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Our smartphones may know when we are sad

Smartphones and computers we all constantly carry around with us aren’t just supplying us with useful information, they’re also collecting a great deal of data about us and our habits. All of this data is logged, stored and used by apps and companies to “improve the user experience”. For instance, Apple or Samsung can pass voice searches on to a third party for speech-to-text conversions, and might share all this data with business partners who in turn can use it to advertise us. For this reason it is important to know what kind of data we are giving up every time we switch our smartphones on.

Each type of data can reveal something about our interests and preferences, views, hobbies and social interactions. New and sophisticated methods built into smartphones make it also easy to track and monitor our behaviour. Posts on social media such as a quick tweets, a rambling or a ranting Facebook status, can give a clear indication about the phone owners' mood. But background data tracked by the smartphone itself can predict our temperament too.

An Italian study conducted by Venet Osmani at the Centre for Research and Telecommunication Experimentation for Networked Communities (CREATE-NET) used a combination of phone sensors to understand when someone was feeling depressed and it discovered that the activity and location data stored by the smartphones could accurately predict patients' mood changes at the rate of 94 per cent.

Another study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, investigated whether a person’s movements and activities as recorded by their smartphone signalled behavioural changes associated with depression. The results showed that these aspects are closely correlated. It has been discovered that people with depression spend more time in fewer places. Moreover, depressed individuals tend to have irregular movement patterns and to use their mobile phones for long periods of time, not for making phone calls, but for texting, playing games or reading.

These studies are an interesting piece of evidence on how mobile phones could detect symptoms of depression. Can mobile phones be used in future to help clinicians understand how depressive symptoms and depression change over time or to develop better treatments and strategies to help people with depression?

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BODY SHAMING

Much of insults on social media involve body shaming, the action of humiliating someone by criticising and writing mocking comments about their body shape or size.

With the rise of social media, celebrities have been more and more body shamed. Unfortunately, individuals are often focussing on perceived body flaws rather than on anything else, as these celebrities’ talent or abilities.

But what shapes people’s perception of beauty? I believe that fashion, movies, magazines, television, advertisements and unattainable standards of beauty created the ideal perfect body shape. For instance, a female body is considered conventionally pretty if it is thin, but not too much thuogh, since it may be described as anorexic.That is why we can see so many comments/insults under Instagram posts of people whose bodies do not match this description.

Celebrities with active social media accounts should be mentally prepared for all the kinds of comments or texts they may receive. Furthermore, I believe that having a good sense of humour and a strong personality may be useful to respond to mean comments without letting criticism get one down.

Lizzie Velásquez suffers from a rare genetic disorder that prevents her from gaining weight: she has never weighed more than 64 pounds. I think very highly of her, since after having found a YouTube video about herself titled “The Ugliest Woman in the World”, she launched her own YouTube channel, where she uploads videos about body positivity, happiness, beauty and tolerance. (https://www.youtube.com/user/lizzitachickita)

Laura Delarato, a sex educator and writer, has used insults and comments about her body shape under her photos to cover her naked body in pictures she shared on Instagram.

Haley Morris-Cafiero, an artist, decided to parody haters’ comments to her photos by creating and publishing impersonations of them. Her aim was to  confront Internet trolls, making fun of them as they did with her.

I cannot understand why people feel satisfied in writing such insults. I find being rude online is not constructive at all. Moreover, anonymity, makes people feel safe and gives them a sense of power they don’t feel in their real lives. In doing so it contributes to online rudeness, since it makes possible to say things that one would never dare to say in face to face conversations. Behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings says that " trolls tend to have an inability to build healthy relationships offline" and they may feel not respected enough by their families or partners. They probably just want to attract attention and upsetting people makes them feel great and important.

It is essential to know which negative effects can result from this haters’ behaviours. Growing up with such exposure to body-shaming and insults may be problematic especially for young girls and may have a damaging effect on people’s  body confidence and self-esteem. I think that every person, skinny or fat, deserves respect and something has to change in our society in order to stop all this body shaming.

