TAG: culture
"What these experiments neatly demonstrate is that the taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of our inputs, and cannot be solved in a bottom-up fashion."
Tags: wine psychology culture criticism research brain bestarticlesof2007
"Therefore the challenge, if you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do at all times."
Tags: conferences culture
"Even though points on Consumating were redeemable for absolutely nothing, not even a gold star, our members had an unquenchable desire for them."
Tags: community design games reputation socialnetworking culture psychology
Postmodernism's Most Important Gift
"Postmodernism's great gift to humankind is this challenging of assumptions, and this is an important matter for our new century. Why? Because in every walk of life, our failed institutions are rooted in assumptions that need challenging"
Tags: postmodernism media culture bestarticlesof2007
Steven Johnson New York Times blog on cities is released from behind the Times' paywall.
Tags: art city nytimes culture
"Naturally, when I get snitty it’s because something’s violating my impeccable taste, and when other people get snitty they’re humorless bastards who are taking things too seriously"
Tags: psychology culture
Awesome blog full of visualizations by the guy who did the McCarren Pool reviewed.
Tags: blogs culture data visualization
When Reality Feels Like Playing a Game, a New Era Has Begun
"We use game models to motivate ourselves, to answer questions, to find creative solutions. For many, life itself has turned into a game."
Tags: videogames psychology culture trend
"Put your shotgun where you can reach it, instead of some out of the way place where it does you no good!"
No Shirts at Improv Everywhere
Improv Everywhere takes on Abercrombie & Fitch
Tags: funny video nyc fashion culture
"A host gathers people to make meaning together, setting the stage with a welcoming spirit, a few ground rules for safe speaking, and a juicy topic"
Tags: likemind conversation culture
How spam is teaching us about advertising
"How many of you aren’t more skeptical of all ad claims (and all media), because spam has taught you that there’s an element of spam in every unwanted (commercial) message?"
Tags: marketing spam advertising culture insight
Letting kids drink early reduces binging
"In this age of "just say no," some people believe it is time for Americans to reconsider how they teach kids about alcohol."
Tags: alcohol youth culture insight
Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments
"So what happens to all the research that doesn't yield a dramatic outcome  or, worse, the opposite of what researchers had hoped? It ends up stuffed in some lab drawer."
Tags: data science research culture economics
"Why waste your time staying informed when pretending to be informed is sooo much easier? Eric Ledgin gives you your weekly Talking Points."
Tags: funny video television news culture insight
5 differences between a NY ad conference and a SF web 2.0 conference
"Just a couple random observations from my first day at MIXX, which as a NYC advertising conference, is probably exactly the opposite from a SF web 2.0 conference."
Tags: advertising marketing culture nyc sanfrancisco web2.0 conferences
"I’ve found it an odd phenomenon to feel relationships strengthening by simply reading status updates, constrained to 140 characters no less, over a period of time."
Tags: twitter community culture socialnetworking
Unintended consequences of the smoking ban
"So it turns out that banning smoking in pubs has not so much encouraged smokers to quit but instead provided them with a decisive competitive reproductive advantage if they keep puffing away."
Tags: economics cigarettes culture law london
Proper comparison points for Kanye West, Michael Jackson, 50 Cent, and Norman Mailer
"Meanwhile, who is really the new Michael Jackson? The iPhone of course."
Tags: music trend insight technology culture
the science of passive pleasure
"As our level of consciousness develops and while we tire of being able to have 'anything, any time, anywhere', I think there is more and more need for these unpredictable experiences."
Tags: culture insight psychology
"We just went our separate ways after school or work and, well, went our separate ways. Trying to force us all back together again because we shared school years has short-term value."
"In a way this bundle that constitutes mainstream music begins to establish a model that could be the future of recorded music  that the recordings are the “loss leaders� for everything else."
Tags: music design packaging business culture
"For only $19.99 on Cafe Press, you can thumb your nose at the fashionsta flock while helping the environment."
"The project documents every instance of the phrase "is the new" encountered from various sources in 2005. It is intended to map the iterations of a peculiarly common marketing and literary device."
Tags: culture trend visualization
It's mathmatically impossible that men could have more sexual partners than women.
Tags: nytimes sex culture gender
loss of context for me on Facebook
"I do feel the need to point out that context management is still unfun, especially for early adopters, just as it has been on every other social network site. It sucks for teens trying to balance mom and friends."
Tags: facebook culture socialnetworking trend
"Along the same lines, I got to thinking how the world was able to for the most part fix the Y2K bug . . . Yet in most other cases, impending disasters, like our dependence on oil, failing infrastructure and unsustainable spending, all go unheeded."
Tags: culture psychology behavioraleconomics
"Could it be that the wired retired are the new digital trailblazers?"
Tags: culture technology insight demographics
Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future
A not-so-hard-to-imagine future vision from Bruce Sterling.
Tags: blogs culture future local rfid science technology
Andrew "Cult of the Amateur" Keen gets slapped around a bit by David "Cluetrain" Weinberger in the Wall Street Journal.
Tags: culture community creativity media talent
The vintage allure of Fake Steve Jobs
"What the Fake Steve Jobs phenomenon has to say about our culture is that perhaps "new media" isn't as new as we'd like to think it is."
Tags: apple blogs writing culture
This post brought to you by the numbers seven and twelve
"It has long been held that there are seven basic plots in literature. . . . So is it really the case that advertisements need twelve whole categories of their own (Slate), almost twice as many as either fiction or humour?"
Tags: advertising culture funny
"Due to access restrictions that limit who can see your profile, there are no ’stars’ there. I wonder - does this detract or attract? It’s kind of nice not to be confronted with celebrity at every turn."
Tags: celebrity facebook internet culture community
"A new type of librarian is emerging: think Dewey Decimal meets Generation X."
Tags: likemind library culture community
"I've liked noticing the solidification of the internet recently, it seems to be becoming more like a thing and less like a service or process."
Tags: internet culture trend insight
"There's no such thing as "small world.""
Tags: culture community networking emergence
How To Visit New York: The Basics
"To get in the right mindset about visiting New York City, there are a few things you need to really take to heart, and once you've absorbed these lessons, the rest of your trip will be much less stressful and a lot more fun."
Say 'Hybrid' and Many People Will Hear 'Prius'
"One reason for the success of the Toyota Prius may be that buyers want everyone to know they are driving a hybrid."
Tags: cars culture marketing environment green
Mika Brzezinski of MNSBC rips Paris report
"MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski refuses to talk about Paris Hilton as a *Lead Story* on the Morning Joe show."
Tags: video youtube journalism celebrity culture
'omg my mom joined facebook!!'
"A nosy parent goes where the kids are and learns more than just what her kid is up to."
Tags: facebook youth parents socialnetworking privacy culture trend
The value of virtual ghettos and virtual suburbs, part #2
"Everyone wants to sell things to the rich kids, sure. But to get the rich kids to care, they've got to sell them to the cool kids first."
