A recent study demonstrated that we can successfully predict which messages will go viral and which will not. This study showed that the ideas that are destined to spread have a characteristic signature at their origin — that is, quite literally, within the brain of the sender. These messages specifically activate key regions in two circuits in the sender’s brain: the “reward” circuit, which registers the value of the message to the sender, and the “mentalizing” circuit, which activates when we see things from the point of view of the person who receives the message…
…The more you value an idea that you want to spread, the more likely you are to be successful at spreading it. In addition, the more accurately you can predict how others will feel about the message, the more likely you are to be successful at spreading this idea. These findings are profound because they imply that we can predict which messages will go viral…
…when you also register that your actual value is that you are investing in helping to cure people from their illnesses or shorten their durations of suffering (“y”). You may not be right all the time, but if this is your genuine reward, your brain’s reward circuit will be activated because this will always be true
How will they feel about the fact that you have a history of success in biotechnology investing? How will they feel about their own investment in the well-being of the world? Do they care about communicating this to their families? Would they be excited about the rapid advancements in this field and seeing the newness of the opportunity? Here again, these different aspects of how your audience thinks will help to accentuate the activation in your mentalizing circuit — where you form a mental picture of the audience’s needs and wants.
it would make a difference if he or she actually wanted to spread the message rather than just passively feeling that the message is valuable. This implies that it matters when you think of how a message can be useful to others rather than simply thinking about yourself.
All three factors (value, mentalizing, and intention to spread) point to the fact that the social currency of a message matters at the very source of the message.
On one hand, my initial reaction is that this is too idealistic.
However, the researcher in me can’t argue with experimental data. Which is why the article leads me to self-reflect. Oftentimes, I do blog with the objective of just shouting into the void. Of curation. Very self-focused objectives. When, if people (including me) and brands would start growing a sincere interest in being useful…maybe, that is all that really matters.
What do I mean by saying “Sports for the Internet Generation”?
It takes advantage of the main strengths of the web – heavy on visuals (lots of GIFs!!!); always involving storytelling and just — “human”. They’re always either funny, cheeky, sexy or intriguing.
Deadspin has interesting features, too. But for some reason, they feel a bit staid.
(I don’t know whether they were thinking that this would honor the gymnasts. But deliberately mentioning how few and rare they were, almost seemed to emphasize that it was a white-woman dominated sport.
It was like the Serena Williams crip-walking incident. You see that hurdler dancing before she ran, but it just made her seem like a sex symbol. Why does Willams’ dance have to be political? Of course, you don’t see people making articles entitled “Black women who kicked ass in tennis”. I’m confused.
Maybe they should make a White Men/Women Who Kicked Ass in Basketball for Team USA article.)
If there’s anything that I can clearly see about the change in treatment and response between the 2012 Olympics and prior Games, is the well more light-hearted, multi-dimensional and “sexy-fied” treatment of the athletes.
I’m not complaining; I think it’s cool. It points to the “celebrit-ization” of sport; of fitness. And the Internet amplifies that. In the same way that actors, musicians can now show facets of their lives online, why not athletes. They’re young, fit – basically, in the prime of their life. So of course they’ll have a possible market for people who want to look at their bodies, make fun of their weird fashion choices, or just want to admire their technical competence. Hooray, Olympics+Social Media+Aggregators!
She is, as Fader describes, “the internet’s preeminent coy white girl rapper”, and her video “Okay Cupid” has been making the rounds.
Now, I’m sure her music will get A LOT of flack.
Because, damn it, when I was watching the first 20 seconds, all I was thinking was “whaaaaaaaaat.”
In fact, I’m impressed that the blogs picked this up pretty quickly. Her main Okay Cupid youtube video only has 85, 475 views, which kind of suggests this topic is at its infancy. Of the 1,429 people who actually cared to click a button on what they felt about this, 38% clicked the thumbs-down one.
And, she gets comments like:
“what the fuck is this shit”
“omg please stop singing”
and “She’s 17 writing the lyrics of a fucking 14 year old girl trying too hard.”
and, one of my favorites: “its like rebecca black all over again with more.. words.. ”
along with: “i give up on life”
From HypeTrak, there’s also: “Really Hypetrak? so many trill nigggas doin they thing and this is what you post? smh….RIP HT”
So what’s there to like?
I actually don’t enjoy her Okay Cupid song as much as her Justin Bieber song. Which is actually a response to his cult of fans and the baby-daddy incident. Listen to it.