  What do you think?

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Multimodality in movie posters

The affordances of images are various. Images have a more direct effect than text, provoking immediate emotional reactions in the audience. Furthermore,  they are polysemous, that is, they can display more than one message at the same time.

Movie posters are a form of visual communication designed to promoting and advertising a movie, capturing viewers’ attention so as to make them interested in watching it. Representational meaning of a movie poster is indispensable to have a right understanding of the movie themes, mood and key elements reflected by designs, colours, and fonts. Furthermore, movie posters usually include slogans that make the plot seem intriguing.

‘The Purge’ is one of my favourite movies. Through the multimodal analysis of its poster, it is possible to gain a better understanding of the elements that effectively grab the attention of the audience a advertise the movie.

The poster is quite simple and  it has a dark colour scheme and black background, which is typical of horror movie posters and symbolise danger and evil. The main element in the poster is man wearing a mask with a sinister smile, connoting that this character may be a psychopath and giving the idea that there are evil people in the movie.

All the text is in white font and reinforces the horror convention as it makes the words stand out from the dark intimidating background. At the top left of the poster , where people naturally begin reading first, there is a line saying ‘from the producer of Paranormal Activity and Sinister’. This is a clever technique to attract the audience attention. Indeed, including this information is useful since people who are fans of these previous movies will be interested in seeing that one, assuming it is as successful/scary as the others.

The title is not big, but it stands out from the rest of the text, allowing the audience to recognise it. The quote ‘One Night A Year All Crime Is Legal’ above the title gives a perfect idea of what the movie is about: a night filled with crimes and violence.

Ultimately, it is possible to see that there is the small faint writing at the bottom of the poster,  which provides information about the producers of the movie, who is in it and the movie institutions. This part includes the hashtag  ‘#survivethenight’. This is a great way to sponsor the movie, by getting people talking about it on social media and making the audience feel more involved. It is interesting to see that there are a lot of posts and conversations on social media about this movie, such as ‘what would you do during the Purge?’.

A visual image is easy to remember than a text and it is worth a thousand words. However, if it were not for the text, one may not completely understand what the movie is about by only looking at the image and vice versa. That’s why text and image are combined together to better achieve the poster aim.

Does this poster make you want to watch this movie?

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The “Selfie” Era

Instagram is a social networking app where the main method of interaction is double-tapping an image/video to like it. Instagram offers its users the possibility to choose which part of their life they want to share and who to share it with by having a private account. As the years passed, this social platform changed from being a friendly environment, where most people posted food and landscapes pictures, into a sort of fake world, where everyone filters out their lives to represent something that does not exist.  

The term selfie is defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2013 ).                                 There have been suggestions which link narcissism and selfies sharing on social media. Just as Narcissus became obsessed with his reflection, narcissists have an excessive need to be admired by others, focussing upon their own image. Before sharing a selfie online, people usually first crop, filter, and scrutinize it to death: what we end up posting is a version of ourselves we actually like, rather than a picture of who we really are. Thus, posting numerous selfies or photos with too much photo-editing may be related to higher narcissism.

I think that sharing selfies does not make us narcissists. Sometimes it is simply a convenient way to take photos when no one else is around and, contrarily to narcissist people, individuals who post lots of selfies may have low self-esteem and desperately want to be liked and boost their confidence by getting likes or comments.

If one posts a selfie that gets a lot of likes and then posts another one that does not get the attention seeked, one may feel anxious, stressed and depressed, with the confidence fallen through the floor. Indeed, selfies may become addictive if people who constantly take them think that getting likes is a measure of self-worth. This aspect should be regarded as the main issue in this context, rather than narcissism. Relying on the approval of others on our appearance to feel happy and confident is not psychologically healthy. However, it is not easy to stop thinking in this way when one is used to doing that, even if it is said that people should appreciate themselves with or without the approval of others.

