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Internet celebrities in Asia: from behind the screens

    As darkness falls over Taipei City, an image of a woman illuminates the night sky. She’s one of Taiwan’s most famous live streamers, a niche group of celebrities who earn their fame through front-facing video cameras. Her face beams from a 100-foot-tall billboard overlooking Taipei. Across Asia, countless other live streamers joke, eat, and sleep while being watched by thousands on smart phones and computer screens. The most successful among them can make fortunes enough to buy their own islands.

    After a long day’s work, Junji Chen treasures time spent gazing into the eyes of his personal favorite, Yutong. Having moved away from his village to work in Taipei, the 42-year-old has little social life. Most of his relationships are with Facebook friends, many of whom he has never met in person — and with live streamers.

    Yutong cannot see Chen or hear his voice but, to him, their connection feels raw, real, maybe even reciprocated. In the comment’s section, he can flatter her with compliments or send her money in the form of virtual stickers. One sticker can cost thousands of dollars, a steep price for a factory worker. But for lonely viewers like Junji, who spends a third of his salary on virtual stickers, the companionship is worth it.

    A streamer’s job can cause physical and mental harm. Peak hours are late at night, meaning irregular sleep schedules and fatigue. Some become isolated from friends and family or grow depressed. In Korea, live streamers who eat large quantities of food in front of the camera — known as Mukbang — are prone to obesity. Because a live streamer’s success depends on their digital popularity, they may continue unhealthy behaviors to please their fans. Once intimacy is lost, so is their source of income — even though, financially, few can live off the industry alone.

    Live streaming fans can manifest “parasocial relationships,” one-sided friendships that appear reciprocated, with their favorite live streamers. For a person who lacks social skills, parasocial relationships can create the illusion of companionship when, in reality, the other person offers them little or nothing in return.

    Fans believe that they are truly cared for, says Jerome Gence, who photographed live streamers and their fans throughout Asia, but “in the end, [the live streamer] just takes the money and the fan ends up even more lonely than before.” Still, he adds, some fans still say the videos help cultivate friendship, or even love. “Some fans say to us, ‘I follow the live streamer because they are the only one who knows my name.’”

(Claire Wolters. www.nationalgeographic.com. 31.07.2019. Adaptado.)

Based on the text below, answer question that follow it. The paragraphs of the text are numbered.

If children lose contact with nature they wont't fight for it

    [1] According to recent research, even if the present rate of global decarbonisation were to double, we would still be on course for 6°C of warming by the end of the century. Limiting the rise to 2°C, which is the target of current policies, requires a six-time reduction in carbon intensity.

    [2] A new report shows that the UK has lost 20% of its breeding birds since 1966: once common species such as willow tits, lesser spotted woodpeckers and turtle doves have all but collapsed; even house sparrows have fallen by two thirds. Ash dieback is just one of many terrifying plant diseases, mostly spread by trade. They now threaten our oaks, pines and chestnuts.

    [3] While the surveys show that the great majority of people would like to see the living planet protected, few are prepared to take action. This, I think, reflects a second environmental crisis: the removal of children from the natural world. The young people we might have expected to lead the defence of nature have less and less to do with it.

    [4] We don't have to undervalue the indoor world, which has its own rich ecosystem, to lament children's disconnection from the outdoor world. But the experiences the two spheres offer are entirely different. There is no substitute for what takes place outdoors, mostly because the greatest joys of nature are unplanned. The thought that most of our children will never swim among phosphorescent plankton at night, will never be startled by a salmon leaping, or a dolphin breaching is almost as sad as the thought that their children might not have the opportunity.

    [5] The remarkable collapse of children's engagement with nature - which is even faster than the collapse of the natural world - is recorded in Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods, and in a report published recently by the National Trust, Since the 1970s the area in which children may roam without supervision has decreased by almost 90%. In one generation the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places in the UK has fallen from more than half to fewer than one in 10. In the US, in just six years (1997-2008) children with particular outdoor hobbies fell by half. Eleven- to 15-year- olds in Britain now spend, on average, half their waking day in front of a screen.

    [6] There are several reasons for this collapse: parents' irrational fear of strangers and rational fear of traffic, the destruction of the fortifying lands where previous generations played, the quality of indoor entertainment, the structuring of children's time, the criminalisation of natural play. The great indoors, as a result, has become a far more dangerous place than the diminished world beyond.

    [7] The rise of obesity and asthma and the decline in cardio-respiratory fitness are well documented. Louv also links the indoor life to an increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other mental ill health. Research conducted at the University of Illinois suggests that playing among trees and grass is associated with a marked reduction in indications of ADHD, while playing indoors appears to increase them. The disorder, Louv suggests, “may be a set of symptoms aggravated by lack of exposure to nature”. Perhaps it's the environment, not the child, that has gone wrong.

