“
I know they don't require a picture to keep your account active. This was about making you smile, not me," His gaze fell to her mouth, taking its time finding her eyes again. "Well worth it.
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”
Tessa Bailey (It Happened One Summer (Bellinger Sisters, #1))
“
Being a Fangirl doesn't mean that you get all the answers right to 'So you think you're a fan of....' quizzes, or that you have dedicated an Instagram account to it. Being a Fangirl is connecting with the characters, reading the books over and over, getting the feels.
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Sophia Akbar
“
In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners and smiling faces; 99 per cent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self.
It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal. In the fantasy, you observe a scene in your mind’s eye or on the computer screen. You see yourself standing on a tropical beach, the blue sea behind you, a big smile on your face, one hand holding a cocktail, the other arm around your lover’s waist. Paradise. What the picture does not show is the annoying fly that bites your leg, the cramped feeling in your stomach from eating that rotten fish soup, the tension in your jaw as you fake a big smile, and the ugly fight the happy couple had five minutes ago. If we could only feel what the people in the photos felt while taking them!
Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just as you are not the winds, so also you are not the jumble of thoughts, emotions and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitised story you tell about them with hindsight.
You experience all of them, but you don’t control them, you don’t own them, and you are not them. People ask ‘Who am I?’ and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
A women living alone in a big ole house almost always invites the question of how she's going to fill it. Partner, kids, multiple rescue dogs, each with its own Instagram account. But a five-million-dollar shack in the most expensive beach destination in the country answers that question with gorgeous restraint. A woman in a home only big enough for herself is the ultimate fuck you to patriarchal society. It says, 'I am enough for me'.
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”
Jessica Knoll (The Favorite Sister)
“
Brody’s problem is that he has zero respect for the opposite sex.
“Does he really refuse to take selfies with a girl, or was he making that up to toy with me?” Sabrina asks.
“No, that’s a real thing for him. He thinks that any pictures of him with a girl pressed up to his side would drive other potential hookups away. Selfies are a sign of commitment.” He’d expounded on this topic at some length after instructing me to keep my Tinder account active and to not tell anyone I was having a kid.
“Ugh. He’s so gross.”
“I signed up for a fake Instagram account so I can troll him. When he posts something, I’ll wait a day or so and then pop on to comment about how cool it is that he and my grandpa are rocking the same shirt. I’ve done that twice now and each time, I’ve seen him shoving the shirt down the apartment’s trash compactor.”
Sabrina throws back her head and cackles. “You do not.”
“Hey, we all have to get our jollies somewhere, right? For me, it’s negging Brody on Instagram and choking my baby mama in breathing classes.
”
”
Elle Kennedy (The Goal (Off-Campus, #4))
“
A good Instagram account is better than day game and standing in the mall doing cold approaches.
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Tristan Tate
“
I click on it to find a picture of an egg in a tiny hammock. A second message simply says: @PabloEggscobar Oh my God. Pablo has his own Instagram account now.
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Elle Kennedy (The Play (Briar U, #3))
“
Funny how fast that happened, how easy it was for people I saw every day to fade away, disappear, become nothing more than a bunch of Instagram accounts I still followed.
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”
Rachel Hawkins (Reckless Girls)
“
dining restaurant Canlis, which The New York Times later called “Seattle’s fanciest, finest restaurant for more than 60 years.” His dad, Chris Canlis, ran the restaurant for thirty years before eventually turning it over to Brian and his brother Mark. (And if you want a case study of how a business can build loyalty and strengthen community in the midst of a restaurant-devastating global pandemic, check out Canlis’s Instagram account for 2020.)
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”
Will Guidara (Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect)
“
Right before the election, Russia placed three thousand advertisements on Facebook, and promoted them as memes across at least 180 accounts on Instagram. Russia could do so without including any disclaimers about who had paid for the ads, leaving Americans with the impression that foreign propaganda was an American discussion. As researchers began to calculate the extent of American exposure to Russian propaganda, Facebook deleted more data. This suggests that the Russian campaign was embarrassingly effective. Later, the company told investors that as many as sixty million accounts were fake.
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Timothy Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America)
“
But in the influencer economy, drama is always to be monetised, and so on 5 April 2019, a tearful Jessy took out her camera, fixed her ponytail and began to record a monologue for YouTube with the caption ‘STOP REPORTING MY INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT’:
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”
Symeon Brown (Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy)
“
When I’m done, I ceremonially delete the Instagram app and move my banking app to the exact spot where it used to sit. I get in bed and scroll through my account. The big deposit, the interest. It’s infinitely satisfying, and I wish there was a like button to press.
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”
Annabel Monaghan (Nora Goes Off Script)
“
If Parts Unknown and its many imitators have taught us anything, it’s that we’re living in the Golden Age of Gastrotourism. The same people who once traveled to Rome to stare at statues now go to twirl bucatini on their forks and filter balls of burrata onto their Instagram accounts.
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Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
“
Democrats need to catch up and leapfrog ahead. And this isn’t just about data. We need an “always-on” content distribution network that can match what the right-wing has built. That means an array of loosely connected Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter feeds, Snapchat stories, and Reddit communities churning out memes, graphics, and videos. More sophisticated data collection and analysis can support and feed this network. I’m no expert in these matters, but I know enough to understand that most people get their news from screens, so we have to be there 24/7.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
“
And yes, I like to crochet. Again, I’ll ask that you not fucking judge me, because it’s my birthday, because my charity, Hookers for the Homeless, has provided over two thousand caps, gloves, and scarves to people in need, and because my Instagram account—Hockey Hooker—has over a million followers.
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”
Lili Valente (Hot as Puck (Bad Motherpuckers, #1))
“
Translation: Total hipster. Although insanely good-looking, this guy would probably end up an NYC transplant in Portland within the next year. But I wasn’t ruling out seeing his gorgeous mug on one of my favorite Instagram accounts, Hot Dudes Reading. Because who doesn’t love seeing man candy nose deep in a book? My
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Max Monroe (Tapping the Billionaire (Billionaire Bad Boys, #1))
“
My sister. The only foodie account holder on Instagram who can't cook.
