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Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.
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Shannon L. Alder
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The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world. (Note: This quote is fake and does not appear in Simulacra and Simulation. I tried to delete it, but the system doesn't allow that because this quote has "too many fans" lol.)
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Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)
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I hate having emotions about real humans instead of fake ones, it just leads to stupid moments like this.
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Martha Wells (Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4))
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Introverts don't like small talk conversation, but they typically don't mind writing. The more people can "see" you on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or a blog, the more they will feel like they know you, even though you don't have one-on-one interaction with them.
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Thom S. Rainer
“
during this century (the twentieth) we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport - the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
I expect that history will show "normal" mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. 'Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn't do anything? Didn't everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?'
Yes, child, that's why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.'
What was the Restoration again, please, miss?'
The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.
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Douglas Adams
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To be clear, conversation-centric communication requires sacrifices. If you adopt this philosophy, you’ll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship. Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, “like,” and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text. Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract.
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Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
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Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century.
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Ernest Cline (Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2))
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Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are bombarded daily with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message is received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction.
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bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
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researchers worry that heavy use of interactive media can, over time, reduce attention spans. The fear is that we grow so accustomed to frequent bursts of stimulation, we have trouble feeling satisfied in their absence.
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Matt Richtel (A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age)
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adding someone in social media is a way of ading them to the hallway you stroll down, a way of saying, "I might like to have more unplanned interactions with you, and we can see where things go from there.
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Gretchen McCulloch (Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language)
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Black people and people of color are taught in school, in the media, and in everyday interactions to be empathetic and understanding of white people and their history. But most white people never have to do the same for us.
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Frederick Joseph (The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person)
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Media has changed the way we interact with one another and what we spend our time doing. Our social norms have changed.
The dangerous part of our social media and technologically saturated world is not its existence but what it distracts us from.
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Jen Hatmaker (7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess)
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A fundamental approach to life transformation is using social media for therapy; it forces you to have an opinion, provides intellectual stimulation, increases awareness, boosts self-confidence, and offers the possibility of hope.
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Germany Kent
“
It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
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Norbert Wiener
“
Conscious Parenting on Children's Happiness and matrix of influences: 'We live surrounded by an increasingly complex matrix of impulses allowing strangers of all sorts (TV, media, Internet) interfere in our children’s mental, emotional and spiritual development. Understanding this intricate network and how does the human brain interacts with it is increasingly becoming our door to happiness and health.
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Nataša Pantović (Conscious Parenting: Mindful Living Course (AoL Mindfulness #5))
“
Being on Facebook too much in a row is like playing chess in a black hole. You never know if the next move will lead you to a checkmate or a mate checked.
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Ana Claudia Antunes
“
Social media has made it possible for consumers to interact with businesses in a way that is often similar to how they interact with their friends and family.
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Gary Vaynerchuk (The Thank You Economy)
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there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
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Greg Lukianoff (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
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Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ”breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.
The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.
More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary.
Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.
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Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
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Social media wasn't usually my thing, as it had the word "social" in it, but I'd taken to the platform after a personal tragedy. I had a cat, the cat died, and now what I used to say to my cat all day, I tweeted. It helped that 140 characters was roughly my preferred limit when it came to human interaction.
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Colson Whitehead (The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death)
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I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please.
"The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere.
"I'm working on it.
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Andrew Sullivan
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Never organize a media interaction without deciding what headline you want to come out of it!
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Sanjaya Baru (The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh)
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Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean — whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.
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Rainer Maria Rilke (The Collected Works of Rainer Maria Rilke: The Complete Works PergamonMedia (Highlights of World Literature))
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Fruit fly scientists, God bless ‘em, are the big exceptions. Morgan’s team always picked sensibly descriptive names for mutant genes, like ‘speck,’ ‘beaded,’ ‘rudimentary,’ ‘white,’ and ‘abnormal.’ And this tradition continues today, as the names of most fruit fly genes eschew jargon and even shade whimsical… The ‘turnip’ gene makes flies stupid. ‘Tudor’ leaves males (as with Henry VIII) childless. ‘Cleopatra’ can kill flies when it interacts with another gene, ‘asp.’ ‘Cheap date’ leaves flies exceptionally tipsy after a sip of alcohol… And thankfully, this whimsy with names has inspired the occasional zinger in other areas of genetics… The backronym for the “POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic” gene in mice—‘pokemon’—nearly provoked a lawsuit, since the ‘pokemon’ gene (now known, sigh, as ‘zbtb7’) contributes to the spread of cancer, and the lawyers for the Pokemon media empire didn’t want their cute little pocket monsters confused with tumors.
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Sam Kean (The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code)
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These kids aren't like us; they'll never be us. They're more like...young Lex Luthors. They've never known a world without the internet. Email. Text messaging. Social media. Likes and views are king, bullying dickheads are inescapable, and genuine social interaction can be almost completely avoided. It makes them really fucking smart technologically and really fucking stupid emotionally.
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Emma Chase (Getting Schooled (Getting Some, #1))
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Followers on social media who do not interact with others by liking or commenting on their posts are like observers who watch the street from behind the curtains without wanting people to notice them. They don’t want to interact; they only want to observe from a distance without taking part in what’s going on.
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Nadine Sadaka Boulos
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The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
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I see no real evolution in media ecology beyond the “shape shifting” nature that seems to have been deliberately embedded in its fabric. The one thing that must, I think, always define a study we recognize as media ecological is its acknowledgement of the interactions of cultures – and the people who constitute those cultures – and their technologies.
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Peter K. Fallon
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Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives.
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bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
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While any software system introduces some kind of formalization of the world, HCI (like AI) deals with formalizations of human cognition and activity. These are the issues that have lay at the heart of philosophical debate for centuries. In some ways, it would be hard to imagine a more philosophical enterprise.
