Why ‘Slacktivism’ Matters The following piece is a guest post. Read more about MediaShift guest posts here. We all have at least one social or political issue that gets our blood boiling. The question is whether it boils vigorously enough to incite action. Of course, the majority of us vent our frustrations about these issues at the water cooler and on social media, rather than marching in the streets. We create an echo chamber of like-minded people with whom we can openly share opinions and commiserate grievances. In April of 2014, hundreds of girls in Nigeria were kidnapped from their school by the militant group, Boko Haram. While the idea that a single post on social media could have an iota of impact on a global issue might sound absurd, it can actually be the catalyst for a successful awareness campaign given the right set of circumstances. SLACKTIVISM vs. I see Facebook as the most effective venue because it offers every tool needed to organize.
What Ever Happened to the Pepsi Generation? | In the CEO Afterlife The concept of a Pepsi advertising campaign designed to capture America’s youth had its roots in the 1960’s. But it wasn’t until the 1980’s that “The Choice of a New Generation” struck 14-24 year olds like a social tsunami. Michael Jackson, the theme to “Billie Jean” and a phenomenal blend of marketing and entertainment drove the Pepsi brand to the pinnacle of contemporary culture. Coca-Cola was so taken aback by the success that they made a colossal error in judgment. They abandoned their century-old recipe and launched “New Coke”. The result was disastrous. Pundits attribute Coca-Cola’s rebound to the reintroduction of Coke Classic and better marketing and advertising. Make no mistake; the Pepsi-Cola brand is still big business. Did you like this?
Interview with Nick Hornby (Author of High Fidelity) February, 2015 English author and screenwriter Nick Hornby, perhaps best known for his autobiography Fever Pitch and his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, returns to bookstores this month with Funny Girl, his first novel in over five years. Set in London in the mid-1960s, featuring a female protagonist who rejects a beauty queen title to instead pursue a career as a comedic television actor, Hornby's newest book captures a brief window of time in 20th century popular culture when over half of the U.K. would watch a hit TV show and the Beatles and Rolling Stones had yet to fully assert their dominance. With his usual humor, pop culture references, and enviable empathy, Hornby has created another cast of instantly memorable characters. Just before departing on his book tour, Hornby spoke with Goodreads Author J. Error rating book. Rate this book Clear rating Nick Hornby: I think anything I've ever done in movies has fed into this. GR: She's also very much her father's daughter. NH: Right. GR: Right.
The Lazy Person's Guide to a Happy Home: Tips for People Who (Really) Hate Cleaning I'm always a little ashamed to admit this, but I hate to clean. I really hate it. I mean, there are so many more interesting things I could be doing. And the annoying thing is that when you clean something, it just gets dirty all over again. I've been working at this for a while, and I've realized that "not caring about it" is not an effective solution. 1. 2. 3. 4. So if you dread cleaning (like me) because you're lazy but also sort of a crazy perfectionist and think everything has to be SUPER SUPER clean: it doesn't. 5. So drink a glass of wine while you wash the dishes. 6. I've experienced firsthand the difficulty of getting rid of things because I'm planning to sell my house soon, so I've been cleaning out bigtime. Even More Cleaning Tips for Lazy People: • How To Clean Your House in 20 Minutes a Day for 30 Days • How To Keep Your Bathroom Clean In 5 Minutes A Day • The Stress Free Plan: How To Clean House for a Party • Dirty Little Secrets of Tidy Families • "Tidy Time" vs.
In Praise of Melancholy and How It Enriches Our Capacity for Creativity by Maria Popova How the American obsession with happiness at the expense of sadness robs us of the capacity for a full life. “One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless,” Van Gogh wrote in one of his many letters expounding his mental anguish. And yet the very melancholy that afflicted him was also the impetus for the creative restlessness that sparked his legendary art. And yet the modern happiness industrial complex seems bent on eradicating this dark, uncomfortable, but creatively vitalizing state — something Eric G. With an eye toward the marketable ticker of bad news on which our commercial news media feed, Wilson writes: Our minds run over a daunting litany of global problems. Considering what lies behind our desire to eradicate sadness from our lives, Wilson admonishes that our obsession with happiness — something he considers a decidedly American export — “could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse.”
The Secret to Creativity, Intelligence, and Scientific Thinking: Being Able to Make Connections - When we shared this image from the @buffer Twitter account a while back, it got me thinking. The Tweet resulted in over 1,000 retweets, which seems like an indication that it resonated with a lot of people. There’s a key difference between knowledge and experience and it’s best described like this: The original is from cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who came up with such a brilliant way to express a concept that’s often not that easy to grasp. The image makes a clear point—that knowledge alone is not useful unless we can make connections between what we know. Lots of great writers, artists and scientists have talked about the importance of collecting ideas and bits of knowledge from the world around us, and making connections between those dots to fuel creative thinking and new ideas. This is a really fun, inspiring topic to read about, so I collected some quotes and advice from my favorite creative thinkers about the importance of making connections in your brain. It starts off like this: 1.
archives.chicagotribune King Solomon had blintzes for the royal coffee break. By Francis Coughlin I N YOUR EXPERINCE has this year s spring fever seemed to set in and linger late? It always has. In addition to this unhappy prospect, the woes of millions of us who are chronically afflicted will be made the more irksome by energetic quacks of- fering all sorts of remedies for the con- dition. Never mind that the shirker -is in there trying and the cheer leader is only jumping up and down on the side- lines. It's probably no use, tho, to try to con- vince the energy boys they re bark- ing up the wrong tree. And it s a pity the well worn proverbs don't have much bearing on the present situation. job to help meet his current expenses. Ten'll get you one that Solomon didn't go anywhere at all. The old proverbs don't apply any more. I say, let the busybody who goes around calling spring fever victims shirkers keep a civil tongue in his head. rhe big boss, back at the office, is not 1 there anyway.
