Some of the folks who attended my Emetrics Summit presentation emailed me wanting to know where they could read more on what I was talking about. One person phrased it as "If you have a few suggestions for that sort of thing (e.g., what kind of physical posture to adopt during different types of business negotiations, or how to present images on a website for different purposes, etc.), I'd love to read more."My suggestions for the interested but casual reader come down to this; Anything by Ed Hall or Clifford Geertz is good and generally accessible. I thought Geertz' Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (Basic Books Classics) an incredible read and still reference it regularly. Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness can serve as a nice introductory text and DeRupp's Master Game, if you can find a copy, is a good read. Make sure you get the 1968 version. There's a new version out and I have no idea what was updated/changed/modified in it. I found The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do a good general source on similar subjects to what I do.
My basic suggestion is to find a book on cultural anthropology, urban anthropology, retail anthropology (yep, those last two are actual fields of research) at a bookstore or library and skim several sections. If you enjoy the author's style and are getting something from it, that's the book you should be reading. If anthropology isn't your thing, find a book on how people differ; in their language, in their cooking styles, in their art forms, the key is to recognize differences. Some of the best field research I've ever seen done was while cooking with friends and family or watching different people make art.
Lots of people liken what I study and talk about to NLP - NeuroLinguistic Programming. Fair disclosure dept: I do have a Master's Certification in NLP and have done advanced research in neurolinguistics (which is different from NLP). I've known some truly advanced practitioners of NLP and they don't study the same things I do although there is some overlap. I'm sure there are good books from that field that would provide some insight for interested readers.
The downloadable chapters to Reading Virtual Minds are as good an intro as any to what I was talking about during the presentation, and there's always NextStage's trainings, seminars and classes.
Now for the rest of the story...
When I was first asked about suggested readings I thought, "Oh, I'll give them a bibliography."Well, the bibliography got up to 97 entries before I stopped and told myself, "I don't think this is what they're interested in, Joseph." (I have this desire to be rigorous and document everything, a case where my strength is also my weakness.)
That 97 entry bibliography wasn't even complete. Right now, on my desk, are over twenty books I've read in the past six months that haven't made it into our bibliographic system yet. And that's not counting the stacks of journals that we've referenced in our research and haven't made it into the system, either. No Joke!
Then I thought, "I can just provide some of the reading lists I've given students over the years." The problem with that was that the readings were just a tad technical, not something I'd recommend for a lay audience. Even the introductory readings were a bit thick. Some of the papers -- whoosh! -- I'd have to go through them slowly to understand them and I've done lots of reading in the field(s). To do what we do, NextStage pulls from four major fields of study and about 120 disciplines (and these are the obvious ones). Here's the first ten entries from the above mentioned list:
1. Aleksander, I., and B. Dunmall. 2003. Axioms and Tests for the Presence of Minimal Consciousness in Agents I: Preamble. Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(4–5):7–19.
2. Alverson. 1994. Semantics and Experience. John Hopkins University: John Hopkins University Press.
3. Anderson, J. R. 1985. Cognitive Psychology and its Implications. Freeman.
4. Barinaga, M. 1997. Consciousness Research: Visual System Provides Clues to How the Brain Perceives. Science 275 (14 March):1583–90.
5. ------. 1998. Listening In on the Brain. Science 280(5362), 17 April:376–78.
6. Barlow, R. B. J. 1990. What the Brain Tells the Eye. Scientific Americam 262(4), April:90–95.
7. Barrs, B. 1997. In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind. Oxford University: Oxford University Press.
8. Bateson, M., D. Nettle, and G. Roberts. 2006. Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting. Biology Letters 2(3), 22 September:412 - 14.
9. Berger, A., and M. Posner. 2000. Pathologies of brain attentional networks. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 24(1), January:3–5.
10. Bub, D. N., M. E. Masson, and C. M. Bukach. 2003. Gesturing and naming: The use of functional knowledge in object identification. Psychological Science 14(5), September:467–72.
Would you have really wanted to see a list 10x that? And this doesn't touch on the thought that my suggestions are more reflective of what's worked for me and might not work for others.
Remember that part of my presentation when I said "Fields specialize themselves by creating specific language, jargon, to quickly identify those working within the field versus those working without.
"And, of course, using jargon with an audience not familiar with field is a sure fire way to distance ourselves from those we’re reaching out to and those we want to affect.
"So use SocioCultural Chromotography, content gestalt and halo effect sparingly.
"Use them enough so that your audience is comfortable that yes, you're knowledgeable in these things, and not so often that they don't have a clue what you're talking about."?
I think this is one of those things.
And if you really want that list, let me know and I'll put it up. In pieces. Probably by then it'll be 150 entries long. Or more.
Whoosh!
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
I'll be speaking at the Society for New Communications Research Annual Awards Gala Summit on 1-2 Nov 07 in Boston. Come on by and say hello.
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