"Community provides a sandbox for playing with identity. Members can find spaces to feel even more themselves"
We draw a lot of insight from observing how branding and advertising agencies try to make a market out of the unmarketable or uncommodifiable. It produces pointers to what one may value as human, and thus defend.
The creative agency Protein Agency run a series of research reports that travel exactly down that fault-line, called Dirty Words. These reports, as they put it:
look to redefine the meaning of meaningless words. We want to look at keywords that dominate product, brand, and media conversations to unpack the disconnect in meaning between individuals and companies. We think of these as Dirty Words, whose original meaning has been modified by cultural shifts.
The previous three are exclusivity, influence, and ownership - full of genuinely contrarian insight. But we are enjoying their current report, on community as a dirty word, as it sharpens up our own use of the term in our own, activist practice. Their reports are each free to download - they only seek to know who you are - and we thought we’d post a few buzzing slides here.
