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Joe’s open ended question.

What is the value of your family in our modern world

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Culture vs Tradition

Culture and traditions are similar meaning terms and concepts used commonly by us in conversation. Many of us believe the two concepts are so similar that they can be used interchangeably. However, it is not so, and despite similarities and overlapping, there are differences that are highlighted in this article.
Culture
Culture is a very important concept that has been put forward to make it easier to better understand human behavior. It refers to composite body of knowledge that has evolved as a result of living and experiences of a people of a particular area. It is a tool that is used by anthropologists, to understand the human capacity as it evolved through shared experiences and not because of genetics. It is the culture of a particular people that helps them think in a better and more imaginative manner. Culture also allows the people of a place to be more creative and knowledgeable. The culture of a people is reflected in the customs, traditions, language, clothing, artifacts and materials used, and shared thought pattern.

Our learnt behavior and social skills are a result of the culture we are born into. The way we interact with other members of our society and the manner in which we cooperate with others to solve a problem is a direct result of the culture we have been living in. It becomes clear then that the complex whole that includes our clothes, language, knowledge, beliefs, traditions, customs, tools, and all other capabilities that are acquired by virtue of living in a particular area and society is what is termed as culture.

The true essence of a culture lies, not in the language or the tools used by a particular people, but how the people of the society look at and interpret at these tools. The values, customs and traditions of people are a better indicator of the shared culture of the people.
Tradition
The set of customs and beliefs that are passed down the generations in a society and still practiced by the people of a society is referred to as its traditions. In different religions, there are different rituals that are the best examples of traditions that have been handed over by one generation to another. The way people greet each other, the way they eat, sleep and dress up are all distinct in different societies and reflect different traditions that developed over the course of time. Some objects are considered auspicious while some are believed to be evil in different societies and become a part of their traditions. For example, black is associated with evil and death in western society, and which is why people wear black clothes when they attend a funeral. On the other hand, people choose to wear white during funerals in India as white is the symbol of purity and death is regarded as an eternal truth.

The word tradition comes from the Latin tradere which means to give or to hand over. The word today has come to mean things and practices that are not modern and are being followed since old times. For a tradition to be formed, it should be passed over at least three generations. Tradition can be religious or cultural in nature. There are family traditions being followed in families for centuries too. There are finally individual traditions such as making resolutions on the eve of New Year.
What is the difference between Culture and Tradition?
* The composite body of knowledge of people that is acquired and not genetic is referred to as its culture

* Traditions are practices that are passed from one generation to another and are still being followed by the people

* Traditions are a part of the complex culture

* Traditions are mostly religious in nature though there are cultural traditions and family traditions too

* Culture is reflected in the language, dress and tools used by a people and the manner in which they share social skills

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Difference Between Culture and Tradition

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Culture vs Tradition Culture and traditions are similar meaning terms and concepts used commonly by us in conversation. Many of us believe the two concepts are so similar that they can be used interchangeably. However, it is not so, and despite similarities and overlapping, there are differences that are highlighted in this article.

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How do celebrities affect your lifestyle?

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Joe’s open ended question.

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Mauro F. Guillén is director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies. A native of Spain and a management professor at the Wharton School, Guillén has done extensive research on globalization and also serves on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Multinationals. He spoke with Knowledge@Wharton High School about the power of globalization. An edited transcript of the conversation follows:
Knowledge@Wharton High School: What is globalization, and why should students be interested in it?

Mauro Guillén: Globalization is a very complex process that encompasses many different subjects - economy, politics, culture, society - and basically puts us into contact with everyone around the world. Students should be interested in it because it is what defines the modern world - every day we are more aware of, and more connected with, other people in other parts of the globe.

KWHS: How do you think globalization has affected the system of education?

Guillén: In a very powerful and clearly defined way. For starters, I think the content that is used in classrooms is more readily available every day thanks to new communication technologies. And also because every day there is more interaction in the world of education, there is more exchange between students and professors from one place to another.

KWHS: What benefits do we receive from globalization? Sometimes students think it can be somewhat harmful. Is this true?

Guillén: Of course. Globalization can carry with it negative consequences, especially for those communities or people or countries that do not adapt well to the change. Globalization can also produce, as we have seen in the last three years, very complicated and complex crises that are called systemic - in other words, they affect various countries at once. What happens in one country has consequences, or ramifications, in other countries and other economies [around] the world.

