links for 2009-07-31

The relentless consumer need to track is really about how valuable our time has become, says Grant McCracken, a cultural anthropologist. But, he warns, 24/7 tracking "fits us with a harness that some may resent. Someone is obliged to feed us perfect information and delivery time, and we're obliged to do the same."

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

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The most interesting finding, though, is that social networks are seeing the most growth globally while other social media platforms stagnate or decline. Users are still sharing photos and videos and posting blog entries, they just tend to do this within a social networking site these days.

In the pre-digital world, gleaning sufficient information to constitute a psychographic profile would often require prohibitively expensive customer anthropology. Imagine researchers observing and following customers as they interact with a product. Now, however, as consumers spend increasingly more time online, a level of digital anthropology is more feasible because consumer data can be better aggregated and analyzed — cheaply.

"If men were to be unchanged by the full participation of women in public life, if women were to participate in public life on the basis of adoption of traditional male modes of interaction, then humankind would have missed a profoundly important opportunity for growth. All the evidence is that something far better is achievable".

Ancheta s-a concentrat pe motivele absenteismului-record (57%) de la alegerile europarlamentare din iunie. Motivele cel mai des invocate au fost lipsa de încredere generală faţă de liderii politici (28%), ideea că votul nu schimbă nimic (17%) şi lipsa de interes pentru politică (17%).
Astfel, 44% din românii care nu au votat şi-au argumentat decizia prin lipsa de încredere în politică în general. Ei sunt devansaţi numai de greci (51%) şi de bulgari (45%). De altfel, numai 20% din români sunt interesaţi de politică, ultimul loc, faţă de media UE, de 39%.

Presidential racial politics has often been conducted with gestures, symbols and photo opportunities, and this is but the latest example of a well-worn genre. Even since the war, when black voters – or the Negro vote, as it was then known – became a potentially election-deciding force, presidents have embraced symbolic gestures, for the simple reason that they allow them to appeal to blacks without alienating whites.

Often the gestures have been rather obvious. Sometimes they have been so subtle as to be almost subliminal.

"When you call a dog a dog's name, you are more likely to treat it like a dog, and it is more likely to behave like a dog."

‘This study does not mean that people should not eat organic food. What it shows is that there is little, if any, nutritional difference between organic and conventionally produced food and that there is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food.'

Mai mult, peste 80% dintre respondente nu au făcut niciodată cumpărături on-line, în timp ce peste 20% nu au folosit niciodată internetul. – o_O !