• Whose line is it anyway?

    When I wrote about the ‘notional boundaries’ in the context of the Arundhati Roy speech, I was reluctant to push the issue further. But while reading ‘The Argumentative Indian’, I came across a section called ‘Critique of Patriotism’ under ‘Tagore and his India’, in which the author – Amartya Sen – mentions that Tagore had once written ‘Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity.‘

    Tagore also apparently used characters in his novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) to hint at how nationalistic sentiments could easily turn sectarian. Amartya Sen ends the section with the words of Bertolt Brecht “…of the corruptibility of nationalism. Hatred of one group can lead to hatred of others….” you can read the section in entirety here)

    And that started a thought on nation states. If we consider attributing more than a functional (say economic, political, administrative etc) importance to it (despite its ‘freedom’ being earned after much effort and sacrifice), how can we logically dispute a demand for separate states intended on the basis of say religion or language, especially since these might be older than the boundaries of the nation state and could prove a better cohesive force than the idea of a country?

    This is not to say that I’m in favour of this kind of a line or line of thought, but I would like your help in finding a logical conclusion.

    until next time, line of reasoning 🙂

  • Legal Crystal

    [scribd id=51587921 key=key-20ylqt7e1axvnkbu58je mode=list]

  • Illusions

    Richard Bach

    Richard Bach and Donald Shimoda, master and disciple. One, a messiah waiting to retire and the other reluctant to learn. Both barnstorming pilots in mid west America.

    The book is about our perspectives and perceptions of reality, and a view that what we see around us is an illusion.. of our own making, a manifestation of what we want it to be.

    Shimoda is tired of being a messiah as he thinks people are more interested in the miracles he shows them, than any understanding of what he’s trying to say. As the narrative progresses, Richard is first awed by the miracles himself, but then starts questioning his sense of reality and begins the journey to become a messiah himself.

    The book consists of many profound quotes from what is called the “Messiah’s Handbook”, which Shimoda lends to Richard. A handbook with no pages, because it opens to the page which answers the questions in the reader’s mind, but like Shimoda says any book can do this, because it is the reader’s interpretation.

    The larger statement here is that each of us has in us, the power to make our own path just the way we want it, if only we let go. To quote, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours”

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  • Attention everyone

    It was a strange coincidence that I watched the 62 Super Bowl ads back-to-back, (thanks to this aggregation effort by Mashable) on the same day that I read this very insightful post by Steve Rubel on “Attentionomics“. The slideshow is also embedded below. In addition to the key takeaways – the lifespan of content created on popular networks, it also suggests ways to overcome this.

    Attentionomics Captivating Attention in the Age of Content Decay

    The interesting thing was that I would have watched the Super Bowl ads without any prompting. Which makes me wonder whether the logical and scientific way proposed above to ‘game’ the attention economy is the best approach. I think my discomfort stems from the fact that this leans more towards the ‘media’ in social media and looks at the social platforms from an information dissemination perspective.

    My consumption of the ads was more out of interest. The term ‘Intention Economy‘ springs to mind immediately in this context.

    The intention economy is an approach to viewing markets and economies focusing on buyers as a scarce commodity. The consumers’ intent to buy drives the production of goods to meet their specific needs.

    The thought is whether/how this can be applied to consumption of content. If it can, then the approach would be to make the content as easy to find and accessible as possible, to ‘appear’ at the time of demand, and create different contexts to drive that consumption.

    There is another perspective too. The easiest way to  elucidate it would be with the example of Google Reader/ Twitter Lists, where I pay attention to certain content creators, because I trust and value the content they produce. As Edelman’s Trust Barometer would tell you, the ‘trust in experts’ has actually increased this year. Their appeal does not really depend on the attention metrics.

    Can’t think of any other ‘angles’, but if you do, please drop me a line, or comment.

    So perhaps like the owned-paid-earned forms of content, brands will have to work on all 3 fronts. Harness expert power (employees and others), seed efficiently, create and use contexts effectively, and be easily accessible (like the brand-stream I proposed last week)

    until next time, at ease now 🙂

    PS: New research on why consumers ‘break up’ with brands on email, FB, Twitter, could be taken as a pointer to look at   alternatives to information dissemination.