KWHS: What challenges do students have to face thanks to globalization? Do you think they face more competition?

Guillén: Of course. Look, for example, here in the United States. Before, it was relatively easy to come study here, and now it turns out that anyone in the world can compete for a slot in a university. I think that globalization does create many opportunities, but it also means much more competition. But competition in principle is not necessarily a bad thing. It is also stimulating, and it prompts you to better yourself and transcend your personal boundaries.

KWHS: Do you think social networks such as Facebook or Twitter have a positive impact on globalization?

Guillén: It seems like in general they have a highly beneficial impact, because otherwise people would not use them. There are still people who fear that participation in these social networks could turn into an activity that has to be catered to every minute of every day. But the truth is that you can control - whether you use Facebook or you use Twitter, etc. - up to what point you want to participate and how much information about yourself you want others to see.

KWHS: What can a student age 18 or 22 do to take advantage of globalization?

Guillén: What is most important is to be exposed to globalization. Get to know other places [through] contact with people and reading - not just traveling, but also reading about other countries. [It's also important] to comprehend what you pointed out earlier - both the opportunities that globalization presents, as well as the problems or challenges that this process involves.
Related Links

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Globalization 'Defines the Modern World' - KWHS

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Mauro F. Guillén, an expert in economies of the world, sits down with Knowledge@Wharton High School to discuss how every day we become more aware of, and connected with, people in other parts of the globe - and the resulting opportunities and challenges.

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-Zachary

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Provide unmatched healthcare experiences ...every day.

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What would this mean for the country?

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The Great Firewall of China has always been porous, allowing an easy flow of information from the outside world and into the hands of those who possessed the simple technological tools to digitally tunnel through it.

Now Beijing is preparing to create a much harder barrier against unapproved information, calling on state-owned telecommunications providers to stamp out the virtual private networks, or VPNs, that everyone from scientists to dissidents and amateur musicians use to access foreign content.

It's a move that would give China's Communist Party leadership an even greater chokehold on information.

China has mandated that personal access to VPNs be stamped out nationwide by next February, according to a Bloomberg report.
Read more: In China, homeowners anxiously wait for government to give them land rights
VPN software masks an Internet connection in a way that allows a user to browse websites as if their computer or smartphone is situated overseas.

Few of the details on the coming ban are clear; it appears it will apply to individuals rather than businesses.

Even that would mark a major change.

"If the authorities really move to neuter all VPNs, it will also mean that they have to cut off China from the global Internet," said Charlie Smith, the pseudonym used by the co-founder of GreatFire.org, which monitors and works to defeat Chinese Internet censorship.

"The long-term effects will be devastating," he added.

"A climate of fear exists inside China and even Chinese outside of China are increasingly wary of speaking their minds. By denying access to VPNs, the authorities are also effectively preventing Chinese from discovering that there are other dissenting voices out there like theirs."

A person who answered the phone at China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said he did not know about the new mandate. The Foreign Ministry also said it had no information. The country's telecommunications giants did not answer requests for comment.

But signs have already emerged that China is preparing for a crackdown. In January, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology demanded all VPN providers be registered as part of a 14-month "cleanup" of the Internet that prohibited the use of VPNs without permission. In recent weeks, several VPNs have already been removed from smartphone digital-download stores.

The megacity of Chongqing last year banned individuals and corporations from getting past the Great Firewall.

Expanding that to a nationwide ban would constitute a harsh new step in a campaign under President Xi Jinping to bring Chinese civil society, religion, entertainment and the news media to heel under the authority of the Communist Party.

China censors large portions of the foreign-language Internet, blocking access to Google services, many foreign news organizations and international social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook. Without a VPN, foreign content that isn't directly censored can also be frustratingly slow to load, and international websites that do work in China - notably Microsoft's Bing search engine and LinkedIn - accommodate Chinese censorship demands.

The majority of Chinese citizens take no steps to penetrate the Great Firewall, spending their online lives in the walled garden planted and pruned for them by the Chinese government.

But access to world knowledge is important for reasons that go well beyond seeking critical commentary on the Chinese government: vital economic data and scientific research exist outside China.

