Interesting Stuff
May. 18th, 2008 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
semiotic_pirateThe following is a series of semi-connected bits and pieces found while rooting through my links list. Some are articles or posts in their entirety, others are just links to follow to an article/post. Enjoy... and please reply with any comments, questions, jokes, etc. I like hearing people's opinions, even when I argue them to death when I disagree with their viewpoints. *wink*
Found this posted a while back on Stay Free - and it makes me more optimistic about the coming yes/no employment decision:
Introducing the new American worker
Newsflash: kids today are self-absorbed, lazy little pricks. That's what we learned on this recent 60 Minutes episode. There have been a number of news articles on this topic: how twentysomething "millennials" raised on a diet of warm fuzzies and relentless self-esteem building are a disaster in the workplace, needing constant praise and attention. 60 Minutes focuses on how U.S-based corporations are coping by reframing old-school Successories-style motivation with new gimmicks like "wacky" in-office parades, award certificates, and free handjobs.
A Wall Street Journal columnist blames twentysomething narcissism on Mr. Rogers (unfair!), Boomer-style permissive parenting (getting warmer), and the gospel of self-esteem (warmer still). What the press reports seem to miss, however, is the fact that this is the first generation of children raised in an environment of unabashed marketing. In 1980, corporate lobbying managed to get Congress to abolish the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate advertising to kids. With no watchdog in sight, an entire industry developed to market directly to kids. Full-length commercials began masquerading as TV cartoons. Channel One launched its in-school advertising "news" network. And junk food marketing skyrocketed. The most common message of marketing to tweens and teens is this: your parents are idiots, your teachers are dull, you're so much cooler than everyone else. But we understand you and know what you want. Product!
What may be bad news for the pampered white kids featured in the segment, though, should be good news for America's immigrants. Based on this segment, I'd say immigrants who've brought over a strong work ethic will have a great shot at out-achieving the coddled elites, once employers stop instinctively hiring rich whites. Let's hear it for class war!
--------------------------
This privileged attitude is something I've -unfortunately- seen first hand in a couple of my siblings... One whom I had a long, pointed conversation with this past weekend. This is also something I have observed in many of the high school students I've encountered in the schools I've been substituting in this past school year. *shudder*
--------------------------
More on marketing toward children (since age 0 even):
Buy Buy Baby (the book, not the store)
Just finished Susan Gregory Thomas's book Buy Buy Baby and thought I'd take the opportunity to recommend it highly. Though I like to think of myself as well-read when it comes to kids and consumer culture, I found the book illuminating and engaging, with a journalist's sense of balance... in the end, though, it all comes down to choice anecdotes, and Thomas delivers with plenty of scary examples of the depths that marketers go to in order to brainwash the infant set.
A couple of personal favorites:
1. The Gepetto Group, a marketing firm that target kids from age 0, hosts an annual scavenger hunt at Walt Disney World. This isn't your typical party game, though—the "items" being hunted are kids. Participants—budding marketing pros—spend the day observing toddlers and their moms as an exercise in "kid immersion."
Though some participants feel uncomfortable with the exercise at first, they come to see it as harmless, even beneficial. Rachel Geller, chief strategic officer of the Gepetto Group, reassured participants in the 2005 scavenger hunt by stating, " It's good for kids to learn how to manipulate (people)—that's how you get ahead in this world."
2. WonderGroup, a kid-targeting firm, created the "Millennium Mom Segmentation Model" to rank moms by permissiveness. According to the model about 40 percent of moms are one of three groups of "permissives;" the other 60 percent are divided into three "restrictive" segments. The R3S segment, for example, has a "low response to kid requests," is the "most educated" group and has a "family focus." At a talk.... President of WonderGroup described the R3S mom as "the evil twin sister of P3... and, dare I say...a bitch?"
Not that Thomas allows all the blame to fall squarely on the shoulders of the marketers. Much of the book focuses on baby television and on the self-centered logic of gen x moms who have embraced it. Far from representing an enlightened elite, educated and affluent moms are some of the biggest chumps of all. As Thomas points out, a common marketing strategy is to first target this "class" group so that the product trickles down to the "mass" group with an educational halo. This, basically, is what happened with Baby Einstein and its ilk—a potentially harmful class of goods that parents have uncritically embraced.
