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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
Steve Bosserman

Is Social Media Disconnecting Us From the Big Picture? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • User-generated content, by and large, is not lucrative at a scale that satisfies investors, and as a result, most social-media companies are changing direction toward other revenue streams. One of the more significant shifts is the move into social messaging.
  • These new messaging features work to bind private groups tighter together, by making it more fun to talk to one another than to engage with the world at large.
  • We are more interested in locating alien species than understanding the humanity among the species we already live with
Bill Fulkerson

The Soil Talks Back - 0 views

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    ]. "The narrow strip of soil around the plant's root teems with millions of microorganisms, making it one of the most complex ecosystems on earth. To determine whether the composition of this "root microbiome" triggers changes within the plant, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Elisa Korenblum and other members of a team headed by Prof. Asaph Aharoni of Weizmann's Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, created a hydroponic set-up in which they split the roots of tomato seedlings in two. In a series of experiments, the researchers placed one side of the split roots in vials, progressively diluting the soil suspensions several times. Each dilution altered the soil's microbial composition and reduced the diversity within the microbial community, so that the different suspensions ended up containing root microbiomes with high, medium and low diversity levels. The other side of the roots was submerged in a vial with a clean, soil-free solution. If the soil microbes communicate with the plant, one would expect to detect signs of their messages on both sides of the root system. That was exactly what the scientists found…. 'Our ultimate goal is to decipher the chemical language - one could call it 'Plantish' - used by plants and the soil to interact with one another,' Korenblum
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

Bernard Lietaer, A Financial Justice Warrior Who Fought for Freedom of Currency - 0 views

  • “I sometimes feel like a flying fish who has had the opportunity to take a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the water in which we swim, and is now trying to report back to its fellow fish and explain what it has learned about what we usually cannot see.”
  • “The real issue is not whether widespread changes will happen or not, but how much awareness there will be about where these changes are leading us. The real question is whether we are even conscious that we have a choice in the matter.”
  • “The urgent message for economics from nature is that the monoculture of national currencies, justified on the basis of market efficiency, generates structural instability in our global financial system. Complementary currencies of diverse types of money enable the economy to flow back towards greater sustainability. While this process clearly reduces efficiency, that is the price to pay for increased resilience of the whole.”
Bill Fulkerson

The digital native is a myth : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

  • The Teaching and Teacher Education paper raises another concern. Digital natives are assumed to be able to multitask, it warns. But the evidence for this is also scant. Reading text messages during university lectures almost certainly comes at a cognitive cost. So too, employers might assume, does fiddling with smartphones and laptops in meetings. Buy that technologically innovative insurance policy another time.
Steve Bosserman

Refugees a Burden? Trump Says Yes; Research Says Otherwise - 0 views

  • At least a dozen local, regional, and global analyses published in the last five years provide credible evidence that refugees and migrants offer long-term economic benefits for their new communities. J. Edward Taylor, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, and director of the Rural Economies of the Americas and Pacific Rim Program, led two such studies, from Rwanda and Uganda, finding that every dollar spent by governments and organizations on refugee aid is multiplied as added income.
  • This “spillover,” as economists call it, accrues when refugees buy goods and services from local vendors and producers. In Rwanda, each additional refugee resulted in an added $205 to $253 to the economy each year. In Uganda, each refugee dollar spent generated an additional $1 to $1.50 in local income. Spillover benefits are higher when refugees receive cash transfers instead of food aid. In fact, the World Food Program promotes a program doing just this in part because it also allows refugees to make their own market choices.
  • But the overall finding offered a powerful message, Parsons said: “It implies that we have nothing to fear from accepting refugees, as long as appropriate mechanisms and support programs are in place to help people resettle and integrate.”
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