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shihalyfie · 3 years

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What went down with the DigiFes situation, from the community and translator perspective

I think the events of the last few days have gotten everyone in a huge fuss, and because everything got caught up in a lot of chaotic social media stuff, there’s been a lot of questions about what came from what and who knew what at what time. Fortunately, I happen to be:

Someone who’s a veteran in this fanbase and thus has a small handful of friends in this community, who also have their own friends

Someone who understands a little Japanese (although not as much as others in this community do) and therefore can read things in Japanese myself to some degree without needing someone else to translate it for me

So hopefully I can shed some light on what kinds of things were being discussed, and what was known and not known at what time in this fanbase with all of this.

The most important thing I want to establish is that there was no organized coalition or smear campaign. (Kind of ironic I have to say this when the topic at hand has so much to do with conspiracy theories.) I’m a veteran, I know friends who are veterans, they know other friends who are veterans but don’t know me at all. My friends usually agree with and like the same things I do, and I give them advice and assistance with my skillset when I can, and they return the favor. We pass things along through the grapevine, not through some super-secret club grapevine, just via the nature of social relationships and some Discord servers (multiple; again, not everyone knows each other). So these are my impressions of what happened, based on said grapevine.

How it all started

Konaka’s blog is long. Like, really long. Which is only natural, because he was recapping basically the entire 51 episodes of Tamers in excruciating detail, so no translator in this fanbase would be able to translate all of that and not lose their mind! So for the most part people who couldn’t read Japanese had pretty much given up on reading it (with maybe a few dedicated people using machine translation), and some people who understood Japanese would point out parts they found interesting, but for all intents and purposes it remained untranslated and not super-accessible to the mainstream. (Even the Japanese fanbase itself wasn’t super aware of the blog’s existence.)

So when that first post in May about 9/11 dropped, the people who did read Japanese started going “uh...”

At the time, the DigiFes stage reading hadn't been announced yet. So, in other words, everyone reading it only knew it as, functionally, him namedropping an alt-right YouTuber and praising his observations. The reaction from anyone reading the blog at the time was something along the lines of “disappointed and mildly concerned.” (Note the mildly.)

The posts in June about the Great Reset and the anti-vaccine sentiment were when people keeping an eye on the situation started to get really worried about how far this was going to escalate. At this point, I want to make something clear that may not be apparent to those who weren’t keeping up or who are outside the fanbase: Most of the translators and Japanese-reading people deliberately chose not to be too public about this at this time.

Why?

This is the irony surrounding the fact that said translators are now being accused of trying to further “cancel culture”: cancellation was absolutely not what anyone wanted back then! If anyone wanted to create a smear campaign, 9/11 conspiracies, the Great Reset, and anti-vaccine statements are already more than enough to make a starting case. But at the time, this was a blog that very few people (Japanese or otherwise) knew about, translating it would basically just boost its platform more than it would have had in the first place (which would be counterproductive), and -- well, let’s be real, it’s not hard to imagine that people might get reactionary over it, and people would go nuts. Was there any real benefit that would come out of that? Not really, no.

So at the most, those keeping an eye on it might have vented a bit on their personal accounts, but some even tried to self-censor with “[redacted]” or vagueposting, because this was a matter that needed to be handled with delicacy. Thus, there were “mild rumors through the grapevine” about what was going on, but those who knew were trying to hold back with restraint and mostly inform people quietly in the hopes of this not needing to become some kind of huge social media campaign.

(Also, to be a bit blunt about it, it’s really hard to be in front of someone who loves Tamers and is gushing about it and showing admiration for Konaka, knowing all of this and wanting to say something, but feeling like a jerk if you pop their bubble like “also, he’s probably an alt-right conspiracy theorist now.” Not to say that the ignorance-is-bliss concept is always a good thing, but...)

But since the blog posts in question were discussing the prospect of having his sentiments in fiction, everyone reading them was on edge anticipating what might be in store for DigiFes. The hope was that it might blow over. Hopefully, everything would be in the form of subtle themes with plausible deniability, it would all stay within the realm of “it’s not worth causing a fuss over this,” that would be the end of it, and we’d all move on with our lives.

Unfortunately, “Political Correctness is activating Cancel Culture” isn’t exactly subtle.

DigiFes and the aftermath

I think it’s too easy to assign too much responsibility to the fansub group that was indirectly responsible for breaking the news for all of this, but actually, the truth is, this would have gotten out anyway.

Even when the stream itself was going on, there were Japanese livebloggers, and there were also English speakers who caught on that something was happening with “the Tamers fighting political correctness”. Some hours later, an upload of the stream went live on YouTube, and quite a few people started watching it and caught onto what was going on. If the fansub group that released the now-infamous version hadn’t done it, I’m absolutely certain someone else would have eventually (perhaps in a different language first, but nevertheless). And even before then, information about what the hell was going on was already starting to circulate in broken and incomplete forms. That fansub solidified what was going on, and perhaps accelerated the moment the bomb dropped on everyone, but if it hadn’t been there, it would have happened much more gradually and chaotically.

On top of that, while the use of Western alt-right rhetoric (seriously, please do not try to bring the “injecting Western politics into Japanese media” argument here when all of us are asking him to take the Western politics out) meant that it went over most of the Japanese audience’s heads (hence your answer to “who approved this?”), there was at least one Japanese person who was politically savvy enough to call it out for what it was in disgust. (I’m not linking them here because I’m not dumb enough to fling them in a place where some of you trigger-happy people will go after them.) They didn’t even need to be super in-tune with Western politics to get it; they understood enough to tell that there were some pretty alarming extremist views in there. If they understood that much, it was naturally going to follow that the Western side was definitely going to become aware one way or another.

Even all that aside, at the very least, said fansub is accurate; imagine how much worse this situation would have been if someone else had taken it up and confused things further with a misleading translation, or, worse, deliberately messed with the contents. Basically, this debacle could have easily been a lot worse.

I don’t think anyone expected this to get as big as it did (as in, to the point mainstream anime reporters outside the fanbase picked up on it). There was a similar tri. reading back in 2016, but even a lot of the hardcore fanbase barely remembers it exists! These aren’t even supposed to be canon, either! But when you have that disclaimer at the front, and the contents are really like that, it was probably inevitable for it to become a social media sensation. I mean the contents...sure are a thing.

One thing I should point out about the disclaimer is that it only mentions the program itself. It doesn’t bring up the blog, and it doesn’t bring up who wrote this scenario, just the fact that the program contains alt-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Because it does! It’s not even technically praising or condemning the content within, it just says “we don’t agree with it”! What the group did condemn was...approaching staff about it (and especially starting a fight). Because, in the end, that’s what the disclaimer was for: a heads-up about what was in there, and an added reminder that the people translating this are just translating it for the sake of informational purposes. Or, in other words:

It was a content warning. Even without the disclaimer, there were many, many people who would have recognized the contents for what they were and been caught by it unawares, and become upset by it. There were many people who said that they were glad to have that there because it at least gave them some time to mentally prepare for what they were about to be slapped with!

It really, really was a disclaimer. When you have something that level of extremely politically charged stuff, it’s only natural to start suspecting that the translation group had an agenda (official translations tend to get this a lot when content is remotely political). But no, the translation group did their due diligence, even if their opinions were starkly opposed to what was in there.

I was not personally involved in that translation, but I’ll give you this (copy-pasted with permission, from someone who wasn’t technically involved directly in it but was privy to discussions while it was being done):

no we brought up all of those questions like the fact that Yamaki's clearly off his rocker and this isn't supposed to be taken seriously in the first place or that maybe if we're lucky he'll just sound like a fake woke boomer but no matter how you slice it the plot is about him "convincing" the unbelieving Takato and co. into rallying up against the true enemy of Political Correctness and that's just literally the alt-right playbook in a nutshell

the thing even made it to YouTube, we were basically racing against the clock

I mean I really want to say this is plausible deniability but I don’t know how you can get any less subtle than this, this is not something you can mince words

like I really wish we could pass this off as “as long as you don’t know the blog you can take this innocently as political commentary or something” but I honestly don’t think this is something you can take innocently even without context

tbh the Political Correctness part is the most cringeworthy but Yamaki’s rant about fact checkers being evil and all that is probably a lot more worrying when you think about it

tbh I’ve never felt as conflicted about what’s the right thing to do as I do now

So in other words, it was not a reckless decision to just tack on a political label; it was done after a lot of consideration about the consequences to put the label on and what people would think of it with or without context, whether there might be a glimmer of light possibility to try and pass this off as more innocuous as it was, and eventually a determination that, in the end, there was indeed alt-right rhetoric in the program, and should be labeled accordingly.

The result was that, of course, everything broke out on social media, chaos burst out, a lot of hearts were unfortunately broken, and a lot of alt-righters started invading spaces accusing people of proving him right with cancel culture. Ironically, my personal observation is that, while there were exceptions, most people in the actual fanbase did honor the requests to not harass people about it, and this may actually be the most solidarity I’ve ever seen from the Digimon fanbase in my life, which is saying a lot considering how we usually tend to be a drama magnet most of the time. The ones who were actually directly messaging him were his newfound supporters locking down on offering him “support against people trying to cancel him” (I think they were more heartbroken and upset at him than anything...), and most of the harassment came from alt-righters not even in the fanbase, namesearching and sending harassing, accusatory messages to anyone involved for as much as expressing mild dismay. (You want to talk about harassment and being attacked for having an opinion? Pot, meet kettle.)

This leads us back to the question of the blog: if you’ll remember, I just said that the fansub in question did not bring it up at all. That’s because, at the beginning, there was no intention to bring it up if it wasn’t necessary; this was not intended as a smear campaign. The warning was attached to the DigiFes program because it was about the DigiFes program. But the resulting chaos had a lot of people bring up the blog because it better contextualized what was going on, and discussion led to people looking it up themselves and posting fragments of it on social media, sometimes even using machine translate.

Ultimately, that’s the reason this document was released: it was the same reason as the fansub being released at the time it was, which was “if it hadn’t been released, the alternative was watching things get disseminated more slowly and chaotically.” I will say outright that I was one of the people who got to lay eyes on that document before it was publicly released (and even helped out with some advice here and there); it’s no secret that it was being quietly passed around as an internal memo prior to the outbreak. The original version of the document had a request to not post it on public social media because of the chaos it would cause, and while I don’t know how many people got to see it before it was released, I’m under the impression that it was enough people that I was quite surprised everyone who saw it respected that request.

Why does the document contain a ton of analysis and debunking on top of just the translations? Well, when you’re translating those blog posts, you’re technically giving it a bigger platform (which was one of the reasons it was originally considered better to not post it publicly). Since the document exists primarily to inform people, especially about why certain things that may seem innocuous actually have wider context behind them, it’s going to need to contain an analysis like that.

The summary

There were a lot of decisions involved by a lot of different people through all parts of this ordeal. I think it’s fair to criticize whether they were the right decisions in retrospect or whether certain things should have been done slightly differently (including my small role in this), but nevertheless, it was one where the risks involved were thought through and taken into account in every step of the situation, with a desire to avoid chaos, or at least prevent it from getting too much worse. When you have contents like this, a controversy honestly is inevitable -- how on earth are you going to be able to put contents like Yamaki reciting off all the typical alt-right YouTuber talking points and ending in Political Correctness activating Cancel Culture and not expect that to make a stir at some point? -- and so, in the end, this wasn’t so much a conscious attempt at stirring the pot as much as it was the dam finally breaking, and a desire to keep it from spilling over too much. Nobody coordinated this! I think everyone just really hates drama.

Knowing all the steps and thoughts that went on behind all of this, I think being reactionary or accusatory for clout is the last thing anyone involved wanted to be. Considering just how many of these steps above could have easily been made into exposure, from the posts all the way back in May and June to the internal memo document that was made to keep friends quietly informed but could have been leaked to the public with only one bad actor, there was an active, common desire among people who didn’t even know each other to try and minimize the potential damage as much as possible. When you look at the situation now, of course it looks awful and hardly like something that came out of “trying to minimize damage”, but in reality there’s only so much you can do when the contents really are like that, and I personally believe everyone involved was doing what they thought was their best option as the situation kept changing.

I can’t speak for anyone else, especially since I don’t even know most of the people involved, and I didn’t have much of a role in all of this, but I think everyone involved, myself and my friends and everyone who’d been keeping tabs on this situation for months, has been going through a lot of heartbreak and conflict over what to do next, so please understand that there was a lot of thought put into all of it, and that it really was a difficult situation no matter how you look at it.

#digimon #digimon tamers

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potteresque-ire · 4 years

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Hi :) Are you following the zheng shuang scandal? Would you say that her career is pretty much over now? The rate the news has been unfolding is so crazy to me. It’s only been 3-4 days. Was wondering if the gov would handle her matters personally.

Hello Anon! Yes, I’ve followed the news about the actress, primarily because it offers insight on how the current administration deals with stars exhibiting what it deems as “immoral” behaviour. As of today (2021/01/26), it’s difficult to imagine her career will survive at all. While she isn’t the first to be categorised as a “bad-history entertainer” (劣迹藝人), she’s the first to be explicitly banned by the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA; 國家廣播電視總局), the department that controls—and censors—content of all radio, television, satellite, and Internet broadcasts in the country. Before, the NRTA didn’t publicise the names of the entertainers the government no longer wishes to see, which allows a possibility for reversal in a few year’s time if the “bad-history” wasn’t too damaging, and production companies are willing to take a risk and produce shows with the entertainers that may be difficult to pass the censorship board. But with such a high profile announcement, the government’s stance is unlikely to turn around in a foreseeable future.

Hmm. Let’s backpedal a little to get everyone on track. Before, I’ve shared some info re: the censoring of books, of audiovisual media. What if the government decides to “cancel” an entertainer instead? How does it do it? What are the standards?

The actress’s downfall is a (sad) example.

I shall skip names, the gossipy elements. Whether she made mistakes or not, no one deserves having their private matters exposed and sensationalised like this; no one should have to undergo such a humiliating, public trial. Essentially, the heart of the story goes as follows: the actress, a romantic-lead type who has been popular for several years, secretly got married. On 2021/01/18, her estranged husband claimed on Weibo that the couple had two children using US-based surrogate mothers, and the actress had abandoned the children in the US under his care. Meanwhile, his friend provided an audio from approximately the 7th month of the surrogate pregnancies, at which time the marriage was already falling apart. In the audio, the actress expressed dismay that abortion was no longer possible; her family talked about abandoning the newborns at the hospital or giving them up for adoption.

The next day (2021/01/19), the actress responded. She didn’t deny the existence of her surrogate children and claimed that she had been extorted. More importantly, she said the following:

“身為藝人我深知我國疫情的防控與重視。** 在中國國土之上我沒有違背國家的指示，在境外我也更是尊重一切的法律法規。”

“Being an artist, I deeply understand the attention my country (China) has placed on controlling the epidemic. On China’s soil, I didn’t do anything that violates the directives by the government. Outside the country, I’ve been even more respectful of all laws and regulations.”