Despite beign regarded by some as a negative thing, selfies can play a very positive role in people’s lives and can help individuals feel that they are part of something. For instance, the recent trend “no makeup selfies” invited participants to post selfies on social networks without makeup as a way to raise awareness of breast cancer. Many famous faces joined the campaign and because of their influence, they widespread this idea. As a consequence, lots of users got involved to support a good cause and this trend has also helped them feel like they were part of a group. In my opinion this kind of campaigns are useful and may be a way for individuals with low self-esteem to overcome it and feel worthy.

What do you think? Do you feel the need to receive compliments on social network?

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Does WhatsApp make it easier to know who is ignoring us?

Most chatting applications like Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp and Instagram messages have status check functions which allow individuals to see if their messages have been successfully sent and whether their contacts have read them or not.

With WhatsApp we measure how effective our communication has been and how much those we chat with value what we say, by taking into account the time that our message was opened, when the addressees ware last online and how long it took them to reply to us.

Since WhatsApp introduced the blue ticks feature, most of its users were left without the excuses: `I mustn't have received your text’/ ‘I did not read your text’. This status shows two blue ticks on the screen if someone has read a text. Generally, users expect an immediate response when seeing the blue ticks and they can become impatient or anxious if the addressee does not reply, especially if the person in question has been online after having read the message.

Some people find this WhatsApp feature really useful, while others argue that it is a sort of torture.

On the one hand, it can be useful to know whether or not a message has been received or read, since the last seen can be invaluable to friends and family who are keen to stay abreast of someone's wellbeing. For instance, the timestamp may be helpful when trying to make sure friends are safe after dangerous events or to generally know what they have been up to. But why are we now measuring people's activities and wellbeing against their last seen? One possible reason may be that the WhatsApp timestamp can tell us something without having to contact the person in question. It's an unobtrusive way of assuaging our fears without bothering or confronting someone.

On the other hand, people generally assume that users who do not reply are annoyed, angry or do not give them enough importance. However, when someone does not reply, there is a strong likelihood that they have a long list of other things to do. In the same way, we feel guilty when we do not reply to messages suddenly after having read them.

Users should free themselves from the weight of expectations and the guilt felt when they should have replied to someone but did not. Generally, we are supposed to reply immediately after we checked our messages to show politeness. However, I often forget to reply in time after reading a text and I need to give explanations about it and apologise.

Some people opt to change their privacy settings in WhatsApp to ensure that the last seen is omitted from their profile. In this way, nobody will know when they were last online, and they will not see when other people last logged on. Still, it is possible to see when people are online, and that may undermine users’ privacy. Furthermore, many other chat apps, as Facebook’s Messenger, do not allow users to turn this feature off.

I do not have omitted the last seen feature, because I do not care about hiding it. If I reply to a text after a long time or I leave someone at seen, I do that without problems. Moreover, there are some tricks that can be used to read the message without let others see we did it, as reading the message with mobile data turned off. This allow us to take time and think about how to reply and then send the message once we turn the data back on.

Instant messaging is the main way of communication especially for those involved in romantic relationships. WhatsApp last seen feature is responsible for many breakups. For instance, according to Gian Ettore Gassani (president of the Italian Association of Matrimonial Lawyers) WhatsApp messages sent by cheating spouses play an integral role in 40% of Italian divorce cases citing adultery.

I think that people should stop paying attention to the ticks or check whether someone has been online since they read a message. Texting is supposed to bring us closer together, not drive us apart.

What do you think about that? Are you ‘last seen addicted’?

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‘Bird Box’ virality

‘Bird Box’ became viral thanks to memes and social media: the meme economy is becoming synonymous with the actual economy.

This Netflix’s psychological thriller began streaming worldwide on December 21st  2018 and since that day a lot of memes have been made from it. According to Netflix, 45 million accounts watched the film in the first week of its release despite many negative reviews. A significant number of those views came from people simply seeking to understand the context of the memes they kept seeing on Twitter and Instagram.

