The Lifecycle Of A Trend As part of its ongoing Youth Culture Insights Series, Fuse Marketing is taking a look at how a trend is discovered, marketed, popularized, how it eventually reaches its demise. The series, which aims to educate those who wish to speak more effectively to teens and young adults, includes information on media behavior, social media, design, web strategy, the future concerns of millennials, and other relevant topics for marketers trying to reach this demographic. Here’s the latest update, following the path of the trend’s lifecycle: THE INSPIRATION – Be it a breakthrough in technology or a shift in our collective consciousness, a trend is born out of circumstance. THE DISCOVERY – Early adoptors begin toying with and ultimately embracing an idea, product, or aesthetic. THE BRINK – Influencers pick up on the burgeoning trend and extol its “newness.” THE FEVER – The trend has caught fire and saturates the mainstream. Implications for Brands
The latest dangerous "addiction" parents need to worry about: Mobile devices Follow me at @drClaire For parents of teens, “addiction” is a scary word. It brings to mind all sorts of things we never want to have happen to our children, from overdoses to arrests — and so we talk to our kids about drugs and alcohol. But is there another addiction we should be worrying about, too? The Merriam-Webster definition of addiction is “a strong and harmful need to regularly have something (such as a drug) or do something (such as gamble).” Using that definition, you could make a real argument that many teens are becoming addicted to their mobile devices. You could make the same argument about their parents — and plenty of other people, too. Common Sense Media recently published a report on a survey they did on 1,240 parents and teens (620 parent-child pairs). This is pretty powerful. Now, I don’t want to seem to say that constantly checking Instagram is the same as shooting heroin. Devices displace. We need more research to understand all those implications.
Viewpoint: Who are the people in the dark corners? - BBC News There are many types of people who have been demonised in the age of social media - computer users who take refuge in anonymity to post extreme or offensive views. Jamie Bartlett wanted to talk to the people behind the masks. My heart was pounding as I waited for Paul to arrive at the train station where we'd agreed to meet. I'd been communicating with him for some time, all via the internet. Paul was a vitriolic, aggressive neo-Nazi who spent his life online producing and sharing White Pride propaganda. He was one of several people that I spent much of the last year meeting while researching my book. We often hear in the news about these dangers of life online. Fifteen minutes late, a handsome, friendly and earnest young man rocked up - excited to meet Jamie "who I've seen off the telly". Was this really the digital iconoclast who earlier that day had been attacking and terrifying minorities from behind his sinister looking avatar? Find out more Listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer
In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives “In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation,” Alain de Botton wrote in his meditation on Nietzsche and why a fulfilling life requires difficulty. “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion wrote in contemplating the value of keeping a notebook. But we are just as well advised, it turns out, to keep on nodding terms with the people we could’ve been, the people we never were, the people who perished in the abyss between our ideal selves and our real selves. So argues psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (public library) — a fascinating read, acutely relevant to our culture so plagued by the fear of missing out that we’ve shorthanded it to “FOMO.” The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?
Trollbusters: This algorithm can predict if you're going to get banned | TechRadar The way commenters write can be used to detect if they'll end up getting banned, according to US researchers working on troll-busting algorithms. A team from Cornell and Stanford Universities scanned the comment threads on three news sites - CNN, Breitbart and IGN - over the course of a year and a half. That totalled up to 35 million comments, sent by almost two million users. 50,000 of those users went on to be banned from the sites. The researchers found that those banned users wrote in a different way to others. From that data, the researchers built a model that could guess with 80% accuracy whether or not a user would go on to be banned from the content of their first five posts. The team hopes that the work can be used to develop moderation tools that automatically highlight users that may go on to be disruptive, saving moderators time.
Children won’t be saved by a digital detox | Life and style The idea of a “digital detox” makes my eyes roll so far back I see memories from a past life as concubine number 6. When will we come to terms with our own desires and, rather than banning something we fear altogether, try to understand it? Whether booze or sugar or Celebrity Big Brother, there is a more adult way of dealing with something we feel has a hold over us than writing it off completely. You see the fear most clearly in the eyes of a parent scrolling through their child’s Instagram. The Blair Witch Project had nothing on this, the sight of 17 comments under Grace’s selfie, all variations on the emoji for “hot”. The typical reaction? Which seems to be the general reaction to a new study confirming a rise in mental health problems among teenagers in the UK. Once, young people ran around in fields, barefoot, laughing at the dying sun. Being offline doesn’t keep you safe, or protect you from anxiety, or make you a better person.