This apparently hit a nerve of the administration. On the same day (2021/01/19), the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (CPLAC; 中央政法委) — one of the most powerful commissions that oversees the entire legal enforcement system of the government — published an opinion piece , in which it said:

但[女星姓名]的回应，却通篇强调自己没有违法，丝毫没有任何悔过、道歉的意思。…

But the response of (name of the actress) insists that she didn’t violate any laws, doesn’t show a hint of remorse, regret…

要知道，在我国代孕行为是被明确禁止的。… 作为中国公民，因为代孕在中国被禁止，就钻法律空子就跑去美国，这绝不是遵纪守法。…

It should be known, that in our country, surrogacy is explicitly prohibited … as a PRC (People’s Republic of China) citizen, to use a legislative loophole and go to the US due to the ban of surrogacy in China is absolutely not obeying the law…

要知道，没有营养的炒作带不来长久流量。公众人物的魅力，来自其高尚的职业操守、良好的社会形象、文质兼美的优秀作品，而不是疯疯癫癫、任性胡闹、缺爱卖惨的“人设”。作为公众人物，几度疯狂游走在法律边缘，把这样错乱的世界观、价值观、人生观，置于众目睽睽之下，贻害世风，这绝不是无辜！

It should be known, that hype devoid of significance will not bring in traffic (click rates). The charisma of public figures comes from their noble professionalism, good social image, high quality works in character and content, and not from “personalities” rooting in craziness, petulance, mischief, the selling of one’s lack-of-love and misfortunes. As a public figure, to wildly roam at the edge of the law, to place such wrong and chaotic world views, values and life perspectives in the public eye, to cause harm to the morals of society — that is definitely not innocence!

Things to note here:

1) The CPLAC reacting within a day of the actress’s statement ~ unlikely enough time for teasing out / verifying the facts or truth of the matter.

2) The implication that Chinese citizens must follow Chinese laws, even when they’re overseas. (What about, for example, same-sex marriages?)

3) These words that, IMO, bordered on insult: “craziness, petulance, mischief, the selling of one’s lack-of-love and misfortunes”.

The actress’s career was hanging by a thread with this opinion piece. State-controlled agencies chimed in, many of which echoing CPLAC’s stance that surrogacy is explicitly prohibited in China. By night time of 2021/01/19, rumours abounded that multiple media companies had already listed the actress as a “bad-history entertainer” and would be shelving all her works and cancelling all her scheduled appearances. Prada terminated her endorsement.

The final drop of the hammer happened a day later, in the evening of 2021/01/20. The NRTA issued a statement that explicitly named the actress and contained the following lines:

代孕不是私事，与法不合，有违社会主义公德。…

Surrogacy isn’t a private matter. It doesn’t agree with the law, violates the civility of socialism…

从事广播电视和网络视听的演艺人员尤其是知名艺人，作为公众人物，有很大的社会影响力和示范作用，应当自觉践行行业自律准则，严格律己修身，严私德，讲大德，守公德。

Artists who work in TV and web audiovisual productions, especially famous entertainers, have significant social influence and demonstrative roles as public figures. They should be conscious about the self-discipline required for their industry, be strict in their behaviour and personal virtues, speak of great kindness and defend civility.

行业主管部门的相关政策要求是明确的，严格的。广大人民群众不愿意、不��受、也不允许丑闻劣迹者污染我们的社会公德和公序良俗。

Policies regarding the management of the industry is clear and strict. The public does not want, does not accept, does not allow those with scandals and poor history pollute the civility, the good order and customs of our society.

我们不会为丑闻劣迹者提供发声露脸的机会和平台，一如既往，坚决为广大人民群众提供健康向上荧屏声频。

We will not supply opportunities and platforms for those with scandals and poor history to sound their opinions, to show their faces. Just as before, we are determined to provide audiovisual content that is healthy above all.

And just like this, less than 72 hours after the estranged husband posted on his Weibo, the actress’s career is over. The NRTA, which has The Say on who and what get exposure time on screen, has spoken. The actress had no way of self-defence. Her 11 million followers on Weibo didn’t get to decide whether she’d stay or she’d go.

This is a brutal punishment but for what, exactly? Some netizens have whispered while the others shout their condemnations ~ but I thought…. surrogacy isn’t illegal?

And they’re correct: surrogacy isn’t explicitly outlawed in China, despite what CPLAC and other state agencies has claimed. In 2001, the Ministry of Health banned medical institutions and health care workers from "practicing any form of surrogate technology". However, no laws have ever passed that prohibit individuals from commissioning or providing surrogacy services—especially when the services are overseas.

The actress, therefore, wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t do anything that violates the directives by the government on China’s soil. Her “crime” of using surrogate mothers was, at worst, a legally grey area. For years, China has had a booming, semi-underground surrogacy market, their client base including older parents who wish to have another child after the country relaxed its birth limit (the so-called “one-child policy”) in 2015, infertile couples, and to a lesser extent, the LGBT+ community. Blued, China’s most popular gay social networking/dating app, has offered overseas surrogate services for several years that connect their clients with US-based surrogates. It pulled the services after the actress’s incident.

But all that doesn’t matter. People in China understands this: the law book is there, but those in power at the moment always have the final word ~ and that word doesn’t have to match the legal codes, or the previous final words of their predecessors. As for the moral outcry re: the actress having wished to abort / give up her unborn children, it’s worth mentioning abortion has long been used to to enforce the country’s decades-long birth limit policies, and forced, violent late-term abortions were not unheard of. Many people in China are also aware of that.

But again, it doesn’t matter.

I’ve described the government’s reactions in detail because they put in words the expectations it has of its entertainers. Entertainers in China are expected to not only obey the laws, but also have proper world views, (moral) values and life perspectives (collectively called 三觀, literally, “three views”) as defined by the government. The state has also made clear that such expectations grow with the fame of the entertainers.

Entertainers at the top of the c-ent industry, especially the idol types with many young fans, are therefore expected to get things right. These opinion pieces are reminders that the administration keeps a close eye on them, can “cancel” them with a few words if they fail.

The term for “canceling” an entertainer is 封殺 (literally, “seal and kill”).

The actress isn’t the first to be “cancelled” by the government. The first time the NRTA issued a directive regarding “poor-history entertainers” (劣迹藝人) was in 2014, which essentially called for shutting out any entertainer with a history of bad behaviours. It demanded all production companies, TV stations, online media companies and theatres to stop producing / broadcasting audiovisual content with these people, citing that TV and film media should be used for “spreading the progressive culture of socialism and promoting socialist core values” (”传播社会主义先进文化、弘扬社会主义核心价值观”). As these entertainers will no longer be exposed to an audience, these directives effectively kill the career of most who are affected.

What makes up the “poor-history” of “poor-history entertainers” then?

- The 2014 edition named drug use and prostitution (including hiring a prostitute) specifically.

- The 2018 edition, an announcement made by a top NRTA official, stated that audiovisual programmes should adhere to the “Four Never-Use” guidelines when inviting guests for their shows. Those guidelines were vague but for the last line: “In addition, the NRTA explicitly requests that programmes should not use entertainers with tattoos; (those associated with) hip-hop culture, sub-cultures (non-mainstream cultures), decadent cultures.” (”另外，总局明确要求节目中纹身艺人、嘻哈文化、亚文化（非主流文化）、丧文化（颓废文化）不用。”)

Some may be asking: wait … hip-hop?

Yes.

It was believed that hip-hop artists were targeted due to a scandal at the time, in which (another) well-known actress had an extra-marital affair with a rapper. Analysis of the rapper’s lyrics found sexism and suggestions of drug use (the rapper later apologised and claimed his “core values” had been distorted due to influence from “black music”.)

As this guideline hasn’t been retracted under any formal capacity, it can still be used to axe any show, shut out any entertainer.

If you’re wondering about SDOC, for example, this again illustrates the need for some … mind-reading skills to navigate life in China. A good way to achieve that without superpowers is to have the right connections to higher-ups, who can offer hints on what can get away at the moment and what cannot (this is true not only for c-ent, but for most business practices in the country; building 關係 guanxi— literally, “relationship”— is a must for those who wants a piece of the Chinese market).

- In 2020, NRTA expanded the “no exposure” rule to live-stream shows on the internet as well as on- and offline charity events, where previously “cancelled” artists had started to find jobs in to make a living. While that notice didn’t further elaborate on what makes “bad history”, the accompanying article in People’s Daily (The State-controlled Newspaper) went into more details. In addition to drug use and prostitution specified in 2014, the article named tax evasion; lying about education levels; *suspected* (涉嫌) extramarital affairs, domestic violence and inappropriate speech.

It’s worth emphasising that many of these activities are not illegal. “Suspected” also means these activities do not have to have happened ~ it’s the impression that they’ve happened that counts. Hence, back to the actress who had surrogate children, not only did it not matter whether surrogacy is actually illegal, it didn’t matter whether the leaked audio was real or taken out of context, or that the babies didn’t end up being aborted / adopted. The article once again stresses that private matters are no longer private for entertainers who are in the public eye as social influencers, and these directives on “poor-history entertainers” — colloquially called “封殺令”, with 封殺 meaning the “seal-and-kill” and 令 meaning command (as in Chen Qing Ling 陳情令) — are there to set the standards, the bottom-line for c-ent. It did call for more specifics in future directives: more guidance on what makes “bad history”, the ways these entertainers can redeem themselves. As of today, however, such specifics have not been provided. As a result, to avoid crossing the NRTA, the media has ended up “overachieving” in certain cases, wiping out the screen time of entertainers who only have a remote chance of being viewed as having “bad history” to play it safe. Last October, for example, a young singer was briefly edited out of all his recorded shows because his parents (not him) was revealed to be deadbeats owing millions in debt.

And so, without a known way out yet, “bad-history” entertainers such as the actress will likely remain “sealed and killed” for a long time. Entertainers recently caught with extramarital affairs ~ a relatively minor “offence” ~ have been missing on screen for 2-3 years, and the heavy-handed treatment by the government this time is likely to put a pause on any companies considering using these people again. Even if they’re finally allowed some degree of comeback, their career prime will be over and and their NRTA “sentence” will likely follow them everywhere they go, which makes their getting face time in any high-profile (high-investment) projects unlikely. Those who must work to make their ends meet will probably end up like so many entertainers who never made it big, or are at the very tail end of their career ~ drifting from city to city singing in local clubs, getting paid poorly and harassed by rude customers...

===

** A side note: In case anyone wonders why she brought up COVID, it’s a similar idea as Gg apologising for “佔用了一些社會公共資源” “occupying social resources” in his first team post after 227 (2020/03/01). For an authoritarian regime that has placed the most attention on maintaining social stability (ie. quelling dissent), disrupting the government’s narrative re: current events and potentially reversing the overall tone the administration is trying to reach in public discourse can be a greater offence than any actual “wrongdoing”. 227, as an incident, was guilty of that.

(And I’m bringing this up because I find this relevant to the safety asks I have in my inbox. Arguments among fans do not themselves render Gg and Dd unsafe, but can become a significant issue if they “occupy social resources”, disrupt the government’s narratives and/or its political machinery in some ways. IMO, 227 took a dangerous turn not because the fans were arguing over a piece of fanfic, but because a group of fans took over the reporting machinery intended to rat out dissidents. It was a mistake that I hope no fans ~ regardless of who they support ~ will repeat again.)

#pie metas #pie answers #yizhan #bjyx

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tazwren · 3 years

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My two cents on the devolution of fandom spaces...

As a former mod of a fandom space and a woman of colour, I do not feel safe.

Seeing what has been done to so many in this fandom, by a particular group of white American women, in the name of moral policing is both abhorrent and demoralising. As it also is to repeatedly see the same narrative being shoved at everyone as the gospel truth.

A narrative that very conveniently either becomes about fic or has nothing to do with fic, depending on how people want to swing things. A narrative that will accuse a person of Jewish heritage of anti-Semitism, a person of colour of racism, a practising Muslim of being an Islamaphobe. A narrative that will define for you and me and all of us comprising this myriad of multitudes in the world what generational or personal trauma includes and what induces the same.

Those of you who know me, know what I’ve been dealing with the past few days & why I haven’t spoken up before now. Before I logged out a couple days ago, I saw what looked like more of the usual nonsense by the same group of people I’ve kept my distance from once their true colours were revealed. What I didn’t expect is that they would think themselves so above the norms of human decency and accountability that they would go after not one but two women of colour this time around in their rabidity. And many others who spoke up, as it turns out.

It hurts to see what these women, that I know of, have had to endure and to see the passivity of the community, save for a few voices, in sitting back and letting the circus rampage through town. It hurt when I was at the receiving end of it and it hurts now.

Why? Because it shows me a microcosm of the world that I don’t really relate to, that makes no sense to me with the values I was brought up with, and which reduces basic human decency to a commodity to be trampled upon and for you to be seen as weak for having. Because people who willingly laud you for your art / writing / wit, meet you with effusive claims of love and affection and friendship, who have no qualms in taking your help when it suits them, will throw you under the bus and let the wolves ravage you when it doesn't.

Before I get into that, let me talk a little bit about what has transpired over the past few days to a week, and what has been systemically taking place over perhaps the past year in this fandom.

One thing is that everyone who makes a statement about anything suddenly has people in their mentions demanding they show what gives them the right to hold that particular opinion. A critical thing people forget about fandom is that it is a place where people hide their identity for a variety of reasons, all valid, and this approach to fiction and conversations where everyone has to reveal every part of their past and identity as a means of establishing their "credentials" in order to present their views comes in direct contradiction with how fandoms operate. It violates people's rights to privacy.

The other is that there has been an increase in the voices that purportedly stand up to “speak for” the marginalised, the abused, those discriminated against and those who belong to minorities who “need to be protected / kept safe”. An admirable sentiment, to be sure. If it weren’t for the fact that none of these groups of people needed saving, speaking for or the protection of this particular group of voices.

Voices who only want to define and use these people as "model victims" to hurt other white women and establish their supremacy over both them and other POC. Voices that will present their "truth" as they see fit and sans context or present you with screenshots of snippets of conversations held in supposedly secure spaces that they have no qualms in violating in the interest of the "greater good" and claim offense / silencing if the misdemeanour is pointed out or action is taken against them, Voices that will conveniently categorize you as a "token POC" or "white adjacent" when you do not support or align with their narrative. Voices that belong to a predominantly white American group of women, whose real agenda, as is evidenced by their modus operandi, has nothing to do with real altruism or a drive for justice or indeed to right wrongs.

No, their agenda is purely power.

To hold sway over groups of followers, to shepherd them as though they are sheep who cannot think for themselves, and to set themselves up as white saviours who call out those who step out of line, or are deemed to be problematic and toxic and unsafe. To be the owners of the only "safe spaces" in fandom and to drive other groups and spaces to be boycotted or worse.

