BMB Geek Club

Status Anxiety - Alain De Botton

Book Summary
Status Anxiety – Alain De Botton

This is a vast text, that I've summarised in 2 parts... causes and solutions.

Alain defines “status anxiety” as “a worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended periods of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect”.

This modern anxiety can lead to success, can encourage excellence, restrain us from harmful eccentricities and bring us together as a society bound by common values.
But it also leads without exception, Alain argues, to sorrow.

CAUSES

1. Lovelessness
Once food and shelter have been acquired, we strive for money, fame or influence, simply put, the desire to be loved.
Love, in respect to status (not romantic love) is a sign of respect and a sensitivity towards someone else’s existence.
Those with status are described as “somebodies”, those without are “nobodies”. This is not true as we are all individuals with individual needs – it’s more a description of the quality of treatment afforded towards those people by others.
We are afflicted with a congenital uncertainty as to our own value. The way others view us often forms our whole perception of our being – our identity.
Our status denotes how much “love” we are offered by others, and in turn we can like, or lose confidence in ourselves.

2. Snobbery
We are forced, as we take our place in life, to live amongst snobs, people who’s opinions are highly conditional.
Snobs are defined as those who take offence at the lack of status of others, they insist loudly on a scale of values defined by society or parts thereof (often by others they view as being influential). They judge others by a narrow set of criteria, ignoring other, deeper beneficial characteristics.
Often this snobbishness is born from the fear of losing one’s own status. Belittling others draws attention to the status acquired by the belittler. Obtaining symbols of status allows the owner to lord it over those who have not.

3. Expectation and Envy
The rapid acquirement of wealth by the Western World during the 19th and 20th centuries, meant that in many people’s lifetimes they became able to obtain material possessions and technological gizmos previously reserved for the privileged only (e.g. the latest fashions, cars, travel etc).
With this increase in material ownership came increased “equality”. This then increased expectation – anything could be within the grasps of the many, leading to an increase in envy.
We judge ourselves by comparing ourselves to those that we consider our peers. If someone in our peer group obtains more than us (stature or material) then we feel inferior, even though in real terms we haven’t changed at all.
In medieval times we had a vivid idea of our position in society. In modern times, the possibilities afforded to us are (as proven to us by others) nearly limitless. Our self-esteem depends on what we back ourselves to be.
A rise in the levels of our expectations comes with a rise in the danger of humiliation (e.g. the fallen politician or the once famous actor).

We have grown to believe success and material will bring us happiness, if so, how is it that primitive tribes are happy? The answer is that we are happy when we expect little and miserable when we expect everything – as modern life has taught us to be.
The result is that we live in perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

4. Meritocracy
The impact of poverty on self esteem is dependent on how that poverty is regarded by the community. The consideration of poverty in western society has become considerably more punitive and judgemental over time. In feudal society, the poor were considered to not be responsible for their position and were regarded as extremely useful to society as a whole. Also, when religion had more of a hold on society, a poor status was seen to hold no moral connotations, whereas the rich were often regarded as sinful and corrupt (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the origins of inequality, 1754).
Karl Marx insisted that the employer, in endeavouring to employ others and pay them as little as possible in order to make a profit was little more than a thief. Conditions for the working class at the time of the industrial revolution confirmed this view-point to many.

As the 18th Century grew to a close, another set of view-points were growing in general public perception – the rich became to be seen as the more useful to society, they were the ones who provided employment for the less fortunate, helping them to survive. Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, wrote that the fabric of society depended upon those who were best at accumulating wealth by industry.
Industrial growth had begun to change societies outlook upon those less able to acquire this wealth.
As education became more readily available for the masses, it came to be regarded that poorer people must have become that way because they are less able or intelligent than others. The increase in equality had lead to an increase in disregard for those who do not excel or succeed in some way.

5 Dependence
The main drive of modern society has been to allow as greater a meritocracy as possible.
The main feature of this society is uncertainty – we contemplate the future in the knowledge that we might be thwarted by colleagues or competitors, we may find we lack the talents to succeed in areas we want to or find ourselves unlucky in the face of an unpredictable marketplace. Failures are compounded by the success of peers.

Anxiety follows modern ambition as it depends on 5 unpredictable elements:
1. Dependence on fickle talent
a. Which can (and often does) come and go

2. Dependence on luck
a. Or favourable conditions that allow our careers / lives to take a turn for the better.
b. In our modern rational society, luck is rarely allowed as an excuse for success or failure. Even though it clearly is necessary at some point.

3. Dependence on an employer
a. In the past, most people worked for themselves. In modern society, most people work for other people. This forces them to lose control of a large part of their destiny.
b. Hand in hand with this comes several other perceived dependencies;
i. The need to lie and exaggerate “the world more often rewards signs of merit than merit itself” La Rochefoucald
ii. The need to beware of colleagues
iii. The need to threaten “It is much safer to be feared than be loved.” Machiavelli

4. Dependence on employer’s profitability
a. The most effective way for employers to lower costs in times of trouble is to cull staff.
b. We are often held ransom to market conditions or bad decisions that we have no control over.

