Strands of Genius [BFTP]: 28 Days Under The Sea, Answers via Email, Unstructured Learning, Rosie on Reality TV

BLAST FROM THE PAST [July 2021]

Apr 30, 2024

WORKING ON | flying to the UK

LOOKING AHEAD

April 26 - 30 | Miami, FL
April 30 - May 18 | Worcester Park, UK
May 18 - 20 | Nashville, TN

:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::

We arrived in the UK with the ambition of writing a newsletter today, but y’all. Jet lag is REAL. We’re on the struggle bus trying to keep our eyes open for a few more hours. This is a blast from the past, featuring content from July 2021. It’s the edition where I wrote about reality TV. I still love reality TV, and I’ve even gotten Faris on board. Below Deck is my favorite, but our favorites to watch together are Survivor and Deal or No Deal Island.

But first before we get into the blast from the past we wanted to be sure you all saw this…

:: CALLING ALL NEW YORK FRIENDS ::

Hey expats and Eurovision fans (or those that love to hate on Eurovision!). Come join us for some day drinking and watch the grand final at NYC's biggest Eurovision Song Contest Watch Party on Saturday, May 11th 2024 at Ulysses in Lower Manhattan. Hosted by Matchmaker Maria and comedian Matt Haze, you'll feel like you're back home watching the show, complete with commentary and all! It's a 70s theme this year to honor the 50th anniversary of ABBA winning the competition.

Get your tickets here!

:: THE LINKS ::

THEY SPENT 28 DAYS UNDER THE SEA

Laurent Ballesta shares his musings and photographs from his 28 days spent as part of a four man team living on a pressurized habitat barge in the Mediterranean. They explored the ocean floor for hours, not minutes, at a time, and discovered some truly wondrous creatures, like narwhal shrimp at 256 feet deep and two veined squid mating at 223 feet deep. The ocean is crazy cool, y’all. (National Geographic)

GIGGLE GIVES YOU ANSWERS VIA EMAIL

This makes me think of the slow food movement. Instead, it’s part of the slow internet movement, if that’s even a thing. Giggle offers 10 categories for requests (poetry, guitar riffs, jokes, fortune cookies, and more) where you’ll send an email and get a single result delivered back to you within a business day. They write, “Today's search engines pummel you with thousands of results for every query. Pages and pages of them. But what if you're not looking for something specific and any one result will do? Meet Giiggle, the latest innovation from the team at HERL. With just an email you can get a result instantly. It may not be the result that you want, but it'll definitely be the result that you *need*. Enjoy Giiggling.” (Giggle)

UNSTRUCTURED LEARNING: HOW TO LEARN HARD SKILLS

Thomas Oppong writes that “successful unstructured learners are in the business of exploring, searching, discovering and experimenting.” But the problem is that once we’re introduced to formal education at such a young edge, we encounter structured learning. We’re given hands to hold for much of our formal education, and our unstructured learning skills atrophy. Oppong shares his approach to unstructured learning, and gives some guidance on how to develop your own.(Medium)

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:: WHAT WE WERE THINKING ABOUT IN 2021: REALITY TV ::

Rosie here, and I’m coming to you with a confession. I’ve recently been sucked into the rabbit hole of Reality TV. This is an entirely new thing for me. I once wrote briefs for Bravo, and while the work was fun, I wasn’t a Bravo addict like others who worked on the brand.

Now it should be said that when I say ‘Reality TV',’ I mean something specific: I mean the emotional people based scripted drama sorta things. I’ve long loved cooking shows, and Queer Eye, and Faris assures me that these are reality tv, too. But for some reason, those don’t seem to need confessing. They don’t feel like guilty pleasures. There are cute accents on GBBO, and they help each other out! During the pandemic, I’d watch an occasional home renovation show or competition show, but even those don’t feel in the same category.

This all started when I was heading to New York on my own. I had been trying to think of a show to watch that Faris wouldn’t want to watch, and Bravo’s Southern Charm was on my mom’s TV. (She lovvvvvvves Bravo, and has a doormat to prove it.) It was a random episode, on a random season, I downloaded the remaining three episodes on the Peacock app (which I had only just recently downloaded.) It was season 5.

And I guess that’s what did it? Because after I watched those final episodes (a collective 4 in total), I decided that I needed to know the backstory. So then I watched the first 10 episodes of season 5. But then I needed to know the fullllll backstory. So I watched season 1.

And while I haven’t watched seasons 2-4, or 6, I feel like it could be in my future. It doesn’t feel ambitious, like watching The Wire (I only made it three episodes) or Lost (I lasted until a college breakup). I know how this works; I know that we see what the producers and editors want us to see. But isn’t that how storytelling works?

Brendan Rooney, Assistant Professor with UCD School of Psychology and Director of the UCD Media and Entertainment Lab, says that, “Stories serve as a kind of emotional treadmill – they allow us to practice empathy and "try out" social strategies without having to experience some of the horrible events from TV or fiction. These stories have the power to make us think and form opinions and learn emotional skills, which we do both consciously and unconsciously when we watch,” he says. At this point we all know that reality TV isn’t entirely real, but "when wrapped up in emotion, they simply don’t think about it,” he said.

I buy it — but again, I feel like this applies to all stories, not just reality TV. I want to know why I like reality TV. And wrapped up in that question is why it seems to be so gendered. I remember seeing the demographic skews back in my NYC days, and I can’t imagine they’ve changed much. Anecdotally, women squeal when I mention Southern Charm, and bring out pictures of that time they met Shep in Atlanta. Men have little to no idea what I’m talking about.

Before I went down this rabbit hole, Faris and I discussed friends’ reality TV obsessions, and wondered why the viewership is so heavily dominated by women. Faris suggested that maybe because women tended to be more interested in talking about their emotions, they enjoyed watching the emotions play out on screen more.

Rooney, the professor above, also speaks about our “need for cognition,” our desire to be able to understand and process what’s going on, and how that impacts enjoyment. For those of us who are more highly skilled at processing social interactions (ahem), we may find these kinds of shows easier to think about. It’s a show that switches off our thinking-side of the brain.

Look, I love the Marvel stuff that Faris also loves. I’m not faking my enjoyment — But it does take a bit more processing power for me. Sometimes I find myself asking Faris an endless stream of questions, because he’s grown up with this stuff, and has a different worldview in his head. Or rather, he has a Marvel worldview. UNIVERSE, I know, I know. But my understanding is piecemeal and based primarily on watching the movies, usually only once, and maybe not remembering as much as Faris. So maybe there is something to the cognitive ease angle for me.

I still don’t feel like I have all the answers — because I’m also wondering why is reality TV a guilty pleasure? Is it a religious overtone that has policed pleasure? Or is it that women can’t really like anything without being mocked? Do men who are highly skilled at processing social interactions also like reality TV? I don’t know, but I’d be curious what you think :)

:: AND NOW… ROSIE’S MOM’S DOORMAT ::

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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

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Strands of Genius