Serendipity Book

Ethnographic busman's holidays

Originally uploaded to Flickr by dgray_xplane

Grant McCracken (This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics) is recommending that people seek cultural stimulation on their holidays via the mechanism of an ethnographic interview. He says we should pay our way and recruit people at £100 a pop and then hang out with them to learn more about their culture.

"if the object is to penetrate the barrier that stands between every tourist and country/culture, ethnographic interviews are really very useful."

Grant turns his nose up at the extremely shallow cultural experience offered by contemporary tourism and offers ethnography as the solution:

"almost all touristic experience has the quality of cruise ship containment.  We may get off the ship from time to time, but the closest we are getting to the host country is a shop filled with touristic chakahs that play out stereotypes and help extinquish the possibility of cross culture contact."

Whilst I agree in principle, in practice surely such brief cross-cultural meetings will only work if you have a common language and some common cultural starting point (Grant limits his ambitions to crossing the Atlantic to London).

Language was always the barrier in our well-meaning exchange programmes at school. You could see how other people lived but you didn't understand why they did what they did. Similarly, I recently watched a German ethnographer try to conduct in-home interviews with a South Korean woman via an interpreter in English. As you can imagine, we didn't exactly get any deep insights into her life other than what we could observe.

Somewhat facetiously, and speaking as a Londoner, some of the examples that Grant gives from his dinner party exchanges are things that he might have picked up on if he'd added The Guardian or The Times feeds to his RSS reader:

"On a recent trip, I found Londoners fascinating on several topics, including how dinner parties are changing in London, the difference between lager andstout, what is the deal with Manchester United, anyway, when and how to use one's best "telephone voice," gardening the Tony Blair way, and how English audiences received The Da Vinci Code (in some cases, with audible and enthusiastic scorn, apparently)."

Putting aside how anyone could be anything but scornful about such over-hyped tripe as the Da Vinci Code, I believe that most of our contemporary culture is, luckily, still healthily reflected by our national media.  Nonetheless, I don't mean to be negative about Grant's idea or the value of ethnography.  Reading a newspaper columnist won't ever offer the same depth of experience as a face to face chat. Most contacts we have with other cultures when we are on vacation (or business) are pretty unrewarding and are often limited to rather predictable conversations  with hotel receptionists, taxi drivers and waiters.

So ... I'm not going to follow up on Grant's suggestion when I go to New York next week but everytime I get the opportunity to visit another country I will remind myself to not be shy (or afraid) and strike up a conversation with a stranger or two.

Fiat Trepiuno Concept Pics

Someone has claimed the address 500blog.blogspot.com in the last few days and started posting some interior and exterior mock-ups of the Trepiuno concept. The Trepiuno is rumoured to give quite an accurate indication of what the next 500 will look like when it comes out in September 2007.

Fiat 500 in Pixar's Cars

  Cars (Luigi a 1959 Fiat 500) 
  Originally uploaded by rndy's game adventures.

This little fella called Luigi is currently starring in the new Pixar film Cars. Some of the British critics have been knocking the script but I still want to see it.

Exhibition about newspapers

There is a free exhibition on at the British Library celebrating the British newspaper...

This new exhibition looks at the growth and development of the last 100 years of the British Newspaper through a selection of 200 front pages. You will discover how the stories which make the front page are reported on, and how and why they are selected by editors and journalists. You will also appreciate why newspapers, throwaway items by day, are a treasure-trove of social history.

The enormous changes in news reporting and newspaper production during this period are imaginatively unfolded in the exhibition. The historic front pages on display record the most turbulent of centuries – two world wars, major disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic, and notorious crimes, including the Crippen murder and the assassination of President Kennedy and his brother.

Journalists and editors from newspapers such as the Times, Mail, Telegraph, Guardian, Mirror, Sun and the Express have written commentaries especially for the exhibition. These provide a real insight into the world of newspapers what makes the front page and why.

Students were always apathetic

Originally uploaded to Flickr by Portefuille

Just found a transciption of a fantastic situationist rant published 40 years ago which was implicated in inciting the French general strike of May '68. Called "On the Poverty of Student Life", the pamphlet was printed at the University of Strasbourg using student union funds. Its calls for revolution were considered so contentious by the authorities that the courts closed the student union.

It starts with a wonderful diatribe against student apathy which reminded me that nothing really ever changes. Even in the golden era of protest, apathy was seemingly the norm and not the exception. The abuse aimed at the student body by the authors is sardonic, patronising and mean but nonetheless still poignant today.

Here they accuse the students of the day of a pseudo-materialistic approach to culture and art ...

The real poverty of his everyday life finds its immediate, fantastic compensation in the opium of cultural commodities. In the cultural spectacle he is allotted his habitual role of the dutiful disciple. Although he is close to the production-point, access to the Sanctuary of Thought is forbidden, and he is obliged to discover "modern culture" as an admiring spectator. Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac. He peeks at the corpse in cine-clubs and theaters, buys its fish-fingers from the cultural supermarket. Consuming unreservedly, he is in his element: he is the living proof of all the platitudes of American market research: a conspicuous consumer, complete with induced irrational preference for Brand X (Camus, for example), and irrational prejudice against Brand Y (Sartre, perhaps).