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Paul Dourish
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Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
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Right and wrong applies to internet interaction. It's #Netiquette. NetworkEtiquette.net
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David Chiles
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detailed overview of youth involvement in specific digital activities). Of principal interest to us are those activities that are interactive (such as multiplayer as opposed single-player games),
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Carrie James (Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media: A Synthesis from the Good Play Project)
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In our quest to become more connected we have actually created a disturbing disconnect where real social interaction has been abandoned in favor of the immediate gratification afforded by electronic devices.
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Michael ONeill (Road Work: Images And Insights Of A Modern Day Explorer)
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You should never automate your content to pretend you’re generating the content right then and there—in other words, to help you fake a human interaction. Ever. Especially tweets, for reasons you’ll read about below. That
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Gary Vaynerchuk (#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur's Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness)
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Indeed, the preoccupation—some would say obsession—with computers and other digital gadgetry, especially among the young in what is commonly called “social media” (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), may be resulting ironically in more self-absorption and less physical interaction; texting, blogging, posting, and tweeting all avoid eye contact. Increasing divorce rates, expanding use of day care, and greater geographical mobility have all contributed to a society that lacks constancy and reliability. Personal, intimate, lasting relationships become difficult or even impossible to achieve, and deep-seated loneliness, self-absorption, emptiness, anxiety, depression, and loss of self-esteem ensue.
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Jerold J. Kreisman (I Hate You--Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality)
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To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce.
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Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series))
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Finally, it's worth noting that refusing to use social media icons & comments to interact means that some people will inevitably fall out of your social orbit - in particular, those whose relationship with you exists only over social media. Here's my tough love reassurance: let them go.
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Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
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Communal narcissists may feature frequent posts on their social media or personal website showing them interacting with those “less fortunate” than them and drawing attention to their charitable deeds with hashtags like #savingtheworld, #feelsgoodtogiveback, #charitygoals, #iloveeveryone, or #elephantsarepeopletoo.
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Ramani S. Durvasula ("Don't You Know Who I Am?": How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility)
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It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction.
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David Amerland (The Social Media Mind: How social media how social media is changing business, politics and science and helps create a new world order.)
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The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper,” he claimed. “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of “interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce” with one word: “baloney.
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Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
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Social connections were also transformed beyond recognition. The invention of radio and television led to the rise of the mass media and a corresponding decline in direct human interactions with a merely social function. Evening meetings between neighbors, pub gatherings, harvest festivals, rituals, and celebrations—they were progressively replaced by consumption of what the media presented.
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Mattias Desmet (The Psychology of Totalitarianism)
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I’ve come to realize this isn’t “real” and there’s no substitute for actual interaction. The difference between social media and a social life is the difference between eating a marshmallow Peep and dining on a tomahawk-cut rib eye: one is substantial and nutritious; the other is just a momentarily satisfying puff of sweetened air, offering no long-term benefits. I can enjoy the fluff, but I can’t subsist on it.
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Jen Lancaster (I Regret Nothing: A Memoir)
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hear companies talk about consumers being bombarded with thousands and thousands of advertising messages every day, because there’s usually a lot of discussion among companies and ad agencies talking about how to get their message to stand out. There’s a lot of buzz these days about “social media” and “integration marketing.” As unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer’s undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it. Too many companies think of their call centers as an expense to minimize. We believe that it’s a huge untapped opportunity for most companies, not only because it can result in word-of-mouth marketing, but because of its
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Tony Hsieh (Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose)
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With the explosion of technology over the last 15+ years, we are in the process of a complete paradigm shift in regards to how we communicate in our marketing, public relations and advertising. Social Media has forever changed the way businesses and customers communicate and the beauty of it is that, through your channels, you can reach your audience directly and at lightning speed. Social Media has also changed the way customers make their buying decisions. Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, have made it easy to find and connect with others who share similar interests, to read product reviews and to connect with potential clients. Within these networks there is an amazing and wide open space for your unique voice to be heard. As the web interacts with us in more personal ways and with greater portability, there is no time better than the present to engage with and rally your community.
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Kytka Hilmar-Jezek (Book Power: A Platform for Writing, Branding, Positioning & Publishing)
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A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged, to ratify the decisions made by their betters in periodic elections. The "rascal multitude" are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.
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Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
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To the newborn, love is action; it is the attentive, responsive, nurturing care that adults provide. A parent may truly love his child, but if he is sitting at a computer posting on social media about how much he loves his child while the infant is in another room, awake, hungry, and crying, the infant experiences no love. To the infant, skin-to-skin warmth, the smell of the parent, the sights and sounds of her caregivers, the attentive and responsive caregiver’s actions-that becomes love. The thousands of these loving, responsive interactions shape the developing brain of the infant. These loving moments literally build the foundation of the organizing brain….the infant begins to associate these responsive people with pleasure, sustenance, warmth; her view of the world is being shaped…it is through these interactions that the child’s worldview is built, and depending upon the quality and pattern of the caregiver’s responses, will build resilience or contribute to a sensitized, vulnerable child.
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Bruce D. Perry (What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
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Social media has helped make the world flatter and reduced the degrees of separation, leading to the situation where many can interact with people who, but for this platform, they may never have had the privilege to meet or speak with. That is the opportunity social media brings.
But it does come with responsibilities. Not to take this opportunity for granted and not to throw decorum to the dogs. The line between virtual and real life is getting thinner and is lately made of morning dew.
Manners matter on social media.
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Nana Awere Damoah
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More often than not, what people put up online using social media is widely accessible because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to sizable audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort.
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Danah Boyd (It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens)
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Is 650 543 4800 Facebook?