Tags: culture economics influence marketing facebook myspace socialnetworking
Ratatouille Star Patton Oswalt on Geeks vs. Nerds
"A lot of nerds aren't aware they're nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, "I speak Klingon  who am I fooling? You win! I'm just gonna openly like what I like." Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves."
Tags: geeks culture interviews
Is wealth really the best form of birth control?
"What if this economic/demographic phenomenon is just a blip while people (in, say, the UK) are rich enough to want the benefits of child-free leisure but not quite rich enough yet to afford childcare?"
Tags: money culture demographics
Bubblegeneration takes issue with the social networking class divide argument. When there's only one (very smart) voice of dissent, it's usually worth thinking about.
Tags: socialnetworking culture class
"Those who saw the telephone as a destructive force in communities might have had -- and might still have -- a point, but technological changes have left them on the fringe of society."
Tags: culture privacy identity youth business transparency
"What's on family dinner tables in fifteen different homes around the globe? Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book "Hungry Planet""
Tags: food culture photography
"Lesson one: a social network that lets people express multiple identities in multiple ways is almost always going to dominate a network that tries to confine identity within a singular niche. "
Tags: socialnetworking culture identity
Reinventing the conference, blogger and new media style
"What we want from a conference is not a surrogate intelligence of a big name speaker. What we want is a tide that delivers new and interesting things that present themselves in fresh and unexpectedly formed ways."
Tags: conference postmodernism culture
Forget 'Digital'. We're Talking Post-Communication
"This is not a digital revolution. It’s social. Your Freeview box is digital. Your computer is digital. Everything else is people."
Tags: media community technology culture
"I sat there at one moment thinking what it would cost me in time and effort to meet any of these people. Tons. Tons of time and effort. But these people have found one another, thanks to the internet, blogging"
Tags: blogs culture community trend
"How enduring will online memorials prove to be in the long run?"
Tags: death myspace culture socialnetworking
Diamonds Are Forever! TODAY ONLY!
"If there's any significance at all to Hirst's skull, it's as a symbol of a far-reaching, manipulative cartel of dubious ethics at the center of an elaborately collusive web of mutually beneficial delusion."
Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic
Stowe Boyd on a new kind of consciousness.
"I wrote “3pm� in an Outlook email this morning, and the spell checker asked me if I meant MP3."
You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well
"In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves -- or their offspring -- to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines . . . "
Tags: search culture identity names trend
New York Times on how checks get split.
Tags: culture food restaurant money nytimes
The mystery of the daytime idle: Why aren't you working?
"The funny thing is, everyone has an answer for themselves but is baffled by everyone else. Possibly this is like life itself."
Tags: culture city sanfrancisco jobs
An incredibly helpful news station exposes the dangers/pitfalls of emo.
Tags: funny culture emotions youth video
Predicting American Idol winners with search.
Tags: search television trend culture analytics
Google is now showing the hottest trends for the day . . . interesting way to see what's going on at the moment.
Tags: google internet trend culture search
"a major feature of the Web is the recording of human behavior in its many forms. To a lesser extent is the creation of truly new behaviors."
Tags: culture internet behavior
Gladwell: "Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage."
Tags: culture economics politics statistics
Attention is a function of the medium
"As bloggers we may have committed a grave strategic error - if we spun our points out to 200 pages with the customary filler, photos and charts not only could we sell them at £10 a copy but people would apparently commit hours of their lives to reading
Tags: attention media books culture
"Read over 4200 brutally honest independent reviews of selected shops and assorted establishments in over 150 superfuture cities."
Tags: city culture design reviews travel shopping
Mere Luxury Isn't Enough for Superrich
As luxury brands move into the mass market, they need a new way to make the superrich feel special. Welcome to the 'experience economy.
Tags: marketing luxury culture trend
likemind - Meet Creative People in Your City
"Talking to people with such an eclectic mix of creative talents made for a very enjoyable morning - the kind that really brings home the opportunities that all this blogging and social media are opening up."
Tags: likemind culture creativity
Riding a bike without brakes on the streets of New York may sound insane. But to the zealous adherents of fixed-gear bikes, they are a thing of beauty and a way of life.
Tags: trend culture bike nyc nytimes
From London: "Eight months into my pregnancy only one man has given me his seat on public transport. Were the rest afraid of being sexist?"
Tags: culture london gender subway psychology
Where You Carry, Why It Matters
Jan Chipchase, researcher for Nokia breaks down the different ways phones are carried around the world.
World's Slowest Instant Messenger
"Connected things in the era of IP networks always do their thing as fast as possible, approaching speeds that are imperceptible to normal humans. Almost without question, this is seen as a good thing. But I wondered what it would take to disrupt that ass
Tags: culture technology internet speed im
In a Station of the Metro... a case study in marketing?
"It speaks to the notion that although content is king (even more so now in this user-generated world) we cannot ignore the importance of the context in which that content is delivered, and the appropriateness of the channel used to deliver it."
"So as our cities grow more dense, our social relationships are moving into Twitter time. Bettencourt and his coauthors would claim that this is neither good nor bad -- it's simply the inevitable outcome of urban growth."
Tags: culture blogs twitter mobile time trend
Is The Bedouin Worker Killing The Third Place?
"Instead of developing different brands offering basically the same thing (which will be inundated by the laptopers), maybe they should offer a modern version of the Second Place to keep the Bedouin Workers and the cafe dwellers happy and apart."
Tags: culture coffee likemind starbucks
Rain Storms in New York City Trigger Visible Feedback Loops
"Our culture so values factory-freshness that the moment of box-opening is the only stage of a product’s life that’s usually designed. The rest is left to fate."
Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
A new theory of the hit record.
Tags: business culture marketing psychology nytimes bestarticlesof2007
"One powerful tactic we used was pushing the product into the potential buyer’s space. The automatic reaction for most people is to pick it up. You’d then point out a few features and then mid-inspection, grab the product out of their hands"
Tags: culture marketing behavior
"A violent demonstration of rage or frustration by a full-grown man in protest of or reaction to a difficult household chore or home-improvement project"
Anil Dash weighs in on the nasty side of the blogosphere.
Tags: blogs culture ethics community
"A very freaky PSA that targets GenY kids who are apparently far too comfortable posting everything online."
Tags: blogs culture youth identity education privacy video commercial
"Hecklers have moved toward the mainstream, making headlines, torpedoing careers, and exploiting a new stage of their own on video-sharing Web sites like YouTube."
"Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out."
Tags: music bestarticlesof2007 culture subway dc
Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct
This strikes me as a very analog solution to a digital problem.
Tags: blogs ethics culture conversation
Account planners and fearless noticing
"Almost nothing is actually nothing. The surface of social life is littered with tiny but telling details. The anthropologist's job is to notice and notice and notice. So I noticed snapping."
Tags: culture marketing bestarticlesof2007
"As someone who's on the Web too many hours, I have wondered what changing screens hundreds of times each day to access different gobs of "information" has done to the way our brains order the world, which is known as human consciousness."
