Re: nettime Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
On Sun, 8 Jan 2006 00:11:51 +0100, Rob van Kranenburg wrote: I don't get it. It is a good analysis. Sings to the right tunes. Yet how can a text that starts with We lost the War end with... fun. Fun has become an overrated concept all of a sudden. Oh, I don't about that. Humour is a very powerful tool. Remember Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals? He managed to move some seemingly very immovable forces (e.g. Kodak and Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago) with great good humour. Laughter can move mountains when carefully used. Brett # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Brands and Identity in the Age of Neuroscience
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8535feedId=online-news_rss20 How brands get wired into the brain 18:31 04 January 2006 NewScientist.com news service Shaoni Bhattacharya A person's liking for a particular brand name is wired into a specific part of the brain, a new study reveals. The research may provide an insight into the brain mechanisms that underlie the behavioural preferences that advertisers attempt to hijack. It has long been known that humans and animals can learn to associate an irrelevant stimulus with a positive experience, for example the ringing of a bell with food, as in the case of Pavlov's dogs. And neuroimaging studies have recently implicated two regions buried deep in the brain - the ventral striatum and the ventral midbrain - as having an important role in this learning. But now work led by John O. Doherty, currently at Caltech in Pasadena, US, shows that the actual level of preference is encoded in these brain regions, and that people access this information to guide their decisions. The key message of our study is that we are able to make use of neural signals deep in our brain to guide our decisions about what items to choose, say when choosing between particular soups in a supermarket, without actually sampling the foods themselves, says Doherty, who did the research while at University College London, UK. This is because we can make use of our prior experiences of the items through which we fashioned subjective preferences - do I like it or not? he told New Scientist. The next time we come to make a decision we use those preferences. Pavlovian conditioning Doherty and colleagues at UCL and the University of Iowa, US, ranked the preferences of human volunteers for blackcurrant, melon, grapefruit and carrot juice, and for a tasteless, odourless control drink. The researchers scanned the volunteers brains using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect enhanced blood flow in various brain regions the greater the flow, the greater the neural activity in those areas. They developed a Pavlovian-type association by flashing a geometric shape on a computer screen and giving a squirt of juice into the volunteers's mouths. However, the volunteers did not realise that they were being conditioned in this way they were simply told to press a button to indicate on which side of the screen the shape had appeared. The team measured how the volunteers had become conditioned by measuring their anticipation of the juice squirts following an image by measuring the dilation of their pupils. Fast food poisoning The fMRI scans revealed significant responses reflecting learning in the ventral midbrain and the ventral striatum. Crucially, they found that the strength of the response correlated with the volunteer's like or dislike of the juice. Stronger neural responses occur in these regions to a cue that is associated with a more preferred food said Doherty. This shows that when you see a cue that is predictive of a reward, you are able to access information about your subjective preferences. Doherty says this kind of brain programming may have an evolutionary function in helping humans and animals predict both good and bad experiences in their environment. For instance, if you learn that a particular fast food outlet gave you food poisoning the last time you ate there it is going to be in your interest to know not to go there again once you see the sign for that shop in the street he says. Journal reference: Neuron (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2005.11.014) # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
Am Samstag, 07. Januar 2006 um 11:47:29 Uhr (-0500) schrieb Geert Lovink: We lost the war. Welcome to the world of tomorrow. By: Frank Rieger [...] Democracy is already over By its very nature the western democracies have become a playground for lobbyists, industry interests and conspiracies that have absolutely no interest in real democracy. The democracy show must go on nonetheless. Conveniently, the show consumes the energy of those that might otherwise become dangerous to the status quo. The show provides the necessary excuse when things go wrong and keeps up the illusion of participation. Also, the system provides organized and regulated battleground rules to find out which interest groups and conspiracies have the upper hand for a while. I admire the perfect Carl Schmitt-ian (and by implication, Leo Straussian) rhetoric of this manifesto: The rhetoric of the emergency state, political friend-vs.-enemy antagonism, and its view of the status quo of democracy. -F -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
On 9 Jan 2006, at 6:37 AM, Florian Cramer wrote: I admire the perfect Carl Schmitt-ian (and by implication, Leo Straussian) rhetoric of this manifesto: The rhetoric of the emergency state, political friend-vs.-enemy antagonism, and its view of the status quo of democracy. You mean admire like in Oscar Wilde's: I admire Japanese chairs because they have not been made to sit upon. You like the text because it's so odd? So untimely? So not like the way journalists and theorists like you and me write? I doubt if Frank and Rop have read Schmitt and Strauss or have even heard of them and would understand the reference you make here. What I liked about it was that it reported about a war that I had no idea about that it was going on. Only at the moment it was over I heard about it. On the cover of the German magazine in which the article was published, Die Datenschleuder, it says Declaration of Capitulation. That's heavy rethoric, no? It is imho an important text that Frank wrote, as it tells us something how the hackers community at large is discussing problems in society (even on planetary scale). We should have a debate about it, as is happening right now on nettime, and not presume that people have read this or that book, in the same way as I do not know Linux details (you might, Florian, but I don't). When I read the text I thought it was significant as it goes beyond discussing some technical problems and solutions and creates a common ground, beyond the hackers communities. We could look into strategies and tactics. I am still inspired by the campaign(s) to prevent European software patents. The Big Brother Awards appeal to me. The struggle over RFID is not yet lost, or hasn't even begun yet. Privacy in general may not exist anymore, but then, as Karin indicates, isn't that a nostalgic position? Geert # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