The number 650 543 4800 Or +1-877-906-2442 is actually a phone number at +1-877-906-2442 or 650 543 4800 that belongs to a specific business or individual. It may be a company's contact number, a personal cell phone, or even a hotline for a particular service.
The number 650-543-4800 is indeed associated with Facebook, the social media giant. This number +1-877-906-2442 is often used by Facebook for various official purposes, including security verification, customer +1-877-906-2442 service interactions, and business communications.
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FaceBook (Facebook Annual Report 2012)
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Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century. I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the “Great Filter” that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change. Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades. Only time would tell.
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Ernest Cline (Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2))
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Humans can maintain only so many functioning relationships; when group size exceeds about 150 members, it becomes impossible to remember not only their individual preferences and peculiarities, but also the complexities of the group’s internal dynamics. Thus, with group sizes larger than 150, direct, face-to-face interaction no longer produces adequate social control, and members tend to drift off and form new tribes. Among behavioral scientists, the 150-person limit is known as “Dunbar’s number,” after the anthropologist/evolutionary psychologist who first proposed it.35
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William J. Bernstein (Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History from the Alphabet to the Internet)
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But there's only one other person besides me in the Monterey Bay area who could pick up on spectral sound waves-especially now that Jesse is going to school so far away-and that person happened to be away at a seminarian retreat in New Mexico. I knew because Father Dominic likes to keep his present (and former) students up to date on his daily activities on Facebook.
The day my old high school principal started his own Facebook account was the day I swore off social media forever. So far this has worked out fine since I prefer face-to-face interactions. It's easier to tell when people are lying.
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Meg Cabot (Proposal (The Mediator, #6.5))
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Sexual-patriarchal relational systems overwhelm, from media glorifying sexual connection above other forms of intimacy and interaction, to medical, economic, and legal structures that automatically privilege sexual/domestic/romantic dyadic partnerships and genetic family bonds over other chosen platonic relationships and support systems. Oppressive social structures and micro-aggressive interpersonal interactions constantly grate on us, damaging our health and maybe even pushing us to seek care, but often available formal assistance is part of the same harmful system and populated by the same privileged persons.
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Zena Sharman (The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care)
“
I’d finally gained enough distance from my addiction to realize something. Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century.
”
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Ernest Cline (Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2))
“
On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It's as if we've been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on "who they are.
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Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion)
“
Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors.
”
”
Walter Isaacson
“
NEUROBIOLOGISTS HAVE IDENTIFIED ‘mirroring’ as one of the neural routes activated in the brains of primates – including us – during interaction with others. In a connected age, the mirrors get bigger. When people feel scared after a horrific event, that fear spreads like a digital wildfire. When people feel angry, that anger breeds. Even when people with contradictory opinions to us exhibit an emotion, we can feel a similar one. For instance, if someone is furious at you online for something, you are unlikely to adopt their opinion but it is quite likely you will catch their fury. You see it every day on social media: people arguing with each other, entrenching each other’s opposing view, yet also mirroring each other’s emotional state.
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Matt Haig (Notes on a Nervous Planet)
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In a world of role-playing personalities, those few people who don't project a mind-made image -- and there are some even on TV, in the media, and the business world -- but function from the deeper core of their Being, those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world. They are the bringers of the new consciousness. Whatever they do becomes empowered because it is in alignment with the purpose of the whole. Their influence, however, goes far beyond what they do, far beyond their function. Their mere presence -- simple, natural, unassuming -- has a transformational effect on whoever they come into contact with. When you don't play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protection or strengthening of your self. As a result, your actions have far greater power. You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don't try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don't try to be yourself. ... 'How can I be myself?' is, in fact, the wrong question. It implies you have to do something to be yourself. ... If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are -- the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. ... Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as a field of conscious Presence.
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Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
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The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.” Lick’s
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Katie Hafner (Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet)
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Who Should You Blame? It’s not the boss or the board or the shareholders who are to blame for the tragic lack of research into the diseases of the poorest. What do we gain from pointing our fingers at them? Similarly, resist the urge to blame the media for lying to you (mostly they are not) or for giving you a skewed worldview (which mostly they are, but often not deliberately). Resist blaming experts for focusing too much on their own interests and specializations or for getting things wrong (which sometimes they do, but often with good intentions). In fact, resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it’s almost always more complicated than that. It’s almost always about multiple interacting causes—a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works and forget about punching anyone in the face.
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Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
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What is most dystopian about all of the digital houses designed for customized consumption is the implication that the entire landscape could be covered with new houses lacking any social or economic neighborhood context. Designers minimize the need for family or neighborhood interaction if they plan for digital surveillance as a route to ordering mass-produced commodities as well as handling work and civic life. If many external activities, such as paid work, exercise, shopping, seeking entertainment, and voting, are able to be done in-house through the various electronic communications systems, reasons for going outside decrease. The residents become isolated, although the house continues to function as a container for mass-produced goods and electronic media. In a landscape bristling with tens of thousands of digital houses and cell towers, where the ground is laced with hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, neighborhoods may not exist. Car journeys involving traffic problems may disappear, although the roads will be clogged with delivery vans.
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Dolores Hayden (Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000)
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Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century. I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the “Great Filter” that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change. Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.
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Ernest Cline (Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2))
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I’d finally gained enough distance from my addiction to realize something. Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century. I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the “Great Filter” that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change. Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.
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Ernest Cline (Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2))
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The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.”
Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture—long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities—conversation, interaction, affection—and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.I had also developed my own culture. Work. I did four or five media jobs in England, juggling them like a clown. I spent eight hours a day on a computer, feeding my stories back to the States. Then I did TV pieces, traveling with a crew throughout parts of London. I also phoned in radio reports every morning and afternoon. This was not an abnormal load. Over the years, I had taken labor as my companion and had moved everything else to the side.
