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...courtesy of Adam who found it on moblog.
Apparently, it marks Cross Bones Graveyard , a graveyard on unconsecrated ground which goes back hundreds of years.
Go read the local history up. Fascinating.
So there we are: two themes in one posting. Cellotaphs AND things we don't notice because we're too busy watching for other folk...
Not by any means an expert on addiction. Glad I've never had to be, to be honest, and full of admiration for those of my friends and acquaintances who've worked with it in themselves or others.
But yesterday, during my NESTA discussion Mark told this beautiful anecdote which shows how important other people are in managing addictions.
Some years ago, he was working in a Family Theraphy context on addiction and learned that for all the willpower, support and other stuff a heavy drugs user might have, a really important indicator of whether the addict would stay clean or not was whether they had it in them to make new friends and see new places or whether they would simply return to the old circle of fellow users.
How much they shape us - all those around us. Thanks, Mark.
Found this lovely thing on Hampstead Heath t'other day, overlooking the ponds.
A bench inscribed "here's looking at you, George" and a fresh bunch of flowers (another cellotaph?).
Amazing how the absence of people affects us as much as the presence.
Not that I'm low or lovelorn or pining or anything. Quite the opposite.
But am much more aware nowadays of the presence or otherwise of others and my response to it.
Had a fantastic day at NESTA yesterday, met loads of really interesting people doing interesting things (with technology way beyond my ken) and had loads of interesting conversations (some of which will surface, I'm sure, in the next few weeks here). And a top evening out with my old friend Jay at a pub quiz that James is running in Islington (no, really).
But today...
Some interesting photos of these floral tributes to victims of traffic incidents coming in now John has been particularly prolific (see left) and - as ever - insightful in his thinking about what he found and what it means...more of that anon.
Do send more of these in. Will start to post them up in the next few days.
Off to talk to NESTA today about things HERD at a neat "open source" conference organised by Steve @ policyunplugged. Might see you there? Hope so.
Not one for the big stadium gig but last night was one of those gigs to make me rethink. The Killers at the revamped Wembley arena.
Lots of interesting stuff (top viewer-operated fountains), top performance from a band with a monosyllabic frontman but great choons. But most interesting of all was the audience and their interaction with each other - how the waves of euphoria swept around the room (helped of course by musical and ah-hem other stimulants), from one person to the next.
A lot of the body language (raised arms etc) clearly both an echo of ecstatic religious practices (it helps you approach trance like states by opening up your lungs more...) and by copying each other...
Enthusiasmos again: individuals "posessed by the deity" and losing their sense of self in a euphoric state...
(NB the shaven headed fella on the left of the picture behaved like a real holy roller...and after an initial scepticism we all joined in...)
We werent made to do this by the band (they created the environment); no, we chose to copy each other (and all the others we'd seen doing this kinda stuff before). Again and again.
Quite extraordinary. And made me think of what my chums who had made it down to the Millenium Stadium for the Carling Cup final would have gone through yesterday afternoon - be they Gooners or The Other Lot. Football seems to work the same way for the crowds anyway...
Neat, too to bump into Flood who co-produced the Sam's Town album. I like that he seemed just as excited as the rest of us even tho' he'd been partly at least responsible for shaping the sound at the heart of it all.
Too excited to sleep much after that...
Been troubled for a long time about the Insight word. Not so much troubled perhaps as repeatedly irritated - like having toothache that you can live with...
First, we assume that insight is to be found inside consumers: we search for them through consumer research. We also half hope that consumers will proffer up insights if we ask them nicely enough...or find the magic question or trick...
Second, we assume that insight is hard to find and is likely to be deep (like jewels). We go digging for them. We mine them. We have to use fancy tools: for example the super-eminent Harvard Prof Jerry Zaltman's view is that they are only to be uncovered by deep and profound probing of the unconscious mind (which clearly takes talent, expertise and a trademarked interviewing process)...which makes it all sound like a Doctor Who episode again (why does everythin do that? )
Third, we assume that insight can be simply be applied to transform marketing and communications efficacy ("now with added insight..."). Adam Morgan long ago highlight the fallacy of "if you're the kind of person who" insights as mere rhetorical devices...
