MASS MARKETS
Newsweek has a provocative article on the value of "Bespoke" vs. ready-made in it's recent issue. First some definitions:
"Bespoke" has a great deal to answer for.
Not since "executive" or
"deluxe" has a word been so monstrously distorted, abused and otherwise
mangled into near meaninglessness. Today it seems that any object with
slightly more pretensions to exclusivity than a hamburger can be
labeled bespoke.
The irony, of course, is that in theory you can "bespeak"—"commission to be made," according to my Oxford dictionary—a burger.
Too often the term "bespoke" is used as marketing shorthand to delineate another quality level for which more can be charged and which, notionally at least, offers a greater degree of exclusivity."
The piece then goes on to make some points on all this, but this one stood out:
"...just because something is made for you does not necessarily mean
that it is better than an object that can be bought ready-made. To
return to the burger: perhaps the humble meat patty is best left to an
expert like Ronald McDonald,
who has many decades of experience and knows how to balance relish and
pickle and cheese and bun, rather than going wild yourself and
garnishing your own bespoke quarter pounder with, say, mango,
anchovies, marmalade, ice cream, toffee sauce and chocolate sprinkles.
Guidance is important; otherwise you go completely off the rails."
That last sentence made me think of how the YouTube culture of the last few years has gotten us all so infatuated with "user-generated content" (aka UGC), which can perhaps also be thought of as "bespoke" content gone wild.
Perhaps the next stage of content evolution on the web may need some Ronald Mc Donalds trying to put some of this stuff on rails. Hulu is but one early example of moving in this direction.
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