Brandymore Castle

I am disappointed by seeing a significant number of articles (mostly in the blogs, such as this article that makes an assertion and then follows with several anecdotes about mental patients to justify the assertion) on Psychology Today where the author is: employing psychology to support negative characterizations of persons holding political views different from the author's own; employing psychoanalysis at a distance to explain the political beliefs and policy opinions of others; using psychology to support speculation about the intentions of others whose beliefs about the world and policy differ from the author's; the labeling of people with opposing views as suffering from diagnosable mental illness, arguing or implying those views are a result of mental illness. Doing so without holding the same mirror of analysis up to their own self seems hypocritical and intellectually sloppy on the face of it. I prefer inquiry that follows the rule of curiosity. Instead of characteriz...

I am reading On the Origin of Stories , a new book by Brian Boyd , which to make a long story short, draws conclusions from recent research into the mind and evolutionary psychology, that status is essentially attention (or at the very least attention is the currency of status). I can see how this applies to Twitter. The ability to 'favorite' another twitter's content is yet another way of bestowing attention. Twitter is an attention machine. When visiting a twitter's profile, being mentioned or retweeted in the stream of updates or being favorited are ways of gaining attention. A twitterer gains when a user with high attention favorites one of their tweets and more so, when they retweet.