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Bill Fulkerson

It's not all Pepes and trollfaces - memes can be a force for good - The Verge - 0 views

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    "How the 'emotional contagion' of memes makes them the internet's moral conscience By Allie Volpe Aug 27, 2018, 11:30am EDT Illustration by Alex Castro & Keegan Larwin SHARE Newly single, Jason Donahoe was perusing Tinder for the first time since it started integrating users' Instagram feeds. Suddenly, he had an idea: follow the Instagram accounts of some of the women he'd been interested in but didn't match with on the dating service. A few days later, he considered taking it a step further and direct messaging one of the women on Instagram. After all, the new interface of the dating app seemed to encourage users to explore other areas of potential matches' online lives, so why not take the initiative to reach out? Before he had a chance, however, he came across the profile of another woman whose Tinder photo spread featured a meme with Parks and Recreation character Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Ben Schwartz) leaning into the face of Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) with the caption: hey I saw you on Tinder but we didn't match so I found your Instagram you're so beautiful you don't need to wear all that makeup ahah I bet you get a lot of creepy dm's but I'm not like all those other guys message me back beautiful btw what's your snap "I was like, 'Oh shit, wow,'" Donahoe says. Seeing his potential jerk move laid out so plainly as a neatly generalized joke, he saw it in a new light. "I knew a) to be aware of that, and b) to cut that shit out … It prompted self-reflection on my part." THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MEMES STRIKE A CULTURAL CHORD AND CAN GUIDE AND EVEN INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR Donahoe says memes have resonated with him particularly when they depict a "worse, extreme version" of himself. For Donahoe, the most successful memes are more than just jokes. They "strike a societal, cultural chord" and can be a potent cocktail for self-reflection as tools that can guide and even influence behavior. In the months leading up to the 2016 US
Bill Fulkerson

Phenomenal World | Another Lost Decade? - 0 views

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    Contrary to common beliefs on fiscal fundamentals, the current debt crisis in the global periphery demonstrates that the solvency of sovereign states is determined by their monetary power. Crucially, liquidity has a cyclical character in the periphery of global capitalism and a countercyclical character in the core.
Bill Fulkerson

What if jobs are not the solution but the problem? - James Livingston | Aeon Essays - 0 views

  • So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.
  • So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?
Steve Bosserman

Here's How Facebook Actually Won Trump the Presidency | WIRED - 0 views

  • Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were. Bleeker says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned from this election cycle is that social media is increasingly going to be part of any candidate’s so-called “earned media strategy”—that is, the coverage a candidate gets for free in the press. The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less; in a recent 60 Minutes interview, he said he plans to continue using Twitter as president. “He’s going to tell his side of the story from the digital bully pulpit,” Lira says. Whether fake news did or didn’t affect the election’s outcome, Facebook as a platform did. The winning candidate was not just willing, but eager to break with traditional models of campaigning. His team invested in new ways of using the digital tools and platforms that have come to dominate the media landscape. Anyone who wants to defeat him in the future will have to do the same.
Steve Bosserman

"That Is Power": Why Democrats Are Losing the Only Fight That Matters - 0 views

  • We inhabit a world of niche interests and platforms and distractions, where everyone is supposedly paying attention to their own thing. Unlike the mass-audience days of I Love Lucy—a show that commanded a remarkable 71 percent of television eyeballs in 1953—today you can happily silo yourself from signals that you don’t care about. Our attention spans are shrinking. Axios reported this week that more than 70 percent of the American population regularly uses another digital device while watching TV. It’s incredibly hard to seize attention in 2018; there’s too much to read and watch, too much to look at.
  • As Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu writes in his book The Attention Merchants, Trump “cannot be avoided or ignored and his ideas are never hard to understand. He offers simple slogans, repeated a thousandfold, and he always speaks as a commander rather than a petitioner, satisfying those who dislike nuance. With his continuous access to the minds of the public, the president has made almost all political thought either a reflection, rejection, or at least a reaction to his ideas. That is what power looks like.”
  • “The way to disempower Trump is to ignore him, but it’s too hard even for his opponents to do it,” Wu told me over the phone recently. “It has to be a pure attention battle. If you were another network and Trump was I Love Lucy, what do you do? You can’t necessarily spend all your time criticizing I Love Lucy because that will just build it up. You need your own programming and to develop your own characters and celebrities who have to be as interesting and compelling. You need to have your own show. And I don’t think Democrats have their own show other than the ‘I Hate Trump’ show.”
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