mink

If marketing is an effort to ring in new customers by relating product/services to them, and if knowledge exchange involves sharing deep stories about the effect of things, then marketing is indeed a form of knowledge exchange.  If companies publicized why their news was good for the world rather than just provide the good news to the world, marketing may just begin to make more sense. It may also get tremendously easier. 

( in-too-ish-ee-yah-no ) Once, there was a small town, Intuitiano, Which was very simple.  People lived by their will, By what drove them to act, And they lived peacefully. A young woman was once Robbed near her family, And nobody said shit. You see the town just lived, Day in, day out, it lived, On intuition. And intuition, Called for continuous Existence. No matter (what).  So she went on living, Without her precious things, But her instinct was hurt. Nobody seemed to care, Nor did she want them to, She was simply puzzled. Then a strange man arrived, He was not from the town, And he brought her things back. "Why did you steal from me?" Asked the young woman. She was a bit confused. He said: "It was a test. I wanted you angry. You people need to wake." She replied: "That we are. Awake for tomorrow. Asleep for yesterday." Him: "But what about rules? And what ...

I think about the difference between public and private work a lot. That is, the difference between a public school and a private one, or between an awareness campaign sponsored by an NGO and a music show sponsored by a phone company. It used to make no sense to me that there had to be a division; that "work" should mean anything that produced some value to mankind, whether it was done in public or in private; and that anything else really ought to be considered non-work, an obstruction. Of course there is the obvious, well-defined difference of money: While private work is self-funded, public work is oftentimes funded by public finances (taxes, etc.) and in-kind grants. But there is something deeper, at the core of an institution, that is hinged on how it wants to think about fairness that could be the inevitable division between public and private work. One observation I made recently is that many differences in decision-making come from the degree to which an ins...

In the first post of these series, I basically asked how people will choose what they read in the future. In the second post , I asked what will information will be available when they go looking. Now I would like to ask: What will be an 18-year-old's motivation to read about a random status update from his or her's counterpart on the opposite side of the world? There is a ton of information out there these days. You can hardly avoid it when you log into your social media accounts, even after all the filtering and careful choosing of "friends". You might have logged on in search of something specific, but you tend to get distracted by the waterfall of everything else. So, if this grows, what will motivate one to check on the waterfall at all? Will there be mechanisms to further customize one's content to their own tastes? Will we develop an interest in peer-to-peer learning that is complimentary to formal, productive, more industrial learning? My gut te...

Who demands education and who supplies it? In this post, I refer to "education" as formal education, that is the learning that takes place in school classrooms. There is a consistent tendency among people and institutions today to assume that education is demanded by students and their parents or guardians and supplied by teachers and schools. So, when anything happens to go well in education - a certain year showing exceptionally good results, or a surge in engineering professionals - schools are rewarded. Similarly, when anything devastating happens in education - a year of terrible results, or an increase in exam-time suicides - schools are blamed.  But this assumption begs a question: Where is the students' and parents' or guardians' demand for education rooted? Is it an esoteric demand that comes from within the household at any given inspirational moment? Or is it an exoteric demand that comes from outside the household, nudging the household itself ...