October 5, 2010
Sunday Mutants 3/10/10
(wow, next week will be 10/10/10)
(anyone have any idea why my computer only seems to want to give me decent speed interwebs late at night, and dialup equivalent during the day? no one else on this router is having problems.)
* Can We Make a Less Brain Damaging Internet?
Good sort of intro/linky to some of the interesting ideas going around at the moment about what the internet is doing to our attention, focus, and ability to think.
* Studies indicating brand loyalty activates same part of brain as religion. The more religious people are, the less they care about brands. Difficult to think of a clearer illustration of how and why we are culturally warped right now.
Similar to Duke’s report, brand expert Martin Lindstrom conducted a 3 year, 7 million dollar study comparing brain scans of the religious to those with high brand loyalty. Lindstrom discovered that the scans of people loyal to Apple matched the scans of devoted Christians.
If you haven’t already, go and watch century of the self now, as it explains how the shifting of our sense of values and identity was done to us by the application of billions of dollars of research in psychology and advertising over the past hundred years.
* Meanwhile, druids are now tax exempt in the UK.
Druidry is to become the first pagan practice to be given official recognition as a religion.
The Charity Commission has accepted that druids’ worship of spirits arising from the natural world could be seen as a religious activity
Awesome 
* Power to the mutants: Guerilla webfare
While many videos posted online reinforce brand messages, others can prove damaging, especially if they’re made by angry customers or loose-cannon employees. One 2008 study estimated that spoofs and anti-marketing pieces accounted for 1 in 10 “advertisements” on YouTube. “Individuals now have more power and influence than at any time in history,” says Sage Lewis, founder of SageRock, a digital marketing agency in Akron, Ohio. “Anytime you allow the consumer to dictate your brand, you have a problem.”
…
Unwanted viral messages carry significant economic hazards. Last year, when Domino’s Pizza faced down a shaky amateur video showing employees tampering with food in disgusting ways, spokesman Tim McIntyre called it “the challenge of the Web world.” He lamented that “any two idiots with a video camera and a dumb idea can damage the reputation of a 50-year-old brand.”
* Some fun wikileaks posters.
* Finally, three tweets from @leashless
“I think we would all be a lot happier to work together on #climate if we didn’t feel like we were being screwed by capitalism
It’s the sense of unfairly shared hardship which makes us so unwilling to radically reduce our footprint to sustainable levels.
It’s the sense of cooperation and collaboration that will get us through this, much as I try to minimize reliance on them for survival.”
Filed by billy at 12:52 am under consciousness,culture,sunday mutants,technology,the world
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