Now, I've long wondered, who indeed are these women to decide that for anyone? In a world comprising multiple cultures, religions, groups, subgroups, genders and which contains multitudes, who are these women and what gives them the right to foist their puritanical standards on everyone, very conveniently disguised as concern for the moral well being of everyone and the consumption, of all things, of fiction?

Certainly, there are many things in this world that people regard with justifiably equal dislike / horror / sadness. At the same time, there is much that is not shared, that is particular to a culture and to a person’s background. There is a multitude of perspectives that make the whole. And the white women of the United States of America have not cornered the market on what those are, or indeed even own any curatorship or censorship of the same. They cannot, because each person’s culture and background and joy and trauma is their own, as are their ways of dealing with it all.

That being said, let’s talk about their pack behaviour and the devolution I’ve witnessed on social media as basic human decency is bartered for clout.

I’m all for standing up for someone who doesn’t have a voice or a platform, or maybe afraid of repercussions to voice dissent. I’m all for being there for our fellow human beings as they face struggles of often unconscionable and unfathomable proportions. I’m all for holding people accountable for their negative behaviours as they impact the larger community.

What I am unequivocally NOT for is treating such situations as an opportunity to preach, to virtue-signal, to shame and to put on blast the alleged wrong-doers. I say alleged because that’s what most accusations are on these platforms—allegations to do with things that disturb our sense of balance or make us wrinkle our noses or that we deem bad, and therefore make the accused deserving of the full force of the community’s misbehaviour and censure.

I ask you if you were found guilty of a crime in real life—you know, the one away from your phones and keyboards—would you not have an opportunity to retain a lawyer, to plead your case in a court of law, to acquit yourself? Or, if found guilty, would you not have the opportunity for correction and rehabilitation? Yes, you say? (If you say no, then that explains the spate of state-perpetuated injustices across the USA, but that is a different matter).

Why then are people treated so abhorrently in this court of public opinion? What gives you, me, any one of us the right to judge people so vilely and with a metaphorical gun to their heads? What gives anyone the right to say you better agree with everything I say, retract everything you said and grovel for it or we will eviscerate you in public, shame you, force you to change or delete the content that offends us and still ostracise you and in some cases even threaten you with bodily harm or death, or doxx you?

Why is there no grace in how people are approached or dealt with? Whatever happened to allowing people to learn from their mistakes, where applicable, or hearing them out and giving them a chance to explain their side of something we may not fully understand?

Why is there no accountability for such behaviour on the part of the accusers?

What makes the rest of you sit back and allow this to happen? What makes you think this is in any shape or form okay to watch? Today, it is a virtual stranger at the receiving end, one you can distance yourself from quite conveniently saying Oh, she just mods a group I am in, or I only read their fics a couple times or I only followed them for their art or jokes or whatever flavour of excuse you choose. Tomorrow, it will be one of your own - or it may very well be you. And you'd better hope there's someone left to speak up for you.

The irony is you will have allowed it to happen by letting the wolf in the fold. By letting these white women manipulate you, and the community you claim to be a part of, so unapologetically, so maliciously and so unashamedly that before you can do anything about it the cancer has taken hold.

If this was happening in the world outside of social media, they would have to follow due process, to present real evidence based on facts (not based on emotions, rumours or perceptions) and would have to allow the person they are accusing to present a counter-argument, to defend themselves or be defended. Failure to do so is a miscarriage of justice and, depending on whether this is a professional or legal proceeding, they would either seriously risk their jobs or have the case thrown out of court. If not face action themselves for attempting to derail the process of justice.

Why then are they permitted to range so freely through the landscape of fandom, snarling and biting at who they please, or who displeases them?

I have no shame in saying I was at the receiving end of their behaviour for defending a friend they put on blast and I will tell you right here and now, I am a woman of colour who feels unsafe and attacked by these so-called self-appointed white saviours of your social media experience, these so-called upholders of the common morality—whatever that means—who will fight for you the evils of problematic and toxic writers who dare to have an opinion not aligned with theirs and who do not bow to their clout. Not that they care, so long as they can ignore this fact since it doesn’t fit their narrative. So long as they can ignore what has just been done to so many people in the name of cleansing the fandom.

If any one of these women were truly interested in alleviating the troubles and pains of the discriminated, the marginalized, the trauma-affected, I invite them to please come roll their sleeves up and help in the multitudes of troubles that wrack this world, not just in the backyards of their minds. My country is amidst a struggle for the basics of human life in this horrific pandemic and, prior to that, for basic constitutional rights for religious minorities. Do not patronize me and lecture me on trauma and racism and discrimination. Do not marginalise me in your attempt to pontificate and set your pearl-clutching puritanical selves above the rest, or assuage your white guilt.

A largely American audience or fanbase in this fandom is purely a function of access and interest—other cultures have vast followings for things you couldn't begin to fathom—and it doesn't mean you are entitled in any shape or form to be spokespeople for the rest of the world. We have no interest in being colonized again by white oppressors.

If you disagree with what I have said, I congratulate you on being a part of their coterie and wish you much joy in being the sheep in their fold. Kindly unfollow or block me on the way off of this post.

#fandom #fandom culture #bullying #gaslighting #gatekeeping #minorities #people of colour #real talk #toxic people #problematic behaviour #problematic authors #problematic fiction #fanfic #reylo #reylo fanfic book club #reylo fic recs #trauma #safety #accountability

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maxcarbaugh · 3 years

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1.) Selfies, or the awkward pictures that you take of yourself on the phone, are a relatively new advancement in human society. Although self-portraits have been around for quite some time now, the smart phone has made it easier to capture pictures of yourself just by clicking a button. In recent years, selfies have been getting a lot of attention because of how bizarre the process actually is. While it might be considered normal in today’s society, one can’t help but be weirded out by the fact that you can find thousands of pictures of different people on a variety of social media websites. Although they could serve as a method of communication, or even as a way of expressing yourself from a different perspective, selfies do seem like they are becoming an imminent threat to human society. Based off of my own experiences, selfies seem like they could affect you both socially and emotionally.

My relationship with selfies has not really changed over the last decade of my life. In my opinion, the selfie does more harm than it does good. This is because of my own experiences growing up in a world dominated by social media and smartphones. In my free time, I often like to scroll through pictures online, where I am readily exposed to a variety of different selfies of people from around the globe. Although it serves as a way to kill time, it is also serves as a way of losing confidence in yourself, because most of the time you are exposed to pictures of celebrities or even models. The problem with this, is that many of these selfies depict people who are seemingly flawless, and it makes you think more about your own actual appearance. Seeing this, it is easy to lose confidence in yourself, and it even begins effecting your social life outside of social media. However, I came to realize that many of these pictures you are exposed to are actually heavily edited with filters to make your appearance seem more flawless. It is important to understand that the selfie should not dictate how you choose to live your life. At the end of the day, I realized that no one is perfect, and I should not let other people’s selfies impact my own.

2.) Jerry Saltz, an art critic for New York Magazine referred to Parmigianino’s painting as the first selfie in a 2014 article. This is because he believed that the selfie included all of the necessary components that a typical selfie should contain. Saltz made it apparent that the selfie contained attributes like; a bizarre angle, an elongated arm, foreshortening, compositional distortion, and close-in intimacy. However, from this self-portrait of Parmigianino in a Convex Mirror, it was clear that the selfie has seen some serious revisions over the years. The 16th century self-portrait, in my opinion, is nothing like the typical selfie we see today on social media. This is because we are living in an age where technology is continuing to improve, and it is becoming easier to take a picture of yourself. Over the years, it is apparent that the selfie has been evolving, and people are becoming lazier while taking a picture of themselves.

As previously discussed, the selfie has seen some serious changes, especially in the last decade of my life. While living in a digital age, it is easy to notice these changes because there are multiple social media platforms in which you can explore all different types of selfies. In my opinion, the selfie has transformed into a picture that only depicts your face, but the bizarre angle and elongated arms are still subtly present. This is because smart phones make it far easier to take a picture of yourself, opposed to painting an image of yourself that is represented on a Convex Mirror. That is why, in my opinion, the selfie angle of the current moment is whatever you want it to be. I think that people are becoming lazier because the process has become increasingly easier, and the cameras are so powerful, that they are taking pictures of themselves however they want.

3.) Over the years, advancements made towards technology have greatly impacted the lives of millions of people around the world. For instance, smart phones are constantly being improved each year, with the help of some serious revisions towards the camera quality. One of the ways companies work to keep your fascination with phones, is offering an abundance of filters that change your appearance after taking a picture. Although these image altering filters have been around for quite some time now, I do not think have reached a plateau. This is because companies will continue to produce more filters that will change your appearance in different ways, and it will keep the consumer more engaged. As an avid user of Instagram, a popular social media website, I can see this exact tactic being put to use. Meaning, every time I go on Instagram it seems like there is a new filter that everyone seems to fall in love with.

As previously stated, technology is only going to get progressively better as time goes on, so I do not see these filters becoming a thing of the past anytime soon. However, I do see that these filters could become problematic because of the false image they project back to you. In my opinion, I am not really a big fan of these filters because they make someone look like they have no flaws, which could hurt the confidence of another person. Although I do not see them going extinct in the near future, I would like to see more people branching away from filters and taking more natural pictures of themselves.

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adazhang-ccc-2020-blog · 4 years

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Week 13

Class notes

Structure of feelings about my topic:

Dominant idea: Suicide is not only influenced by society but an individual's thoughts are also essential to take into account. The increase in suicidality occurs, particularly during adolescence.

Residual idea: We cannot talk about suicide in public or with a group of people, as people would think you are saying something else. Because of the seriousness of the problem, it is not a normal thing for us to talk about, and it is dangerous to even mention it.

Emergent idea: Self-awareness can enable us to realize the pain, however, it can also invite suicidal thoughts. It is not the aversiveness of psychache that kills, but the idea of suicide as an available means of escaping it.

Resource I have looked at

The Evolution of Suicide By C A Soper, pg 87 https://books.google.com/books?id=DS5mDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=what+is+the+emergent+idea++for+suicide&source=bl&ots=70Mi8nrjkD&sig=ACfU3U04kbLdFkxIx8ksq6F_wQkX3BJWVQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAxq27us7pAhUCHaYKHTeeBUMQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=what%20is%20the%20emergent%20idea%20%20for%20suicide&f=false

Further research

Can artwork influence suicidal thoughts?

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN. July 13, 2010

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/07/13/suicide.locations.barriers/index.html

Brief description: it focuses on the negative artworks which have been published in public in Russia, and its effect might have been brought to people. Some psychologists think that for artwork that are negative, dark and might contains suicidal behaviours could influence people's mental health.

Notes

The artwork has been raising eyebrows among mental health professionals and bloggers alike. The question remains: Could this subway station become a place that encourages suicidal behaviour?

Too early to say what will happen, but could be inviting suicidal behaviour.

It can affect people already at risk, said Nadine Kaslow, a psychologist at Emory University.

More recently, many systematic studies have found that media reporting can lead to imitative suicidal behaviours and that young people and those suffering from depression can be especially vulnerable.

Against describing or showing photographically the specifics of suicide method and location, as these details and images may encourage others to imitate the act.

Thoughts

This article agrees that artwork can influence suicidal thoughts in terms of its content and the way it 's presented.

Sometimes the content in artworks is dark and distorted due to time it was created and the impacts of the social environment within that period. Therefore, when people with mental health problems see these works, they may cause further harm to people’s psychology which is a commonly agreed view echoed by some psychologists.

In my opinion, the cause of this problem mainly depends on the content of the artworks as well as the way they are displayed. We cannot change the content of a work, nor can we control the production of such an art piece. Putting it on public display represents making it be seen and exposed. However, it is impossible to predict who will see it and who will be affected by looking at it. For people who are not suicidal, the effect is small, but for people who have mild or severe problems, it can be fatal.

The proper use of art is essential, as it can help others to some extent, but when it is misused or misleading, it can have the opposite effect and have a serious impact.

I think what we can do is to minimize the exposure of works like this in public which can have a great negative impact on people’s mental health, or we can use the artwork in another way, for example, turning the content into something positive, something that can help people out.

A Community’s Response to Suicide Through Public Art: Stakeholder Perspectives from the Finding the Light Within Project

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3865777/

Citation: Mohatt, Nathaniel V et al. “A community's response to suicide through public art: stakeholder perspectives from the Finding the Light Within project.” American journal of community psychology vol. 52,1-2 (2013): 197-209. doi:10.1007/s10464-013-9581-7

Brief description: This article presents seven first person accounts of Finding the Light Within, a community mobilization initiative to reduce the stigma associated with suicide through public arts participation that took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 2011 through 2012.

Notes:

#Introduction

The purpose or content: Describe a community mobilization effort to address the issue of suicide through public arts. It focuses on the shared experiences of suicide survivors as well as stories of individual and community healing and resilience in the aftermath of suicide.

The high risks: Pennsylvania’s suicide rate (11 per 100,000) is significantly higher than neighbouring New York (6.91) and New Jersey (6.71) (CDC 2011), and in Philadelphia, the rate of suicide attempts per 100,000 among African American youth (12.1) is significantly higher than that of nearby New York City (6.5) and Baltimore (7.8) (CDC 2011).

Presenting a series of seven, brief first-person accounts. Each first-person account is the personal statement of the individual or pair. This format offers a 360° perspective on how participatory public art can be used as a mechanism for social change and community mobilization to address what is historically considered to be an individual mental health problem—suicide and its aftermath.

Finding the Light Within resulted in considerable local publicity that promoted a public narrative of suicide and its aftermath that contained both stories of pain and suffering and ones of collective healing, resilience, and hope.

My thoughts:

The example of the mural artwork is opposite to the one displayed in Russia metro station. Although they share the same content which is about suicide and are also publicized in public places, they are playing different roles and having different influences. If the work in Russia station brings negative influences, oppositely this mural has full of positivities.

Community members are urging people to face suicide issues directly and to help those who are suicidal. The Community provides a platform where everyone reaches out to each other, acknowledges the serious negative consequences of suicide, and encourages people instead of giving up their hope try to pull themselves out of the pain.

I think it's a great example of turning a negative subject into a positive project. People have the chances to express their emotions and share with others with no fear and shame. By making the work public, more people can see it and be healed. In the rest of the article, the first-person perspective is adopted to narrate their points on the project which is good as the audience can engage their thoughts more deeply and truly.

#Margaret Pelleritti, Community Member and Suicide Survivor

One of the biggest challenges with suicide is how much it affects the people surviving, outside of even the direct survivors.

He thinks that it's better if this project can help people realize that suicide is not the answer to problems, to understand why some people would choose to suicide and to heal some of them.

Pelleritti has lost his son. But he never gives in to life, his daughter is the reason he keeps on his life for.

The painting was very permanent. When you put the brush into the paint, you know that what you are doing is something very lasting for someone that you love. Doing this for the memory, even though the person was long gone, he was here once before.

