‘Welcome to the new WillSmith.com. In the coming months we’ll be bringing you several ways to communicate with friends and interact with content and information from around the globe.’
willsmith.com
Oh dear.
I love August. August is like January. August is in fact more like January than even January itself. It’s January on steroids. That is, a month of good intentions, new beginnings, promises of changed behaviour and generally improved personalities. it is August, and I have big plans. With tonnes of exciting stuff on what I wrote my Master’s thesis on (digital, visual consumption stuff that is damn interesting, I must say) as well as a big bag of unsorted but hopefully interesting-when-untangled thoughts from working in media for the last six months in the back of my mind, I just can’t fail with blogging regularly, now can I. Also, a redesign. Yes!
For another day: let’s talk about the power of daydreaming in digital consumption and, yes, production.
It was never quite like this, but I wish it would have been.
… sometime in the future … but this month, Crédit Lyonnais finally decided that enough was enough. After five years of non-activity – save the odd deposition to cover fees – their bloody-impossible-no-hope-customer algoritms have, correctly, identified me. They’re closing my account for me.
With some types of products and services, consumers are thought to be profoundly boring. Like with bank accounts. Either hyperrational assessors of offers or safety junkies, clinging to a brand because it feels like an institution stuffy enough to lack the imagination needed to do anything remotely risky.
Well, I had a bank account for five years after moving from France, because I liked to toy with the idea that I was back in Stockholm temporarily.
Also, I thought 1 euro per month plus the additional sporadic 27 euro fee (I could never figure out what that one was for, actually), was quite cheap for this pleasurable sensation of faux cosmopolitanism.
I’m not suggesting that this is the most common rationale for keeping a Crédit Lyonnais account. I’m not even suggesting that I’m not an utterly, utterly silly girl. But I think that there’s some kind of poetry in the power of humans to take the most prosaic of services, and just go crazy romanticizing it. And it should be taken into account when trying to figure out the intricacies of ‘consumer behaviour’. That is all.
The word heritage brand is my Pavlov’s bell.
In New York, I once saw a middle-aged hobo type sitting on the street with a tin cup in front of him and a hand-lettered sign reading I USED TO BE QUITE ATTRACTIVE. I noticed his tin cup was flush with bills. Another time, in San Francisco, I spotted another grimy homeless guy with a sign that simply read I NEED $ FOR A HOOKER, which also seemed to be inspiring charity from the local citizens.
from John Waters: Role Models (2010)
