Information overload

No, I'm not complaining about Twitter blackouts - believe me or not, I never got the whale so far. It's just too much information outside there. And we increasingly need filters to keep us going through all these posts, articles, texts, messages, and emails.
I tried to embrace the task of daily reading "a little bit" of what has been published about a couple of topics that interest me, but I now officially give up. I'm overfed with information!
I'm sure Oscar Wilde faced a different issues in managing information at the late Victorian era, but his moan still holds:
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information."
What do you think? Are you also overwhelmed by the amount of information circulating on the web? How do you separate what is interesting from what is not worthy your time? Is there any cure for "Torture by information overload"?

How to be(come) a creative anthropologist

I spent all the 4 years of my undergraduate program (in Advertising) learning how to be creative (among other practical matters). The literature and professors used to defend that creativity can be learned. I was told that some specific techniques allied to the practice of creative thinking would work even for the most hopeless case. To become creative seemed to demand hard work, patience, and perseverance. However, that was not for me. I was feeling fine and blessed in my condition of "naturally creative". I wouldn't take me more than a couple of minutes to come up with a great slogan or jingle; I imediatly sensed what would be an appropriate media strategy for a specific client, and I could shoot ideas endlessly during brainstorm sessions with my colleagues. I never had to think how painful it would be if I had to make the effort to be creative.

However, at some point I decided to leave the comfort zone and years after I find myself learning something new - something I would say some people are simply born to do. I'm trying to do good ethnographic field work. Yes, like an anthropologist.
And - what a coincidence - this learning process requires the practice of a specific way of seeing the world and thinking about it. I need to learn many techniques that are pretty new to me and it also demands hard work, patience, and perseverance.
Well, I'm willing to make the effort.

PS: The link on the title will take you to Grant McCracken's blog - and his great post ""How to think like an anthropologist".

Fat acceptance and the market

I’ve been burning my neurons in trying to find “the” link that better connects the Fat Acceptance movement to consumer theory. There are some highly relevant concepts I can borrow from sociology and psychology and I’m already reading a lot about stigma, new social movements, and online communities. However, I find recurrent posts on the fatosphere dissecting, analyzing, questioning or criticizing market practices and I do there is something there…Something we - consumer researchers – do not fully understand.

This feeling was reinforced today after I read this post at Shapely Prose (which I consider one of the nicest blogs on the fatosphere). In this post, Kate refers to another blogger who had a “dilemma”: whether to support an online store’s efforts to continue carrying larger plus sizes or to discard them as a retailer because they had just cut her size off their selection.
As I was reading both posts and the comments left by people who had read them, I realized that in this situation, the general attitude was not that of criticizing the market. They were actually attempting to help marketers to better serve “the plus market”. In this mood, Kate published a long email she got from the owner of the store involved in the dilemma, and even invited her audience to help the store owner:

“How do we help her make B & Lu a successful store that at least fulfills the promise of carrying sizes 14-30 (better yet, 30+)? If you wear a size in the high 20s, did you even know you could shop at B & Lu (before the selection became so limited, anyway)? How do they get the word out? What else can they do to improve? And of course, if there are things you do love about B & Lu right now, positive feedback never hurts.”

What this post tells me (I’m aware that there are many other relevant issues here – this is just the perspective of someone sited on a business school office) is that these individuals are trying to help marketers to serve them better. They want to fully participate in mainstream domains, and being the market is one of these domains, they want to have the same product choices and consumption experiences of other people, no matter their size.
From other posts, I know these bloggers and commenters are fully aware that the stigma associated with fat is frequently reinforced and fuelled by market practices – the market who excludes them is the very same market they are trying to get into.

So far I’ve read the activities of Fat Acceptance bloggers as a “collective form of stigma rejection” (Gofman 1974, p. 112) and I though marketers were simply caught in the middle of these fight against the stigma.
But this notion of collective stigma rejection does not fully account for the practices of the FA bloggers who sometimes praise market practices and attempt to “educate” the market on how to serve them better. Henry & Caldwell (EJM, 2006) already suggested that “in contrast to withdrawing into an enclave, the stigmatized individual may respond by challenging the stigma label by attempting to participate in the mainstream domains” but we have no data so far on how stigmatized individuals develop workable ways to interact with the mainstream (some studies on immigration deal with similar issues: e.g. Askegaard, Arnould & Kjeldgaard 2005; Penaloza 1994; Mehta & Belk 1991).
To fight the stigma also involves fighting its underlying economic and social aspects. Since the market practices are deeply rooted and strongly influential in these two arenas, they become one of the most evident targets for activists in their rejection of a stigma.
Being part of a group (in this case the Fatosphere) probably allows stigmatized individuals to access more information and share resources that are eventually directed to criticize market practices that reinforce the stigma they are fighting.