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Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson)
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We are in uncharted territory" when it comes to sex and the internet, says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. "There have been two major transitions" in heterosexual mating, Garcia says, "in the last four million years. The first was around ten to fifteen thousand years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled," leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract.
"And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet," Garcia says. Suddenly, instead of meeting through proximity, community connections, and family and friends, people could meet each other virtually and engage in amorous activity with the click of a button. Internet meeting is now surpassing every other form. “It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.”
And yet this massive shift in our behavior has gone almost completely unexamined, especially given how the internet permeates modern life. While there have been studies about how men and women use social media differently- how they use language and present themselves differently, for example- there's not a lot of research about how they behave sexually online; and there is virtually nothing about how girls and boys do. While there has been concern about the online interaction of children and adults, it's striking that so little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Internet has changed the sexual behavior of girls and boys interacting together. This may be because the behavior has been largely hidden or unknown, or, again, due to the fear of not seeming "sex-positive," mistaking responsibility for judgement.
And there are questions to ask, from the standpoint of girls' and boys' physical and emotional health and the ethics of their treatment of each other. Sex on a screen is different from sex that develops in person, this much seems seems self-evident, just as talking on a screen is different from face-to-face communication. And so if talking on a screen reduces one's ability to be empathic, for example, then how does sex on a screen change sexual behavior? Are people more likely to act aggressively or unethically, as in other types of online communication? How do gender roles and sexism play into cybersex? And how does the influence of porn, which became available online at about the same time as social networking, factor in?
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Nancy Jo Sales (American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers)
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Youth development is an interdisciplinary field that draws broadly on different social sciences to understand children and adolescents (Larson, 2000). It embraces an explicit developmental stance: Children and adolescents are not miniature adults, and they need to be understood on their own terms. Youth development also emphasizes the multiple contexts in which development occurs. Particularly influential as an organizing framework has been Bronfenbrenner’s (1977, 1979, 1986) ecological approach, which articulates different contexts in terms of their immediacy to the behaving individual. So, the microsystem refers to ecologies with which the individual directly interacts: family, peers, school, and neighborhood. The mesosystem is Bronfenbrenner’s term for relationships between and among various microsystems. The exosystem is made up of larger ecologies that indirectly affect development and behavior, like the legal system, the social welfare system, and mass media. Finally, the macrosystem consists of broad ideological and institutional patterns that collectively define a culture. There is the risk of losing the individual amid all these systems, but the developmental perspective reminds us that different children are not interchangeable puppets. Each young person brings his or her own characteristics to life, and these interact with the different ecologies to produce behavior. Youth development
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Christopher Peterson (Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification)
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If the symbolic father is often lurking behind the boss--which is why one speaks of 'paternalism' in various kinds of enterprises--there also often is, in a most concrete fashion, a boss or hierarchic superior behind the real father. In the unconscious, paternal functions are inseparable from the socio-professional and cultural involvements which sustain them. Behind the mother, whether real or symbolic, a certain type of feminine condition exists, in a socially defined imaginary context. Must I point out that children do not grow up cut off from the world, even within the family womb? The family is permeable to environmental forces and exterior influences. Collective infrastructures, like the media and advertising, never cease to interfere with the most intimate levels of subjective life. The unconscious is not something that exists by itself to be gotten hold of through intimate discourse. In fact, it is only a rhizome of machinic interactions, a link to power systems and power relations that surround us. As such, unconscious processes cannot be analyzed in terms of specific content or structural syntax, but rather in terms of enunciation, of collective enunciative arrangements, which, by definition, correspond neither to biological individuals nor to structural paradigms...
The customary psychoanalytical family-based reductions of the unconscious are not 'errors.' They correspond to a particular kind of collective enunciative arrangement. In relation to unconscious formation, they proceed from the particular micropolitics of capitalistic societal organization. An overly diversified, overly creative machinic unconscious would exceed the limits of 'good behavior' within the relations of production founded upon social exploitation and segregation. This is why our societies grant a special position to those who specialize in recentering the unconscious onto the individuated subject, onto partially reified objects, where methods of containment prevent its expansion beyond dominant realities and significations. The impact of the scientific aspirations of techniques like psychoanalysis and family therapy should be considered as a gigantic industry for the normalization, adaption and organized division of the socius.
The workings of the social division of labor, the assignment of individuals to particular productive tasks, no longer depend solely on means of direct coercion, or capitalistic systems of semiotization (the monetary remuneration based on profit, etc.). They depend just as fundamentally on techniques modeling the unconscious through social infrastructures, the mass media, and different psychological and behavioral devices...Even the outcome of the class struggle of the oppressed--the fact that they constantly risk being sucked into relations of domination--appears to be linked to such a perspective.
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Félix Guattari (Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977)
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In the beginning, there was the internet: the physical infrastructure of wires and servers that lets computers, and the people in front of them, talk to each other. The U.S. government’s Arpanet sent its first message in 1969, but the web as we know it today didn’t emerge until 1991, when HTML and URLs made it possible for users to navigate between static pages. Consider this the read-only web, or Web1.
In the early 2000s, things started to change. For one, the internet was becoming more interactive; it was an era of user-generated content, or the read/write web. Social media was a key feature of Web2 (or Web 2.0, as you may know it), and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr came to define the experience of being online. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, along with the ability to comment on content, expanded our ability to watch, learn, search, and communicate.
The Web2 era has also been one of centralization. Network effects and economies of scale have led to clear winners, and those companies (many of which I mentioned above) have produced mind-boggling wealth for themselves and their shareholders by scraping users’ data and selling targeted ads against it. This has allowed services to be offered for “free,” though users initially didn’t understand the implications of that bargain. Web2 also created new ways for regular people to make money, such as through the sharing economy and the sometimes-lucrative job of being an influencer.