I hope this project can help spread the word. By sharing anyone’s story, whether it is someone who attempted or someone who lost someone, by sharing these stories we are hopefully creating a light bulb moment for someone to realize I feel this way, or I don’t want my mother to feel this way.

Make people realize they do want to live, whether it is something like the Out of the Darkness Walk or the Finding the Light Within mural, to save lives so that there are no more survivors.

My thoughts:

This part is about the experience of a suicide survivor who has seen people committed suicide and his views on this mural project. He believes the effects of suicide are mutual, and the impact on others can not be underestimated. Suicide to their own injury is the physical destruction, for them, their morbid psychology makes them only focus on themselves, as a result, they have no way to know and can not take into account the people who cherish them and understand how much pain these people will be in. Pelleritti saw his uncle commit suicide when he was young, and when he had children, he saw his son chose to end his life as well. These were heartbreaking experiences, but he kept his spirits up as he realized that suicide was not the right way to solve the problem, there were better options and turning away from the problem can not be helpful. He still has his love and his daughter.

For the mural painting project, he thinks it is a good platform, providing a place for people who have survived from suicide or who once had this idea to share their feelings without scruples. It's also a way to be aware of and cherish your life. First of all, he thinks that this mural can help people understand that suicide is not a good way and there is a lot of hope in life. Even if some people choose to commit suicide in the end, mural painting can also convey the thoughts of those who commit suicide, so that we can know their real thoughts justly.

I really like what Pelleritti said about the permanence within the mural and I agree that the characteristic enhances the meaning of the project. The long-lasting mural symbolizes the ever-lasting love for the one you care about. Although some people may no longer be in this world, the murals have permanently retained the evidence and traces of their presence. Although everything is over, the memory is unable to be erased, it is like a beautiful scar, fleeting like fireworks. The mural frames the eternal beauty that took place in the past and portrays the preciousness of life.

I Want To Live

A photography project exploring suicide

http://iwanttolive.photography/

Full project link http://danielregan.photography/iwanttolive/

This photography project is run by photographer Daniel Regan and suicide prevention charity Maytree.

The project comprises several interviews and photographic portraits of Maytree’s volunteer workforce, investigating what brings people to volunteer with those in suicidal crisis, volunteers’ own mental health experiences and the impact of suicide.

One of the interviewees

Kwabena

I was studying social work when I started volunteering at Maytree. I enjoyed my time there so I continued even after I’d finished my studies.

There are so many people out there that try to commit suicide. I’m not trying to save them but I am trying to support them. I try to offer them different perspectives that help them recognise their difficulties. I do feel that I’m contributing in some way, even if it’s just helping them on to the path of recovery. The fact that people can make a phone call to Maytree is a sign of strength, to recognise where they are and what they need.

I know family and friends that have been affected by depression so that’s impacted my decision to stay there. It’s very simple at Maytree, it’s just talking and allowing people to express their emotions, but it’s also very effective. Whenever I do a shift it always feels like the first week that I’ve been there because the situation is so fresh and different. We form short but meaningful connections with guests. Because the connection is so temporary it’s easy to say how you feel with someone, which I think helps to get things out and be honest.

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blueboycal · 6 years

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Number One - Ashton Irwin

REQUEST: A jealous ashton request when he gets really jealous/ possessive because of one of the other 5sos boys being too handsy + An insecure ashton request where he thinks he isn't good enough for you

AUTHORS NOTE: shoutout to @flannelpunkcalum for editing this and helping me in general.

PAIRING: Ashton x Black!Reader

WARNINGS: mentions of racism, self harm

WORD COUNT: 1,912

She followed closely behind the boys as they entered the bar. She held on tightly to Ashton’s hand. They’d gotten off stage about an hour ago and were going to celebrate their third record debuting at number one. Ashton found a booth for them and they sat down while the others were at the bar ordering drinks. She checked her phone to pass the time before the other boys sauntered back to the table carrying drinks in each of their hands. Soon glasses were passed around the table and she picked hers up.

“We’re number one in the U.S baby!” Michael shouted. He lifted his in the air and brought it to his lips, downing the shot. Cheers erupted around the table. Everyone echoed Michael’s actions.

“You guys earned this. I’m so proud.” She beamed looking around at the boys. They’d worked so hard to get where they are now, and their hard work was paying off.

Ashton slipped an muscular arm around her bare shoulders attached his lips to her pink plump ones. He could taste the strawberry gloss that coated her lips. He broke the kiss satisfied that he left her breathless.

“Get a room!” Calum hollered in disgust, while Michael made a gagging gesture from the other side of the table.

“Oh, we will.” Ashton fired back.

She felt her cheeks burn at her boyfriends cheeky remark, she took another sip of her drink as her eyes wandered around the club. The boys began to strike up a conversation about how excited they were to play shows. She continued to sip on her drink and half listen. She slid out of the booth and began to head towards the dance floor when a hand tugged on her arm.

“Where you going?” Ashton asked.

“To dance.” She nodded her head in the other direction. “You coming?” She asked, hoping he’d join her on the floor. He may not be the best dancer in the world, but she loved his energy.

“No, I think I’ll sit this one out.”

She giggled. “Haven’t you been sitting all night?”

“I’ll have you know drumming isn’t just sitting.” He retorted.

She rolled her eyes at him. She knew a lot of physical exertion went into drumming, she just liked to give him a hard time.

“I’ll dance with you. I feel like I’m gonna explode if I don’t move around.” Luke said, getting up from his spot at the table.

With a flick of her red box braids, she led the way to the dance floor with Luke trailing behind her still wearing his stage outfit from earlier. As soon as she stepped on the neon tile her body was swaying to the beat of the music that blared from the speakers. He grabbed her hand twirling her in a circle and pulling her close to him. Back at the booth Ashton occupied, he watched as Calum left to join the others. Michael had stepped outside to call his girlfriend.

He was left alone at the table with his thoughts.

He watched as Luke danced with his girlfriend, he felt a tinge of jealousy within. His green eyes followed their every move. Deep down he knew he had nothing to worry about; Luke was one of his closest friends and wouldn’t try to steal his girlfriend. There was something in they way he held her that bugged him to no end. The way he rested his hands on her waist and brushed her braids out of her face that made his fists clench. Ashton forced himself to look away and take a few deep breaths.

“There’s nothing going on between them.” He whispered to himself. He was acting jealous over nothing. It was just his overactive imagination making him see things where they aren’t. He had been sneaking glances at the two of them while scrolling through his social media.

Several derogatory comments caught his attention as he scrolled through the You section on Instagram. He clicked on the photo he posted days ago, it was taken before he’d gone onstage. He had his arms wrapped around her while she planted a kiss on his lips, she had her back to the camera so no one could see her face. In the photo she wore the white Youngblood hoodie which was a stark contrast against her dark skin and braids. Andy had taken the photo without either of them noticing and then sent it to him after the show was over. Ashton asked for her approval to post the photo and she agreed.

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the photos of her receive hate but it was the first time he posted a photo that confirmed their relationship. She made a point to ask him to keep her face out of the photos he posted online of her. He fought tooth and nail to keep her out of the spotlight when they first got together. They’d take separate cars and enter restaurants separately. If management wanted paparazzi to follow him around he’d make sure to tell her ahead of time. The two of them kept a low profile by going out at night in places where they wouldn’t be spotted. He’d even entertain wearing disguises so he could hold her hand out in public. The hiding in plain sight was thrilling at first but he soon tired of the charade and wanted to be a bit more open about the relationship. In interviews he’d mention he was seeing someone or he’d mention her discreetly in tweets.

He was several beers in when she had come back over to the table. “I’m ready to go, are you?” Ashton asked standing up from the table, her jacket and purse in his hands.

“Yeah.” She took her jacket and slipped it on and put her purse over her shoulder. The two of them gathered their belongings and said goodbye to the other boys. Ashton couldn’t help but feel like she took too long saying goodbye to Luke.

Ashton rushed up the steps to his house after getting out of the Uber. He unlocked the door and headed inside without bothering to see if she was even behind him. She closed the door and took off her heels and jacket. She set her heels by the door and went over to the hall closet to hang up her jacket. She observed her boyfriend unsure of what to say. The sound of his boots stomping around the house made her jump.

She didn’t understand why Ashton’s mood had soured. He was all smiles before they had gotten to the club. The screeching of the dining room chair being dragged across the floor sent chills up her spine.

She went upstairs and changed into one of his t shirts and a pair of shorts before she crept into the kitchen. Ashton was sitting at the table with his back to her. He held his head in his hands, lost in thought.

“Did I do something wrong?” She asked breaking the suffocating silence that had hung in the air ever since they left the club. Her brown hand clung to the door frame. Tucking a loose braid behind her ear she walked over to him and pulled out the chair closest to him and took a seat. Her brown arms sneaked around her sides as she tilted her head to look at him.

Ashton slowly lifted his head up at the sound of her voice. Guilt spread through him; he didn’t mean to make her think that he was upset because of something she did.

“No.” He said softly, meeting her worried brown eyes.

“What’s wrong then?” Her eyes darted back and forth trying to get a read of his facial expression, but she couldn’t figure out what he was thinking no matter how hard she tried.

Ashton ran a hand through his brown locks and let out a sigh. “I don’t feel good enough… for you.”

“Good enough how?” She gently pried.

“I don’t deserve you. There’s plenty of other guys who could make you happy. I’m not good enough to be your boyfriend.”

“That’s not true.” She reached across the table and put her hand over top his, lightly rubbing it with her thumb.

“Yes it is! Look how you are with Luke.”

She furrowed her brows in confusion. “What about Luke? We’re just friends.” Ever since she met Luke they’d gotten along very well and although she found him attractive, she was never interested in him in a romantic way.

Ashton scoffed. “He seemed a bit too friendly when you were dancing together.”

She pulled her hand back and began twirling her hair. “Okay first, there’s nothing going on with me and Luke. And second, you are literally the best boyfriend I could ask for.”

“All I do is bring negative attention into your life and I hate it.” He frowned.

She shook her head. “People on the internet are assholes and they always will be. Nothing can change that. It’s better to ignore it.” She learned a long time ago that you couldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

“But-”

“Ashton you bring me so much joy and laughter in my life. You have a way of making me smile on my worst days, and you listen and try to understand the things I go through. You see me as person, and that’s all I could ask for.” She placed her fingers underneath his chin and titled his head upward so they were eye level.

“You’ve gone out of your way to defend me to your fans when you didn’t have to.” When they first started dating, Ashton wanted to show her off to the world and would constantly post pictures off her on his Instagram stories. It sparked an awful amount of hate from ‘fans’ who couldn’t understand why he’d choose to date someone who looked nothing like his last girlfriend.

It got so bad she deleted her Instagram. Her account had always been set to private but she had hundreds of message requests that contained nasty and hurtful words. Some ranging from racial slurs to strangers telling her to hurt herself or bleach her skin because she was 'too dark’.

She stayed off the internet for three months and eventually decided to create a new account because she didn’t want to let internet trolls take away one of social media platforms that brought her happiness. The hate she was getting resulted in Ashton having to write a series of tweets condemning the fans who wrote awful things about her, and him asking them to be more mindful of people’s feelings. It broke his heart to see how racist people were towards his girlfriend. He had to set the record straight. He was in love with her and no amount of hateful comments could change that.

“I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk to me about serious things,” She paused. “When you’re feeling insecure I want to know. Communication is the only way I’ll know what’s going on in that head of yours.”

Ashton was speechless, he didn’t realize he had such a profound impact on her. He nodded in agreement. "Okay, I’ll try to be more open about how I’m feeling.” She got up from the chair and pulled his head against her chest. She ran her fingers through his brown locks while his arms wrapped around her waist. She pressed a gentle kiss to his cheek.

“You’re my number one.” She whispered.

#ashton irwin imagine #ashton irwin fanfiction #ashton irwin angst #ashton x reader #ashton x black!reader #5sos fanfiction #5sos fanfic

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starchained-blog · 6 years

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whats up my dudes !!! i am bee, i’m 19 & i never fuckin learned how to stop using this exact vine reference in all my intro posts !! i will be playing my Babe andromeda black. but first a lil bit about me b4 i start 2 ramble about andromeda: i’m always a slut for the Aesthetic, i’m a math Nerd aaaand im probably ?? way too in love w fitzwilliam darcy. also i will Always want to plot so if u do too please hmu !! nyways u can find out more abt my daughter andromeda under the cut !!

- ̗̀✰ • 【 XU JIAQI, CISFEMALE, SHE/HER 】 ❝ did you see ANDROMEDA BLACK on the train back to hogwarts ? they’re a PUREBLOOD in their THIRD year as a TWENTY-year-old SLYTHERIN. apparently they’re the RECUSANT around the grounds; most likely because they give off an aura of rain on dark windows, the heavy sweetness of red wine, ink-stained fingers, a tempest barely contained within a girl. of all the social media platforms, they’re definitely most obsessed with their INSTAGRAM; probably because they’re SELF-RELIANT, but also INTROSPECTIVE. however, on the new manifest app in mr. carlos’ english class, they’ve already managed to anonymously steal the username: NIMUE. ❞ ┊ 「 bee, 19, est, she/her. 」

PINTEREST !!

rec·u·sant ( noun. ) a person who refuses to submit to an authority or to comply with a regulation.

aka just a fancy way of saying rebel !

( rain on dark windowpanes, the heavy sweetness of red wine, ink-stained fingers, greyish purple of dawn, cold bones, fastening the clasp of a silver necklace. dark curls escaping from pins, starched white shirts under wool coats, cold coffee dregs and burnt out matches from a guilty cigarette. fog over the scottish moor, the soft tick of a grandfather clock, stars peeking through an overcast sky, the stark echo of a single violin. the pages of a book turning in a library past midnight. holy places long since abandoned, the simmering wildness of a bird caged, and the ancient ache for freedom. a tempest barely contained within a girl. )

PRE-HOGWARTS !!

andromeda & her mother have what u can call a strained relationship. from her moment of birth, druella saw everything andromeda did as an act of rebellion, whether it was a childish question asked in the wrong place at the wrong time, or getting so absorbed in a book she forgot to come down for dinner, or a bit of accidental wandless magic born out of a moment of frustration. every day was a trial against andromeda, with her parents acting as the judge, jury and executioner, & over and over again she was found GUILTY.

andromeda never meant to defy her mother, at first, but no matter how hard she tried to please druella, nothing she ever did was quite good enough. there was always some fault, whether it was a lock of hair tumbling free from its pin, a corset come unlaced, posture ruined from hunching over a book. her wrists were too bony, her lips were too thin, her skin too easily flushed.