So if any of you from the fatosphere happens to read this – does my interpretation resonate with your thoughts? Would you like to discuss the topic further? I have some great references to share and I would love to talk to anyone who’s also interested in the topic. Just click on the comments link and let me know what you think!

Keep on caching

I didn’t think the first time I would have to apologize for not posting for a long time would come so soon, but at least I have good reasons to offer. I’m struggling with the need to define the theoretical focus for my research on Fat Acceptance; I’m having trouble in getting into the field for the research on Geocaching, and I’m running out of time – the summer break is going to be over in few weeks and I wish I can do advance these studies before my courses start.

I may have to take another methods course and I’m seriously considering one called “Advanced Research Methods in Anthropology”. I took only one course in Anthropology during my Master’s course and I feel a little ill-equipped to access informants and get insertion into a community to start my fieldwork. Maybe I know some techniques, but I just need to be reassured again and again that it’s ok to get acquainted to people if you want to get information from them to do research and write a paper. And then I find myself wondering if it’s just me or if this is a regular stage of the learning process... I will take the course, just in case.
I’m just going to shoot a list of reasons that may explain why I’m finding it hard to get into the geocaching community. If you ever had similar issues with your fieldwork, let’s talk - I’m willing to consider any counterargument seriously, because I do want to make this work.
- This is the first time I’m doing field work outside my home country and culture. I see how this can be positive because it makes me question things that would be taken for granted otherwise. However, it also poses me so many challenges! For example, I’m extremely resistant to the idea of going to parks by myself to look for geocaches because I still fear violence, even realizing that I’m safer here than I was back in my home country. Or the way I have to re-write a message ten times before posting it at the discussion forums just to be assured that I’m using the appropriate words to say what I mean.
- There’s no structured group or stable community – geocachers are disperse and extremely mobile. This is tricky... Let’s say that, for convenience, I get a group of informants who live in the same city as I do. If I want to participate in their geocaching activities, I will have to follow them all around in their trips, because the first thing a geocacher usually does is to hunt everything around her/his area. Then s/he has to travel around to keep the adventure happening. If I choose attending to geocaching events as a form of participation, I also need to move around to the meeting places and I’ll probably never meet the same group of people twice. Besides, much of the geocaching-related activities happen in the “micro-level”, in short periods of time, and in many cases, the hunts are not even previously planned.
- Geocaching may be not only “something you do”, but a lifestyle. What I’ve noticed is that unless you have a background of traveling/adventure related activities, you don’t simply start doing geocaching and keep your regular life untouched. This was one of my previous misconceptions that were broken as soon as left my first geocaching event. I thought geocaching was something to fill in the boring moments of ordinary life, something that would aggregate a little fun and fantasy to an unexciting routine. Now I tend to think of it as the anchor of, or at least as a complement to, a lifestyle. And the difficulty this re-categorization brings to my field work is: how far am I willing to change my lifestyle to take this research further? Do I need to exchange my urban weekends for a camping trip? Should I forget heels and skirts because it’s impossible to hunt for a last minute cache on them? Will I get used to carrying the GPS in my handbag everyday along with extra-batteries, flashlight, trinkets to trade, travel bugs, and camera?
That’s it for now (oh, except for the fact that Toronto seems to have one of the lowest concentration of caches per area...)!

Next post will give you a brief idea of all the things I’m thinking about while investigating the Fat Acceptance blogs.

We want you - and your audience

I casually opened my mail box today, waiting for “no comments” to this blog, as usual. Instead, I found a nice message from Kim:

“Hello Daiane,
My name is Kim Montgomery. I recently came across your blog and I love how witty and intelligent your entries are! Your blog totally targets the lifestyles of young Torontonian women... great research and authorship!
The reason I'm writing is, I work for Matchstick Marketing, a hip market-research/ promotions company that spreads "word-of-mouth" marketing for our various clients. The campaign I'm currently working on is looking for women who write popular blogs that discuss topics like lifestyle, fashion, health & beauty and savvy current events, with the hopes that they'd be willing to participate in a short study about feminine beauty & hygiene products.
The survey wouldn't take too much of your time. I'd love to get the chance to connect with you and get your valuable feedback!
Please feel free to email me at kim@matchstick.ca and you can let me know if you're interested in participating in the study and how best to get in contact with you!
Thanks in advance,
Kim”

Oh, oh... Where should I start?
First, I’m quite sure the entries they inserted in the search that pointed to my blog were: Toronto, women, and “sex and the city”. Of course, someone who mentions this movie in a blog can only be discussing “topics like lifestyle, fashion, health & beauty and savvy current events”.
Well, this blog doesn’t “totally target(s) the lifestyles of young Torontonian women”. And if popularity was the spamming criteria, I may not have more than two readers – this is definitely not a “popular” blog.
Anyway, what if I decide to contact Kim and participate in Matchstick’s study? I would probably be more qualified to criticize their survey instrument than to willingly provide my opinion on feminine beauty and hygiene products.
We still don’t know much about online word-of-mouth, but there are great studies going on that will help us understand better how bloggers deal with their audiences and how companies can use them as mediators or initiators of marketing messages. In the meantime, I would say it’s worthy to employ some time doing quality research (i.e. actually reading blogs) before sending recruiting messages all over the blogosphere.
But maybe I’m wrong... Maybe this fishing tactic optimizes results? Or, oh... maybe Kim actually read my blog and sincerely thinks my posts are witty and intelligent?

