Cant wait…

This deserves a short ramble.

I believe there is extremely fertile ground in research at the juncture of these two disciplines - psychology and economics.

The particular area that I used to read a lot about in recent years, is sort of around the area of ‘cooperation’. Howard Rheingold published a book called smart mobs, to look at modern living and how mobile communications has impacted on the way we relate to each other.

It would be well worth it, sending on a flyer to the guys at Google or Facebook, who are really at the front line of trying to understand this.

Danah Boyd, a researcher with Microsoft, formally of Yahoo and MIT media lab does some interesting talks. I remember one talk where she described google applications, that behaved in strange and unusual ways - i.e. went viral and got really popular in countries like Brazil and India.

But the thing was, when you drilled down into the application - it was like the social structure of the country of Brazil or India was being replicated bit by bit in virtual space, in these google applications. The guys in the US, who may come from a technology background rather than a cultural studies background, weren’t very fast to pick up on this. In fact, often it was assumed to be an error or something that could not be explained.

As I said, there is rich areas for research opening up here, for psychologists involved with economics and visa versa.

I am reading Richard Dawkin’s book, The Selfish Gene at the moment. It is one of the required reading list for this kind of thing. Where many individual parts come together to form a larger collection, which may be a human being, a giraffe, a whale or a monkey. Dawkin’s book gives a very interesting way to understand huge numbers, and how they form something much larger.