Cultural Groupings: Where is the innovation now?
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ANALYSIS, Sydney –The tendency to think cities are homogenous across a country is an untruth.
Melbourne CBD is vastly different to Sydney CBD. (Yes I’m in Sydney once again. City yesterday and Parramatta today.)
Sydney CBD is vastly different to Parramatta.
The culture in the northern & Eastern Suburbs of Sydney are different. Both are affluent eras generally, but the culture is different.
This goes further than cities. Any form of grouping, cities, generational, academic, social, demographic is by nature a generalization.
Grouping theories
To generalise is human nature.
And many times in writing or describing a phenomenon a broad-brush grouping describes a phenomenon.
A majority of Australians wherever they are from tend to love an (alcoholic) drink. However the image of the beer-drinker is over stated, as many prefer wine or vodka.
This statement often is true for a given percentage of a grouping.
Most Australians I know like a drink. Many Americans I know are business-oriented. Most English I know enjoy dry wordplay humour and sarcasm. A sizable number of Czechs from Prague city I know are intellectually focussed.
Why not just deal with each situation as a sum of individual factors?
Simple. Granularity of each grain of data would over-run us. Each decision would become slow and unwieldly. This is arguably what happened to the Bracks government in Victoria. At some point a decision has to be taken, not just a series of opinions gathered.
And at a national or global level a grouping needs to be representative in the aggregate. Decisions may be taken at different levels however: City, State, National or International.
Interest rates are a blunt tool for influencing the aggregate of groups of citizens in our society. Economists still argue over their usage.
So the government have to decide where to place a road. Or where to place a hospital that is going to benefit the majority within a group, or a sub-group; which may be based on interest or geography (eg. a suburb).
Without generalizations that are predominately accurate we cannot make decisions. If we took every factor into account in decision making this would slow down the decision.
Those making macro-decisions rely on macro-statments.
But it is useful to remember that America, Australia and your neighbours are the sum of cities and regions, that may be generalized about to make a decision. But increasingly in our world, geography is no longer the sure boundary of groupings it once was.
How does culture factor in?
Cultural factors can be best explained in groupings often.
Unfortunately culture is often ignored and not factored into business.
Most people think they can transplant a business model from one country to another with a ‘coat of paint’, if that. Or from one target demographic to another.
Further though in the Web 2.0 world groups and communities of like minds are increasingly international. So Web 2.0 rewrites geographic-based rules of culture.
Librarians gather in http://library20.ning.com. From all over. US, Germany, India, Slovakia.
Rap and hip hop lovers have their own communities on ning. There are communities dedicated to dog breeds.
These communities are boundary-less to some extent.
Whereas once there was no group if you were the only person in our town who liked Owls (like a friend of mine) in your small town, now there is a global community.
So it is useful to think of grouping as overlapping circles, where an individual belongs to individual groups that to some extent explain the individual.
Some circles are geographic, some are not.
That is the success of web 2.0 and social networking. It’s how Social networkers assess each other, communtiies of interest and shared interest. It can be as simple as ‘I love BlackAdder’ and so does ‘XYZLOLCat’.
We haven’t escaped groups. We can’t. Granular data is still overwhelming.
Humans sort, group and generalise. We self-group. we self-generalize (Emo, Goth, Suit).
The difference is whether such generalisations are always tied to geographic, racial or physical groups as in the past, or virtual groups.
There are 2thinknow models to explain web 2.0 and social networks we are using with clients. If you’d like to know more for a business or government application, then drop me a line.
See you soon. Take care,
Christopher
Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.
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