This is the proof of triumph of popular culture. And some sign for transformation characteristic for Liquid Times. Who knows, maybe Z. Bauman transforms into Batman of sociology.
I can conclude one thing for sure - Batman is more popular than Bauman.
It's like Amazon was trying to tell me - give me a break Bauman, have some fun and watch Batman.
Interesting project by Phillip Toledano who photographed phonesex operators at their homes. Together with pictures we can read some of their thoughts on what they are doing and the world of fantasy they are creating. He enters the fascinating world of delusion where anything can happen as long as you want it to happen...in words, through words.
"There is a contract that exists between phonesex operators and the people who call. It is a contract of self-delusion. The cal l er agrees to pretend t hat he (or she) is cal l ing a young, beautiful girl, and the phonesex operator willingly plays the part. Phonesex reveals the truth. It pulls back the veil to reveal the expected, and the unexpected, all at once." says Phillip Toledano
Here is the one of stories, it is very poetic:
I was writing an article about freeconomics and its consequences for music business when I thought about some other aspects of things for free. Working in agency gives you access to many free things. You get magazines, newspapers, free cinema tickets, invitations to theater and X-mass gifts. There is nothing unusual in that, you get free access to media that are the substance of our work. What’s interesting is to observe how people cope with the “free”. “Free” brings status with itself. It means you’ve been noticed and acknowledged important. Free means VIP. It is social currency that communicates to your surroundings that you are someone. Someone who gets things for free. And I would believe deep down in the reptile part of the brain, free makes you feel instinctively as a successful hunter. You get your share, so you don’t have to spend resources on it any longer.
Photo by broterham
UPDATE
It can be this is one of the reasons behind the mechanism of popularity - Minds Think Alike
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We listen to the new song on the radio. We discover accidentally in the conversation with others that they've listened to the same song.. We visit iTunes and it appears there are many other people who have chosen the same song. We say, we like the song a lot. We say the song is fantastic...but it can be possible that none likes the song. It is possible that if we didn't know others liked the song, we wouldn't be interested in it at all. It is very likely that if the singer wasn't claimed to be "talent of the year", we would be less excited about her.
It is also possible that everyone the excitement, clapping hands and shouting loud is the result of the fact that others are also excited, clap hands and shout. Our excitement grows and is nurtured by others excitement. Everyone adjust her self to her neighbors, despite we try very hard to persuade ourselves and the world how unique we are, while our tastes, interests and opinions are the results of interests, tastes and opinions other people share.
Picture by Delgoff
Tags: group, mechanism of popularity, brain, wisdom of the crowd
A person never express himself directly and accordingly to his nature. A person use always forms and behaviour patterns that are determined by his environment and significant others. His behaviour and choices depend on other people. A person hunts the form to define himself and to adjust himself to environment. We define ourselves through form. This is everyday theater where our roles are defined by form. Liquid form.
I have always loved history. It is something fascinating in making the sense out of past events and finding out how those have defined nations and societies. History - the true discourse of the past, that takes past to explain present and get a slight understanding of future. Our history is something that shapes us not only as nations but also as individuals. It is a part of our "we consciousness".
That history is changing today - it becomes personalized. The stories about big events are told through the eyes of real people. Events have no longer an effect on humanity, events influence life of Alice and John.
We save and distribute our history online. In pictures and videos.
Like ERA project, that is online space with individual stories of people who stood up against terror and humiliation of fascism during WWII. The stories told by people who experienced Holocaust are very important in XXI century when increasing number of people denies Holocaust took place and WWII seems like a kind of fantasy for today's teenagers. "The protagonists and eyewitnesses will disappear in the next years. Soon, there will be no other testimonies of the happenings apart from those having been collected, recorded, recounted and written down. The value of eyewitness interviews is unique. No book or film can replace the opportunity of watching eyewitnesses tell their stories of resistance and independent decision to do so."
Or like this 10 minutes video from YouTube that tells the Polish history.
There is also vast amounts of personal stories created and saved online. We save our histories in pictures, on blogs and forums. We create not only the collective picture of history, but we also save the history of our times for the future generations in form of our experiences, emotions, not just numbers and dates. History becomes open to amateurs and it gets additional dimension - emotional. It gets it closest ever to other disciplines as sociology and philosophy and moves it always from historiography approach based on dry facts and dates.
We share, store out stories of the big events. Like April 16th archive documenting tragic events on the Virginia Tech tragedy of April 16, 2007.
We get even more personal by passion on our everyday stories in blogs and collective projects like those projects from UK: History Matters, Pass it On and Your History Here.
Or Yahoo's Time Capsule that is going to reopen in 2020 and reply all submissions it get from people all over the world.
We create the new Youniverse history facilitated by multimedia and Internet. We become ubiquitous and available 24/7. We share our knowledge about history and our personal histories via our networks and communities, demonstrating history is a story tale of herd. The question is, will the history saved on fiber connections survive? Will it be passed on as a immortal meme through new connections driven by links as a new form of story telling?
"Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs" (David Ben Gurion)
Inspired by Historia & Media
Tags: history, sociology, meme, Youniverse
I've learned during my study a lot about statistics in combination with philosophy. My favorite professor who taught in methodology of sociological research always told us - numbers are what you say they are. It is true. Numbers are very flexible, they seem to be objective as they are perceived as hard facts. Numbers describe the reality which we can control. Numbers remove the randomness. What I've also learned was the inevitable need for observing the individual's experiences and ideas. Researchers should study reality as a social actors (subjectively - understanding people's motivations), not as an independent observers (objectively - understanding people as numbers). The truth is that you can never connect with a number. You hear lots of people in media and advertising business claiming that people comes first to add afterwards: we can reach 75% of target group. And so what? 75% can translate in many things depending on what we want to say. But it doesn't say anything constructive, it doesn't help us to lose any communication challenge or neither takes any closer to people (target group as some call them).
