From the Library of Quick Study, March 2024
Three topics we’ve been hearing a lot about lately: loneliness, curation, and shopping.
Hey. Hi. Hello. This is The Other 90, a blog about strategy from your friends at Quick Study. Today’s newsletter will take about 3 minutes to read.
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Let’s start here:
At Quick Study, we consume hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of content a month. The most relevant things we see get added to an internal tool we’ve nicknamed the Library. We decided it might be nice to share some of its contents with you, so today we’re going to start doing just that.
From the Library will be a monthly series that gives us a chance to share interesting concepts and stories that are making us think beyond our deep dive Study Guides. Each issue will highlight several timely topics that might merit a spot on your mental bookshelves.
So grab your library card and let’s get started!
Loneliness
Since January 1, we’ve added 11 items to our Library related to the ongoing loneliness epidemic. The problems start earlier than you might think thanks to the fact that kids undervalue kindness, and extend into adulthood where parasocial relationships turn people into stans and namecallers. Our own Soloculture research found that Americans feel more bubbled than ever before. The economy is even changing because of our siloed behaviors.
The answers to this epidemic are complex. Having conversations about how we define loneliness and other mental states is helpful. So is speaking out and telling the truth, a brave & major step forward that more folks in the limelight are taking. Something that isn’t the answer? Branded communities, which tend to mimic the attributes of real communities without any depth or substance. Tech might be able to help, but so far it hasn’t and it definitely won’t in the future if the only goal of a company is for numbers to go up. One other solution would be more third places, breweries, banks or otherwise. Regardless, there won’t be a silver bullet that fixes culture’s loneliness, but lots of little things could help.
Curation
Every time a media network lays off employees, we lose a curated lens through which to see the world. As a result, individual blogs and personal essays seem to be back at the forefront of sharing, which is reminiscent of an earlier internet. The difference is that there’s so much more quantity now that discovery is nearly impossible. Much of what used to be free curation is now subscription-based, and to put it bluntly, an entire media ecosystem built on subscriptions kinda sucks. As we covered in last year’s Study Guide on Anticuration, there are many folks who are working to change the way we discover in positive ways. But these types of tools, and their curators, are niche, leaving broad curation to a select few who have weathered the storm and now have more power in setting the conversation agenda. Will AI be the curation savior? Probably not.
Shopping
The livestream shopping ecosystem is bursting in Asia at the same time TikTok has flooded American feeds with its shopping tools. Teens and tweens are headed to the mall, but will they get in? Without powerful mass publications, commerce is now the dominant way visual styles are introduced and popularized in culture. Consequences of our current shopping culture include train robberies and poisoned gig workers. Read more of our POV on the state of retail.
That’s the end of our first peek into the Library. We hope you enjoyed it! Hit reply and let us know what you’d like to see more of in future editions.
The Other 90 is written by Rob Engelsman, a former baby model and now Cofounder & Strategy Partner at Quick Study. To find out more about how we help brands and agencies get to smarter plans faster, email rob@quick.study. You can also find Quick Study on LinkedIn.