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Pintip Dunn (Malice)
“
The imbalanced power relationship is in your face all the time. Don’t you feel humiliated using one of the Facebook brands, like Instagram or WhatsApp? Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.32 I mean, I don’t personally have anything against Mark Zuckerberg. It isn’t about him. But why would you subordinate a big part of your life to any one stranger?
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
I have come to realise that the most critical of the social media accounts are the least verbal in real life and I can assure you that most social media trolls have no physical troll land to dwell.
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”
Aysha Taryam
“
Someone driving a $100,000 car might be wealthy. But the only data point you have about their wealth is that they have $100,000 less than they did before they bought the car (or $100,000 more in debt). That’s all you know about them. We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that’s the information we have in front of us. We can’t see people’s bank accounts or brokerage statements. So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars. Homes. Instagram photos. Modern capitalism makes helping people fake it until they make it a cherished industry.
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Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
“
«Sai, credo che se la gente vedesse un uomo come te dichiarare senza problemi che gli piacciano i ragazzi, la vita di qualcuno là fuori potrebbe cambiare. Inoltre, può anche ampliare il tuo pubblico. Non importa se avrai dei nuovi fan che all’inizio ti seguiranno per la tua sessualità, perché alla fine, anche i loro amici ascolteranno la vostra musica,» disse Lolly.Dusk rifletté sulle sue parole e mandò giù l’ultimo boccone di hot dog.Cliccò su “posta” sull’account Instagram appena creato.«Ed è per questo che ti a…» Dusk si morse la lingua, «… mi piaci tanto.» Intrecciò le loro dita sporche di salsa
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K.A. Merikan (Manic Pixie Dream Boy (The Underdogs, #1))
“
For example, Twitter and Facebook—both of which happily hosted Kim Kardashian’s nude bottom—removed the word “vagina” from an advertisement marketing a book about female anatomy, written by prominent gynecologist Dr. Jen Gunter.21 Similarly, journalist Sarah Lacy found that she was unable to advertise her book, entitled A Uterus Is a Feature, on Facebook.22 Plus-sized women have had their Instagram accounts removed for posting selfies in bikinis—something that skinny women do all the time without reprisal.23 Both platforms have also blocked advertisements for information about teen pregnancy, proper bra fitting, and gynecologist visits.24
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Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
“
Paradise, blooded daughter of Abalone, First Adviser to the King, frowned at the screen of her Apple lappy. She’d set herself up here in her father’s library ever since he’d started working each night for Wrath, son of Wrath, because in the old rambling Tudor mansion, Wi-Fi was strongest at this desk. Not that a good signal was helping her at the moment. Her Hotmail account was full of unread messages, because, with iMessage on her phone and her Twitter, Instagram, and FB accounts, there was no reason to sign into it very often.
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J.R. Ward (The Shadows (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #13))
“
Everyone at the company had access to the whole Facebook code base and was allowed to make changes to the product without much oversight. All they needed to prove was that their edit caused a boost, however small, for some important metric, like time spent on the app. That allowed engineers and designers to work a lot faster, because there was less arguing about why or whether they should build something. Everyone knew that their next raise would hinge on whether they affected growth and sharing. They weren’t held accountable for much else.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
So, fast-forward to the Smollett post. After I reposted it, and called them out for taking it down, I received an outpouring of thousands of comments and DMs, some even showing videos, of how Instagram was interfering with my following. Some weren’t allowed to like my posts or my father’s. The little heart would light up, and then it would flash back off. Some commented, “Hey Don, I had to follow you three times this week and I never unfollowed you.” With others, it was, “Don, I was blocked out of my account for twenty-four hours for liking one of your feeds.
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Donald Trump Jr. (Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us)
“
Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you're popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you're unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves.
"Can she back a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things - all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends.
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Heather Havrilesky (What If This Were Enough?: Essays)
“
Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.”
But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.”
When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce[…]
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram)
“
I want to be authentically nice, and certain online designs seem to fight against that with magical force. That’s the core reason why I don’t have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, 2 Instagram, Snapchat, or any of the rest.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle595-597). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
“
What is a tremendous, unspeakable honor may feel insufficient for those who are used to being god of their own blogs and Twitter accounts. It feels insignificant to those who have erected their own shrines on Facebook and Instagram, filled with beautiful pictures of themselves. Herein lies the danger of clamoring for attention: we don’t realize that true joy comes from the opposite. Joy comes as we stand among those Jesus has redeemed and get lost in a sea of worship, becoming fully a part of something sacred.
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Francis Chan (We Are Church)
“
I have to use my finsta, my fake Instagram account, to see their stories and go unnoticed. I created the extra account for this exact purpose: when I want to thoroughly stalk someone but don’t want to be found out.
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Julia Spiro (Full)
“
I scrolled through my personal accounts, but nothing really caught my eye, so I switched over to the Instagram account I'd made for Longganisa. She was way more popular than I was, but I hadn't uploaded a new pic in a week and her fans were not pleased. I made a quick post of her splayed out on the sidewalk the day she gave up mid-run. A quick caption of "My human is mad I stopped running to sploot, but doesn't she know it's important to stretch?" and there we go. Enough to appease her fans for a couple of days, at least.
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Mia P. Manansala (Arsenic and Adobo (Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery, #1))
“
She looked me in the eyes and said "I used to keep stalking you on Instagram. Why did you make your account private?"
And I couldn't stop laughing.