Fourth, we assume that insight can be farmed on a mass scale...and that's what I worry about you, dear reader. I was pondering how many folk there are out there in planning and strategy land struggling to uncover an "insight". Thousands, i reckoned. I know that my ol chums at Ogilvy had a huge open plan space (like a call-centre, yes) for the insights and planning gang. It always made me thought of chicken farms, the Matrix's human pods and the like. Could there be that many 'insights' out there or are most of these poor folk trapped in insight-ette land...mass producing limp and flaccid versions of insight by day (and dreaming of profundity and visionary stuff by night)? Cruelly enslaved by the machine to satisfy its hunger for reconstituted and recovered "insight"-flavoured marketing slops (no, I know that's not what happens in the film...)
OK, so here's my take on insight.
1. It can be about anything not just the consumer so don't stop there. Honda UK's reinvention has been built around understanding the founder's original passion and belief system.
2. Insights aren't the answer - beliefs and having a point of view are more useful...(Apple is built on a point of view about what computing technologyis for NOT on an insight).
3. Insights are about seeing an opportunity that no-one else has. Reordering things in your brain. So doing some consumer research may help but its the thinking that counts (one of the old planning directors at BMP used to say that doing groups was a great way to get out of the office to think for a couple of weeks). The thinking....(but even then, remember the Tesco point - doing something is better than not...)
4. Insight-as-opportunity: you either embrace an opportunity or you don't. Telling your customers that you've thought about what they might like, you've even met a few of them only works for a bit (as a counter to "they're all robots". Do something don't just talk about it.
5. Close the insight farms now. You can't mass-produce this stuff and it's not right that you should try (let's talk about scalability in the business another day, Martin). These farms are cruel, inhumane and wasteful of our most precious (human) resources.
What say we raid planning departments and the like under the cover of night and let the suffering brain-chicks go free into the Soho night air to think other more interesting thoughts and do more interesting things.
Ok you don't like direct action. Maybe we could start a campaign to reveal the cruelty of much of the insight industry and what it is doing to our finest young people and that would force these shops to close
Who's in? Busy tomorrow with Russell and Richard but maybe Tuesday night?
M
Not really.
But a bit better than yesterday. Been reviewing the last post and don't think I really nailed what I was trying to say. So here's another shorter go:
i. most of the traditional talking cures can't put much of a case together for bringing about long-term change in the individual patient's happiness
ii. this is largely because of their conception of humanity as being a separate-independent type of species rather than one which is first, foremost (and just about everything else) a social one...
iii. also because they tend to assume that 'thinking' of some 'deeper' sort is what drives behaviour (so that's where they focus (similar errors dominate the thinking of the pharma obsessed psychiatrists...)
iv. when there is some evidence of superior efficacy (as there is with CBT) it is dismissed because it is "clearly" too superficial and too quick-fix...which just reveals the underlying assumptions about how this stuff works...
v. they bitch a lot at and with each other (if nothing else, Freud's ideas gave a lot of folk a lot of opportunity to quarrell with each other of precise definitions of abstract conjectures...)
Frankl's point is this: let's be sensible. Sometimes causes are deep and profound (and thus need deep and profound tools to unpack); mostly they are neither. So let's have a modicum of commonsense in psychotherapy and in other attempts to change behaviour like marketing, please. Mostly behaviour has superficial causes and corresponding superficial levers for change. Just because something's powerful doesn't make it deep...(insight department files F9 button here)
My additional point is: let's be pragmatic. The "I" view of things has helped to a certain degree to take us all this far but beyond that it's less than useful for the kind of behaviour we are now looking at - social media, networks, etc etc. "We" however seems much more likely to deliver the goods so let's spend some more time seeing where it can take us. I believe that the latter is not just likely to be more useful; I also happen to think it's a more accurate description of human behaviour. But that doesn't really matter right now: the key question is which is going to be more useful to us?