If that becomes much harder to access, it stands to hurt China's competitiveness and even more unmistakably mark the country as one dedicated to erecting barriers rather than pursuing openness, as its leadership has sought to proclaim in the months since Donald Trump became U.S. President.

"The Chinese concept of globalization is very, very different," said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of consultancy Gavekal Dragonomics.

"It's much more restrictive and involves a lot more controls."

At the same time, China wants its companies, including its Internet giants, to be multinational champions. A hard block on information flow would make that tough and could also interfere with recruiting talented people, including Chinese students who have studied abroad.

In part for those reasons, China has until now left wiggle room in its Internet restrictions.

"Many Internet companies, including China's lucrative gaming industry, are using VPNs to better their user experience. It is hard to imagine China will cut off all VPNs," said Lotus Ruan, a research fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs' Citizen Lab, which researches Internet security and human rights.

A spokesperson for one VPN provider, ExpressVPN, also expressed little worry. "The number of individuals and businesses in China relying on VPNs like ours has continued to grow. In the absence of any official statements on the matter, we see no reason to believe that there is now a fundamental shift from this status quo," said the spokesperson, who declined to provide their name.

If China does choose to make the Great Firewall impenetrable, it's unlikely to encounter much difficulty.

"Shutting down widely used VPN traffic of any scale is technically possible," said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Internet security firm Cloudflare.

In China, suspicions have emerged that Beijing's worry about VPNs has been elevated by Guo Wengui, a Chinese tycoon who has in recent months waged a YouTube and Twitter campaign to disseminate embarrassing information about China's elite political leaders.

"The Guo Effect, I'd think, has definitely given them pause," said Yaxue Cao, founder of chinachange.org, which translates Chinese democracy voices into English.

But, she added, "China is living a dangerous conceit that the world needs it no matter what and will adjust to whatever it does, with or without complaints."

The danger, Ms. Cao said, lies in China going so far that it provokes international reprisal.

It also risks internal pushback.

A ban on VPNs, in "key areas like tech in Shenzhen, it's absolutely going have an impact. Because if you are a tech company, you simply can't have the unreliability of Internet," said Christopher Balding, a business and economics scholar with the HSBC Business School in Shenzhen.

Such a move would be a transparent attempt to "slow collaboration with any foreigners at all."

Chinese propaganda and information control have already sculpted a young generation whose mentality separates them from the rest of the world, said Jasmine Bernstein Yin, a Chinese-born Columbia University student.

"My middle-school classmates who remained in China think very different from the study abroad groups," she said.

"It's nearly impossible to escape and become an independent thinker."

For someone like her, she said, it's a major obstacle to ever returning home.

The idea of "living in a 1984-like society scares me," she said.

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'The long-term effects will be devastating': China prepares to harden Great Firewall censorship

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The Great Firewall of China has always been porous, allowing an easy flow of information from the outside world and into the hands of those who possessed the simple technological tools to digitally tunnel through it.

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What will happen if robots control our mind?

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Social Media and Social Networking Sites

Like with content marketing, due to the continuously developing internet marketing industry, there are countless digital media and social networking sites , all of which have a unique characteristic and purpose. As part of an introduction, here are a few social network examples.

Facebook is the biggest and arguably most powerful social network in the world with 1.55 billion active monthly users. Regardless if you are a startup or fortune 500 company, you need to be on Facebook and start *engaging with your consumers. (*Positively. We don't want to replicate Amy's Baking Company's mistake).

Twitter is known as the ''in the moment'' platform and boasts a respectful 255 million active monthly users. Twitter is a perfect online marketing tool for businesses that want to reach out to people (and are ready for a reply). The key is to be quick and smart, ever heard of dunk in the dark ?

Instagram is a visual platform designed for customers to post, share, comment and engage through digital media . As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

LinkedIn is regarded as the professional social networking site . LinkedIn largely focuses on b2b marketing rather than b2c.

Google +, Youtube, Foursquare and Pintrest are other social network sites that harshly miss out on the list. And then there's Snapchat, the new kid on the block, who recently recorded six billion daily views . Should Facebook be worried?

What's your take on any of the above social networking sites ? Are there any other sites you display your digital media and connect with consumers on? We'd love to know !

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Why you need to understand the Importance of Social Media

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Social Media and Social Networking Sites Like with content marketing, due to the continuously developing internet marketing industry, there are countless digital media and social networking sites , all of which have a unique characteristic and purpose. As part of an introduction, here are a few social network examples.