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Avijeet Das
“
The dog account’s popularity spread beyond her family and friends to a few thousand people. But on a Monday night in December 2012, the account started gaining fans around the world. After Toffey posted three pictures of Tuna on the Instagram blog that night, the dog’s following grew from 8,500 to 15,000 within 30 minutes. Dasher pulled to refresh the page: 16,000. By the next morning, Tuna was at 32,000 followers. Dasher’s phone started ringing with media requests from around the world. Anderson Cooper’s talk show offered to fly her to DC; she appeared via webcast, thinking it wouldn’t be feasible to take a vacation day. But as requests for appearances continued to come in, her friends warned her about what was coming before she realized it: she would have to quit her job at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles and run her dog’s account full-time. It sounded ridiculous, so she took a month off to test the theory. Sure enough, BarkBox, which made a subscription box for pet items, was willing to sponsor Dasher and her friend on an eight-city tour with Tuna. People in various cities came up to her, crying, telling her they were struggling with depression or anxiety and that Tuna was bringing them joy. “That was the first time that I realized how much weight these posts had for people,” Dasher later recalled. “And that’s also when I realized I wanted to do this full-time.” Her life became about managing Tuna’s fame. Berkley, part of Penguin Random House, signed her up to write a book titled Tuna Melts My Heart: The Underdog with the Overbite. That led to more brand deals, plus merchandising to put Tuna’s likeness on stuffed animals and mugs. In her book’s acknowledgments, she thanks Tuna most of all, but also Toffey for sharing the post that changed her life. The tastes of one Instagram employee directly affected her financial success, but also the habits of the two million people who now follow that dog—including Ariana Grande.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
“
Is Threads a threat to Twitter?
Threads on Twitter refer to the ability to connect multiple tweets together in a continuous conversation. By simply replying to one's own tweets, users can create a chain of related messages, providing a coherent and concise narrative. The feature was rolled out to enable users to share longer stories, thoughts, or discussions without having to break them down into individual tweets.
Threads also allows longer videos and does not use hashtags, unlike Twitter. The app requires an Instagram account and has gained immense popularity, with millions of users joining within hours of its launch. As Threads continues to evolve, it remains to be seen how Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, will respond to this competition.
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comstat
“
After a short while, I noticed that I’d write things I didn’t even believe in order to get a rise out of readers. I wrote stuff that I knew people wanted to hear, or the opposite, because I knew it would be inflammatory. Oh my God! I was back in that same place, becoming an asshole because of something about this stupid technology! I quit—again. Of all the ten arguments in this book, this is the one that really gets to me viscerally. I don’t want to be an asshole. Or a fake-nice person. I want to be authentically nice, and certain online designs seem to fight against that with magical force. That’s the core reason why I don’t have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp,2 Instagram, Snapchat, or any of the rest. You’ll see fake accounts in my name. There’s even a supposed @RealJaronLanier on Twitter. But I have no idea who that is. Not me. I don’t think I’m better than you because I don’t have social media accounts. Maybe I’m worse; maybe you can handle the stuff better than I can.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
Parker sighs, relaxing a little. “People are so excited you’re here, Logan. They want to see you. It’s good for the team. Good for the organization. Good for the town, who still claims you as its hero. The Harvest Hollow Happenings already has several posts with photos of you around town.” “The what?” “Just this gossipy Instagram account and—you know what? Never mind. The point is—this could be good for you too if you want to capitalize on it. A lot of the Appies have gotten pretty sweet gigs usually not offered to guys in the AHL.” (Page 66, Just Don't Fall)
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Emma St Clair
“
Nowadays, queer teens have no idea how good they have it, with their lesbian-outfit Instagram accounts and their dreary homophobia movies and their JoJo Siwas. Back in my day (2003), finding something gay to be horny over was like navigating the Oregon Trail. You'd have to run home from school and sit in front of the TV for hours waiting for the "Me Against the Music" video to play on MTV, just so you could get a sliver of gay, and that would be your only shot at seeing gay that whole day. No quietly streaming Netflix on your laptop in your room, no saving photos of Cara Delevingne and Selena Gomez showering together to camera roll, no "every Jamie and Dani scene in The Haunting of Bly Manor" compilation video on YouTube. Just a single queerbait moment of the day with absolutely no idea when it would come or ability to plan for it. Just sit and wait for Britney and Madonna to flirt. Oh, you have to go to the bathroom? What if you miss it? No, you'll be fine, just go. You missed it. The flash of a moment where Britney pins Madonna against the wall and they almost kiss is gone. Sorry you ate too many SunChips and got diarrhea and blew past the only possible lesbianism you could find today. You died of dysentery. You missed the gay; try again tomorrow.
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Jill Gutowitz (Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays)
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Aza [Raskin] said: 'For instance, Facebook tomorrow could start batching your notifications, so you only get one push notification a day ... They could do that tomorrow.' ....So instead of getting 'this constant drip of behavioural cocaine,' telling you every few minutes that somebody liked your picture, commented on your post, has a birthday tomorrow, and on and on - you would get one daily update, like a newspaper, summarising it all. You'd be pushed to look once a day, instead of being interrupted several times an hour.
'Here's another one,' he said 'Infinite scroll. ...it's catching your impulses before your brain has a chance to really get involved and make a decision.' Facebook and Instagram and the others could simply turn off infinite scroll - so that when you get to the bottom of the screen, you have to make a conscious decision to carry on scrolling.
Similarly, these sites could simply switch off the things that have been shown to most polarise people politically, stealing our ability to pay collective attention. Since there's evidence YouTube's recommendation engine is radicalising people, Tristan [Harris] told one interviewer: 'Just turn it off. They can turn it off in a heartbeat.' It's not as if, he points out, the day before recommendations were introduced, people were lost and clamouring for somebody to tell them what to watch next.
Once the most obvious forms of mental pollution have been stopped, they said, we can begin to look deeper, at how these sites could be redesigned to make it easier for you to restrain yourself and think about your longer-term goals. ...there could be a button that says 'here are all your friends who are nearby and are indicating they'd like to meet up today.' You click it, you connect, you put down your phone and hang out with them. Instead of being a vacuum sucking up your attention and keeping it away from the outside world, social media would become a trampoline, sending you back into that world as efficiently as possible, matched with the people you want to see.
Similarly, when you set up (say) a Facebook account, it could ask you how much time you want to spend per day or per week on the site. ...then the website could help you to achieve your goal. One way could be that when you hit that limit, the website could radically slow down. In tests, Amazon found that even 100 milliseconds of delay in the pace at which a page loads results in a substantial drop-off in people sticking around to buy the product. Aza said: 'It just gives your brain a chance to catch up to your impulse and [ask] - do I really want to be here? No.'
