Neuroanthropology

“Can The Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?” A provocative title to Sara Corbett’s New York Times Magazine article, which focuses on the work done by Jan Chipchase. And who is Jan Chipchase? Besides being a Brit and working for Nokia, he is a combo “human-behavior researcher” and “user-anthropologist.” Sounds almost as bad as neuroanthropology.

But what does he actually do? “His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.”

Corbett’s article impressed me, so I am going to provide an annotated version below, coupled with some of my own interpretations and then sent out to all of you. But to basically summarize everything, our world is going to see a transformation through the convergence of four factors: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us, human-centered science, and emerging methods.

All four of these are age-old, but now, reformed and resurgent, they will help shape our world in years to come. Welcome to the new globalization. It lurks behind the bright lights, big city view peddled in academia and media alike.

People-Driven Processes

Chipchase engages in “on-the-ground intelligence-gathering” to help promote “human-centered design.” This “business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on.”

Continue reading “Cellphones Save The World”

…from today’s New York Times.

Louise Story writes The Face of a Prophet on George Storos. One quote jumped out at me: “Now in his eighth decade, [Soros] yearns to be remembered not only as a great trader but also as a great thinker. The market theory he has promoted for two decades and espoused most of his life — something he calls “reflexivity” — is still dismissed by many economists. The idea is that people’s biases and actions can affect the direction of the underlying economy, undermining the conventional theory that markets tend toward some sort of equilibrium. Mr. Soros said all aspects of his life — finance, philanthropy, even politics — are driven by reflexivity, which has to do with the feedback loop between people’s understanding of reality and their own actions. Society as a whole could learn from his theory, he said. “To make a contribution to our understanding of reality would be my greatest accomplishment,” he said.

The other quickie is David Brooks’ humorous op-ed The Great Forgetting. The quote from there: “Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots. On the one side are these colossal Proustian memory bullies who get 1,800 pages of recollection out of a mere cookie-bite. They traipse around broadcasting their conspicuous displays of recall as if quoting Auden were the Hummer of conversational one-upmanship. On the other side are those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.”

Now if we could only put those two together, then we might actually have a great theory!