16 photographs of value clusters
Mar. 2nd, 2007 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHave a look at this picture-strip of someone's room, then answer ten questions about your impression of a person who might live in an environment like this.
1. Is there anything in the pictures which tells you what continent we're on? If so, is there anything here which indicates which country it is? (Don't rely on things you already know, if you know who this is.)
2. What do you notice about the colour range in evidence here? What, if anything, do these colours "mean"?
3. Is this a room occupied by people with university-level educational qualifications?
4. Could you predict which daily newspapers (if any) are read in this room by looking at what's in these pictures?
5. What kind of political views would you extrapolate from the pictures? Why?
6. Are the people who live here, in your view, earning more or less than the minimum wage (as measured in their country of residence)?
7. What is the likely age range of the people who live here?
8. Can we guess some of these people's life priorities -- their basic values -- by looking at the pictures? How would you describe those values?
9. Did you feel that these pictures gave you as much information about the people living here as, say, meeting them would?
10. If you lived here, would you immediately make some changes? What would they be?
Okay, pens down! This isn't really a test. You don't have to answer those (although if you want to, you're welcome).
I suppose what interests me about these questions is stuff to do with the politics of texture, or neural-style taste networks (just how does YouTube know what to dig up for me to watch next?), or cultural capital. This relates to this entry about "geodemographic" marketing, and the way direct mail marketers can target people on different streets, tying up specific postcodes with likely value clusters.
Sometimes I think that, whatever this blog is ostensibly talking about, it really just has one message: "these are my values". It isn't even "these are my opinions". It's not something you could really argue about. It's something textural, a set of values best expressed as colours and shapes. And yet, somehow, from those colours and shapes everything else can be extrapolated. I don't think that's the case for every blog. It would be more true of Lord Whimsy's, say, than Marxy's. But it's certainly true of mine.
I remember feeling this way about my family, when I was growing up. Only my own family had the right textures and colours in our house. It was something I was quietly proud of. (Now that the members of my family no longer all live in the same house, it's interesting to see whose house still feels this way to me. The answer is, my sister's. But in fact we all have different styles now, reflecting different outlooks on life, different diets, different cultural consumption patterns, different peer pressure, and so on. Could we all be in slightly different social classes by now? You'd need sharp marketers to pare social class down to the kind of fine distinctions required for a "yes" answer to that, I think.)
Anyway, I'm fascinated by the way language and most rational thinking (Gladwellian Blink stuff works better) are so utterly inadequate at expressing these values, while emerging description-sets like geodemographic marketing and neural networks are just beginning to find ways to describe and predict them. It's like they're just on the verge of mapping the genotype of human taste.
1. Is there anything in the pictures which tells you what continent we're on? If so, is there anything here which indicates which country it is? (Don't rely on things you already know, if you know who this is.)
2. What do you notice about the colour range in evidence here? What, if anything, do these colours "mean"?
3. Is this a room occupied by people with university-level educational qualifications?
4. Could you predict which daily newspapers (if any) are read in this room by looking at what's in these pictures?
5. What kind of political views would you extrapolate from the pictures? Why?
6. Are the people who live here, in your view, earning more or less than the minimum wage (as measured in their country of residence)?
7. What is the likely age range of the people who live here?
8. Can we guess some of these people's life priorities -- their basic values -- by looking at the pictures? How would you describe those values?
9. Did you feel that these pictures gave you as much information about the people living here as, say, meeting them would?
10. If you lived here, would you immediately make some changes? What would they be?
Okay, pens down! This isn't really a test. You don't have to answer those (although if you want to, you're welcome).
I suppose what interests me about these questions is stuff to do with the politics of texture, or neural-style taste networks (just how does YouTube know what to dig up for me to watch next?), or cultural capital. This relates to this entry about "geodemographic" marketing, and the way direct mail marketers can target people on different streets, tying up specific postcodes with likely value clusters.
Sometimes I think that, whatever this blog is ostensibly talking about, it really just has one message: "these are my values". It isn't even "these are my opinions". It's not something you could really argue about. It's something textural, a set of values best expressed as colours and shapes. And yet, somehow, from those colours and shapes everything else can be extrapolated. I don't think that's the case for every blog. It would be more true of Lord Whimsy's, say, than Marxy's. But it's certainly true of mine.
I remember feeling this way about my family, when I was growing up. Only my own family had the right textures and colours in our house. It was something I was quietly proud of. (Now that the members of my family no longer all live in the same house, it's interesting to see whose house still feels this way to me. The answer is, my sister's. But in fact we all have different styles now, reflecting different outlooks on life, different diets, different cultural consumption patterns, different peer pressure, and so on. Could we all be in slightly different social classes by now? You'd need sharp marketers to pare social class down to the kind of fine distinctions required for a "yes" answer to that, I think.)
Anyway, I'm fascinated by the way language and most rational thinking (Gladwellian Blink stuff works better) are so utterly inadequate at expressing these values, while emerging description-sets like geodemographic marketing and neural networks are just beginning to find ways to describe and predict them. It's like they're just on the verge of mapping the genotype of human taste.
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Re: Avant gentlemen
Date: 2007-03-02 11:00 am (UTC)Viva revolution and No War! It's been painted over since, alas. I think hanging a Union Jack or an Old Glory here would make you the most unpopular (and certainly the most eccentric) person in the district! They'd be gone within hours.
Re: Avant gentlemen
Date: 2007-03-02 11:02 am (UTC)Re: Avant gentlemen
Date: 2007-03-02 07:28 pm (UTC)I leave the Union Jack to the Brits.