Archive for the 'Consumer Behavior' Category

Will The Personalized Web Filter Out Diversity?

Published by Jarred on January 14, 2009 in Book Reviews, Consumer Behavior, Culture, Search, Social Networks, Sociology and Web 2.0. Comments

About a year ago, I wrote that I had received a book for Christmas called The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr.  I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was only two weeks ago, on my post-holiday flight back to California, that I finally finished it after ten months of letting it collect dust.

Carr’s attitude about the rise of cloud computing, social networking, and all the other web 2.0 buzztrends caught me off guard.  While he seems to marvel at and mostly celebrate the speed and scale at which this phenomenon has grown and subsequently become integral to modern life, he does so with a very cautionary and sometimes pessimistic tone.  I guess I should have expected as much after reading his piece in the Atlantic last summer (hat tip to Joel for passing it along) called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.  Though I don’t share all of his concerns, it is refreshing to find a voice like his among the generally over-enthusiastic technorati (myself included).

Carr highlights a particularly interesting threat in the chapter he titles “The Great Unbundling.”  While granting that the jubilation over the democratizing and barrier-lowering nature of the Internet is mostly well deserved, he also warns that these characteristics come with potential harm.  What harm?  In short, Carr argues that the speed and personalization offered by the Internet facilitate our natural human tendency to cluster into isolated groups that can deafen and blind us to differing opinions.

Carr’s main evidence is an experiment conducted in 1971 by a Nobel Prize winning economist named Thomas Schelling.  The experiment consisted of a grid of squares and a set of white and black markers.  After randomly distributing these markers to represent an “integrated” community, he moved the markers around based on the rule that no one marker could have more than 50% of its immediate neighbors be of the opposite color.  This rule, Schelling posited, mirrored a natural instinct that humans possess: to be closer to people similar to ourselves than we are to those who are different.  After moving pieces one at a time based on this rule, he ended up with one all-white cluster and one all-black cluster.  Self-segregation, Schelling concluded, is the natural result of our instinctual preference to be closer to those that resemble us than to those who differ from us.

Extrapolating from these results, Carr hypothesizes that because the Internet removes so much friction from the market for information, self-segregation will happen much more quickly and completely online than, say, in a once-integrated neighborhood that slowly segregates over many years into two or more distinct socioeconomic or racial groups.  In my opinion, however, his interpretation of Schelling’s experiment, and his application of it to the Web, is flawed from the start.

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Here’s What I’m Thinking About

Published by Taylor on December 5, 2008 in Business, Consumer Behavior, Environment, Philanthropy, Politics and Social Entrepreneurship. Comments

Taking a page out of Ezra Klein’s playbook (and continuing our trend here of shamelessly copying features from other blogs…ahem), here are a few things I keep meaning to write about:

  • The NC legislature commissioned a study report by a few of the best environmental and public policy academics in the state to look at water quantity and allocation.  The report, currently in draft form (PDF), is very well done and a nice synthesis of policy and science.  Water quantity is not the sexiest issue, but after recent severe droughts I think more folks are starting to give water policy the attention it deserves.
  • The Acumen Fund invests in social enterprises around the world–businesses, generally operating at a below-market return for investors, that have as central tenets to their mission alleviating a social problem or improving lives of vulnerable populations.  A recent think piece by Acumen’s Chief Investment Officer, Simple Measures for Social Enterprise (PDF), is a good reminder for social investors and philanthropists alike that sometimes just capturing consistent and reliable data can lead to greater improvements than the thorough impact assessments we all think of as ideal.
  • I’ve been meaning to write about Nate Silver (creator and whiz behind fivethirtyeight.com) for a while.  Even though the election is long past, this NY Times profile is worth a look.
  • Speaking of the NY Times, this piece from the Magazine about the Netflix recommendation engine and the “Napoleon Dynamite problem” is fascinating (apparently Napoleon Dynamite is a love/hate kind of movie, and it’s nearly impossible to consistently predict whether someone will like it based on their other movie preferences).

Distracted by Shoes

Published by a Guest on July 24, 2008 in Advertising, Consumer Behavior, Culture and Lifestyle. Comments

The following is a guest post from Daniel H.  Welcome back, Dan!

In a recent NY Times column, David Brooks describes a deterioration in American culture over the past century, noting that “America once had a culture of thrift…but over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded,” and now we exist in a “culture of debt.”

He partially blames the effects of a rapidly growing economy, noting how some luxury items which were once unaffordable for the middle class suddenly came within financial reach (especially within the reach of creditors if not within the reach of one’s own cash).  He also blames the deterioration of the norm of personal responsibility, and claims that those who fell victim to marketing schemes were also furthering the deterioration of a norm of thriftiness, in themselves and in those around them.

I thought it was a good opinion piece, really. But the whole time I was reading the article, I kept getting distracted by shoes.

Lots of shoes.

