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scriptmedic · 7 years

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BS Tropes that Need to die TODAY, Part 3: “Truth Serum”

Hey there folks! Earlier this month, your kindly counterparts over on Patreon got access to vote on several nascent post ideas. And this post was the winner! Thanks so much to those who voted . I’ll be sure to run another poll in the near future, so if you don’t want to miss out, consider becoming a Patron!

And the Patron’s Choice this month was a post about truth serum. And hoo boy howdy, ever there was a trope that’s off (and pretty awful), this one... well, this one is on the list.

What’s The Trope?

Billy Badbones has been captured. Whether it’s by the CIA, by Superman, or someone else, they want to know the absolute truth.

And Billy isn’t giving it up lightly!

First comes the tired threats. Then the weary, aged intimidations. Maybe a little bit of torture (and don’t get me started on why that pile of crap doesn’t work!).

And then they whip out the needle with Good Ol’ Sodium Pentothal(TM), and Billy Badbones starts singin’ like a little birdie!

Why Is It Wrong?

“Truth serum”, as depicted by writers and Hollywood, is actually real. The meds exist, and they’ve been used for interrogation. It’s just that the technique doesn’t freaking work. If you want the TL;DR version of it, straight from your friends and mine at the CIA, here it is:

The salient points that emerge from this discussion are the following. No such magic brew as the popular notion of truth serum exists. The barbiturates, by disrupting defensive patterns, may sometimes be helpful in interrogation, but even under the best conditions they will elicit an output contaminated by deception, fantasy, garbled speech, etc. A major vulnerability they produce in the subject is a tendency to believe he has revealed more than he has. It is possible, however, for both normal individuals and psychopaths to resist drug interrogation; it seems likely that any individual who can withstand ordinary intensive interrogation can hold out in narcosis.

(Emphasis mine. Also, my good friend at @scriptshrink would like to remind everyone that the term psychopath is dated. The correct modern diagnosis is Antisocial Personality Disorder. Forgive the language; this article was written in 1961).

The other problem with narcoanalysis is that while under the effects of barbiturates, people become very suggestible. It means that they’re likely to tell interrogators what they think interrogators want to hear, not what’s actually true. So even if someone confesses, or spills the location of the secret Rebel base, the veracity of the information is always in doubt.

But writers didn’t get this from nowhere. This didn’t just spring, fully-formed, from some typewriter clacking away in the 1920s. This is based on some actual research. And some of that research is horrifying.

The History of “Truth Serum”

Scopolamine was the original “truth serum”, and was accidentally “discovered” to have this effect in the 1920s by Dr. House.

(No, not that Dr. House, though we’ll definitely be talking about him at some point here on ScriptMedic.)

House was delivering babies, and discovered that a combination of morphine and scopolamine was able to help keep mothers quiet during the childbirth process.

This combination also delivered many a dead baby, but hey! It was quiet.

But during the process, House found that the women who were sedated were actually able to speak, usually very cogently and “unreservedly”, about any and all topics.

House had an interest in the criminal justice system. He then used scopolamine to “prove” the innocence of two men wrongfully convicted of crimes. By interviewing them while under the effects of scopolamine, House believed that they were incapable of holding back information.

“Truth serum” then took off, both in the popular consciousness and in American policing. There was a time in this country—less than 100 years ago—that police would inject suspects with scopolamine and question them while they were under its effects.

Because scopolamine has amnestic properties, interrogators were able to convince people they had confessed while under the effects of scopolamine, even if they hadn’t. Remember, being unable to remember an interrogation means you don’t know what you told The Man.

Other agents have also been used for this effect, the most famous of which is sodium thiopental (Sodium Pentathol is the brand name), and sodium amytal. A 1986 paper suggests that ketamine—yes, my very favorite pharmocological agent—is equally as effective in narcoanalysis as the barbiturates.

Fortunately, here in the US, the courts system has rejected “narcoanalysis” as a means of interrogation. That’s been the case not only domestically, but around the globe as well.... with exceptions.

Is The Trope Still Useable?

Only if you want to turn it on its head, or have it fail. Because the thing is: places in the world are still doing this. India, for example, uses sodium thiopental even to this day in interrogation (or at least as late as 2012). Colorado wanted to use it as recently as 2013. And it’s been long held that the American Central Intelligence Agency has used some variation of “truth serum” in interrogations.

Which, considering how much of this article is sourced from a CIA document, means they’ve at least looked into the stuff.

But before we continue, let’s clear something up.

Injecting someone with a medication against their will, especially when they’re not actually sick, is a goddamn human rights violation. It will make your characters liable for prosecution and, if they’re part of a military organization, possibly eligible to stand trial for war crimes.

Typically in fiction, the methods used are wrong. As is the ultimate outcome. As is the fact that it’s overlooked as being a human rights violation. So if you’re going to use this trope, I’d rather you used it accurately.