5. Dependence on the global economy
a. Economies are characterised by growth and decline, we are so clearly unable to control this that anxiety is the only reasonable response beyond complete apathy.
b. Economics will always prevail over human needs in our commercial world. As tools in the process, workers are destined to a life of anxiety.

Next post... SOLUTIONS!
How exciting...

Bretzy

Distraction - Being human in the digital age. Mark Curtis

There are two types of people in advertising agencies, those who have succumbed to the Blackberry and those that haven’t. This book is about the mass migration from the latter into the former, and the consequences of this movement. Well actually it’s a bit more than that; it’s a collection of thoughts on how changes in communication technologies impact the way we live and work, think and don’t.

Always On.
A lot of attention is given to the ‘revenge effects’ of new technology; the unintended negative side effects of what we generally embrace as progress. At times, most notably when he’s prattling on about his T-rex vinyl it reads like an ode to the real. Thankfully however, this book is not merely a plea for the world to slow down. At its best it’s an eloquent articulation of the niggling doubts we all have about the advance of new communications technology and an insightful argument for putting our basic human needs at the centre of communications development.

He pinpoints invention and mass distribution of the mobile phone as a seminal movement in our social evolution. It has become the organising tool of life, and we are psychological wedded to our vibrating friends, beyond reason. One good stat’ in the book is that it takes on average 26 hours for a person to report a lost wallet, but the average time taken to report a lost mobile is 68 minutes (quoting Unisys M-Commerce presentation from 2003). Mobiles are ‘always on’ - or at least others think they may be, and so we are ‘always on’ - or at least others think we should be. For me the most interesting and useful discussion concerns the overlapping of (old) physical space with (new) virtual space. This, Curtis argues represents more than simply the death of distance, it represents a distribution of self, a concept whose infancy is illustrated in Facebook and Second Life. It also throws up the potential for people to annotate their world, and of course for brands to insert their narrative. There’s a little story about what ‘Digital Graffiiti’ might look like,

“Rich calls it ‘tagging the city’... And since it’s his city why not? On Friday night he walks right across down from work to the first bar of the night and sees hotpots that non-one can with just their eyes – like a sort of a 4th dimension... Tonight he sets the filter to alert him to tags laid in the last hour - its busier each week and market square is almost too hot. He can se JAZ’s trail almost as clearly as if he was tracking footprints – this guy’s funny, edgy, avoid the usual Iwozhere smiley clichés. So when he says check out the girl with the leopard skin pill box hat in Starbucks Rich doesn’t hesitate.. Hmm...giggling, Rich ads a tag endorsing JAZ’s taste. He know that 2 messages so close will begin to attract a lot more soon.... to the bar, his friends are late. So Rich leaves a tag (“I was here where were you? Your round I think!”).

Which I thought was a nice way to illurstate an idea that’s usually explained using lots of mad diagrams or with reference to rad’ dudes on hover boards.

Defined by our context.
The book builds to a lengthy discussion of networks. All the basic stuff about bringing people together, holistic thinking etc, and also some deeper thoughts about how systems create behaviour of their own. The implication being that a populated network of individual humans is a mind – a system capable or ordering, analysis, making connections – an entity that thinks coherently. Networks can give us joy and utility, and he demostrates that myspace, flickr and letsbuyit are just the tip of the iceberg. The book also looks at the wider and often more worrying implications of the mass ‘plugging in’ that’s occuring. If our parents were ‘people of the book’, and we are ‘people of the screen’(coined by Kevin Kelly in Time Magazine 2000), will our children be ‘people of the cyberspace’, existing mostly via digital expressions, compressed files and defined by their links? The books main thrust is well summised when the author quotes Douglas Ruskhoff who points out that “increasingly the power and agency of individuals is defined not by what they know – not what’s on the hard drive – but who and what they have access to – who is in their date book or how readily they can find a link... even those individuals lucky enough to be valued for their opinions and assesements will increasingly be judged by the breath of access they have to information”. The old maxim ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ squared I suppose.
DH.

Book Review - Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Making decisions in the blink of an eye

Gladwell proposes that the snap decisions that we make can be of equal worth as decisions that are put together over a longer period of time as a rational argument. He believes that we can learn when to listen to these snap judgements (and when not) as well as how to hone our skill and ability to make accurate instant assessments.

The statue example

One of the best-known examples that Gladwell gives is of a Greek statue bought by the Getty. Scientific tests on the statue and the paperwork appeared to be ok. But when put in front of experts, they just knew, immediately and in ways that they struggled to articulate, that it was a fake.

Further testing revealed that the paperwork was forged and that the scientific tests weren’t infallible. The experts were right.

Its all about pattern recognition

What the experts were doing, was recognising that something was off with the statue. They didn’t know what, exactly, mainly it was just a feeling. But probably they recognised that genuine statues of this type have a certain look or feel, and the fake was somehow off.

Human relations work in the same way. There’s a pattern to our relationships which act as extremely accurate predictors to how that relationship will pan out in the future…. If you know how to read them.