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Harvard Business Review (Web3: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review (HBR Insights Series))
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with “This is a class assignment,” and (2) they had to engage the interactions with a straight face. They couldn’t give away the punchline. The exchanges went something like this: Students (walking in a group toward a stranger in a mall): “Excuse me, sir!” Stranger (looking around and awkwardly shifting bags of clothes): “Uhh, yeah? Me?” Students: “Yes! You. I was walking by, saw you, and wondered: Will you be my friend? Can I see pictures of your family? What are your political preferences? Can I see the pictures of your tattoos? What are your religious preferences? Why? Are you pro-choice? How come? Who are your favorite musicians? We’re going to read you a list of probing, introspective quotes, and you simply give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down if you like them or don’t like them. If you feel angry about a quote, tell us why.” And so on. My students had to video each interaction. And yes, it was as awkward and cringey as you can imagine. According to the papers they had to write after the fact, the assignment stirred up quite a bit of reflection. In a few short years, my students had come to believe they had “friends” because they knew some information about people. They thought they were connecting with those people. The exercise helped them see that our social media exchanges are anything but normal. The thumbs ups and thumbs downs are anything but connecting. The reality is that most of us don’t have any friends. Until recently, friendship was about enduring the awkwardness and ugliness of human
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John Delony (Own Your Past Change Your Future: A Not-So-Complicated Approach to Relationships, Mental Health & Wellness)
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Americans need to get off their cell phones—my sons included. Contrary to what you’re thinking, you can live without them. I promise you can operate and function without them. I don’t have one. You don’t have to have one, either. And while you’re at it, get off your desktop computer, laptop, iPad, tablet, reader, and whatever other mobile devices you own. I’ve never figured out how the computer, the very device that was supposed to revolutionize the way we live and save us so much time, ended up occupying so much of our time. Americans can’t stay off them! The IDC study revealed some alarming facts about Americans. Did you know that 79 percent of smartphone users reach for their devices within fifteen minutes of waking up? A majority of them—62 percent—don’t even wait fifteen minutes! I have an idea: why don’t you grab a Bible and read, or lie there in bed and pray or meditate for a few quiet moments? Hey, news flash, folks: I promise you it’s the only quiet time you’re probably going to get in this busy, busy world. Why don’t you take advantage of a few moments of solitude and slow down, Jack? I’m convinced that the Internet and social media in particular, the very things that were supposed to bring us closer together, have actually distanced us from each other more than ever before. They’re destroying the social interaction among humans. We don’t talk to anybody anymore, and we’ve isolated ourselves, spending most of our time in front of a computer or tapping the screens of our smartphones and tablets. We’ve become robots.
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Phil Robertson (unPHILtered: The Way I See It)
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Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.
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Alexander R. Galloway
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The Blue Mind Rx Statement
Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans.
The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being.
In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters.
Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history.
Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more.
Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety.
We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points:
•Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies.
•Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits.
•All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy.
•Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both.
•Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support.
•Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.
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Wallace J. Nichols (Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do)
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to say that I saw ways to connect with Americans that Barack and his West Wing advisers didn’t fully recognize, at least initially. Rather than doing interviews with big newspapers or cable news outlets, I began sitting down with influential “mommy bloggers” who reached an enormous and dialed-in audience of women. Watching my young staffers interact with their phones, seeing Malia and Sasha start to take in news and chat with their high school friends via social media, I realized there was opportunity to be tapped there as well. I crafted my first tweet in the fall of 2011 to promote Joining Forces and then watched it zing through the strange, boundless ether where people increasingly spent their time. It was a revelation. All of it was a revelation. With my soft power, I was finding I could be strong. If reporters and television cameras wanted to follow me, then I was going to take them places. They could come watch me and Jill Biden paint a wall, for example, at a nondescript row house in the Northwest part of Washington. There was nothing inherently interesting about two ladies with paint rollers, but it baited a certain hook. It brought everyone to the doorstep of Sergeant Johnny Agbi, who’d been twenty-five years old and a medic in Afghanistan when his transport helicopter was attacked, shattering his spine, injuring his brain, and requiring a long rehabilitation at Walter Reed. His first floor was now being retrofitted to accommodate his wheelchair—its doorways widened, its kitchen sink lowered—part of a joint effort between a nonprofit called Rebuilding Together and the company that owned Sears and Kmart. This was the thousandth such home they’d renovated on behalf of veterans in need. The cameras caught all of it—the soldier, his house, the goodwill and energy being poured in.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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Each day, Internet users share more than 1.8 billion photos, according to a report by venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. For advertisers, the social media posts that include those photos are more valuable than those with just text because pictures reveal how consumers act "in the wild." "You have a window into their world," said Duncan Alney, CEO of Firebelly Marketing in Indianapolis, which uses Ditto Labs' service. Alney, whose firm represents a beer company, learned from Ditto that people drink beer not just with pub grub but also with healthier snacks like hummus. And that consumers who favor mainstream beers also consume craft brews. Other companies use it to interact with fans. Nissan North America found a photo on Twitter of a baby peeking out from behind a cardboard cutout of a Nissan race car driver. Nissan got the Twitter user's permission and reposted the photo on the company's account, garnering 17 retweets and 37 favorites. The original photo was not tagged with "Nissan," so without Ditto the company never would have found it, said Rob Robinson, a senior specialist in social communications at the automaker.