--------------------------
A new economics website I found had a great article describing what is now being termed as the "oil bubble" by us economists.
--------------------------
More on "bubble theory" here in the Wall Street Journal. Great article about the how they form and why they are sustained.
--------------------------
A post - found on Marginal Revolution, has this great book review covering globalized social networking:
Network Power
Tyler Cowen
Indeed, while this convergence in ways of thinking and living may extend to influence cultural forms like music or food, it need not necessarily do so. It is striking that in this moment of global integration producing massive convergence in economic, linguistic, and institutional standards, we should be so worried about restaurant chains and pop music, neglecting much more significant issues. Famously, Sigmund Freud argued that nationalist rivalries between neighboring countries reflected the "narcissism of minor differences," a pathological focus on relatively trivial distinctions driven by the desire to keep at bay an anxiety-provoking recognition of fundamental sameness.
That is from David Singh Grewal's Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, one of the most interesting books on cultural globalization in recent years. He uses the ideas of social networks and peer effects to argue that widespread cultural convergence is occurring, most of all in ways of life. Here is the book's home page.
There is much wrong in the central thesis. "Ways of thinking" may be less diverse across countries (France is more like Germany than it used to be) but ways of thinking are now much more diverse within countries and in fact within the world as a whole. What's so special about having diversity distributed according to geographic or political criteria? Once you get over the geography fetish, many of the author's main mechanisms don't hold up as accounts of growing sameness of ways of life and thinking. Has the author spent much time poking around Second Life?
Nor is he capable of simply coming out and saying that lots of countries in the world *ought* to be doing more to emulate Anglo-American ways of thinking.
The following claim is also questionable:
To reshape or reduce the power that the social structures we create have over us, we can only summon the organized power of politics. The large-scale voluntarism of sociability, by contrast, has always delivered the most varied and elaborate forms of individual subjugation.
Cranky Tyler is about to come out of his shell, so maybe it is time to end this post. It's still a book worth reading and thinking about.
---------------------
Finally, an interesting term describing top-heavy home loans:
jingle mail n. The practice of abandoning one's house and mailing the keys back to the creditor because the mortgage is worth more than the house itself.
—jingle mailer n.
Example Citation:
Making it harder for people to discharge their credit-card debts has other drawbacks as well. Homeowners would once do almost anything to keep up payments on their homes, even if it meant falling behind on other debts. In the past year, though, economists have reported an increase in the number of people who are just walking away from their homes, because it's now often easier to abandon a mortgage than a credit-card bill. (The practice has even been given a name — "jingle mail," because people simply send their keys back in an envelope.)
—James Surowiecki, "Going for Broke," The New Yorker, April 7, 2008
Found this posted a while back on Stay Free - and it makes me more optimistic about the coming yes/no employment decision:
Introducing the new American worker
Newsflash: kids today are self-absorbed, lazy little pricks. That's what we learned on this recent 60 Minutes episode. There have been a number of news articles on this topic: how twentysomething "millennials" raised on a diet of warm fuzzies and relentless self-esteem building are a disaster in the workplace, needing constant praise and attention. 60 Minutes focuses on how U.S-based corporations are coping by reframing old-school Successories-style motivation with new gimmicks like "wacky" in-office parades, award certificates, and free handjobs.
A Wall Street Journal columnist blames twentysomething narcissism on Mr. Rogers (unfair!), Boomer-style permissive parenting (getting warmer), and the gospel of self-esteem (warmer still). What the press reports seem to miss, however, is the fact that this is the first generation of children raised in an environment of unabashed marketing. In 1980, corporate lobbying managed to get Congress to abolish the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate advertising to kids. With no watchdog in sight, an entire industry developed to market directly to kids. Full-length commercials began masquerading as TV cartoons. Channel One launched its in-school advertising "news" network. And junk food marketing skyrocketed. The most common message of marketing to tweens and teens is this: your parents are idiots, your teachers are dull, you're so much cooler than everyone else. But we understand you and know what you want. Product!
What may be bad news for the pampered white kids featured in the segment, though, should be good news for America's immigrants. Based on this segment, I'd say immigrants who've brought over a strong work ethic will have a great shot at out-achieving the coddled elites, once employers stop instinctively hiring rich whites. Let's hear it for class war!