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Samuel’s open ended question
How will modern style our traditional way ?

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Article ( Wiley )

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What are the difference between media and tradtion?

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How is, and will our modern world change?

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What is the difference between traditional world and the modern world?
What kind of things are there in the modern world?

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Daniel J Levitan: 'When trying to concentrate on a task, an unread email in your inbox can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.'

Our brains are busier than ever before. We're assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.

Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife-like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight. They're more powerful and do more things than the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago. And we use them all the time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we're walking across the street, catch up on email while standing in a queue - and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter, cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative podcast on urban beekeeping.

But there's a fly in the ointment. Although we think we're doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are "not wired to multitask well... When people think they're multitasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there's a cognitive cost in doing so." So we're not actually keeping a lot of balls in the air like an expert juggler; we're more like a bad amateur plate spinner, frantically switching from one task to another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us but worried it will come crashing down any minute. Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new - the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty- seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.

In the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn't answer or we turned the ringer off. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach us at all times - one might have gone out for a walk or been between places - and so if someone couldn't reach you (or you didn't feel like being reached), it was considered normal. Now more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so ingrained that people in meetings routinely answer their mobile phones to say, "I'm sorry, I can't talk now, I'm in a meeting." Just a decade or two ago, those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered during a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability.

Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, London, calls it info-mania. His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. And although people ascribe many benefits to marijuana, including enhanced creativity and reduced pain and stress, it is well documented that its chief ingredient, cannabinol, activates dedicated cannabinol receptors in the brain and interferes profoundly with memory and with our ability to concentrate on several things at once. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.

Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve. MIT's Earl Miller adds, "People can't do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they're deluding themselves." And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.

'Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task.' Photograph: Alamy

Then there are the metabolic costs that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We've literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviour. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain's need for glucose.

To make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making: Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I respond to this? How do I file this email? Do I continue what I'm working on now or take a break? It turns out that decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and that little decisions appear to take up as much energy as big ones. One of the first things we lose is impulse control. This rapidly spirals into a depleted state in which, after making lots of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly bad decisions about something important. Why would anyone want to add to their daily weight of information processing by trying to multitask?

In discussing information overload with Fortune 500 leaders, top scientists, writers, students, and small business owners, email comes up again and again as a problem. It's not a philosophical objection to email itself, it's the mind-numbing number of emails that come in. When the 10-year-old son of my neuroscience colleague Jeff Mogil (head of the Pain Genetics lab at McGill University) was asked what his father does for a living, he responded, "He answers emails." Jeff admitted after some thought that it's not so far from the truth. Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.

Before email, if you wanted to write to someone, you had to invest some effort in it. You'd sit down with pen and paper, or at a typewriter, and carefully compose a message. There wasn't anything about the medium that lent itself to dashing off quick notes without giving them much thought, partly because of the ritual involved, and the time it took to write a note, find and address an envelope, add postage, and take the letter to a mailbox. Because the very act of writing a note or letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time, we didn't go to the trouble unless we had something important to say. Because of email's immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing up any little thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button. And email doesn't cost anything.

Sure, there's the money you paid for your computer and your internet connection, but there is no incremental cost to sending one more email. Compare this with paper letters. Each one incurred the price of the envelope and the postage stamp, and although this doesn't represent a lot of money, these were in limited supply - if you ran out of them, you'd have to make a special trip to the stationery store and the post office to buy more, so you didn't use them frivolously. The sheer ease of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be less polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar story. One said, "A large proportion of emails I receive are from people I barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what would normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship with them. Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail."

There are also important differences between snail mail and email on the receiving end. In the old days, the only mail we got came once a day, which effectively created a cordoned-off section of your day to collect it from the mailbox and sort it. Most importantly, because it took a few days to arrive, there was no expectation that you would act on it immediately. If you were engaged in another activity, you'd simply let the mail sit in the box outside or on your desk until you were ready to deal with it. Now email arrives continuously, and most emails demand some sort of action: Click on this link to see a video of a baby panda, or answer this query from a co-worker, or make plans for lunch with a friend, or delete this email as spam. All this activity gives us a sense that we're getting things done - and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.