I have seen a couple of examples of the numbers tyranny in the pursue of explaining reality. For me it looked more like manipulation and completely lack of understanding of what's going on. This week, there were released to surveys about the use of digital and traditional media in Denmark. First of them, conducted by Explora, focused on the 15-24 years old and the conclusion was: This is a myth that you can't reach young people via TV advertising. Explora found out that young people spend 84 minutes on watching TV and only 11 minutes online. Here comes the best - they measured only 136 Danish websites!! How on earth can you draw any conclusions on youth Internet usage based on 136 websites? Numbers show only the part of reality.
Another research covered the new media usage compared to the traditional media amongst "the early adapters" and was conducted by Danish national TV station TV2 and ACNielsen. The conclusion was: the young people with high interest in technology has still high consumption of traditional media. Research responsible at TV2 believes that the increasing usage of the new media and internet don't decrease the time spent with traditional media, there is no cannibalization. So far so good. The early adapters spend in all 9 hours and 32 minutes daily consuming media (150 min. with TV, 233 min. in front of computer, 35 minutes with other media like game consoles and mp3). I read the article once, twice and I couldn't find anything interesting except some numbers. I didn't learn anything new about media usage.
I wonder why none of the research didn't cover multitasking issue that makes it possible for many to extend media time into 9 hours. None of research come up with the slightest attempt to understand HOW people use the media. Would it be to uncomfortable for the traditional media?
It is so ignorant and one sided picture of reality presented by those two research. I don't believe TV is dead. It is not, the way we use it changed and those numbers don't tell anything about it.
It almost cliche to say it over and over again: People are first, data are second. Still, it is hard to live up to this sentence, as we are attached to the old media world order. As long as we don't change the terminology and become more curious to see what lies behind the numbers, we will stand still in one place. The world will pass by.
(Read more on statistics here)
Tags: research, numbers, sociology, media consumption
Lately I was keeping it low with blogging. They say silence is golden. Yes, it is, but don't exaggerate with all that golden bling bling. Silence is good from time to time as it encourages observation. The observation is good before you draw any conclusions about surrounding world.
I followed the discussion about blogging vs. Twitter going on for a couple of weeks.The interesting about the whole discussion is the urge we have for making revolutions. We can't just use both blog and twitter as complimentary tools in communication. No, we desperately want to replace them. We strive for making revolution, for introducing new things and putting our fingerprints on them.
We are talking about visions, future, and ideas thinking in linear ways. Surely, the world is changing, the new things happen all the time, but they aren't linear. We tend to believe we moved from A to B, from Blogging to Twittering and then we expect we move from B to C - who knows maybe it could be the silence stadium.
The fact is that our life is a pulse. Pulse is not linear. It is like pendulum we go from A to B and return to A. It is like in the trivial saying: the history repeats itself. We always return to the same or similar places convinced that with every movement we have discovered something new, that we've changed reality. Yes, there are changes but they have rather evolutionary character - evolution fills the gaps where there is an opening.
The new social media and the new technologies aren't anything revolutionary new. They are just the result of technological development we have been experiencing though the last decades. The core behind social media isn't anything new. The social media, communities, tools whether they are old-fashioned (photo albums, phones, letters, neighbours gatherings in the backyard, etc.) or modern (blogs, Twitter, Flickr, etc) are grown up upon the same human need - need for being with other. The modern social media forms are just more powerful. The human needs are empowered as never before. The traditional photo album wasn't accessible to so many, as the photo album on Flickr.
Exchanging the old media or tools with the new ones will not generate a change. We should move away from linear thinking and begin to feel the endless pulse of human life. We need to learn to combine and cooperate. We need to navigate within complexity.
"Throughout the universe, then, order exists within disorder and disorder within order (...) Just as in the timeless image of yin and yang, we are dealing with complementaries that only look like polarities. Neither one is primary; both are absolutely necessary." (M. J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science)
Blogging and Twitter are just two different tools that are suppose to help us to communicate, transmit our meanings, build networks, find like-minded peers, etc. The complement each other. None of them is better than other. They just fulfill different needs for people in different states of mind. After all SMS didn't replaced telephone conversation.
Tags: blog, twitter, evolution, communication, pulse
I was just thinking about the humans' susceptibility to emulation of social behavior. The easiest experiment is at the zebra crossing. Red light is on (make sure first there is not traffic and any possible danger near you), you begin to go over to the other side, people will always follow you. It is very simple experiment, but it shows that we act instinctively. We follow the herd. Our brain makes us to move and follow others without any rational thought about how dangerous it could be.
We follow the group convinced that it must be good and accepted behavior when others people act the same way. Besides it saves us time to make decisions ourselves, it is kind of shortcut. The same phenomena we can observe on the tram in the video below. Just watch the young guy, how his surprise turns into engagement. No matter how strange it is what others do, it must be OK if they do it - social proof.
This is promotional video of Polish agency Artegence that works with building communities - excellent and clever spot that shows in a simple way what they are good at. They have also superb website - available in English as well.
Tags: society, sociology, emulation, social proof, artegence
Grant McCracken: Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture
Philip Zimbardo: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Duncan J. Watts: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition)
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi: Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
