Focus groups have long-been derided by the left, right, and center for watering down culture and reducing creative and political endeavors to dull, show-of-hand reductionism.
But what if focus groups – which first arose from socialist experiments in 1920s Vienna – are not inherently bad? What if they’ve simply been exploited by the capitalist class and could, potentially, have much to offer a left-wing, democratic vision of the world?.
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Liza Featherstone talks to me and Gabe about focus groups and how they’re ruining politics. We discuss her latest book “Divining Desire: the Culture of Consultation,” her latest piece in The Baffler “Sorry to Bother You,” and the midterms.
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THE APARTMENT WAS in one of those large luxury apartment buildings, like dorms for young New Yorkers lucky enough to have the money to buy a real home but still lacking the inclination to do so. The property had several sprawling lounges, a weight room, and a doorman. A pets-inclusive happy hour was advertised in the elevator.
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Liza Featherstone in Divining Desire: Focus Groups & the Culture of Consultation shares with journalist Chris Hedges how advertising techniques developed by early Viennese intellectual elites were adapted and coopted by US elites to control politics, consumption and opinion.
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BackStory is a public radio program & podcast that brings historical perspective to the events happening around us today. On each show, renowned U.S. historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths. Over the course of the hour, they are joined by fellow historians, people in the news, and callers interested in exploring the roots of what’s going on today.
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Liza Featherstone is a journalist and a contributing editor to The Nation, where she also writes the advice column “Asking for a Friend.” Her latest book is “Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation.”.
Listen to the full interview here.
This week, Inc. editors and writers talk about how 20 small business owners who appeared on CNBC’s “The Profit” allege that Marcus Lemonis took advantage of some of the companies he’s claimed to save. The crew also talks about how an American paper straw company dealt with insane 5,000 percent growth. Lastly, author Liza Featherstone comes to the studio to talk about her book Diving Desire, which is about the history of the focus group and how it transformed from being a tool to determine what things people want to a way to sell us stuff we don’t need..
Listen to the full interview here.
Watch the full interview here.
What can we know of our fellow citizens? The question is at root philosophical or epistemological. In the peculiar climate fostered by the Trump regime, however—not to mention the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal—it has also become a political one. Everything from the trustworthiness of social scientific indicators to the facticity of the news media to the techniques by which candidates reach voters is now subject to suspicion. The means by which we know “the public” is, today, a central public debate.
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