I first applied the term Culture vultures to those who look at markets through the culture end of the telescope: semioticians, anthropologists, discourse analysts culture analysts all. The market researcher works at the sharp end - understanding an individual's motivation and extending this out to segments and market populations. Until yesterday I had not become so aware of the fundamental difference not just between the one and the many but the difference between scavengers and raptors. Not to be rude to my culture vulture brethren - they don't need real people to study them. They can use magazines. TV programmes, social contexts, transcriptions, movies, blogs and websites as quite proper human artefacts to study. Researchers on the other hand always want to ask someone What do you think? Why do you think that? Which makes them raptors - not the Jurassic Park variety but birds of prey who always eat a fresh kill.  

It is a crucial distinction because the world is filling up with human artefacts which has made decision support activity quicker and cheaper - and research is under threat. I would say though that research abandons the principle of live prey at its peril. There are many ways of analysing artefacts many of them mechanical. Research will continue to be time consuming and more expensive than the alternatives. But it will also continue to have a role. There is only so much you can do with artefacts - without a deep understanding of motivation - you just don't know why that blogger chose to express themselves in that particular way.  

Elsewhere I have described offline traditional research as cultivation when online research techniques are closer to hunter gathering. I still think that but would add this corrollary - that researchers will not go out and collect just anything. What they collect needs to be subject to theory and method.  The culture vultures have their theories too but these don't require a living subject. Research does and long may it continue to do so.