Thiopental, when injected, typically takes the subject into deeper levels of sedation than is useful to the interrogator. It’s as that injection wears off that they enter the “twilight sedation” that’s supposedly useful to interrogators.

As for how it works, well, Courtesy of the CIA, who have an actually truly excellent article on this topic that I highly suggest you should read:

The descent into narcosis and beyond with progressively larger doses can be divided as follows

I. Sedative Stage

II. Unconsciousness, with exaggerated reflexes (hyperactive stage).

III. Unconsciousness, without reflex even to painful stimuli.

IV. Death.

Whether all these stages can be distinguished in any given subject depends largely on the dose and the rapidity with which the drug is induced. In anesthesia, stages I and II may last only two or three seconds.

The first or sedative stage can be further divided:

· Plane 1. No evident effect, or slight sedative effect.

· Plane 2. Cloudiness, calmness, amnesia. (Upon recovery, the subject will not remember what happened at this or "lower" planes or stages.)

· Plane 3. Slurred speech, old thought patterns disrupted, inability to integrate or learn new patterns. Poor coordination. Subject becomes unaware of painful stimuli.

Also, the “phase 3” area, what they helpfully refer to as the “Psychiatric ‘work’ stage”, lasts only 5-10 minutes—hardly long enough for a detailed, confessiony interview.

And, for the record? Nobody injects anything into the neck. Okay? Okay. #Aunty’sPetPeeves

Can Subjects Keep The Truth Hidden During a Pentothal Interrogation?

The CIA sure as hell seems to think so. Observe:

At least one experiment has shown that subjects are capable of maintaining a lie while under the influence of a barbiturate. Redlich and his associates at Yale25 administered sodium amytal to nine volunteers, students and professionals, who had previously, for purposes of the experiment, revealed shameful and guilt-producing episodes of their past and then invented false self-protective stories to cover them. In nearly every case the cover story retained some elements of the guilt inherent in the true story.

Under the influence of the drug, the subjects were cross-examined on their cover stories by a second investigator. The results, though not definitive, showed that normal individuals who had good defenses and no overt pathological traits could stick to their invented stories and refuse confession. Neurotic individuals with strong unconscious self-punitive tendencies, on the other hand, both confessed more easily and were inclined to substitute fantasy for the truth, confessing to offenses never actually committed.

What Happens As They Wake Up?

From the CIA again:

“As the subject revived, he would become aware that he was being questioned about his secrets and, depending upon his personality, his fear of discovery, or the degree of his disillusionment with the doctor, grow negativistic, hostile, or physically aggressive. Occasionally patients had to be forcibly restrained during this period to prevent injury to themselves or others as the doctor continued to interrogate. Some patients, moved by fierce and diffuse anger, the assumption that they had already been tricked into confessing, and a still limited sense of discretion, defiantly acknowledged their guilt and challenged the observer to "do something about it." As the excitement passed, some fell back on their original stories and others verified the confessed material. During the follow-up interview nine of the 17 admitted the validity of their confessions; eight repudiated their confessions and reaffirmed their earlier accounts.”

(If that isn’t a human rights violation, I don’t know what is.)

So yeah. As someone withdraws from sedation under a barbiturate, they can get angry, violent, agitated, etc.

So that about clears it up for truth serum!

Sorry, This Post Was Hella Long. What Did You Say?

Truth serum is a social name for sodium thiopental, sodium amytal, or scopolamine, though other agents including ketamine can be used. While people can be put in twilight sedation with these medications and interrogated, they can reasonably withhold information. Also, they tend to tell interrogators what they think the interrogator wants to hear rather than the truth, and/or a made-up bit of fantasy.

It may be possible to sedate Billy Badbones and, once he wakes up, convince him that he told them everything they wanted to know under sedation, but attempts to do so may or may not succeed.

So yes, “truth serum” exists. It’s just that it doesn’t do what’s on the label.

Actually, it does do what it says on the label, because the label is for a drug that was intended for sedation. Barbiturates are perfectly effective as sedatives.

But a magical drug that makes you tell only the truth is just that.... fantasy.

Sources:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol5no2/html/v05i2a09p_0001.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7773261.stm

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/05/india-truth-serum

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/13/james_holmes_the_ethics_efficacy_of_truth_serum/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3172517/

Thanks for reading.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

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wbayne · 6 years

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Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

Work often sucks. Broadly speaking, people have agreed upon that idea since the first time someone did some crap he or she didnâ€™t want to do because they needed the dough. Ah, but bosses and corporations are a bunch of sneaky (and increasingly sophisticated) Petes, and in his fascinating, somewhat depressing new book The Happiness Industry, English sociologist and economist William Davies uncovers and deconstructs the ways in which our workplace masters have turned to science and measurement to influence theirÂ employees'Â happiness â€” which takes a regular beating from institutional factors (poor work-life balance; intense competition) that these same bigwigs aren't nearly as interested in examining or changing.Â

Deeply researched and pithily argued, Davies's work is a welcome corrective to the glut of semi-scientific happiness books that have become so popular in business and management circles, and which rarely, if ever, acknowledge the larger ideological goals of workplace well-being. Science of Us spoke with the author about the pitfalls of the quantified life, why it's important to be misunderstood, and Google's insidious Jolly Good Fellow.

