Kairos – Phenomenology and Photography.

Decisive Moment, Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.

I can’t say much about this book yet. Other than it is here. I got a mail from Zeta Books yesterday, and they told me so.

I wrote to the author Chan-fai Cheung, Dr. Phil.. Besides being a keen photographer and a teacher of phenomenology, he also is Professor and Chairman, Department of Philosophy, at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Among many other things.

One review copy is in the post to me from Hong Kong, and I really look forward to reading and reviewing it. I already downloaded an ebook version, but that will never be the same, will it?

Stay tuned for a review, and probably much more on this book. Oh,  Kairos is an old Greek word, and it basically means “decisive moment”.

Have a good day.

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For full information about the book, please go here.

Telenot Commercial

Telenor’s overall marketing concept this season is that they want to help and support you. Hardly an USB position,  but fair enough. Telenor is trying to trick you into one of their stores where the staff can act as gods/guides to the complicated world of telecommunication. How to set up Facebook on your mobile phone, for instance? Fair enough even here, and I am sure that this is a relevant message for some.

But why make a simple message like this more complicated than it really it? I consider their last commercial on the Danish market as an expensive, confusing and artistically blown out example of how you muddle a basically good idea. My 2P. It hardly moves anything. Least of all market shares.

I might do a proper  CET (Communication Efficiency Test) on this commercial. Yes, I think I will.

Please take my wording here as a result of first impressions. That might change after a test.

Read more about Telenor Danmark.

Frequent but Small Mini-Insights.

Mini Insight. Copyright.

“Rather than coming in a single moment of insight, creativity involves a lot of hard work over an extended period of time. While doing the work, the creator experiences frequent but small mini-insights. Unlike the mysterious insight of our creativity myth, these mini-insights are usually easy to explain in terms of the hard work that immediately preceded them.”

R. Keith Sawyer: Explaining Creativity, Oxford University Press 2006.

This is a barebones pitstop post. For more of the same, please go to pitstop puzzle.

Library Thing.

Yet this is a delusion.

Kids in Alley. Knut Skjærven.

“The world of perception, or in other words the world which is revealed to us by our senses and in everyday life, seems at first sight to be the one we know best of all. For we need neither to measure nor to calculate in order to gain access to this world and it would seem that we can fathom  it simply by opening our eyes and getting on with our life. Yet this is a delusion. In these lectures, I hope to show that the world of perception is, to a great extent, unknown territory as long as we remain in the practical or utilitarian mode. I shall suggest that much time and effort, as well as culture, have been needed in order to lay this world bare and that one of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy (that is, the art and philosophy of the last fifty to  seventy years) has been to allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always  prone to forget.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception, Routledge London New York  2004. (Translated by Oliver Davis).

This is a barebones pitstop post. For more of the same, please go to pitstop puzzle.

Library Thing.

Who Is Reading Barebones?

Screen shot 2010-02-02 at 09.24.56

It has been a while since we had blog statistics. This time is as good as any.

Screen shot 300 2010-02-02 at 09.25.47

Who is reading barebones? The answer to that question is that I don’t know. But I have an idea of where they come from. Normally the US is in for 40plus percent of readership, but that changed overnight due to the last post in the TDC/Telia/Telenor Project. Even Norway and Sweden opted in with some readers. A few.

Americans, this morning, is down to 36,20 percent, the Danes (nudes included) up to 17,40 percent and the British try to hang in there as well with some 13 percent straight. Apart from the cold weather it is a good day.

Good to see that things work. They don’t always do.

By the way, I saw Telenor’s new commercial yesterday. I will comment on it soon. They give away mobile broadband access for free. Really, I should consider becoming a customer .

Both screenshots are from Statcounter.

Szarkowski: Introduction.

The Thing Itself. Copyright 2007: Knut Skjærven.

“The first thing a photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it: unless he did, photography would defeat him. He learned that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness, and to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligence both acute and supply.

But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing than the reality itself. Much of the reality was filtered out in the static little black and white image, and some of it was exhibited with an unnatural clarity, an exaggerated importance. The subject and the picture was not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer’s problem  to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter.”

John Szarkowski: The Photographers Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2009.

Library Thing.

This is a barebones pitstop post. For more pitstop posts, please go to pitstop puzzle.

Other posts on Szarkowski: Introduction, The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point.

Mrs. Robinson.

“Here is to you Mrs. Robinson”. You are welcome to sing it. I am sure that you know the song from way back. Simon and Garfunkel it was who wrote and performed it for Mike Nichols’ Oscar winning film”The Graduate”.

If you have seen the movie, or read the story, you will know that it is about a middle age woman having an affair with a much younger man. Excellently played by Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffmann. Way back in 1960 something.

Another Mrs. Robinson turned up this week. I am sure that you know that one as well. Mrs. Iris Robinson, a well-known Irish politician, admitted to have had an affair with a 19 old friend-of-the family’s son. She later provided him with a 50,000 pounds loan from two local developers to help him set up his own business.

