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In the early 19th century Honoré de Balzac wrote around a hundred novels and essays that together he called ‘La comédie humaine’. He undertook this enormous endeavor in order to give an accurate image of French society in the early 19th century. It was meant to be a critique of the social circumstances in that period. La comedie humaine had three divisions called ‘Etudes de moeurs’ ‘Etudes filosophiques’ and ‘etudes analytiques’. These etudes were divided in scenes varying from ‘Scènes de la vie Parisienne’ to ‘Scènes de la vie de la politique. Among these novels there are a few that have become global classics like ‘La père Goriot’ and ‘Eugénie Grandet’. Honoré Balzac, (he added ‘de’ to suggest nobility) did something new in these novels. Main characters in one book appeared in other books also. You can even read little hints to other books through these cameos as you could call them. By doing so, he intertwined the plots in the books together in to one big narration. The novels are readable separately but together they open up a beautiful ‘network-view’ of French society with its hopes, fears, loves and envy’s in the early 19th century.
› Continue reading “Spaghetti Novel”
Emile Zola, inspired by Balzac, did more or less the same in his ‘Les Rougon-Macqart, histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire’. But these twenty novels had a more hierarchical approach as it told the story of a succession of family members and their social environment.A few times a week I travel through Utrecht CS (Central Station), one of the busiest train stations in the Netherlands. If you have never been there: the main hall is basically a large, rather open space that is often full of people. As a matter of fact I think CS secretly stands for Crowd Surfing. Well, to transfer trains I need to walk from one end from the station to the other end and most of the time at rush hour. But even when it’s very crowded, I can cross the hall without any problems and even without thinking much about all the other people around me. And so does everybody else. When I first thought about this, it looked to me as if the crowd is organized in some way. As if someone or something is constantly coordinating everyone, creating pathways in all kinds of directions. In a way like: “you go a bit to the left and you’re going to walk behind him, you need to slow down a little, etc.”.
Tagged with: utrecht, crowd surfing, central station, youtube
› Continue reading Utrecht Crowd SurfingAs some of my colleagues already said: happy 2012 to everyone! When the year comes to an end we reflect on the past and look forward to the coming year. We dwell by the things that we have achieved, the new experiences we have gained, the things that unfortunately went wrong or the goals we weren’t able to achieve. New Year is an event to reflect on our life and develop new goals for the coming year.
Tagged with: mindfulness, resolutions, new year
› Continue reading New Year's ResolutionsI love charts and yearlists. This passion started in my childhood. As a child I made lists of almost everything: how long it took to brush my teeth and put on my pajamas (with a all time record of 10 seconds), lists of the time the planes flew over our house to Maastricht Airport, and also of all the licenseplates of the cars in our neighbourhood. When I think about it, I’m surprised that my parents never thought I was autistic.
Tagged with: chart, social media, music, interaction
› Continue reading The Crossmedialab social media album Top 50 2012And we’re back! On behalf of the whole research group we wish you an interesting, joyful and above all inquisitive 2012! Ofcourse a new year can’t start without all sorts of trendlists, top 10’s of great things that will happen on us in the coming year, and even lists of these lists. Fear not, we will not pile on these lists with our own predictions. There’s enough of that already and as the late great Peter Drucker once said, the best way to predict the future is to create it. So let’s work on that the coming weeks and months!
Tagged with: buzzword, 2012, apps, tools
› Continue reading A new year a new buzzword...As a follow up to my last blog on the measurement of quality, experience, satisfaction & loyalty, let’s take a closer look at satisfaction, as we did in the context of our festival research program. Satisfaction is characterised by most researchers as an ‘emotional response’, a response to a certain service; or as an ‘emotional state’, an affective psychological outcome of visitors’ experience. What this experience includes stays mostly unclear. In contrast to explanations how satisfaction comes about, no less than four models are usually presented to assess consumer satisfaction (taken from: Yoon & Uysal - An examination of the effects of motivation and satisfaction on destination loyalty: a structural model. Tourism Management 2005, 26, pp. 45-56).
Tagged with: satisfaction, festivals, christmas
› Continue reading A satisfying Christmas dinner?Concepting, prototyping and field-test as interactive research method. The Museumbattle is a five day pressure-cooking concepting event for students with different backgrounds (economic studies, creative studies, communication studies and technical studies). In total we will organize four Museumbattles during our two-year Museum Compass project (www.museumkompas.nl).
Tagged with: prototyping, museumkompas, museum battle
› Continue reading Museumbattle: more than concepting in a pressure cookerNormally, I’m not really that much into statistics but today, as I stumbled upon my old post of 2 January 2011 ‘More than 7 trillion SMS messages will be sent in 2011’, I decide to check if that is actually the case. So, trying to find any information on the issue, I ran into these stats that are pretty nice, at least for me. Please don’t bug me with any remarks on reliability in general and the stats in particular. They are just indicators, not religion.
Tagged with: merry christmas, smartphone, phone, stats, 2011, mobile
› Continue reading StatsOne of the unanswerable questions in life is whether philosophy is a science or not. To me it is not. Philosophy is like a fitness center. The activities are absolutely pointless but it looks cool and it might help you doing a proper sport (science). The relation between philosophy and science has not always been the same. In ancient times it was believed that philosophy began where science stopped. But that held no water for science only progresses over time and it would put philosophy in the same perilous position as religion. Useless rearguard fights with the inevitable result of unconditional surrender. It has also been said that philosophy was a mother and her three children were the natural sciences, language sciences and psychology.
The post-modernists claimed that those children had grown up and had become too specialized for mother to understand. As every good mother knows, you should leave their children alone when they are grown up. But post-modernist mommy didn’t do that. In stead she started ‘parroting’ her daughters. She used the vocabulary of her offspring in order to disguise her erratic thoughts and by doing so created a verbal diarrhea that is unparalleled until now. Let me give you an example:Tagged with: social context, sokal, post modernism, philosophy
› Continue reading “Sokal’s Hoax”I thoroughly enjoy LinkedIn. It functions as my CRM, I can keep track on who’s following me and I can connect to interesting people with whom I can make more meaningful connections at a later stage. I also use LinkedIn to show my profile to the world of business. But, lately something about LinkedIn has been nagging me.
Tagged with: linkedin, social network sites
› Continue reading LinkedIn: rubbing shoulders and outbidding one another
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Holidays
A merry Christmas and a happy new year from all of us at the Crossmedialab!
Business Modelling Masterclass (March – April)
The University of Applied Sciences Research Group; Crossmedia Business, provides a masterclass in which participants learn methodologies for structural development and evaluation of products and services. Focus is on the deployment of new and social media innovations. The program offers an introduction to the method STOF (Bouwman, de Vos & Haaker, 2008) and the method of Osterwalder: Business Model Generation (Osterwalder & Pigneur 2009). The Social Media Game finally offers an opportunity for a practical interpretation of one’s own situation. More information (in dutch)
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Extremely close and incredibly slow (ASCA 2012)
The 2012 ASCA International Workshop and Conference concentrates on crossing conventional perceptions of “closeness” and “slowness” in order to explore the cultural, political, and aesthetic values associated with fast versus slow, and close versus far.
Think Cross - Change Media
New forms of narrative and presentation will be developed, new distribution channels and revenue models will be discussed and new techniques will be learnt at this conference in Magdeburg.