You lay out in the book all these different ways that corporations have become increasingly attentive to employee happiness and well-being: everything from giving out gym memberships to engaging in biophysical monitoring. You also say that, in the long historical view, caring whether or not your employee is happy is a relatively recent phenomenon. Isnâ€™t a shift toward happiness a good thing? It seems like you see some nefarious dynamics behind it. Yeah, I understand that to be critical of any suggested move towards happiness is to put oneself in an absurd situation, but the problem is that the drive toward happiness is the result of a set of power relations that are both potentially manipulative and slightly clandestine. What the book is trying to do is bring some of this to the surface, because it's better that people are aware of the strategies that are shaping their environment.

Like what? The rise of wearable technology is something to be worried about. There's potential for managers to track the movements and behavior and stress levels of their employees. That in itself is not malignant, but itâ€™s often presented as being purely for everyoneâ€™s benefit, and thatâ€™s just not the case.

Whatâ€™s an example of how itâ€™s not beneficial? If you talk to people at companies like Jawbone and Fitbit, one of the things they say is â€œeverybody wants to live a better life.â€ Of course the way that they say you should achieve that is to quantify your existence. Where things get tricky is when existence becomes inextricable from work. Thereâ€™s the idea that how we feel about our work and how we feel about the rest of our lives is intertwined. So workplace well-being strategies often include emotional counseling, nutritional advice, all this stuff which suggests no separation between what we do at work and how we are as human beings in some broader sense. The irony is that work often creates the conditions that lead to the unhappiness.

Because work has become all-encompassing? Yes, among other things. Long-hour cultures, a dominant highly competitive ethos, people striving to outdo each other or outdo themselvesâ€”thatâ€™s what creates a lot of the stress that then needs to be alleviated through things like meditation and mindfulness. All the workplace happiness gurus ever say is, "we need to teach more happiness habits to people." Theyâ€™re not saying, â€œWe need to reform workplaces.â€Â

Itâ€™s like if someone was punching you in the face and their idea for how you might feel better about that situation is for you to learn to take a punch better, rather than they stop punching you in the face. Does my convoluted metaphor capture what you mean?

Yeah, I think thatâ€™s right. You know, a lot of the early efforts to affect and measure happiness come out of what's called the Social Indicators Movement, which is associated with things like humanist psychology and began in the 1960s. There was this idea that the human being should flourish and grow and enjoy the simple things in life. But when you extend that idea, it potentially puts quite a critical bite on the excesses of market competition and materialism.

Has there been any backlash to that notion? I think what's happening now, which is a countervailing force to a more humanist approach. Neuroscience and happiness economics are repositioning our understanding of happiness as something physical and chemical that happens in the brain, and are interested in things like how happiness manifests itself in terms of, for example, vocal inflection or facial monitoring. There's a company called Beyond Verbal that measures happiness by your tone of voice, and then that information is used to, say, direct telesales so that you can alter your sales pitch accordingly.

But the underlying point Iâ€™m trying to make with all this is that businesses are increasingly taking a cynical economic view of how emotion is triggered, altered, monitored, and then integrated into managerial and marketing-type strategies. Thereâ€™s no room for happiness for happinessâ€™s sake. Itâ€™s all understood in the context of workplace efficiency.

The idea that human beings might treat happiness as a scientific problem meant to be â€œsolvedâ€ feels like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie. Well, the issue, or one of them, is that work society is organized around the logic of behavioral scientists: You have the majority of people going about their day-to-day life and a very small group of experts who observe and then come up with the facts of whatâ€™s really going on. That way of thinking is not just true of happiness science, itâ€™s true of things like behavioral economics, too. Weâ€™ve arrived at this moment where thereâ€™s this utopian expectation that there is a scientific answer to questions like â€œwhat makes an employee happy?â€

Do you think Americans have different expectations about workplace enjoyment than people from other countries? It always seemed absurd to me that itâ€™s not enough for us to just do the job, but weâ€™re supposed to demonstrate pleasure in doing it â€” especially in jobs that arenâ€™t even public-facing. Why? Itâ€™s hard to imagine, I donâ€™t know, the French or Russians feeling obligated to evince pleasure at engaging in work-for-pay. Differing cultural attitudes toward work could be the topic of a whole other fat book. But there is a sense in America that if you donâ€™t love your work then youâ€™re not striving properly. One of the bits in the book where I address this a little is in relation to the Chicago school of neoliberal economics.

