Phys .org: Database stores names for family members in 1,200+ languages. “Fiona Jordan, professor of anthropology from the University of Bristol, has been working with colleagues from Australia, Finland, and Brazil to develop KinBank—a catalog of more than 1,200 languages and their words for family members—known as kinship terminology. It features more than 210,000 kinship terms ranging from cousins to great-grandparents.”
Illinois News Bureau: Viral videos about private moments may affect offline relationships. “When individuals share videos about surprise reunions with their intimate partners on the internet, the reaction from viewers may not be the roses and unicorns the posters expected. Viewers’ responses to shared videos have the potential to shape offline relationships, a case study of one such video found.”
Tricycle: A Nontoxic Social Media Experience. “The app departs from other social media apps in that there’s no feed, no photos or videos, and no texting element. Rather, Landed connects users one-on-one via audio messages. Each week, on Sunday, users are prompted to share three things they were grateful for in the last week, and, if they want, to share a challenging experience. A few days later, they’ll receive an audio message from their randomly assigned match for the week, and then the matched pair can exchange audio for the rest of the week.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison: NEH grant largest federal grant in Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research’s history . “The grant will fund digitization of 863 original videotapes recorded in 13 different formats and produced by [Wendy] Clarke for a series of 15 video projects from the 1980s and 1990s— including the Love Tapes—that explored themes of love, community, culture, and self-reflection across multiple underrepresented communities.”
Discover: Social Media Is Not to Blame for Dwindling Face-to-Face Communication. “It’s a familiar and seemingly logical argument: Social media makes us less social. We’re hooked to our phones at the expense of going out into the real world and interacting with other people. And according to Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies and director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas, the concept even has a name: the social displacement hypothesis.”
Michigan Daily: A case for keeping your relationship off of social media. “I certainly don’t love the idea of any of my followers gossiping about what I’m posting, and I’m sure you don’t either. Yet, isn’t that inevitable? By putting even just small pieces of our lives on social media, don’t we invite people to speculate about it all, including our relationships?”
The Conversation: More than just risk: LGBTQIA+ young people use social media to sustain and make sense of family relationships. “Social media offers new opportunities to be visible, and many people have shared their celebrations of Pride during this time. However, not everyone. Our new research shows that LGBTQIA+ young people are deciding what to post on social media sites with their families in mind, to foster and maintain ties with them.”
Arizona State University: More internet matches are leading to happy marriages. “According to a 2013 study by social psychologist J. T. Cacioppo, the internet is responsible for roughly one in every three marriages. And those who use online dating end up being slightly more satisfied with their relationship and marriage than those who met in more traditional ways.”
New Yorker: Turning YouTube Comments Into Art. “…a ‘web experience’ [Chiara] Amisola created this past Valentine’s Day… explores ‘the rawness of human intimacy and confession in the YouTube comments left under love songs.’ The page is minimal: each comment appears in large black text above the video in question, which plays inside a small circle that rotates like an LP.”
Brigham Young University: BYU nursing professors unearth disturbing trends in sexual assault cases connected to dating apps. “In the first large-scale study of the relationship between dating apps and sexual assault, researchers find violent sexual predators use dating apps to target vulnerable victims.”
Vogue: Are Social Media Break-Up Announcements the New Normal?. “Of all the quirks that define modern relationships, perhaps the oddest is the fact that we feel compelled to tell strangers on the internet about them. And yet, it’s something we’ve been doing for years. Millennials will recall Facebook’s ‘relationship status’ feature, which was introduced in the early ’00s shortly after the site launched. Users could inform friends of any changes to their love lives within a matter of clicks, with options ranging from ‘single’ and ‘in a relationship’ to the fateful ‘it’s complicated.’”
WIRED: How I Learned Confidence From Online Posers. “I learned that quite a few dating app users ignore posted filters and explicit preferences. They insist that if you just meet them, you’ll love them…. I, on the other hand, was looking for a connection. I’d never once considered misrepresenting myself. I know that I’m not perfect, but I felt dejected after wasting my time and energy (as well as theirs). Ultimately, I decided to do some research to find out what I was missing.”
Stanford News: The real strength of weak ties. “A team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and LinkedIn recently conducted the largest experimental study to date on the impact of digital job sites on the labor market and found that weaker social connections have a greater beneficial effect on job mobility than stronger ties.”
WIRED: ‘Date Me’ Google Docs and the Hyper-Optimized Quest for Love. “What do we talk about when we talk about Date Me docs, a kind of wiki to the human soul? On the one hand, none of this is new. The desire to find a mate, or just fornicate, has launched a thousand apps over the past two decades. Both Facebook and YouTube started out as versions of ‘Hot or Not.’ But Date Me docs are uniquely paradoxical. For one, they’re not apps.”
Input Magazine: The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos. “I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word ‘victim,’ and the fact that ‘finger-guns’ gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo…. A quick search of ‘high five wikipedia photo’ shows that the images are an object of fascination for many others besides me.”
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