Her husband, Mr. Peter Robinson, who just happened to be Northern Ireland’s First Minister did not know about this, he says, but nevertheless he temporarily stepped down from office yesterday leaving Northern Ireland in a political turmoil.

Not good for Northern Ireland First Minister Business. Not at all good.

To be continued … (-:).

While you wait for the continuation, you may rest your soul by listening to this alternative version of the song Mrs. Robinson.

Good luck it.

barebones’ telco project

Photographers. Copyright 2009.

Barebones have been looking for a company, a couple of companies, a highly competitive environment on a national (local) marked to use as a specific case to investigate, and possible show, what benefits a barebones approach to a prolific communication area can have. We have now found such an area and have started researching it.

The case will be around the high-end telecommunication industry on the Danish consumer market consisting of three providers: Telia, Telenor and TDC. (Triple Tee).

The reasons why this area is interesting are, among other things, the following.

1) The Danish marked is reasonably small and therefore possible to oversee.

2) The number of players are limited.

3) The competition among the three main players are hefty.

4) The penetration of telco based products are among the highest in the world.

5) Customers are highly educated and critical.

6) A barebones approach to the area, due to the specifics of the Danish marked, is likely to have an international interest.

7) Ownership, strategies and markets tactics are very different in the three companies mentioned (more on this later).

What, then,  is a “the barebones approach”?

A barebones approach to the area includes all that you normally find in a traditional “marked analysis” as a prerequisite to a marked address, and thus to market communication.

Add  to that three things:

First, we go a step further in that we will look for a proper reflection of strategy, tactics and overall market conditions in the expressed marked communication e.g. commercials, print advertising, online marketing, etcetera.

Second, the project will be bases on the barebones toolbox and resources, in which traditional tools for market analyses occupies but a tiny corner. This will, hopefully, bring forward new aspects of market communication, and establish spaces for future planning, and implementation in the competitive arena.

Third: the stress will be on specific communication and not the planning of such communication. The first, normally, being a weak link.

There are, however, certain modification that needs to be made. The investigation and analysis will be based on open source material. This means that we rely on what spokesmen from the three companies have said or indicated. We look at websites, read interviews and press material, etcetera.  In addition, we look at what the companies have executed through other venues of market communication e.g. different forms of print advertising, commercials, social groups marketing, etcetera.

We mirror that against what the companies have stated in their e.g. visions, mission and strategies as we find these stated and explained, for instance, on their websites. All companies have extensive web sites.

Barebones will conduct content analysis of company communication and position each campaign, or other marked communication, in communication grids. Such positioning will possible reveal communication gaps. e.g. empty spaces for future telco communication.

And barebones will do more along these lines.

Why this effort? What’s in it for barebones communication, you may well ask?

Well, barebones sees it this way: Since it is the first time we execute an extensive barebones communication analysis to a specific and focused area, methods and models are not clearly defined from the start.  These will only emerge during the unfolding of the project, and will thus be new territory for barebones as well. Methods and models will be reusable for future analysis of a similar kind. That’s what in it for barebones communication.

By the end of the project new ways of market analysis will have emerged.

How are we going to present the material? We will not present it in any tradition way. We will present it the barebones way. There will be no final reports or executive summary.

The presentation will happen as we go along. This means that you need to follow the posts related to this barebones’ theme. We may collect relevant posts at a blog page, as with barebones puzzle, at a later stage. All relevant posts will be tagged: barebones telco. You will be able to find all theme posts by hitting this tag in the tag cloud. But you will need to sort posts, structure them, read them and understand  them on your own.

Does this mean that barebones communication will turn into a Danish telco project for the next many months? No, it will not mean that, but there will be some triple tee posts (Telia, Telenor, TDC).  Evidently.

Good luck with it. Remember to stay tuned

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The photograph, or the people in it, has nothing to do with the theme in question. It is there for its own, or symbolic, sake only.

Ladies Here We Come.

One of the most talked about Danish commercials in 2008 was Fleggaard’s commercial for a washing machine. Promoted mainly by bare breasts.

Titled by one if the best barebones captions that years: from bare bones to bare breasts. Now Fleggaard has done it again, but this time aimed at women. “Ladies here we come”.

Apart from the gender difference in the two commercials, there are other differences too. Try check this new Fleggaard commercial in the Communication Efficiency Test (CET), and see how it falls out. Something like this. Your turn.

You could also go behind the scenes of Fleggaard’s latest commercial, or take a look at all the provocative commercials from one site. You need to state that you are over 18 to watch them. Click the link “se filmen” on the right hand side of each commercial to get them rolling.

Fleggaard operates just over the border from Denmark into Germany having large groups of customers from Denmark every day. The company is a successful Danish retailer. As his location, so his commercials: just over the border. People seems to enjoy them.

Good luck with it with the commercial entertainment from Fleggaard.

Just Brilliant: Be Your Own Hero.

Sometimes commercials can be just brilliant. Watch the commercial found at YouTube, or make your own version here. Be your own hero. English version.