This New Yorker article is the first I’d heard of Mass-Observation. From the official site at the Unviersity of Sussex

This organisation was founded in 1937 by three young men, who aimed to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’. They recruited a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This original work continued until the early 1950s.

A team of paid investigators went into a variety of public situations: meetings, religious occasions, sporting and leisure activities, in the street and at work, and recorded people’s behaviour and conversation in as much detail as possible. The material they produced is a varied documentary account of life in Britain.

The National Panel was composed of people from all over Britain who either kept diaries or replied to regular open-ended questionnaires send to them by the central team of Mass-Observers.

An interesting effort; I’m reminded of the variously hyped flavors of Virtual Anthropology

that crop up when people see all the pictures of, say, daily life on flickr.

I will be leading a discussion on Participation and Authenticity: The new Prosumer and User-Generated Content (perhaps an update to an older FreshMeat at MarCamp

in South San Francisco on September 26.

“To our valued customers:
In cooperation with the
recent FDA warning we
have pulled all fresh
spinach.”

This is a terrible sign. The grocer in this AP photo has simply attempted to cover their ass for not stocking the produce we might be searching for. There’s no helpful information about the FDA warning – we’re supposed to know about it. There’s an opportunity here to help people and remind them not to each spinach for the duration of this situation.

And what the hell does it mean to “have pulled” spinach? This is not how people communicate, this is how merchandisers talk.

I realize this is a reactive sign and not a lot of time was spent in composing it (although it’s not hand-written, it’s somewhat professional looking, so there was some measure of care), but the jargon and self-referential tone is disappointing.

I experienced something similar in a recent email

Mr. Portigal,

Sorry, you are having problems with your Salter Electronic Scale Model 929. The people of Taylor Precision Products take great pride in producing quality products. Salter Model 929 has a ten years warranty. Please return the scale to Taylor. Taylor does not require a receipt or the original box. Please enclose a brief note with your name, return address, explanation of problem. Kindly put the note inside a box with
the scale, return to the following:

[blah]

Once your scale is received it will be replaced with a new Salter Model 929. Taylor than will mail the new scale back to the consumer. Turn around time of two to three weeks. I do hope this information proves to
be helpful to you.

How, in the course of a couple of short paragraphs, did “Mr. Portigal” morph into “the consumer”? Suddenly they are talking about me, not to me. What?

Not to grossly oversimply, but could it be that organizations spend too much time thinking about themselves, and not the people that they serve? The colloquial term is “drinking the Kool-Aid” and many companies, small and large, turn that into an asset that attracts and retains employees (“a strong culture”) but also presumably excites customers. But there’s a heavy black line on an org chart somewhere that splits the internal dialogs from the external ones, and the strong culture builds in shorthands and buzzwords that alienate and exclude the people on the outside – the ones that those companies are in business to serve.

The business press (and even worse, the blogosphere) is filled with enthusiastic writing about infectious passionate customer/marketing/blah but things are far far messier than any of those authors would want you to believe.

Here’s a detail from a flyer from a local Coastside restaurant

Note the schematic indicating their location. There’s a lot of local knowledge required to interpret that. Which direction is north? Are each of those towns equal distance from each other? Are they equal size? Are there stop signs located at those locations?

(Answers: right, not really, not hardly, no way)

Here, then, is a more familiar map, from Google.

El Granada doesn’t even merit text on their map, but they do a get a green arrow!

On August 30 I posted about this men-only conference lineup

(although some good comments pointed out it was WHITE men, too). I didn’t say much; the picture speaks for itself. But on September 15, this post caused a reasonably large reaction.

They wrote a very long and passionate essay; I just posted a picture and a snappy comment. People that read here saw that post and did whatever readers here do.

That other post caused a bit of stir, ended up on the Valleywag blog, ended up irking one of the people in the picture, and generated a lot of comments.

Just interesting to see the stories flow in the blogosphere and where the participation and reaction is, how to frame stories that cause different levels of reaction and action.

Looks like we’ll be in Vancouver for a family visit right around (Canadian) Thanksgiving. We’ll likely be staying not far from Hon’s (an exceptionally delicious restaurant).

If anyone who reads All This ChittahChattah is intersted in coffee, ping me and let’s see if we can set it up…

Yeah, dude. Keep eating sugar cereal like this and you’re going to have a serious diabetes problem. You already look like you’re suffering from ADD. You (or your guardian) might want to have a doctor check that out.

…this may not be what you think of.

As the SF Chron tells us

The cry will go out from city hall in every hamlet and metropolis in Mexico tonight — and will be re-enacted in San Francisco and several other major U.S. cities — “Mexicanos y Mexicanas, Viva la Independencia Nacional! Viva Mexico!”

It’s Mexico’s Fourth of July: A commemoration of the day, 196 years ago, when Father Miguel Hidalgo, a parish priest in the village of Dolores in the state of Guanajuato, rang the church bell to rally his congregation, then gave the grito, or yell, that sparked the war for Mexican independence from Spain.

Just as it took the American patriots eight years from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to win the Revolutionary War, so Mexico’s war of independence stretched on for 11 years. But Sept. 16, 1810, is the day Mexicans declared they would be free from colonial rule.

How lame is that! A “Fourth of July” that is celebrated in September…Does the US have some sort of branded monopoly on having a day of indpendence? I would think of the holiday as Mexican Independence Day

, not “the 4th of July for those people.” I don’t want to throw the racist tag around too easily, but it smacks of something uncomfortable.

Elsewhere: Cinco de mayo is not the Mexican 4th of July

P.S. Hannukah is also not the “Jewish Christmas.”

Marin Oriental Rug House, slightly dodging the cliche that all such establishments are always “going out of business” – they offer the shopper the chance to shop at going out of business PRICES. Going out of business is no longer a state of being, it’s an attribute.

Nice.

I was fooled when I drove by and took this picture (while making a left-hand turn, even); it wasn’t til looking at the picture later that I see their little dodge.