The dangers of preconceived judgement:
look beyond stereotypes

People often say “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, and it holds true in many aspects of life. We are all
guilty of making snap judgements about others based on their appearance, actions or even just a brief
encounter. But have you ever wondered why it’s important not to judge someone before getting to know
them? Do you ever consider that?
[5]   Imagine that you are at a party and, out of the corner of your eye, you spot a person with a unique
hairstyle and an outfit that screams “fashion forward”. Your brain, always ready for action, instantly springs
into snap judgement mode. “They must be an avant-garde artist or a fashion model”, it enthusiastically
proclaims. This is thin slice judgement! It refers to the action of making lightning-fast judgements based
on minimal information. An example is when you are at a job interview, and the person in the hot seat
[10]   glances at your handwriting before making a quick assessment of your personality. It sounds ludicrous,
but our brain has a way of magnifying minor details and turning them into grand narratives. As amusing
as it may seem, such judgements can have real-life consequences.
While snap judgements can provide an amusing story to share at parties, they can perpetuate stereotypes,
reinforce biases and limit our ability to see the true beauty in diversity. Instead of jumping to conclusions,
[15]   it’s better to lean into curiosity. Ask questions, seek out diverse perspectives and recognize that everyone
has a unique story to tell. By embracing our inquisitive nature, we can uncover the richness of human
experiences and challenge our own biases.
Empathy is the secret weapon against prejudice. To truly understand someone, you must put yourself in
their shoes and see the world through their eyes. Actually, prejudice is when we form an opinion or make
[20]   assumptions about someone without having all the facts. It’s like trying to write a book review after only
reading the first chapter. We should strive to give people a fair chance before passing judgement. Besides,
it’s essential to remember that nobody is perfect, and we should embrace diversity instead of assuming
we’re always right. Rather than acting as self-appointed judges, we should approach people with empathy
and understanding.
[25]   Practicing self-compassion and recognizing our own imperfections can help us show more compassion
towards others. Harsh judgement can stem from a variety of factors, such as insecurity, fear or simply our
own experiences and biases, but it’s okay, we’ve all been there! What’s important is to take a step back and
reflect on why we are quick to judge. And, if we always do that, it’s time to think outside the box.

PATRICK TURNER
Adaptado de appgecet.co.in.

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Read Your Way Through Salvador

By Itamar Vieira Junior and translated by Johnny Lorenz. July 19, 2023.

I was born in Salvador, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, and lived in the general vicinity until I reached the age of 15. But it was when I left that I really came to know my city. How was I able to discover more about my birthplace while traveling far from home? It might sound rather clichéd but, I assure you, literature made this possible: It took me on a journey, long and profound, back home, enveloping me in words and imagination.

To understand the formation of our unique society and, consequently, the cityscape of Salvador, one should read, before anything else, "The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom and Islam in the Black Atlantic," by João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Marcus J.M. de Carvalho. Rufino was an alufá, or Muslim spiritual leader, born in the Oyo empire in present-day Nigeria and enslaved during his adolescence. "The Story of Rufino" is an epic tale, encapsulating the life of one man in search of freedom as well as the history of the development of Salvador itself, a place inextricably linked with the diaspora across the Black Atlantic. Another book for which I have deep affection is "The City of Women," by the American anthropologist Ruth Landes. It offers an intriguing perspective, focusing on matriarchal power in candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian sacred practice, and revealing how the social organization of its spiritual communities reverberates across the city.

If you want to feel the intensity of life on the streets of Salvador, these two books, both by Amado, are indispensable: "Captains of the Sands" and "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands." The first is a coming-of-age story in which we follow a group of children and adolescents living on the streets and on the beaches around the Bay of All Saints. Written more than 80 years ago, the book was banned and even burned in the public square during the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas in the first half of the 20th century. As a portrait of Salvador, it is still relevant and reveals our deep inequalities. "Dona Flor and her Two Husbands" is one of Amado's most popular novels, translated into more than 30 languages and adapted many times for theater, cinema, and television. The book is a kind of manifesto for a woman's liberation. Dona Flor possesses great culinary talent, and oppressed by a patriarchal society, finds herself divided between two men, one being her deceased husband. While the novel captures the daily life of the city in the 1940s, it is also a wonderful guide to the cuisine of Salvador, with its African and Portuguese influences.

I invite readers to travel into the interior of Bahia, many hours by car from Salvador to the region known as the Sertão, whose name translates loosely to "backwoods." Two books can also transport you there, and they are sides of the same story: "Backlands: The Canudos Campaign," by Euclides da Cunha, and "The War of the End of the World," by Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Backlands" is one of the most important works in the history of Brazilian literature. It is a journalistic telling that introduces us not only to the brutal War of Canudos, but also to the intriguing landscape of the Sertão, a place so full of contradictions. In his writing of the conflict, da Cunha tells the story of the genesis of the tough sertanejo: a mythic, cowboyesque figure of the drought-stricken, lawless interior. "The War of the End of the World" is an essential epic that amplifies the narrative of "Backlands," bringing a more imaginative, creative aspect to the story of Antônio Conselheiro, the spiritual leader of a rebellion, and of the multitude that followed him to their deaths.

[Fonte: "Read Your Way Through Salvador". In: The New York Times, 19/07/2023, .Adaptado, Data de acesso: 01/09/2023.]

T E X T

The word ‘viral’ has lost its meaning

    The nature of virality has shifted radically over the past decade as the internet has fractured into uncounted disparate algorithms, platforms, and niche communities. The volume of content being churned out every day has skyrocketed, the life cycle of each piece of media has grown shorter and social media platforms continue to inflate public metrics, devaluing previously impressive online stats.