I don't think it's really much to do with me and the HERD but there seems to be both an ever increasing interest in I and We and the relationship between them. Particularly in that growth market of personal development, healing and (yipee!) psychotherapy.
On Tuesday Madeleine Bunting summoned up Oliver James and Richard Layard in her piece on "the politics of well-being" to point up how the social connections and relationships that used to hold us safer, as we wandered through life's byways are now undervalued and even somewhat stigmatised.
Yesterday, the family therapy movement struck back in the same newspaper: Peter Stratton pointed out that while the diagnoses was correct, being based on We, the prescription (the dreaded CBT) was largely I-based. Family therapy sees individuals as part of a co-created and dynamic family system and would prescribe much more a We-solution. Which is a good point, but only part way there...
Then again today, Darian Leader pops up to plug his book ("Why people get ill" tells you the angle) which looks again at the connection between the mind and sickly body. And in doing so, he too has a good go at the superficiality and (thus lack of real efficacy) of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (a competitive "I" methodology to Leader's preferred long and deep psychoanalytic stuff).
Wow.
Lots of heat, lots of passion but how much light is generated here, do you think? Apart from telling us something about psychotherapists. There's nothing like a psychotherapist cat fight to help you see how partial the truths of the whole lot of them are.
The answer - as my friend Tania pointed out over coffee today - lies somewhere between all of us. Because it is our lives with others - past, present, future, real and imagined - that shape and contextualise our individual behaviours. Trying to shape one separate from these influential others is unlikely to be successful. Trying to shape it by the individual's thinking and talking is also unlikely to bring about the kind of change we seek (because most behaviour is not thinking-driven and is always done in the real or imagined presence and context of others...)
No wonder the longer-deeper school of psychoanalysis struggles to demonstrate efficacy of their practice (and this is why they get sooooo angry at the CBTers or Landmark or Hoffman practitioners...who do have rather better evidence - not that either of the latter would stand up to a Cochrane Report, I suspect but don't know myself).
Anyway it reminds me that story of the great student of Freud and Adler, Viktor Frankl:
"A man is taken to a psychoanalyst because he suffers from headaches, congestion in the head, and ringing in the ears – and the analyst will undoubtedly find many deep, unconscious causes for these symptoms. On his way to the appointment, however, the man passes a clothing store and remembers that he needs a new shirt. He enters and asks for a certain brand.
“What size?” asks the sales clerk.
“Fifteen” is the answer.
“I’m sure you need at least a 16”
“Give me a 15 and not questions”
“OK, but don’t be surprised if you suffer from headaches, congestion in the head and ringing in the ears”
Sometimes the answer lies in that individual and sometimes that answer lies deep in that individual. But mostly it doesn't and by assuming that it does we're unlikely to solve the problem or change the behaviour as we would like to because we'll be too busy digging deep. More often than not, the issues lie either in the context that the individual finds themself in or in the way an individual habitually interacts with others...and this can be influenced both by tweaking rules of interaction, challenging habitual responses and laying down new habits (and that can only be done in the real world of Others.... Sometimes (but not as often as Big Pharma would have you believe) a drug can play a major role in shaping brain responses...but often this just covers up other problematic responses).
Happiness, hell, health and hysteria and everything in between is other people. Because that is the nature of human life. Now get on and enjoy the weekend.
B****** Gareth beat me to this 'how-they-did-they-do-it?' video collection for the latest Orange UK campaign, "Belong"
I like it but well, I would do, wouldn't I? It being based on a Herd idea.
Yup, I love it...almost as much as when I did in the meeting 3 years ago...
Ahead of my time, I guess...(sigh)
And also, clearly behind...