I wonder how could some joking images benefit Netflix marketing in this massive way, but the only answer is that everything about ‘Bird Box’ was designed to give it the best shot at going viral.

The fact that ‘Bird Box’ was so easy to access could be the reason why so many people watched at least a part of it, since there was no need to go to the cinema or pay any ticket. Furthermore, timing has been a key factor to ensure people watched ‘Bird Box’. Releasing the film around Christmas time gave Netflix the perfect opportunity to reach users who were home during the holidays. Moreover, the combination of an intriguing horror premise and famous actors, as Sandra Bullock and Malkovich, made ‘Bird Box’ go viral.

Self-promotion on social media helped give the film its own boost by tweeting about how many people have watched it. This tweet was for sure a marketing tool.

‘Bird Box’ was also helped by tweets from famous people as Kim Kardashian West, who has 59m followers.

People began to retweet memes after watching the film to give their opinion, encouraging other social media users to watch it and understand the context surrounding these memes.

A conspiracy theory holds that Netflix created bots or paid people on Twitter to spread memes about the film so as to create FOMO (fear of missing out), persuading individuals to watch it. I believe that there were no fake accounts, but, even if Netflix denied these claims, influencers who posted these memes may have been paid to advertise the film. I have to admit that FOMO was the reason why I watched ‘Bird Box’: there were just so many memes and reactions about this film that I decided to watch it to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

Since the ‘Bird Box’ release date,Twitch gamers started the ‘Bird Box challenge‘, playing their favourite game while blindfolded. Subsequently, YouTubers applied this challenge to their daily lives and TikTok users fashioned the blindfolded dance. This challenge became popular but also dangerous. For this reason Netflix tweeted a warning to its followers:

I think that it is almost like they made it even more viral, since after this tweet the challenge exploded online. It was more like a ‘be careful, but continue doing that, you are promoting our film’.

‘Bird Box’ virality is the proof that memes can be an effective marketing tool. Even if ‘Bird Box’ is lacking originality, since it resembles previous films such as ‘A Quiet Place’, and is not as good as people generally thought it would be, it gained so much popularity in a very short time. Despite the criticism, for Netflix the creation of a massive online movement is worth more than a few positive reviews.

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“Master your influences, or your influeces will master you’

Introduced by Julia Kristeva, intertextuality is the shaping of one text by other texts. In terms of films and Tv shows, we can find intertextuality where there are overlaps with other works of art. Some argue that intertextuality shows lack of originality, but I do not agree with this view since as Porter(1986) states, a text can be original without being completely unique. Indeed, he suggests that originality relates to how well one interprets intertextual material and adapts it within the new text. Stranger Things, the successful Netflix sci-fi horror series, is the proof that intertextuality can be used to its full potential. Set in 1983, this series relies heavily on pop culture references from the 70’s/ 80’s to give sustenance not only to what happens in the show but also to contextualize it. The Duffer brothers created this series by using deliberate intertextuality, since they intentionally made reference to other films in order to capture a particular aesthetic from the 1980’s. Hence, it is possible to see that Stranger Things is constantly referencing, amongst others, Steven Spielberg and Stephen King’s works.

The character of Eleven draws heavily from E.T. For instance, it is possible to see that the chase scene is very similar to the one in ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ (1982): a group of children is running away from a goverment army on their bikes in order to save their supernatural friend. This explicit intertextual referencing allows the audience to have a more in-depth understanding of the action.

Moreover, especially in season two, there are allusions to the film ‘It’: the Shadow Monster is able to manipulate its form and is accompanied by death wherever it goes, like the Clown Pennywise. Additionally, in both stories adolescents  have to face supernatural events while adults are only involved in the margins of the conflict.