In addition, Facebook could ask you at regular intervals - what changes do you want to make to your life? ...then match you up with other people nearby... who say they also want to make that change and have indicated they are looking for the equivalent of gym buddies. ...A battery of scientific evidence shows that if you want to succeed in changing something, you should meet up with groups of people doing the same.
At the moment, they said, social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder, but it could be designed to understand your intentions and to better help you achieve them. Tristan and Aza told me that it's just as easy to design and program this life-affirming Facebook as the life-draining Facebook we currently have. I think that most people, if you stopped them in the street and painted them a vision of these two Facebooks, would say they wanted the one that serves your intentions. So why isn't it happened? It comes back... to the business model.
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Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
“
following him on Instagram from my throwaway account to keep up surveillance. You may proceed.
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Abby Jimenez (Just for the Summer)
“
with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram following the introduction of the front-facing camera. By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that “everyone” was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. Over the next few years the social media ecosystem became even more enticing with the introduction of ever more powerful “filters” and editing software within Instagram and via external apps such as Facetune. Whether she used filters or not, the reflection each girl saw in the mirror got less and less attractive relative to the girls she saw on her phone. While girls’ social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones. With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years. The daily life, consciousness, and social relationships of 13-year-olds with iPhones in 2013 (who were born in 2000) were profoundly different from those of 13-year-olds with flip phones in 2007 (who were born in 1994).
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Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness)
“
I tried to take a selfie or ten. Lame, maybe, but I hadn’t posted to IG in a few days now and since I actually make money from my account for posting things like my outfits, then it’s something I can’t really neglect, demons or not. “What are you doing?” Jay asks, leaning across the roof of the car and watching me curiously. I chuck the duffel bag a few feet from me to get it out of the shot and try another angle, holding the iPhone far above my head. A lone scraggly-haired man in his pajamas exits his room, heading to the vending machine. He looks at me like I have a screw loose. Whatever. He probably takes dick pics so he should know all about getting the right angle.
”
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Karina Halle (Veiled (Ada Palomino, #1))
“
Sandra, I need one of the IT guys to send me the feeds for all of Everly Jensen’s social media accounts.”
Wait. What?
“She’s a senior at Penn. Grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut. You should be able to locate her easily enough.”
“What are you doing?” I interrupt, confused and annoyed.
“Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,” he rattles off. “And whatever other sites college girls are currently using to post selfies on the internet. That will be all, Sandra.” He ends the call with a tap to a control on the steering wheel.
“Hello, I’m sitting right here. Did you want me to friend-request you or something?” I wave the phone in my hand as I talk. “Because that”—I point in the direction of the speakers in the dashboard—“was a little melodramatic.
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Jana Aston (Right (Cafe, #2))
“
When we scroll through a social media page, we see the highlights of what everyone else is doing. Frequently, we are scrolling through those highlights while we are bored, maybe alone, maybe wishing our lives were a little different, if not like their lives seem to be on Instagram. We compare another person’s exciting trip to the beach with the fact that we’re still sitting here on the couch. Or working so many hours to make ends meet. We forget that Jane posts when she is experiencing a highlight, or when Bob landed that new account, not while they’re sitting on the couch like you are.
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Herbert Cooper (But God: Changes Everything)
“
Plans seem to belong not just to another lifetime, but to another timeline. Years of bumper stickers and Instagram accounts encouraging us to live in the now have not, it seems, prepared anyone to actually exist in a present where the future is so glaringly shifting like cursed quicksand in a fairy tale.
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Glynnis MacNicol (I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris)
“
Their campaign was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood,” the Senate Intelligence Committee reported in October 2019. The IRA reached tens of millions of voters. It connected with at least 126 million Americans on Facebook, 20 million people on Instagram, and 1.4 million on Twitter. This generated 76 million interactions on Facebook and 187 million engagements on Instagram; its Twitter accounts were retweeted by Trump, his sons, and his closest aides, among countless others, including some forty American journalists. The IRA’s posts and ripostes to support Trump—2,563 on Facebook, 13,106 on Instagram, 430,185 on Twitter—far exceeded its messages against his rivals. It uploaded more than a thousand videos to YouTube. It spent roughly $15 million all told, and it paid about one hundred Americans who organized forty different political protests across the United States.
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Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
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The IRA’s Black front was by many measures its biggest. “No single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2019. “By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country.” The IRA’s messages to the black community sometimes lobbied for Stein, but far more often argued for boycotting the election entirely. The voter suppression drive aimed at dozens of cities, especially communities where the killings of black citizens by white police officers created flash points for the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black front made an overwhelming effort to keep African Americans away from the ballot boxes with messages like “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton,” and “Don’t Vote at All.” Its “Woke Blacks” Instagram account argued that “a particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils.
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Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
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In other words, not all networked products experience context collapse as rapidly as others. When users are able to group themselves, they prove particularly resilient. Facebook Groups provide separate smaller and more disjointed spaces away from the main newsfeed, as do Snap Stories as a complement to the app’s 1:1 photo messaging features—both provide a network within a network that can hold its own context. Instagram’s usage patterns include “finstas”—secondary and tertiary accounts—where different content can be shared. Each has different sets of followers attached to them, so that photos can be posted away from the prying eyes of parents and bosses.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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On Instagram, anyone could become famous among strangers. And so the Kremlin’s IRA did too. Nearly half of their accounts achieved more than 10,000 followers, and 12 of them had over 100,000. They used the accounts to sell things. One sold the idea that Hillary Clinton was a bad feminist. Another, @blackstagram_, with 303,663 followers before Facebook took it down in the Russian account purge, touted products from what it said were black-owned businesses, while telling black Americans not to waste their time voting.
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Sarah Frier (No Filter: The inside story of Instagram)
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Ever since Leo's Instagram post, where he called out the sexism she'd experienced, reporters had actually gone back and started to examine it. Think pieces were published, and some old comments were retweeted and discussed by Twitter users with verified checkmarks. A whole shift happened with the conversation around her leaving the show because, apparently, it hadn't occurred to anyone that she could've left for her own mental health, versus personally ruining their TV viewing lives.