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Anonymous
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If this simulated flourishing were restricted to the world of leisure—cruises and games—at least we would know that it was not the real world. But the reward structure of video games—the simulated authority and vulnerability of virtual reality—is increasingly colonizing our interactions with the most serious matters of the real world as well. Like technologically mediated entertainment, the technology of social media is becoming more “gamified” by the year as developers learn how to tap into the deep human hunger for simulations of authority and vulnerability. In social media, you can engage in nearly friction-free experiences of activism, expressing enthusiasm, solidarity or outrage (all powerful sensations of authority) for your chosen cause with the click of a few buttons.
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Andy Crouch (Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing)
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Social media, for all their powers, cannot give us what we get from churches, unions, athletic clubs, and welfare states. They are neither a safety net nor a gathering place. In fact, insider accounts from Silicon Valley tech companies establish that keeping people on their screens, rather than in the world of face-to-face interaction, is a key priority of designers and engineers.
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Eric Klinenberg (Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life)
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Even though there is no evidence of a direct relationship between Trump and these extremist groups, Fortune magazine assessed the impact of the interactions between them. Using social media analytics software, it tracked the campaign’s connections to white supremacists. Locating the white supremacists who were considered social media “influencers,” Fortune discovered that a significant number of Trump campaign workers followed the leading #WhiteGenocide influencers. The study concluded that “the data shows…that Donald Trump and his campaign have used social media to court support within the white supremacist community, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
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Deborah E. Lipstadt (Antisemitism: Here and Now)
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Social media made it possible for young black people to document interactions they believed to be injustices, and exposed their white friends and family members to their experiences.
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Wesley Lowery (They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement)
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[...] interactive media is no longer a novelty [...]—it is an expectation.
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Philip Hughes (Exhibition Design)
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The Interview
The largest determining factor in whether you get a job is usually the interview itself. You’ve made impressions all along—with your telephone call and your cover letter and resume. Now it is imperative that you create a favorable impression when at last you get a chance to talk in person. This can be the ultimate test for a socially anxious person: After all, you are being evaluated on your performance in the interview situation. Activate your PMA, then build up your energy level. If you have followed this program, you now possess the self-help techniques you need to help you through the situation. You can prepare yourself for success.
As with any interaction, good chemistry is important. The prospective employer will think hard about whether you will fit in—both from a production perspective and an interactive one. The employer may think: Will this employee help to increase the bottom line? Will he interact well as part of the team within the social system that already exists here? In fact, your chemistry with the interviewer may be more important than your background and experience.
One twenty-three-year-old woman who held a fairly junior position in an advertising firm nonetheless found a good media position with one of the networks, not only because of her skills and potential, but because of her ability to gauge a situation and react quickly on her feet. What happened? The interviewer began listing the qualifications necessary for the position that was available: “Self-starter, motivated, creative . . .” “Oh,” she said, after the executive paused, “you’re just read my resume!” That kind of confidence and an ability to take risks not only amused the interviewer; it displayed some of the very skills the position required!
The fact that interactive chemistry plays such a large role in getting a job has both positive and negative aspects. The positive side is that a lack of experience doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t get a particular job. Often, with the right basic education and life skills, you can make a strong enough impression based on who you are and how capable you seem that the employer may feel you are trainable for the job at hand. In my office, for example, we interviewed a number of experienced applicants for a secretarial position, only to choose a woman whose office skills were not as good as several others’, but who had the right chemistry, and who we felt would fit best into the existing system in the office. It’s often easier to teach or perfect the required skills than it is to try to force an interactive chemistry that just isn’t there. The downside of interactive chemistry is that even if you do have the required skills, you may be turned down if you don’t “click” with the interviewer.
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
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This is the Number. It is in the things we do, the people we meet, the ID cards that we carry. It's part of our identities, our credit cards, our social interactions. It takes our influences, our biases, morals, lifestyles and turns them into a massive alternate reality that no-one can escape from. It lives on our phones, in our televisions, in the cards we swipe to enter office. At its best, it’s an exact mirror of how human society actually works - all our greatness, all our petty shallowness, all our small talk and social contacts all codified and reduced and made plain. At its worst, it’s also exactly that. It’s how poor and rich and famous and desirable you are. It’s the backchannel given a name and dragged out into the limelight for everyone to see.
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Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (Numbercaste)
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Job Acquisition
The entire job-acquisition process—considering job prospects, your personal and professional preparation, creating a resume, going on a job interview—depends for success upon possessing social skills and managing anxiety. How you adapt to the stress of this process can play a major role. As with other aspects of interaction, anxiety can often keep you from getting the jobs you really want and would be well suited for. If you allow your anxiety to control you, you may avoid applying for a new position because you fear rejection. Or you may let the fear of failure keep you from accepting a new challenge, no matter how badly you would like to take the job. But let’s look first at the job process and consider self-help techniques that will lead to a more rewarding, productive career. For people with social anxiety, low self-esteem is often a stumbling block to fulfillment in their careers: If you feel you are underqualified, you may hesitate to seek challenges, whether in a new company or within your current one.
I have worked with several men who say their self-esteem is low because they are not the stereotype of success: They do not wear a suit, carry a briefcase, or drive the latest-model car. In their minds, this is the most important measure of success. But they themselves are not failures. One of the men I can think of is a successful plumber, another has a telephone sales job, and a third manages a large warehouse. Still, they have doubts about their appeal to women because of their career choices; increasing their self-esteem will help them to see themselves in a new way. Success need not be defined by media standards such as the right clothes or an expensive automobile. Everyone is different. Your personal success can only be measured by your own personal fulfillment and productivity.
