mullet

We talk a lot, both online and off.  Since an ostensible majority of this discourse in our “connected age” happens online, it follows that phrases from the “real” world slip onto web pages, into videos, vlogs, blogs, Twitters, emails, chats, forums, etc.  Words either remain static in syntax and spelling, like “long tail,” but take on different meaning, or they shift by a few characters to represent a different word entirely, like “phishing,” to convey a different meaning while still drawing on the semantic relationship with the original word (phishing is when cybercriminals “fish” for your information with legitimate looking emails or web pages).  However, my favorite morphology thus far has been the phrase “the Mullet Strategy,” let us explore:   

The phrase seems to have originated with Jonah Peretti, a founder of the Huffington Post who was quoted in a recent article by the New Yorker on the future of print news sources.   The article explains that, like the eponymous hairdo, the Mullet Strategy means, “Business up front, party in the back.”  You might be thinking “What does this have to do with cyberlinguistics and/or more importantly, with media in general?”  Well, Favored Reader, the article goes on to explain how the Mullet Strategy is deployed across the Internet, mostly as a categorization of Web 2.0 companies. In this case specifically, it refers to online news sources like the Huffington Post.  The article continues, “’User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,’ Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to ‘argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.’”  The Mullet Strategy then is the business up front of a well designed and tightly controlled home page and the party in back of the unpasteurized and messy bloggers/content providers.  

On another level, the Mullet Strategy represents the tension between traditional ad-rev driven media and emergent forms of social media (user-generated content like blogs, online videos, etc) that in most cases are still clamoring for ways to generate revenue. One must maintain the dignity and integrity of the appearance of the Home(page) to sell a house, despite the kegger raging in the basement.  It’s also no accident that the conceptual space symbolizing the informational backwaters and badlands of the Internet be mapped onto a coiffure, the Mullet, that itself is coded as jocular, and “underclass” (see: www.ratemymullet.com, www.mulletsgalore.com and numerous other humor sites dedicated to the do).  The term is therefore pre-loaded with significance, transferring the ridiculosity (what, I’m not allowed to make up words?) of the Mullet onto the online spaces that the “Mullet Strategy” attempts to describe. Basically, we have recreated the same social codes and mores online that we have offline – just on different people or concepts.  

It will be interesting to follow the trajectory of the term, from a linguistic standpoint, to see what new meanings and social codes the Mullet Strategy adopts.  However, I suspect that as media channels continue to integrate the still relatively “messy” user-generated content and Web 2.0 realms, the mullet will go on, uncut.  Companies across the board will continue to nervously pander to advertisers from the front while anxiously appealing the masses in the back.  Who knows though?  Maybe we will find a smooth and standard way to monetize the messiness and equalize UGC and traditional media, the business and the party.  We may have to move on to different styles of talking and styles of hair…Quick!  Someone figure out how a “Flock of Seagulls” cut is like social networking!