The whole top and side of the internet page on the New York Times website was full of shoe advertisements, which of course, exist because the Times wants to collect on extra revenue whenever possible and because advertisers are willing to pay prime dollar for space on a site viewed by perhaps millions of people per day.  And so as I was challenged by Brooks’ thoughts on how we, as Americans, should seek to be wiser consumers, I also felt that this change cannot and will not happen if I do not seek to monitor the ways in which I take in information, most especially on the web, but anywhere for that matter.  If Americans truly desire to become wiser spenders, we must question our acceptance of the commercial advertising industry and its self-imposition into our day-to-day lives.

While I don’t think internet advertising is wrong at all, it might be helpful, as technology and the internet becomes more and more central to our means of gathering information, to ask several questions:  First, what space is sacred?  What space or information should not be corrupted with advertisements?  At what point, if any, is the value of information corrupted or degraded by advertisements?  Would we put corporate sponsors on our holy scriptures or governmental documents?  What about on websites that contain this kind of information?  What about good literature?  The unspoken reality here is that corporate sponsors help keep quite a bit of the internet free and available to all, which I tend to find is a good thing.  I only wonder where we go from here?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bcjordan.

Web Frustration: Partial RSS Feeds

Published by Taylor on July 23, 2008 in Advertising, Blogging, Computing, Consumer Behavior and Web 2.0. Comments

I’m sure if I thought about it for a moment, I could come up with other blog and web quirks that drive me bonkers (please share your own web-peeves in the comments).  But there’s one in particular that has me rankled this morning: RSS feeds that provide only partial content.

Those of us who use feed readers are well accustomed to major newspapers limiting their feeds to article titles and a sentence or two of summary.  A typical NY Times feed item, instead of a full article, looks like this:

Sticking Together, Up to a Point

from NYT > NYTimes.com Home

The Americans preparing for the Olympic sabre team have come to New York City, always a hotbed of fencing, to train for Beijing with Yury Gelman at the Manhattan Fencing Club.

It drives me nuts that I have to click through to read an article instead of reading without breaking stride on the Google Reader page.  But I accept that advertising pressures–despite the fact that some feeds, even partial ones (*cough*washington post*cough*), have ads embedded in them–will prevent the major news institutions from sharing their content in a more open way.

When the Freakonomics blog moved from an independent site to the NY Times, they experienced a huge amount of legitimate outrage from readers for switching from a full to a partial feed.  In a post to readers, co-author/blogger Stephen Dubner wrote (emphasis mine):

Way back when we first started talking to the Times, they said that they, like most content providers of their sort, favor partial feeds. Why? As much as people like to say that “information wants to be free,” content does not like to be created for free. In order to pay all the writers, editors, photographers, graphic artists, technologists, and the few dozen other kinds of folks who create and curate the Times’s content, most of which is free on the web [...] the Times sells ads on its site. But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so that feed readers can still get all the content they want delivered to their computers for free without having to visit a single web site? The short answer is yes, they can, and our friends at FeedBurner, who have been distributing our feed, created a great business by doing so. But the Times and its advertisers aren’t crazy about this option. (Nor are they alone, apparently.) Why? This is the fundamental point: many advertisers do not value feed readers as much as they value site readers, since they believe that feed readers are far harder to measure and track.

Enter the most recent source of my web-frustration: Mental Floss.  I’ve read the Mental Floss blog (which is absolutely terrific) for about a year and a half.  While catching up on their prolific feed after a week of travel, I discovered that in early July they switched from a glorious and full feed to a sloppy partial feed.  I’m pissed.

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Stepping Back from the Mac

Published by Jarred on June 30, 2008 in Apple, Consumer Behavior and Reading. Comments

Last Tuesday, my otherwise trusty MacBook sputtered out for the second time in six months.  In February, I returned home to find my white plastic-encased sidekick unable to boot up.  One new hard drive later, I was back in action (Apple’s awesome Time Machine utility saved me from any data loss).  Unfortunately, I had to relive this scenario last week when my MacBook wouldn’t revive after a routine reboot.  And so it was, after a painless call to AppleCare tech support, that I shipped my MacBook off to let the wizards work their magic on my poor, sick machine.

(Don’t worry, Mac lovers, this isn’t a hate-on-Apple post.  I’d much rather have my backed-up MacBook die every six to twelve months, and be bug-free in the interim, than have a constantly bogged down PC frustrate me on a daily basis.  What’s more, AppleCare was impeccable with their service.  I called them on Wednesday, and they had a box to me for my MacBook on Thursday morning.  They received, repaired, and reshipped it on Friday, and it’s been in D.C. since Saturday.)

In the period between shipping my computer to Apple’s repair depot and this moment, I’ve enjoyed a nice weekend away from the computer.  It’s true that I cheated a little and used my roommate’s iMac to do some quick e-mail checking and such.  And although I don’t exactly count the Kindle as a computer, I did spend some significant time with it as well.  My computer vacation, though,  has made me realize just how much of my free time revolves around my laptop.

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