To start our look around the Consortium this afternoon, I wanted to point toward an intriguing piece from C3 Alum Ilya Vedrashko over at his Advertising Lab site about bookmarkable advertising. He starts:
People bookmark ads. They circle ads with red markers, cut them out, paste them on the fridge, carry them inside wallets, give ads away, put ads on the walls. Given the opportunity and a good reason, people archive, manage and retrieve ads. Naturally, it is in advertisers' best interests to encourage this behavior because bookmarking gives the ad another chance to do its job, which is why we often see the dotted "cut here" lines around ads.
Meanwhile, C3 Consulting Researcher Grant McCracken was just featured in Canada's The Globe and Mail, promoting his new book Transformations and sharing his thoughts on identity in a "convergence culture." Grant says:
You know, Erving Goffman, Canada's great gift to sociology, used to talk about consumer goods as an identikit - the process by which we would buy a number of consumer goods to outfit our present identity. And if it's the case that that identity is multiplying so we have many identities, several selves, then it makes sense for people to be buying several identikits. In fact about a year ago I did a project for a client on storage in the home. The striking thing about homes is that they are bursting at the seams as people accumulate. ... So I found myself in attics and garages looking at colour-coded plastic containers that contained all the things a house would need to outfit itself appropriately for the season. That too was a kind of multiple identity at play.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Gray writes about the various Jonathan Gray's who he shares a name with at The Extratextuals. He writes of other versions of him that include a book cover designer, a porn star, a musician, a photographer, an archaeologist, a computer scientist, acomic artist, a lawyer, a small forward, and others.
See my post on similar issues from last year.
Finally, see this post from Aswin Punathambekar about some of the difficulties facing some attempts from U.S. media companies at providing "ethnic television."
