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find related articles. powered by google. The New York Times Magazine Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe
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"Abrams knows that the Housecalls approach seems invasive -- but aren't anthropologists who camp out with remote tribes pretty pushy, too? ''There are things that you just can't learn from questionnaires,'' he says. ''You have to see people with the product at the very moment they're using it.''"

"Housecalls does not describe what it does as anthropology; it prefers to say that its researchers generate ''reality-based product differentiation.'' But the language of Margaret Mead and her followers constantly creeps into the company's official literature."

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11:47 PM

[ rhetoric ]

"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.

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