by david allan van nostrand | Oct 27, 2016 | Conformity, Items in the News, 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
New generations take every bit of today’s technology for granted. They have never known life without mobile phones, smart phones, tablet laptop computers, digital music, on-demand video, streaming, and so on. When products in each of those technological product...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 20, 2016 | Fads, Human Behavior, 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, cost $4,000, and airtime was $1 a minute The first DynaTACs were owned by four different groups of Early Adopters: Status seekers Business people who spent a lot of...
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,...
