Kategori Insight

Anthropology means to participate in parts of the daily life of a selected group of people. It is about to retract to peoples’ basic needs, their intuitive behaviour. To address a limited selection of people representing the target groups and interpret the metaphors these people express with reference to basic human needs rather than to articulated desires (which we know change in pace with fashion and trends).
To understand that human needs transgress cultural borders and that the dominant current cultures of communication and dwelling appear to work happily with other form of cultures; national, regional and religious as well as different subcultures.

What is really a place and what importance does it have for humans? A place can be anything from the city as a whole, to the unplanned gap, i.e. the unplanned, disorderly surfaces. Each place has its quality and is perceived differently depending on who occupies the place. All places have a cultural form of what and who is located on that place – what is beautiful, what is ugly, what is boring, what is possible, what is impossible…? Most people can not express affection before they experience the place as it is, since it is a physical and mental experience.

A place is primarily related to stored experience – collectively, it is really what tradition is all about. Each place has its traditions, its history, its identity and its inhabitants. A place without a story, is fictional, a place that has stayed in the story is retrospective. An authentic place is both. What people feel should be anchored both backwards and forwards, i.e. the time factor should be seen as a process and as an experience of development rather than one of innovation, something ‘new’. We not only live ‘at a time’ but as part of a time process. Each location must take their history, their identity, in possession and not become a non-place – which are planned and steeped in the same shape, smooth, stiffened up, where people who live there become alone and alike, just as everyone else.

In order to get people to care about places, it is about creating meaning, both in the ambient environment and in the functional enviroment. People want to live and inhabit, not just the latter. Even the seemingly simplest, most everyday places in people’s lives are rich in values that give life meaning.

Media, especially for young users, is about a complete integration with everyday life, which constantly is ongoing. It is no longer about the ”new” in media technologies that should be problematizied in order to understand the use and impact – it’s about to see media as a cultural expression that mediates social relations. Only then one can also understand how media works and how it affects everyday life.

All technology are social in its manifestation, technology are helping us to be more human. Information and relations are constantly mirrored in the social networks. And your digital self continue to live even though you are not there at the moment – meaning: you can be social all the time, regardless of time and space. This is what ”old” media logic has difficult to relate to. Today they still use rigid metrics that fail to measure a total integrated behavior.

Read my new blog text at The Brand-Man about the book Buyology and neuromarketing in general. (Written together with Jacob Östberg).

An article in Amos Magazine about shopping and the meaning of brands. Click here to read (though in Swedish).

Daytona has conducted a quantitative study on the use of the iPad. Several ”experts” were asked to comment the findings in the study. The question I got was how the relationship with the iPad is different from the one to cell phones and computers. Read my answer here.

I love Daniel Miller’s definition of an anthropologist:
My definition of the anthropologist is someone who seeks to demonstrate the consequences of the universal for the particular and of the particular for the universal by equal devotion to the empathetic understanding and encompassment of both. (Stuff, 2010)

Read my blog text at The Brand-Man about have people use cell phones vs computers.

Martin Berg has made a nice summary of our session at The Conference, Media Evolution 24th of August. Click here and come to Martin’s blog where you also can see me, Martin Berg, Thomas Johansson and the concluding discussion.

Food is a cultural and contextual matter and when you have the luxury of making choices on what to eat, “good food” is one of the most flexible, negotiable and unfixed phenomenon we ever came across. Consumers either go for quality or mass production, homemade or prefab, or both; you go for soul or the general idea. At one occasion one either chooses ecological or locally produced, the next time cheap canned without story or localization. It’s a non-logical process depending on what currency you use in that certain moment. Read the report about ecology vs locally produced food Inculture wrote for Skånes Livsmedelsakademi 2010 or see the film here!