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Consumers are “time starved,” as many designers and marketers may know, but there is more to the story than simply not having enough time. The very concept of “down time” carries an important lesson about technology design.

In this post, I analyze the idea of “down time” and the activity of “cottaging” as a Canadian (and [...]

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Categories: Blog · anthropology · culture · design · home · interaction design · sociology · technology design · time · time use · user experience

Gladwell sparked quite the social media flare when he claimed recently that social media pundits greatly overestimate social media’s ability to effect social change. He compared the famous civil-rights era lunch-counter sit-ins to the revolutionary activity in contemporary Iran and found good, old-fashioned face-to-face relationships were a more effective mobilization tool than the new-fangled Twitter [...]

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Categories: Blog · anthropology · culture · facebook · home · organizations · qualitative research · sample size · social capital · social media · sociology

Autumn Rituals: Buying Jeans
Ritual plays an important role in our lives. Emile Durkheim noted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual bookends our experience of time:
The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.
Time passes, in part, because we create rituals to signal [...]

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Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · culture · home · market research · sociology · time

The real meaning of “back to school”

by Sam Ladner on August 24, 2010 · 2 comments

in Blog

These late days of August have an unmistakable whiff of Autumn. Like many other times of year, Autumn has a distinct social significance: back to school. But like many other social phenomena, “back to school” is not what it appears to be.
On the surface we see it as a time for children to re-focus, get [...]

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Categories: Blog

I was recently invited to speak at Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast. The organizers, Simon Chen, Rob Lane and Ryan Anderson, asked me specifically to bring a sociologist’s understanding to social media. Below is my presentation. For the full version, with the notes, visit the full slideshare version.
My essential argument for the presentation was that we [...]

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