Link List #76: Dopamine’s effect on our online behavior, how society fails to recognize female art and the revival of Tamagotchis to increase our productivity - Friends of Friends / Freunde von Freunden (FvF)

Link List #76: Dopamine’s effect on our online behavior, how society fails to recognize female art and the revival of Tamagotchis to increase our productivity

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Get excited, our Link Lists are back! To kick-start, we’ve got a fresh set of picks: learn how the National Geographic has failed people of color for over a century, disconnect to read about human encounters with technology and hear more news relating to Facebook than the revelation of Cambridge Analytica.

Links

    • 1 In this article from The Guardian, writer Lili Loofbourow reminds us of a famous meditation by Susan Sontag: While men have the advantage of being allowed two standards of beauty—the boyish as well as the male, masculine aesthetic—women’s beauty only reaches a peak when they are youngish and wrinkle-free. In a broader context, the author refers to society’s inability to recognize female art. Epic, universal, and profoundly meaningful are just some of the attributes associated with art featuring male stories; domestic, emotional, and trivial are adjectives left to describe female creations. The Male Glance asks how we ended up misreading so many stories.
    • 2 When a magazine as renowned as the National Geographic reminisces of its past, the connotation isn’t necessarily positive. While its editors have accumulated influential stories since 1888, the magazine’s current editor, who happens to be the first woman and first Jewish person to lead the productions, describes her feeling towards the magazine’s stereotyped coverage of people of color. For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It introduces the April issue, which is solely devoted to the topic of race.
    • 3 Dopamine, discovered in 1957, is one of about 20 major neurotransmitters, which ensures us to keep dehydrated or to procreate so that our genes survive us. In today’s world, the molecule’s effect even translates to our lives on screen: According to one of Facebook’s architects, whenever someone likes or comments on a post or photograph, the social media channel gives “you a little dopamine hit”. Has dopamine got us hooked on tech? published by The Guardian presents studies that explain why we may never want to live without technology again.
    • 4 When disconnect becomes the name of the game, offline-reading has reached another dimension. The first issue of the recently launched magazine The Disconnect thematizes human encounters with technology that can be intentional, inconsequential, constructive or devastating. Along with commentary and fiction, the magazine also presents a careful selection of poems—so it’s worth disconnecting for the time being.
    • 5 Open-tabs overload? Feeling unproductive yet again? Before you force yourself to prioritize, let us introduce you to Tabagotchi. Much like its physical ’90s counterpart, the little friend is easy to please: fewer tabs, happy Tabagotchi.

Hopefully you enjoyed the reads from this week’s Link List, but if you’ve still got an internet itch to scratch, you can find more here.

Also be sure to check out the FvF Mixtapes to check out some tunes mixed by our friends and favorite artists, and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with FvF stories.

Text:Ann-Christin Schubert

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