Material for thought

What is the resource that most companies are desperate to get their share of: oil, food, human power? Well, did you ever think of our own minds? Our minds are solicited nowadays by tons of information per day. We cannot pay attention to all of them. Consumer products, politics, activists and media want desperately to get their “mindshare”, and I don’t even speak about the attention sought by our friends and family. Mindshare is a limited and highly valued resource, its negotiation is the object of a new economy, the Mind Economy. But if you are let’s say a teenager, fan of Justin Bieber, and want to become influential, how can you compete and get a bit of the public’s mindshare?

Complex Systems Theory could help us predict public’s opinions. The applications are endless and rather scary, e.g. media manipulation for political control or commercial gains. On the other hand, these researches could also explain us how we interact in a society, and maybe in which conditions social change is possible. It is in any case necessary for the general public to become aware of these new techniques. If not, nothing will refrain their use for the benefit of a few. Here are three examples from the ECCS 2010 conference in Lisbon. (I have edited the paper introductions in order to make them more accessible.)

The Hermitage is a massive residential property under construction in Kowloon (Hong Kong). I was living just next to its location, so I could see the progress of its development and I was very intrigued by the inside. Few weeks ago, I was walking in the adjacent Olympian shopping mall and I discovered that The Hermitage opened its showroom to the public. It went beyond all my expectations and was by far the craziest thing I have seen during my stay in Hong Kong, The showroom is completely out of reality, immersing visitors into a manufactured ‘dream’-like experience.

Here are two fast food chains that I think are interesting in Hong Kong.

The first, Café de Coral, is from Hong Kong. It has a very distinctive board at the entrance where meal placards are hanged and moved manually by waiters dressed like flight attendants. Other smaller chains have also this system and I don’t know if Café de Coral was the first one to use it. But it still makes the experience feel different. It materializes a menu that is changing day by day, even hours by hours between the breakfast, lunch, dinner and meals being sold out. But the fact that it is updated manually makes it somehow more playful and trustworthy than a digital screen, even though the entire process flow seems to be anyway automated.