wear sunscreen

The post-authentic world - Future Tense - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Why Do People Still Bother to Marry? - NYTimes.com

Brand Thinking: Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, and Other Mavens on How and Why We Define Ourselves Through Stuff | Brain Pickings

On brands as uncomfortable pillars in the architecture of identity, Gladwell observes: [T]he things people put on display inevitably generate a kind of inertia. In a world where we now have extraordinarily efficient ways of communicating and displaying, the question of who you are becomes incredibly complicated. I think that brands are a part of this. When you surround yourself with certain kinds of objects, they become a public statement about who you are. There are hundreds of choices that are necessary to fill out your life with objects and things, and I think that requires an inner logic as well. Maybe the modern version of introspection is the sum total of all those highly individualized choices that we make about the material content of our lives. Above all, Gladwell argues, branding has shifted our relationship with products and services from one of utilitarian and passive consumption to one of political, highly engaged civic participation: [O]ur material choices as consumers are no longer trivial. They are now amongst the most important choices we make. They have consequences well beyond our own selves — they have global consequences. They have consequences on our economy, on the community we live in. When you eat a McDonald’s hamburger, you are casting a vote for a certain kind of agricultural system, and for a certain kind of climate. In a sense, everything we do casts a vote for a certain kind of world. And this isn’t true in the same way it was one hundred years ago, or if it was, we weren’t aware of it. We weren’t forced to make that connection because our world wasn’t being driven on this macro level by the sum total of consumer choices — at least not in the same way. So it makes perfect sense that when you decide what car you’re going to buy, you think long and hard about the choice, and when you drive a Nissan Leaf, or a Chevy Volt, you’re saying to the world, “These are my values. This is the kind of world I want.”