But, as usual, I love her in a “meta” way.
What do I mean?
I mean: I love what she represents.
For one, I love the whole “package”, the whole “non-marketing marketing*” approach.
I love that her Bandcamp page has close-up, self-taken pictures of her face with black mascara trails streaming from her eyelashes and showing off her inner lip tattoo.
She is authentic.
Or, at the very least, feigns authenticity. The kind of current “real-ness” that proper adults and “good values” see as icky.
But, she does precisely what teenagers on tumblr do.
This is the best example to support how one teenage girl (who I interviewed last year) explained her liking Miley Cyrus, as a personality, over Taylor Swift.
Because, she said, Taylor Swift is “less real”.
Her songs are all about love and liking the boy who doesn’t like you back; she beams heart-shapes into the world, which might be relatable for her 12-year old fangirls.
On the other hand, you have Miley Cyrus, who is out there making mistakes, trashing her own name, trying to break out of the mold her parents brought her up in.
Which sounds much more like a 17-year old.
And, I think authenticity especially matters when making music.
In my opinion, successful music is authentic.
Meaning it represents something true about a culture, an image or an experience.
It’s why, for me, although many great songs have universal appeal, the way they sound and the way they’re made is culturally specific.
We tend to laugh at people who just mimic or copy musical styles. But, as it has often been said, good artists steal and we now have a culture where “everything is a remix“.
What gives away that something is just a copy is when it isn’t owned. South Korea creates successful pop songs, because they embraced it. They got Western ingredients and made it their own. They practiced it from childhood and honed their pop sensibilities.
Now, you have the addition of hip-hop. Which, I think, also represents society’s ills, like poverty, and violence.
But it has swagger, a gritty machismo not present in the aggression of the 70’s. A swagger that developed from the earlier years of blues, which was also a form of dealing with slavery and sorrow.
How does this relate to Kitty Pryde?
Because if Kitty Pryde made music any other way, it wouldn’t have made sense.
She can’t rap like Nicki Minaj because she doesn’t talk like Nicki Minaj or live like Nicki Minaj.
It was a lot more valid for Eminem to rap the way he did because he lived in the same kind of anger and survivalist aggression.
It’s probably like how it’s annoying to hear non-American musicians, who try to sound American when they rap, when you know they didn’t grow up talking that way.
It’s just fake.
Kitty Pryde’s songs are about her crush and social media culture, and she ‘raps’ the way she talks because that’s how it makes sense to express herself.
Not everyone’s a songstress, you know.
There have been weirder things — like Miranda July’s spoken-word songs, yet those are considered art. More on music appreciation in a future post. (Seriously. If you think Kitty Pryde was weird, you should listen to these. I almost find them disturbing.)
[Watch video at your own risk. I tend to get traumatized.]
I guess I’m just not a “hater” when it comes to people who write their own music. I may not always like the songs, but I respect the difficulty in creating them.
Lastly, I like that they actually can’t pigeonhole her.
I think that if they stopped calling her a rapper there’d be much less negativity surrounding her video.
What this means for culture is that her music can’t really be defined as…anything, which is going to be a good description for the media genres of tomorrow. Hip-hop and rock have crossed over for a while, and I’m pretty sure I recently read an article on the alternative sound of today’s R&B. Or was it the other way around.
This kid sounds like a teenager talking on the phone crossed with a Garage Band track from someone’s basement crossed with frozen yogurt.
I don’t even know what genre you’re supposed to call that. And that’s why I think she signifies the start of something interesting. Because this’ll open up doors for girls who just want to sound like they’re talking on the phone, and want to express themselves, but feel pressured by Taylor Swift and Jessica Sanchez.
Ideating in this day and age calls for a whole other set of creativity.
I want to bookmark some of the most relevant (to me) tweaks and ideas that people thought up to harness the stream of social media…stuff.
Responses to oversharing. No one can deny that individuals with thriving online lives experience lots of clutter.
Every day, it’s entry after entry, stream upon stream of individuals, groups, organizations sending you virtual updates.
So what can we do about it?
1. To combat the overall bombardment, Flavors.me, featured in Fast Company, collects and streamlines your different social feeds into one “page”. Fast Company writes that it’s similar to About.me, but I’m just generally happy that there are ideas like these that are trying to corral the onslaught.
