Funny Example

Last weekend it was raining and I though it was a great day to put together some Ikea boxes and wondered if any other Twitter user came up with the same idea at exact the same moment. When I looked for only the word ‘Ikea’ I only got tweets from the last minutes, so Ikea surely was a hot topic that sunday! When I look for ‘dozen’ (Dutch for boxes) I get tweets with the English word dozen so I had to look for ‘boxes’ and found someone who wrote about Ikea boxes too;

@themurmish Ah, the smell of freshly opened IKEA boxes… 1:43 AM Jun 7th from web

Then I asked if he was cynical about this and he replied he could not wait for the smell to be out of his apartment. Not much later he replied a friend and him were writing a twesis too so we should stay in touch. This information was not on Twitter and I only found him because of Ikea boxes, funny how things go on Twitter.

Shops for the Masses

Is IKEA the McDonalds for furniture? Or is McDonalds the IKEA for food? (Is Google the IKEA for searches?) Most of my friends have at least some pieces of furniture from IKEA and also most of them have eaten at McDonalds once or very often. I do both too. The differences between the two companies is their display of goods in promotional photo’s and how they look in reality. The furniture and accessories of IKEA look the same in real life as on the website or the catalog, the same cannot be said for the food of McDonalds. The thing these shops have in common is that they’re created for the masses, like many websites are too if you don’t look beneath the surface. Today I was thinking and writing about Twitter and even this can be linked to the McDonaldization, part of a ‘theory of rationalization of modern society and culture’.