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
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For she thought to herself, “If I can just touch his clothing, I will be healed.” And sure enough, as soon as she had touched him, the bleeding stopped and she knew she was well! (vv. 28–29 tlb) Her interaction with the Great Physician could’ve/should’ve ended right there because she’d gotten what she came for: physical healing. Plus, Jesus was en route to Jairus’s house, a leader in the community, to attend to his dying daughter (vv. 22–24). But instead, Jesus stops in the middle of a seemingly more important mission just to listen to her: The woman, knowing that she was healed, came and fell at Jesus’ feet. Shaking with fear, she told him the whole truth. (v. 33 ncv, emphasis mine) I believe Jesus stopped because, despite her medical cure, He knew her heart still needed care after twelve long years of suffering. So the Lamb of Judah paused for a moment to lean in and listen to one lonely woman’s entire story. Really listening—leaning in and giving our full attention to what someone else is communicating or attempting to communicate—is one of humanity’s most powerful expressions of compassion. Unfortunately, in our digitized, hyperstimulated, selfie and social-media obsessed culture, being actively present while someone else tells their true, unfiltered story seems to be going the way of the Dodo bird. I’m sure, like me, you’ve found yourself awkwardly trailing off and not finishing a complete thought because the person in front of you stopped paying attention as soon as their phone started vibrating. Leisurely, device-less conversation between two people seems to becoming passé.
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Lisa Harper (The Sacrament of Happy: What a Smiling God Brings to a Wounded World)
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We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are often brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction…
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bell hooks
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Within the term otaku, there is a certain degree of subtlety. Addressing someone as “otaku” is a formal way of saying “you” by referring to you as “your residence.” Thus using the term otaku can have a double connotation. It can imply very formalistic social relations. The reference to otaku in the 1980s was often to boys and young men who played video games together without really interacting in ways traditionally deemed sociable—these guys weren’t talking much to each other or roaming the streets together; they were interacting through the games. In these game contexts, boys called each other “otaku” as if sustaining cordial but distant (not sociable or intimate) relations with one another. At the same time, otaku can imply “housebound” due to its reference to the residence. This connotation of otaku became pronounced when linking fan behavior to social withdrawal syndrome.
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Thomas Lamarre (The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation)
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Then, too,” she continued, “we’re more polarized than ever, more propagandized than ever. And this is only getting worse as new tech, especially social media and 24/7 news, divide us. First, we’re each getting individualized news feeds, so no two debaters are even working from the same set of facts, the same objective reality. And social media provides an anonymous platform to spew venom, to unleash our worst selves on each other, bypassing the normal restraints that evolution has built into us when interacting in person.
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Douglas E. Richards (Portals)
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When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.”
“Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.”
“Do the right thing even when no one is watching, not because you have too, but because you can!”
“You are who you choose to be!”
“The only thing that can’t change in a human’s life is its birth – If you think there’s death -there no death if you have a legacy.”
“I will because I can!”
“If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.”
“Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.”
“Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.”
“Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.”
“When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.”
“We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.”
“Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!”
“Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.”
“Be positively the influencer, not the follower.”
“Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.”
“If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.”
“Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!”
“Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!”
“Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!”
“Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!”
Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth”
“Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!”
“The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human”
“Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!”
“The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!”
“I’m realistically optimistic!”
“Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!”
“Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!
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Steve "Mr. Pineapple" Mathieu
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When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.”
“Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.”
“Do the right thing even when no one is watching, not because you have too, but because you can!”
“You are who you choose to be!”
“The only thing that can’t change in a human’s life is its birth – If you think there’s death -there no death if you have a legacy.”
“I will because I can!”
“If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.”
“Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.”
“Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.”
“Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.”
“When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.”
“We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.”
“Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!”
“Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.”
“Be positively the influencer, not the follower.”
“Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.”
“If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.”
“Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!”
“Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!”
“Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!”
“Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!”
"Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!”
“Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth”
“Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!”
“The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human”
“Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!”
“The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!”
“I’m realistically optimistic!”
“Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!”
“Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!
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Steve "Mr. Pineapple" Mathieu
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I'm still not sure why they call it social media. It robs us of genuine social interaction because we're forced to communicate through a device.
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Germany Kent
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It is not only in the halls of the local high school that people are taught to evaluate their self-worth based on who their friends are or who they’ve hooked up with. Ideologies tying self-worth with seduction permeate the web. Social media and dating sites teach us that the more we market ourselves, and the more “likes” we get, the more desirable we are. These interactions and sites are teaching us to be dependent on what other people think of us, and to derive our sense of self-worth from them, regardless that these other people are unstable and insecure in their own right.
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Michael J. Heil (Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose)
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We must first remember that today’s relational successes are not measured on the scale of media—which ones to use and how many friends, fans, or followers one can accumulate. They are measured on the scale of meaning. Become meaningful in your interactions and the path to success in any endeavor is simpler and far more sustainable. The reason? People notice. People remember. People are moved when their interactions with you always leave them a little better.
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Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age (Dale Carnegie Books))
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Social Media Marketing And Optimization
Social media marketing and optimization refer to the strategic use of social media platforms to promote a brand, product, or service and improve its online visibility, engagement, and overall effectiveness. It involves a combination of creating compelling content, building a strong online presence, and interacting with the target audience to achieve specific marketing objectives.
Social media marketing involves the active promotion of a business or organization through various social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and others. The primary goals of social media marketing are to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to a website, generate leads, and ultimately boost sales and revenue.