--------------------------
This privileged attitude is something I've -unfortunately- seen first hand in a couple of my siblings... One whom I had a long, pointed conversation with this past weekend. This is also something I have observed in many of the high school students I've encountered in the schools I've been substituting in this past school year. *shudder*
--------------------------
More on marketing toward children (since age 0 even):
Buy Buy Baby (the book, not the store)
Just finished Susan Gregory Thomas's book Buy Buy Baby and thought I'd take the opportunity to recommend it highly. Though I like to think of myself as well-read when it comes to kids and consumer culture, I found the book illuminating and engaging, with a journalist's sense of balance... in the end, though, it all comes down to choice anecdotes, and Thomas delivers with plenty of scary examples of the depths that marketers go to in order to brainwash the infant set.
A couple of personal favorites:
1. The Gepetto Group, a marketing firm that target kids from age 0, hosts an annual scavenger hunt at Walt Disney World. This isn't your typical party game, though—the "items" being hunted are kids. Participants—budding marketing pros—spend the day observing toddlers and their moms as an exercise in "kid immersion."
Though some participants feel uncomfortable with the exercise at first, they come to see it as harmless, even beneficial. Rachel Geller, chief strategic officer of the Gepetto Group, reassured participants in the 2005 scavenger hunt by stating, " It's good for kids to learn how to manipulate (people)—that's how you get ahead in this world."
2. WonderGroup, a kid-targeting firm, created the "Millennium Mom Segmentation Model" to rank moms by permissiveness. According to the model about 40 percent of moms are one of three groups of "permissives;" the other 60 percent are divided into three "restrictive" segments. The R3S segment, for example, has a "low response to kid requests," is the "most educated" group and has a "family focus." At a talk.... President of WonderGroup described the R3S mom as "the evil twin sister of P3... and, dare I say...a bitch?"
Not that Thomas allows all the blame to fall squarely on the shoulders of the marketers. Much of the book focuses on baby television and on the self-centered logic of gen x moms who have embraced it. Far from representing an enlightened elite, educated and affluent moms are some of the biggest chumps of all. As Thomas points out, a common marketing strategy is to first target this "class" group so that the product trickles down to the "mass" group with an educational halo. This, basically, is what happened with Baby Einstein and its ilk—a potentially harmful class of goods that parents have uncritically embraced.
--------------------------
A new economics website I found had a great article describing what is now being termed as the "oil bubble" by us economists.
--------------------------
More on "bubble theory" here in the Wall Street Journal. Great article about the how they form and why they are sustained.
--------------------------
A post - found on Marginal Revolution, has this great book review covering globalized social networking:
Network Power
Tyler Cowen
That is from David Singh Grewal's Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, one of the most interesting books on cultural globalization in recent years. He uses the ideas of social networks and peer effects to argue that widespread cultural convergence is occurring, most of all in ways of life. Here is the book's home page.
There is much wrong in the central thesis. "Ways of thinking" may be less diverse across countries (France is more like Germany than it used to be) but ways of thinking are now much more diverse within countries and in fact within the world as a whole. What's so special about having diversity distributed according to geographic or political criteria? Once you get over the geography fetish, many of the author's main mechanisms don't hold up as accounts of growing sameness of ways of life and thinking. Has the author spent much time poking around Second Life?
Nor is he capable of simply coming out and saying that lots of countries in the world *ought* to be doing more to emulate Anglo-American ways of thinking.
The following claim is also questionable:
Cranky Tyler is about to come out of his shell, so maybe it is time to end this post. It's still a book worth reading and thinking about.
---------------------
Finally, an interesting term describing top-heavy home loans:
jingle mail n. The practice of abandoning one's house and mailing the keys back to the creditor because the mortgage is worth more than the house itself.
—jingle mailer n.
Example Citation:
Making it harder for people to discharge their credit-card debts has other drawbacks as well. Homeowners would once do almost anything to keep up payments on their homes, even if it meant falling behind on other debts. In the past year, though, economists have reported an increase in the number of people who are just walking away from their homes, because it's now often easier to abandon a mortgage than a credit-card bill. (The practice has even been given a name — "jingle mail," because people simply send their keys back in an envelope.)
—James Surowiecki, "Going for Broke," The New Yorker, April 7, 2008