[ TW ABUSE ] it didn’t escape andromeda’s notice that every flaw her mother criticized was one druella shared as well, and when she grew older she realized her mother’s dissatisfaction with andromeda was merely a product of her own dissatisfaction with herself. but that didn’t feed her the nights she was denied dinner for her ‘ misbehaviour ’. it didn’t take back the days andromeda went unable to speak thanks to a punitive silencio, and it didn’t grant andromeda’s wish to have a real mother who loved her. [ END TW ]

did druella love her children ? who knows. maybe she did, in her own twisted way. but druella was first and foremost a business woman, and her main trade was her daughters. andromeda grew up listening to endless warnings that her mother would “ never be able to find andromeda a husband if … ” and then came whichever grievance she’d chosen to focus on that day.

it cannot come as a surprise that andromeda learned to live in the shadows, away from her mother’s disapproving glare; that she learned to rely on herself and herself only, that she learned to watch & observe & test the waters, to think before acting. ( of course, druella did not approve of this either, and informed andromeda that no man would want a girl who was so serious all the time. )

her parents often dragged her and her sisters to various pureblood functions, where andromeda stood off to the side in uncomfortably starched dresses, disappearing like smoke any time someone looked like they were heading over to strike up conversation. she would explore the pureblood manors, all silent footsteps & watchful eyes, making observations on how the wizarding world’s elite lived their lives, noting separate beds in the master bedrooms & half-empty whiskey bottles in the washrooms. it seemed like everyone was only looking out for themselves in this world, trying to further their own social status and wealth.

at home, she would escape to the roof with a book, whether it was a history of warlocks or the kind of torrid romance novel druella pretended she didn’t read, dark eyes hardly looking up as the sun sank lower in the sky, fingers blackened with ink by the time she closed her book and descended into the house to face her mother’s wrath that she missed her piano lessons.

is it strange that such a cynical girl could have such a yearning for beautiful things ? or would that merely be a side effect of cynicism, to long for something to thaw a hardened heart ? andromeda loved beautiful things, perhaps a bit too much, but she did not trust them. nothing beautiful was made to last, and if it was, it wasn’t truly beautiful. sunsets faded to darkness, books ended, lovers grew apart. the inherent transience of beauty made andromeda crave it all the more.

HOGWARTS !!

hogwarts was a breath of fresh air for andromeda, the chance to experience life outside her parents’ regime. to her inquisitive, probing nature, an ancient, magical castle full of history & secrets was paradise, let alone all the classes it housed. and the people — andromeda had never seen so many people in her lifetime. hundreds & hundreds of students filled the castle, all with their own thoughts and lives and desires. an introvert by nature, she didn’t interact, merely observed. she made best friends with the library & the constellations, sneaking out of the dorm to sit with her legs dangling over the fifty-foot drop of the astronomy tower, eyes finding her constellation, andromeda, and wondering if her fate was written in the stars too; drunk on the beauty of an untamed scottish night.

the unidentifiable yearning she’d always kept tucked inside a corner of her heart ballooned until she could hardly stand it. it was a yearning to be something more than the perfect pureblood wife her mother was trying to groom her to be, a thirst to prove herself in some way she didn’t even understand yet, and it was this ambition & drive that got her sorted into slytherin.

if druella & cygnus had thought andromeda was unmanageable before hogwarts , when she wasn’t even trying to be, she was downright wild when she returned for winter break in first year. now that she knew life could be better than what she was currently living at home, she buzzed with a restless energy that alarmed her parents. andromeda may have been troublesome before, but this was bordering on dangerous. druella made the decision that andromeda would not be returning to hogwarts. [ ABUSE TW ] this sparked one of the worst fights they’d ever had, and culminated in a rare but unforgiving physical beating. [ END TW ]

eventually druella conceded, and andromeda was allowed to return, but she was much more cautious now. she only made friends who her parents would approve of, she kept her nose clean, and at home, she played the part of the dutiful daughter. there were still small rebellions, though — long curls cut short with a silver flash of the kitchen scissors; a nicked pack of her father’s cigarettes smoked cross-legged on the roof, coughing into her fist so nobody would hear. as she got older, she paired the cigarettes & book with red wine , the finest she dared steal without risk of being caught. this was her escape, her small patch of beauty in an ugly world.

andromeda keeps to herself at hogwarts as much as she can. the only people she spent time with were those her parents approved of, and she didn’t like most of them. she threw herself into her schoolwork instead, easily landing herself a spot among the top students.

but she loves hogwarts, loves it with all her heart, as so many abused children do – it’s a safe haven, a place where she can at least pretend she’s free. she loves learning everything that she can ( in fact, she was very nearly sorted into ravenclaw ). her favourite place to be is the astronomy tower, and she still escapes there whenever she’s feeling a bit too claustrophobic.

she was chosen to be a slytherin prefect for her year and although she thought she wouldn’t like it, she’s grown to enjoy the position. not for the power it gives her over her fellow students, but for the escape it brings. she can associate with people she would normally never talk to, and roam the castle freely past curfew. and andromeda isn’t a naturally nurturing person, but she’s found that she enjoys talking to and helping the younger years. she sees their wonder at hogwarts in their eyes, the same wonder that she felt, and has grown quite protective over quite a few of them.

she’s technically in slug club, due to her prowess in potions and her illustrious family name, although she hardly ever goes – she does not like slughorn at all, nor most of the people he’s selected to be in his little club. other than that, however, andromeda doesn’t make a habit of joining clubs or teams or anything that would involve her being forced to interact with people.

PERSONALITY !!

those who don’t know andromeda might say she’s aloof, proud, detached, all flint eyes & sharp edges. and they wouldn’t be wrong. andromeda’s habit of keeping to the shadows has carried on into her hogwarts years, and as an introvert, her solitary nature can sometimes come off as downright anti-social. she’s naturally pensive, and her pensive face just so happens to look pissed off.

she finds it hard to trust people. she’s so used to a world shaped by selfishness that she rarely meets someone she doesn’t suspect of having ulterior motives. after all , beautiful people, like beautiful things, are temporary. everyone turns ugly sooner or later; everyone’s claws are eventually revealed.

andromeda carries an unmistakable air of wealth that, although entirely unintentional, can rub people the wrong way. she has a taste for the finer things in life — an aged wine, a silken scarf — and sees no reason why she shouldn’t enjoy them. she’s well read & well bred, and has a vocabulary and accent that can seem pretentious to some.

but those who do know andromeda, those precious, precious few, know of her vivacity, her independent streak, her love of learning, her dry humour, the dimples that appear with every mischievous smile. they know the fire she’s kept hidden in her heart for so long, and the proud, apathetic mask she slips on so easily whenever she’s hurting.

MODERNISMS !!

listen as much as i love the idea of andromeda in a modern age, it’s mostly just bc of the wealth of information that’s available to her ? like staying up ages watching random ass videos & falling into a black hole of wikipedia articles & having 12 languages on duolingo and a streak on khan academy. fuckn nerd ass

but social media ? not for this bitch !! i really have Tried to get her to use social media so i can do fun sc threads & such but she wont listen to me smh. u know when u meet someone cute & you’re trying to stalk them online but they either dont have any social media or it’s just like an empty acct with no posts ? shes that bitch. she’ll text people but she hates the like …. publicity of social media. doesnt trust fb at all ( and she shouldnt !! zuck shes onto u ) and probably has a snapchat someone made her get but she consistently replies like 3 days late, breaks streaks, has a snapscore of like 304. what a mess. shes a grandma. understands & enjoys memes but never uses them or references them. if andromeda black references a meme around u then u know she trusts u implicitly

she’s wary but intrigued by this new english class. she dreads to think of the reaction it’s getting from pureblood families like hers, but she recognizes this for what it is: an escape. an opportunity.

she chose her username nimue after the famed lady of the lake from the stories of king arthur and the round table. she’d loved those stories as a child, and was especially drawn to the mysterious witch, half-good and half-bad, who trapped the kingdom’s most powerful wizard inside a tree to gain her independence, who gifted the king with his famed sword, who was there when the great golden age of the kingdom rose and who was there when it fell.

OTHER !!

gender / sexuality: cis female / bisexual

birthday / zodiac: jan 11 / capricorn

mbti: intj

moral alignment: chaotic neutral

temperament: melancholic

patronus: raven

amortentia: dried ink, pine, petrichor, dark chocolate

that was ??? ridic long so bless u if you read all of that mess. im Too Lazy to list wanted connections rn, maybe i’ll do that later who knows. but anyways pls plot w me & let me love u down

#mhq:intros #( *｡✧ 𝑎 𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑝 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑖𝑙𝑘 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑏𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑤𝑜𝑜𝑙 ┇ OOC . )

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talakhouri · 5 years

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Practice 2 - Pre- Production

Idea Development

Whenever I am told to do a short animation I think of what I want to say. When creating a story I always take the complicated way to do it so I end up with a story either too long or incomplete. I got rid of this problem when I started working with comedy. Throughout the 5 projects I worked on during practice one I started looking at narrative and storytelling from a different perspective. Working on very small animated sketches I found that turning everything with a twist at the end helped me a lot, but since my final project is gonna be a lot longer I wanted my comedy to say something. The topic I am going for is eating disorder. A lot of people struggle a lot with their body image and what makes it worse nowadays is social media, a kind of “scale” has been created on which people are defined as pretty, perfect or ugly. Some people can’t get over it or even live with it to the point where it starts taking a huge part of their lives, they forget about the important things and just focus on their body image for outside compliments, likes or comments.

Story

Alex and Delilah two neighbors each heading towards her own apartment. As Delilah enters her own apartment, model posters and meal plans are hanging on her wall. She goes to the window and looks at her across the street neighbor taking pictures of herself. Delilah takes her phone out of her pocket and checks the post and sees that it already has lots of likes and comments while her own is very discarded. She turns around and heads to a huge mirror placed in the middle of her apartment, the reflection is all distorted and looks very bad. She takes a deep breath and changes to training clothes and starts her daily work out. An entire day passes by, she then heads back to the mirror to see if anything changed, and nothing has. She gets frustrated and breaks the mirror into a million pieces. She orders another one online. On her way home, Alex sees the mirror on Delilah’s doorstep and looks at it and notices that the reflections are all distorted. She heads back to her apartment. Delilah fetches the mirror and takes another deep breath to see if her reflection changed. It’s still distorted so she breaks the second mirror again and starts screaming and trashing her apartment. Worried, Alex comes in the apartment and sees it very disorganized and notices the broken mirrors and the posters on her walls. she understands what’s happening and heads back to her apartment and when she gets back to Delilah’s she holds with her, her own mirror and places it in front of Delilah and it shows a normal reflection and tells her “This is You”.

Characters

Delilah is a girl in her mid-twenties, she settled for a job she does not like. The only thing that she works really hard on and actually matters to her is her figure, she trains every day, follows a meal plan, never has a cheat meal and she obsesses over her neighbor. She’s a shy girl, her insecurities keep her from having a decent social life. Her low self-esteem led her to believe that what matters about her is what people might say when they see her.

Alex is about the same age as Delilah, she’s confident, self-contained, knows what she wants, fun and couldn’t care less about what people might think of her. She tried to make a friend from Delilah but their relationship never passed a wave in the hallway.

The neighbor, she’s a pretty but shallow woman, the only thing that matters are her looks and her social media platforms. she’s so sucked in this world to the point where she doesn’t know how to live in the real world anymore.

#practice2

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jess-dw-sherman · 4 years

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Media Switch-Up: Instagram

Why I picked Instagram, and how it is new for me:

To preface this analysis – I have had an Instagram account for over 9 years. However, I very rarely post and stopped using it regularly at least 7 years ago. I’ve posted maybe one or two photos per year and am following essentially only my friends. Since this week’s topic of study was video, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the newer functions of Instagram. When I got an account, it was a photo-only platform, and I don’t use the Story or IGTV functionalities. Additionally, I’ve never made an effort to look at what companies use Instagram or followed any that inspire me, so I wanted to analyze the platform’s users and the corporate presences that are the most successful.

In terms of usage, I maybe look at Instagram a couple of times a week. I am also notoriously bad at answering Direct Messages from friends (to be honest, I really don’t look at them at all and currently have 17 unread messages…). I thought it would be interesting to see how it is used by people outside of my group of friends, contacts, and occasional content I see from companies and public figures.

Wide range of content and some interesting functionalities

I thought I’d look at the discover section to see what would come up. It seemed mostly influenced by what I follow or have watched already, like a lot of cat videos or LGBTQ-related topics). There was also a selection of very random videos that I don’t completely understand, including one I forgot to screenshot but it seemed like a guy pretending to be a column in the NYC subway.

Author’s note: I do love cats and seeing people be confident in who they are, so I enjoyed these adorable posts.

Looking further into the different functionalities on the platform, I liked that Instagram has new options for content.

Shopping

I had no idea there was an entire shopping section, as it hadn’t occurred to me that that was a regular thing people do, other than the sponsored content you can see on your newsfeed. Looking at it, it is actually well organized and easy to use. This is a really interesting option for companies that sell products that appeal to a large range of consumers, especially since the headlining content on the Shopping homepage is titled “Buy on Instagram: shop without using a website.” It’s convenient that companies can link products to their account, so it would be easy for users to find them either through the shopping page or if they follow the company page.

IGTV

Instagram TV looks like it’s similar to YouTube. You can post videos that are up to 10 minutes long, and many of them seemed to be from companies or public figures and less personal content. It looks to me like a way for users to post longer videos (rather than the short ones available in regular posts).

Reels

I also had no idea what Instagram Reels were. Upon further inspection, it is a new functionality that was released only a couple of months ago and allows users to post shorter videos than IGTV. Honestly, this seems like a way for Instagram to compete with TikTok but it hasn’t been around long enough to see if it really makes an impact, although it is nice to have so many content format options (photo, clips, full videos, shopping, and more) all contained in one platform.

Who is using Instagram?

While I knew it would be interesting to do what - I hope - is insightful and useful analysis of Instagram since it is so widely used and has been around for a long time, one positive was that it was really easy to find clear statistics on many different demographics (much easier than for my previous Media Switch-Up on Medium!).

By Country

One thing I found interesting was the number of people who use Instagram by country. According to statistica.com, the U.S. is by far the country that uses Instagram the most at 130 million accounts, followed by India at 100 million. Considering the difference in population size between those two countries, a much larger percentage of Americans use Instagram than Indians. Europe also seems significantly less interested in Instagram, with the top EU country (at least until December of this year) being the U.K. at 27 million users, Germany with 25 million, Italy with 23 million, and France with 21 million.

Leading countries based on Instagram audience size as of July 2020

By Age

The age breakdown of users was less surprising. The largest categories of users are between the ages of 25-34 (33.3%) and 18-24 (29.3%), and the smallest group are users over the age of 65 (2.2%). On a personal note, I was a little bit happy to see that only 6.9% of users are ages 13-17 because I am still on the fence about how I feel in terms of young kids posting photos and videos of themselves without a full understanding of the permanence of their posts.