2. But then, we also have Shu.ush, which works only within Twitter, featured on Co. Design. I love how it literally “tones down” the din from talkative tweeters. Just really amusing.
We’ve also got innovation ideas that make the digital Instagram stream more tangible.
I think this surprisingly makes sense, since iPhone or Apple product owners would probably frequent places of interest for global counterparts with similar purchasing power.
Damn, I talk in a really boring way now. Mental laziness.
4. Also, to make things easier to grasp for the Pinterest generation, Brazilian agency ionz creates infographics out of users’ personal informaton (likes, dislikes, favorites) to create your “digital persona” desktop wallpaper. Fun idea. via Creative Applications
And lastly, for people who just want to keep their finds to themselves:
I’ll be watching out for their work. They seem to be the first massive purely digital agency I’ve seen. The others usually seem to be under multinational umbrella agencies who started in traditional media.
I also like the navigation set-up of their portfolio – which has a secondary navigation bar showcasing: new projects, case studies, featured projects, greatest hits, lab projects and a client list.
They just made it simple to find things, with clear paths. Which is just right considering they’re in the business of interaction design.
They have an interesting blog – which both showcases their work, but also reports relevant industry-wide updates. I found this nice article on managing “content creep” – the social media content strategy of version of feature creep.
Susan Kare was an artist who was asked to design fonts for Macintosh, back in the day when there were no screen icon design apps. The featured excerpts of the sketchbook where she drafted initial ideas for user interface icons are just an interesting glimpse into sometimes overlooked bits of web design as we use and look at them day in-day out.
2. I love how someone thought of creating a “virtual palate cleanser”.
Featured on Creative Applications, Cell is an interactive installation that, when you walk through it, lets social media tags “stick” to your body – symbolizing the second identities we create through our Internet profiles and activities.
1. Today, I learned a new word: gamestorming, which is a concept Dave Grey and Sunni Brown pioneered (essentially game-type activities used for innovation).
I have a new blog to follow now. Since it can help me a lot when I facilitate teams for ideating and insight-generation!
Sketch notes by Sunni Brown
2. Grain Edit, a site about the 50’s-70’s design aesthetic and the contemporary designers who get inspiration from it.
Excerpt from Anorak MagazineExcerpt from Anorak MagazineIllustration by Alain Gree
I like how they look for themes in whatever’s popular for the past week, even if they could just be coincidences. That’s how trendspotting begins anyway – pattern-finding.
In my eyes, the homepage content is quite a revolutionary way of presenting “news”. Not that it’s flashy or jazzed-up or animated, but the way that the content is written (especially the headlines ticker) seems very…”social media”-oriented.
They aren’t direct in a traditional sense. They’re paraphrased to elicit some feeling of suspense. Given everything I’ve read about web writing and how it has to be meaningful, concise but not bland. And it is all those things, but not in a CNN or BBC way. Interesting.
It was my first time to hit “Reblog” up on that WordPress universal navigation bar up there (for fellow WordPress subscribers).
It just feels…different. My reference point being re-posting on tumblr, facebook and Pinterest. It just isn’t the same.
After looking at the reblogged post, I had the urge to either a) apologize to the SoFiliumm authors or b) delete-the-post-slash-unreblog (if that was even a word).
In my opinion, as much as my account on tumblr and my account on facebook are every bit as personal and curated as my yellowicepick blog here on WordPress…something just felt wrong.
It’s not part of my personal mental model to see someone else’s content “word-for-word” in my blog feed. Which is so ironic and hypocritical given that most of my posts are actually collections of other people’s works, with barely any introduction (but always, attribution).
So what is it? Maybe I felt like it was an invasion of someone else’s blog – that I took something someone else lovingly wrote and seemed to pass it off as part of my own.
How is that different from when I post someone else’s artwork or design? Isn’t it enough that WordPress blatantly put “Reblogged from…”?
Hmm. Is it because, unlike facebook and Pinterest, WordPress is not a social sharing platform? It’s a network, yes. But when you post, it isn’t as if you’re posting to your friends and loved ones to popularize something. In a way, WordPress is a museum, a soapbox, not your living room.
So, SoFiliumm authors, I’m sorry about reblogging. I didn’t delete it as a lesson to me, and partly, as a bit of a socio-cultural experiment. But if you’re uncomfortable as well, I could take it down.
Reblogging on WordPress. Didn’t think it would be that weird.
with more.. words.. ”
icepick 