> From: Marvin Long, Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Ok, this one's kind of a cheap shot, I admit. > > I recently began reading Benford's _Foudation's Fear_. Reading about > Nick's Arnet's career projects and watching all the commercials during the > Superbowl yesterday brought me to a conclusion. Psychohistory, or some > form of predictive sociology, will be developed by advertisers and > lobbyists who are constantly looking for ways to change mass behaviors to > their own advantage. That's because advertising gets all the big bucks, > and because to reliably change future behavior you have to be able to > predict responses to stimuli. > > These disciplines leave out much of the question of how we arrived at a > given state, however, which also must be taken into account by any decent > science. Also, I'm wondering if email groups might make a fertile ground > for basic psychohistorical research simply because here is a place where > personalities interact, laden with the baggage of ego but not with the > baggage of having to survive. (I.e., we don't argue with each other as a > way to compete for resources, which might simplify observations and > analysis.) After all, predicting that two tribes will come into conflict > once they start competing for resources isn't terribly hard work. The > trick would be looking at the ideas at work and predicting how the > conflict would come out, which would imply some kind of analysis of memes > and the sorts of egos a society tends to produce. > > So...any thoughts?.
Advertising will eventually die. For four reasons, people do not like adversing, advertising is losing it's effect (particularly on the internet), Micropayments are starting to take effect in some places, and File sharing will make content free. Napster showed us how to do it, Gnutella showed us how to do it right; Nothing the content control industies try will prevent it.
