by david allan van nostrand | Oct 27, 2016 | Conformity, Items in the News, Other, Research, Technology
Enough With the Wacky Safety Videos, a recent WSJ article, tells us how it has become the norm among airlines to produce big-budget safety videos, and how customers are reacting to this phenomenon. Airlines, emphasizing entertainment over information, think these new...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 20, 2016 | Conformity, Fads, Human Behavior
They were the first to get on the technology bus, and now they’re the first to get off. Seventy million Baby Boomers were born in the years immediately after World War II. They were well into managerial and professional careers when desktop computers and...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 20, 2016 | Fads, Human Behavior, Status, Technology
One effect of too-small and hard-to-use keyboards is the shortening of words and messages. This spins itself off into a linguistic subculture where understanding and using code words are evidence of being well-informed and up-to-date — technological sophisticates with...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 20, 2016 | Fads, Status, Technology
Thirty years ago, the first Motorola Brick cellphones weighed two pounds, were as big as your shoe, and cost $4,000. The first ones were owned by four different groups of Leading Edge Adopters: status seekers, business people who spent a lot of time out of the office,...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 17, 2016 | Conformity, Human Behavior, Status
A hundred years ago, a new comic strip was published in the New York Globe. Called Keep Up With The Joneses, it featured the adventures of a family vainly trying to keep up with their well-to-do neighbors. Mr and Mrs McGinis and their daughter were social climbers,...