Tags: politics technology internet culture brain bestarticlesof2007
"Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog. In the new world of radical transparency, the path to business success is clear."
Tags: transparency business blogs trend marketing culture
Bochco enters the online world
"I used to have friends that would call me on the phone constantly and say, "Listen to this one ... ." It was a culture of storytelling -- joke telling -- because that's a kind of community, and people don't do that anymore."
Tags: television media2.0 video culture interviews
Is a new breed of wireless worker emerging?
Tags: culture mobile wireless business
the end of accidental networks
"One of the things that the internet extinguished was the need for accidental sociality, for post-kinship connections that depend on spatial or institutional proximity."
Tags: networking community attention culture socialnetworking
Narcissism and Fame Are a Little Too Easy
"The act of conveying information to others is in itself a very pleasant experience for most people . . . Sharing gives you a buzz, especially when that sharing is acknowledged directly."
Tags: blogs attention community culture
Numbers Drop for the Married With Children
"Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households -- a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census."
Tags: demographics trend culture marriage
What is an Open Creative Community?
"The barrier to entry is creative citizenship, and you are either a citizen and a participant or you are not, based on your individual relationship to that community’s interests, practices, proximity and values."
Tags: creativity likemind opensource community culture technology bestarticlesof2007
"Printable cold sores allow us to take action! Bring these people back down to our level, and tell advertisers that you don't agree with their message. How can you help? It's easy..."
Tags: advertising culture beauty funny
"Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe
Tags: culture powerpoint data design philosophy visualization
Beauty and the death of zero sum
"Zero sum is dying in our culture. The notion that there is one single hierarchy of any kind is now in question."
NFL Films and the reinvention of football
"Ed and Steve say they thought about football as something theatrical, perhaps even operatic, well, come to that, actually mythical. They accomplish this effect with stirring music, slow motion athleticism, and a grand, booming narrative."
Tags: football sports culture marketing history
"Gender equality has come a long way when the press doesn't differentiate between homicidal maniacs who are men, and those who are women."
"A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished . . . "
Tags: community networking marketing culture
As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.
Tags: attention radicaltransparency identity culture trend blogs youth technology
Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information.
Tags: business finance culture
Patrons or Pirates: the music industry has to choose
What if the music industry restructured itself to more resemble the arts?
Tags: art music business culture
Just another lonely, terrorist-like blogger
CK breaks down why bloggers are not necessarily as lonely as one professor seems to think they are.
Tags: blogs community culture books
"The love affair our culture has with communicating by keyboard has drastically reduced the amount we write by hand, so much so that the New York Times recently reported that the skill, "like an unused muscle," is pretty much dead by . . . High School."
Tags: culture technology communication
"Experience exists only in the minds of your customers. When a person engages with your products, services, and environments, a set of distinct human qualities comes into play:"
The problem with one right answer
momus shows the world there is often more than one answer, especially to popular riddles.
I Survived My Internet Vacation
The dangers of seven days without the web.
2006 Agency Of The Year: Nobody
"What should an agency of the year look like? In my eyes–in this era of the rising “you�–an agency must embody ten critical attributes and capabilities"
Tags: marketing change culture advertising business management
"The inevitability of jeans is clearly part of the monoculture we live in. It's part of the paradox that, in a time when more people are alive than ever before, there are fewer and fewer styles, erasure of difference, pluricide."
Powells.com Interviews Steven Johnson
"That's the natural mode that my brain seems to work in. When I see a problem, I think, How does this connect up and down? That pushes you into other disciplines."
Tags: interviews books culture thinking city
"She has self-selected what she takes in to such a degree that getting a word or thought or image into her consciousness that she hasn't chosen herself is like serenading a cinderblock wall."
Mission for 2007 and the rest of my life: 10x
"What if I was focused on providing 10x (x = to the value provided to me). This is a bit of a misnomer because I intend to provide this contribution without any reciprication. I just know that it is the right way to operate."
"Although the web has enabled all of us to connect with so many people we couldn't have before we still don't know that many more people face to face. It's the real-world meet up that realizes the whole social networking phenomenon."
Tags: socialnetworking coffee likemind culture trend
"How does using a computer change when nothing ever has to be thrown away? And how does the experience design of software have to change to accommodate that change in usage?"
Tags: technology innovation culture
"In an age when many politicians seem molded from plastic, Obama's smoking may actually help his image"
Tags: politics culture marketing
Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm
"Google, in typical eccentric fashion, has created an automated way to search for well-rounded candidates."
Tags: google management jobs culture business nytimes
"If the thought of being a yuppie once made you shudder, you’re not alone. But if you’re a thirtysomething professional, it’s quite possible you’ve become a yuppie without even realizing it."
Friendship: The Laws of Attraction
"The conventional wisdom is that we choose friends because of who they are. But it turns out that we actually love them because of the way they support who we are. "
Tags: psychology identity culture friendship relationships
Anal Sex Is Increasingly Popular in the Hetero World
"Anal-sex talk still makes people blush. But it’s also increasingly popular in the hetero world."
All about Google's new New York City office.
Tags: google nyc management culture nytimes
Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village.
Tags: architecture business management city collaboration culture design innovation productivity
"Instead, inexpensive, miniaturized and connecting technology has created a Little Brother Society where the masses are outfitted with cameras and are ready and willing to record, report and snitch on each other and the government."
Tags: culture transparency trend
No schedules. No mandatory meetings. Inside Best Buy's radical reshaping of the workplace
Tags: business change culture innovation management productivity time
"Yes, they're efficient and good for business, if business is what you care about. But sitting at a computer when you don't have to is to be cripplingly passive, even if you're playing the bloodiest, most maniacal shooter game ever."
Tags: technology communication culture
"There's something about a low-end brand that offers a sense of authenticity, particularly among those who feel jaded by traditional advertising."
Tags: culture trend advertising marketing
"Fed up with members' bars and superclubs, nocturnal thrill-seekers are looking to illicit drinking dens for kicks, Fleur Britten reports"
Tags: trend alcohol culture secret bars
Questioning "VPs of innovation"
"If ever a VP of something is created, say a VP of quality or a VP of sarcasm, it means one thing: 1. The company is failing at that activity. 2. The company will continue to fail at that activity until that VP is no longer needed."
Tags: business innovation management culture
This Week's Non-Racists: Michael Richards and Clint Eastwood
"It’s this refusal to embrace our racism and deal with the deeper issues that allow racial injustice to continue generation after generation."
Only the New York Times would print a story about how no one in New York goes out on Saturday nights . . .
Tags: nyc culture consumerism nytimes
'Beer goggles' effect explained
"Scientists believe they have worked out a formula to calculate how 'beer goggles' affect a drinker's vision."
Tags: alcohol mathematics culture funny research sex
Anil Dash on Michael Richards: "Michael Richards lost his shit for the same reason white people always get mad when black people talk at the movies."
Tags: celebrity culture race movies
"Economics often presumes that people act rationally. Ulrike Malmendier knows better."
