…that society becomes reshaped by the media, ever more resembling the echo chambers of its algorithms.
Category: psychology
Fetishes Amid the Hellscape
Ever notice that stores that sell any sort of entertainment product are filling up with these little nostalgic keepsakes courtesy of Funko’s Pop! collection and other brands. Perhaps that’s not new in itself, except by […]
The Desire for Heroes Despite All Evidence: Mad Queens and White Hats
“Don’t let my white duds and pleasant demeanor fool you.”
The Structure Toys with Us
What The Player is able to do is hold up the formal structure of a story without actual content. It anticipates the audience holds that form together in their minds. Whether innate and archetypal, or structurally etched into our minds by years of Aristotelian plotting and three-act structure, the form of story itself is most of the battle creating story.
In the Realm of Strong Opinions
There’s something deeply cynical about the entire culture of instant evaluation. Turning everyone and everything into an instant judge, a cybernetic node in a gossip-hungry cyber mob.
Austin Powers’s Awkward Patty Hearst Moment
What’s funny is how apparently stubbornly we grasp on to social identities that can in reality be tissue thin. In the self-preservation society instinct, we want to be on the right side of the consensus, whatever we believe the consensus is.
Oceans of the Forgotten
When I look back on my life, turn my thoughts to accounting for past events, beyond a week or so ago, memories fade. Each day in the past, thumbing through the calendar, each day a little less distinct, fading into what folk metaphors tell us of our memory warehouse, a kind of secret library in our mind littered with cobwebs and dark dusty corners. Banker’s boxes on shelves, file cabinets, pictures, antiques, a spiral staircase to different levels; the shiftable inner recesses, the Xanadu of the mind. Some areas of the warehouse are in front, accessible, others more discrete, or hidden, even some places with more security than others, requiring a series of keys. But the memories are only apprehended as much as we can pay attention to them. As if we traipse around the memory warehouse with a single torch – you can only see as far as the light goes, the rest fading to shades of grey and the darkness beyond.