In many ways, Leo's post had freed her from being the villain she'd been cast as. He forced their fans to reflect on their own behavior and take accountability for what they'd created. But they'd also taken stock of who Leo was, and now their fans thought he was the bad guy.
She hadn't been sure how to bridge that gap. There were no real villains on the show. She and he were just people on TV, trying to further their own careers. Their actions didn't make them evil--- all they'd done was their jobs.
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Erin La Rosa (For Butter or Worse (The Hollywood Series #1))
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My friend Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, called this idea the theory of “Adjacent Users.” He describes his experience at Instagram, which several years post-launch was growing fast but not at rocketship speed: When I joined Instagram in 2016, the product had over 400 million users, but the growth rate had slowed. We were growing linearly, not exponentially. For many products, that would be viewed as an amazing success, but for a viral social product like Instagram, linear growth doesn’t cut it. Over the next 3 years, the growth team and I discovered why Instagram had slowed, developed a methodology to diagnose our issues, and solved a series of problems that reignited growth and helped us get to over a billion users by the time I left. Our success was anchored on what I now call The Adjacent User Theory. The Adjacent Users are aware of a product and possibly tried using it, but are not able to successfully become an engaged user. This is typically because the current product positioning or experience has too many barriers to adoption for them. While Instagram had product-market fit for 400+ million people, we discovered new groups of billions of users who didn’t quite understand Instagram and how it fit into their lives.67 In my conversations with Bangaly on this topic, he described his approach as a systematic evaluation of the network of networks that constituted Instagram. Rather than focusing on the core network of Power Users—the loud and vocal minority that often drive product decisions—instead the approach was to constantly figure out the adjacent set of users whose experience was subpar. There might be multiple sets of nonfunctional adjacent networks at any given time, and it might require different approaches to fix each one. For some networks, it might be the features of the product, like Instagram not having great support for low-end Android apps. Or it might be because of the quality of their networks—if the right content creators or celebrities hadn’t yet arrived. You fix the experience for these users, then ask yourself again, who are the adjacent users? Then repeat. Bangaly describes this approach: When I started at Instagram, the Adjacent User was women 35–45 years old in the US who had a Facebook account but didn’t see the value of Instagram. By the time I left Instagram, the Adjacent User was women in Jakarta, on an older 3G Android phone with a prepaid mobile plan. There were probably 8 different types of Adjacent Users that we solved for in-between those two points. To solve for the needs of the Adjacent User, the Instagram team had to be nimble, focusing first on pulling the audience of US women from the Facebook network. This required the team to build algorithmic recommendations that utilized Facebook profiles and connections, so that Instagram could surface friends and family on the platform—not just influencers. Later on, targeting users in Jakarta and in other developing countries might involve completely different approaches—refining apps for low-end Android phones with low data connections. As the Adjacent User changes, the strategy has to change as well.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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Over the years, Facebook has executed an effective playbook that does exactly this, at scale. Take Instagram as an example—in the early days, the core product tapped into Facebook’s network by making it easy to share photos from one product to the other. This creates a viral loop that drives new users, but engagement, too, when likes and comments appear on both services. Being able to sign up to Instagram using your Facebook account also increases conversion rate, which creates a frictionless experience while simultaneously setting up integrations later in the experience. A direct approach to tying together the networks relies on using the very established social graph of Facebook to create more engagement. Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, describes how Instagram built off the network of its larger parent: Tapping into Facebook’s social graph became very powerful when we realized that following your real friends and having an audience of real friends was the most important factor for long-term retention. Facebook has a very rich social graph with not only address books but also years of friend interaction data. Using that info supercharged our ability to recommend the most relevant, real-life friends within the Instagram app in a way we couldn’t before, which boosted retention in a big way. The previous theory had been that getting users to follow celebrities and influencers was the most impactful action, but this was much better—the influencers rarely followed back and engaged with a new user’s content. Your friends would do that, bringing you back to the app, and we wouldn’t have been able to create this feature without Facebook’s network. Rather than using Facebook only as a source of new users, Instagram was able to use its larger parent to build stronger, denser networks. This is the foundation for stronger network effects. Instagram is a great example of bundling done well, and why a networked product that launches another networked product is at a huge advantage. The goal is to compete not just on features or product, but to always be the “big guy” in a competitive situation—to bring your bigger network as a competitive weapon, which in turn unlocks benefits for acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Going back to Microsoft, part of their competitive magic came when they could bring their entire ecosystem—developers, customers, PC makers, and others—to compete at multiple levels, not just on building more features. And the most important part of this ecosystem was the developers.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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That said, everyone should have an account on the big four: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. You’ll want an Instagram account, because it’s where the majority of influencer marketing campaigns take place. YouTube is also a big market for fashion hauls and beauty tutorials and is also a great way to show advertisers your video presence.
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Brittany Hennessy (Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media)
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Back then I just wanted to get to know you better. After I received the invitation to your trials, I looked you up on Instagram. I thought you were cute. I followed you and you deleted your account. I was intrigued. Then I came to invite you for a drive, and you called the cops on me.
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Ilona Andrews (Sapphire Flames (Hidden Legacy, #4))
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One prominent source was the Instagram account Glossier Brown by blogger Devin McGhee that showcased Glossier fans of color. McGhee told Glamour, “Women of color, black women specifically, spend more money than any other demographic on cosmetics. I believe this is mainly because we
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Marisa Meltzer (Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier)
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As I pondered street parking on roads covered with snow drifts, and getting four kids into rental ice skates, and figuring out what we would do with our stuff, the whole thing felt like a lot of trouble. Why not just pour myself a glass of wine and read a magazine? I follow a great many minimalist-focused Instagram accounts that would recommend such an evening as restorative self-care. My house was nice and warm. Everyone would have been content to watch YouTube all evening. But I knew that was my present, experiencing self talking. The “self,” as we think of the
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Laura Vanderkam (Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters)
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view instagram story highlights anonymously
Instagram Story Highlights are a feature that enables users to compile and display their past stories in a lasting and well-organized manner. Unlike regular Instagram stories that vanish after 24 hours, story highlights remain on a user's profile indefinitely, making them accessible to their followers and profile visitors.