Geocaching culture

I’m not a gadgets person. I don’t have an IPod (though I have an “IPauvre” - or “IPobre” to the Portuguese speakers). I don’t have an Iphone, not even a Blackberry. Actually, I don’t access email from my mobile, I don’t even Twitter from it. No PDA, no Kindle, no TiVo, no Blu-ray, no Mac. I think all these things are amazing, beautiful, useful, and super cool. But, beyond the fact that I could not pay for them, I just don’t feel like owning them.

Despite this attitude of mine, I now have a GPS... It’s not the latest-coolest device, but it’s a good one: a Garmin eTrex Legend HC. I got it because a GPS device is an indispensable resource to do Geocaching, which is something I’ve been researching online for a while. Now it’s time to go to the field, literally.
I will post here some excerpts from the article I wrote on Geocaching using online data only. And as my activities of observation and participation in the geocaching community develop, I’ll compare and extend my findings to better understand how online and offline data may complement each other. This is also an attempt to contribute a little bit to alleviate some of the issues faced by researchers that use netnography as a method. For instance, how important it is to go beyond the “unobtrusive and painless” online data collection and interact face-to-face with the members of a community? How relevant it is to track community members’ activities on other online spots beyond the board/group/website being studied?
Besides this methodological aspect, some characteristics of geocaching suggest that it is a unique context in which to study consumer culture:

• First, the use of multiple technologies (GPS devices, internet, PDAs, digital cameras) combined with outdoor activity, nature and travel may attract and bring together individuals with diverse backgrounds, profiles, interests and motivations. Besides, these two essential components of the game, technology and nature, require geocachers to articulate their incursions into these two apparently opposite environments.
  
• Second, the main rule of geocaching (“take something, leave something, and sign the book”) adds complexity to the social and communal aspects of the game because it promotes the exchange of objects among players and gives them the opportunity to obtain recognition and prestige (e.g. the first to sign the book of a very challenging cache is celebrated among geocachers). Could play be one central link that brings a community together?
  
• Finally, because the game was created and developed by consumers without encouragement from active market agents, the importance of interaction and cooperation among participants to keep the game active is enhanced.

My initial thoughts linked geocaching to the communal aspects of play. Thanks to the insightful comments of professors Belk and Kozinets, who read the first version of the paper, I’m also looking at references on amateurism, consumers as producers, and the re-enchantment of everyday life.
Geocaching is a fascinating activity and this research project has been one of my top priorities for this summer. You will certainly read more about it in future posts here. In the meantime, here’s a nice video about geocaching by Tessa Banks Jeff Orlowski from the Dept. of Communication of Stanford University.

Summer readings

I’ve been visiting bookstores, trying to take a look on what they’re displaying as the must-read books for this summer. And I notice that something that was already big enough to have an exclusive shelf now has gained the main display, in the center of the store: the “chick-lit”.
Chick-literature is a term used to denote genre fiction written for women and marketed to young, single, working women in their twenties and thirties. Wikipedia tells us that “the genre's creation was spurred on, if not exactly created, by Sure Towsend’s Adrian Mole diaries which inspired Adele Lang's Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber: The Katya Livingston Chronicles in the mid-1990s.” The genre got much more attention and fans after Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones’ Diary became a movie, in 2001.
A good chick-lit title inevitably contains at least one of the following words: shoes, dresses, friend, sister, boyfriend, bride, girl, or a female name that refers to the main character in the book. The covers must be colourful (or cute), and there’s always a touch of pink somewhere.
I’ve read the “Devil wears Prada” two years ago just to realize that I liked the movie better. I started to read Marian Keyes’ “Watermelon” but gave up after reading two or three of the book’s dozens of chapters. So I’m ill-equipped to criticize the genre, and I don’t even want to do it. I’m just intrigued. Marian Keyes alone sold more than 10 million copies of her books (all chick-lit). There are books and blogs dedicate to the genre, and even Naomi Wolf criticizes it (oops: the link will take you to an Oprah show: “Stupid Girls”).
So who are the readers? What are they looking for in these books (distraction-enlightenment-help-something else)? How is this genre impacting on a generation of women?

All I know for now is that these books are not in my summer reading list... Have you read any chick-lit? Do you feel like reading it?

Royalty-free picture from "The Image Bank"