By Gender and Race

In terms of gender, usage seemed essentially equal for men and women, varying only by a few percentage points for each age category (see chart above). However, I think that in terms of the racial breakdown of users, it’s important to note that the Black and Latinx communities are more likely to use Instagram versus White people

On demographics

All of these factors would be important for a company to consider when developing their strategy and their content. Usage by country was most surprising for me – I thought the app was much more popular around the world. When considering Instagram in a corporate digital media strategy, it would be important to know that your reach with content on this platform may be very effective in the U.S., but much less so outside of America.

Most popular accounts on Instagram

Instagram’s account is the most popular on their site. While this may seem unsurprising – I thought that it was some sort of automatic follow situation, an easy account for new users to follow, or one of the first suggestions that new users see when they create their account – the company has actually marketed their account in an interesting way, by using it is a platform to promote for interesting accounts. A lot of the topics in their Story sections are social/cultural topics, such as Share Black Stories, Latinx Heritage, Pride 2020, Juneteenth, and their 2020 vision. There was also an assortment of positivity topics, such as Made us Smile, Guides (on a variety of subjects), Try This at Home, and Self-Care Tips.

The most popular accounts after Instagram are all celebrities, with the top five being Christiano Renaldo, Ariana Grande, The Rock, Kylie Jenner, and Selena Gomez. I’m not sure what I expected, but I did find it interesting that there are no other companies or organizations that fall in the top 20. While those 5 are all celebrities and these are their individual accounts, the variety in those 5 personas was also remarkable, and I feel reflects the diversity of users and interest that the platform includes.

Companies on Instagram

I don’t use Instagram to follow companies, although I have bought a couple of spontaneous (possibly ill-advised and unnecessary) products through sponsored content. Statistically, companies in the fashion industry are the most successful Instagram. Considering the style of a lot of photos that users post on Instagram, and the popularity of style influencers, this was not surprising. The top 5 companies on Instagram are Nike (by a large margin), Victoria’s Secret, Huda Beauty, Chanel, and Gucci.

From my research online, it looks like Lego is one of the most popular corporate accounts. I do love Lego, so I decided to follow them and was excited to look at their content.

Lego account contains mostly fun content (though I’m not sure what serious content people would be expecting in relation to Lego) and posts at least once a day, if not more. Their content is mostly video content and they have really taken advantage of the longer video format that IGTV offers. I am a big fan of Lego (and am now following them) because I found some of their content to be delightful, like how they stress test their Duplo products and a cute video on sustainability encouraging users to pass on their Lego sets to others.

I work in finance and banking and I was not surprised to see that my industry is not even included in the graph above, probably because these are not topics that people think of when they’re using Instagram. Most banks and large financial services companies do have an account, although they vary in the degree to which they take advantage of the platform’s different features. One account that I do like is Goldman Sachs and I discovered a new feature when I looked at one of their stories: apparently, you can link content directly to Spotify! This is a great feature if you want to promote things like podcasts or music, and it did make me wonder if you can do the same things with other platforms like linking things to YouTube (Answer: not yet, but maybe soon?).

Final thoughts

Overall, this analysis has changed the way I view Instagram. I thought it was mostly photo-based, but they’ve adapted to changing interests from consumers and seem to be focusing on promoting videos, making it very easy to edit them and post your content in multiple formats. I know that companies that I’ve worked for in the past tend to only post photos, but I think they need to expand into video content if they truly want to engage their followers. Videos of these things would be much more engaging. I also think that the videos seem much more real – you only post the best photo you have, but a video shows your followers feel like they are at the actual event. Clips of people speaking lets viewers feel closer to the person, rather than just reading something they said and seeing a headshot. I’m actually really excited to start thinking of ways that I can make videos for my current job (Employer Branding) because it seems like a great way to showcase things like events, speeches, and our employees.

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coopdigitalnewsletter · 4 years

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3 June 2020: Structural racism. Trump vs Twitter.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

[Image: Martha Raddatz]

Structural racism

A newsletter about technology feels a bit beside the point when structural racism is lacerating a country, and a virus is tearing the world apart, and climate change looms in the background. But technology is a catalyst, enabling and amplifying what’s happening.

“We know we can’t go on like this. A world where people are judged, discriminated against and die due to the colour of their skin is not the world I want, that any of us want. Even though we are not in the USA we all have a part to play.

Some of you experience judgement and discrimination every single day. Both in work and outside of work. I know I can’t get close to knowing what this feels like, but I want you to know that my ears are pinned back, my eyes are open and, as uncomfortable as it may be, I won’t look away. I know this is happening and it’s unacceptable and intolerable. It must change. We can change it.

The inclusive culture that we, together, are trying to build at the Co-op will only live through actions. Not words alone. There is no doubt we’ve got more to do. We’re well underway but I’m not naive enough to think that we’re even nearly done. We need to go further and faster.”

That’s from a thread on Twitter by Co-op’s leader Steve Murrells. The killing of George Floyd by police officers was appalling. The protests in Minneapolis and other cities across the US and elsewhere - and the responses by law enforcement and government - show that structural racism must no longer be suffered by some while being politely ignored by others. Action is needed. Here are some good reads that point at resources to understand, and action to take:

Co-op’s BAME colleague network, Rise: “Serious about being an ally? Here are some great ideas on what you can DO to help in this situation”.

Monzo Head of Diversity & Inclusion: “Your org needs to step up for Black folks right now. Here’s some pointers in thread - silence isn’t an option.”

White Guyde To The Galaxy: “I made you a list”.

Anti-racism resources for white people.

Related: Public Health England quietly published their Disparities in the risk and outcomes of COVID-19 report, which found that age and sex, deprivation and ethnicity were all significant factors in the variance of COVID death rates.

Trump vs social media

Twitter flagged one US Presidential tweet as needing fact-checking and another as glorifying violence. Trump wasn’t at all happy, and issued an executive order to prevent “powerful social media companies censor[ing] opinions with which they disagree”. Twitter and other social media platforms are now doing more content policing than Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg has remained carefully neutral, prompting employee walk-outs and criticism.

There’s a long-standing debate over whether online companies have a responsibility for the content their users post (as if they were making editorial judgments and publishing the content). Or whether they’re neutral platforms (in the same way that your mobile phone company isn’t responsible for what you say in a phone call).

Half a decade of social media being politicial weaponised suggests that Big Tech needs to act more like a publisher, and take more responsibility. Big Tech has been able to ignore the unintended consequences and the harms to society it created. Big Tech needs to design responsibly and design for society.

Also: you wonder if increased partisanship in US politics (and elsewhere!) eventually means that many companies will be forced to pick political sides more explicitly.

Local and online grocery growing

Online grocery, local shopping have all seen a lot of growth recently:

“Online shopping now accounts for 11.5% of all grocery sales, gaining more ground and attracting more new shoppers in 2020 than the channel has in the previous five years. Online specialist Ocado saw sales rise by 32.5%, with its market share increasing to a new high of 1.6%, up from 1.3% last year.

Shoppers staying closer to home and avoiding queues at large supermarkets benefited both Co-op, up by 30.8%, and independent retailers, up by 63.1%. Co-op reached 7.0% market share, a level last achieved in 2011, while the 2.5% of sales taken by independent grocers was last seen in 2009.”

Elsewhere:

“It’s been a crash course in retail. We’ve had to perfect a completely new kind of service, using bike couriers to get great products to customers at Amazon speeds. But we’ve also learned it can be a viable business, which will be part of our long-term plans, even when we reopen”

Selling the company to the community

Instead of IPOs and acquisitions, exiting to community is one alternative.

“The idea with exit to community is how can you create a model where the whole point is to create a vibrant community that will become its eventual stewards. It seems like a natural fit, especially in a moment where we’re looking for increased accountability and the wealth distribution problems in the startup economy.”

Privacy vs pandemic

Developing for privacy in the pandemic - interesting book excerpt, and very timely.

Supporting garment industry workers

Lost Stock is “a clothing box for you, containing clothes that high street retailers have cancelled because of COVID-19”.

Happy birthday GDPR

Two years under the EU GDPR (pdf file) - more enforcement needed?

Co-op Digital news

How a voice user interface could help our Funeralcare colleagues - interesting prototypes.

Federation House’s online events:

Free of charge

Andy’s Man Club – Gentleman's Peer to Peer Mental Health Meet Up – Mondays 7pm

Amity mental spa session – 1-2-1 Mental Health Chat – Various dates/times in June – Aug

Self Care – Online Workshops – Various dates/times in June

PyData Code Night – Meet Up – 3 June – 6pm

Supporting your community with food distribution – Webinar – 4 June – 2pm

How might we design a People Powered Smart City – Webinar – 8 June – 2pm

The difference we make – Social Impact Workshop – 9 June – 9.30am

Paid for

Mental Health – 2 Day Training Course – 15/16 June – All Day

Cariad Yoga – Online Yoga – Various Dates & Times in June

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletter’s typist @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

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schoolofartsgent · 5 years

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How Did We Get Here? The History of fireinsidemusic Told Through Tweets

A single this kind of millennial who knocked my socks off was this youthful Lady named Anushka, a teenager in her early twenties. Her white t-shirt with "MILLENNIAL" in significant, black, Daring letters just caught our rapid consideration and we could not halt thinking of her Exceptional Expertise Presentation, in this article at Nirmiti Academy. The Do-it-yourself (Get it done By yourself) Craft was her one of a kind expertise. She represented a younger encounter from the millennials. Moreover, it absolutely was her presentation that spoke a lot more of her like a millennial. She was a true go-getter when it came to existing her exceptional talent in a unique way. We could see her beaming with pleasure and contentment to showcase her unique talent to others. She was so energized that she was conversing a mile a moment. She had a great deal to mention about this and she could go on and on and preserve us glued to her presentation. The millennials like Anushka and lots of others are motivated to work on things which fascination them. Simultaneously, I could also see her remaining unable to smile and present herself Fortunately. Long gone are definitely the times for that millennials where they come to feel present and enjoy their surroundings. These are the technology who experience the regular need to have for Digital attention which potential customers them to overshare their lives and times on social media marketing or go inward in deep conscience to seek out by themselves. This leaves them unconnected with the physical environment about them.

Millennials can be a hugely praised and self-assured technology. They are a remarkably optimistic generation. They may have a higher have to have to possess lifestyle encounters rather then to accumulate materials prosperity, Though they are doing like to acquire things that should help them to appreciate People encounters. Millennials are by far the most educated era. Because the price tag of training has become so large and continuing to climb yearly, Millennials are getting to be pretty savvy regarding their academic selections. Contrary to previous generations who observed education like a ritual and an financial investment inside their foreseeable future, millennials watch instruction being an cost, Except it will empower them in an effort to be an even better individual. They hope training to assist them put together for the new possibilities and worries of the age, rather then encouraging them by furnishing simple fact-primarily based information and facts/information. The millennials wish to be challenged by contemplating the longer term And the way they're able to contribute to creating a far better Modern society and natural environment. They do not truly feel the need to develop into "textbook wise / e-book worms".

They recognize that points is usually easily discovered on-line through their particular unbiased motion. They may be the era that offers and prosper on knowledge at finger "click on". In a entire world of open use of expertise, it tends to make tiny sense to count on the classroom to be a forum for that transfer of knowledge.

In its place, The scholars much choose to understand from the tales and encounters of Many others. These shared stories and activities aid them to enhance their own personal expertise by Mastering within the good results and mistakes of Some others. This will help them stay away from building the identical faults as their influencers. For this reason, they like to take a position far more in their time and cash on this sort of courses which aid them to develop many methods that they could include into their ideas and final decision-producing system, thereby creating a new talent set.

We can't dismiss The point that millennials may also be a era of uncertainties and fluctuations. They can be the generation who likes to maintain switching their gizmos. They grew up with engineering where anything was at their fingertips. It will become discouraging for them to not get what they want whenever they want it. A lot of the points are handed to them with a silver spoon. This tends to make them come to feel entitled to get what they want without Placing in A lot energy.

However They may be the main workforce of the businesses currently, they don't have confidence in lifelong work. Lifelong dedication is a fairy tale for that millennials. They constantly soar from on occupation to a different since they are constantly searching for anything new and far better. These higher expectations develop into their downfall and would make them fewer financially stable than their parents.

Millennials are in this article to remain! They can be younger, bright and energetic and they ARE the FUTURE. They are great belongings which the world must harness and use. They're the era that is certainly revolutionizing the world. They may be the budding leaders of tomorrow. They undertake technology and stimulus in the identical breadth. This technology is also a collaborative and social technology that includes a deal with comprehending and making their knowledge via a variety of kinds of medium to find the solutions. It truly is with the educator like us to offer an arena for engagement and discovery and also become a content material skilled and mentor. It is for learning platform companies like Nirmiti Academy to provide an explorative and experiential experience and produce out their legitimate probable in life and at perform. It Is that this transformational journey that we at Nirmiti Academy stay up for on a daily basis to learn, unlearn and relearn Using these youthful and magical technology - the Millennials!

With the improvement of innovation, it has gotten crucial to persistently find out, unlearn, and relearn to extinguish the thirst of grave challenge. In contrast to customary time, the action of bookkeepers isn't really constrained to maintaining thick registers. With robotization, the thought of guide bookkeeping happens to be an outsider expression and now, a massive bit of bookkeeping operate could be addressed bookkeeping programming, one example is, QuickBooks programming.

On this website, We are going to take a look at a percentage of the significant specialised functionality and talents to change into a professional Accountant now and constantly:

Basic Imagining

Supply: magnapubs.com

At The purpose after we discuss the bookkeeping contacting, we should give thought to fundamental qualities, by way of example, acquiring the vital info on the bookkeeping contacting. In almost any case, presently the situation is altered and people are alluding applicants having the ability to burrow even more to have a gander in any respect viewpoints in the numbers and the information just as recognizing styles and illustrations to understand the story inside. Be that as it may, this means cannot be grown medium-expression. That is a type of sensitive aptitudes that you can discover more than a timespan, via efficiently searching for facts Together with the operate. Instead of performing things which ring a bell, attempt to consider ingenious and out in the container preparations. Look into, evaluate, and Assume once you experience a difficulty to concoct essentially the most achievable and innovative preparations.

Get Complex Abilities

Resource: Area.me

As indicated by Entrepreneur.com, cloud bookkeeping will likely be launched in over ninety% businesses. Mechanization has gotten inalienably fundamental to assistance from the small business. With innovation, as an example, the cloud, it is presently very simple to appreciate the unpredictable data also to get to them from anyplace in the world with hardly any snaps. The cloud is becoming The newest sample with the bookkeeping business.

With cloud facilitating it is becoming Significantly less difficult for the companies to operate cooperatively with out buying and selling off the safety issue. Also, working with the cloud give nonstop accessibility of the information from any distant corner of the planet. Accordingly, the fascination for just a bookkeeper getting specialized abilities would be the best selection in excess of the group.