The inclination to view Instagram story highlights discreetly arises from various motivations, such as curiosity or the desire to consume someone's content without revealing your identity or notifying them. However, it's crucial to grasp that Instagram, like most social media platforms, places a significant emphasis on safeguarding user privacy and has implemented policies to uphold it.
Here is an extensive approach on how to view Instagram story highlights while adhering to privacy norms and Instagram's policies:
1. Access Instagram: Begin by launching the Instagram application on your mobile device.
1. Search for the User: Utilize the search functionality to locate the Instagram profile of the individual whose story highlights you wish to peruse. You can perform a search using their username or full name. To view Instagram highlights, you can view from the page of the dj downloader website.
2. Visit the Profile: After locating the user's profile, tap on their profile picture or username to access their profile page.
3. Access Highlights: Provided that the user has assembled story highlights, you will observe circular icons featuring their profile picture and titles or categories, positioned above their regular posts. Typically, these icons are located beneath their bio section.
4. Select a Highlight: Tap on the specific highlight that intrigues you. Each highlight encompasses a collection of related stories.
5. Review the Stories: The chosen story highlight will commence playing, enabling you to navigate through the individual stories within that highlight.
While the above guidelines empower you to explore story highlights in a manner that respects both privacy and Instagram's policies, it is imperative to address additional facets:
1. Respect for Privacy: Always demonstrate respect for the user's privacy and content. Refrain from attempting to employ third-party tools or methods to view stories anonymously. Instagram expressly prohibits such activities, which could lead to the suspension or restriction of your Instagram account.
2. Ethical Conduct: Employ Instagram in an ethical manner. Uphold principles of honesty and transparency in your interactions with other users on the platform, contributing to a positive online community.
3. Evolving Policies: Be aware that Instagram's guidelines and features may evolve over time. Staying abreast of these modifications and adapting your usage accordingly is vital.
4. User Consent: Keep in mind that the content shared on Instagram is subject to the user's consent. If someone has chosen to make their story highlights public, they have voluntarily shared that content with a broader audience.
In summary, while there may be a desire to discreetly view Instagram story highlights, it is pivotal to do so in a manner that upholds the platform's policies and respects the privacy of fellow users. By adhering to the steps delineated above, you can explore highlights in a compliant and considerate manner, contributing to a positive and ethical online environment for all users.
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djdownloader
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We tend to judge wealth by what we see, because that’s the information we have in front of us. We can’t see people’s bank accounts or brokerage statements. So we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success. Cars. Homes. Instagram photos. Modern capitalism makes helping people fake it until they make it a cherished industry. But the truth is that wealth is what you don’t see. Wealth is the nice cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The watches not worn, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. Wealth is financial assets that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.
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Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
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Willpower and brain capacity. Most of us are confused about what willpower really is. We tend to think some people have it in spades and that others like those with chemical and behavioral addictions are lacking in it. That's exactly how I saw myself as a person with no self-control or willpower which was not at all true. While impulse control was indeed a skill I had to hone. For instance through meditation, and mindfulness - staying present with feelings and reactions. Willpower, as in repression or inhibiting a desire. It isn’t a skill. It's a finite cognitive function known as inhibition. To understand a little bit more how willpower or inhibition works, a few pieces of information will help. First, willpower is one of five functions delegated to the prefrontal cortex or PFC. The other four functions are decision making, understanding, memorizing, and recalling. Second, it's important to know that the brain requires a crapload of energy from the body. It accounts for about 2% of our body mass and consumes about 20% of our energy. Most of our brain functions are automatic and don't require conscious processing. Like the beating of your heart, or a habit like driving a car. These automatic processes don't burn up metabolic resources. The PFC on the other hand requires a massive amount of energy or glucose to work. The same way you need energy to run a mile you need energy to make decisions or memorize facts. And this energy is not inexhaustible. We wake up every day with only so much gas in our tank to fuel our PFC. And we burn through it fairly quickly. What this means for willpower is that 1) it's a finite resource with only so much of it available to us each day and 2) it's a resource shared with other functions. Every time you solve a problem, make a decision, memorize a fact, remember something, or try not to do something, like eat that second cookie, or check your Instagram for the 14th time, you are draining your willpower reserves. Trying harder doesn't work when you've got nothing left in you to feel the effort. The thing about the Pfc is that there's no way to give it more gas. So there's no way to increase your willpower, or decision making, understanding, memorizing or recall. What you can do is approach those five functions as if they are precious resources because they are and plan your day in a way that uses them carefully. By creating more automation or habits so that you aren't using your decision making and willpower as often.
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Holly Whitaker (Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol)
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Hello,
If you're interested in getting an overview of what I'm reading and my personal thoughts about books, feel free to follow my Instagram account: @books4life.ro
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None
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One of the first scientific papers to write about exercise-induced myokines labeled them “hope molecules.” Ultra-endurance athletes talk about the metaphor of putting one foot in front of the other—how learning that you can take one more step, even when it feels like you can’t possibly keep going, builds confidence and courage. The existence of hope molecules reveals that this is not merely a metaphor. Hope can begin in your muscles. Every time you take a single step, you contract over two hundred myokine-releasing muscles. The very same muscles that propel your body forward also send proteins to your brain that stimulate the neurochemistry of resilience. Importantly, you don’t need to run an ultramarathon across the Arctic to infuse your bloodstream with these chemicals. Any movement that involves muscular contraction—which is to say, all movement—releases beneficial myokines.
It seems likely that some ultra-endurance athletes are drawn to the sport precisely because they have a natural capacity to endure. The extreme circumstances of these events allow them to both challenge and enjoy that part of their personality. Yet it’s also possible that the intense physical training contributes to the mental toughness that ultra-endurance athletes demonstrate. Endurance activities like walking, hiking, jogging, running, cycling, and swimming, as well as high-intensity exercise such as interval training, are especially likely to produce a myokinome that supports mental health. Among those who are already active, increasing training intensity or volume—going harder, faster, further, or longer—can jolt muscles to stimulate an even greater myokine release. In one study, running to exhaustion increased irisin levels for the duration of the run and well into a recovery period—an effect that could be viewed as an intravenous dose of hope. Many of the world’s top ultra-endurance athletes have a history of depression, anxiety, trauma, or addiction. Some, like ultrarunner Shawn Bearden, credit the sport with helping to save their lives. This, too, is part of what draws people to the ultra-endurance world. You can start off with seemingly superhuman abilities to endure, or you can build your capacity for resilience one step at a time.