I hate those ding-dongs. [Laughs.] I think theyâ€™re misunderstood at times. It strikes me that what the Chicago school really believed in wasnâ€™t actually markets. Everyone thinks they were the market fundamentalists, but really what they believed in was the American spirit of refusing to accept defeat in various respects, which is associated with an old-world class consciousness â€” whereas America has a new-world entrepreneurial consciousness. The way in which neoliberalism worked as an ideology so successfully was in the way it shackled the vision of the entrepreneur to a 1960s version of individual flourishing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

I donâ€™t know the answer to that, but I do know that businesses are keenly aware that the costs of disengagement are dramatic. Gallup does a huge amount of work on the issue of employee disengagement, and they say that something like less than 20 percent of the U.S. workforce is actually psychologically engaged, and they calculate the cost of that employee disengagement to the U.S. economy as a remarkable 500 billion dollars per year.

And that cost causes business to think of happiness as a form of labor capital? Yes, which is why companies are doing things like appointing Chief Happiness Officers. Iâ€™m not sure what this person does exactly, but Google has something they call a Jolly Good Fellow, who goes around the company spreading happiness and mindfulness to try and combat the mental impact of living a 24/7 work-life. Google is always held up as the exampleÂ par excellenceÂ of this kind of thing worker well-being, with their amazing free lunch service and the endless perks and so on. Again, itâ€™s difficult to be against that, but itâ€™s about building a workplace culture that says you have to put your entire self to work, and therefore the company has to kind of nurture the entire person.

Itâ€™s not enough anymore that you bring your particular skills, that you come in and put your work hat on and then leave and take your work hat off. This goes back to digital technology â€” I donâ€™t think that all managers are exploiters who want their employees to be plugged into work all the time, but very few places are introducing institutional norms and practices to stop that from happening.

It seems to me that with increased measurement of, and attention to, employee happiness, what happens is that the burden of well-being really ends up falling on the individual rather than the company. Because then these places can say, â€œHey, weâ€™ve got wellness expert on-staff, but youâ€™re still not happy. So you have to go, and itâ€™s your own fault.â€ Absolutely. This is also an American phenomenon. There are these people, these corporate happiness experts like Tony Hsieh, who's the CEO of Zappos [and author of Delivering Happiness] â€” his recommendations are some of the most brutal. He basically just advocates laying off the least happy 10 percent of your workforce. This is when happiness gets repositioned as a business resource, and it's up to each of us to either invest in it or let it depreciate, and if the latter happens, you become extraneous. That attitude renders happiness into something completely joyless.

It's happiness as an economic investment. Itâ€™s blaming unhappy people for being unhappy. The origin of the word happiness comes from happenstance â€” something that just falls on you unexpectedly. When you look at happiness as a form of capital, weâ€™ve gotten pretty far away from that original meaning.

Isnâ€™t that also an inversion of how economics historically treats happiness? I think so, because instead of it being an output of the market, it's an input. Since the late 19th century, economics has been interested in whether our purchasing decisions bring us pleasure or not. The underlying assumption of neoclassical economics is that the way we spend our money is an indicator of what might cause utility or pleasure. The management trends now are to see happiness as the opposite â€” something that we bring to work and run down and then have to build it up again. It doesn't correspond to any ordinary understanding of what happiness means to people.Â

Okay, this is all a giant drag. Itâ€™s not likely that corporations will suddenly decide that decreasing the work week is going to be a happiness method that fits in with their larger economic goals. So is the future of workplace happiness necessarily grim? So one of the things that I argue quite strongly in the book is that we've developed a society that's become more and more expert at being able to detect and monitor the notion of happiness, and yet the question of, "Why do you feel like that?" is no longer really a question that we really ask. Thatâ€™s what psychoanalysis was interested in â€” the effort to try and understand happiness and unhappiness, not just monitor it and measure it. Thatâ€™s what the new frontier of happiness research is abandoning.

We need to recover from that and actually listen to people when they tell us what theyâ€™re feeling. Weâ€™ve become dislocated from our emotions. We think of them as like blood-pressure levels or something. I think it might be idealistic, but we should aim for more democratic types of workplaces, where people can actually voice what's bothering them and be listened to and dealt with rather than be given a tool that will monitor their facial muscles or a survey that says "How do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10?" Economists and behavioral scientists too often say â€œpeople think they know why they do what they do, but theyâ€™re wrong.â€ That, to me, is a problem.

I think in that â€œwrongâ€ is where personality and culture and humanity exist. Itâ€™s fundamental! Culture is people telling stories to each other, saying, "I had a bad day today because of this, that, and the other." As a society we're undermining the authority of the explanations that people give about their own lives and their own feelings. Because we're more and more obsessed with detecting the so-called facts about those things.

