How they see us

Arianna Huffington was on the Daily Show last night talking about blogging and how great it is and how she has this new book out which is all about blogging. And one of the things she said is that blogging should be all about the first thought that comes to your head, rather than the conclusion you come to after lots of pondering.

I don't know how much I agree with that, but here's a thought I had today.

We get a lot of mail that's not for us, or at least that we didn't ask for, because of all the previous residents that have lived in our apartment. So today we got an envelope. The first thing I noticed was: "Your opinion matters!" and the fact that the return address was somewhere in Pennsylvania. The next thing I noticed was who it was addressed to: "Current resident"

I think that pretty well sums up the way that companies look at us. They want to know a lot about us: what we eat, what we buy, how often we buy it, what kind of stores we like. Basically, our opinion matters. But of course, what doesn't matter is our name. We don't want to know WHO you are, we just want to reduce you to a bunch of useful marketing data.

I feel so needed.