Months after I spoke with Bearden, an image from his Instagram account appeared in my feed. It was taken from the middle of a paved road that stretches toward a mountain range, with grassy fields on either side. The sky is blue, except for a huge dark cloud that appears to be hovering directly over the person taking the photo. I remembered how Bearden had described his depression as a black thundercloud rolling in. Under the Instagram photo, Bearden had written, “Tons of wind today, making an easy run far more challenging. So happy to be able to do this. Every day above ground is a good day.” Below, a single comment cheered him on, like a fellow runner on the trail: “Amen to this! Keep striving.
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Kelly McGonigal (The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage)
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Essentially, GE operates its own social network for heavy industrial machinery. It’s sort of like all these power grids and oil refineries and MRI machines have their own Instagram accounts, but instead of pictures of beaches or food, they’re sharing fuel consumption, hydraulic pressure, usage hours, decay rates. “First there was the consumer internet, and then the enterprise internet,” as Barzdukas said, “and now we’re moving into the third generation: the industrial internet. It’s not just about having our phones connected or our enterprise applications connected and operating on subscriptions models. Now it’s the big machines.” So far GE has built more than 600,000 of these digital twins. And just as social networks changed our world, this third-generation industrial internet is going to transform manufacturing.
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Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
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My dog did a really big poo one day, I showed it to my friend, Sam. It was way too big to keep to ourselves, So we put it on Instagram! (And then had our account banned because that really is disgusting and you shouldn’t do it!) Hiding Cabbage On the weekend I made a
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Lee M. Winter (What Reggie Did on the Weekend 2: Unfair! (The Reggie Books))
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This is my megaphone,” Trump said again. “Let’s not call it Twitter. Let’s call it social media.” Though the White House had Facebook and Instagram accounts, Trump did not use them. He stuck to Twitter. “This is who I am. This is how I communicate. It’s the reason I got elected. It’s the reason that I’m successful.
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Bob Woodward (Fear: Trump in the White House)
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Example: @simonsinekinspires and @simonsinek are Simon’s account, one I suggest you follow.
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Jason Heiber (Instagram Stories: The Secret ATM in Your Pocket - Financial Freedom Between Your Thumbs)
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And I’m also really, really into the algorithms. Hashtags, shout-outs, geotagging, getting tagged on bigger accounts and on the Instagram Explore page—it’s all about climbing a ladder and getting yourself noticed.
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Sara Shepard (Influence)
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One or two photos doing something you’re passionate about (playing music, throwing a football, building something, etc.) – these show personality depth and give her a sense of who you are. - One or two stylish photos, where you pose in a basic environment with stylish clothing (go to Instagram and “steal” poses from accounts like Magic_Fox and HowToBeast) – these show that you clean up nice. - A dog photo (i.e., a photo with your dog or a friend’s dog) – women love dog photos!
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Dave Perrotta (The Lifestyle Blueprint: How to Talk to Women, Build Your Social Circle, and Grow Your Wealth)
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She looked good in every shot, and not one of them had told the truth about the two of us, or about her, about who she was, or what she wanted, or who she’d been in love with. Not any more than my Instagram account told all of my truth, or Darshi’s account, or Leela’s.
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Jennifer Weiner (Big Summer)
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STRUCTURAL CHANGE: NETWORK EFFECTS TURN FIRMS INSIDE OUT As we’ve seen, in the industrial era, giant companies relied on supply-side economies of scale. By contrast, most Internet era giants rely on demand-side economies of scale. Firms such as Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox, Threadless, Upwork, Google, and Facebook are not valuable because of their cost structures: the capital they employ, the machinery they run, or the human resources they command. They are valuable because of the communities that participate in their platforms. The reason Instagram sold for $1 billion is not its thirteen employees; the reason WhatsApp sold for $19 billion wasn’t its fifty employees. The reasons were the same: the network effects both organizations had created. Standard accounting practices might not factor the value of communities into the value of a firm, but stock markets do.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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Most brand marketers that I meet want to have the biggest Instagram account in their industry. They think that if they don’t have a Facebook page with millions of ‘likes’ they’re not hitting critical mass, but they’re wrong. You don’t need thousands or millions to succeed in this game. But you do need people who care enough about your company to tell their friends about you. It’s no different from network marketing or multi-level marketing.
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Carlos Gil (The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI)
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Maybe this all sounds cheesy to you. Maybe you're feeling secondhand embarrassment that Barack Obama called me to say he saw the spirit of my dead cat soaring over a mountain. Maybe you think I'm a spoiled baby- that there are real problems in the world and instead of dissecting them and advocating on behalf of them, I decided to end my book with a story about how much I love cats. Maybe the fact that my Instagram account consists primarily of pictures of these cats- or the fact that I have an Instagram account at all- is infuriating to you. Maybe you think this proves the point that I'm a "cupcake-eating cheerleader," and not a "serious" professional woman. I think a "serious" woman can also be a crazy cat lady, and I will be rescuing cats until someone has to rescue me.