So the key problem is that happiness and workplace science make a kind of category error about what happiness means to us as individual minds? We're fascinated by the unconscious, but it's an unconscious that well-being experts claim to have some sort of perfect scientific view of. It's not the unconscious that someone like Freud was interested in, which is a much darker, more unruly thing that really only emerges through the messy, ambiguous, flawed tools of human conversation. It doesn't come out through some sort of scientific indicator. There's a neurotic fear that comes with a lot of behavioral science, that if we rely on conversation to understand each other, that we might misunderstand each other, and that that might be disastrous.

When really it's just a part of life. Our relationships go well, they go wrong; politics goes well and politics goes wrong. We have to live within the limits of our understanding of each other, and if you can't cope with the flaws in the human condition, you can't encounter any of the joys either. This desire to live in a fact-based, quantifiable wayÂ â€”itâ€™s actually not what the experience of being a human is about on any deeper, more meaningful level.Â

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

vcaffeinear · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

tankeflukt · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

stormdamneron · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

warlust · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

tuesdayswithyou · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

valterbecks · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

tea-and-cozy-idek · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

tijeritasdepapel · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

voppul · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

tryingtoberespectable-blog · 6 years

Text

Your Boss Wants You to Be Happier. This Is Not a Good Thing.

That sounds like a bad mix for workers. What you get is the very clichÃ©d new economy worker who is keeping up with football and loving every minute of it, but also working a 16-hour day.

How do you keep an employee feeling engaged for 16 hours a day?

More from Science of Us:Â

How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk

The Everything Guide to the Libido

The 4 Ways People Rationalize Eating Meat

How to Buy Happiness

Why Hiding Your True Self Feels So Terrible

This article originally appeared on nymag.com

0 notes

rounaq-comm3p18-blog · 6 years

Text

Fandom Subculture

As we approach the end of the semester I have realized that there is a lot more to audience studies than I expected. In the past blog, I discussed how our world is constantly changing and evolving. As audiences, our experiences have seen a massive shift in our media environment that deviate from our traditional sources of media such as print and television. This shift brings many changes to the audience experience by allowing people to obtain more information and new forms of entertainment. These new forms of media provide audiences to interact amongst each other but as well as create or follow certain subcultures that are created purely by having similar interests. The internet offers a place where individuals can actively engage in conversation and share ideas and thoughts and a prime example of that is blogs. Writing these blogs in this course taught me how quickly culture changes. For example, some of the topics I discussed in my first blog post seem outdated in today’s fast-paced society. With the emergence of new media, issues started becoming less salient due to many other issues arising. In this blog post, I want to discuss fandom culture and how the digital age is responsible for creating and breaking trends. Also, the interactivity aspect of digital culture provides society with user-generated content.

Fandom culture has existed throughout different decades and through the evolution of media, the fandom culture has progressed as well. In the early 1900’s audiences idolized people in power such as the president or the queen of England. As forms of entertainment began to rise and the view shifted to athletes, musicians, performers and artists. In today’s society, we begin to see the shift from television celebrities to online stars such as Instagram models, social influencers and more where they do not necessarily have a background in acting or sports but are there to influence consumers and are seen as “trendsetters”. But how did they get in that position to do so and where can I apply to be an Instagram star. Well, John Fiske noted that fandom is “associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class, and race” (Sullivan, 2013). Basically, these individuals have a cultural advantage by being from a certain lifestyle and culture where they are viewed as idols. When I think of a modern-day online celebrity, Kim Kardashian’s name instantly comes to mind. One day I was watching television with my cousin and Keeping up with the Kardashians was on and it got me thinking why are Kim and her family famous, do they have a successful business or are they movie stars? I was beyond disappointed when I did some research and found out that she gained her fame through another television celebrity Paris Hilton. By being a certain lifestyle and social status Kim Kardashian utilized that to earn money and influence her “fans” into the Kardashian culture.

To be fair not every celebrity in the digital age has gotten famous by being friends with a “celebrity”. There are many emerging performers that are getting international recognition by uploading their personal content such as vlogs (video logs), product reviews, comedy skits and much more. One of my personal favourite YouTuber is Casey Neistat, a filmmaker from New York City who started “vlogging” but utilizing film and camera techniques to make them look cinematic. Prior to Casey Neistat “vlogging” was quite popular in the YouTube scene due to its ability to allow everyday individuals to share their experience with a broad audience. This style emerged from the freedom of speech of blogging but by using video as the medium allowed people from all over the world to watch and it ultimately created a subculture within the YouTube subculture. Neistat’s distinct style lead me to be one of the most popular Youtuber’s and his fan base is constantly growing. By having millions of subscribers Neistat is able to create social change and influence within the community. Neistat often crowdfunds campaigns that he feels needs attention. Paul Booth mentioned that “by following a crowdfunding campaign from opening video to the funded project, one could theoretically see the birth of a new form of creative product” (Booth, 2015). Therefore, fans are able to assist in new projects by donating monetary funds and an example of this in real life was Casey Neistat’s GoFundMe page for Somalians. In March of 2017, a “Viner” named Jerome Jarre took to YouTube to help fund the Somalian food crisis. It was not until Casey posted a video discussing the issue where fans gathered instantaneously to help fund the project. This crowdfunding campaign raised over 1 million dollars in the span of 19 hours. This act highlighted the influence of participatory culture within digital media. Similarly, as Booth highlights, “that fan studies and technology studies can integrate in order to demonstrate changing paradigms of audience involvement in the media process” (Booth, 2015). Thus, it was the fandom culture that contributed to the success of the campaign and bringing exposure from international markets.