Tags: behavioraleconomics culture
Is the SecondLife copybot a sign of things to come?
Tags: copyright culture secondlife ip
what i mean when i say "email is dead" in reference to teens
"Email is not gone but it is dead in the sense that it is no longer a site of deep emotional passion. People still have accounts, just like they still have mailboxes. But their place for sociable communication is elsewhere."
Tags: email trend youth culture
One of the women from the feminist scene explains how the whole thing went down.
"You only have one reputation, and it’s yours to ruin."
Tags: pr communication culture marketing
"BE AN ANARCHIIVIIST Use Photographs, MOVING IMAGES, TEXTs, s o u n d s , music, PHILOsophies, PORNOgraphies, Artworks–the whole gamut of ‘Information’–and approach it like The Child In Kindergarten"
Waistline Banging Like a Bassline
Turns out people's waists are much bigger than the pants sizes might lead you to believe.
"Reginald Pike's Yael Staav takes us from model to billboard in under 60 seconds in this impressive new spot from Dove."
Tags: video advertising culture beauty marketing health fashion bestarticlesof2006
Poking is stupid -- and genius
"The profile world (facebook, myspace, bolt, etc) seems to be the ultimate “safe� medium. As an alternative to keeping in touch with people by contacting them, we can simply leave something that others can come across if they wish."
Tags: socialnetworking culture relationships psychology
Videogames as the Future of Everything: Spare Me
"Studying videogames in a larger context is useful for UI/man-machine interaction, for immersive entertainment, and for non-linear storytelling. Not much else."
Tags: videogames culture
Flavorpill is a different kind of long tail business.
Tags: culture internet longtail nytimes
"The most intelligent producers of media have clued into the way the Internet’s destroyed social censure, and are turning this knowledge into dollars as fast as they can."
Tags: culture internet identity
On collaboration and Prisoner's Dilemmas and the Power of Many
"People want to bond. People want to learn. People want to defend that which they hold as precious. And people want to acquire, yes, but not at the cost of the other drivers."
Tags: connectedness culture
Times Square Makes Everyone Feel Famous
"The man with the cameraphone is going to capture your street performance whether you like it or not."
Tags: music business culture trend
Zinedine Zidane and Authenticity
"Zidane was pissed--who really knows why, or cares?--and he expressed himself directly. Not intelligently or articulately, but directly. That's in stark contrast to 99% of other public figures, and it's made Zidane authentic . . ."
Tags: soccer culture marketing authenticity
Ze Frank on Decisionmaking and Happiness
The decision matters less than the stress of making the decision . . . preach on.
Tags: decisions video culture happiness
Why lonelygirl15 Matters/Doesn't Matter
"Online personality is a shifting, strange thing and we should not be surprised that any person we encounter is real, fake or somewhere in between."
Tags: identity video culture youtube branding
All about the act of 'friending.'
Tags: myspace facebook socialnetworking trend youth culture
"Life 2.0 is about discovering our purpose through finding each otherâ€â€and ourselves."
Tags: connectedness identity culture web2.0
"Marketers know about consumers, consumers know about marketers, marketers know consumers know about marketers, and consumers know marketers know consumers know about marketers."
Tags: marketing consumerism culture
Please feed (but don't fetishize) the participation
"I'm all for participatory entertainment. But let's carefully design platforms, vehicles, and contexts for participation that really work to engage audiences, players, makers, collaborators in meaningful ways."
Tags: video culture cocreation
The Media Assault on Male Body Image
If being a man means having body hair and sweating, why are the sexy guys in ads immune to both?
Tags: gender relationships media culture
"What would happen, I wonder, if I actually told the truth about what happens in a design process?"
Tags: creativity culture design process management productivity business bestarticlesof2006
Lonelygirl15's Online Diary Is the Birth of a New Art Form
"It’s the birth of WikiTV: a television show created by a broad community of participants and built not of sequential, hour-long episodes, but of two-ÂÂminute interconnected parcels."
Tags: media2.0 celebrity culture video youtube
Rich people spend less time lying in bed trying to fall asleep than poor people.
Tags: health sleep money culture
Advent of an era? Corporate America finally gets contemporary culture?
"When does the corporation get in touch and build a system for staying in touch? Naturally, this will happen when senior managers decide that it is in their best interests that it happen."
Tags: business culture innovation internet trend
"At Organic, we are thinking about the “11%� – reaching beyond the traditional opinion makers (the 1%) to speak to what we call the New Influencers – ordinary consumers who are finding their voice online in an assistive or synthesizing role."
Tags: marketing communication influence culture media2.0
Viral Manipulation for Fame and Profit
Trying to answer the old question of what makes something viral.
Tags: branding viral marketing culture
Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds
A man posted on Craig's List looking for sex then posted the emails (including photos) that he got.
Tags: attention privacy sex craigslist culture community law internet identity
Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.
"Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them." That's not true. Friends on a social network are very different . . .
Tags: facebook privacy socialnetworking culture
"A computer by itself is a piece of antisocial hardware. It is all about a person alone in from of a glowing, captivating screen. But once that computer is connected to a network it has potential to become a social tool, but only if unlocked by software."
Tags: socialsoftware culture technology
Interview with Rob Walker, Writer
"PSFK sat down with Rob Walker, a columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and picked his brain about where and how he gets inspired."
Tags: consumerism inspiration marketing nytimes culture
"Much of avant-nerdism has borrowed from what Wasik calls 'the idea that you can take connections that exist online and suddenly actualize them in this kind of real-world physical way, among the uninitiated.'"
"Playing a game with frequent save points is kind of like being the child of a billionaire: You can soar through life without worrying about financial problems because if you fail, there's a "restore" point waiting for you."
Tags: videogames culture
Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last
"If you follow the leads, this Everest of electric-guitar virtuosity, like so many other online artifacts, turns out to be a portal into a worldwide microculture."
Tags: music culture youtube video longtail
Up Periscope: YouTube as the raw feed of contemporary culture
"There are too many things out there, moving too quickly, and too many things in here, colliding too often, for a single editorial perspective to serve. As usual, the middle falls out. What I want is key word notice plus raw feed follow up."
Tags: youtube culture media2.0 magazines advertising
youth and those crazy hormones
Maybe, just maybe, it's possible that teenagers aren't as dumb as we think they are?
An interactive capture the flag game using payphones around nyc.
Tags: cool nyc technology culture
"I would say that most Americans qualify as expert music listeners. We have the cognitive capacity to detect wrong notes, to find music we enjoy . . . an activity that involves a process of meter extraction so complicated that most computers cannot do it"
Motivation for online behavior
"I’m not fully convinced yet, but I’m increasingly thinking that successful social software is nothing more than an online Skinner box. Positional, status-conveying goods. . . entice people to contribute their valuable content for free."
Tags: psychology culture attention community media2.0
Looking back on 25 years of MTV, "More and more, it feels as if there is no longer such a thing as mass culture. MTV, for good or bad, still reassures me that there is."