Can you really trust a snap judgement?

The problem with a snap judgement as that we often rely on unconscious stereotypes and bias, even if that bias is at odds with our conscious worldview.

Studies at Harvard have found a consistent pro-white bias in black/white association testing (www.implicit.harvard.edu), even among blacks. That bias was neutralised when respondents were primed to view black more positively by reading articles on Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela.

In other studies, people were given a set of Trivial Pursuit questions to answer following a pre-task where half thought about football hooligans, and half were asked to think about professors. The first group’s results were 42.6% correct. The second group had 55.6% of the Trivial Pursuit answers correct – they had been primed to think  smarter.

Imagine if we primed ourselves in this way before key exams or meetings?

Sifting out the bias

So if we want to develop our skill in making an accurate snap judgement, we need to learn to filter out all the irrelevant distractions that throw our instinct off course.

That’s why we need to understand what are the really important issues or predictive factors that we need to focus on? Eg in relationships, levels of contempt are the biggest single predictor of likelihood of divorce.

Is the context right for reaching the right decision? New Coke did well in blind taste tests but bombed in the real world because no one takes just one sip of an unbranded cola.

And finally, although this is a book about snap decisions, Gladwell points out that you need to slow down and give yourself time to recognise and understand that judgement. That’s why in New York they have one man police cars, because where two would rush in to a situation, just one will take time to assess and process the signals all around them.

Back to the statue

The statue experts couldn’t have said it was a fake if they’d rushed past it at speed. Even though they knew immediately, they still had to stand and look and process the patterns they were seeing. So that’s all about how ‘just knowing’ has to be grounded in expertise and time to take an uncluttered look (all be it in about 2 seconds)

And why didn’t the experts at the Getty realise sooner it was a fake? Because they were blinded by their desire for it to be real. So that’s all about the context and the bias, and the need to strip it out before you listen to your gut.

Lyla

Book Review: The Hedgehog and the Fox: Isaiah Berlin

A brilliant book about War and Peace and Tolstoy's theory of history . wikipeia ref.   It might seem  a bit arcane and irrelevant.  What does a book about Tolstoy have to do with marketing of spuds, suds or software, pray tell?  Well the central idea of this book is so elegant, simple and transferable that I think it might.  According to Berlin, there are two types of thinker. The fox , who knows many things and the hedgehog who knows only one. Some people are natural foxes and have delightfully roaming, vulpine minds.  They love to sniff out new things and can happily hold  apparently irreconcilable ideas in their minds at once.  The hedgehog, on the other hand, looks at the world through one organising idea or system and is a model of consistency, clarity and faith. 

Now, to move from Shakespeare (a fox) and Proust (a hedgehog) to our world of brands and ads might be embarrassing for all concerned, but what the hell.   We used to live in a world  mainly populated by hedgehog brands, good at one thing, usually  supported by a single, lasting communications idea.  Stella was the spikiest of them all. Today it seems that there are many more fox brands and even some of the hedgehogs are getting a bit foxier, doing  and saying many more things. Even old tufty itself has moved away from the old barb of 'reassuringly expensive'. The historical movement in branding and the communication of brands  is often seen as a moveing inexorably from hedgehog to fox.

I think this is a truism but not a truth.  And  much absolutist tripe has been written about it. Rather naive or cynical opinions  has suggested that this is some seismic or permanent shift in the way communications and brands must behave today in our fragmented, segmented world.  Very  plausible and seductive  but not actually very untrue.  For every foxy brand like Honda or Nike, there is a bluff old hedgehog like O2, doing one thing everywhere with almost monotonous consistency. And both species are doing very well thank you. 

So why do the contemporary cases of hedgehog branding get ignored by the theorists who say that only the foxy can survive?   Perhaps it is because most planners are foxes and most creatives and clients are different types of hedgehog.  The creative hedgehog knows one big thing about originality or cut through and the client hedgehog often knows one big thing the brand has to do or fix.   But often it is the foxes who write the theory and history of branding and for them it's simply more fun to be foxy and live in a foxy world. It chimes deeply with their sense of themselves and their confused sub guardianista identity.

But look a little deeper and you find a more  common strategic fallacy:- the fallacy of the lonely fact.  Bad or dishonest inductive generalisations from scant evidence (such as the assertion that all brands have to be fox like today)  is a seductive  habit of mind.  We have all made gross generalisations to prove a marketing point and many of our arguments about  social, cultural and branding trends become  facile when we try and turn them into absolute  principles. I makes us pretend the world is full of foxes even when it isn't.

The truth is that every bit of strategic thinking has to happen from first principles, in context and in the particular.  The brand menagerie is full of foxes, stoats, hedgehogs and kippers and the  humble strategist recognises this and wears the appropriate trousers.   

Bain   

Book Review: The Laws of Simplicity

The Laws of Simplicity
John Maeda

http://www.lawsofsimplicity.com

A slim volume about ‘simplicity’ that claims to be readable ‘in a lunch hour’ . A gift to the time-pressed reviewer. Except that simplicity turns out to be an absurdly more complex topic than you’d think possible.
Whether that’s a fault of the writing, or just a strange inherent truth about the topic in question is a moot point.

