Tag: consumption

  • An efficient existence

    The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem is a book I recently read, and loved. It was written in Polish in 1965, and translated to English in 1974. Lem wasn’t an author I had heard of, despite having read many science fiction anthologies. An online post that extolled him at the cost of my favourites like Asimov was what led me to this book. (I would have linked it, but I’ve forgotten how I found it!) Lem has been translated into 41 languages and has sold 30 million copies. But he was rebuffed by quite a few American writers including Philip K. Dick, multiple times, because he was perceived as being annoying, and had commented that American writing was “ill thought out, poorly written…” Also, his belief was that the only true motive for writing was to contribute to literature.1

    It made me think of a post in one of the newsletters I often recommend to folks – Taylor Pearson‘s The Interesting Times. As I tweeted sometime back, his writing is centrifugal – pointing to books, posts and ideas, and centripetal – goes deep into an idea and provides food for thought (the latter is different from what Austin Kleon meant in the original framing 2). The specific post I am referring to – 4 minute songs, which was about certain rules that a creators need to follow if they want their work to be consumed and appreciated, was the latter, and made me reflect. I wondered whether, even at an individual level, we are increasingly optimising for others’ consumption over our own expression.

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  • The abstraction of trust

    Usually, I use evolution. But that indicates a forward movement, and in this case, I am not so sure now! I had a thought on how the notion of trust in transactions has changed, and felt that I should document it, even if it’s in a super simplistic way!

    1. It began with a producer/consumer – consumer/producer relationship in the form of barter.

    2. A central currency suddenly opened up trade and now it could just be producer – consumer

    3. That also meant that a middleman could enter the system, hence a producer – seller – consumer (more…)

  • Please find detached

    “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl

    This quote has been a favourite since I first read it, and creating that space is something that I not only constantly try to work on, but also write about – the challenges and the learning. However, this post is on a tangent – what if we delay the stimulus itself? Yes, I admit it’s quite impossible to do that with people, but what about consumption in general? Given that we are now debating the direction(s) of the ‘arrow of time’, there’s no better time to discuss that space. After all, in my consumption, I am what is called the ‘observer’, and I’m the one creating the moment of interaction.

    That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the increasing dominance of the urgent over the important. Seth Godin had a very interesting post titled “Spectator sports” about how we have taken the discourse around things of significance to the level of spectator sports because we can “vent without remorse.” A longer read in context is Helen Boaden’s commentary on the state of journalism as she retires from BBC Radio. The devices, features and services popping up around me indicate that ephemerality is trending upward. Think about the cycle – watch something live on TV, tweet about it/post on FB/Whatsapp, someone has a comment, a discussion ensues, and somehow inexplicably reaches generic areas of conflict like religion or liberalism (a variation of Godwin’s law, if you will) before the next cycle starts. Rinse, repeat. Did we have a discussion aimed at understanding each others’ perspective and expanding a worldview? More often than not, not!  (more…)

  • Global Mood Swings!

    Recently, at a meet-up of Twitter folks, a couple of people asked me whether I had retired from Twitter. They had a point. Sure, I still shared links, but not only were they few in number, I also mostly stayed away from conversation. My reasons were that I had seen people and their agenda on Twitter change  (from the first time I had encountered them on the platform) – the vanity numbers affecting the ego, the loss of humility, the perceived slights and the overall nature of conversations that are more to convince and score points, than to understand and gain perspectives. From discuss to diss and cuss, as bad wordplay would go. 🙂

    Yes, there are some great folks around with whom I have conversations, funnily enough more over DM, phone, other networks and offline meetings! One could also prune the feed to maximise this, but one could also read a book!

    I had alluded to this in a previous post – Binary Code – the increasing disappearance of nuance in our consumption. Obviously, this is also happening in creation. In less than a couple of decades, we have moved from being in bubbles formed from having only a few information sources to ones made from having too many. We aren’t used to having a microphone in the hand, and it’s showing. Making things binary in consumption and reasoning is a way of coping with unbridled creation. It’s also not being helped by search engine and social algorithms accentuating and reinforcing pre existing notions and showing us the kind of things we’d like. Sanitised for our unique taste buds. (more…)

  • The transience of consumption & marketing

    Rajesh wrote a very interesting post recently on ownership, and how it would impact brand/marketing/purchase. My own view of ownership has undergone a massive change in the last couple of years, thanks to a combination of factors like increasing life spans, the changing nature of jobs, and the rise of on-demand services. Add to that extreme income disparity, economic flux, and technological advances that have the potential to create obsolescence faster than ever before, and I’m reasonably sure the concept of ownership is up for a revamp.

    Rajesh brings up two factors that caused previous generations to value ownership – financial success (trophies) and asset building. If I have to analyse my own motivations in the past, both of these would find a place. If I dig deeper, I also see a couple of others. One would be lack of access on demand. (eg. music/movie CDs, books, even say, photographs) You can see how streaming and cloud storage have changed this. The other subtext I can vaguely discern is ‘control’. A car, home, all lend an air of certainty and being in control. Maybe it has something to do with growing up in middle class India which had quite a lot of experience with scarcity. But in the line of anti fragile thinking, the key skill going forward would be agility rather than trying to retain control. In essence, a whole lot of cases for ownership that no longer seem relevant.  (more…)