121–130 of 139 posts
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social interaction != group membership I think you're confusing the two.
I don't think the two are dissociable.
If you've never had a non-inter-group interaction, then I feel terribly sorry for you. For most people, that's the normal mode of interaction.
It just shows the power of good marketing really. Audiophiles will rant and rave about the poor quality of the headphones, and rightly so. I've not used Beats but it's pretty obvious from the reviews I've read that Beats headphones are overpriced crap. However, I don't believe Dre played anybody like a fool. He and his co-founder simply understood that there was a gap in the market for "fashionable" headphones, and s…
Beats headphones sound okay and often deliver the music the way many of their users want with heavier bass. Beats also makes headphones that have a much nicer form than any others I have seen.
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Why is buying headphones based on their audio quality superior to buying headphones based on their aesthetics?
Because their main job is to reproduce sound in an acceptably accurate manner? Owning a pair of Beats is like owning a Ferrari or a Porsche powered by a 75BHP 1L engine with suspension made of play-doh. Nice to look but drives like crap.
> Because their main job is to reproduce sound in
> an acceptably accurate manner?
And this isn't even a bad thing. Just understand that sound quality isn't objective, unless you're judging things by how flat their frequency response curve is -- and the headphones/speakers trying to achieve that are generally aimed at audio engineers.
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Me too. I own some Bose QuietComfort 15 which have made my work life much better because of the active noise cancelling, and they have made my flights more comfortable. But with that said, I would not wear them in public. Apart from walking around in traffic with noise-cancelling, which is dangerous, the headphones looks a bit big on your head, so I use the headphones that came with my iPhone.
Bose invented the game that Beats perfected. Bose are over-priced for the sound you get but "just work". Beats just added the fashion element.
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Because their main job is to reproduce sound in an acceptably accurate manner? Owning a pair of Beats is like owning a Ferrari or a Porsche powered by a 75BHP 1L engine with suspension made of play-doh. Nice to look but drives like crap.
> Because their main job is to reproduce sound in > an acceptably accurate manner? Check the frequency response graph of almost any speaker or headphone in the sub-$1,000 range (and quite a few over that price as well). Peaks and valleys all over the place. They're not trying to sound "accurate," they're trying to sound pleasing. And this isn't even a bad thing. Just understand that sound quality isn't objective, unl…
I agree that sound quality isn't objective when it comes to hearing what passes through one's ear holes, but the sound reproduction that passed into my ears from these Solos was noticeably and objectively bad. I don't need a fancy graphs to tell me that.
I should add that I did actually like the construction and build of the Solos.
Whilst I dislike Beats, I admire them a lot. They entered a market where every company was focusing on sound quality first, aesthetics second and they came in with a new take: headphones should look good (I actually dislike the style but a lot of young people seem to love it), and should have a lot of bass to make certain types of music - music listened to by young people - sound good (again, I dislike this but many…
> certain types of music - music listened to by young people Can I feel old now? Where's my lawn? > People aren't buying the headphones for the sound quality, they're buying it for everything else. I find this worrying, really. Are we so desperate to consume that we're willing to buy shit just for sake of buying?
Our consumer culture (good and bad) goes all the way back to the post-war boom.
Tell ya what, I'll get off your lawn if you get off mine... :-)
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I don't think the two are dissociable.
Of course they are. Even if you belong to a tribe, interacting with anybody outside of your tribe is by definition social interaction. If you've never had a non-inter-group interaction, then I feel terribly sorry for you. For most people, that's the normal mode of interaction.
The article's title is "How they played you like a fool" but in the article I feel like all I see are marketing gimmicks for the brand over and over. Each item is basically a small marketing paragraph why beats did it in spite of the nerds telling them they had inferior quality and were overpriced, and then a big picture of a celebrity trying to look cool wearing beats. #1. They found the golden niche #2. They Ignore…
Beats has more money than you (probably) and me (definitely), and for some people, that's what's important. Not the "how" or "why" or "should", but "can".
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Of course they are. Even if you belong to a tribe, interacting with anybody outside of your tribe is by definition social interaction. If you've never had a non-inter-group interaction, then I feel terribly sorry for you. For most people, that's the normal mode of interaction.
I'm guessing you're overly restricting your definition of social group. "Americans" is a group. So are "men" and "women".
I stated the group identity replaces and/or subsumes personal identity.
You replied, "How is that personal identity formed, if not by social interaction? I think the dichotomy you refer to is illusory." I believe this indicates that you think all collections of people are "groups" regardless of the way that they formed, the size and any notion of in-group out-group membership status.
So I replied "social interaction != group membership"
To which you replied "I don't think the two are dissociable" which reinforced my understanding of your previous statement -- that you believe all collections of people, regardless of the size or reason for their formation, are interchangeable. A society = team = club = class = mob = airplane full of people = global population = tribe = clan = family = nation = citizenry = company = group = like-working tradesmen = guild = union = etc.
My claim is that this is patently absurd and a remarkably oversimplified model of how the world works, one that's so wrong as to be virtually non-functional. It doesn't provide any workable estimates or cause-effect relationship that apply even trivially across almost any pair of those words. We've decided that these things are so different that we even give them different words, definitions, legal status, philosophies, fields of study, and so on. In fact it's unusual when any of these two words even start to smell like the same thing.
For example, a team doesn't play a game against a tribe, people don't organize labor into a citizenry, a train-car full of people aren't a global population, a nation-state isn't a guild.
These concepts are vastly different and any model that conflates them is so useless as to not be considered.
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I'm guessing you're overly restricting your definition of social group. "Americans" is a group. So are "men" and "women".
Let me review what you've said, in case I misinterpreted any of it. I stated the group identity replaces and/or subsumes personal identity. You replied, "How is that personal identity formed, if not by social interaction? I think the dichotomy you refer to is illusory." I believe this indicates that you think all collections of people are "groups" regardless of the way that they formed, the size and any notion of in-…
Most of those "collections of people" lead to certain behaviors, simply from the fact that people self-evaluate and even construct their identity based on their membership and hierarchic position in them.
When you can have a feeling of belonging or not belong, social incentives to reject those not belonging, feelings of pride in your actions as a group, etc, you have a social group, be it a tribe, a company or a family.
Self-categorization theory explains how these groups are formed, and why they are a social group, and not just a random collection of people.