During a January week in 2012, around 700,000 English-speaking Facebook users were chosen, without their knowledge or consent, to be emotional lab rats. The researchers found that if you tweak what people see in their Facebook news feed – the scrolling information on your page –to suppress or heighten certain emotive words, readers’ emotions will shift to match.
It’s not only emotions Facebook can nudge. It can make you vote, too. On the US presidential election day in 2010 it offered one group a graphic with a link to find nearby polling stations, along with a button that would let you announce that you’d voted, and the profile photos of six “friends” who had already done so. Users shown that page were 0.39% more likely to vote than those in the control group who hadn’t seen the link, button or photos.
The researchers reckoned they’d mobilised 60,000 voters and that the ripple effect caused 340,000 extra votes.
lunch break thoughts: working for free
lunch break thoughts: working for free
Multiversity recently put out a call for new writers, with the caveat that they cannot pay you and revelation that their entire staff is unpaid, from the editors on down. They’re offering exposure—they have a platform, they have inroads with creators and publishers, and you can use that platform…
David Brothers brings the truth. Click through for the whole thing, if you haven’t already read it.
Yahoo’s decision to keep the show running now is the television business equivalent of trying to start a new political party by focusing on an issue with a tiny, but passionate constituency. Maybe the Yahoo “Community” will be great. But however wonderful it is, that success does not mean that Yahoo can produce good original television of its own, or that network television will take that success as a sign that it ought to find better ways of nurturing either high-concept television or kind comedy.
Treating the television industry like politics is an appealing idea, but a limited one. Networks can afford to have narrower brands, and in the present television environment, they actually have to — the days of big-tent broadcast are dead. You cannot turn Yahoo, Hulu, or Netflix into the tea party and hope the Big Four get the message.
Alyssa Rosenberg articulates a lot of my feelings about Yahoo resurrecting Community for a sixth season online (I loved the show, but to be honest, I suspect it’d run its course, and a lot of the “WE WON” about the show’s return makes me uneasy, much as it did when Arrested Development came back on Netflix).
The Ballad of Magic Boots Mel
A piece of Internet ephemera: A story written for THR that ended up not running because it was just a little bit too out there, written to accompany last week’s USA/Germany World Cup match.
Interview: Graeme McMillan and Jeff Lester on Wait, What? Podcast, the Comic Industry, and Crowdfunding
Wait, What? hosts Graeme McMillan and Jeff Lester discuss their podcast and their recent Patreon campaign.
Jeff and I did an interview about Wait, What?, which was a strange and wonderful thing. (We did another one, that’ll hopefully run later this week, for somewhere else. It’s weird doing interviews from this side, but not a bad weird.)
The Ballad of Magic Boots Mel
Back after three months with this, a story written for the Hollywood Reporter to accompany the USA team’s match against Germany in the 2014 World Cup — at the request of an editor — that was shelved because everyone agreed it was just a little bit too random. How I hoped this would make it on there, though.
A tweet from the official Twitter account of the U.S. Men’s Soccer Team before today’s match made the most of Clint Dempsey’s nickname of Captain America by tagging Marvel and including a pic of the star-spangled Avenger. Which got me thinking: where is Magic Boots Mel during all of this?
#USAvGER about to start. Fans, Players, Heroes: Unite behind the #USA colors! #LetsDoThis #OneNationOneTeam @Marvel pic.twitter.com/e0R5DjFU13
— U.S. Soccer (@ussoccer) June 26, 2014
Admittedly, Magic Boots Mel is a bit of a deep cut for Marvel, considering that the character has only made one appearance to date (in 2013’s Avengers Assemble No. 15AU, for the completists out there). She is, however, Marvel’s primary—and admittedly, only—soccer-themed character, and as such, one that would be primed to take full advantage of the surprise soccer fever surrounding this year’s World Cup.
This isn’t as ridiculous as it may seem: Marvel has not one but two (non-soccer) football-themed concepts in its character library, with the series NFL SuperPro and Kickers, Inc. having both turned football heroes into super heroes in the 1980s and ‘90s. The publisher has also published titles centered around motocross (Team America) and previously teamed with the NBA for a line of basketball-related Marvel merchandise. So why not bring Magic Boots Mel back for the World Cup?
The character, whose real name is Melanie Kapoor, gets her powers of superhuman accuracy and long-distance kicking—I promise, I am not making this up—from a pair of magic boots that give her soccer powers. Admittedly, the fact that she’s English may not be the most topical tie-in to this year’s World Cup, given England’s speedy exit from the tournament, but this just opens up the possibility of a story wherein she lends the magic boots to the actual Captain America, who leads the U.S. team to victory and unexpected soccer domination.
Okay, so it’s probably a little too close to the U.S.’ own exit from the tournament—let’s be pessimistically honest, here—to make this happen, but there’s always time to bring Magic Boots Mel into prominence for next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup in Canada. If nothing else, just stick her in Avengers: Age of Ultron for a winning cameo…?