My new favourite blog is blog.stayfreemagazine.org the blog of Stay Free Magazine and a must for ‘Media criticism, consumer culture, and Brooklyn curiosities’. Top recent posts include this piece about a public art project which involved covering all the adverts and advertisers slogans in Vienna for two weeks. This on an archive of propoganda music (‘The Happy Listeners Guide to Mind Control’), and this well put and much needed bit of commentary on the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Blink. That last post led me to this article from Stay Free magazine proper (yes! they have an online archive) about those who study ‘consumer behaviour’, which contains this choice quote:
Funny how such a studied observer of consumer behavior could overlook a pretty basic truth–any company spending that much money, time, and energy on my psyche must not have a product worth buying. That is, my so-called needs only bear such intense scrutiny when the differences between deodorants don’t matter.
(Compare with gladwell, here)