The film Poltergeist (1982) is explicitly referenced by a flashback, when Joyce gifts Will tickets for this film, foreshadowing  Will’s future and the moment when he will try to communicate from the ‘other side’ through the walls of his house,  like Carol in Poltergeist.

 Overall, nowadays almost everything is intertextual and thus, artists have to find new ways to be original. When cleverly used, intertextuality can create successful films and series, as the Duffer brothers did  by comprising successful 70’s/80’s film ideas into one series. Many people perceive the constant references in Stranger Things as annoying, but I believe that that's what made it so great. Furthermore, taking inspiration from so many sources is not plagiarism, but is creating a new work of art.

(Videos about intertexuality in Stranger Things, focusing on a collection of the references in this series and their original sources from the 70′s/80′s)

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THE POWER OF THUMBNAILS

Big multinational companies as Google and Facebook use algorithms in order to give us results that we are likely to find useful and relevant based on our interests and interactions.

Netflix’s algorithm collects data about what users watch and organises the recommendation system. In Netflix’s Home Page, we can see recommended rows of tv shows and movies which are tailored to our viewing habits. Hence, while choosing what to watch, this algorithm gives us options that we may enjoy most according to our tastes.

An interesting Netflix’s algorithm feature is the artwork personalisation, which sources high-quality images from the shows and uses them to capture users’ attention. Thus, it is possible to see that the same tv show or movie can have different thumbnails depending on the subscribers’ watching history. For instance, certain images highlight aspects of a tv show or movie, or an actor that are relevant to the user and are related to past viewings.

These are different thumbnails of the same shows that my friends (one Spanish,one French and two Italians) see in their Home Page:

Pictures may change as the system refreshes and learns more about our tastes. In addition, the same user can see different thumbnails of the same show and this is a sort of  test that aims to find out on which image users are more likely to click.

Some may argue that this algorithm could create filter-bubbles, since Netflix only suggests us shows that are similar to the ones we have already watched. I disagree with this view, because Netflix has different rows which not only give us suggestions according to our tastes, but they also display the most popular shows/movies and there is a wide range of categories between which one can choose. I believe that this algorithm is really efficient and useful, but still a bit ‘scary’. Netflix artwork personalisation made me reflect on how far technology has come and how intelligent a machine can be.

What do you think?

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Is Instagram killing our creativity?

‘Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, or is it the shortest path to Insta-glory?’ (Joe Shutter)

Not surprisingly, scrolling through our feed, we can notice that some Instagram pictures and pages look similar. When going on holiday, or to a beautiful location, people tend to copy pictures seen on Instagram: same time of the day, same angle, same pose, same filter.

It seems like in recent years people are lacking originality and imagination. But why is this happening? In my opinion, we are not used to thinking with our own brain without drawing on someone else’s opinion and creativity anymore,and for sure, social media do not make things better. For instance, concerning Instagram, there are websites which make lists of cool ideas that one can use to create a stunning Instagram feed and get popular.  So, why should we struggle with thinking about how to take a creative photo if it is easier to parrot someone else’s pictures and styles? Some may believe that this is a kind of laziness, while others, including me, would argue that there are so many people who upload photos everyday on Instagram that it is impossible not to have their same ideas or that if an influencer’s photo has tons of likes, there is a tendency to copy it with the aim of getting likes and followers.

In itself, Instagram is not the main problem, but the fact that people tend to conform with society standards instead of standing out from the crowd is what is killing creativity: we should use our own imaginationand not simply draw inspiration from others.

I found an interesting Instagram profile called Insta Repeat (https://instagram.com/insta_repeat?utm_source=ig_profile_share&igshid=1luwmsb19y6vd) which posts collages of similar photos uploaded by different accounts showing how artificial and manufactured Instagram aesthetic is.

Let me know what you think!

When my 190K Instagram account got deleted by Instagram, that was my wake up call. The popularity on the social media is just an illusion. Don’t get too caught up on it. Create what I love and share it with everyone, it’s my new philosophy for 2019.