Tag Archives | Social experiment

Using Smart Gadgets As Tools Of Social Control

By JacobSloan on March 5, 2013 in News 14

How devices will soon begin pressuring us to “fix” our behavior. Via the Wall Street Journal, Evgeny Morozov writes:

Many smart technologies are heading in a disturbing direction. A number of thinkers in Silicon Valley see these technologies as a way not just to give consumers new products that they want but to push them to behave better. The central idea is clear: social engineering disguised as product engineering.

Last week in Singapore, Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette restated Google’s notion that the world is a “broken” place whose problems, from traffic jams to inconvenient shopping experiences to excessive energy use, can be solved by technology. The futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal, a favorite of the TED crowd, also likes to talk about how “reality is broken” but can be fixed by making the real world more like a videogame, with points for doing good.

Insurance companies already offer significant discounts to drivers who agree to install smart sensors in order to monitor their driving habits.

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Indian Parents Push For Surgical Procedure To Turn Children From Girls To Boys

By Pelliciari on June 29, 2011 in News 29

Photo: Planemad (CC)

Oh the social questions this raises! How does this benefit/hurt the future generation? Should parents have the right to change a child’s sex? What psychological damage could occur? What if an adult learns that they had the procedure when they were young and want it reversed? The next twenty years may see a rise in the search for therapists. Hindustan Times reports:

Girls are being ‘converted’ into boys in Indore – by the hundreds every year – at ages where they cannot give their consent for this life-changing operation.

This shocking, unprecedented trend, catering to the fetish for a son, is unfolding at conservative Indore’s well-known clinics and hospitals on children who are 1-5 years old. The process being used to ‘produce’ a male child from a female is known as genitoplasty. Each surgery costs Rs 1.5 lakh.

Moreover, these children are pumped with hormonal treatment as part of the sex change procedure that may be irreversible.

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First Advertising Campaign Targeted At Monkeys

By Pelliciari on June 28, 2011 in News 8

The advertising belief that sex sells may not just work on humans, but on monkeys too. That is what the first non-human aimed advertising campaign is basing its marketing strategy on. Via Wired:

A primatologist has created the first advertising campaign aimed at non-human primates and believes that it will be sex that sells.

Laurie Santos from Yale University’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory has teamed up with advertising agency Proton Studio to “determine where advertising has innate primate responses”.

Santos and team will create two foods specifically aimed at Capuchin monkeys — possibly two different colours of jelly. One will be featured on a billboard outside of the monkeys’ enclosure and the other will not. After a set period, the monkeys will be offered both foods. “If they tend toward one and not the other we’ll be witnessing preference shifting due to our advertising,” Keith Olwell of Proton told New Scientist.

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