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You Are Not Merely Selling an Object: You Are Selling a Story

This (hat tip) is an amazing illustration of the power of stories:.   the Significant Objects Project, an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that ?narrative transforms the insignificant into the significant.? Or, put differently, the goal was to determine whether you could take an object worth very little and make it worth much more by giving it a story, by endowing it with meaning. To that end, the project?s originators ? NY Times columnist Rob Walker and author Josh Glenn ? bought up 100 unremarkable garage sale knickknacks for no more than a few dollars each, and then had volunteer writers whip up fictional back stories for them. This, they thought, would up the trinkets? objective value. They were right. Whereas the objects had cost Walker and Glenn a total of $128...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime & Federalism on February 12, 2010 (boomark / email).