about the world,
to build our aspirations, to define ourselves,
and to organize our perception of the world,
it's really, really important to keep
in mind who is making them, who is controlling them,
and what about them we are using as kind of central-- I
don't know-- almost organizing principles for ourselves.
And so I think, yeah, this is a great point
and a really interesting developing theme
across several Idea Channel comment responses.
So yeah, thank you for writing this.
Creatrix Tiara writes a really great comment
that provides a little bit of support
to the claim of brands becoming mythologized
by way of marketing and advertising
by talking about how when you're advertising something,
you're not necessarily advertising
the product or the object itself but you
are advertising its story or its effect
because that's what you're going to get people with.
And I think that this ties in really nicely to one
of the ideas that we talked about,
which is that it's easier to construct
a situation or a story where you are indicating
that lots of people like something as opposed
to making something that lots of people like.
Because man, that's tough.
Tamar Lichter, I think it's fair to say that both me and Idea
Channel have a kind of brand.
And I think that they're not both isomorphic.
And relatedly, I think, also, buy our t-shirt is
how advertising works.
I don't know.
Pandemoni writes a comment about how I essentially
got it backwards, that it is not brands that are myth-like
but rather myths which have brand-like qualities now
the brands are a thing that exists.
And I think that this is a really convincing way
of talking about how the two don't necessarily line up.
It also accounts for a lot of what Barthes writes
about in his "Myth Today" piece, that what he is talking about,
and a lot of the things that he did discuss in his career,
were the kind of popular ideas and populist messages
that existed.
And I agree with Pandemoni that a brand is not necessarily put
together in order to explain things about the world
so that you can move through it.
It is rather put together to point to certain things
so that you associate the brand with what it is pointed
towards, whereas a myth has that sort of more active role,
to help us orient ourselves and figure out
who we are in that greater situation,
in the greater context of living in the world
without associating a thing or a product with it.
And so yeah, I think this is absolutely a great point.
Relatedly, Stephanie Cooper writes a comment
about the kind of code of conduct of brands, which
makes me think about how status is
a big part of this conversation that we didn't even touch on.
I think classically, myth is meant to bring people in.
It's meant to explain the world to them.
It's meant to make them feel comfortable
and provide them an understanding of their context.
Whereas it's very possible, if not likely,
if not the purpose of many brands,
to be exclusionary, to provide people with a thing
to aspire to, sure, but only, in a lot of situations, because it
is something that they feel is beyond them
or that excludes them.
And that is another very important and complicated part
of this conversation.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Julia Friedland writes a really great comment
about how we can view the rejection of brands
as a kind of rejection of mainstream narratives.
And I think that this is really great
and also provides a little bit of context
for hipsterdom as a kind of almost postmodern condition.
A refusal to buy big names, in some way, or an emphasis
on things that don't have these mainstream-constructed stories
or myths is a kind of rejection of a lot of things--
traditional notions of success, traditional ideas
about the future and history and yada yada yada.
And yeah, I think this spot on and really great
and I'm going to think about this for the rest of the day.
Sam, I might go so far as to say that it is exclusively
myths that are permitted to run for president.
[MUSIC PLAYING]