The recent discovery of water on the moon is one of the most exciting scientific discoveries since humanity began exploration of outer space. It captured headlines around the world with its broad implications but any child of the information age would be anything but shocked to hear that it was all part of an elaborate marketing ploy- maybe a NASA/George Lucas collaboration to hype up the release of a new toy line, or Coca Cola for a new brand of sports water.  It’s not, but I’d be surprised  if anyone read the title of this blog and didn’t think  “Hmph, I should’ve known”.

In the 1960s French social theorist Guy Debord wrote the Society of the Spectacle, in which he essentially tore a strip off of post ww2 western culture as being wholly fixated on a series of spectacles in which any form of reality (in the sense of meaningful discourse over how to live together) is replaced by these glamorous or shocking distractions as spoon fed to us by the media’s talking heads. It is the cheapening of society through totalitarian control of social discourse through media. And even now 40 years later we would rather fixate on Balloon Boy for a week instead of looking to the dark and broken parts of humanity that need the most attention.  Ariana Huffington goes off about this in one of her most recent blogs.  The media coverage of “balloon-boy” is an example of how major news still focuses on the pedantic details of singularly  exploitable and wholly inconsequential stories. Elian Gonzales, Tonya Harding, OJ Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Magic Johnson, the list goes on and on of singular stories in which one person creates a spectacle through some ridiculously stupid or careless action they take or statement they make- usually leading to death, deportation, disease or incarceration. Meanwhile the real issues that we should be focused on are made into silhouettes deep in the back of our minds. The spectacle shines too brightly. Often times, like sails catching trade winds, the marketing execs will capitalize on mass fixation. It is a large focus of human mental energy that is hard not to want to tap into.

So even in the spectacle of this Lunar discovery exists the seeds of marketing, maybe even the fresh spring buds of marketing. The Moon is exciting again!  President Obama is reconsidering which direction to take NASA in, so the timing of this discovery couldn’t be better. The Moon, which had been recently considered to be waning in value, was in risk of being supplanted by Mars or the asteroid belt as the new budget would dictate. In this case, the recent spectacle may have served those who have put their life’s work into researching the moon and perhaps justify funding on space research in general.  In essence it markets the value of lunar research to both Obama and to taxpayers. It’s great timing for UBC, the Vancouver university fielded the only Canadian team in  a recent NASA robotics competition focused on lunar excavation. The squad came 6th out of 24 and performed impressively- maybe showing that regardless of what Obama’s NASA budget dictates there will still be scientists and engineers keen to explore the lunar surface.

So  was the rocket splash all a ploy by some in NASA who wanted the agency’s mandate to continue focusing on the Moon?  I don’t honestly think so, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t make a strong case for those in the agency keen to continue this lunar research at a time when the future of NASA is being seriously reexamined. If anything it highlights two valuable things about marketing. It’s not just about taking up time and space. Effective marketing happens at the right time in the right place.

Hopefully it won’t take crashing a rocket into the moon to give your business some needed exposure though.

I guess the UN didn’t hear about Senses: A blog about the Thirdi Software Perception. The award winning website was developed for the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology by whiz kids and specialists from the Learning and Instructional Development Centre (LIDC) at SFU, Xa:ytem Longhouse Centre of Mission BC also contributed to ensure authenticity. That authenticity was regarding a virtual tour of the lower mainland as it was 3000 years ago; interacting with the Sto:lo people and the natural environment the way it was or at least as close to as what scholars, researchers and First Nations people of today believe it was. The collaboration was enough to ensure that out of 20,000 entries from around the world, the United Nations World Summit Award went to the Vancouver university. SFU is already respected for GIS software development and has a strong reputation in spatial information systems. This award will hopefully shed more light on the talented pool of innovative designers the school has produced.

The site is great and one of the reasons it received the award was because of its focus on serving the needs of a local population. It has a real utility to it beyond its attractive design, it’s interesting and informative and will compliment the collection at the  Virtual Museum of Canada very well- which you should take the time to check out if you haven’t seen it already. The virtual museum takes exhibits and presents them online through interactive and pictorial collections of historical documentation. The site from SFU is the ringer on this team.

Spongelab Interactive, a Canadian company out of Toronto also won an award at the WSA.  Their site is an interactive learning environment that teaches kids all about plants. It’s also a fantastic design and really fun to use. These kinds of web designs present to me, a turning point in education. Kids need to be engaged at the level of technology that entertainment and culture operates on. Schools need to realize that old mediums of teaching will have an increasingly hard time competing with new mediums of entertaining, and kids need to be engaged on a more interactive and captivating level. These kinds of software and site designs can take us in that direction. I bet  Marshall McLuhan would be proud of his countrymen for producing such quality and useful rich media content.