The book is written as a guide to achieving simplicity in an ever-more complex world. We are rebelling against technology that’s too complicated, rejecting DVD and computer manuals that weigh more and take up more space than the gadget itself. Clean, minimalist designs, like the Ipod have made simplicity cool again. And that’s where the central paradox lies: we want something that is easy and simple to use, but does all the complex things we ever wanted it to.

The Laws of Simplicity is a guide to finding this balance, meant to be applicable to not just to design and technology, but also somewhat grandly to ‘business’ and ‘life’.

It's a maddeningly subtle subject, and what with flitting around between technology, philosophy, politics, design and pop-psychology it's pretty hard to summarise. Nonetheless it's a curiously interesting little book, which gets you thinking, and has plenty of food for thought for marketing and advertising if you transpose the thinking.

Maeda identifies 10 laws:

1. REDUCE
2. ORGANISE
3. TIME
4. LEARN
5. DIFFERENCES
6. CONTEXT
7. EMOTION
8. TRUST
9. FAILURE
10.THE ONE

and 3 “Keys”

1. AWAY
2. OPEN
3. POWER

1. REDUCE
“The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction”

Example: you could simplify a DVD player by removing all its buttons except ‘play’, but that might compromise its functionality too far. So be careful what you remove.

Once you have removed everything possible without compromising its usefulness too much, then employ S.H.E. (Shrink, Hide, Embody) to minimize the impression of complexity.

SHRINK: when a small, unassuming object exceeds our expectations we are not only surprised but pleased (“That little thing did all that?”)
Any design that incorporates lightness and thinness gives the impression of being smaller, lesser and humbler, less threatening. This is a form of deceit, but a valid one, that can help to make the medicine of complexity go down more easily

HIDE: When all the features that can be removed have been, and a product has been made slim, light and thin, then HIDE the complexity through brute-force methods, e.g. a Swiss army knife that hides all the other blades and only leaves the one you wish to use exposed. Or, the computer interface that HIDES the functionality behind it via a series of menus at the top and each side of the screen.

EMBODY: As features are hidden and products shrink, it becomes necessary to imbue the object with a sense of the value that is lost and give a quality perception. This can be done via marketing and advertising, or physically, e.g. the Bang and Olufsen remote that is thin and slender in composition but significantly and intentionally heavier to subtly communicate higher quality than you might expect from its appearance.

2. ORGANISE

“Organisation makes a system of many appear fewer”

This is simply systematising, categorising and organising many things into similar groups, and then prioritising them.

The interesting design point in this chapter is about the changing form of the Apple Ipod control wheel.

When it first came out the controls were laid out like this:

They then displaced the centralised functions to an unattractive row at the top that made it look unnecessarily complicated

Now they have oscillated towards extreme simplicity by integrating all of the buttons into a single seamless control

3. TIME

“Savings in time feel like simplicity”

Kind of obvious this one. When forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Reducing the time spent waiting means more time spent doing something else of your choosing.

We all personally try to save time by planning the quickest route home. Businesses can succeed or fail because of efficient or time-wasting processes.

One way to save time is to remove all constraints (e.g. taking a helicopter home instead of the train)
The Ipod shuffle is an extreme example of this: removing the constraint of choice and letting a machine choose for you is a radical approach to shrinking the time we might spend otherwise fumbling with the iPod’s scroll-wheel.

If you can’t save waiting time, a good cheat is to make the waiting time more tolerable e.g. the ‘progress bar’ on a pc.

An experiment

Time seems to pass more quickly in the bars on the right hand side, and telling people how much time they have to wait is a humane practice that is becoming more popular e.g. when waiting on hold, an automated voice tells you how many minutes you may have until you speak to a human.

The illusion of time-saving can be given via an even more deceptive approach – using ‘styling’ to create the illusion of motion and speed. A 1930s designer called Raymond Loewy is credited with a styling concept called ‘streamlining’ – he designed the curvy classic coke bottle. He is famous for transferring the ‘style’ of flight onto regular household objects, for instance, a car could be made to look faster by attaching fins that had no aerodynamic function. Computers today use many of the ‘swoopy’ styling cues from the automotive industry to enhance the image of speed.

4. LEARN

“Knowledge makes everything simpler”

Again, apparently obvious. Example, although a screwdriver is a simple design, you need to know which way to turn it. The problem is that the time taken to learn a task is that you often feel you are wasting time, a violation of the Third law.

Maeda suggests a design-led approach to learning complex systems:

RELATE-TRANSLATE-SURPRISE

Basically – a metaphor with a surprise at the end to reward the audience for their efforts. Design example: the computer desktop interface, which takes RELATES the office desk environment , TRANSLATES it into a pc interface, with the SURPRISE of being able to collect, categorise, redistribute and repurpose many more documents than previously imaginable.

Worth remembering when trying to convey the essence of a complex brief to a creative team?

