Social Hallucinations

Generation M and the Conflict of Generations

The situation, most of you will recall from the young years. You come back home very late. You  open the door quietly, so as not to cause noise, because you know everyone in the house is probably sleeping. You sneak slowly inside, creeping like a cat. You don't want to wake anyone, just head directly to bed to hide your too late arrival. But your efforts fail - there is always someone waiting for you. The conflict of generations - round one. Parents are angry cause they worried and feel deeply responsible for you and expect you to play by their rules and you are tired and think this is the storm in a glass of water cause you are grown up enough to decide yourself and do what you want - your independence from parents is crucial for you.

Each society has its own culture, a different era and different generations like every family. Every new generation is different and poses some other values, has other interests and what to emphasize and rationalize their otherness. The conflict of generations is as old as humans existed. Such conflicts seem to be an inevitable necessity. Only when two cultures / generations clash, their interdependence and fierce fighting can lead to the creation of something new, revelatory and riveting. Development as the result of conflict. Well, conflict doesn't need to have the negative staining. The secret lies in how we do play the rounds in the match between generations. How clever we are to use the old's wisdom to build something new.

Umair Haque writes "Dear Old People Who Run the World, my generation would like to break up with you." Every era has its own goals and tend to forget about yesterday's dreams, but trampling on the previous generations altars will not bring any good. I agree with Umair Haque that we need to "create an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity". We need to do instead of talk. But manifestos and breaking up will not take us there. In my humble opinion, it is interdependence along with fierce fighting and learning from the past success and fails that will bring us to the new set of values and allow to make a difference and move forward.

It is irrevocable, that everything is transient and the light of the young stars who just won over the old ones will be turned off later on in the curse of history as the new generations arrive. We need solid foundation anchored in culture and cores values to make a difference. Development. Otherwise we build house of cards. Every time the new winds blow, house falls down and the new generations come and build the new houses of cards, over and over again. In the result we never learn from the past and seem to start from the scratch.

The new generations like to rebel but overthrowing the old and replacing it with new manifestos doesn't guarantee the success. We can't cut off our heritage that shaped us and the society we are living. Not everything sucked what old people created as long as the new generation turned out to despise greed and crave for the new authentic and sustainable reality - we haven't been created in vacuum. The Generation M is the natural result of the collapse of the systems and economies that is happening in front of our eyes but it can't bury the past. It needs to learn from it. Generation M can't burn down the old monuments, it would be revolution and those usually lead to decapitations in the first place. Generation M needs to analyze the past, learn, blend and act, act smarter as it has the potential and tools to do so. After all, Generation M is a necessary reality, as if we don't introduce new trends, if we don't have ideals, and don't discover the new experiences, our world would be wishy washy and dull gray ... we would be stuck...

Photo by Pensiero

Come Together

We may never diminish the powerful role of emulation for our behavior. This funny video shows how powerful emulation is in connecting people in spontaneous ways. Music and a guy who felt like dancing - it is a must see for all people working with communication. It's not about reaching people, it is about giving them something to copy.

Found at Asi's blog

I Belong therefore I Am

Image by michael.heiss via Flickr

The need for belonging is one the most powerful needs we share. Being with others people, being social is what our nature demands to function. Some wise-men even claimed that the secret of a good life lies in the harmony between social and personal feelings.
We are herd species and we want to belong something bigger than us. Danes proved it when Anders Colding-Jørgensen Internet psychologist from the University of Copenhagen made an experiment on Facebook. He created a group called 'No to demolition of Stork Fountain' (Storkespringvandet - fountain in Copenhagen). There was nothing strange in it, except the fact that no one wanted to demolish the fountain.
He sent invitation to the group to all his approx. 120 Facebook friends with a message that there was an experiment and asked them to join in. First, the group began to grow quietly. On the second day was reached small 300 members. Then went the stronger and after a little week, reached the 10,000 members. The group has around 25,000 members and is growing fairly stable with approximately 2 members in a minute!

Despite the fake cause, there were 25.000 people who joined and were against something what wasn't suppose to happen. The conclusion - the people didn't join the group to protest against the demolition of the fountain, they joined to be a part of something bigger than them, something that connected them with other people and gave them feeling of joint cause and belonging. This the same as with the groups that protest against new FB layouts. It is not about layout, it is about being part of something bigger than ourselves.

Belonging, being part of something bigger is the one of the most powerful needs you need to consider while working on your digital strategy.

