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Topic: RE: virus: Water cooler (Read 1275 times) |
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Hermit
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Posts: 4287
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Prime example of a practically perfect person
 
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RE: virus: Water cooler
« Reply #1 on: 2005-11-19 03:13:32 » |
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I have often noticed that many people pant at tongueable manga. I think I may have done so myself when the manga was insufficiently seijin (adult) - no wait, perhaps I mean the opposite. Whatever ;-)
Hermit
PS a present or two. Hopefully somebody who enjoys this stuff and doesn't know about one of these sites will be pleased. Note that these sites are ***definitely not*** work safe.
http://img.renchan.org/imgboard/ and http://www.not4chan.org/index.html.
Yuo cna raed tihs megsase, olny bucesae of teh peowr of teh hmaun mnid...
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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RE: virus: Water cooler
« Reply #2 on: 2005-11-23 01:26:32 » |
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[Blunderov] Thanks to Hermit for previous presents. Here is more coolth for
the cognoscenti.
Best Regards.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/22/douglas_rushkoffs_th.html
Feed: Boing Boing
Title: Douglas Rushkoff's Thought Virus #3
Author: David Pescovitz
David Pescovitz: BB pal Douglas Rushkoff has posted the third excerpt from
his coming book Get Back In The Box: Innovation From The Inside Out. From
Doug's post:
Thanks to the emergence of the Internet and its networked culture, a whole
lot about our needs - both as consumers and as workers-has been put into
perspective. Success has a variety of definitions and dimensions, and many
of them are changing.
For instance, the most respected kids in the culture of computer games are
not the ones who play the best; they're the ones who program the best. For
they, even more than Nintendo champions, give the rest the players something
to talk about, something to play with, and something through which they can
connect with others. The driving force behind all of the authorship and
creative energy of the networked age is the need to create what I've come to
call social currency.
Networks are great, but until we can move through them ourselves, we'll need
proxies in the form of ideas, images, words, and other constructs that can
be exchanged through our wires and screens. Even in the real, physical
world, our engagements with one another are almost always predicated on
something else. A party starts with a few good jokes to break the ice.
"Invite Sam," we remind ourselves, "he tells good jokes."
Observe yourself the next time you're listening to a joke. You may start by
listening to the joke for the humor - because you really want the belly
laugh at the end. But chances are, a few sentences in, you will find
yourself not only listening, but attempting to remember its whole sequence.
You'll do this tentatively at first, until you've decided whether or not
it's really a good joke. And if it is, you'll commit the entire thing to
memory - maybe even with a personalized variation, or a mental note to
yourself to fix that racist part. This is because the joke is a gift - it's
a form of social currency that you'll be able to take with you to the next
party.
So is the great majority of the media we watch and even the products we buy.
HBO understood this well enough to base an entire season's advertising
campaign on the "water cooler" effect. In a series of fake ads, the water
cooler industry thanks HBO for giving workers something to talk about the
next day at the water cooler. The message of these ads was clear: watch
these shows to gain social currency.
In today's commercial landscape, cluttered as it is with messages of
personal gratification and consumption, the HBO campaign revealed a deeper
understanding of our social needs than meets the eye. Not only did it
recognize our desire for connection with other people - especially at work -
but it recognized our awareness that accumulating social currency was the
surest route toward achieving these connections.
I first developed these ideas in a spirited, if overly optimistic, book
called Media Virus, which I wrote in those breathy days just before the
emergence of the World Wide Web. I argued that all our media are connecting
up to one another, forging a 'datasphere' in which we are all connected,
too. Thanks to interactive media from phones and faxes to the early
Internet, everyone was becoming capable of providing feedback - launching
ideas that could spread through this new mediaspace like viruses.
Media Virus became something of a media virus itself. Many business authors,
consultants, and advertisers caught on to the idea of cultural contagion and
came to believe that a savvy marketer needed to find only a few key
individuals who could provide the right word of mouth (or word of Internet),
and a campaign would propel itself. This led to an industry of "viral
marketing," where hip advertising agencies find people they consider to be
cool or trendy, and then induce them - or pay them - to hawk a particular
brand of shoe, book title, or camera phone to their friends and followers.
But they've got the horse and the cart reversed. People don't engage with
each other in order to exchange viruses; people exchange viruses as an
excuse to engage with each other. Media viruses, and their massive
promotional capability, are all dependent on the newfound collective spirit
of our age and the increasing need for social currency that has resulted.
It's not about convincing a few key individuals to sell products; it's about
creating products that provide everyone the currency they need to forge new
social connections. Sure, if we analyze the movement of an idea across a
community, we'll be able, retroactively, to determine which individuals gave
it the most word of mouth.
If we want to understand or even replicate this effect, however, we must
instead learn to see people not as individuals looking for power or social
status, but as parts of a group looking for cohesion. Media viruses were
made possible by the emergence of a networked mediaspace. They are an
emergent phenomenon - a life form, of sorts, native to this new interactive
landscape. Viruses exploit what we have in common and, when we have little
in common, help to create shared experience. The best products and brands in
this environment do not serve to help people stand out; they have much more
to do with helping people fit in.
That's why, in spite of growing fears that we are living in a materialistic
society, social currency almost always wins out over pure ownership as a
motivator for buying. For the majority of consumers, their cars,
electronics, and even their sneakers are ways of communicating to and
connecting with other people. In an almost Darwinian competition for
survival, products that serve as social currency succeed, while the ones
that don't, fail.
---
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