How Cultural Innovation Happens: Q&A with Anthropologist Grant McCracken
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2011
- About 15 years ago, Grant McCracken went to a shopping mall to interview teenagers about their identities. He found that the old rigid categories of "preppie," "jock," and "nerd," had given way to a much longer list: There were surfer/skater guys, b-girls, goths, punks, heavy-metal rockers, and many other types of kids wandering around.
In books such as Plenitude, McCracken catalogued the explosion of new lifestyles and identities in North America and the developed world more generally. In his most recent volume, last year's Chief Culture Office, McCracken argues that an understanding of how consumers play with their identities is key to making products that people want. His next book, Culturematic, will be published next year and examines how people create self-replicating cultural experiments that producers and audiences either dig or reject. One example: MTV's invention of reality television in 1992, just as the station's old programming model was beginning to flag. Out of a moment of desperation grew today's dominant form of serial TV.
Trained in anthropology, the Canadian-born McCracken is a research affiliate at Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT and a brand consultant; his blog covers everything from arcane academic research to Gossip Girl plot threads.
Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie sat down with McCracken to talk about the throughline that exists in all of his work.
Edited by Jim Epstein; camera by Epstein and Anthony Fisher.
Approximately 8 minutes.
Go to reason.tv for downloadable versions, and subscribe to Reason.tv's UA-cam Channel to get notified when new material goes live.
Fascinating interview! It's nice to see someone who embraces cultural revolutions rather than demonizes them as so many "intellectuals" do.
Great stuff.
Fascinating subject!
Great informatoin.. thx
I'm reminded of II Peter chapter 3.
@Mathiassss You can try to have them expunged. That will help for any job application which does not have a "penalty of perjury" clause or something because you would be untruthful if you answered "No" to the question "Have you ever been arrested?" Depending on what the arrest was for, this would make getting any government security clearance, possibly more challenging.
So, to watch a Reason vid, the first thing to do is jump to the 39 second mark. Everything before that is just advertising.
yeah if only we could get government small enough to be described as a kernel.
@abadubie Hah hah. I thought I was the only one who thought that!
@Vlaxitov Hah hah. That's a good one.
@goingalt You would be shocked at finding a non-Marxist anthropologist given your very poor knowledge of cultural anthropology. Good for you for discovering that an entire academic field isn't wrung through a Marxist funnel. Those who actually are involved in the discipline, of course, could have easily told you about the different theoretical frameworks available in anthropology, and given you a brief rundown of the departure from Marxism since, I don't know, the 60s.