Archive for the ‘culture’ Category
New York Times: Consider, for starters, this paradox of social psychology, a problem for myth busters everywhere: repeating a claim, even if only to refute it, increases its apparent truthfulness. In 2003, the psychologist Ian Skurnik and several of his colleagues asked senior citizens to sit through a computer presentation of a series of health warnings that were randomly identified as either true or false — for example, “Aspirin destroys tooth enamel” (true) or “Corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips” (false). A few days later, they quizzed the seniors on what they had learned.
American Thinker: Today, easy access to the Internet is flooding us with gossip, rumor, celebrity tales, and slant that drown out the trickle of actual truth. The Internet can tell you anything you want to know with a googly glance at its googol of inputs. We no longer need seek out and read a book to learn; we need only power a search engine with a few words, even when they’re spelt inkorekly. Internet’s Wikipedia, which is as objective as a list on a barroom menu, and often as fully fact-checked as a diatribe, has all but replaced studiously researched encyclopedias.
Banksy: The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
08.01.27 / art, business, culture
How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
Benjamin Barber’s Consumed: Consumerism has an aggressive, even totalizing face. It effectively colonizes the plural sectors that define culture’s diversity, replacing them with a homogenized environment of marketing, advertising, and shopping-faux feelings and simulated sentiments-as well as common pop-cultural commodities that constrict cultural pluralism. Nonetheless, anthropologists have argued for some time that colonized cultures often react to being colonized by shaping the forces that affect to shape them in ways that alter the cultural aggressor and modify its supposedly “dominant” cultural face. This countercolonizing logic may apply within a culture that is trying to brand and homogenize taste. The process has been called creolization, or sometimes hybridization, and is evident in America’s own cultural interaction with the postwar world beyond its shores.
A period of intense cultural introspection
Things Magazine: There’s a lack of depth on the internet, a world with an atmosphere just one pixel thick that has reached out across all forms of media and turned everything into a vast, shallow pool that stretches as far as the eye can see. All visual culture is instantly at our fingertips, with the thrill of discovery superseded by a high fructose corn syrup buzz that comes from near-constant, 30fps stimulation.
07.07.19 / culture
Everything Bad Is Good for You
Steven Johnson: What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter? It’s not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven’t shown the same steady gains. It’s not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II…
07.07.12 / culture
Urban Spam Deleted In São Paulo
IHT: Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom.
Tony de Marco’s photos of São Paulo
07.06.28 / art, business, culture
Propaganda Critic: As Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson point out, “every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate, but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda.” (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1991)
The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture
Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: What’s more disturbing than the fact that millions of us willingly tune in to such nonsense each day is that some Web sites are making monkeys out of us without our even knowing it. By entering words into Google’s search engine, we are actually creating something called “collective intelligence,” the sum wisdom of all Google users. The logic of Google’s search engine, what technologists call its algorithm, reflects the “wisdom” of the crowd. In other words, the more people click on a link that results from a search, the more likely that link will come up in subsequent searches. The search engine is an aggregation of the 90 million questions we collectively ask Google each day; in other words, it just tells us what we already know.
Chris Anderson: The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare…
07.05.29 / books, business, culture