Tags: culture history youth music
The man behind the 'Girls Gone Wild' soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman into his world, for better or worse
Tags: business celebrity consumerism culture gender media sex video
"The summer-camp ink blot, then, is universal. You are how you camped, even if you never camped at all."
"'What if the New York Times decided to have readers vote on where things should be placed in the paper?' Only a very narrow slice of the population - the Web 2.0 true believers - would view this as anything other than a rhetorical question."
Tags: web2.0 internet technology culture geeks
"I love YouTube, but there's something you need to understand: YouTube just stomps around, recklessly murdering innocent bystanders." Anil Dash chronicles the latest tragedies.
Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv
A beautiful collection of shivs.
Tags: art culture death prison design hacks
A Conversation with Steven Johnson, Part 2
"In part two of Jesse James Garrett’s interview with author Steven Johnson, we look at cultural attitudes and innovation in interface design."
Tags: culture interface design technology books ui
The death of the double entendre
"Advertising has forgotten how to be subtle. Worst of all, it requires no cultural competencies to decode."
Tags: advertising culture marketing sex bestarticlesof2006
"These are my passions, but they reflect the part of me that is about horses, running, skiing, skating, the environment, writing, or creating. If I relabel them to reflect my gender, I believe both (my gender and the labeled thing) are diminished by the "
Tags: blogs gender culture identity technology
The "Snakes on a Plane" Problem
The tragedy of the best titled movie in the history of film
Tags: movies culture blogs marketing
Get That Out of Your Mouth #27
"We have to strip away the geekery, the gadgetry, and the consumerism, and instead of explaining why this brave new freakshow interests us, we have to understand what it's doing to us."
Tags: culture technology media writing journalism
When a Brand Taking From Subculture Goes Wrong
"If the idea behind borrowing from subcultural phenomena is to look cooler or smarter than you are, it's critical to remember two things: 1)don't stray too far afield from your brand's comfort zone, and 2)nothing truly cool or smart tries to be that way."
With the accessibility of new technology, it's all about the content.
Tags: art photography design culture technology media
"YouTube dispels the mystical air around witnessing things. The TV audience doesn’t have to stick around."
Tags: youtube television media2.0 culture video trend
"If your framework doesn’t explicitly account for culture and context, then it is unlikely that you will be attuned to these things when you do your research and design."
Tags: design marketing strategy process culture
Phsyical Scientists & Gutter Thieves
"Recent studies show that you prefer say 100 units of pain now than say 50 units of pain in some time in the future. The anticipation kills us."
Tags: behavioraleconomics economics culture psychology
"Perhaps, as the study’s authors themselves hint at one point, we’ve also gotten better at demarcating what constitutes truly intimate communing  expecting more of our confidants, we have, in effect, defined intimacy up."
Tags: connectedness community psychology internet culture nytimes
A Conversation with Steven Johnson, Part 1
"All other things being equal, a person who is used to making active choices while consuming media is going to be more receptive to complex media, even if the medium is a passive one, like television."
Tags: culture interviews internet technology
U.S. Trendsetters Go On Strike
"If a collective-bargaining agreement cannot be reached, trendsetters will likely be replaced with scabs."
Can Burberry save itself from the tacky British yobs who love it?
Tags: branding business apparel fashion marketing culture
The Grups and Thinking Beyond Demographics
"Clearly, we need better tools that can help us to examine the psychographics of an audience and to buy and measure performance this way."
Tags: demographics advertising marketing culture
"Instead of fixing the other 7 showers, and bringing them up to par with the best shower --- and making all the showers WORK AS WELL AS THE BEST, or #1 shower.....someone decided to......IMPAIR THE SHOWERHEAD OF THE BEST SHOWER."
Tags: culture education business
The art of the doggy bag.
"The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released."
Tags: science internet linking research culture
"There are relatively few universal socially acceptable excuses for interacting with strangers in public spaces, but sport is one of them - useful if you are thinking of use cases for shared viewing of mobile TV for example."
Tags: sports mobile airports culture soccer
"The real power is how personal media fragments the mass market audience by turning readers, watchers, listeners, into writers and video and audio creators. Most of these folks won't make money and it won't matter."
"In 1981, artist Richard Serra installs his sculpture Tilted Arc, in Federal Plaza in New York City." It was destroyed because people didn't like it.
Warren Buffett's lesson to the rich.
The Sins of American Sportscasting
"All these strands together add up to the crisis in American sportscasting that is made evident at every World Cup, when English-speaking fans flee in enormous numbers to listen to commentary in a language they don’t even understand."
Tags: soccer journalism sports television culture
Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future
Tags: design culture environment scifi technology
Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says
The Number of People Who Say They Have No One to Confide In Has Risen
Tags: culture emotions health psychology relationships
A leading atheist says people must embrace rationalism, not faith -- or they will never overcome their differences.
Tags: religion culture interviews politics science
Database of American Proprietary Eponyms
Popsicle, escalator and rolodex are all trademarks. Who knew?
Tags: branding marketing names culture
Top Ten Truths About the Digital Ecosystem
A great state of the digital ecosystem piece.
Tags: business culture internet media2.0 technology
How Brazilian soccer players get their names
How Brazilian soccer players get their names.
Tags: soccer sports language culture brazil
Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop
"This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969."
Tags: video music remix culture copyright dj documentary hiphop bestarticlesof2006
Serendipity casts a very wide net
"It is no accident that technology commentator Bill Thompson believes that the web does a lot to promote chance discovery"
Tags: culture search technology serendipity
"Who killed the cool hunter? I think contemporary culture did. It got more complicated, in the process outstripping the cognitive abilities of even those who claimed guru status."
Tell me about couples and surfing!
"A couple watching TV, curled up on a sofa together, may have felt "together", a couple surfing on two wifi laptops are visiting different sites, having different experiences . . . The internet age feels less communal than the TV age did."
Tags: culture internet relationships psychology
What if men were drawn in the same objectifying way as women in comic books?
Can We Please Kill This Meme Now
"Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture."
Tags: internet culture networking search
Some of the many ways Starbucks has changed America.
Tags: starbucks business culture economics
"In a world of attention scarcity, we will not continue to receive attention unless we earn that right. If we do not receive attention, we risk becoming progressively marginalized."
Tags: attention culture trend internet
"We must engage strenuously with the future, thinking through the dark side of each opportunity, and working to maximize the good that we create while minimizing the harm."
Tags: internet future business culture
Barbie? Who's Barbie? Young girls are playing electronic house with The Sims, and the game lets them tell their own stories.
Tags: videogames gender culture youth trend nytimes
Faith = Illness. Why I've had it with religious tolerance.
Doug Rushkoff takes religious believers to task.
Tags: religion culture history
"When it comes to jobs, let your blog be your screener. If you run into potential employers similiar to those Kristine had to deal with, then screw ‘em, there are better places out there that’ll have more respect for you."