PS. FB group changed its name to "I love Stork fountain" after experiment was done. And it has now over 27.000 users.

Sociology and Marketing

"Sociology and marketing are on a collision course." - says Armano

Sociology and marketing should never be separated. Marketing is about creating the value for people and making it accessibImage by Donna Cymek via Flickrle. It is hard to create and spread it without understanding human relations. This is not about focus groups or media, it is about real life observations and digging into human nature and nature of interactions. Social media and the digital technology are just enhancers of social behavior. We people are just keep talking and express ourselves and our opinions, this time powered by technology that makes it loud wider and allows us to reach more people. The motivations remain the same as BSM (before social media) - belonging and conviviality, to mention two most relevant drivers.

But *beware the common sense thinking* when applying sociology into your marketing efforts.

$100k Makes People Collaborate

Great example of social behavior. If you give people something to share / talk about they will get involved and will collaborate even though they are complete strangers. The common purpose forms community.

Found at RedFraggs blog

Human interactions are initialized by things

Image via WikipediaWe are no longer focusing on the socializing with others. Our human relations get objectified and objects are necessary for social interactions. They facilitate them and enhance them. People are not unique, the objects they own, are.
Increasingly, human interactions are initialized by things – they intermediate our contacts with others and definte the nature of our interactions.
Things become essential in the human connections. Nintendo Wii becomes the essential object for kids, it becomes the "be or not to be" of their social life. Should we study Nintendo Wii manual to get more profound understanding of youngers social life? It may be not so silly idea after all seeing so many extreme reactions to receiving Wii.

50 kids happy to get a Nintendo Wii for Christmas - watch more gamer videos

Hat tip to Seth Godin

'The Common Sense Sociology'

Internet is infested with social media experts who apply "the common sense sociology" to explain and consult on social behavior. There are dangers of the common sense wisdoms that lead to blurring the reality and taking the wrong decisions based on the wrong assumptions.

"The common senImage by Compound Eye via Flickrse sociology" 3 mistakes:

1. Presumption that we know the social reality because we live in it, and on the basis of our experience we take for granted certain social relations and social behavior. There is an internal limitation stopping us from making the right judgments - many of our social experiences aren't recorded by our awareness thus they are not included when making judgments. Besides our experience is in most cases limited to a single group of society. We take those limited experiences and create oversimplified theories for the whole society.

2. We believe that the research or study we are working on is always linked directly with practical objectives and we measure the reality in relation to the norms that we use to describe what is desirable or undesirable.

3. Assumption that each group of social facts may be considered theoretically and practically in isolation from the rest of the life of society. Despite it is our mantra, we forget about it when talking about social behavior or social relations - Everything is connected!

As a result we can lots of bullshit said around. Lots of so called experts who mess in the heads of uncritical sheeps.

The good example of such an ignorance and the usage of the common sense science was the discussion on Twitter authority where Loic Le Meur and Michael Arrington demonstrated the lack of understanding for basic terms like authority and social relations linked to those. Authority for those gentlemen is the measure of the number of followers. What a misjudgment and oversimplification of social interactions based on the power of authority. There is a huge difference between authority and popularity (I think the whole discussion about the number of followers is referring to the latter one). Applying the number of followers equals authority logic would mean Britney Spears is a heck of an authority! (BTW she has almost 13.000 followers, gee it must be some pearls of wisdom on her profile).
Majority the social media experts are just popular through self-promotion. There are only a few who are credible experts. The difference comes from professionalism, truthfulness, trustworthiness and impartiality.
We need to be more careful and fight for professionalizing in the field to avoid being drifted away by "the common sense science" and tempted with the easy solutions based on vague theories build solely on one person experience: 'I did it this way, it worked, so it must be true for everyone and everything else.' This way of thinking is just the reproduction of the existing stats quo of the cultural structures driven by a great army consisting of the people who do not get it, but have the right to vote.
If we are here to make change we need to keep on being clever and avoid those 3 mistakes of the applying common sense thinking into any social science.

Drawing by gapingvoid

Bauman or Batman?

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.

amazon, Batman, Bauman, sociology

Phone Sex

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:

photography, phone sex, Phillip Toledano

The Prose of Life

Tags: world through my eyes, daria, poland, street photography

Things for Free and Hunters

 

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

The Mechanism of Popularity

UPDATE

It can be this is one of the reasons behind the mechanism of popularity - Minds Think Alike

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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

Humans and Forms

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.

History 2.0

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

People versus Numbers

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