Cultural Cartography

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Off to the party

pink hat red bus
Originally uploaded by lomokev.

I'm getting married next Saturday and then I'm on my honeymoon and then I'm moving to Berlin so there is a lot going on. And not much time to blog. So ta ta for now and see you in Berlin in June.

Getting your bearings

IMG_9437
Originally uploaded by René_Berlin.

I recently registered in Berlin, something that is as a freedom loving Brit who basically believes that the state has as little right to know what's going on in my life as the man on the moon was very hard. However in celebration of officially now being a Berliner, I decided to go up the TV Tower at the Alexander Platz. I can highly recommend it and it felt like just the right symbolic action: To be standing over the town I'm going to be moving to, perusing the axes and generally getting a feel for the lay of the land. It also struck me once again how different Berlin is from London. It is a much grander city in one way but at the same time a lot poorer in architectural interest. In London round every corner there is a fascinating left over from the Middle Ages, the Victorians etc. Berlin feels a lot more purist and cleaner but thus also less quirky.

rational vs emotional

"I must be in touch with my feminine side" - translates to a man being emotional and looking for a way to say it. And thereby, as Shakespeare almost says, lies the rub. Men don't want to be women, any more than women want to be men. So associating emotions with being feminine makes them less appealing to men. But there seems to be this understanding in society that the emotional is the feminine is the right hand side of the brain. And whilst there is a lot of talk about how it's important to utilise emotions in business and for brands to appeal to consumers' emotions, so long as they are associated with the feminine and the non-rational, this will not happen. We have had too many centuries of the feminine being weaker and non-effective for it suddenly to be appealing.

I'm reading lots of stuff about how the brain works at the moment and I also went to a series of talks last week organised by Ipsos-Mori at the London Zoo, where this was also talked about. And one of the most interesting things was a terminology that was introduced about System 1 thinking and System 2 thinking. A new way of talking about intuition versus post-rationalisation.

A lot of the stuff that I've been reading seems to pretty decisively say that you can't make a decision without emotions. And that actually emotions are everything that helps you distinguish between things that you want versus things you dont'. So even seemingly "rational" decisions like buying an expensive Volvo are based on emotions, such as fear for your family and the need to look to good to your friends.

So my challenge to myself and to anyone out there who cares to help is to find a new terminology for "rational vs emotional", "masculine  vs. feminine" or any of these other basically "positive vs negative".