Tags: blogs jobs trend culture identity
"But at the end of the day Google is still a modern answer to a postmodern question: it is a massive, centralized hub enlisted to parse and catalog the universe of human endeavor."
Tags: interviews technology culture
The homepage of Natalie Jeremijenko.
Tags: design culture education
Laura Fields and the Page Three Sutra
Looking at the convergence of advertising and news on Page Three of the New York Times.
Tags: design advertising culture nytimes
"Author and design critic Rick Poynor takes a hard look at his own profession and finds that, despite living in an age when everyone's a critic, real criticism is almost impossible to find."
Tags: criticism design culture art
The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who Are Redefining Adulthood
Tags: culture parents demographics nyc
The Marketplace of Perceptions
"Behavioral economics explains why we procrastinate, buy, borrow, and grab chocolate on the spur of the moment."
Tags: behavior finance economics marketing culture psychology
Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?
"Social technologies succeed when they fit into the social lives and practices of those who engage with the technology."
Tags: socialsoftware myspace culture youth socialnetworking friendster community
Character is the new dominant trend in design
"And character is what we want from design right now. In our spoilt, saturated consumer culture, we have become bored by the sleek, over-styled interiors we see in television makeover programmes and car commercials."
Tags: design furniture culture personalization
Future Perfect: Micro Breaks, Macro Breaks
"If you design mobile devices, applications or services you should be interested in micro and macro breaks - as a commonly carried mobile essential there is a fair chance that the mobile phone will be used during that break."
What It Means To Be An Intellectual
"What is "this drive"? It's the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them."
Tags: thinking culture politics
Academic turns city into a social experiment
A different kind of politician: "Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change."
Tags: change culture politics creativity education southamerica
Wi-fi set to re-wire social rules
"With more people now using broadband rather than dial-up and online shopping soaring during the weeks before Christmas, there is no doubt that Britons are big fans of the net."
Tags: wifi culture technology mobile
Will Wright: "In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers' mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they'll treat the world as a place for creation . ."
Tags: videogames education culture youth
"An average day at NYC indie record store Other Music. Produced by Human Giant for the 2006 PLUG Awards." Starring Aziz Ansari.
Tags: funny video music culture
"The point is that we need to be very careful in the way we interpret statistics purporting to show that one kind of dog, or one kind of drug, or one kind of anything, is more dangerous than other things in its class."
Tags: culture research statistics
"Unlike churches, people in airports aren’t much invested in helping with your problems. There’s not much comfort to be found here. And I guess that’s where Pretzel Time comes in."
Tags: culture religion airports
Marketing in Accelerated Culture
"If marketing is to lead culture, marketers must create brands that stand for more than product attributes or heritage in the category."
Tags: marketing planning culture
"Blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf."
Google and the Tyranny of Good Design
"You don’t see the work of sign writers any more; it’s hard to find handmade signs and ramshackle window displays. The urban environment is now over-designed. It's all too branded, too inhuman."
Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace
Danah Boyd's excellent look at MySpace and it's impact on youth culture.
Tags: youth culture myspace identity socialsoftware research
On athletes: We believe "that players need supportive environments in order to flourish. It would be nice if we were as generous and as patient with the rest of society's underachievers."
Tags: interviews sports culture writing
He of Tipping Point and Blink fame has finally entered the blogosphere.
Tags: blogs books culture marketing
"The democratization of content creation will not democratize value creation. Only a small handful of people has the gift of original insight and original ideas. All the rest is echo and noise."
Tags: internet blogs culture media2.0 web2.0
How can the design of digital surfaces help engender trust?
"In other words, when we're presenting interfaces of tracks or radio programmes or books that people have a relationship with, how do we represent those relationships and patterns of usage at the surface layer?"
Tags: design communication culture ux usability
Bottled Water: Nectar of the Frauds?
"For a fraction of [the $100 billion spent yearly on bottled water], everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation, the Washington, D.C.-based organization said this week."
Tags: water culture health environment
Study Probes the Mystery of Hit Songs
"Popular songs became more popular and unpopular songs became less popular when individuals influenced one another."
The Rise of the Participatory Panopticon
"Digital devices and network connections can allow individuals to bypass chains of command and control."
Tags: culture mobile technology photography privacy surveillance identity
Everything Counts (in large amounts)
In this essay we will look at some of the ways that ideas about architecture are affected by electronic communication and the culture that surrounds it.
Tags: architecture design attention technology media culture art
Thinking about the Stanford marshmellow experiment, which showed that "Delayed gratification seemes to play a significant part in success," and considering what that means for entrepreneurship.
Tags: entrepreneur culture business
"The report's major conclusion is that the heaviest e-mail users are more likely to also meet with friends and acquaintances in person--or talk to them on the telephone--than are those who don't use e-mail as often."
Tags: research email interaction relationships culture internet
A deep look into the psychological effects of the reality television process on its stars.
Tags: television celebrity culture marketing psychology bestarticlesof2006
"When a mobile phone is primarily used as a phone book to facilitate kiosk phone calls, how does this change the way the product should be designed?"
Steven Johnson explains why too many books -- and not enough gaming -- rots your brain.
Tags: media books videogames culture
"Instead of auguring a new day for SNL, maybe it points up what's missing in mainstream rapâ€â€an awareness that it's OK to be goofy. Who needs Biz Markie and Tone-Loc?"
Tags: hiphop funny music nyc video viral television culture
"A Hype Cycle is a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies."
Tags: trend technology culture research
An interview with Rex Sorgatz of fimoculous -- king of all lists
"First off, we live in a culture where events fly by so fast that history never has time to establish itself. (VH1's "Best Week Ever" is the personification of this -- a week is as far back as we can see)."
Tags: lists interviews culture media
Blog from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Eye Level will be dedicated to American art and the ways in which the nation’s art reflects its history and culture."
Tags: art blogs museums culture history
Generation Y: They've arrived at work with a new attitude
""They've grown up questioning their parents, and now they're questioning their employers. They don't know how to shut up, which is great, but that's aggravating to the 50-year-old manager"
Tags: youth research business generationy culture posted
We assembled some of the smartest people we know to identify the trends that are most likely to affect our future. What we got was a fascinating discussion about religion, technology and politics and why no one's golf scores seem to be getting any better.
Tags: future internet technology culture posted interviews
"While blogging can be about playing on a world stage to influence . . . there are millions of people who are happily publishing daily without those motivations. For them, it's more about expression, self-reflection, and communication."
Tags: blogs culture podcasting posted
BugMeNot requires registration for any "employee, partner, affiliate or legal representative of any site which enforces compulsory user registration" with some great questions.
Tags: funny culture productivity posted
The modern rules of advertising?
"He has drawn up a list of seemingly unwritten rules which, he concludes, might as well be the Advertising Bible."
