So, I thought that's what you might have been thinking initially but I figured I'd ask in order to clarify my point. And you never know; our crowd has more than its share of parents who are professors in the social sciences.
The distinction I was probably unclear in originally expressing was that it would be fun to have someone with me who was able to explain to me, for example, exactly what it meant to be buying and/or carrying some consumer item (a particular smartphone, for example, or a particular handbag) and place it in whatever context they're familiar with at home, and then make some hypotheses about what that meant elsewhere.
One geeky example is that the social significance of carrying an iPhone is different from that of carrying one of a number of Android phones, and which generation iPhone, etc.
I do know some people I talk with about this sort of thing but I've never traveled with them. I guess the distinction is better expressed as that between going to malls to acquire objects and going there to acquire insights into the people who go to acquire objects.
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Date: 2011-01-05 11:11 am (UTC)The distinction I was probably unclear in originally expressing was that it would be fun to have someone with me who was able to explain to me, for example, exactly what it meant to be buying and/or carrying some consumer item (a particular smartphone, for example, or a particular handbag) and place it in whatever context they're familiar with at home, and then make some hypotheses about what that meant elsewhere.
One geeky example is that the social significance of carrying an iPhone is different from that of carrying one of a number of Android phones, and which generation iPhone, etc.
I do know some people I talk with about this sort of thing but I've never traveled with them. I guess the distinction is better expressed as that between going to malls to acquire objects and going there to acquire insights into the people who go to acquire objects.