5.DIFFERENCES

“Simplicity and complexity need each other” aka nobody wants to eat only dessert.

The more complexity there is in the market, the more that something simpler stands out. And because technology will only continue to grow in complexity, there is a clear economic benefit to adopting a strategy of simplicity that will help set your product apart

6. CONTEXT

“What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral”

This is complex, but the core idea is that that which appears to be of immediate relevance may not be nearly as important compared to everything else around.

Metaphor: you can focus research on a subject to brighten a single point with laser precision, or else use the same light to illuminate everything around you. Striving for perfection usually entails the sacrifice of everything in the background for the sake of attending to the all-important foreground (as any Olympic athlete will attest to)

Our goal is to attain a kind of ‘enlightened shallowness’. Sounds like advertising to me. And I guess the applicable point is that we ought not to focus too narrowly on any one thing, for fear of missing the bigger picture.

7. EMOTION

“More emotions are better than less”

Simplicity can seem cold, brutal, when at its most efficient. We need emotion, and designs that leave room for, or indeed, encourage emotion to avoid this.

Example: a powerful socialite was diagnosed with cancer. While she was still reeling from the shock of the news, her doctor informed her of his ten-minute time limit for appointments. Even in her fragile state, she would have to leave so that he could deliver similar messages to his waiting patients. With 5 months left to live, she started a foundation to create intensely artful, beautifully designed centers near oncology units, where those first facing death can soak their minds and hearts.

A certain kind of more is always better than less – more care, more love, more meaningful actions.

8. TRUST

“In simplicity we trust”

This is the observation that to enjoy simplicity we have to place our trust in it to do right by us.

Example: having a hotmail or Yahoo! Account means you can access your email from anywhere in the world. But we have to trust that all the private information stored in this account will not be misused.

Trusting a power greater than our own is ingrained from birth when the adults that care for us provide the ultimate experience of simplicity. Every need and desire is met by a parent, and in return, we entrust our love.

Achieving true simplicity in life requires a high degree of trust.

9. FAILURE

“Some things can never be made simple”

Like simplicity itself, presumably.

Knowing that simplicity can be elusive in certain cases is an opportunity to make a more constructive use of your time in the future, instead of chasing after an apparently impossible goal.

10. THE ONE

“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful”

Maeda claims this one law sums up the central message of the book.

He then goes on to describe three ‘Keys’ which are effectively three ideas he has had about the future of simplicity in technology.

1) AWAY

“More appears like less by simply moving it far, far away”

Example: in future, instead of having to deal with a stack of CDs or network downloads to keep your computer going, Maeda sees a future where we simply access software on a remote computer.
Think also of the power of Google, which runs from a simple text input box in your web browser to access Google’s vast network of computers and databases.

More appears like less by moving it far far away – thus an experience is made simpler by keeping the result local and moving the actual work to a far AWAY location

2) OPEN

“Openness simplifies complexity”

In the same way that we take a risk when we tell someone we love them for the first time, companies opening up a proprietary system is a high risk activity that a company poster quarterly earning figures often cannot afford. Giving away “intellectual property” does not make sense.

Maeda suggests the emergence of a potential alternative model, citing the emergence of Linux, an operating system that competes with Windows, but which is completely free and open source.

If you are a Linux expert, you can fix problems yourself, whereas with Windows you cannot. Even if you are not a Linux expert, you have access to thousands of Linux experts on the net that are more likely to jump into action before you’d even get to real Microsoft employee on the phone.

Therefore “Openness simplifies complexity” – with an open system, the power of the many can outweigh the power of the few.

Maeda notes that this recalls the eighth law, TRUST, and that open systems place unique demands on the economics of trust.

He notes that “if the the adage ‘it is better to give than to receive” rings true to you, then the long run gains associated with an open system will also be obvious to you. If conventional captitalism is your compass, and to hear “trust me” translates to “fuck you” then you will lkely choose the closed approach”

There are signs that a ‘for free’ open approach can lead to a “for a fee” approach, e.g. the “Ruby on Rails” web framework by 37signals is completely free, but related pay-for services are sold simultaneously.
http://37signals.com/svn/

3) POWER

“Use less, gain more”

The magic of cordless systems such as mobile phones, laptops etc is freeing but comes at a price: endlessly recharging their batteries. A team of researchers at MIT have invented a self-powered wireless switch that harvests the energy generated during the push of a button to electrically send a radio signal. So, in future your car key fob will not need a battery and will instead just use the power recovered from your pushing of the button.

Electronic devices can never be truly simple until they are freed from their dependence on power. A seemingly unpowered electronic device may seem like an oxymoron, but it is critical to achieve.

This has particular importance for the future of a growing world population. The only foreseeable solution for humanity is to collectively use less energy and use it more wisely. USE LESS, GAIN MORE.

Social practices that result in the use of less power – as well as supporting technology innovations for power harvesting and conservation – stand to realize a world in which the most powerful examples of simplicity are those that will ironically appear powerless.

