The great unasked question of the age....

Technology is wasted on the crapiest generation of spoilt idiots (yeah, that includes me) « Nicola Davies

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:20:02 GMT

Pingback from Technology is wasted on the crapiest generation of spoilt idiots (yeah, that includes me) « Nicola Davies

re: The great unasked question of the age....

steve booth — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:40:41 GMT

hi Rory,

You raise very good questions, ending with this: The brutal question underlying all this is simple. For all the talk about "value not price", do people have any genuine appreciation of value at all?

But that said, I'm really commenting to thank you for that video. That comedian is hilarious. I remember rotary phones and the days before ATMs. He cracks me up. But he is also RIGHT. People take so much for granted today.

I'll be watching that video again.

Thanks, steve booth

re: The great unasked question of the age....

Rory Sutherland — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:50:37 GMT

At http://snipr.com/dbma3 Tim Harford has a great piece on the human incapacity to make cross-category value judgments.

re: The great unasked question of the age....

James Caig — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:50:21 GMT

This makes me think of a particularly resonant scene in The Sopranos. Tony's just slept with the one-legged Russian maid who's looking after his invalided uncle. As an educated, ambitious individual dealt an unlucky hand, she has plenty to be disappointed by. Yet she challenges Tony, and by extension America, on the prevalence of therapy in US society. Why, in the country where people have everything they could possibly want - let alone need - does everyone feel the need to moan about what they DON'T have? Just how expectant do you have to be in order to feel quite so hard done to as everybody seems to today?

What the comedian talks about is the same thing, accelerated and exacerbated by technology. When everything is available, it ceases to have value. Or rather, as its put in The Incredibles, if everything is special, nothing is

Thomas de Zengotita writes about how we're all 'flattered selves', perpetually pampered and complimented into believing that we, here and now, are the people who have seen it all. The premise of history is how events have led us to this very moment - as if everything was merely a rehearsal for our time. And our being here, right now, is not through anything as indiscriminate as dumb luck, but because we deserve it. So if things don't work, it's partly because we're so jaded about the sheer speed of progress, and partly because we all live with an idealised view of what should be, rather than what is (hence the basis of most marketing is who you could be, not who your are). But it is also because of our own flattered sense of entitlement.

Because, after all, we're worth it.

re: The great unasked question of the age....

James Page — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:31:51 GMT

DAN ARIELY et al latest paper may shed some light on the issue "In Search of Homo Economicus: Preference Consistency, Emotions, and Cognition" In a series of very clever experiments they show that people make more rational decisions (or Preference Consistency) when they use the emotive rather than confusingly the rational part of their brain.

He quotes Wilson, et. al., 1993 found that if people spent too much time deliberating the positives and negatives when evaluating Jam or Art they would have less enjoyment than if they didn't. So if you try to rationalise your purchase of Sky TV it will ruin your enjoyment of it.

In other words less words (the experiments only tested short copy, and I wonder if long copy would make a difference), more pictures, less bargains, less facts.

You can download the paper here papers.ssrn.com/.../papers.cfm (free but complex registration process)

You may find Kevin Kelly's (ex editor of Wired) post on this interesting. <a href="www.kk.org/.../are_we_duped_by.php" >Are We Duped By the Technium?</a>If technology is so bad for our spirits, why do we consume it?

Kelly makes the argument that "What progress means for some people is that by the miracle of modern medicine, we can be unsatisfied for decades longer than ever before. Some year in the future, science will enable us to live forever, so we’ll be unhappy forever."