{"id":2440,"date":"2023-10-12T15:39:10","date_gmt":"2023-10-12T15:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/?p=2440"},"modified":"2023-12-06T14:15:21","modified_gmt":"2023-12-06T14:15:21","slug":"cultures-intro-are-we-seeing-anything-different-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/cultures-intro-are-we-seeing-anything-different-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultures Intro: Are we seeing anything different here?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(image credit<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you want to be a rock star.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Shirtless
(credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

You’ve got the haircut, the tattoos, the requisite willingness to lick instruments in public… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Yes, and you’ve got a band and you try real hard<\/a>) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what does it take to make it, really?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conventional wisdom is that you should be enormously talented and work really hard. But there’s a study which suggests that this may be… well, mostly wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It created an artificial music market in which 14,341 people listened to clips of (real!) obscure bands and chose one to download <\/span>. What it found is that when they could see past participants’ choices (i.e., how many times songs had already been downloaded) this started distorting their choices – quite heavily. The bands that were lucky enough to get a few early downloads started accumulating more and more of them, and the bands that were unlucky with their first few listeners withered. This effect was so strong that it almost completely overwhelmed the ‘objective’ preferences shown by participants who couldn’t see each other’s activity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much so? Well, the absolute best songs rarely did poorly, and the very worst rarely did well, but outside of those extremes it seemed to be mostly luck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how do you succeed? Don’t be terrible, try to be brilliant, and mostly just get lucky with early adopters.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Woman
We think she has what it takes (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

But that’s probably just a lot of teenagers all following each other. People get smarter and more sophisticated by the time they get to university. This is why, when we look out at the classes we teach what we see is… erm. To be fair, usually just a lot of people all dressed in the same clothes: jeans, t-shirts, sweatshirts, slacks, running shoes, rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"two
Do an image search for “students”, grab the first applicable result, and wouldn’t you know, they’re wearing all that same stuff too (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

There is a conventional wisdom on this too. It says (rather unkindly!) that while all those students imagine that they have their own unique, and carefully considered styles, expressing their own unique identities, are all wearing basically the same clothes because they are… well…<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Most
“baa” (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Is that rude to call them sheep? It probably is, isn’t it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sorry students!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But don’t worry, there is an alternate theory here too. One based on the genius of markets:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students all enter a free, competitive, and wide-open market, with an unfettered ability to buy whatever clothes they liked, so if they are all choosing the same things, it must be because they are looking for similar core benefits (maybe comfort, attractiveness, and practicality for urban living), and after much searching (people do spend a lot of time on which clothes to wear), they all converged on the same optimal answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeans and t-shirts are clearly the most beautiful, comfortable, and practical clothing available. And given how much time, money, and energy has already been invested into innovating clothes options, it seems safe to imagine that if nothing better is known now, then it seems unlikely that anything else ever will. Logically, then, we conclude that jeans are the crowning pinnacle of human achievement, the peak discovery of our civilization to date#up.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
#down. Which tidily resolves all debate over the origins of civilizational greatness: The answer is 16th century French shepherds<\/a> from near the town of Nimes ( the word \"denim\" is a corruption of \"serge de Nimes\")<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
\n
\"Photo
Guy who can afford nice clothes but who chooses not to wear the (consensus) best clothing ever invented. Right? (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Perhaps this strikes you as a little unlikely (we admit to being sceptical too). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe it is option 1, then after all (baa).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or maybe we need to develop our understanding a little further: so far this book has only talked about people as atomized individuals, each with their own memory, goals, needs, perceptions, and identities. <\/p>\n\n\n
\n
\"Black
An individual with his own memory, goals, needs, perceptions, and identity (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
And that is fine, so far as it goes, because we do have all those things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But is this just more lies to children? Are we also something more? Part of something bigger, that is all around us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just maybe?<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
\"Zoomed
Oh look, there he is 
(the original<\/a> has an even bigger, wider view)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
If we are going to understand people, and their consumption then maybe (just maybe!) we are going to have to learn a little bit about how we react to the people around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is such a big topic we’ll split it into two chapters, but really it could be an entire book or ten. We’ll start in this chapter with some simpler (some would argue ‘simplistic’#up) ideas, that look at social influence through a functional lens – they are about how our social dynamics can help us operate<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
#down. But then some people are pretty darn argumentative, aren't they<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Our next chapter will look through more of a ‘conflict’ based lens, that takes notice of the ways that people don’t always get along and help each other – sometimes quite the opposite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(image credit) So you want to be a rock star. You’ve got the haircut, the tattoos, the requisite willingness to lick instruments in public… (Yes, and you’ve got a band and you try real hard) But what does it take to make it, really? The conventional wisdom is that you should be enormously talented and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"chapter":[18],"exclude_from_index":[15],"class_list":["post-2440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","chapter-6-cultures-consumers-in","exclude_from_index-exclude-from-index"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2440"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3214,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440\/revisions\/3214"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2440"},{"taxonomy":"chapter","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chapter?post=2440"},{"taxonomy":"exclude_from_index","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exclude_from_index?post=2440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}