Book Review - A Theory of Shopping by Daniel Miller

The premise is, that provision is a devotional rite

So the theory goes that everyday shopping (provisioning), follows the same structure and purpose as sacrifice and ritual in Judeo-Christian traditions, whereby the ultimate purpose is an expression of love and devotion.

Shopping vs provisioning

The idea is, that current (negative) discourse around shopping focuses on hedonistic, indulgent and individualistic behaviour, whereas most shopping is actually about provisioning, ie grocery shopping.

A study of provisioning as a proxy for social relationships

Basically, who are you doing the provisioning for, and why? Typically, shopping for someone else is about both reflecting their preferences, and trying to mould them to an ideal. So buying healthy foods for your kids is a balance between love and responsibility.

The theory holds for single-person households as it covers provisioning for ‘the household’ or for an imagined other, ie eating the right food to stay healthy.

Sacrifice opens up a relationship between the sacrificer and the object of devotion

To be clear, this isn’t about killing anyone! Sacrifice and self-sacrifice are the dominant ideals of Christian devotional love. Ritual and routine acts of everyday sacrifice can be as simple as having the right food (halal, kosher, healthy) or praying at the right times. It affirms the deity, the object of devotion.

Miller makes the structural connection between sacrifice as a rite for transforming consumption into devotion, while shopping is a rite for transforming expenditure into love.

Thrift is a moral as well as a functional concern

Still with me? Provisioning is basically ‘work’, with occasional treats/rewards. In fact, what provisioning represents is thrift (value for money), which is rapidly emerging not as a means to an end (saving money) but an end in itself (a moral position around spending wisely).

So the idea of thrift is in fact a way of negating the vision of excessive expenditure, and therefore becomes an expression of devotional love (doing the right thing).

So how do we use this?

Well actually, although it's all based on an ethnographic study of just one North London street, there are some interesting thoughts here.

There’s a clear devotional position for grocery brands to think about, in particular for those that can tap into current moral discourse about what’s right (eg healthy eating), as well as those that tap into specific expressions of care or making others happy. Brands like Heinz Tomato Soup or the Persil ‘Dirt is Good’ campaign are both examples of this.

For retail brands there are a number of thoughts around how to transform the negative discourse around (treat) shopping. This could be through adopting the language of thrift (spending wisely) or by extending the idea of reward as deserved, rather than greedy. Some of these ideas are already evident in premium and personal care brands.

Finally, there’s a question around where the line is between shopping and provisioning. This is likely to be quite individual as well as some general gender, age and demographic differences, and it’s a line that’s surely moveable.

Book Review - Mediation: The Hidden Effects of Media on People, Places and Things

Mediation: The Hidden effects of Media on People, Places and Things
– Thomas de Zengotita

Mediation is about Thomas de Zengotita’s theory of human behaviour in a postmodern world overflowing with exhaustingly “flattering” media representations and endless choices about what kind of person you want to be, but also with the strange demand, always, to be yourself. The result, De Zengotita says, is that we are all mediated, all "method actors" - not phonies, but experts at expressing our authenticity in a performative way.

De Zengotita believes that the mediation is the paradigm that ties all aspects of the 21st century human condition together, from the lives we lead to the way we speak and even our psychological state.

***

Today we are all surrounded by infinite choice and control, soon we’ll even be able to control our kids’ personalities! So many choices, so many options, so many representations that nothing is ‘real’ any more.

‘Optional’, De Zengotita says, is the opposite of ‘real’. Very few things that we experience these days are not influenced in some way by someone. The only things that aren’t ‘mediated’ are necessity and accident which doesn’t leave much!

People today grew up exposed to- and, in many cases, surrounded by the media in a way that previous generations didn’t experience.

De Zengotita cites the way that everyone today knows how to behave when there’s a camera on them, even if they’ve never experienced it before.

He says that as a result of this exposure to the media we are ‘mediated’- we know how our behaviour, actions, gestures and even the finer points of the things we say will be received and this knowledge affects the choices we make and way in which we express our opinions.

As a result of this we perform all the time (method actors). It’s not fake, it’s just a slightly contrived way of communicating:

“Let's say you like cats. When you visit a friend's house and he happens to have a cat, you make a big deal about stroking it, picking it up, talking to it. And you do the same thing with every cat you encounter. It demonstrates to the people around you that you're a sensitive, sympathetic, tactile person. All these things are true of you, including your innate adoration of cats. But that doesn't mean to say you haven't cultivated your cat-fancying into a self-conscious, gushing performance that somehow represents you. This doesn't make you a phony; it makes you something else: mediated.”

***

De Zengotita says that the way in which all media addresses the user has created a world in which everyone thinks everything is for them or about them. This makes us more and more self-conscious rather than providing us with the freedom and gratification it pertains to deliver.

There are millions of instances of this from filters for the tap water you’ve always drunk to upgrades for technical appliances that work perfectly well. All of this has engendered a concerned society that is never at ease with the status quo.

