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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

Risky business: the shadow of constant threat is changing us | Books | The Guardian - 0 views

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    Covid-19 has heightened our perception of danger so that every day is a series of finely balanced calculations. How do we decide which are the risks worth taking, asks Sarah Perry
Steve Bosserman

Rediscovering Our Nature Instinct - 0 views

  • humans have a special capacity for perceiving and even anticipating natural phenomena and its patterns.
  • This innate sense has been largely forgotten, according to Gooley, because modern lifestyles demand we engage in mostly logical, deductive thinking, rather than using our intuition. Our ability to extract meaning from interrelated phenomena such as bird behavior, wind direction, plant growth, and sunlight has atrophied. By searching out these relationships and patterns in nature, Gooley writes, he has rediscovered a manner of experiencing the outdoors through intuition. With some practice, he assures us that we can, too.
  • Gooley describes the nature instinct as an awareness of the outdoors that allows him to observe and understand before conscious thought. He can sense direction from a tree or predict the behavior of animals, and only afterwards analyzes how he knew these things to be true. While he uses gut feeling or the sixth sense (a common but debunked theory of navigational aptitude in the 19th century and early 20th century), he settles instead on the term “fast thinking.”
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  • What makes us unique as a species — in ancient and modern form — seems to be the complexity of thought and diversity of cultural practices we use to accomplish highly-skilled tasks such as navigation or problem solving. Whether we grow up tracking animals in the Kalahari or riding subways to school, humans seem able to switch quickly between intuitive and analytical modes, to both directly experience and step out of that experience and employ logic.
  • Through deciphering nature, he ventures that we can develop a more metaphysical understanding of the world: the ability to discern the big picture from many parts. “God,” he writes, “is only shorthand for the belief that there is some deeper meaning behind the things we sense and beneath the universe as a whole.”
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