⏰✨The Nexialist #0060
Stolen Focus | Channel Drift | It’s 2AM Again | Tanu Muiño | Juro Que | Kiss Your Brain | Is Everything Trauma Now? | Putin’s war on Ukraine, explained
Welcome to another curated compilation of (not so) random links, The Nexialist
If you follow The Nexialist, you know how in love I am with new words, or learning that a word already exists to define something. If there’s a word for something, it’s because it happens enough times that someone (or some people) decided to give it a name.
Years ago there was a website that I spent a lot of time on. It was a kind of crowdsourced reverse dictionary or a reverse urban dictionary. It worked the following way: someone would type, most of the times something funny such as: the hate you feel towards the furniture you hit your pinky toe against. People would then either suggest an existing word or come up with new words (phallanger… phallange+anger, for instance) which would then get upvoted or downvoted. I loved it because we were collectively coming up with new words (usually portmanteaus or puns) to describe things that we identified with, that was not unique to us and therefore relatable to ourselves and others.
Sadly, I can’t find that website anymore (if anyone knows, please, send it my way, I’ll be forever grateful). I still keep trying to find new words to validate what I’m feeling, seeing or going through. Sometimes stupid things, sometimes serious things. This week, there were a few situations that I needed words for. Below are two that I could remember:
-When we rush through our feed avoiding looking at certain content (violence, war, or news we don’t want to face)
-How suddenly some things that were deemed important (or even just commonplace) seem trivial, irrelevant and out of place when there’s a historic event happening (i.e. fashion week posts or TikTok dances while there’s a war happening so close.)
Just some thoughts that were in my mind and that I needed to share with you before the 60th Nexialist. Now, keep reading:
👁Stolen Focus
Sean Illing interviews Johann Hari, author of the book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again and oh my… this is worth a listen. Johann shows how this attention distraction economy profits from how easily we get distracted. He interviewed more than 200 attention experts, and makes great analogies for us to understand, comparing the shift to cultural changes in our diets and things like lead pipes/paint in the past. I’ll leave a transcript below, but I invite you to listen to the whole thing.
Simone de Beauvoir the great French philosopher. She once said that when she became an atheist, it was like the world had gone silent. And when I was deprived of these thin insistence signals from social media, it felt like the world had gone silent. I had spent whatever it was at that point 15 years, being trained in a Skinnerian way to crave the rewards that these apps provide— the hearts, the likes, the retweets. And when they were gone, I initially felt relief. And then I felt terrible crash. I was like, where's my signal. Cause no normal social interaction floods you with hearts, right? That would be a very odd social interaction indeed. And obviously I had to, then I sort of then realized I've created a vacuum that I need to fill with meaning.
Listen: Why we can't pay attention anymore - Vox Conversations
📺Channel Drift
From the great Instagram profile @depthsofwikipedia, this concept has been in my mind ever since:
Channel drift or network decay is the gradual shift of a television network away from its original programming, to either target a newer and more profitable audience, or to broaden its viewership by including less niche programming. Often, this results in a shift from informative or artistic quality programming aimed at cultured and educated viewers toward sensational, ratings-based or reality-formatted programming designed solely for the entertainment of a mass audience. Channel drift frequently features the incorporation of infotainment, reality television and heavy advertising into the channel's lineup.
The Wikipedia entry also says the same phenomenon can happen in radio. It got me thinking that today, not only channels are subject to this, but also each one of us, creators and influencers. What happens when we become channels (as many of us are today with our social media) and there are a plethora of algorithms intermediating what we publish online? And what are the kinds of content we are leveling down to in order to get a larger audience? Just some food for thought.
⏰It’s 2AM Again
A couple of weeks ago I watched FOALS’ new video and got super hooked to it. The song reminds me of my early twenties, plus the video is fun to watch, the colors, the choreos, the makeup and Yannis, the cute Greek vocalist… Reading the description of the video, something caught my attention: directed by the legend Tanu Muiño & filmed in Kyiv, Ukraine last month. How things change… And truly this woman is a legend.
