Michael Maoz

There we have it – Claude Lévi-Strauss passes into history. The man who interpreted myths was himself almost of the stature of myth. I hadn’t thought of him for 30 years and suddenly the newspapers are temporarily aflutter with news of his passing.

As I read through the summaries of his works I wondered what he would have made of the Facebook and Twitter revolution (and they are revolutions, no?).  In the 1962 work, The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss looked at those who are spontaneous (the Bricoleur) and those who look at the entire process and engineer it (the Engineer).  Maybe this is what we are seeing in microblogging – today it is a raw (another Lévi-Strauss concept) medium driven by emotions and reflex. It is a lot about tinkering with Tweets to see where they will lead. Businesses are wary, because they are uneasy with sociology and ethnography and spontenous. They want – and need – to engineer processes and work to create business value.

As time passes and our facility with Twitter and other instant posts increases, the business will gain more reassurance about the gains in customer insight, customer experience, and customer convenience. We are still very much centered on the Bricoleur, with the Engineer standing in the wing, watching and learning.