This week's research

This idea can be applied to fake news too – 'Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult'.

Here’s what Hans Zimmer says about the shameful agony of creativity

"Today, Zimmer is an accomplished composer who Hollywood directors and producers seek out, but he still believes he must go through “a period of agony and torture” before achieving a breakthrough.

Despite his creative setbacks, Zimmer pushes himself to avoid fixed ways of thinking, and he advises new artists who want to do the same to try something new every day.

How can you find an idea that’s novel and useful, as Hans Zimmer did with the Dark Knight soundtrack? Well, I’d like you to think of your creative project as like a mountain.

At the top of this mountain, you can mine bizarre, outlandish and absurd ideas and at the bottom of the mountain you can extract practical, relevant and logical ideas.

Now, you’re not looking to set up camp at the top of this mountain because conditions up there are too inhospitable for your ideas to thrive. There’s also little point in settling at the bottom of this mountain because basecamp is a crowded place; we’ve all been there before.

Instead, there’s a hidden place between the points of absurdity and relevancy rich in novel and useful ideas. Think of it as like a secret forge where you can combine the novelty of the absurd with the applicability of the practical. Here, you will finally master your inner genius.

Be absurd as possible

The next time you’re struggling with a creative project, try to come up with as many absurd ideas as possible. Push past your point of comfort and cognitive biases and have fun with your ideas, fantasies and daydreams.

… then seek out what’s relevant

Once you have these absurd ideas, work your way down to what’s relevant — move from composing music with razor blades toward the cello playing a single note. The climb down is always easier. Remember, it’s okay to explore hunches, probe new avenues of thought and bring back anything unusual or odd that you find. Later on, sift through these discoveries and figure out what’s usable and what to put aside.
Your creative ideas are never wrong, not even the absurd ones."

Library Fake News talk

The uni library had a fake news talk yesterday, and I was the only one that came along! Subsequently I had a fantastic one-on-one session with the CoCA Librarian, Lauren Deacon, discussing my project and the whole topic of fake news.

Notes:

• Although fake news has been around for ages, through propaganda and false advertising/journalism, it was only picked up widely as an impactful force after the 2016 US election. It affects and impacts our relationship to the media, particularly after the rise of the internet, and there is the temptation to believe the news that you want to be true. Because of this it can facilitate conflicts between groups of people on different sides of a standpoint. It is most commonly fuelled and spread through social media outlets, and can have a big say on global topics of interest from it's online, wide-reaching presence. Articles are targeted to what people have previously viewed online, so that it suits their viewpoint and delivers what they want to hear, says this study in the Cornell University Library.
• People are strangely more likely to trust strangers than friends of family close to them, as shown by this study.
• Facebook's view on fake news has changed from 'not my problem, I only run a system that people use, and policing that would be a violation of free speech', but that viewpoint has changed, and Mark Zuckerberg released this manifesto.
  
  How to combat Fake News:

1. Release your inner skeptic:
   - Places like The Onion deliver obvious satire, poking fun at events in order to bring to light the strange ideas or underlying concepts surrounding them.
   - Trump endorses fake news to seem like an everyman, positioning himself as someone who appeals to everyone and is like fellow Americans.
   - How do you get critical thinkers at high school?
   - Fake news sites often have prominent sharing buttons and often much advertising (which is interesting from a design point of view) because they want to be widely shared and increase their website traffic
   - Huffpost is legitimate-ish. Some articles have vague and clickbait-y headlines.
2. Who wrote it and who owns it?
   - Does it offer you background information and links?
   - Fake news sites often have 'buy' and 'create own content' buttons, and particularly 'create own content' makes the authors virtually anonymous.
   - The Shovel is an Australian satire website, but it doesn't very fake. The header is one of the only indicators that it's not as professional as it seems.
   - Two fake news sites are endingthefed.com and Occupy Democrats
   - Fake news can be life-threatening, like in the case of fake research that was disproven about vaccinations causing autism. Although disproven and discredited by scientists, anti-vaxxers use it as their primary point for not vaccinating their children, putting them and others around them at risk of preventable diseases.
3. Go above and beyond
   - Compare all information, don't read in a vacuum. It's important to always look at multiple sources and compare the information in them to weed out discrepancies.
   - BloombergView.com "Why fake news spreads so fast on Facebook"
   - Psychology of spreading information, such as the reach of a single Tweet on Twitter. A single tweet from a small account without many followers can be seen/have an impact over 1,000 times. The things that we say impact a very large number of people, whether we notice it or not. Facebook accounts for pages show the statistics of people numbers, clicks and views, but individual profile pages don't show these same stats – is this for our safety? People might get caught up on their popularity and sharability values.
   - Is academic language creating a blockage for less educated people to learn about the news without being conned?
   - Tone of voice is lost online. Satire or sarcasm can be taken for truth (or the other way around)
   - Filter bubbles – only encounter what peers share and see.
   - Linguistic element and location of headlines in newspapers and trending stories. Stories in prime places on websites and newspapers get read much more often, and if the headline isn't interesting, people are far more likely to skip over the article.
   - We're bombarded with so much information, and we can't fact-check it all.

• In an age group of 16-21 year-olds, is disengagement a form of self-care? Is it compassion fatigue from being bombarded by so much information with heavy emotions often attached to it, it's easy just to block it out, to read a headline and then move on. I think I fall under this category, being an emotionally driven person means that I generally block out and disregard the news because it always makes me sad. There isn't enough/enough emphasis on positive news.
  
  On T-shirts:
• M.I.A. tour shirts – she was interested in ending unfair labour and production, so people who wanted her merchandise were given the designs and could print their own.
• B.C.I. by Cotton On, the Better Cotton Initiative
• High Snobriety - a collective of internet-famous people, who can promote and alleviate the status of a person online with only one repost. They are trendsetters and path-forgers with a big say in the nature and aesthetic of internet culture and ideas.
• 'Wearables' – wearable technology & fashion crossover. Will promote sustainability in the future through being able to be digitally customisable physical objects. The Apple Watch is one example.
• Partner with a corporate, and create a range printable on demand in any size. This keeps the cost down, and ensures that there isn't extra wastage from unwanted garments.
• Have a recyclability element, like the Adidas 'Partner With The Ocean' campaign that created shoes entirely from recycled fishing nets
• Guerrilla marketing – An element of 'clickish' behaviour made physical, and to bring a positive end.
  
  On the idea of Twitter handles/QR codes on shirts:
• This may be problematic, as it means that people first have to take an extra step, and actually DO something, message somebody, look them up. It doesn't just come to them easily. I'll likely lose a lot of people at this first step.
• People may find that if there's already an online conversation in progress, they don't want to butt in, and everyone may be already saying what they want to say.
• There is potential to localise this to a community, but I don't want to come across as baiting them. There is potential here for backlash in online discourse, which isn't good – unless I want to encourage discursive conversations? Create a stir and have the campaign start from there?