Where I was heading was the replacement of 'fictitious' with
'representative' or some other less perjorative term to describe personas.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not a persona fan-boy. But the underlying techniques
- quantitative & qualitative - for deriving these audience segmentations
(not just personas) is sound and warrants greater (respect isn't quite the
right word) consideration.

Steve

2009/5/31 Jared Spool <[email protected]>

>
> On May 30, 2009, at 5:18 PM, Robert Hoekman Jr wrote:
>
> A map of J.R.R. Tolkien's Shire is fictitious.
>>
>> A map of Manhattan is not.
>>
>
> A map of Manhattan is documentation of a real place. Personas are not
> documentation of real people — they're hybrid, man-made, archetypal,
> representative descriptions that arebased on real people.
>
>
> Uh-huh.
>
> Except maps aren't true documentation of real places, since much of the
> detail of the real places are left out of the maps. A map of Manhattan may
> not show any of the buildings or contours of the city and even may leave out
> important streets.
>
> The cartographer abstracts the important content and intentionally leaves
> out the rest. That's the secret behind good map design.
>
> And this is just a game of semantics.
>
> Where are we going with this?
>
> Jared
>
>


-- 
Steve 'Doc' Baty | Principal | Meld Consulting | P: +61 417 061 292 | E:
[email protected] | Twitter: docbaty | Skype: steve_baty | LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/stevebaty

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