Ok. Today's bit of thinking due for a makeover is this word: audience. The folks who sit back and listen and appreciate the performance of the professionals. The folks we send our messages out to/at...
i. Adam Morgan long ago pointed out that it's foolish to assume our marketing audiences are actually listening (or even there for the show we've worked so hard to put on). We get little glimpses of the real life they live as they pass our media 'channel' windows, but no more than this...
ii. Whether they are paying attention at all, the passive nature of an 'audience' seems a recent and very North European innovation: twas only first in the late middle ages, c/o the Catholic Church and then later by the Protestant Reformers, the idea of a passive audience in church was really instigated. In most other cultures, the idea of a passive religious congregation is anathema (or at least unusual). An audience that participates and creates the ritual as much as the priests is not unusual in other religiouns and cultures (whatever the vested interests would have you believe). Or indeed in our own culture: go to the footie this weekend and see what happens there....(yes, even at the Lane)
iii. Again in Northern Europe we've disassociated the body from the mind/spirit in thinking about audiences: the priest/marketer sends messages but the audience just receives intellectually or at least without moving. The medieval church worked really hard to extirpate dancing from religious celebrations (as well as secular ones) for similar reasons that later Calvinists (and even later missionaries to the 3rd World) did: they all saw the energy created by physical, collective worship as unpredictable, dangerous (and plain ungodly-in-the-sense-they-understood-it...).
No wonder our notion of marketing (or employee) audiences is less than helpful: it's based on a wilful denial of our nature and what we know about ourselves, deep down...
And it just doesn't fit with our capacity for collective enthusiasm...
Today is the official launch of HERD. Feels funny after all this time. So am getting together with a few friends to celebrate the fact. Just as humans always gather to mark important moments together. And have always done.
It made me think of arguments about whether to call the book "Ubuntu" (my early fave) or not. Probably right not to (not just because of the Linux variant but also because Africa's issues are rather more important and serious than those I will ever have to deal with - as an old boss used to tell me, "it's only advertising, nobody died". The struggle for freedom in SA was very different and something I wouldn't want to tarnish).
But maybe the Ubuntu thought is relevant today after all.
Ubuntu is a Zulu/Xhosa word which expresses a view of humanity which is essentially mutual and interdependent (and not individualistic in the way we understand things).
The Xhosa proverb "Ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu" roughly translates as "A person can only be a person with and through other people". It shapes so much of African life and makes our Anglo-Saxon attempts to isolate our selves from each other seem cold, unhelpful and unhealthy even.
Desmond Tutu puts it this way in No Future Without Forgiveness:
"My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up in yours. We
belong in a bundle of life. I am a human because I belong. 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, when others are tortured or oppressed, or
treated as if they were less than who they are."
So my excitement today is cause for excitement amongst all those I know and care for; my achievements also somehow theirs (and yours), also.
Because I belong.
Because we belong to each other.
Because it's often difficult to tell where you start and I end.
And that - whatever your therapist tells you - is a very good thing
We're doing a gig to raise money for a non-profit organisation run by an old family friend in Bolivia.
Having trouble finding a suitable website to do ticketing - justgiving for example works best if you are a registered UK charity...
Any thoughts?
Another thought on why marketing and comms folk get soooooo hung up on the individualist way of seeing mass behaviour:
We've grown up looking at people through the pipelines of the media - as little folk sitting at the end of the TV or radio channel. Whether its a big audience or small, it's made up of little individuals, individuals who are all looking our way (they're using the medium after all). Far from the medium being the message as dear old Marshall had it, the audience has been hidden by the medium - as we peer down the tube at them, we've not seen that they've got other things to do in their lives but consume the media as a preparation for consuming the products advertised in the media. As if that has ever been the nature of human lives....
(BTW I think this is where the 'emotional engagement' nonsense that the US industry has embraced is really revealing - key supporters of the combined agency-advertiser-research agency initiative are media owners. It makes things seem as if there's a media-attention centred heirarchy within media which is now being restored...emotional engagement rather than just atttention...so now we can go back to lobbing things down the channels and hoping they'll do the job)
Let's think of these media instead as windows perhaps: we can see some of their life and they can see some of ours. But far from all of it or even the important bits....
Think this builds turbo-s Faris' brilliant transmedia planning idea...
The lovely Surinder at Research Talk is a passionate advocate of change in Marketing and Market research. He also interviews some really interesting folk. And he did me, too and does some top posting, also...