Culture is based on the lives of individuals residing in a location or sharing similarities. Cultures surpass space and time by providing individuals with concepts, ideas and ways of life. Most cultures are rooted in religious beliefs. For example, in the Jewish culture food has to be Kosher. This way of preparing food is known within the religion but also culturally. Individuals who many necessarily are of Jewish decent can participate in the Kosher tradition and learn and adapt to it. Therefore, culture is much more than religious practices but a way of life. Over the past decade, Ontario has seen a huge cultural shift through Toronto. Growing up just outside of Toronto allowed me to see the cultural changes surrounding the city. I was always a fan of hip-hop and R&B music and growing up I would listen to these artists from America who was bringing exposure to their hometowns by discussing them on the latest track. I always wondered even though Toronto does have a massive population, why are there no big artists emerging that represent the city in international markets. As I grew older, artists like Justin Bieber, Drake and the Weeknd found success in international markets. But it was Drake who actively talked about what the city has to offer and provide exposure to the Canadian culture to make it popular. In chapter 8 Sullivan discusses fan culture and I believe the artist Drake embodies the “two aspects of media fandom have emerged as central to theorists in this tradition. The first element is the social aspect, where media fans band together in either informal or more formally structured groups (such as fan clubs) to share their mutual interest with others. Second, fans act as interpreters and producers of media content, which we will call the interpretive aspect of media fandom.” (Sullivan, 2013). Due to his music fans merged together to appreciate his music which creates a social aspect and through utilizing “Toronto slang” and similar clothing, fans propagate the culture engages in the interactive aspect of media fandom.

As I was reading the article by Kihan Kim, Yunjae Cheong, and Hyuksoo Kim titled “The Influences of Sports Viewing Conditions on Enjoyment from Watching Televised Sports: An Analysis of the FIFA World Cup Audiences in Theater vs. Home” I thought my experiences of watching a sports game live vs. at home. It is pretty clear that once you are in the arena the atmosphere is totally different with fans wearing jerseys, cheering and actively engaging in participatory culture. But with the advancement of digital media, the presence of being at the game vs. watching on a television or through streaming has closed the gap between the two. Kim et al. elaborate by stating “Presence refers to the phenomenon in which an individual develops a sense of being physically present at a remote location through interaction with media”. A prime example of actively engaging remotely is through Twitter and Facebook. Using hashtags such as #wethenorth that promotes active participation from fans in a different area. In chapter 7 Sullivan discusses that “In his 1990 book The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argued that one of the hallmarks of modern societies is the breakdown in the traditional notion of ‘place’ as a specific physical location—something he called ‘time-space distanciation’” (Sullivan 2013). This absence of time and space within fandom cultures provides people with a sense of belonging even if they are not from the same area or culture. Taking Raptors as an example, a team that was always seen as the underdogs in the NBA due to their further distance from all of the American teams. With the Wethenorth campaign, it allowed raptors fans from all over the world to engage is fan culture even if they had never visited the city before.

The convergence of digital media also brings downsides to factual information. In Ben S. Wasike’s article titled “Framing News in 140 Characters: How Social Media Editors Frame the News and Interact with Audiences via Twitter” discussing the issue of framing news by social media editors. The study found that most journalists tend to focus on news that deals with war/terrorism, man-made disasters and natural disasters. Ultimately news that would “sell” across multiple platforms rather than political or social issues. When I surf the web for news my main platforms of use tend to be Facebook and Instagram because it provides me with the social aspect and interactivity amongst real worlds news and social events that my friends post. News channels have a tendency to post the same news and even in some cases the titles and the contents are the same. This convergence of news events provides a narrow insight into world issues that deviate individuals from important issues occurring internationally.

Digital media is expanding rapidly and due to the advancement, many platforms are taking advantage trying to create applications through multiple devices. Audience culture has benefited as well as had a few setback due to the digital shift. This shift has allowed subcultures to flourish and fandom culture is going to continue to grow due to the ease of connectivity throughout the subcultures. For example, Star Trek or “trekies” fans are really devoted to the show even though the show has been off the air for years now. This continuation provides the show to be timeless and passed on from generation to generation creating many subcultures.

Sources Booth, P. (2105). Crowdfunding: A spimatic application of digital fandom. New Media and Society, 17(2), 149-166.