    [8] In her famous essay the Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, Edith Cobb proposed that contact with nature stimulates creativity. Reviewing the biographies of 300 “geniuses", she exposed a common theme: intense experiences of the natural world .in the middle age of childhood (between five and 12). Animals and plants, she argued, are among "the figures of speech in the rhetoric of play... which the genius, in particular of later life, seems to remember”.

    [9] Studies in several nations show that children's games are more creative in green places than in concrete playgrounds. Natural spaces encourage fantasy and roleplay, reasoning and observation. The social standing of children there depends less on physical dominance, more on inventiveness and language skills.

    [10] And here we meet the other great loss. Most of those I know who fight for nature are people who spent their childhoods immersed in it. Without a feel for the texture and function of the natural world, without an intensity of engagement almost impossible in the absence of early experience, people will not devote their lives to its protection.

    [11] Forest Schools, Outward Bound, Woodcraft Folk, the John Muir-Award, the Campaign for Adventure, Natural Connections, family nature clubs and many others are trying to bring children and the natural world back together. But all of them are fighting forces which, if they cannot be changed, will deprive the living planet of the wonder and delight that for millennia have attracted Children to the wilds.

(Adapted from: https://www theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/19/children-lose- contact-with-nature)

Women who changed the world

Text I

    Born in Warsaw, Marie Curie became the first woman Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne (Paris) in 1906. She had Masters Degrees in both physics and mathematical sciences and was the first woman to obtain a Doctor of Science degree. Madame Curie was also the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. The first was in Physics in 1903, with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel, for their study in spontaneous radiation. The second was in Chemistry in 1911 for her work in radioactivity.

Text II

    An indigenous Guatemalan woman of the K’iche’ branch of the Mayan culture, Rigoberta Menchú has dedicated her life to promoting the rights of indigenous peoples. She became active in the women’s rights movement as a teenager and later was a prominent workers’ rights advocate. In 1992 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation for indigenous peoples in Guatemala and is the first indigenous person to receive the prize.

Text III

    Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani advocate for girls education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. In 2009, when Malala was just eleven she began blogging about life under the Taliban, speaking out directly against their threats to close girls’ schools. The blog on BBC Urdu garnered international attention while also making her the target of death threats. In October 2012, a gunman shot her and two other girls as they were coming home from school. Malala survived the attack, and, in October 2014, she received the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyart.

Felicity Amos. 12 women who changed the world. Internet: www.one.org (adapted)

Judge the following items according to texts I, II and III.

    How can we ever change the world? Military
leaders have certainly managed to change large parts of it;
scientists devising cures and vaccines for disease can
spread a more benign influence across whole continents;
[5] the thoughts of religious leaders or philosophers can sweep
through generations like fire. But books?
    Reading books is generally a solitary pastime:
bookishness is the very antithesis of the man-of-action
qualities that seem to shake the world. The pen may boast
[10] of being mightier than the sword, but it is generally the
sword that wins in the short term. It is that phrase, though,
which gives the game away: in the short term, writers can
be imprisoned or executed, their work censored, and their
books burned, but over history, it is books and the ideas
[15] expressed within them that have transformed the world.
    But which books can be said to have changed the
world? There are few better ways of starting an argument
than producing a list, and I have no doubt that not
everyone will be happy about the books I included in my
[20] list. About some, like the Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio
and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, there can be little
argument - but what about Euclid’s Elements, Thomas
Paine’s Rights of Man or A Vindication of the Rights of
Women by Mary Wollstonecraft? The answer is that any
[25] list can only be subjective.

Andrew Taylor. Books that changed the world: the 50 most influential books in human history. Quercus Editions, 2014 (adapted).

Judge the following according to the text presented

T E X T

How a Canadian Chain Is Reinventing Book Selling

By Alexandra Alter

    About a decade ago, Heather Reisman, the chief executive of Canada’s largest bookstore chain, was having tea with the novelist Margaret Atwood when Ms. Atwood inadvertently gave her an idea for a new product. Ms. Atwood announced that she planned to go home, put on a pair of cozy socks and curl up with a book. Ms. Reisman thought about how appealing that sounded. Not long after, her company, Indigo, developed its own brand of plush “reading socks.” They quickly became one of Indigo’s signature gift items.

    “Last year, all my friends got reading socks,” said Arianna Huffington, the HuffPost cofounder and a friend of Ms. Reisman’s, who also gave the socks as gifts to employees at her organization Thrive. “Most people don’t have reading socks — not like Heather’s reading socks.”

