Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking
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Product Description
Product Description
"Big Ideas" explains where concepts like 'the long tail', 'urban tribes', 'soft power' and 'metrosexual' came from, what they mean, and what their critics say about them. It includes explanations of key terms such as: Maturialism: the name given to the new trend among middle-aged people of spending their money on expensive 'youth' gadgets and services, and the new habit among advertisers of targeting the mid-life market, repositioning their brands as accessories to the distinctive joys of mid-life; The Tipping Point: the controversial idea that the best way to understand everything from changing fashions to the rise of teenage smoking is to imagine people as viruses and social phenomena as contagious epidemics; And Social Jet Lag: an ailment suffered by up to half the population, social jet lag is said to arise when our body clocks falls out of synch with the demands of our environments, thus putting us at risk of chronic fatigue and an increased susceptibility to disease.
About the Author
James Harkin is director of talks at the ICA. He is a former consultant forecaster at the Social Issues Research Centre. Between 1996 and 1999 he taught politics at Oxford University, where he researched ideas of risk within contemporary society. He now consults widely as a forecaster of social trends and writes for the Guardian and the Financial Times.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
One for the loo,
By
This review is from: Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking (Paperback)
This little book starts well but fades halfway through as you spot and then tire of the formulaic approach: (1) outline the "idea", (2) offer potted history (3) rubbish it with a clever quip. One imagines Harkin sitting in his room on the Old Kent Road, googling like a good-un in order to write each of his 600 word essays on 70-odd topics from Advocacy to Yeppies, before tailing each one with a somewhat sneery kiss-off. This is not Bertrand Russell! I take the publishers to task for a glaring mistake - namely the exclusion of a piece on "metrosexuals" within the pages despite the promise offered on the cover to explain the term. Was this cold feet or incompetence? These qualifications aside, I enjoyed most of this book, if only to take comfort in the fact that most of these ideas - whatever their proponents claim - are old ones dressed in new technologies. Many are missing. Where are the big ideas around climate change and migration, for example? I can't quite see what the unifying theme of his chosen ideas might be. The one idea I added in the space allowed at the end was "Listism" -- the current obsession of publishers and other media outlets with lists and league tables.
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