Tags: funny advertising culture stereotypes lists posted
"Six Degrees of Separation"€� Theory Explained in New Algorithm
"It is remarkably efficient at finding the short paths between nodes without knowing the central network’s structure, say the researchers"
Tags: networking science mathematics culture posted
"Six Degrees of Separation" Theory Explained in New Algorithm
"It is remarkably efficient at finding the short paths between nodes without knowing the central network’s structure, say the researchers"
Tags: networking science mathematics culture posted
"What those who are afraid of civil society breaking down don't realize is that civil society has already broken down!"
Tags: politics culture race posted
Some incredibly honest statements about what it means to be poor. A humbling read.
The cumulative genius of Overheard in New York.
Tags: funny culture blogs nyc posted
"On a landscape that seems to be transforming itself with every new technology, marketing tactic, or investment strategy, businesses rush to embrace change by trading in their competencies or shifting their focus, altogether."
Tags: books culture media business innovation posted
Physics of Passion: The Koolaid Point
Creating Passionate Users: "Forget the tipping point--if you want to measure passion, look for the koolaid point."
Tags: passion business marketing posted culture
Why do Americans love it so much?
Tags: food culture posted health
Types of Stories My Mother Tells
As it begins, you’re pretty sure you’ve heard this one before. Wait, no, maybe this time it’s different. Maybe this time it’ll have an extra nugget of sage advice. Maybe? A catalog of favorite themes.
Tags: funny culture parents posted
"How do you turn a middle-aged, bookish writer who loathes computer games and violence into a gun-toting, head-stamping street punk? Simple - deliver a stack of the latest consoles to his front door."
Tags: videogames culture posted
How Craigslist Has Changed New York
“Erotic servicesâ€? providers, reality-TV casting agents, Eames loversâ€â€all have plenty of reasons to celebrate the site’s fifth anniversary.
Tags: culture nyc craigslist community posted
"Ah, the summer rooftop party, one of the delights of New York socializing, whether the setting is a Fifth Avenue terrace with manicured topiary or a sprawl of tar in Chelsea miraculously transformed by a Weber grill . . . into an egalitarian penthouse".
Tags: nyc culture fashion posted nytimes
"I’m so Goth, I carry black food dye around in case I have to eat anything that's not black."
Tags: funny culture lists posted
Rides From the Amusement Park of My Collective Memory.
McSweeney's: "Custody Battle"
Tags: funny lists culture posted
"Much of the "canned laughter" used on the soundtracks of sitcoms is said to have come from tapes that were originally recorded during broadcasts of "The Red Skelton Show""
Tags: strange culture history television posted
You're emotional. Deal with it.
"People don't choose rationally to listen to your message and then have a feeling about it. They choose to listen to your message because they have a feeling about it."
Tags: brain emotions culture gender marketing passion posted
On Moleskines: "Even if you're carrying it to another boring staff meeting to take notes about sales projections, the notebook makes for a fantastic emblem of creative possibility."
Tags: nytimes notebooks creativity culture writing posted
A look at the different ways people in London, Paris and Madrid use their mobile phones.
Tags: mobile communication europe london madrid paris research culture posted
Can woman live on Mickey D’s alone?
Tags: culture food health interviews movies posted mcdonalds
Google vs. Yahoo: Clash of cultures
On the walls of Yahoo's modest Silicon Valley offices there are posters with sketches of oddball inventions that have landed patents, such as a portable bird cage. The point: If a bird cage can get a patent, Yahoo's employees can come up with something bi
Tags: google yahoo innovation culture internet posted
The DOJ has wisely made the world safer by forcing anyone even remotely connected with publishing erotic images online to keep elaborate files on the true identities of everyone in said images for seven years.
Tags: culture law politics privacy pornography posted
Cityofsound on London's private public spaces
Tags: london culture economics city posted
Big Ben is back, badder than ever
"As racist as it really is, the fact that white people can walk around the Palace in fake black Afro wigs without black folks taking offense is a testament to the power of racial "go beyond" that he has single-handedly generated."
Tags: sports race culture posted
Playing Dumb with Videogame Clerks
"We sent our spy, posing as a clueless girlfriend shopping for her gamer beau, on a quest for flimflam advice at four major game retailers."
Tags: funny videogames culture posted
NYTimes: "To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it."
Tags: culture movies nytimes posted
"A pop star salutes skillful shoppers, and the act of buying becomes a commodity itself."
Tags: consumerism japan music culture posted nytimes
The Mystery of the Duane Reade Drugstores
The aisles are an obstacle course, the staff moves at glacial speed, and the prices aren’t even that low. So how did it become the only place you’d ever think to go for your tube of Aquafresh?
Tags: nyc culture realestate pharmacy posted
All Consuming: An Interview with Rob Walker
Rob Walker examines consumer behavior in his weekly column, "CONSUMED," for The New York Times Magazine. While demurring at the label "design critic" . . .
Tags: culture design interviews consumerism posted
"Welcome to oldmencrying.com, a site dedicated to the lachrymal performances of the elderly. "
Tags: culture gender emotions posted strange
My short, scary career as a sperm donor
Tags: culture science sex posted
Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New
The New York Times examines the class divide on Nantucket
Tags: money culture posted realestate
From the very first moment we suit up for gym, our physical abilities can influence who we become or reveal who we were meant to be: blooming star athlete or total band nerd.
Tags: funny sports culture youth posted
Jonah Peretti, Director of R&D at Eyebeam
"Hipster designers and viral marketing firms almost always fail when they try to recreate the magic of these serendipitous projects."
Tags: interviews culture art viral marketing posted
How technology has transformed the sound of music.
Tags: culture music history dj technology remix posted
So you wanna be a hipster . . .
Six requirements (of which you must meet five) to be a hipster
Tags: funny nyc culture fashion posted
Loosing Google's Lock on the Past
"But if misery loves company, then there is solace in knowing that many people bristle at the mere thought of being Googled because of the photographs, news clippings or blog entries that they feel do not reflect who they really are."
Tags: google identity blogs posted nytimes culture
"If you control what is acceptable to say, to print, to show, you control the ability of people to form opinion, especially dissenting opinion."
Tags: mcluhan postmodernism media language posted culture
Reggaeton, grime, baile funk, and the globalization of hip-hop.
Tags: hiphop music culture posted
Wired: "By focusing the book on setting up that straw man and knocking it down, Johnson largely misses the point of the more valid critique of today's pop culture."
Tags: videogames reviews books culture posted
The bar mitzvah's history holds a clue to saving the modern-day ritual.
Flash Mobs: an experiment in social networking
Who'd have thought a single email designed to mock New York scenesters would have turned into an international craze?
Tags: posted interviews culture nyc
Guardian: "It's an ageless, unisex, all-weather basic. With a hoodie, there's no need to carry a jacket or an umbrella. It's all there, on your back."
Tags: fashion culture youth posted
There's real money to be made selling unreal stuff, such as digital weapons and land, to online gamers. It's a controversial market.
Tags: videogames money culture posted
Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up?
Tags: books reviews videogames culture education thinking posted media
Where Do Mob Nicknames Come From?
The origins of "Tony the Ant," "Big Tuna," and "Joey the Clown."