R.I.P. Blogging, Killed By Screenshorts Late last year, Mat Honan wrote for Buzzfeed about “screenshorts”, a rising phenomenon on Twitter where people share their favorite quote of an article in a screenshot to avoid Twitter’s character count. What’s most interesting about the rise of these screenshots on Twitter and other social media is that they’re actually killing traditional blogging in its entirety. The easiest place to look for this phenomenon is celebrities. Almost every celebrity under 40 that you can possibly think of has probably made a screenshort blog post. Researching this for just an hour reveals a staggering amount of famous people making incredibly formal statements… as a screenshot of the iOS notes app. It’s not just celebrities, however, that have gone to screenshorts as their medium of choice to getting their thoughts online. Young people far and wide have climbed aboard the bandwagon all over social media to share their thoughts, instead of a traditional medium like WordPress or even Tumblr.
Can we break free from the fear of missing out? – Jacob Burak Here’s a test you might enjoy: rate these scenarios on a number scale, ranging from 1 for mild discomfort to 7 for outrageous distress. Scenario 1: you’re flicking through news websites, as you do every morning. Today, however, you’re behind schedule and have only 15 minutes to read articles, instead of your usual 30. You have to skip some of your favourite columns and sections. How would you rate your level of discomfort? Popular now Quantum weirdness is everywhere in the living world Why broken sleep is a golden time for creativity The virus that hitched a ride into the Grand Canyon Scenario 2: you’re visiting New York City and realise there’s no way you’ll be able to get to all the exhibits, see all the recommended plays, or take in even a fraction of the ‘musts’ your local friends have raved about. Scenario 3: you’re at dinner with friends, and you’ve all agreed to make it a strictly phone-free evening. Of course, that sense of missing out is nothing new. 28 May 2014 Comments
Why is a Chinese takeaway box taking over election talk? - BBC News People wanting to follow the general election campaign on Twitter have been using the hashtags #GE2015 and #GE15 but as these have become popular, they've attracted the attention of spam advertisers. On Thursday, this image of a Chinese takeaway food box was the fourth most tweeted image under #GE2015. Which is somewhat strange because of the seriousness of the tag. The BBC and other news outlets are using the #GE2015 tag to share their reports, and politicians from all the major parties are using it to highlight coverage which is favourable to them. So, for example, Tristam Hunt used it to announce that Labour would offer guaranteed one-to-one careers advice, and this was re-tweeted around 100 times from different Labour backed accounts. The Conservatives' Dr Liam Fox used it to highlight his comments about Britain's nuclear deterrent Trident, and this was retweeted three times. But those Twitter numbers are all less than the Chinese takeaway box, at least within the #GE2015 stream.
Internet Addiction, Sleep Deprivation, or ADHD ... With the diagnosis of ADHD on the rise in American teenagers, there is a risk of mislabeling teens with ADHD when the cause of their inattentiveness and falling grades may be related to something else entirely—like anxiety, family issues, or their media-infused lifestyle. This misdiagnosing was especially striking to me with a sixteen-year-old girl named Joy, whose family came to consult me a few months ago. Up until last year, Joy was a straight A student. All of her high school classes were either honors level or Advanced Placement (AP). But in the fall of her junior year, Joy seemed to lose her motivation to do well in school. article continues after advertisement The psychiatrist prescribed first Zoloft then Wellbutrin for Joy, hoping to find a drug that would help her depression. After five months, there was still no improvement in Joy’s symptoms. My first question to the family was to ask when Joy’s depression began. Copyright Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D. Source:
Behind the online comments: the psychology of internet trolls | Media Network Readers’ comments are an important, yet often overlooked, type of user-generated content. And some readers are much more likely to post and read comments than others. Trolling, the act of posting disruptive or inflammatory comments online in order to provoke fellow readers, has been the focus of much recent attention. PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg), the world’s most popular YouTuber, recently decided to ban comments on his channel because of his inability to silence trolls. So, why do trolls troll and how should we manage them? First, trolls are more likely to display noxious personality characteristics, that is, traits that impair one’s ability to build relations and function in a civilised or pro-social way. Second, trolling – like other forms of computer-mediated communication – unleashes people’s impulses by providing anonymity and temporary identity loss. So, how can trolls be managed? • Snapchat’s $10bn valuation: inside the billion-dollar bubble
Internet Addiction and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Among Schoolchildren. - PubMed - NCBI Twitter advertisers can now target ads based on the apps a user has installed 24 Strategies for Working with ADHD Children When working with young children with ADHD, keep the following points in mind: 1. Make directions clear and short. Repeat if necessary. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. Dorothy Parker: The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires. Pediatric Behavioral Health Resources - PO Box 5594 - Maryvile TN 37802 Online Counseling, Online Classes, Behavior Management Home Study Courses, Long Distance Learning For more Strategies to help your ADHD child try this ebook: Get Control Of Your Child's Adhd! Put an end to the tantrums, arguments and hassles.