furtherandfaster

The perils of consumption

 
Just off the to-read book stack this summer has been Pete Rollins excellent - How not to speak of God. There is a useful section at the end about consumption and the way it forces binary thinking. In a consumer society we are programmed rather like toddlers to put everything in our mouths. We consume everything. Or vomit it out. And what Rollins is suggesting is that we need to become much better at dealing with ambiguity. At allowing ourselves to entertain ideas that different people hold without needing to agree with them or to actively refute them. Dialogue doesn't mean agreeing that both points of view are correct. Or that we need to debate until only one point of view is left. On balance we absorb far too many unhealthy ideas because we don't oppose them strongly enough to avoid consuming them. But if we only have rejection as the alternative then we become pluralistic with a grab bag of ideas not consistent with one another. Which we have accepted on the grounds of tolerance.  So thought for the day - don't accept anything. Or reject it. Until you have reflected on it. Toddlers grow out of shoving everything in their mouths. And so should we.

Cloud 2 - cloud of knowing meet Tues 23rd

Took place in Brainjuicer's offices - and I have just posted my account of what we talked about on the webjam.  David Bausola talked about DGR research bots. Riva Elliot gathered feedback about new models of journalism advertising and publishing. And I got some feedback on what to focus on at the MRS conference next month when I have only 15 minutes to deliver the written paper of the Cloud of Knowing - content analytics as part of market research. Cloud is attracting some very bright minds indeed - I came away last night hugely energised - and even more so knowing that there were others who had hoped to make it who couldn't but will add their own lustre when they do!

Its a scary thing running an open source project - worrying about if there is enough to interest people and what constitutes success. Cloud is small and focussed - it won't hurt if it gets bigger but as it stands it is proving to be a very useful way to exchange ideas which are so far away from the mainstream of research that I don't know where else we could discuss them.

You can't always get what you want

Pouring semiskimmed milk at breakfast this morning I was reminded of a rather unusual brief I had to work on many many years ago for the Milk Marketing Board. Whose members were getting fed up with the cost of removing the butterfat from milk and then finding somewhere to dispose of it. When the nutritionists had labelled it BAD and didn't want it anywhere near the human ecosystem. The  brief was to reduce demand for semi skimmed milk.

I remember raising a quizzical eye to the senior planner for whom I worked and being told to shut up and get on with it. "Just because they're consumers doesn't mean they can have what they want". True but when it wasn't good for them either the double bind troubled me.  It was one of those absurd briefs that gets quietly dropped when someone suggests that if it ever got within sight of a daily newspaper that heads would roll. Quite.