Welcome to A Cytations Needed News Brief. I am Neem Asherazi.

I'm Adam Johnson. You can follow Cytations Needed on Twitter at CytationsPod, Facebook

Cytations Needed, and support the show at patreon.com slash Cytations Needed Podcast with Neem Asherazi

and Adam Johnson. I'm excited for this extended interview that we are sharing with our listeners

today.

The issue of focus groups is one that is very obviously very close to media criticism in general

on how we talk about perception and how the feedback loop between corporations, those

in power, and the general population, how that kind of feedback loop happens. And Liza

Featherstone wrote a real interesting article in the Guardian about the history of focus

groups that we wanted to get into a little bit and talk about in a kind of more less structured

and more free-flowing way. She also wrote a book called Devining Desire Focus Groups in

the Culture of Consultation that we had the privilege of getting copies of and we were reading

it and talking about it. We thought it would be great to talk to her because I know that

focus groups are interesting. They're sort of a great shorthand for kind of the lazy,

drooling masses who kind of don't know what they want and the kind of most disconnected

way of corporate culture and marketing.

Yeah. And they've gotten a bad rep and sort of been countered by the Malcolm Gladwells

of the world to say that actually there's a sort of anti-focus group mentality embodied

by people like Steve Jobs who kind of steamroll through the masses and sort of they don't

ask people what they want. They tell them what they want and they're sort of these heroes

of capitalism. And what she does is she pushes back on this and talks about that the focus

groups actually have in many ways socialist origins and have a lot of potential for democratic

...