Kim, K., Cheong, Y., & Kim, H. (2016). The influences of sports viewing conditions on enjoyment from watching televised sports: An analysis of the FIFA World Cup audiences in theater vs. home. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 60(3), 389–409.

Sullivan, J. (2013). Media Audiences: Effects, users, institutions and power. Sage Publications Inc., New York, NY.

Wasike, B. (2013). Framing news in 140 Characters: How social media editors frame the news and interact with audiences via Twitter. Global Media Journal - Canadian Edition, 6(1), 5-23.

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willmeiertext · 7 years

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Dmitri Obergfell: Death of the Cool

via One Good Eye (Denver)

INTRO:

This is the first of a series of experimental writings about, and in collaboration with, select Denver artists. Having no specific agenda other than an interest in these artists’ work, the plan is to have a conversation with them in their studio about whatever happens to come up. There’s no Q&A, no topics to necessarily cover, and honestly, if there’s one thing I want from these experiments, it’s for them to feel different than your typical artist interview. A conversation that is true to the work and the personalities of the artists and myself.

I hope to document the personality of the conversation itself. So keeping the process organic beyond their studio and back into my own, the writing produced will inherit the thematic trajectory of the dialogue directly, with my role as writer being to subsume both peoples’ viewpoints, conclusions, questions, answers, misdirections, etc., into a single, weirdly tangential perspective.

DMITRI OBERGFELL: THE DEATH OF THE COOL

Dmitri Obergfell’s process fills the entire main space of Leisure Gallery, his current studio, in preparation for his show, Man is a Bubble and Time Is a Place, opening at Gildar Gallery March 23. Rap music from Macbook speakers echoes around our conversation. The entire time I was in there, he never paused from making molds. I started in at the natural place: What’s this show about?

Basically, it’s a meditation on “Deep Time” — an idea sampled from 2001: A Space Odyssey (the book), in which one of the most defining moments was the first time a proto-human got bored. Thus began the search for meaning, leading to the creation of symbols, the original “victory over time” that allowed information to be passed to future generations. But this sounds romantic, which isn’t the point. Dmitri is mainly just curious about what might possibly in the future be considered an artifact representative of our current era of massive overproduction.

Really, though, think about what this might be in our current, pop culture-obsessed world. The commodity of what we might call Cool? It’s certainly what’s being produced in rap and pop music, and just about every other corner of cultural industry other than art (as artists would love you to think — but really, their Cool is a commodity too, just more codified).

This has always resonated in Obergfell’s art for me, even at surface value, reflected in the chameleon paint signature to his style. The “flip paint,” as it’s sometimes known, which changes color under varying light conditions, embodies the theme of change and originally came from his fascination with car modification culture, where people have this eerily invested relationship with objects. Weirdly similar to Egyptian funerary art — some of the most extraordinary artworks ever produced, with express intent to be immediately put in the ground. I’ve personally felt for most of my life that the purpose of capital-A-Art is easiest to grasp in a sarcophagus. And I know it isn’t just Obergfell and myself who are on this wavelength: it was one of the most beautiful themes in Matthew Barney’s largely grueling film-opera, River of Fundament, screened in town as an arrival present from DAM curator Becky Hart not too long ago.

But really, for the majority of history, most art arguably had to do with some spiritual notion of death, all the way up until it made a departure from Christianity and began a slow descent into a sort of crisis as it began to become increasingly about only itself. Some might even say that modernism was a result of art becoming aware of its own mortality, with abstraction and minimalism and postmodern schools of self-referentiality becoming obsessively anxious about their encroaching deaths.

That’s a bit pessimistic, though, which is a sort of inapplicable frame for pieces like Dmitri’s recent installation featured in DAM’s Mi Tierra, which reads as not only profoundly Cool, in its chrome-plated, flip-painted, nails-did, speaker-boxed, narco-saint-swearing, tequila-shot-taking visual vocabulary, but also heartfelt, detail-oriented, and really very fresh and futuristic. Obergfell brings up Robert Smithson saying something like, “installation isn’t about filling up a room, it’s about taking things out.” This aside, though, perhaps one of the greatest strengths of this piece is that it isn’t art-about-art. It feels like it’s made for non-artists to enjoy — a product of the MTV / internet age, not just in its references, but in its attenuation to short attention spans with dozens of layered, individual moments for viewers to explore with reward at their leisure. To thumb through like the window shoppers we all are, until the museum revokes the public’s entry privileges because we can’t stop ourselves from doing so (true story).

The fact that Dmitri’s works can be understood and appreciated by both artists and those who know nothing about art cannot be emphasized enough. His artworks’ brand of Cool is that of common symbology, things cool to regular people, in some ways analogous to really exceptionally-produced radio-rap. There’s a persistent legibility, even if you don’t know the prerequisite slang (artSpeak) to understand everything being said. And this is really important to him, mainly because art is in a really dangerous place in our current political climate. Much of the public may come to (if they don’t already) view being an artist as some sort of con, and regardless of any individual cases of subjective truth to that effect, it’s a fact that art is at least threatened by more forms of recreation and entertainment than ever before, constantly competing for increasingly shorter attention spans.