Once you're bored of my witterings, check out the other podcasts. V good.
Funny how things turn up when you're looking for them.
Wednesday night, in the safety of the singles crowd not enduring Valentine's night with someone you don't really like surrounded by waiting staff who resent having to work because they've got someone they'd like to be with, I pulled this little beaty out of the hat.
For all the psychotherapeutic advice about being independent (expressing your true self etc), we all of us feel happier and safer with others. Don't worry it's a primate thing....
So there I am this avo, having a bracing stomp around Hampstead Heath in the mild winter sunshine, listening to a bizarre mix of the Only Ones, Tapper Zukie, Lee S-P and Johnny Mozart and it occurs to me one of the reasons iPods (and my new fave, the little silver shuffle) are so successful is that they respect and encourage our Herd nature:
i. the white accessories thing has always been a social marker
ii. the launch ads (incl. for the new shuffle) have largely been based on what Felders used to describe to us babyplanners as the "500m flies can't be wrong, eat s*** strategy" - see what other folk around you are doing/buying/wearing...
iii. while being (largely*) a private usage product, they give each of us the impression that the we are taking part in some big lifestyle music video experience (and that everyone around is, too)
iv. fundamentally, they create the sensation for the isolated individual of being in a large and vibrant crowd where non-verbal interaction shapes our feelings and responses - more on music and 'enthusiasmos' soon...
This begins to answer a question I got asked at the AMA conference in Chicago in September - not sure I did the question justice during the show, but I hope this is a bit better. Just because (as Ray Kroc the fonder of MacDonalds put it) you serve burgers one at a time, doesn't mean that it's not a HERD product...single person purchase/usage does NOT equal or even indicate non-HERD motivations...
Think that's right...?
*that is apart from those crazy mobile clubbing boys and girls...
Missed this in the Times from Saturday. Apparently on December 31st we in the EU will be safer from astroturfing, flogging (fake blogging) and the like because an EU Directive comes into force on "falsely representing oneself as a consumer”
Which is a nice idea except that the online world is really hard to legislate on (esp across borders...)
Good that Brussells is busy tho'
Ok. Time for new game.
Hopefully a game that you might enjoy.
It's all about the things you don't see as you walk around your modern urban environment.
It struck me recently how little we notice. Or at least that's how it is for me.
It's not just that I'm in a world of my own (yes, I know...), I think it's also that my alert-systems (what they call pre-attentive consciousness) are set in a limited physical zone: other folk.
So I'm walking down Tottenham Court Road, lost in my own world but scanning for what other folk will do (and being a human herd creature, I'm v good at this). And at scanning the visual and sonic space in which I'm most likely to find other people: the pavement and across the road and shops I pass...
What I don't see is this:
At best I see this (cheated so you can see what it is):
And further on down the road, as it got darker, I spotted this one hundred feet above the pavement I have trod at least 3 times in the last week already (which very nearly caused me to bump into a passerby:)
Now if you're an architect or similar, this kind of stuff may be too obvious for words but for me - a self-confessed fan of buildings of all sorts - it struck me forcibly how much of our energy is taken up with a world that consists of other people.
So here's the game:
What have you seen recently on a habitual route to work etc that you've never noticed before (because you've been on other-people-watch but must have always been there?
Have fun
Interesting noises coming out of the Cable Europe Congress last week in Amsterdam.
Apparently, file sharing apps are now taking up 50% of all internet traffic (think that's not just the popularity of sharing stuff but also the size of video files being shared via things like Youtube). And this is causing the infrascture to creak; indeed, many key players are worried about what the next generation of net film and video businesses will do to the capacity.
"The Web infrastructure, and even Google's (infrastructure) doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect" said Vincent Dureau of Google.
Yikes! So there's not an infinite capacity? So it won't just keep growing? I'm a bit surprised at my own surprise here but of course it's true.
As I've noted before, the internet is first and foremost a peer-to-peer, sharing phenomenon (not a media channel as marketing folk are prone to think) and has grown as we find new and more interesting things and ways to share stuff (that ol' Herd nature again).
