Hey Baby, What's Your Schemata?

A guy walks up to a girl in a bar and says: “Hey baby, what’s your schemata?”

I’m not a psychologist and I don’t play one on the internets, but I do find myself desperate for an empirical model to study the interaction between people and culture. Enter psychology. Psychologists have long used the theory of schema to understand the byzantine mental structures used by our brains to process information. And increasingly, social scientists are using schemata in their investigations of culture.

Yet settling on what we all mean by culture (which varies by discipline, by university, and by individual) can be tricky.

Category: The Gnovis Blog

Real Estate Killed the Radio Star?

No, not quite. That happened years ago when MTV began tinkering with its programming and started slowly phasing out music-related content. New Yorkers, at least some of them anyway, are mourning the loss of MTV’s iconic Times Square studio on Broadway after landlord S.L. Green and the music network’s parent company, Viacom, opted not to renew the space after the 12-year lease term ends.

Category: The Gnovis Blog

Ann Arbor loses the News

On July 24, the Chicago Tribune printed a mournful column, lamenting the death of the Ann Arbor News. Unlike many other cities, the death of the Ann Arbor News is the death of the only major news source in the area.

The News was not just a hometown paper for the 114,000 residents of this university town about 45 miles west of Detroit, it was the hometown paper. Ann Arbor has become the first American city of any size to lose its only full-time daily.

But perhaps understandably(less so for the many journalists sitting in the seats), they are starting from the ground up. The editors are trying a business model that has been semi-successful for other digital news outlets: small staff, small circulation, niche advertising (see AnnArbor.com–oh and the top story this morning is dead swans).

Category: The Gnovis Blog