🧠✨The Nexialist #0009
Dance Like an Idiot | Memes, Emojis and the Rosetta Stone | Humor as a Tool | Telenovelas are Hell | Intense Salsa | Remote Culture Canvas, and more...
Welcome to The Nexialist, the newsletter that tickles your brain.
Another Thursday, another Nexialist in your inbox. I must confess that usually, I have no clue what I’m going to write about until the day before sending it (though I did plan the Valentine’s Day edition). I collect my references on Trello and organize them, trying to find something in common between those ideas. But most of them come as I’m writing and looking for further information about the content I found. I must say that since I started this project, I’m enjoying this serendipity of the writing process, not only in my content consumption. It’s again some kind of Ontological Design at play. Thank you for signing up, reading, sharing, messaging me to ask questions or make comments. It means a lot to me.
🤯Rosetta Stone for the Digital Age
“Over the next decade language fluency will blur into media literacy.”
Klein brings in his newsletter, Zine, great insights about cultural trends. I highly recommend reading this piece: Why We Need The New Rosetta Stone for Gen Z. As a language lover, it’s nice to see words describing so clearly what we a living through right now, with language evolving rapidly with memes and emojis. Below, the on-point explanation of why memes have become a means of self-expression:
On social media, Young Adults are more likely to share a meme than a selfie or photo of their food. Why?
The meme contains more emotional information than text
The meme is embedded with cultural data, serving as a secondary message
What’s communicated is safely outsourced to a character (ie. “I’m not saying it, they are”)
There is power in numbers (ie. “I’m not saying it, we are”)
Memes speak rich, collective truths. And in a time-crunched world, visual representations are quicker to summon and consume. They won’t be disappearing.
🦦Nexialist Tip: Learn Emoji
Emojis have become part of our daily lives and a pretty developed language system. When new emojis come out, it usually reflects the needs of our time. We have had more diversity added with different skin tones and family formats, for instance. Now, Apple is releasing new ones, and the syringe is being made less graphic due to the vaccine being an important conversation. It’s all constantly changing to adapt to the current moment. That’s pretty cool, right?
I found this piece while writing this newsletter, and of course, there is a generational difference in the way we use and interpret them:
Research can help explain these spats over emojis. Because their meaning is interpreted by users, not dictated from above, emojis have a rich history of creative use and coded messaging. Apple’s 217 new emojis will be subjected to the same process of creative interpretation: accepted, rejected, or repurposed by different generations based on pop culture currents and digital trends.
From: Hey millennials, stop ruining emoji for Gen Z - The Next Web
I might be a millennial, but as you can see, I love my emojis (I felt like my uncle writing this). I use them for work too, a lot. First, because they add a layer of fun and color, but also they can function as a great organizational tool. Emojis like ⬜️ ✅ help me share task status with my team, or 🆘 for tasks that need attention or 🤔 for something I have questions about. It helps me tag things for myself and for others. For many of us that work online, it’s also a way to create a more fun and relatable work culture.
[Oh wow, while writing this, apparently the TikTok community has given the favorite Nexialist emoji, 🧠 , a new meaning, and I am equally mortified and amused. I’ll keep using it, Gen Z can laugh at me.]
💻Remote Cultural Canvas
With emojis becoming part of my remote work culture, I want to share this necessary canvas with you. Fearless Culture published this a year ago and I have not specifically applied it as a canvas, but it definitely brought me insights, especially the Rituals part. I started to realize that having rituals like meetings to start the day, short talks to check on how everyone is doing and laid-back meetings Friday at the end of the day helps me having a sense of structure. You can read how to apply it here.
🥸Is Humor the Tool We All Need?
I love my comedy-news shows. John Oliver, for instance, makes watching the news so much more fun and political contexts easier to understand. Now a New Study Finds that Delivering the News with Humor Makes Young Adults More Likely to Remember and Share. I would even argue that humor can be used for many other things, as you’ll see in the next links.
“Our findings show that humor stimulates activity in brain regions associated with social engagement, improves memory for political facts, and increases the tendency to share political information with others,” says lead author Jason Coronel, Assistant Professor of Communication at OSU. “This is significant because entertainment-based media has become an important source of political news, especially for young adults. Our results suggest that humor can increase knowledge about politics.”
🎭Telenovelas Are Hell
If you grew up in Latin America, chances are very high that you or someone in your home watched telenovelas. If you didn’t, you probably have in your imagination the exaggerated drama it is. Well, this series from Funny or Die is a present to everyone. It’s what I pay my internet for. Each video tells a story from an entire telenovela, narrated as a comedy show. Bear in mind that they were usually dramatic and these stories are serious and kept millions of people in front of the TV. Have fun and get ready to laugh!
☠️This Man Poisoned Me!
Nathy Peluso’s intensity is contagious and I’m obsessed with her. From Argentina and based in Spain, she brings real drama to her songs and performances. This one is a joy to watch as she tells the story of how a man “poisoned” her (or seduced her), with a tad of humor. There is so much talent and strength in her voice and moves. The best part for me: she does everything without taking herself so seriously.
🕺Dance Like an Idiot
This video from The School of Life brings great reflection on why we dance, and why we should lose the fear of being perceived as idiots when we do so. It’s worth watching. I couldn’t help but connecting this to emojis: dance is also a kind of language and it seems humor is an inherent part of any language.
The videos below I selected because the dancing is so weird and fun that it brings me joy. If you have any videos that you like, please comment or send me an e-mail. I’m collecting them.
💃Dance Like This
These colorized videos feel like I’m time traveling. I love the moves and outfits on this one, along with the fact that most girls are dancing with girls.
Of course, I couldn’t leave Raffaella Carrà out of this. It’s like a cup of coffee to wake you up. The hairography and the looks are incredible. I do think I would break my neck if I did that.
There is one word that comes to my head when I watch this video from 1984: Exuberant. If you have this hair or if you can dance like that I want to be your friend. Makes me smile from beginning to end.
This one is so iconic to me (THERE’S A GOAT ON THE DANCEFLOOR!) I confess I have seen it so many times that I might have or might have not done a few of those moves at parties. The outfits are so good. Also, you can leave the music out and put any song you want and it looks great. Try it!
In this video, the dance moves are crazy, and the CGI brings it to another level.
This is a quintessential Lipsync Assass moment on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Denali has so much repertoire and control of her body and the stage, she keeps on surprising us (and RuPaul) even when the song seems to be finishing. If you don’t smile while watching this, I don’t know what to say to you… I actually do, and I think it’s the message of this edition: Don’t take yourself too seriously.
❤️If anything made your brain tingle, click like and don't hesitate to share it with the world. It helps The Nexialist to reach more curious minds. See you next week!🦦
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