Maybe it's the very peer-to-peer instinct that has built the web that is the thing which will bring it (if not down then) into difficulty...in our love of sharing, lie the seeds of our own disappointment...
More thoughts on the herd perspective. Or rather, how hard it is to let go of our own individualist perspective.
Top post yesterday from Dave O'Hanlon on Adliterate. David pulls together much of what I've been on about with regard to the misleading impressions that our minds give each of us about how our own behaviour arises (in the context of how advertising works and how Millward Brown are trying to tell us it does).
Pondering this (and knowing DOH's love of continental philosophy), I remembered Albert Camus and the existentialist distinction between the inside view we have ourselves and the outside view.
In Camus' retelling of the Sisyphus myth, he explores the essential absurdity of the human condition: from the inside our lives seem to make sense (indeed it has to) but from the outside, not: however great the goal and purpose that fires us if we achieve it, our lives descend into meaningless; and if we fail,...
Now the kind of stuff that I'm worrying about and writing about is not of the same order of profundity as the Great Goalie deals with, but the inside-outside perspective tangle is of the same sort. I think...?
Great new word (for me anyway) in New Scientist this week: Astroturf.
That is, an apparent upswelling of grassroots support for something that turns out to be entirely manufactured....by people like us?
This led me to ponder how we might blow this chance completely. How long will it be before P2P influence gets degraded by those keen to force their product or cause on the population? Already a number of us know folk posting on online forums under fictitious ids - or selling this capacity to clients.
Last summer there was a bit of a kerfuffle (not a big one, mind you) when J&J's Holiday skin sparked a competitive astroturf-war. Someone allegedly from the Girls Intelligence Agency (GIA - geddit?) with the spooky moniker Anon posted the following on a teen forum:
"Hiya. I was wondering if anyone has seen the advert for Johnson's holiday skin moisturiser on TV. It is meant to be good for the skin and leads to a natural looking tan....thanks!"
Not to be outdone the curiously named Dokta posted
"Try St Tropez, the Number 1 brand in alternative tanning products!"
This is just the beginning.
Maybe we need to recognise peer-to-peer influence as a finite resource - like the earth's own - and stop wasting it (like we did every other medium before it)? Just a thought.
Pic courtesy John H
A flashback to Monday night for the boys.
Al's portrait of me, hung on Pub wall with other - slightly more famous - fitzrovia authors...Like Dylan Thomas.
A curious herd-phenomenon I haven't really discussed yet is this: "distributed memory". That is, the ability (and tendancy) of close-knit social groups to remember events and experiences together, when each individual has only a partial (and often inaccurate) individual memory of the whole event. You see it in families, in groups of friends (like me, Al and the 2 Johns), in the workplace and even in bands of sports supporters (like the Barmy Army). Together we have better memories than we do apart (yet very often, memory researchers don't allow distributed memory as "real" memory because it lies beyond the scope of an individual...
Now you don't need an evolutionary-psychology explanation to see the usefulness of distributed memory: groups that share memories are more of a group than groups that don't (think how two strangers seek to discover shared experiences - how sporting events that men can both recall even if neither attended become something that binds the two together...). We are what we remember together...
The Greeks had a word for it. For that collective, contagious fervour the Welsh call Hwyl. Enthusiasmos: literally, having the god within you. With its roots in the cult of Dionysus (other cultures had their own equivalent deities), this is something that our organised religion (and even our secular world) has disallowed and rendered taboo, particularly since the late Middle Ages (and not just thanks to Calvin and the Protestants...).
Apparently, one of the mysteries of this and similar cults is that in the state of collective ecstacy, when the individual loses all sense of their normal self, they also gain a glimpse of their immortal selves...as we do at gigs, at parties, on demonstrations and at state occasions
No wonder we distrust crowds, if they can reveal who we really are (and not what our minds tell us)...
Interesting thought for those of us who are advocating Enthusiasm Marketing with a passion...
Top night out with Al, John and John last night. Drinks, dinner, teasing, laughter and taxi home.
