NeuroScience: Friend or foe?

I don’t know what to make of neuroscience…is it going too far?

As a marketer I feel that neuroscience is the best invention ever. By using neuroscience we are able to get to the consumer to believe that they need the product one way of the other by stimulating different feelings. Appealing to their senses regardless what they might need or actually want to buy. Marketers are able to study the consumer trends and what triggers the consumer particular interest to want to buy something or the product in question.

As a consumer I am reluctant to accept the idea of neuroscience. This is because I would be targeting with products that I actually don’t need or want and quite possibly not even afford (considering the economic crisis and the majority of income in general). Neuroscience could be the cause of more debt and the creation of more inequality in the world. It is scary how the mind of others could be influence so easily. How do I know the products that I think I need are the ones that I actually buy.

I believe the neuroscience can be used at a shallow level, such things as particular colors, nice packaging and so on. But, I would not want it to go beyond that influencing feelings and action. This is because as a marketer I don’t want to trick anyone into purchasing anything and even more so if it ultimately is going to affect them in a certain way (such as budgets and actually taking home something useless or that doesn’t work). As a consumer I would like to have the choice to test products for myself and be able to go more in depth of the actual produce and not be persuade into buying something that when I look at it my mind triggers to buy it. Is that socially responsible?

Sorry Automakers

Dear Automakers,

With this letter I would like to appoligize for the mentality of Generation Y. We choose not to spend our savings and rush into debt by purchashing a gas guzzler that ultimate harms the environment and our health. We prefer massive transit transportation to get to places which is better for the economy and our planet earth. Aside from the fact that the government pays to make public transportation available from our own tax money. So excuse us for trying to be more efficient.

Theres a war caused by petroleum money hungry people and a massive oil spill on one of the top hot spots in the world and automakers keep making cars and little progress with alternative tranportation. What ever happen to the electric car? What ever happened with the hydrogen car? Whats up with the hybrids prices? Excuse us Automakers if your not changing for the better, but we sure are.

The Internet as Generation Y is all about efficieny.Without leaving your home you can go to the bank, you can pay bills, you can pay fees, renew licenses, book a flight, go shopping etc etc Because of this we save time and money and can spend more timne with our families and friends like we used to. We choose not to be in a car jam for three hours, we choose to be safe in the comfort of our own home. We choose to do everything we could do in a week in just one day with
various clicks.

Excuse us automakers that if for some reason we leave our house to the gym, meeting or restaurant we most likely own a smart phone that permit us to carry the internet where ever we go. We continue to solve, text, bb, skype anything we want on the run just to use our cars for less time. Please forgive us automakers, but quit
your complaining and get with the generation.

Yours truly,

Adrian Gonzalez

The Virtual Government

The Virtual Government

 

As Mr.Anthony Miyazaki states in his blog The Virtual Government - Will Online Governing Change Our World? the government is becoming everyday more of a web based institution. In many ways, as mentioned in the mentioned blog, government interaction through the internet is a good thing. This postiveness thrives upon the fact that government can be more efficient when it comes to processing and can reach out to even more people then television. As heard, during Obamas campagin, when targeting the younger public to vote Facebook played a key role in reaching millions of young voters.

 

Yet, theres is something about the government going virtual that bothers me which is the deminishing of face to face interaction. On usual ocations government has some face to face interaction even though many times this interaction is not genuine (its a political thing), but for its survival it does reach out to the mases. Politians head out to see and in some cases live the way their people live and from that experiance can base imuch needed desicions or policies. Even with this kind of political interaction many feel that more often than usual government base decisions on political and convinience reasons and ignore the majority of the root to the governed problems.

 

I believe if Government were to go completely virtual this phenemenon would worsen. Theres no doubt the government could reach more people and ultimately be more efficient in processing given information, but the face to face interaction will completely vanish. If this were to happen would the people be forgotten? I bring this up more strongly now because last night I was watching a movieMaid in Manhattan, during the movie this politition was heading out to the bronx in New York City to talk about the projects and the complications of conditions that exists in them. He was told by the main lady in the movie that instead of talking about them (sure he had researched them and had a pretty good idea about what goes on in them), but that he experience them and then talk from his heart ultimatly being more effective and more efficient than otherwise.