Until recently, each of the many different modes of communication we used signalled its relevance, importance, and intent. If a loved one communicated with you via a poem or a song, even before the message was apparent, you had a reason to assume something about the nature of the content and its emotional value. If that same loved one communicated instead via a summons, delivered by an officer of the court, you would have expected a different message before even reading the document. Similarly, phone calls were typically used to transact different business from that of telegrams or business letters. The medium was a clue to the message. All of that has changed with email, and this is one of its overlooked disadvantages - because it is used for everything. In the old days, you might sort all of your postal mail into two piles, roughly corresponding to personal letters and bills. If you were a corporate manager with a busy schedule, you might similarly sort your telephone messages for callbacks. But emails are used for all of life's messages. We compulsively check our email in part because we don't know whether the next message will be for leisure/amusement, an overdue bill, a "to do", a query... something you can do now, later, something life-changing, something irrelevant.

This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don't answer, or if I don't answer right now?

'Because it is limited in characters, texting discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail, and its addictive problems are compounded by its hyper-immediacy.' Photograph: Alamy

Now of course email is approaching obsolescence as a communicative medium. Most people under the age of 30 think of email as an outdated mode of communication used only by "old people". In its place they text, and some still post to Facebook. They attach documents, photos, videos, and links to their text messages and Facebook posts the way people over 30 do with email. Many people under 20 now see Facebook as a medium for the older generation.

For them, texting has become the primary mode of communication. It offers privacy that you don't get with phone calls, and immediacy you don't get with email. Crisis hotlines have begun accepting calls from at-risk youth via texting and it allows them two big advantages: they can deal with more than one person at a time, and they can pass the conversation on to an expert, if needed, without interrupting the conversation.

But texting suffers from most of the problems of email and then some. Because it is limited in characters, it discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. Emails take some time to work their way through the internet and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: you receive a text, and that activates your novelty centres. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you 15 seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out "More! More! Give me more!"

In a famous experiment, my McGill colleagues Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists, placed a small electrode in the brains of rats, in a small structure of the limbic system called the nucleus accumbens. This structure regulates dopamine production and is the region that "lights up" when gamblers win a bet, drug addicts take cocaine, or people have orgasms - Olds and Milner called it the pleasure centre. A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar; they even ignored the opportunity for sex. The rats just pressed the lever over and over again, until they died of starvation and exhaustion. Does that remind you of anything? A 30-year-old man died in Guangzhou (China) after playing video games continuously for three days. Another man died in Daegu (Korea) after playing video games almost continuously for 50 hours, stopped only by his going into cardiac arrest.

Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
© Daniel J. Levitin. Extracted from The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, published by Viking (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.

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Why the modern world is bad for your brain

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Daniel J Levitan: 'When trying to concentrate on a task, an unread email in your inbox can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.' Our brains are busier than ever before. We're assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information.

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Should we see celebrities as role models?

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Debate.org is a dynamic social community where you can voice your opinion on today's hottest issues.

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What is the difference between culture and tradition in our modern world?

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What will we do if we unlock time travel and what do you think about the time paradoxes?
https://www.space.com/21675-time-travel.html

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How technology effect to people in their daily life

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What values do celebrities have?

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What’s the difference between values and tradition?

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What more will change as the world keep developing?

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What is the impact of modern technology to you?

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Why modern world became different from the tranditional world?

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What values are important in the modern world?

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How can the modern world change and be better?

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How can the modern world change and be better?

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:Wiley

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How do people feel about celebrities?

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Ms Basrai - A question to ponder upon...

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Ms Basrai - A question to ponder upon...

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Where would we gain information from if the government banned VPNs?

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What are the importance of social media to the world today?

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Modern world open-ended question Nikolas

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Modern world open-ended question Nikolas

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What are the reason why and why not we should see celebrities as role models or people to look up to?

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How are celebrities affecting our modern world ?

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Most of us find celebrities gripping in one way or another. Curious about the effect that's having? We were too.

As a teenager, I worked at a summer camp for young kids. One summer, as we sat around the campfire, I told the kids about a movie I'd seen. Naturally, they wanted more details. While a few of the other counselors chatted about the film's plot, on our side of the campfire the conversation devolved to talking about the actors' personal lives. This information enthralled most of the kids. Only one stopped me to ask, "Why do you know so much about her?"

