Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,30

since he’d sent Awad around with covert instructions to behave in such a way as to test for faultlines in Field Team morale and the girl’d shown such an extraordinary blend of personal stones and political aplomb in defusing Awad’s stressors) so but yes which field experiment Britton and his mentee Laleman had been told by no less a personage than T. Cordell (‘Ted’) Belt himself was designed to produce data on the way(s) certain received ideas of market research’s purposes affected the way Field Researchers facilitated their Targeted Focus Groups’ GRDS phase and thus influenced the material outcome of the TFGs’ in camera deliberations and GRDSs. This internal experiment was the second stage of a campaign, Britton had later told Laleman over near-zeppelin-sized cigars in his inner office, to finally after all this time start bringing US marketing research into line with the realities of modern hard science, which had proved long ago (science had) that the presence of an observer affects any process and thus by clear implication that even the tiniest, most ephemeral details of a Field test’s setup can impact the resultant data. The ultimate objective was to eliminate all unnecessary random variables in those Field tests, and of course by your most basic managerial Ockham’s Razorblade this meant doing away as much as possible with the human element, the most obvious of these elements being the TFG facilitators, namely Team Δy’s nerdy beleaguered Field Researchers, who now, with the coming digital era of abundant data on whole markets’ preferences and patterns available via cybercommerce links, were soon going to be obsolete (the Field Researchers were) anyway, Alan Britton said. A passionate and assuasive rhetor, Britton liked to draw invisible little illustrations in the air with his cigar’s glowing tip as he spoke. The mental image Scott Laleman associated with Alan Britton was of an enormous macadamia nut with a tiny little face painted on it. Laleman did unkind impersonations of Britton’s speech and gestures for some of the boys in Technical Processing when he was sure Mr. B. was nowhere around. Because the whole thing from soup to nuts could soon be done via computer network, as Britton said he was sure he didn’t have to sell Laleman on. Scott Laleman didn’t really even like cigars. Meaning the coming www-dot-slash-hypercybercommerce thing, which there’d already been countless professional seminars on and all of US marketing and advertising and related support industries were terribly excited about. But where most agencies still saw the coming www primarily as just a new, fifth venue* for high-impact ads, part of your more forward-looking Reesemeyer Shannon Belt-type vision for the coming era involved finding ways to exploit cybercommerce’s staggering research potential as well. Undisplayed little tracking codes could be designed to tag and follow each consumer’s w3 interests and spending patterns—here Laleman once again told Alan Britton what these algorithms were commonly called and averred that he personally knew how to design them; he of course did not tell Britton that he had already secretly helped design some very special little tracking algorithms for A.C. Romney- Jaswat & Assoc.’s sirenic Chloe Jaswat and that two of these quote unquote Cookies were even at that moment nested deep within Team Δy’s SMTP/POP protocols. Britton said that Focus Groups and even n-sized test markets could be assembled abstractly via ANOVAs† on consumers’ known patterns, that the TFG vetting was built right in—as in e.g. who showed an interest? who bought the product or related products and from which cybervendor via which link thing?—that not only would there be no voir dire and no archaic per diem expenses but even the unnecessary variable of consumers even knowing they were part of any sort of market test was excised, since a consumer’s subjective awareness of his identity as a test subject instead of as a true desire-driven consumer had always been one of the distortions that market research swept under the rug because they had no way of quantifying subjective-identity-awareness on any known ANOVA. Focus Groups would go the way of the dodo and bison and art deco. Alan Britton had already had versions of this conversation with Scott Laleman several times; it was part of Britton’s way of pumping himself up. Laleman had a vision of himself at a very large and expensive desk, Chloe Jaswat behind him kneading his trapezius muscles, while an enormous macadamia nut sat in a low chair before the desk and pleaded for a livable severance package. Sometimes, on