You are a Melancholic You are a "nervous" Melancholic, with an abundance of black bile. Melancholics are characterized by the element of Earth, the season of Autumn, middle-aged adulthood, the colors black and blue, Saturn, and the characteristics of "Cold" and "Dry." Animals used to symbolize the Melancholic include the pig, cat, and owl. To ehnance your Melancholic tendencies, listen to music in the Mixolydian Mode; to diminish those tendencies, listen to music in the Hypomixolydian mode. Famous Melancholics include St. If you were living in the Age of Faith, perfect career choices for you would be contemplative religious, theologian, artist, or writer. From "The Four Temperaments," by Rev. The Melancholic: Is self-conscious, easily embarrassed, timid, bashful. The melancholic person is but feebly excited by whatever acts upon him. Such impression may be compared to a post, which by repeated strokes is driven deeper and deeper into the ground, so that at last it is hardly possible to pull it out again. 1.
The Next Big Thing in Email is You On Monday mornings, my personal inbox is a hailstorm. 25%-off sales, blog posts from every industry site I subscribed to, spam from 3 sites I once used to look at house paint, and 400 emails from J. Crew (I exaggerate, but it’s a lot). I’m sure you can relate. And beneath all of those layers, there are 10 emails I want to read: 2 blog posts, a message from my aunt, a bunch of imgur links from friends, and 3 solid gold personal email newsletters. I open the first email newsletter and bask in its glory, clicking on links to interesting news items or brands of nail polish and getting a little respite from my day. ::Pause:: If you haven’t come across a personal email newsletter yet, you might have no idea what I’m talking about. Personal email newsletters are the new trend in self-promotion. Branding One reason you might write your own newsletter is to create a personal brand. So we end up with several Internet “identities.” Ad Sales Maybe you’re not concerned about personal branding. Subscribe
Tim Hunt should treat female scientists with the respect that he enjoys | Sophie Scott Women, eh? Can’t work with ‘em, can’t complain about them without all bloody hell breaking loose on Twitter. What’s a scientist to do? I’m a great fan of the different varieties of outrageous sexism that we get exposed to on a fairly regular basis – I particularly like the “no woman is my equal” kind – and this week we’re seeing another variety being taken for a gentle canter around the ring, with Nobel prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt’s comments about the problems of having women in the lab. In case you’ve been living under a rock, or possibly hiding under a rock in case you fall in love with Hunt, he announced to a room full of female scientists and journalists that he has “trouble with girls”: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.” Consider what happened to women in computer science in the west.
Huxley's Letter to Orwell Regarding "1984" In case you aren’t aware, Aldous Huxley was George Orwell’s French teacher at Eton College. The below letter contains Huxley’s brief review and initial thoughts on Orwell’s iconic masterpiece. Wrightwood. Cal.21 October, 1949Dear Mr. Orwell,It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. h/t Open Culture.
10 good reasons to live in Iceland | I'd Rather Be In Iceland There is so much that I like about Iceland, and I’m still hearing about or reading about new things that convince me that it really is the most civilised place on earth. Here are some Icelandic ideas and customs that I really like the sound of. (Icelandic friends, you can feel free to tell me if I am completely crazy…) 1. Knitting is taught in schools. In a country with so many sheep, woollen products and long winters, this would be a really useful skill to have. 2. 3. 4. From reykjavikdailyphoto.blogspot.com 5. From recipebridge.com 6. These next ideas all highlight what a fair, equal and non-judgmental society Iceland is. 7. 8. 9. Excuse me, Mr President? 10. Laugardalslaug – From wikitravel.org Does your country have ways of thinking or customs that you are particularly proud of? Update: This post has had more views than any other on my blog. Like this: Like Loading...
fRoots - The Elusive Ethnomusicologist Recently it seems I’m ambushed daily by death or disaster of some sort. Mostly they take the form of the resident A&R guru detailing the dying throes of the music industry, in all its horror: the bloody battles where monolithic global music corporations slaughter the independent labels and streaming sticks the knife in. It’s David and Goliath or Mad Max, both with the wrong ending. Yet in the devastation of this post-apocalyptic terrain, life asserts itself. Music blossoms like weeds or flowers, shoots of green as human beings make music because they have to whether or not they (or anyone else) can make a living from it; whether it’s deemed to be any good or not, whether it’s ‘liked’ or ‘hated’. And of course there’s life and death in music itself, progressions, motifs and cadences that spring to life, swell, bloom and die in perpetual cycles. Then suddenly there’s death that’s shocking, inconsolable, unreasonable and wrong. But it’s not true. Elizabeth Kinder
A Watford welcome for the Bilderberg group - the world’s most powerful club Yet there was nothing secretive about the start of the four-day ego fest, which was being live streamed into conspiracy theorists’ living rooms all over the planet by the hardcore of alternative media, epitomised by US radio host Alex Jones, who had assembled in their hundreds in the hope of catching a glimpse of attendees, ranging from our own Chancellor George Osborne and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls to the heads of Google, BP, Goldman Sachs and Shell. Even the BBC – which some Bilderberg conspiracy theorists believe is shorthand for Bilderberg Club, such has been its lack of coverage in previous years – was out in force, as were most other mainstream outlets. Led by the vociferous Jones, whose voice practically carried the half-mile up the hill from the media tent to the hotel where attendees were gathering, there was even talk a Bilderberger might break rank to disclose for the first time since the group started in 1954 some of the detail up for discussion. George Osborne Chancellor