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Alyssa Mastromonaco (Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House)
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I was in charge of decisions and marketing, and Sean was in charge of research and operations. When we were trying to identify our target customer, he spent a ton of time putting together spreadsheets comparing all the different markets we should consider. When he showed them to me and asked me what I thought, I replied, “Yoga.” Huh? “We could easily do multiple products serving people who do yoga,” I told him. “It’s an emerging trend. And I know a ton of those people; I can ask them what they want. Let’s start a yoga business.” Sean’s initial response was, “That’s not a quantitative analysis, Ryan!” I’ve never been one to overthink things—most people spend way too much time in the research period. I make decisions fast and adjust later. With our target customer identified, we made a list of possible products and chose our gateway product—a yoga mat. With that, we began the process of product development. We looked up the top-selling yoga mats on Amazon and read through the reviews; we asked questions on Facebook groups, subreddits, and Instagram influencer accounts. It didn’t take long before we had an idea of the main pain points we needed to address with our first product. I remembered Don’s advice and began looking for people to make the product. With a quick scroll and a click, we could choose between a wholesaler in China, a private label supplier out of India, or a contract manufacturer in Vietnam. For about fifty bucks, we were able to order a set of yoga mat samples that had the exact features we were looking for. It was that easy. Samples in hand, we needed to refine our product idea to make sure we were really hitting the pain points we’d identified. At that time, I’d done yoga maybe two or three times in my life, and I wasn’t nearly the right demographic for our mats anyway. That forced me to ask questions. We were targeting yoga-loving millennials, so I went where they often congregate: Starbucks. There, I did the kind of tough field work that really makes an entrepreneur sweat: asking young women questions over coffee. “Which yoga mat do you prefer? Why?” “What makes the difference between a bad yoga mat and a good one?” “What’s wrong with your current yoga mat?” “What do you think of this one? And what about this one?” Next, I headed over to local yoga studios to see how our samples stacked up against the strenuous demands of a yoga class. A few classes later, Sean and I had everything we needed to narrow down our product development. Armed with all our data, we went back to the manufacturers. From a couple yoga-clueless guys, we’d become knowledgeable enough to know not just what a good yoga mat looked like, but how it had to feel and perform. We knew what we needed our yoga mat to do. Now we just had to find the manufacturer to supply it.
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Ryan Daniel Moran (12 Months to $1 Million: How to Pick a Winning Product, Build a Real Business, and Become a Seven-Figure Entrepreneur)
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For the most part, this new breed of wellness gurus is white and female, young and attractive, engaging, and media-savvy. Some are yoga teachers, or personal trainers, or martial-arts instructors, but scant few have any qualifications that equip them to give health advice. What they do have is an Instagram account.
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Beau Donelly (The Woman Who Fooled the World: Belle Gibson's Cancer Con, and the Darkness at the Heart of the Wellness Industry)
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I've been wondering lately why adultery is the primary cause of failed relationships. It's challenging to meet someone who will love you as much as you loved them. either because they don't respect their partner or because they're not happy with them. I have heard numerous accounts from friends and coworkers about how they ended their relationship after discovering their spouses were cheating. I received a reference for Recovery Nerd as a result, and they assisted me in remotely accessing my suspected unfaithful girlfriend's activities. During my business trip to the UK, I was able to view all of her messages, calls, Instagram chats, and other correspondence. I could see everything she did on her phone. It's incredibly heartbreaking and painful to see this, but I'm glad I've finally found peace of mind again. I thought this was impossible, but RECOVERY NERD made it simple and easy to use. I was able to discover that she had been seeing a guy downtown during our relationship. My friend recommended RECOVERY NERD to me, and after reading numerous online recommendations, I decided to go along with them. If you need comparable help and have been taken advantage of a few times, their services are excellent, sincere, and prompt. Reaching out to RECOVERY NERD is the best way to find a long-term solution to your violent and shameful relationship. Email address: Recoverynerd@mail.com
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Oliver Fabroa
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In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also had one about Rome called 'A Roma Therapy'.
In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn't sleep.
In one life she ran the showbiz column in a tabloid newspaper and did stories about Ryan Bailey's relationships.
In one life she was the picture editor at the National Geographic.
In one life she was a successful eco-architect who lived a carbon-neutral existence in a self-designed bungalow that harvested rain-water and ran on solar power.
In one life she was an aid worker in Bostwana.
In one life a cat-sitter.
In one life a volunteer in a homeless shelter.
In one life she was sleeping on her only friend's sofa.
In one life she taught music in Montreal.
In one life she spent all day arguing with people she didn't know on Twitter and ended a fair proportion of her tweets by saying 'Do better' while secretly realising she was telling herself to do that.
In one life she had no social media accounts.
In one life she'd never drunk alcohol.
In one life she was a chess champion and currently visiting Ukraine for a tournament.
In one life she was married to a minor Royal and hated every minute.
In one life her Facebook and Instagram only contained quotes from Rumi and Lao Tzu.
In one life she was on to her third husband and already bored.
In one life she was a vegan power-lifter.
In one life she was travelling around South Corsican coast, and they talked quantum mechanics and got drunk together at a beachside bar until Hugo slipped away, out of that life, and mid-sentence, so Nora was left talking to a blank Hugo who was trying to remember her name.
In some lives Nora attracted a lot of attention. In some lives she attracted none. In some lives she was rich. In some lives she was poor. In some lives she was healthy. In some lives she couldn't climb the stairs without getting out of breath. In some lives she was in a relationship, in others she was solo, in many she was somewhere in between. In some lives she was a mother, but in most she wasn't.
She had been a rock star, an Olympics, a music teacher, a primary school teacher, a professor, a CEO, a PA, a chef, a glaciologist, a climatologist, an acrobat, a tree-planter, an audit manager, a hair-dresser, a professional dog walker, an office clerk, a software developer, a receptionist, a hotel cleaner, a politician, a lawyer, a shoplifter, the head of an ocean protection charity, a shop worker (again), a waitress, a first-line supervisor, a glass-blower and a thousand other things. She'd had horrendous commutes in cars, on buses, in trains, on ferries, on bike, on foot. She'd had emails and emails and emails. She'd had a fifty-three-year-old boss with halitosis touch her leg under a table and text her a photo of his penis. She'd had colleagues who lied about her, and colleagues who loved her, and (mainly) colleagues who were entirely indifferent. In many lives she chose not to work and in some she didn't choose not to work but still couldn't find any. In some lives she smashed through the glass ceiling and in some she just polished it. She had been excessively over- and under-qualified. She had slept brilliantly and terribly. In some lives she was on anti-depressants and in others she didn't even take ibuprofen for a headache. In some lives she was a physically healthy hypochondriac and in some a seriously ill hypochondriac and in most she wasn't a hypochondriac at all. There was a life where she had chronic fatigue, a life where she had cancer, a life where she'd suffered a herniated disc and broken her ribs in a car accident.
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Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)