Still on the anthropology of cellphones: Playing With Fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel. “[The paper] examines how the mobile phone alters social dynamics, relationships, and the construction of gender in Palestine. In short, they document how culturally specific gendered practices (not technological features) frame the meaning and value of technology.” A good summary and a really interesting paper.

-

Not as impressive as the latest Sony Bravia ad, but still quite imaginative. The Rampenfest, a viral initiative for the launch of the BMW serie 1 in the U.S., where inhabitant of a small Bavarian city, Oberpfaffelbachen, build a 400 meters hight ramp to catapult BMWs in the U.S. Here’s the (false) company behind The Rampenfest.

-

McDonald’s launch the unsnobby cafe intervention/website. I went to a McCafe while I was in Stockholm and was quite pleased by the experience actually…

-

“Back in October, when Takashi Murakami’s retrospective opened at the LA MoCA, the inclusion of a guerrilla Louis Vuitton store within the museum garnered almost more press than the exhibition itself. [...] actors - posing as street vendors - were set up outside the museum selling authentic Louis Vuitton products alongside the monogrammed canvases designed especially for the exhibition store by Murakami. The tongue-in-cheek stunt brought to life the very serious issue: it’s still not a social taboo to see street vendors hawking counterfeited designs. Which is a strange injustice to the worlds of art and fashion when you consider the theft of intellectual property rights is a criminal offence.”

-

I just had a look at the L’Oreal e-strat 2008. On the first 30 team, there’s only 3 of them which are from the Occident: Spain/Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (5th), Australia/Monash University (15) and France (30th). There’s 11 teams from The Philippines (all from Ateneo de Manila University) and 10 teams from Indonesia (Institut Teknologi Bandung). The best MBA teams (it’s both MBAs and undergrads) is in 12th position.

And then you look at the finalist and you realized how messed up their selection is. They’re taking one team per education level (undergrad vs MBA) per Zone… Which gives one team from Western Europe, one from Southern Europe, etc….

The best team from Western Europe got an overall score of 73.9 (they’re going to the finals). That would place them roughly in the 20th position if they were from Indonesia, Phillipines, Uzbekitstan. Actually, if the finalist weren’t taken from each zone, they’d be something like 1 team from Spain, 1 from Poland, 1 from Russia and the rest from Indonesia and Philippines.

Just a thought.

-

(Must see) Foam. woah. for Sony Bravia. ****

-

Everybody has been talking a lot about Stuffwhitepeoplelike.com lately. Why? This article sums it all.
“When I moved to New York, I imagined my dating repertoire would reflect the diversity of a Barack Obama rally (#8). [... but] People like me who moved here to drink from some mystical font of urban cultural capital, then just kept on dating within the tight-jean pool. If you’re one of these people, you can supposedly appreciate the irony (#50).
And an example of a date …
“We met at an Asian-fusion restaurant (#45). I ordered the vegan teriyaki (#32), she ordered the sushi (#42). We bonded over our bad memories of high school (#83), and compared the uselessness of our respective liberal-arts degrees (#47). She told me about her work at a non-profit (#12). I told her my reasons for not owning a TV (#28). We both agreed New York was the greatest city we knew (#26) because of the diversity (#7), the indie music (#41) and the architecture (#34). “

Posted in links |