Tanu Muiño is Ukrainian and had quite a few nominations and prizes last year. She has directed videos that define the visual pop culture at the moment: Montero (Lil Nas X), Juro Que (Rosalia), One Right Now (Post Malone and The Weeknd), Wild Side (Normani) and Up (Cardi B) are a few.
It made me think of how many artists and how much art is lost in moments of war and conflict.
💃Juro Que
Just slipping this in here, one of the masterpieces because I do miss this sound from ROSALÍA.
💋Kiss Your Brain
Christina Costa shared her inspiring story about beating cancer. At the time, she was a biopsychology and neuroscience major, and a psychology Ph.D. student within the area of positive psychology, which she thinks the “universe must have found funny.” She brings a ritual from her time as a primary school teacher: kissing your brain. It might seem silly, but this Nexialist writing to you finds it cute, so I’m here to share it with you. She makes an excellent point about the language around cancer and the tools she used to change that. I put parts of the transcription below, but I recommend playing it, it’s just 10mins.
“…And then about a week after that, I wrote this: "Fighter.” I tried it on to see how it felt because I kept hearing those words next to my name, like a job, like an identity, like a role. Fighter. I look at myself in the mirror. It felt OK at first, but soon it became exhausting, too heavy to lift, too much to carry, too burdensome to bear. I took it off and left it on the floor. War was not for me. A body is not a battlefield. I realized that I had been introduced to the fight narrative. When people heard my diagnosis, I became a fighter. "You're a fighter," "Keep fighting,""Beat this tumor,"were the top comments… I hated the idea that I was going to be at war with my brain because I had spent months and years kissing it instead. I hated the suggestion of naming my tumor something awful because the reality is that it was going to be my neighbor for the rest of my life, and I hated the guided imagery training that asked me to picture chemo as an army coming to battle the cancer cells
because I didn't want to spend over a year of my life at war with my own body.I can see how these elements of the fight narrative can be empowering for people, but for me, I knew it wasn't going to work. So I started to reference well-being practices that I had learned from my own studies.
I read and taught about gratitude practices, specifically as a well-being strategy, and even though I knew the positive effects, I had never seriously practiced them myself. I started to incorporate some of these exercises into my life. I tried to stop focusing on what my body had done "wrong" and focus on the gratitude I had for my body instead. And really, I realized this is something I had been doing when I was kissing my brain those days leading up to and after surgery. Gratitude became the tool that helped me restructure my vision of illness and disability when the world was telling me I should fight it instead. Instead of thinking about if I would be able to have kids one day, I thought of how amazing it was that my brain, despite its trauma, was able to deliver the perfect amount of hormones to my body to produce enough eggs to save for a later date…
😶Is Everything Trauma Now?
This article from Vox written by Lexi Pandell was just waiting to be shared here. It talks about How trauma became word of the decade — and the Covid-19 pandemic, from its greek origins until being a word thrown around when talking about a bad case of diarrhea (or missing the bus for that matter).
“Trauma” in its current usage has created a tidy framework within which to understand our lives and roles. The word evokes a narrative in which one is stripped of agency: An event happens to us, an aggressor attacks us, we are born into generations of suffering. In this telling, we are powerless. Our minds protect us, or our memories get stuck, or our behavior changes — and it’s beyond our control. “The trauma narrative became a very easy one to adopt, even for the people who didn’t have what we would call a lot of trauma,” Whitlock says. “It has currency, so people broker in it.”
Listen: Is Everything Trauma Now? - Today, Explained
Read: How trauma became word of the decade — and the Covid-19 pandemic - Vox
🇺🇦Putin’s war on Ukraine, explained
This just came out as I was finishing this week’s Nexialist. So I have to share it with you. Not much to say, other than how horrible it is to see a man threatening other countries who attempt to interfere.
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