De Zengotita has an analogy called the ‘Justin’s helmet principle’ which he uses to explain this: Kids survived without cycle helmets for generations but now the option is here it has to be taken. We have to take it as much because of what not taking it would say about us as because of genuine concern about the problem

This is comparable to caring more about people knowing your views on the situation in Iraq than you care about the situation itself.

Bizarrely, simultaneous to this is an apathy among the youth of today which the author also believes in engendered by the sea of too much choice. The kids of today are distinctly non- plussed with the opportunity to pursue whatever life course they like: What do you want to do when you grow up? “whatever”

Not only is the belief that they can do anything causing this, but also the way in which mediated opportunities present themselves so readily leading to a disinclination to pursue anything that isn’t easy.

Insights that could be of interest

1. the flattery of mediation

De Zengotita says that the way in which all media addresses the user has created a world in which everyone thinks everything is for them and/or about them: so many choices, so many options.

He says that this has created an impatient and self absorbed society who, more than ever, skim between all the choices in a way that enables them to sever themselves from any experience/relationship at any time and move on to the next, spurred on by the flattery which leads them to believe they deserve better.

2. Irony

We live in a post-modern society that separates itself from ‘reality’ by referring to things in an ironic way. This allows us to acknowledge the facts of our situation but also to mock them in a knowing way that separates us from them allowing us to feel above them and in a way superior.

De Zengotita says that anyone who thinks this is just a social commentators theory and not of actual pertinence must have somehow managed not to see The Simpsons in the last 20 years

3. social structure composed by mediation

The best performers dominate social groups. Politicians success can, today more than ever, be correlated with their ability to present and perform rather than their intellect or political stance.

An altogether different example De Zengotita cites is of adolescent girls’ domination of social group. They are masters of using performative behaviour to get what they want, belittle others, “whatever”.

4. mediated behaviour

the connotations of this for brands are potentially interesting. De Zengotita’s examples suggest that the use of slightly contrived behaviour to show people what you really stand for is in fact the way in which all people demonstrate their views/opinions/beliefs and is arguably therefore exactly the way brands should behave in the 21st century.

N.B. Mediation isn’t an easy book to synthesise, there are a lot of ideas and they are written about in a very complex way. I have tried to sum up the key points but have had to leave a lot out.

Book Review - The World is Flat. A brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century... by Thomas Friedman

At somepoint whilst everybody was sleeping, the world got flat. We were so distracted by the war on terror, Enron and geo politics that we hadn't noticed a fundamental inflection point in the way companies do business. Big business and agencies knew what was going on but nobody told the kids.

The Global playing field has been levelled and America is not ready.

Friedman breaks off from his time covering the war on terror to go on a mission to discover what's been happening. He finds a whole city in China full of Japanese speaking Chinese running the back offices of every major bank in Tokyo. He found Jet Blue Airways had outsourced their entire customer service offer to retired people working from their homes in Salt Lake City. He found that if you went to a drive through in Washington, your order would be taken by a call centre in Utah and zapped back to the counter in Washington.

Globalization 1.0 1492 - 1820
Globalization is driven by countries expanding. Empires. The world is large

Globalization 2.0 1820 - 2000
Globalization driven by companies expanding. The Global village

Globalization 3.0 2000 - present day
Globalization is driven by individuals and small groups thinking and locating globally. Plus this isn't being driven by white western individuals like 1.0 and 2.0

There are 10 major flattening forces and moments as defined by Friedman:

1. 11th September 1989. The Berlin Wall comes down.
Previously everyone talked about Eastern policy and Western policy because there was a wall in the way. No longer. And as walls went down windows went up. Microsoft Windows was launched

2. 8th September 1995. Netscape goes public
The internet is alive. Open standard protocol means that people can talk to each other. A $Trillion of fibre optics enable free communication. The dot com boom

3. Workflow
A catch all term for software and standardisation. The Genesis moment where we have suddenly created a global platform of collaboration.

4. Outsourcing
Empowered by the global platform of collaboration

5. Offshoring

6. Open sourcing
It's hard to beat free. This is a bunch of geeks deciding that they don't like closed networks and cracking the ipod code (for e.g.) and posting it on the internet.

7. Supply Chains
Take a product of the shelves in Wal Mart and a computer taks to a factory in China that immediately orders a replacement. Wal Mart is the biggest company in the States and they don't make anything.

8. In Sourcing
Take UPS. Your world synchronised. If your Toshiba breaks you phone the Toshiba hotline and a UPS employee answers. It gets picked up (by UPS) taken to a warehouse (UPS owned) and fixed by a technician (employed by UPS). It doesn't touch Toshiba once.

9. In Forming
Catch all term for navigating the new world. Google. TiVo etc

10. Steroids
Catch all term for empowering the internet. Filesharing programmes, wireless, wifi on trains and shops. You can access the global platform of collaboration at any time from any place.