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comstat
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For instance, when we are afraid that we might not be considered cool, attractive, or high-status, we don’t feel good. That fear is a profound emotion. It hurts.9 Everybody suffers from social anxiety from time to time, and every child has encountered a bully who used social anxiety as a weapon of torture, probably because behaving like a bully lessened the chances that the bully might become a target. That’s why people, even those who would normally be decent, tend to pile on to a victim of social anxiety torture. They’re so afraid of the very real pain that social anxiety brings that they can lose sight of their better natures for a moment. That’s not to say that all social emotions are negative. We can also experience camaraderie, sympathy, respect, admiration, gratitude, hope, empathy, closeness, attraction, and a world of other positive feelings when we interact with other people. On the negative side, we might feel fear, hostility, anxiety, resentment, repulsion, jealousy, and a desire to ridicule.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Here are some examples of excessive use of social networking sites. There was this guy who fell for online dating so much, that it became his zone of comfort. He boosted his confidence, became a better communicator, knew what works and what doesn’t. Even kept interacting with girls for weeks and grabbed their attention with every word, while still playing it casual. But he never went on a real date. That’s because when you meet someone in person, you don’t have a screen between you two and that makes you vulnerable. It’s because you don’t always look your best and can’t choose a ‘profile picture’ that suits your mood. Because you’ll be asked questions you won’t expect, and wouldn’t have the time to pretend like you’re not on the phone and think of the best possible answer before replying. So, your image can be ruined, although it was never the real you in the first place.
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Lidiya K. (Quitting Social Media: The Social Media Cleanse Guide)
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Indeed, much of the work on compassion fatigue reviewed here assumes that compassion fatigue is a consequence of audiences’ declining concern for others’ suffering, rather than an active response to media practices of representing and interacting with sufferers. It is crucial for us to explore in this book how audiences’ discourses of compassion toward sufferers on television might be dependent not only on an evaluation of sufferers themselves but on what I call ‘lay media moralities’ about the very process of mediation, which pertains to audiences’ judgments on whether media are exploitative or helpful, manipulative or sincere, in their interactions with sufferers.
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Jonathan Corpus Ong (The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines (Anthem Global Media and Communication Studies))
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Frame control creates power and power attracts.
BY JOSH (JETSET) KING MADRID
WHAT DO KANYE WEST AND ELON MUSK HAVE IN COMMON? When you put the two together, there may be few similarities, but I believe one trait they share is the ability to control their frame, also known as frame control.
Frame control is a little-known underlying phenomenon that may be one of the reasons they are so influential and successful despite the controversy. Nonetheless, they maintain their status as some of our culture's most powerful figures.
The power of how we frame our personal realities is referred to as frame control. A frame is a tool that you can use to package your power, authority, strength, information, and status. Standing firm in your beliefs can persuade and influence.
I first discovered frame control in 2016 after coming across the book Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. I was hooked instantly. I was a freshman in college at UC Irvine at the time and was earning a few thousand dollars a month in my online business. In just a few short months after applying the concept of frame control in my life and business, everything changed — I started dating the girl of my dreams, cleared my first $27,000 in one month and dropped out of college to go all in on my business.
Since then, I've read every book, watched every video, and studied every expert-written blog I can find on the subject. This eventually led me to obtain NLP and neuro-marketing certifications, both of which explain the underlying psychology of how our brains frame social interactions and provide techniques for controlling these frames in oneself and others in order to become more likable, influential, and lead a better life overall.
Frame control is about establishing your own authority, but it isn't just some self-help nonsense. It is about true and verified beliefs. The glass half-empty or half-full frame is a popular analogy. If you believe the glass is half-empty, that is exactly what it will be.
But someone with a half-full frame can come in and convince you to change your belief, simply by backing it up with the logic of “an empty glass of water would always be empty, but having water in an empty glass makes it half-full.”
Positioning your view as the one that counts does take some practice because you first have to believe in yourself. You won’t be able to convince anyone of your authority if you are not authentic or if you don’t actually believe in what you’re trying to sell.
Whether they realize it or not, public figures are likely to engage in frame control.
When you're in the spotlight, you have to stay focused on the type of person you want the rest of the world to see you as. Tom Cruise, for example, is an example of frame control because of his ability to maintain dominance in media situations.
In a well-known BBC interview, Tom Cruise assertively puts the interviewer in his place when he steps out of line and begins probing into his personal life. Cruise doesn't do it disrespectfully, which is how he maintains his own dominance, but he does it in such a way that the interviewer is held accountable.
How Frame Control Positions the User as Influential or Powerful
Turning toward someone who is dominant or who seems to know what they are doing is a natural occurrence. Generally speaking, we are hard-wired to trust people who believe in themselves and when they are put on a world stage, the effects of it can be almost bewildering.
We often view comedians as mere entertainers, but in fact, many of them are experts in frame control. They challenge your views by making you laugh. Whether you want to accept their frame or not, the moment you laugh, your own frame has been shaken and theirs have taken over.
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JetSet (Josh King Madrid, JetSetFly) (The Art of Frame Control: The Art of Frame Control: How To Effortlessly Get People To Readily Agree With You & See The World Your Way)
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Host Events When you want some control over an influencer’s interaction with your brand, you can sponsor an influencer event. Invite a small handful of influencers to come and experience your brand’s products or services. By doing this, you allow them to become part of your story
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Chase Barlow (Storytelling: Master the Art of Telling a Great Story for Purposes of Public Speaking, Social Media Branding, Building Trust, and Marketing Your Personal Brand (Brand Storytelling))
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Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
Notice anything about the difference between the two lists? Screen versus nonscreen. When kids use screens for two hours of their leisure time per day or less, there is no elevate risk of depression. But above two hours per day, the risks grow larger with each additional hour of screen time. Conversely, kids who spend more time off screens, especially if they are engaged in nonscreen social activities, are at lower risk for depression and suicidal thinking.
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Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt
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Auxost is more than just a marketing company – we’re a team of passionate individuals dedicated to helping businesses succeed in the online world. The internet and social media are rapidly changing the way we communicate and do business. The period of individuals interacting with visual graphics, text, etc. is reducing each day. Therefore, to get your content to the right audience with optimum visibility is of utmost importance. We knew that businesses needed a way to stand out in the digital landscape. That’s why, we at Auxost make sure to create stand-out creatives that not only stand out but entice the consumer to click or grow brand presence.
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Auxost