    Over the last few years, Indigo has designed dozens of other products, including beach mats, scented candles, inspirational wall art, Mason jars, crystal pillars, bento lunchboxes, herb growing kits, copper cheese knife sets, stemless champagne flutes, throw pillows and scarves.

    It may seem strange for a bookstore chain to be developing and selling artisanal soup bowls and organic cotton baby onesies. But Indigo’s approach seems not only novel but crucial to its success and longevity. The superstore concept, with hulking retail spaces stocking 100,000 titles, has become increasingly hard to sustain in the era of online retail, when it’s impossible to match Amazon’s vast selection.

    Indigo is experimenting with a new model, positioning itself as a “cultural department store” where customers who wander in to browse through books often end up lingering as they impulsively shop for cashmere slippers and crystal facial rollers, or a knife set to go with a new Paleo cookbook. Over the past few years, Ms. Reisman has reinvented Indigo as a Goop-like, curated lifestyle brand, with sections devoted to food, health and wellness, and home décor.

    Ms. Reisman is now importing Indigo’s approach to the United States. Last year, Indigo opened its first American outpost, at a luxury mall in Millburn, N.J., and she eventually plans to open a cluster of Indigos in the Northeast. Indigo’s ascendance is all the more notable given the challenges that big bookstore chains have faced in the United States. Borders, which once had more than 650 locations, filed for bankruptcy in 2011. Barnes & Noble now operates 627 stores, down from 720 in 2010, and the company put itself up for sale last year. Lately, it has been opening smaller stores, including an 8,300-square-foot outlet in Fairfax County, Va.

    “Cross-merchandising is Retail 101, and it’s hard to do in a typical bookstore,” said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, which analyzes the book industry. “Indigo found a way to create an extra aura around the bookbuying experience, by creating a physical extension of what you’re reading about.”

    The atmosphere is unabashedly intimate, cozy and feminine — an aesthetic choice that also makes commercial sense, given that women account for some 60 percent of book buyers. A section called “The Joy of the Table” stocks Indigobrand ceramics, glassware and acacia wood serving platters with the cookbooks. The home décor section has pillows and throws, woven baskets, vases and scented candles. There’s a subsection called “In Her Words,” which features idea-driven books and memoirs by women. An area labeled “A Room of Her Own” looks like a lush dressing room, with vegan leather purses, soft gray shawls, a velvet chair, scarves and journals alongside art, design and fashion books.

    Books still account for just over 50 percent of Indigo’s sales and remain the central draw; the New Jersey store stocks around 55,000 titles. But they also serve another purpose: providing a window into consumers’ interests, hobbies, desires and anxieties, which makes it easier to develop and sell related products.

    Publishing executives, who have watched with growing alarm as Barnes & Noble has struggled, have responded enthusiastically to Ms. Reisman’s strategy. “Heather pioneered and perfected the art of integrating books and nonbook products,” Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, said in an email.

    Ms. Reisman has made herself and her own tastes and interests central to the brand. The front of the New Jersey store features a section labeled “Heather’s Picks,” with a display table covered with dozens of titles. A sign identifies her as the chain’s “founder, C.E.O., Chief Booklover and the Heather in Heather’s Picks.” She appears regularly at author signings and store events, and has interviewed prominent authors like Malcolm Gladwell, James Comey, Sally Field, Bill Clinton and Nora Ephron.

    When Ms. Reisman opened the first Indigo store in Burlington, Ontario, in 1997, she had already run her own consulting firm and later served as president of a soft drink and beverage company, Cott. Still, bookselling is an idiosyncratic industry, and many questioned whether Indigo could compete with Canada’s biggest bookseller, Chapters. Skepticism dissolved a few years later when Indigo merged with Chapters, inheriting its fleet of national stores. The company now has more than 200 outlets across Canada, including 89 “superstores.” Indigo opened its first revamped concept store in 2016.

    The new approach has proved lucrative: In its 2017 fiscal year, the company’s revenue exceeded $1 billion Canadian for the first time. In its 2018 fiscal year, Indigo reported a revenue increase of nearly $60 million Canadian over the previous year, making it the most profitable year in the chain’s history.

    The company’s dominance in Canada doesn’t guarantee it will thrive in the United States, where it has to compete not only with Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but with a resurgent wave of independent booksellers. After years of decline, independent stores have rebounded, with some 2,470 locations, up from 1,651 a decade ago, according to the American Booksellers Association. And Amazon has expanded into the physical retail market, with around 20 bookstores across the United States.

    Ms. Reisman acknowledges that the company faces challenges as it expands southward. Still, she’s optimistic, and is already scouting locations for a second store near New York.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01