Finally, we saw three convergences that made flat earth happen:

1. 2000
In 2000, all 10 flatteners converged to a tipping point and started to work together to create the flat earth. We had created a "Global web enabled platform for sharing work and information irrespective of geography, time and language"

2. Working Horizontally
Companies are waking up to working horizontally. The 9 to 5 office work (vertical silo) is being seen as not adding value and working inefficiently. BA do this. In Globalization 1.0 they would have a bloke standing at the check in 2 hours early to sell you a ticket. in Globalization 2.0 you could book online collecvt your boarding ticket. in Globalization 3.0 you can log on the night before, pick your seat, print out your own boarding pass and turn up at the airport 1/2 an hour before the flight. Essentially meaning that you have turned into one of BA employees! They have made huge savings by working horizontally and you have captured 1 1/2 hours of potential productivity. Everyone is happy.

3. Non-Western workforce
The people making use of horizontal working are not white westerners. 3 billion people have joined the playing field and they're all Indian, Chinese or from the former USSR.

Here's a video of Thomas Friedman talking to MIT that I ripped off to do this review...

http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/264/

JDC

Book Review - The Change Function by Pip Coburn

What’s this book all about when you ditch the filler, repetition and mumbo jumbo?

The tech industry often assumes that new (or upgraded) technologies are easily (and eagerly) adopted, as long as the price tag is low enough. Coburn refers to this as the “build it and they will come” assumption.

This assumption is a major problem.

“Adopting a new technology requires changing the habits of users. The industry acts as if change is easy when it’s actually quite difficult. Users will change their habits when the pain of their current situation is greater than their perceived pain of adopting a possible solution – this is the crux of the change function.”

Users are always in charge.

No matter how cool new technology may be, if users find it scary to learn and/or use they literally won’t buy it.

The Change Function =
Perceived crisis of living w/o something (e.g. a product), VS.
Total perceived pain of adoption/using that product

What use is it to anyone (i.e. what thinking can we nick)?

Coburn’s use of the word “technology” (as in adopting a new technology) can be replaced with any product, service, etc.

The book provides a close look at all the ways “pain of adoption” may occur with and affect the potential of client’s products, services, etc:

-the long wait in line to buy a product
-the lack of customer service/assistance
-the customer service/assistance that is rude/belittling etc
-the pain of learning something new
-the perception of the pain of adoption

See Chapter 11 for final advice on how to evaluate potential success of new products.

Any good case studies (ie what examples can we nick)?

Yes, the book uses a series of case studies to prove its point.

Examples from failures within the wider field of technology innovations.

-The Personal Computer (of the 1970’s) p. 9…
-The Picture phone p.47
-Interactive TV p.55
-Iridium/Globalstar Satellite Systems p.63
-Tablet PCS p.72
-Webvan p.80
-The Alpha Chip p.90
-ISDN p.93
-Electronic Exchanges p.98

Other examples show how failure can turn to success after design and user interface are evolved…

-Flat Panel Display TV (e.g. plasma screens) p.101
-Mobile Enterprise E-Mail (e.g. Blackberry) p.115
-Business Intelligence Software p.119
-Satellite Radio p.123

Predicted future failings, based on contemporary studies.

-RFID p.127
-Fiber To The Premise p.143
-The Entertainment PC p.146
-WIMAX p.149

And, examples of “two very cool companies…coolness is not because of their technology…but because they are immersed in a user-centric culture”:

-Salesforce.com p.154
-Reactrix p.163

Not a case study, but a great modern parable:

“The most famous meeting in the past fifty years of technology? Headquarters in Webster, New York, orders Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California to give Steve Jobs and his merry men from apple a no-holds-barred demonstration of the graphical user interface without having to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Xerox quite literally gave away that key technology in an afternoon. Later, Bill Gates and Jobs would battle over who owned the GUI, with Gates suggesting that Jobs was jealous of Gates who made more hay – or, more precisely, money – planting the technology in the Windows environment.”

And a few good quotes:

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
--W. Edwards Deming

“Technology is not kind. It does not wait. It does not say please. It slams into existing systems…and often destroys them. While creating a new system.”
-- Economist Joseph Schumpeter

Book Review - Purple Cow by Seth Godin

What’s it all about then?

These days, 'good enough', isn't. You need to be remarkable to get noticed, because there's too much clutter out there.

Uh huh? So how do you get to be remarkable? Seth says: it's safer (more successful) to take risks

- Be new: You can't copy remarkableness, because once its been done, version two isn't remakable.
- Be talked about: 'very good' is the opposite of remarkable because no-one's going to talk about 'very good'.
- Be different: "the best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out."
- Be passionate: "Imagine how cool Pop Tarts would be if the brand manager was the kind of person who ate them for dinner."

In the US, Band Aid dominated the plaster market. Curad decided to launch character plasters into the market, and gained significant share.

OK, and how do you cut through the clutter? Seth says: messages for everyone are really messages for no-one.

- Talk to influencers and early adopters, not the mass market.

- Talk to 'sneezers' - people who will talk about and be passionate about you.

- Be irresistible to a niche... When Comedy Central held focus groups for South Park, appeal to women set a record because it was so low - some women were reduced to tears they hated it so much. But it's a huge hit with its target market.

Final thought: its a jungle out there, only remarkableness will cut through.