Tags: culture crime funny posted
British men are almost twice as likely to use their mobile phones for talking compared with women, who prefer to text, according to research on Wednesday.
Tags: mobile gender culture communication posted research
Mitch Hedberg was supposed to be the next Seinfeld
Tags: comedy death television culture posted
One law rules dedicated followers of fashion
New Scientist: "The magnetic model predicts that when people have a strong tendency to imitate others, shifts in behaviour will be faster, and there may even be discontinuous jumps, with many people adopting cellphones virtually overnight."
Tags: trend science culture behavior posted
They're known as firework careers: bands whose popularity rockets, flares - and dies all too quickly. Dorian Lynskey reports on a worrying trend and looks at what a new band can expect
Tags: music culture trend posted bestarticlesof2005
A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American life
Tags: research internet culture technology
The great American beer crisis.
Tags: food alcohol beer business culture posted
Plasticbag.org: "The weblog becomes and extension of yourself. A suit you wear, if you will. It's like you're controlling a whole prosthetic version of yourself."
Tags: blogs postmodernism culture technology mcluhan posted
John Taylor Gatto: "Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:"
Tags: culture education politics posted
zengestrom.com: "The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object."
Tags: culture socialnetworking socialsoftware posted
Learning to eat everything.
Tags: culture food howto posted
We Want Your Retro, Hard-to-Find Shoe Styles, The Fanatics Said. So the Companies Ran With It.
Tags: shoes fashion culture posted
You are what's on your playlist
Experts say digital music library reflects listener's personality
Tags: music culture personality playlists posted
New Republic: "Practice may not make perfect, but it enables an experienced person to arrive at conclusions more quickly than a neophyte. The expert's snap judgment is the result of a deliberative process made unconscious through habituation."
Tags: books culture thinking posted
What do we know about tipping?
10 interesting facts about tipping
Tags: culture economics food lists posted
Gender Differences in Spoken and Written Communication
"One study that she references found that reviewers could guess the gender of the author of a paper with 75% accuracy."
Tags: culture im communication language gender posted
MSNBC: "Your Vulfix Shaving Brush should be allowed to air dry in a "Bristles Down-ward" position after use. Doing so will assure long brush life and proper bristle shape retention. Never enclose your brush in a sealed container while still damp."
Tags: culture fashion health howto lifehacks shaving posted
Paper Spends More Time With Its Family
Design Observer: "Just as photography freed painting to do what it did bestâ€â€be paint on canvas rather than a "window on the world"â€â€so computers are freeing paper to be white stuff with marks on it. Paper is getting to "spend more time with its family"
Tags: design media culture paper posted
On the Internet, 2nd (and 3rd and . . . ) Opinions
NYTimes: "Not all lists are so much fun. There are plenty of boring lists on the Web. Everyday, Web contests list their winners. Every blog has a running tab of favorite Web sites. Many of them take a good part of a minute to scroll through."
Tags: culture internet nytimes blogs posted lists
Index: "Legendary musician, producer, and artist Brian Eno would much rather talk about urbanism, new computer applications, or emergence theory than something as pedestrian as EQ levels or his own brilliant musical history."
Tags: music culture design city interviews posted
It's Not Graffiti, It's Grafedia
Wired: "Geraci wants grafedia to make people think about the idea that the boundaries of the web are totally arbitrary. If you can put links in different places, he said, you're essentially extending the internet."
Tags: streetart linking culture posted internet
Apple Becomes a "They" Company
A VC: " "We" companies are built by and for a community of users. "They" companies are traditional companies that seek to optimize profitability at the expense of everything else."
Tags: apple business culture posted
A Guide to Ethnic Fried Doughs Around the World
Most likely everything you ever wanted to know about fried dough
One of us is smarter than all of us
"The wisdom of crowds comes not from the consensus decision of the group, but from the aggregation of the ideas/thoughts/decisions of each individual in the group."
The global home for grassroots media
Tags: culture journalism media opensource posted
I remember seeing these Japanese greasers eight years ago when I was in Japan, I am always trying to describe them
New York Times article on sneaker culture
Tags: culture sneakers nytimes art posted
No Need to Stew: A Few Tips to Cope With Life's Annoyances
The things people do when they're annoyed
Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and emotion.
Tags: brain creativity culture business posted
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The famous essay by Walter Benjamin
Tags: writing culture technology posted
Cameraphones as Personal Storytelling Media
The cameraphone exists at this moment in that ephemeral, potent and confusing phase of its adoption cycle where people are still deciding what kind of social medium it is.
Tags: conference posted mobile culture
Art and culture are open to interpretation. Why must we give them fixed identities?
Tags: art culture branding design posted
Think tank: Cultural diversity breeds creativity
Our cities can profit from the creativity that cultural diversity brings
Tags: creativity culture posted city
Nerve.com interview with Malcolm Gladwell about Blink
Cultural divide in IM: presence vs. communication
There's a divide between different kinds of IM users, one is constantly online and the other shows up to talk
Tags: culture im posted conference
Between Truth and Lies, An Unprintable Ubiquity
What's really going on with bullshit?
SMS Text Messaging and Youth Culture
Thoughts on the importance of text messaging in youth culture
Tags: youth culture conference posted
Technology increases the ability of people to share, but will they share more than just technology?
Tags: culture economics opensource posted
Does Your iPod Play Favorites?
Life may indeed be random, and the iPod probably is, too. But we humans will always provide our own narratives and patterns to bring chaos under control. The fault, if there is any, lies not in shuffle but in ourselves.
Tags: apple music culture ipod
For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They're Good at It
Former science editor for the Times talks about the stigma still attached to women being good at math and science
The iPod is a revolutionary device that transforms listeners into "cyborgs" through a process he calls "technotranscendence."
Tags: apple music posted culture ipod
A generation lost in its personal space
New technology is bringing to light philosopher Martin Heidegger's observation that technology is the art of arranging the world so that we don't have to experience it.
Tags: mobile culture posted technology conference
Is it possible that technology, instead of liberating us, is holding us back?
Tags: culture technology
If you're too cool for school, you're probably not very smart. Some of us would rather build rockets than friendships.
Tags: culture
The long tail is everywhere around us and has the ability to really transform our world for the better
Are You With Him? Why Yes, Want to Date Him?
New York Times examines the wing-woman fad
Wikipedia entry for 'American Dream'
Tags: culture
Andrew Womack explains how being a hipster is not necessarily a bad thing, and shows how to determine if you are, in fact, really one of them
Tags: culture
FB vs. FWB . . . fascinating
Tags: culture
Tags: culture television
We are becoming digital pack rats
Tags: culture
Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall
Tags: culture
English spreads through the EU
Economist on the use of English
Cellphones are altering social behavior in ways that seem counterintuitve
Escape-a-date encourages lying
Mobiles and the appropriation of place
Tags: culture
Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Ride my pimp
For those that haven't seen 'Pimps Up, Hoes Down," SEE IT
Tags: culture