Archive: Dec 2018

According to a recent CityLab article, “[n]ot everyone spends Christmas Day eating home-cooked meals beside a tree draped with tinsel and ornaments. For many Jewish families in the United States, there’s another Christmas tradition: maybe a trip to the movie theater, and definitely dinner at a Chinese restaurant.” The article uses Yelp and Google Trends data to examine how many people — Jewish and others too — eat Chinese food on Christmas Day. Next year in 2019 the authors will have to update the article to also include data on Christmas Eve; while driving around searching for an open spot for dinner on Christmas Eve 2018 my favorite Chinese restaurant had a line that stretched halfway down the block (!).

Why do grits remind U.S. Southerners of home, while maple syrup does that for Canadians, and chocolate activates positive feelings for the Swiss? “Behind our seemingly nationalistic food preferences are the psychological processes that inform group identity, which, research shows, can change depending on our environment,” explains a Pacific Standard article on social identity theory. The brief article closes with “identities that govern seemingly innate experiences, such as the taste of food—or even racial bias—can be harnessed to create positive social change.” It doesn’t provide any specifics, however. Hopefully future article will do so.

The sub-header of the recent Pacific Standard article The Boundary Between Our Bodies and Our Tech is “Our online identities have become a part of who we are in the real world—whether we’re always aware of it or not.” The author asks readers to conduct a thought experiment:

Where do you end? Not your body, but you, the nebulous identity you think of as your “self.” Does it end at the limits of your physical form? Or does it include your voice, which can now be heard as far as outer space; your personal and behavioral data, which is spread out across the impossibly broad plane known as digital space; and your active online personas, which probably encompass dozens of different social media networks, text message conversations, and email exchanges? This is a question with no clear answer, and, as the smartphone grows more and more essential to our daily lives, that border’s only getting blurrier.

The rest of the article provides a compelling analysis of the blurred lines.