It’s true, sadly. The magic that often lived in art — in Stonehenge, in representational painting, in philosophical minimalism — where is it now? Because mystery, wonder, and “how the hell?” often feel like they now belong to software. And while art has always progressed in tandem with technology, is it a given that, as just one of many incarnations of information, it’s exempt from an expiration date?

This all leads me to the place where I don’t think what might be an “average” perspective on art misses the point at all. If art has this anxiety about its own death, which it compensates for by incessantly semantically proving it’s existential value in this core way, perpetuated by an industry where accumulating generations of post-Duchampian, self-proclaimed Artists successively come-of-age wanting to believe that the fortune they spent on their art-school education was worthwhile — okay, it’s a big ‘if’, but if that’s true — it kinda makes sense that artists wouldn’t want to just make “some shit that’s cool”. But whether tastes are fabricated by capitalism or not, whether that matters or not, “some cool shit” is what anyone who isn’t plagued by these anxieties wants art to be. And even just within the context of a museum visit, focusing on anything in the 21st century is like speed-dating.

Art shouldn’t be superficial. It honestly probably isn’t even art if it doesn’t get deeper and better the longer you spend with it. But it should be gratifying and appreciative of its viewership now more than ever. In a political time when it could be said that people are increasingly scared of being challenged, in all areas of their lives, whether thanks to Facebook algorithms or just some greater zeitgeist, what I’m getting at is a dangerous line of thought, for sure. But I think taking seriously people’s willingness to engage information will only benefit the future of art’s wider efficacy, and maybe ensure it even has that future in the first place. It’s important to connect to the culture you’re a part of, not just simply detach from or criticize it. Then influence is possible. Enjoyment will always be capitalized upon. That doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted.

Returning to 2001 (the movie) — which anecdotally is my personal favorite work of art — no one understood this better than Stanley Kubrick. His movies are immaculately shot. Basically perfect. But if you really think about it, what he did was almost like what people now call “edutainment,” a sort of high-art sacrilege. And yet, there’s no doubt that the way he works with the “material” of film, using something shiny to draw people into his world of ideas, is tactically smart, to say the least. I personally don’t mind admitting that I love to be edutained.

I wanted to talk about Obergfell’s sculpture at BMOCA, Go Home Bacchus, which seemed much farther down the continuum toward “critical” art, and learned that I kinda missed the mark in my interpretation. It’s not institutional critique, it’s again, a meditation. On monuments. They’re everywhere — huge, politically charged objects made by bureaucracies to celebrate victory, a kind of weird idea in the post-9/11 world, you might think, but apparently these sorts of idealistic, fascist colossuses are still a major export of North Korea for dictators worldwide. When New Orleans takes down their confederate monuments, as in current news, then how best to do that? Will they literally topple them? What an indulgent symbol…

And yet, for all this power these things are supposed to hold in the public spaces they reign over, its almost like the only way for people to react is to take a selfie in front of them, or else commit petty vandalism. It’s almost like instinctual in our culture, like it’s funny to vandalize a giant statue whether you care about the politics behind it or not.

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Obergfell’s main piece of research for this project was the scene in Tim Burton’s Batman when Jack Nicholson’s Joker brings his gang in to supervillianize the art museum. “A really fucking cool scene,” representative of popular culture. But then also around that time ISIS began making headlines for destroying vast amounts of historical artifacts — horrifically seeming to say “we’re erasing your history in its most prized form, it’s gone, we own you.” So it turns out there is power in the act…

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But Bacchus is about graffiti, not aesthetic genocide. But maybe not even graffiti, because that word is loaded and this has nothing to do with geometric, gradient murals. So a more slippery concept — slippery to the extent that Obergfell *might* not even be upset if someone was to tag the piece. Something racist: no-go. Some self-important graffiti writer trying to claim the piece and “get up” — get out. Junior WestSideMafia alternative school student? Go for it. The person who keeps writing “Kill Trump” on electrical boxes around Denver, please. Do your thing (endorsement is mine, not necessarily the artist’s).

Not to get redundant, but there’s something really charmingly normal about the shit-headed vibe of these sentiments, likened by Dmitri to a teenager stealing fire extinguishers to blow at cars in the parking lot for fun. And while that’s so juvenile and condemnable by the ultra-ethical art world, I know – is it not also kind of the most raw manifestation of The Artist’s Instinct, if such a thing exists? To just say “fuck it I’m gonna do this thing and see what happens”.

Why? “I just thought it’d be cool.”

#contemporary art #gildar #dmitri obergfell #installation #cool #sculpture #kubrick #deep time #graffiti #matthew barney #flip paint #chameleon paint #symbols #dam

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