Information on Federal government Legislation

Supply: Money Convey

As a result of differed new and reconsidered rules, The task of bookkeepers has In addition modified. In the year 2020, recognizing the stray pieces of such progressions can get principal for bookkeepers. As indicated by experts within the bookkeeping business, new federal government principles and compliances might be constantly actualized to progress straightforwardness in business enterprise. In this manner Will probably be A great deal less complicated for the bookkeepers to get the knowledge on new and current govt policies and tips. Therefore, it is usually recommended to makeover your current mastery time allowing, and to boost a vital most popular posture in excess of Some others.

Relational Abilities

Resource: Jarvee

You should have the option to liaise with diverse divisions, investors and The shoppers. For this, bookkeepers are predicted to acquire good relational talents, as an example, shopper the executives, arrangement aptitudes, compassion, and so forth.

Presently, the exercise of the bookkeepers are not restricted to the calculating, it contains customary gatherings with industry experts, consumers, and associates to fit their preferences. In this manner, having every one of these talents will consist of inside the function usefulness and accomplishment of the bookkeeper. By way of example, it is prescribed to not make use of inside abbreviations or specialised language though responding to inquiries of The purchasers. Owning terrific relational aptitudes will assemble solid connections and to hold customers and to draw in new purchasers. This is certainly a significant aptitude to obtain.

Information and facts Analytics

youtube

Source: brilliant info mixture

Smarts are definitely the individuals who can fathom the information, even so more astute are the ones who can make it getting used. To analyze the data and to think about a plausible arrangement, it is significant with the bookkeepers to be aware of the intricate specifics of the information. Possessing Each one of those aptitudes can make you mindful of the existing interest with the clients and buyers. Grasping the innovation and embellishment of our arrangement of skills as per the need of time will almost certainly assistance.

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elliewrit1133 · 5 years

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Lit Review Draft # 2

The modern world is fast paced and always moving; The modern society places countless demands on the modern day individual. The result is high stress levels, which different people cope with in different ways. I am interested in the role that dress and self presentation effects confidence levels, and in turn how this affects the way we interact with the world. What conscious thoughts as well as subconscious influencers drive people to dress how they dress, and how does this influence the ways that we feel and the ways that we engage in the world?

The sources which I will discuss in this review were gathered to provide background information that could help me direct my own research regarding style and self expression. I began my search using the University of Denver Libraries online database looking for articles that discussed influencers of fashion change. For the remainder of my academic sources I switched to google scholar and searched for resources centered around style, identity, self-expression and conformity. In selecting my sources I also was looking for a variety of research methods within them: some with interviews, some conducted via surveys, some containing historical analyses and some explaining definitions related to the fashion industry. Fashion is very much intertwined with pop culture and the modern day and age of social media domination which made finding popular media sources easy. I searched for a source containing an interview with Tan France, one of the best in the business when it comes to style, and selected the option which contained the most discussion about the life-improvement aspect of fashion. I also searched for a blog discussing the importance of fashion, a blog discussing the up-and-coming fashion trends, and a non peer-reviewed source discussing the psychological aspects of style choices. Through all of these sources several dominant themes emerged, and it is around these themes that my review will be structured.

From Macro to Micro: The Fashion Industry and Consumer Emotion

Where do changes in fashion trend originate from? In other words, does change begin with us as consumers or with the actions of the fashion industry as a whole? Studying fashion trends and the complicated processes that allow them to shift reveals that there is a relationship between the emotional needs of consumers--the emotional needs that could be fulfilled via the ownership of a certain product, idea, look--and the way the fashion industry interprets and predicts these needs and turns them into tangible items. This idea was explored in many of the sources I used for my research. Cholachatpinyo divides this relationship into four stages/levels: the macro-subjective, in which changes reflects social needs; the macro-objective, where suppliers turn these needs into tangible fashion items by creating items with symbolic significance; the micro-objective, where individuals begin to interact with the fashion market in order to create their own ‘look’; the micro-subjective, in which consumers use their look to turn symbolic ambiguity into meaning. The micro-subjective level is the most centered around the needs of each individual separately, leaving room for fashion to mean different things to different people: “It is as this level that individuals interpret the results of looks by negotiating with self in order to satisfy their needs”(Cholachatpinyo 2002). An article on the Harper’s Bazaar website, which is all about ‘Fashion’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Culture’ and ‘Travel’, reveals 10 trends of the upcoming 2020 spring/summer season. In describing these trends, words such as “bold”, “power”, “punchy”, “effortless chic” and “free-spirited” were used(Klerk 2019). All of these words have emotional meaning tied to them, demonstrating how the fashion industry tries to interpret and respond to the trends in emotional needs of consumers. Cho and Joohyeon explore this idea by compiling a list of the main themes in mainstream fashion from 1991 to 2001 and connecting the themes to their symbolic meaning. The implied significance in each of these trends caters to the emotional needs of different groups of individuals, such as ‘sportism’ which appeared as anti-fashion during the time when being active became more popular, giving individuals who did not feel they belonged to the mainstream a chance to symbolize their identity and form a community with others who have similar values(Cho and Lee 2005).

Individual Style and Identity

Consider the difference between uniforms and dress codes: one leaves much more room for self-expression. Now consider free dress with no dress codes or parameters of any kind: even more room for self-expression. The identity and the self are very much intertwined, indicating that style provides a good platform for expressing and exploring one’s identity. A study conducted by Hunt and Miller demonstrates this relationship. In the study, women from a single sorority at a university in the southern United States were interviewed in small groups and asked questions pertaining to appearance, interpretation of the appearance of others, personality traits and personal as well as collective identity issues. Small groups were used in order to mimic “the more naturalistic setting where identity talk is negotiated”, indicating that identity talk is muddled with perceptions of what people think others expect of them. The results of the study showed that the woman largely replaced “absolute standards of ideal appearances” with attention to factors related to personality, culture, and situational context--leaving room to respect the identities of others as they are communicated through dress(Hunt and Miller 1997). A fashion and lifestyle blogger wrote a post about why following fashion is important and one of her points was on how it proves your identity. The point that she made demonstrates the role of respecting situational context as well as cultural differences as they pertain to the way people dress: “A person’s dressing also expresses his way of living which is a part of his identity"(Why Following Fashion Is Important), the key words here being ‘way of living’. This is one aspect of many that make up our individual identities. Through the way that we dress we are able to present a specific identity which is what gives dressing well so much power for our psychological well being. O’Neill interviewed Queer Eye’s Tan France, the man who is responsible for the ‘clothing’ aspect of the transformation of the individuals who get made over for the show, and got to learn a little more from him about the importance of dressing well, but also about the importance of dressing in a way that feels ‘you’. She asks Tan for his input on how she could improve her style in order to feel more powerful and look older at work and upon following his advice, she reports that “my outfit does make me feel immediately more powerful”. What’s important about her outfit though, is the way she takes Tan’s general advice and turns it into something that is specific and meaningful for her: he says a skirt and she puts on a soft black mini-skirt with some “Very Serious Tights” and a “sort of silky shirt”. It’s easy to see O’Neill’s personality shine through in the way that she dresses. A form of empowerment and self-expression(O’Neill 2019). Eicher and Roach-Higgins elaborate on the meaning of ‘dress’ in a way that opens it up as an outlet to express an even wider array of personality traits and identities: “Dress of an individual is an assemblage of modifications of the body and/or supplements to the body”(Eicher and Roach-Higgins 1995). With this definition, ‘modifications’ such as tattoos, hair-cuts, piercings and beyond are part of an individuals ‘dress’, their style. Experimenting with these things allows one to better understand their own identity, and to share it with others.

Conformity vs Self-Expression

Conformity; the desire to fit in. This is not something that can be overlooked when it comes to any style related topic. I previously discussed the study conducted on sorority women by Hunt and Miller but feel it is relevant again here. The tactic of conducting the interviews in groups here demonstrates the deep need to fit in that all of the respondents have: it provides a setting where they can reaffirm eachothers inputs and build off of one another--conform. The study also revealed the ways that the women justified their own perceived style offenses, as well as the offenses of others: blaming things such as rips or food stains on “forces outside of the individual and beyond his control”, or justifying outfits by saying things such as “that’s just me”. This indicates that the approval of others is still a factor in dress and that the woman felt a need to explain themselves and the way they were presenting themselves in respect to their identity and individuality. Kim Eundeok, in her book Fashion Trends: Analysis and Forecasting, explores both the role of “fashion acceptance” and the individuals need to express themselves as they relate to the ways that people engage with fashion. She differentiates between style, which is “a characteristic mode of presentation”, and trends, which refers to a general direction or movement as it relates to fashion. Styles do not have to be widely accepted and thus individuals can express themselves via their style without dressing in a way that mainstream culture would deem in style. As such, style does not necessarily have to imply mainstream conformity and can be more about individual expression. An article on Grazia Daily, a British website about fashion, lifestyle and pop culture, also explores these factors. Titled The Psychological Reason Why We Wear The Clothes We Wear, one of the most interesting concepts this article introduced was the idea of the “near-exposure” effect: "The near exposure effect works on the basis that the more you see something, and the more you are exposed to something, the more likely you are to act with a positive reaction without knowing why you did it". Essentially, it is the thought process of if everybody else is doing something/wearing something so we are exposed to it over and over again, we will be drawn to dress/behave in a similar way in order to make it easier to fit in with our peers.

Conclusion

Fashion and the role it serves in our lives is mutli-faceted. That is, it serves many purposes: a place to wrestle with and also showcase our identity, a medium of self-expression, mental and psychological comfort, and an opportunity to fit in. Are people aware of just how much power it has in their lives?

References

Cho, Hyun-Seung, and Lee, Joohyeon. “Development of a Macroscopic Model on Recent Fashion Trends on the Basis of Consumer Emotion.” International Journal of Consumer Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 7 Jan. 2005, doi:10.1111/j.1470-6431.2005.00370.x.

Cholachatpinyo, A., et al. “A Conceptual Model of the Fashion Process – Part 1.” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 1 Mar. 2002, doi:10.1108/13612020210422428.

Eicher, Joanne B and Roach-Higgins, Mary Ellen. (1995). Dress and identity. Fairchild Publications. Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://hdl.handle.net/11299/170351.

Hunt, Scott A., and Miller, Kimberly A. “The Discourse of Dress and Appearance: Identity Talk and a Rhetoric of Review.” Symbolic Interaction, vol. 20, no. 1, 1997, pp. 69–82., doi:10.1525/si.1997.20.1.69.

Klerk, Amy de. “10 Spring/Summer 2020 Fashion Trends to Know Ahead of next Season.” Harper's BAZAAR, Harper's BAZAAR, 4 Oct. 2019, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/shows-trends/g38445/spring-summer-fashion-trends/.

Kim, Eundeok, et al. Fashion Trends: Analysis and Forecasting. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Kressmann, Frank, et al. “Direct and Indirect Effects of Self-Image Congruence on Brand Loyalty.” Journal of Business Research, vol. 59, no. 9, 2006, pp. 955–964., doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2006.06.001.

Martin, Stevie. “The Psychological Reason Why We Wear The Clothes We Wear.” Grazia, Grazia, https://graziadaily.co.uk/fashion/news/psychological-reason-wear-clothes-wear/.

O'Neill, Lauren. “I Interviewed Tan France and Then ‘Queer Eyed’ Myself.” Vice, 12 Mar. 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3mej7/tan-france-interview-i-queer-eyed-myself-uk.

“Why Following Fashion Is Important.” Stylish Lady, 29 June 2013, https://stylishlady.net/why-following-fashion-is-important/.

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theadmiringbog · 5 years

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*wakes up and looks at phone* ah let’s see what fresh horrors await me on the fresh horrors device

–@MISSOKISTIC IN A TWEET ON NOVEMBER 10, 2016

A more recent project that acts in a similar spirit is Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, which happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. On a cliff overlooking the sea, forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests in to an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward.

—

Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online.

They write: If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life? What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?

To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever.

Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (a book parodying goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-priced wellness empire), put it: self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

Thinking about sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.

The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.”

Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”)30. To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.”

Poswolsky writes of their initial discovery: “I think we also found the answer to the universe, which was, quite simply: just spend more time with your friends.”

... he said, with an epiphany he had while accompanying a fellow clergyman on a trip to Louisville:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.

My most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger.

Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.

Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.

To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one.

Standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.

A crowded sidewalk is a good example: everyone is expected to continue moving forward. Tom Green poked at this convention when he performed “the Dead Guy,” on his Canadian public access TV show in the 1990s. Slowing his walk to a halt, he carefully lowered himself to the ground and lay facedown and stick-straight for an uncomfortable period of time. After quite a crowd had amassed, he got up, looked around, and nonchalantly walked away.

So to a question like “Will you or will you not participate as asked?” Diogenes would have answered something else entirely: “I will participate, but not as asked,” or, “I will stay, but I will be your gadfly.” This answer (or non-answer) is something I think of as producing what I’ll call a “third space”—an almost magical exit to another frame of reference. For someone who cannot otherwise live with the terms of her society, the third space can provide an important if unexpected harbor.

Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby, the clerk famous for repeating the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” uses a linguistic strategy to invalidate the requests of his boss. Not only does he not comply; he refuses the terms of the question itself.

Facebook abstention, like telling someone you grew up in a house with no TV, can all too easily appear to be taste or class related.

We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety.

“In short, when the inattention stimulus falls outside the area to which attention is paid, it is much less likely to capture attention and be seen,” the researchers write. That’s intuitive enough, but it gets more complicated. If the briefly flashing stimulus was outside the area of visual attention, but was something distinct like a smiley face or the person’s name, the subject would notice it after all.

As an artist interested in using art to influence and widen attention, I couldn’t help extrapolating the implications from visual attention to attention at large.

In a post about ad blockers on the University of Oxford’s “Practical Ethics” blog, the technology ethicist James Williams (of Time Well Spent) lays out the stakes: We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

In an effort to make the user aware of persuasive design, Nudget used overlays to call out and describe several of the persuasive design elements in the Facebook interface as the user encountered them. But the thesis is also useful simply as a catalog of the many forms of persuasive design—the kinds that behavioral scientists have been studying in advertising since the mid-twentieth century.

Vivrekar lists the strategies identified by researchers Marwell and Schmitt in 1967: “reward, punishment, positive expertise, negative expertise, liking/ingratiation, gifting/pre-giving, debt, aversive stimulation, moral appeal, positive self-feeling, negative self-feeling, positive altercasting, negative altercasting, positive esteem of others, and negative esteem of others.”

Vivrekar herself has study participants identify instances of persuasive design on the LinkedIn site and compiles a staggering list of 171 persuasive design techniques.

“knowing your enemy” when it comes to the attention economy. For example, one could draw parallels between the Nudget system, which teaches users to see the ways in which they are being persuaded, and the Prejudice Lab, which shows participants how bias guides their behavior.

Or that the woman in front of you in line who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered “default setting,”

Last week, after a meeting, I took the F streetcar from Civic Center to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. It’s a notoriously slow, crowded, and halting route, especially in the middle of the day. This pace, added to my window seat, gave me a chance to look at the many faces of the people on Market Street with the same alienation as the slow scroll of Hockney’s Yorkshire Landscapes. Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life—of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine—this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing. As Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.” Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.