Al and I flatshared years ago and it was then that he first introduced me to A Dance to the Music of Time
This 12 volume novel seems to be a bit of a boys' thing: 12 volumes, hundreds of characters and one 70 odd year span of English Upper Middle Class life in the 20th Century...
The title comes from an observation made by the narrator in the first few pages of volume 1 (A question of Upbringing), Nick Jenkins (an art critic) about the Poussin painting above, as he sits watching snowflakes on a coal fire:
"These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance."
Over the next 12 volumes, he recounts the people he has met over the previous 50 years of his life and suggests that none of the individuals really understands the dance or the role of the others in it. Instead each face appears, disappears and reappears from out of the darkness according to indecipherable rules...
So it is for me with Al and the 2 Johns, I thought as we stood at the bar of a Fitzrovia pub. We all met a long time ago and have found ourselves giggling many a time since then as our lives have gone off into the darkness (or so it seems to those left behind).
But this is not just a personal post: I think the same thing applies to all mass behaviour. Each of us is unaware of the role of others; each of us slightly bemused by a dance that started long ago; each of us has the impression that the dance is ours alone, that it is somehow shaped by our consciousness and experience.
So why trust the individual's account of how stuff works, then?
"Going out tonight, going out tonight..." sing the Hard-fi boys...and Mother Nature does the rest.
So what else is this ad about then, but our herd-nature? We want to be together. We shape each other, for good or ill. Most of our lives are other people. And Saturday nights, particularly...
For more stuff like this but with a slightly more scientific bent, check out boids - Craig Reynolds' fantastic simulations of flocking behaviour from as far back as 1986...
I love the weekend papers - the collision of high and low culture; the way that things you've long forgotten are re-awakened as if new.
Yesterday's Guardian Review had a great piece by James Fenton on WH Auden and reprinted Musee des Beaux Arts - one of my faves.
It's a bit of a risk referring to poetry in a blog like this but as I re-read it, it made me see something important.
So if you don't mind, today we'll be having a bit of poetry. Then I'll say what it made me think about...
OK, so here's Wystan first:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specifically wnt it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood;
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrydom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an imortant failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I've read this many times over the years but the thing that struck me yesterday how well these few lines describe the distorted view of reality our individual experiences of our own minds gives each of us. Each of us may feel to be the centre of our own drama - a drama that we assume others are interested in when clearly they are not - the dogs go on with their "doggy life" and the ship sales "calmly on", ignoring Icarus's fatal fall from the sky. The "torturer's horse" rubs his rump on a tree, indifferent to the torturer's drama.
Why is this relevant to HERD and our attempts to understand mass behaviour?
Simply this: the way our brains are gives each of us the impression that we decide what to do as individuals (unless we're 'brainwashed' or 'hypnotised' by others, as we damningly put it...). We don't see the reality of things - the influences we get from other folk or how instinctively we respond to situations - we see things AS IF each of us were at the centre of our own universe. Our minds give us both an inflated view of our own position and of our mind's own role in shaping the world...It seems this way because our minds tell us it is.
Realising this - the distorting nature of Mind - is one of the biggest steps to appreciating how things really happen, how the Herd effect really works.
Right, enough deep stuff. Sigh of relief all round, no doubt. More tea anyone?
I know, Bobby/Travis doesn't say quite that in the movie but it's early yet...
Following on from 10x10 yesterday, I found this neat thing (still in beta) on Crowdsourcing. It's one of the outputs of the gang at IBM's Collaborative User Experience team's Visual Communication Lab a team concerned with visual communication of data and how users behave around it...
The base application here is a means to store data in visual form and allow other folk to manipulate it (see how the beneficiaries of US military aid changes year by year for example). Neat but nothing new, nowadays I guess.
What I like the app that follows what we are "digging": it uses the same tech to help us track what we get excited about online at any time and how that changes...
There are better technical tools out there if you really want to monitor stuff on t'internet in a grown up way, but this gives me a really good instinctive feel for what's happening in Digg land
Go play...
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