Media Redefined: interest mixes for curious minds. media + tech + pop
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Tag: entertainment
👓 What We Learned from Studying the News Consumption Habits of College Students | Dan Cohen
Dan Cohen (Dan Cohen)Over the last year, I was fortunate to help guide a study of the news consumption habits of college students, and coordinate Northeastern University Library’s services for the study, including great work by our data visualization specialist Steven Braun and necessary infrastructure from our digital team, including Sarah Sweeney and Hillary Corbett. “How Students Engage with News,” out today as both a long article and accompanying datasets and media, provides a full snapshot of how college students navigate our complex and high-velocity media environment.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Side note: After recently seeing Yale Art Gallery’s show “Seriously Funny: Caricature Through the Centuries,” I think there’s a good article to be written about the historical parallels between today’s visual memes and political cartoons from the past. ❧
This also makes me think back to other entertainments of the historical poor including the use/purpose of stained glass windows in church supposedly as a means of entertaining the illiterate Latin vulgate masses.
October 22, 2018 at 08:07PM
nearly 6,000 students from a wide variety of institutions ❧
Institutions = colleges/universities? Or are we also considering less educated youth as well?
October 22, 2018 at 08:08PM
A more active stance by librarians, journalists, educators, and others who convey truth-seeking habits is essential. ❧
In some sense these people can also be viewed as aggregators and curators of sorts. How can their work be aggregated and be used to compete with the poor algorithms of social media?
October 22, 2018 at 08:11PM
The 86-Year-Old Breakout Star of Sundance | The Daily Beast
After six decades in showbiz—she made her film debut opposite James Dean—Lois Smith is finally getting her due as a grieving widow in the Sundance sci-fi drama ‘Marjorie Prime.’
When Couples Fight Over Books | WSJ
People feel possessive of books because they help form our beliefs. How couples keep, display and discard books can be the stuff of heated debate.
📺 Watched S2 E1-6 of The Closer with Keith Olbermann
The Closer with Keith Olbermann - One of the most provocative voices in American politics is back! As GQ's Special Correspondent, Keith Olbermann turns his eye to the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election in “The Closer,” a series of political commentary and special interviews that's unlike anything else on the internet or on television.
This series is awesome! It’s almost as if Will McAvoy from the HBO series The News Room has come to life with even more vim and vigor! I see it as a far more serious version of The Daily Show with facts and reasoning that keep it relatively close to news while still working in the realm of punditry. I want to call it entertainment or even satire, but sadly the underlying facts are all too true.
In particular, it’s hilarious to see him subtly referencing Trump as “Donald John Trump”, a verbal trope that’s often used in the news to directly identify serial and other murderers, social deviants, and psychopathic sociopaths: John Wayne Gacy, Jared Lee Loughner, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, John Wilkes Booth, Paul John Knowles, Mark David Chapman, and Gary Leon Ridgway.
I also find it fascinating that there’s now finally someone who can rail against the right as well as any of the loud pundits on the right who’ve been lambasting the left for the past 20 years.
The Response of the Schoolmaster
This must certainly be the quote of the week from English author Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On:
Foster: I’m still a bit hazy about the Trinity, sir.
Schoolmaster: Three in one, one in three, perfectly straightforward. Any doubts about that see your maths master.
Another Reason to Shun Chick Flicks: Crying = Less Sex!?
A new study by Noam Sobel, of the Olfaction Research Group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and others are reporting in the journal Science this week that men in their study who sniffed the tears of crying women produced less testosterone and found female faces less arousing.
Previous studies in animals such as mice and mole rats have shown that tears convey important chemical messages which are used to attract or repel others of the same species. There is good evidence for an interesting type means of higher-level chemical communication. These previous studies also incidentally show that “emotional” tears are chemically distinct from “eye-protecting” types of tears.
Scientific American’s “60 Second Science” (via link or listen below) podcast has a good audio overview of the study for those without the time to read the paper.
In press reports, Adam Anderson, a University of Toronto psychologist who was not involved with the study, posited that the results may imply that “tears have some influence on sexual selection, and that’s not something we associate with sadness.” He continued, “It could be a way of warding off unwanted advances.”
This study provides a new hypothesis for the evolution of crying in humans. (Now if only we could find some better reasons for laughter…)
The take home message may be that guys should not take their dates out to weepy chick flicks, or alternately women reluctantly accepting “pity dates” should force their suitors to exactly these types of testosterone damping films.