It's impossible to escape celebrity culture. Images and details of everything celebrities do, from grocery shopping to partying, is plastered all over every newsstand and supermarket checkout aisle. Their love lives are all over the Internet. Their charitable involvements and political opinions are newsworthy. We consume their private lives like public commodities. They're treated like extensions of the entertainment industry they work in. But how does this culture of celebrity worship affect us?

We see celebrities through a screen of Photoshop, professional makeup, and designer clothes. We then broadcast this unrealistic beauty fantasy to every media outlet in the country and impose it on every woman. The impact that these unrealistic images have on our girls' self-esteem is well documented, but we don't stop. Some celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Winslet and Keira Knightly, have spoken out about this manipulation. But these lone voices are not enough to negate the terrible impact 'Photoshopping' has on our culture.

The stereotypical Hollywood beauty standard creates a conformity culture. Instead of celebrating diversity in beauty, we all want to look like Taylor Swift or Angelina Jolie. Hollywood celebrates the same body type, skin color, tiny nose and perfect facial features over and over again. Meanwhile, we shunt every other kind of 'imperfect' beauty to the sideline, and rarely ever mention intelligence or personality. After all, beauty is so much more important, right?! [Wrong!]

It's time their power was checked...

The problems with this conformity culture extend beyond just beauty, though. Many of Hollywood's products encourage sexist and racist tendencies. People of color get little representation in popular media. The film Exodus: Gods and Kings actually cast white actors to play ancient Egyptians. Meanwhile, less than half of all movies released pass the Bechdel Test (which rates films based on the criteria of containing at least two female characters who talk to each other about something besides a man), even though its standards are quite low. Every movie should have enough women to pass this test without even trying, but few succeed. Hollywood can't pass basic standards of representation, yet they command significant social power.

The popularity of interviews means that celebrity culture now reaches into every aspect of actors' personal lives and opinions. While women like Emma Watson use this power for good, others share their uninformed views in damaging ways. Shailene Woodley, for example, announced that she isn't a feminist because she doesn't hate men. She is one of many celebrities who have denounced feminism for reasons that reveal their ignorance on the subject. More disappointing than Woodley's uninformed views, though, was the attention they got. Woodley has no idea what she's talking about when it comes to feminism, since she dismisses it as a man-hating war of the sexes. So why do we listen to her?

Shailene Woodley's starring roles in two young adult hits means she has a huge tween fan-base. Because of our growing obsession with celebrity culture, her tween fans are by now well aware of her opinions on feminism. It's easy for informed adults to dismiss Woodley's views, but most of her tween audience is new to feminism. For them, Woodley's uneducated words can do a lot more damage. Of course, Woodley should have her own opinions, incorrect as they may be, but that doesn't mean the media should spread them around. Shailene Woodley's profession in no way qualifies her to talk about feminism, but we still listen to her opinion.

More worrying is the blurring line between celebrity and politics. Celebrities endorse politicians and presidential candidates. Though we all like to think that their opinions don't affect ours, they do have an impact. Given the way most media channels broadcast their opinions, it's hard to escape. It goes the other way as well: politicians have appeared in the past on talk shows meant for actors to talk about their personal lives. But we shouldn't mix Hollywood and Washington. Actors have a right to their political opinions, but it's not appropriate for them to carry so much weight in society at large.

We're all conforming to the same ideals; it's time to break free of the Hollywood mold.

As a huge movie fan, I believe in the work actors do. The entertainment industry can be a source of inspiration, powerful commentary, or great laughs. But Hollywood's social power goes far beyond the movies it produces, and it's time that power was checked.

The solution is to disengage with the celebrity world. It's hard to escape the constant barrage of information that overwhelms us everyday, but it's worth it. Each of us can make the choice to de-glamorize celebrity and step away from the damaging culture of celebrity worship. Limit actors' power of widespread expression to the movies that made them famous in the first place. Only in this way can we limit the inordinate cultural power Hollywood currently commands.
How do you feel about your interactions with the celebrity world?

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How Do Celebrities Really Affect Us? - URBANETTE: Lifestyle Magazine & Blog

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Most of us find celebrities gripping in one way or another. Curious about the effect that's having? We were too. As a teenager, I worked at a summer camp for young kids. One summer, as we sat around the campfire, I told the kids about a movie I'd seen.

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What makes the world modern?
-Connie