    All of these factors have rendered the term “viral” nearly meaningless, say experts, and have led to a condition we’ll call “viralflation.” The term speaks to the diminished meaning of virality. If everything is labeled viral, then is nothing viral?

    “Back in the day, 1 million views was the thing,” said Marcus Stringer, a partner manager at Social Blade, a social media analytics platform. “That meant you’d gone viral, and you’d get picked up by news agencies around the world. Now, tens of millions of views is the norm for top YouTube channels. Soon, 20 million views will eventually become the norm.”

    “Because the concept of virality has been so watered down, truly viral pieces of content must reach hundreds of millions of people at a scale that’s increasingly unattainable for anyone but MrBeast,” said Lara Cohen, vice president of partners and business development at Linktree, a platform that allows creators to aggregate links to their social media profiles on one page. MrBeast is the internet name of Jimmy Donaldson, YouTube’s most watched creator.

    A decade and a half ago, there was a clear delineation between viral content and the vast majority of media that users would encounter every day. The internet was smaller, and most sharing was manual (people emailing and messaging links to each other) or via early internet aggregators such as sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

     Viral content emerged slowly, so the life span of a viral video was long. Some content remained viral for up to a year, worming its way through the internet as it gained traction. When social media platforms began to switch to algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement in the mid 2010s, the viral content cycle accelerated, experts said. Brands began recognizing the power of virality and started to attempt to manufacture it. Content creators joined engagement groups where they’d reshare each other’s content in attempts to force virality.

    Platforms themselves also began to realize the power of virality and sought to generate it, or at least generate the appearance of it. This was the beginning of the era of viralflation. Facebook helped lower the industry-wide threshold for what counted as a video view, and began inflating view counts on various Facebook videos in an effort to make them appear more viral than they were.

    Then TikTok broke into the mainstream in 2020, lowering the bar even further for what counted as a “view.” While a view on Facebook counts after three seconds of watch time, a view on TikTok is simply an impression, meaning the video was served to a user for at least a fraction of a second on screen. According to the company, TikTok also counts each loop of the video as a view, allowing videos to rake in massive view counts.

    “The speed at which we cycle through trends and sort of moments of virality on the internet is faster now largely because of TikTok,” Cohen said. This has created an arms race among tech platforms to see which could inflate metrics the most. There’s been an incentive to have these numbers look bigger because they look better to advertisers, so there’s a financial incentive to cause this viral inflation.

    A new class of content creators also has raised the bar for what’s considered viral. “When MrBeast started to explode, things really started to change in the landscape,” Stringer said. “People didn’t consider [earlier metrics of virality] viral anymore, because he’s getting multi millions of views per video.”

    Coco Mocoe, a trend forecaster in Los Angeles, said that along with these shifts, users are also consuming a higher total amount of content online per day, especially members of Generation Z, those born between 1998 and 2012. They are more likely to consume all forms of media through the internet and social platforms, rather than via newspapers or TV. And, much of that content is short form and less than 60 seconds long. “The main reason there are bigger numbers now is because people are consuming so much more content in a given sitting,” she added.

    This has made virality more ephemeral. “There’s not that same… permanence,” Mocoe said. “If you’re watching 50 videos with 1 million views, you’re less likely to remember one as opposed to a decade ago, when you might only watch five videos a day, and just one would have 1 million views.” For the average consumer, viralflation has made it increasingly difficult to tell what is and isn’t actually viral. Because we no longer have any shared sense of virality, it makes it easier for people who don’t understand the mechanics of the internet to fall for fake viral trends.

Adapted from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ 2024/03/09/

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    The effects of alcohol on young people are not the same as they are on adults. While alcohol misuse can present health risks and cause careless behaviour in all age groups, it is even more dangerous for young people.

    Because young people’s bodies are still growing, alcohol can interfere with their development. This makes young people particularly vulnerable to the long-term damage caused by alcohol. This damage can include: cancer of the mouth and throat; sexual and mental health problems, including depression and suicidal thoughts; liver cirrhosis and heart disease.

    Drinking alcohol in adolescence can harm the development of the brain. Young people might think that any damage to their health caused by drinking lies so far in the future that it’s not worth worrying about. However, there has been a sharp increase in the number of people in their twenties dying from liver disease as a result of drinking heavily in their teens.

    Alcohol interferes with the way people think and makes them far more likely to act carelessly. If young people drink alcohol, they are more likely to end up in dangerous situations. For example, they are more likely to climb walls or other heights and fall off. Or they might verbally abuse someone who could hit them. They are also more likely to become aggressive themselves and throw a punch.

(www.nidirect.gov.uk. Adaptado.)

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    The spread of fake news can have both personal and academic consequences. In a perfect world everything reported would be based only on facts and you would be able to trust that the media you consume is reliable. But unfortunately that’s not the case. You should learn to spot false information because fake news can:

    1. Call into question the credibility of your sources. As a student you are expected to find, evaluate, and reference trustworthy information sources in a variety of formats. If you include fake news as evidence for your arguments or as part of your research it may raise doubts about the integrity of the sources you use as a whole and your ability to identify quality information. Maintain the respect of your professors, peers, friends, and family by citing only true, credible news and information sources.

    2. Provide you with false, confusing, or dishonest information used to make a decision or take action. It can be dangerous to do something without having all the facts, but it can be just as detrimental to do so based on inaccurate information. Whether it’s political, medical, academic, or personal, you need to be able to recognize when the information you are taking in can be trusted to help you make an intelligent, fact-based choice.

(https://libguides.uvic.ca, 26.05.2023. Adaptado.)