To avoid alienating every single person on campus, they make allowances for a few:

We must add in all fairness that there do exist students of a tolerable intellectual level, who without difficulty dominate the controls designed to check the mediocre capacity demanded from the others. They do so for the simple reason that they have understood the system, and so despise it and know themselves to be its enemies.

The summation by the judge who heard the case was priceless:

These publications express ideas and aspirations which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of a student union. One has only to read what the accused have written, for it is obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adoloscents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgments, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with "unlicensed pleasure" as its only goal.

Interviews with advertising's great and good

This is an archive of interviews with advertising's great & good including a clip from Leo Burnett's classic and inspirational speech "When to Take My Name Off The Door".

Some of the clips are extremely brief (Bernbach for example) and others are puff pieces (the Ogilvy one) but it is interesting to put a face and a voice to some of these names.

HD Ready - for what?

Interesting to read the experiences of another consumer agonising over the purchase of an HDTV.

We are also in the market for a sexy flat telly but I have a number of very significant reservations:

1. Limited availability of HDTV broadcasts (and limited potential for growth until the UK analogue signal switch off in 2012) - there is very little content to be HD Ready for!
2. Poor reproduction of existing PAL signals by current LCD TV sets (jittery, grainy pictures with poor image reproduction - especially for sport)
3. We don't want anything over 32" so the improvement in image size on our current 25" CRT is slight.
4. I have a legacy collection of DVD content which I have no intention of upgrading to Blu Ray or equivalent (especially given the impending format war).
5. Prices are falling fast and I believe they will fall a lot further
6. I don't need it, I want it

Nonetheless I am sick of watching widescreen broadcasts where I am missing 20% or more of the image!

I also resent the fact that none of the consumer magazines (Stuff and their ilk) tell you any of the above lest they lose their advertising revenue from HDTV manufacturers. And don't get me started on the quality of advice from the UK retailers!

Honourable mention to the Consumer Association's Which? though who are recommending that people wait and see and stick to CRT until the analgue switch-off. Trouble is, it is getting very difficult to buy a decent CRT in stores any more.

On Procrastination

Uploaded by omit

Great quote on procrastination from Thomas Edison:

The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it.

Why neuromarketing isn't much cop (yet)

Uploaded by Hole New World

Thanks to one of the more anonymous planners over at the Fallon Planning Blog for providing a great round up of some of the activities at the annual AAAA Account Planning Conference held last week in Miami.

I was particularly interested in their transciption of Mark Earls' comments about the nascent field of neuromarketing:

[Earls'] gives three basic reasons for why the idea of hooking someone up to a machine and measuring their brain's response to an ad stimulus is a bad idea...

1. the technology isn't good enough yet - those who tell you it is are swindlers. real neuroscientists hate those guys for overstating what's possible.

2. thinking you can measure the link between brain and behavior misunderstands how consciousness really works. our brains are not independent actors, they are part of larger systems within our bodies. there is no "buy button" in the brain that a marketer can discover through neuromarketing - we just don't function that way. the fact that we are tempted to think otherwise stems from the fact that our brains are fooled into thinking the decisions always come before actions, when that's just not always the case - our brains are brilliant post-rationalizers as it turns out. not to mention that testing one person's brain does not necessarily mean anything for another person's, nor does it necessarily even mean anything for the person being tested - our brains are different from each other, and they change over time.

3. the desire for neuromarketing to be the silver bullet stems from our uniquely western concepts of materialism, positivism and individualism. we think that all things can be represented how they are, that things are certain and can be measured, and that the truth about human behavior lies in individuals. not necessarily the case for any of these three ideas. he concluded by saying that if we're trying to influence mass behavior, then that's what we should be focusing on, and that talkability is a great indicator of effectiveness because it measures mass impact rather than individual impact. loved his focus on culture as a key influencer on our behavior - we spend so much time thinking about psychology, but we often ignore sociology and anthropology.

I too am cynical about the potential value that brain scanning experiments offer to marketers in the short term. Current neurological techniques provide us with only a very limited toolkit to explore the near infinite complexity of the human brain. Most of the neuromarketing experiments conducted to date appear to offer hopelessly simplistic explanations of the neurological response to extremely complex stimuli.

We are still a very long way away from being able to interpret the human response to even the simplest ads using these techniques. Whilst many university hospitals and academic departments are now seemingly willing to offer marketers the key to their scanners in return for guaranteed research funding, few marketers have the skills to construct an appropriate experiment let alone to accurately interpret the results.

It will be a long long time before any of these experiments provide significant insights that will give any direction for marketing action and I am not sure that the marketing community has the money or the patience required to fund such a protracted period of academic enquiry.

Fiat 500 spotted testing

Channel 4 Motoring has pictures of the Fiat 500 seen testing

"It's looking cute, even under all that black disguising. Fiat's new baby Cinquecento goes on sale mid-2007, replacing the Seicento, and it's already clear that it will bear a strong resemblance to the Trepiuno concept, which tested the water for this retro-look city car. Built on a shortened version of the Panda platform, the new 500 will be built alongside a city car for Ford - the replacement for the Ka - at Fiat's factory in Poland. This partnership has enabled Fiat to keep its costs down and invest in the facility in Tychy, as well as providing Ford with a short-cut into this growing market sector."

I love the fact that it is being built in Tychy!