Before it gets away from me. Kroker wrote something to the effect of it being the height of cynicism to see an add recongnize how they are trying to manipulate you, then buy the product anyway. (I don't feel like digging up the exact quote right now)

This summer I had a chance to speak with Richard Webber. He started a little thing we call geodemographics. Basically categorizing neighborhoods. It's well used in marketing. The obvious example is store site selection. You want to build your store near the people who would shop there. Who are those people and where are they? Geodemographics. Anyway, I asked them if he thought people were getting more savvy to marketing aimed at them. I wanted to know if there was a category of people who deliberately live in a certain kind of market demographic. Well, he didn't seem to think so.

If I see a commercial that I don't like, I'm less inclined to buy that product. Most of the time this is subconcious. But sometimes it's deliberate. I'm recognizing that productX has ignored my entertainment needs in favor of someone elses, or has grossly erred in judgement. By not buying their product, I'm casting a little vote against such a practice. Coming from a generational hollow ('74 - '76) between X and Y. It's easy to see advertising that is aimed at others because most of it is. My point? Sometimes I live that way, in the "height of cynicism" (no, I didn't look up the quote, I'm quoting myself).

 

11:58:21 PM    

After reading a couple of chapters of Bower's Let Them Eat Data I can say that I felt none of the visceral reaction that I got from Kroker. He seems more concerned with the loss of cultural diversity, then the loss of humanity itself. Bowers contends that as the world becomes more homogeneous through the expansion of the global network, indvidual and localized cultures get devoured.

I'm glad that he doesn't argue that that is bad for its own sake. While it may be a valid argument, it doesn't have much merit. I mean it's not really worth talking about. Degustibus non disputandum est. What he does argue, is that localized cultures that have organically developed in harmony with nature contain the secrets of sustainable living in all the various environments in which humans have found themselves. The virtual monoculture will run roughshod over the globe. Applying the same values, practices, and problem solving to all areas. The world wasn't meant to be like that.  As cultures are swallowed up. The local knowledge they have (and he doesn't mean like what roots are good to eat, he's talking about culture, the things we don't even know they know. The things they don't even know they know, I'm talking about, to quote Wooderson, "...livin' man, L-I-V-I-N." (I know I mentioned it before, but I do realize the irony of busting the recombinant sign on you like that)

 

11:32:47 PM    

The dead flesh, seperated from it's cybernetic nervous system.

This would never happen in GIS Society and Technology!

11:10:57 PM