When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.

In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this” and “I don’t like this,” with little room for ambiguity or contradiction.

The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.

(“bland enough to offend no one”)

The professional social media star, a person reverse-engineered from a formula of what is most palatable to everyone all the time.

Everybody says that there is no censorship on the internet, or at least only in part. But that is not true. Online censorship is applied through the excess of banal content that distracts people from serious or collective issues.

Our interactions become data collected by a company, and engagement goals are driven by advertising.

Mastodon... They allow more granular control of one’s intended audience; when you post to Mastodon, you can have the content’s visibility restricted to a single person, your followers, or your instance—or it can be public.

... forming any idea requires a combination of privacy and sharing. But this restraint is difficult when it comes to commercial social media, whose persuasive design collapses context within our very thought processes themselves by assuming we should share our thoughts right now—indeed, that we have an obligation to form our thoughts in public!

A counterexample would be the sparse UX of Patchwork, a social networking platform that runs on Scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt is a sort of global mesh network that can go without servers, ISPs, or even Internet connection (if you have a USB stick handy). It can do that because it relies on individual users’ computers as the servers, similar to local mesh networks, and because your “account” on a Scuttlebutt-powered social media platform is simply an encrypted block of data that you keep on your computer.

In #NeverAgain, David Hogg writes that “[a]nger will get you started but it won’t keep you going.”

Before long, the conference would be over, and I would have missed most of it. A lot of things would have happened there that are important and useful. For my part, I wouldn’t have much to show for my “time well spent”—no pithy lines to tweet, no new connections, no new followers. I might only tell one or two other people about my observations and the things I learned. Otherwise, I’d simply store them away, like seeds that might grow some other day if I’m lucky.

Seen from the point of view of forward-pressing, productive time, this behavior would appear delinquent. I’d look like a dropout. But from the point of view of the place, I’d look like someone who was finally paying it attention. And from the point of view of myself, the person actually experiencing my life, and to whom I will ultimately answer when I die—I would know that I spent that day on Earth.

“I would prefer not to.”

#How to Do Nothing #books

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russellq18-blog · 4 years

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How musicians promote themselves on social media.

Musicians make use of social media as a tool to garner attention and increase their fanbase with the goal of getting their music heard. Particularly for rap artists, their online presence heavily relies on social network sites such as Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for their music videos. It is highly unlikely an artist would succeed in today’s music industry without having an account on social media. Two rappers that I will be analysing for this report are J Hus and Swarmz, who have become widely known for their use of social media, with J Hus on Twitter and Swarmz making use of Instagram’s live feature during the Covid-19 lockdown. To do this analysis, I will outline the methods that I will make use of, then I will conduct a literature review on the topic of artists and their self promotion and then I will break down my findings from the analysis with what I can contribute to the subject.

To undertake this research, I will be using qualitative methods such as textual analysis as a way to explore the meanings behind J Hus’ tweets and how he interacts with his supporters and I will also be making use of video analysis in order to break down what Swarmz is doing on his Instagram live. Following from this, I will also have to make use of quantitative methods of analysis as I will break down each artists’ engagement numbers, from how many likes J Hus receives on his tweets, how many followers they each have and also how many viewers Swarmz draws in from his live videos. I have chosen to use discourse analysis because it will enable me to understand why what J Hus tweets gains so much attention by delving deeper into what he is trying to tell his audience and how it has an impact on them (Mogashoa, 2014) and also sentiment analysis because I will be trying to uncover the opinions he expresses (Liu, 2012). Video analysis will enable me to get a read on what is happening in Swarmz’s live videos, put it into context and develop an argument for why it has attracted so much attention (Knoblauch et al., 2006). My quantitative analysis will enable me to present the statistics and highlight their popularity on social media as a way to elaborate on why this is important for musicians to promote themselves on social media.

Current academic writing on musicians and their use of social media looks to provide an explanation to how artists make use of their online presence and the advantages and disadvantages that may come with it. Haynes and Marshall (2018) makes a case for independent artists, saying that in the past, musicians relied on a record label to promote them and get exposure in mainstream media, however now due to the internet, independent artists have the ability to promote themselves and they can go viral without the need for a record label. I agree with Haynes and Marshall, as much of the rap scene in the UK started out as independent artists posting their videos on YouTube and by sharing each other's music on apps like Instagram and Twitter. Although now the biggest names such as Stormzy, J Hus and Dave are all now signed to labels, they still managed to have had large success when they were independent. They also mention how the artists can use Twitter in order to engage with and build a fanbase, as the closer the fans feel to the artist, the deeper the connection they feel with the music. Building on this argument, Harrison (2014) says ‘Thanks to the internet, musicians and singers now have more control over their own fates. They are able to produce their own track, upload it to the internet and promote it accordingly.’ suggesting that the record labels have now lost their power due to the internet and social media. I also agree that it is no longer a priority for musicians to get a record deal in order for them to succeed. However, there are also disadvantages that come with the way musicians can use social media as a means to promote themselves, with Haynes and Marshall also finding that having a large following on social media does not always directly translate to real world success and money. I think that this is an interesting point because there is a lot of discussion about how social media may portray a false image of someone, so this could be suggesting that the money a lot of rappers claim to be making may not be as much as it seems. There is a lack of academic literature on other negatives of how musicians may use social media, such as the possibility of old homophobic, racist or misogynistic tweets that have come to the surface after the musician has found fame. This means that social media has given artists a platform to express their opinions and views which can potentially ruin their image and career in the future, despite how they may have outgrown or no longer hold those views. This wouldn’t have been an issue for artists in the past where their views and opinions were rarely heard. These days people in the public eye have to be a lot more careful about what they say and how they conduct themselves.

For my own findings, I have looked at how two artists in particular have made use of social media as a way to promote themselves, being UK rappers J Hus and Swarmz. J Hus has become renowned for his use of Twitter and his daily tweets, amassing over 450,000 followers and some of his tweets receiving tens of thousands of likes, which as far as Twitter goes is considerably high. In my opinion, J Hus has gained such popularity on Twitter due to the way in which he tweets, he is very casual, is considered to be ‘woke’ and writes as though he is sharing his train of thought. From already being a successful music artist, him tweeting in this manner means that his fans feel a lot more connected with him as a person, not just some person they hear on the radio or someone who has popular music on YouTube. A lot of his tweets are also messages of empowerment for his supporters, as he went through a phase where he would tweet ‘ARE YOU STRONGER THAN YESTERDAY???’ daily, which became well known for. This is good for his engagement and promotion of himself as a musician as he is asking his fans a question to which he will get responses. He also has previously made some controversial tweets in the past regarding homosexuality as he tweeted ‘STOP FORCING LGBT ON US’ as he then went on to essentially say he’s more interested in ‘the black struggle’. This received a lot of backlash from the LGBT community, with a lot of people arguing that he cannot compare racial and sexuality issues and also brought up the fact there are also a lot of people who are black and part of the LGBT community. Overall I think J Hus has made use of Twitter successfully to gain a strong following and fan base allowing them to understand his personality more, which develops the audience's ability to further understand his music as it contains a lot of empowering messages in songs such as ‘Fight For Your Right’ on his latest album ‘Big Conspiracy’, the name itself also catering to his woke persona.

As for Swarmz, he has gained considerable popularity as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown. As people are no longer allowed outside unless for essential reasons, more people than ever are active on social media. Swarmz made use of this situation as a way to promote himself by starting to make use of Instagram’s live feature where also one other user at a time can feature in the live video. His live streams have become known for him getting various women on and having them twerk. He regularly receives tens of thousands of viewers and he once reached 100,000 viewers in a live session. Due to this he has also seen his followers increase by over 800,000 in the last month (SocialBlade, 2020). I think that the reason for the success of his live’s lies within its sexual nature, but because of this he has not gone without criticism. As it was celebrated that Swarmz had reached one million Instagram followers, a lot of people took to Twitter to express that he achieved this through exploiting women on his live videos, but he was also defended saying the women were not forced to go onto his live videos and twerk. Swarmz has made use of social media and the Covid-19 lockdown to make his Instagram following 5 times bigger than it was previously and only time will tell how this impacts his music engagement numbers.

In conclusion, musicians can promote themselves through social media through a number of different ways and can benefit greatly in doing so. Social media has made the case that record labels are no longer necessary to help with promotion as artists can now do it themselves and find a lot of success. It also enables the artists with fan engagement which is something that in the past was a rarity amongst famous musicians. This is also beneficial for the artist as getting to know their personality can also help with the audience’s understanding of the music. My two examples that I have chosen have demonstrated clearly how being viral social media personalities can also translate to success in their music.

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teeky185 · 6 years

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The Duchess of Sussex opened up about the pressures of social media during a conversation with mental health advocates in New Zealand. During a visit to a beachside cafe in Wellington, Meghan talked to people supporting others in the area of mental health about the impact that unrealistic images on the likes of Instagram and Twitter can have on youth. “Young people find it so difficult,” she said during a conversation with staff and volunteers from Live For Tomorrow, an online youth initiative focused on reaching millennials with messages of hope and positive change. “You see photos on social media and you don’t know whether she’s born with it or maybe it’s a filter. Your judgement of your sense of self worth becomes really skewed when it’s all based on likes.” The Duke added: “Issues stemming from social media and gaming are a major problem for young people in the UK — and globally. "Fingers are often pointed at the parents but that’s not always fair as they too need to be educated about these things.” The Duchess of Sussex talks people from a number of mental health projects Credit: Ian Vogler Harry and Meghan — who are both strong advocates for mental health awareness — were at Wellington’s Maranui Cafe on Monday, October 29, to learn about initiatives and programmes supporting mental wellbeing in New Zealand, with a focus on youth. They arrived just after 10am and were escorted in by Lucia Kennedy, founder of Luminary Legacies, which honours people who have impacted positively on individuals, families and communities. “It smells so great in here,” Harry said after walking past the cafe’s colourful cake counter. Before sitting at their first table, the couple were offered drinks by the cafe’s co-owner Bronwyn Kelly, with the Duke asking for water, the Duchess having a “milk tea”. At the first table the couple met Jazz Thornton and Gen Mora from Voices of Hope. “We’ve both had battles with mental health of our own and so we wanted to create a platform where people can share stories of hope,” Thornton said of their website, which contains videos and personal blogs which promotes mental wellbeing, empowerment and recovery. Harry and Meghan heard the two women from Voices of Hope share how their 2017 viral video “Dear Suicidal Me” - which features young people who have overcome mental health problems reading their own suicide notes - saved the life of a 15-year-old young girl in Canada. “Her mother contacted us and said that her daughter was planning to take her life but then saw the video and went to speak to her instead,” explained Thornton. “It saved her life.” “It’s amazing what you have done,” Harry remarked. “I think anyone who has overcome mental health problems often go out of their own way to help others.” The Duke spoke about his own struggles with mental health during the conversations, admitting that it took him years to confront his own inner turmoil. “It took me about three or four years to start the journey and then after that you still have to find the right people to speak to,” he started. On the same table the couple also spoke with volunteers and staff from Lifeline Aotearoa, a 24-hour crisis service offering free community helplines and text message support to people of all ages in New Zealand. The organisation has been established for 53 years and has over 200 volunteers and 50 staff. “Kidsline buddy” volunteer Leroy, told the couple about how the service doesn’t just offer support but also gives callers tools to cope with mental health struggles in their daily lives. The Duchess of Sussex pours herself a tea Credit: Ian Vogler Harry was interested to learn that around 50% of the callers that phone in to the three helplines are men. “They’re able to call from a private number if they want and it’s a place they can open up and speak freely, without judgement,” said Lifeline’s Clinical Manager, Renee Matthews. “What’s great about this is that it’s done without judgement, it’s a safe place for people that just need to talk,” Meghan commented. Added Harry, “It’s a real topic that doesn’t just need to be openly discussed amongst the younger generation but also parents.” At the third table Harry and Meghan met 21-year-old Ezekiel Raui, founder of Te Kotahi (which means to stand as one), a peer-support programme run by young volunteers that focuses on creating a positive society and removing judgmental attitudes that come prior to crisis. The programme has already been rolled out in four New Zealand schools and will reach even more in the months ahead. Raui received a Queen’s Young Leader award in London earlier this year for his service, which he started in 2012 after a series of suicides, including that of a nine-year-old boy, rocked his Auckland high school and the Northland region of the country. “It’s about educating children at school from an early age so they don’t grow up feeling isolated or anxious about mental health problems or being judged... and hopefully they will pay that forward in the future,” said Raui. “It’s a programme built by young people and it’s great to see how far it has come. “Our goal is long term, to push for an intergenerational change that will create better methods of understanding and communication between young people and their peers, young and adult, and also help create a better representation of [young people] in society.” “I take my hat off to you,” Harry said. “Having a 10 or 20-year strategy is much better than three or four. You want to take it to the point where you’re out of a job, that the work you have done is so successful that the issue you have been tackling is no longer an issue.” “It’s important to focus on longterm planning and then creating that ripple effect,” added Meghan. At the age of 18 Ezekiel Raui took part in the first White House United National Indian Tribal Youth (UNITY) conference and met President Obama. Harry was so impressed by the young man’s dedication to philanthropy that he asked for his name badge so he could get in touch again at a later date. “We need more people like you,” Harry said. The last initiative they spoke to was youth mental health project Live for Tomorrow, which is part of New Zealand youth organisation Zeal. Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex with Meghan Markle the Duchess of Sussex meet young people from a number of mental health projects operating in New Zealand, at the Maranui Cafe in Wellington Credit: Reuters Manager Andrew Sutherland told the couple how their project tells real-life stories from young people, both online and in school, through documentaries, music videos and other resources. “There’s a fear of embarrassment of having these problems in the first place,” Harry said, “The fact you’re going to schools and offering it online, which is where so many people spend most of their time, is really important.” After the group chats concluded, Harry and Meghan took photographs with each table and seemed motivated by their chats, both smiling and laughing. “This has been so inspiring,” said Meghan, who started a round of applause. “You’re all doing really excellent work.” The volunteers from Lifeline handed over gifts to the couple — two goody bags containing a baby onesies and t-shirts from their 72 Club campaign. “This is so sweet of you,” Meghan said after thanking the group. Maranui Cafe owners Kate Richardson and Bronwyn Kelly also handed gifts for the couple — t-shirts and a book about the history of the Maranui Surf Life Saving Club, which was founded in 1912, and trains Wellington lifeguards. “They were both so warm and friendly,” Richardson later remarked. “What they’re doing is so important.” After leaving the venue, Meghan had an aide return to the venue and request that the plates of small pastries that had been laid out on each table were shared with the children from Houghton Valley School they earlier met outside the venue. Sign up for Your Royal Appointment – for everything you need to know about the Royal Family, direct to your inbox each week.

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