Driving around in Mauritius, suddenly, in the green wild, a shopping mall. It was a somehow unreal feeling walking around in the mall. It was silent, empty and out of it’s cultural context. I went back several times to see if the emptiness only was a coincidence with my first visit, but no. The lines of cashier just sitting with almost nothing to do, the overfilled shelves, the lonely woman walking around.

The local market a few miles away was overfilled, with people and goods. I ask one woman why she was speding time at the local market instead of the mall, she answered: “Because the fresh and cold feeling at the mall, the cleaness and the perfection makes me so unhappy. All the joy with food is gone. The smell and texture is not there. It’s not food.”

A growing number of small businesses are now delivering food at your door. But it’s not just food. It’s an environmental friendly produced bag of raw food that constitutes a dinner week for a whole family. Well suited for timed crunched parents who just don’t have time to prepare, plan or shop. In Sweden we have more and more following the trend of subscribing to this kind of services (Middagsfrid, Familyfood, Framtidens mat, Årstiderna). It’s all about simplifying your life. This is an interesting development and when hearing from people that use it, it seems to be cost-effective as well since: “When I buy food myself I tend to get so much unnecessary stuff that I have to throw away.” This might be great but it’s also sort of sad and it says a lot about our stressed out society. But hats off- this is a good business idea.

We often talk about a “new generation” when describing the use of digital media technique and all applications. For this generation media is something natural; integretaded in everyday life and the difference between consuming and producing is no more. One aspect of the mediated society is how this “new” generation, especially Generation Z, integrate design in everyday life. From an early age they are connected and design as communication strategies and commercial messages are everywhere in their lives. Everything around is part of the identity formation, their own and the social world around them. Two examples from our fieldworks.

A girl 8 years old follow her mom and dad to IKEA. They are supposed to buy a new bed to the girl. The parents find several beds that they like, the girl becomes more and more grumpy. She sits down and says that she wants to go home: My bed in Sims is the only I want.

A boy 6 years old helps his mom to make lunch. He’s responsible for holding the eggs until the mother needs them. He carefully looks at one egg and the red stamp and suddenly says: Oh, this is designed by ICA!

In some way the blogosphere is a great field for ethnographic studies and everything is worth some examination regardless of the topic. It doesn’t always have to be so serious or intellectual, the average person just ain’t that deep.

The extremely popular blog (now book and soon to be a tv-series) Stuff White People Like (an article in DN say it has 58 million readers so far) is hardly funny. But it touch upon something that people in general enjoy, the always taboo subjects of ethnicity linked with self-deprecating humour. You can of course do this in a serious way as well, like Moore did with Stupid White Men, but now to the fun part…

You can examine these texts and figure out a lot about our society and no matter how interesting it is… It is, to me, always overshadowed with the fact that only white men are privilege enough to make books (blogs) like this. I know I won’t live to see they day when a Japanese woman write the book “Stupid East Asian women” or a black man write the book “Stuff black people like” – and get away with it. (They might do it but they won’t get away with it.) And that’s also a part of the society we live in.