I have a history of depression in my family, and it did not skip a generation with me. My father battled depression for a large part of his life. He is better now, but I know that the same old demons...
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I posted to hubpages.com
Arguing with Yourself: Tips to Battle Depression
http://hubpages.com/hub/Arguing-with-Yourself-An-Effective-Way-to-Battle-Depression
- Tags:
- professional
- tips
- life
- depression
- god
- how to
- family
- advice
- friends
- myself
- suicide
- get up
- feel tired
August 22 2009, 11:50am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The Critics and Social Media
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2008/11/24/the-critics-and-social-media
In the creative world, the views of critics have traditionally been held to be of some significant influence. A few bad reviews could kill off a promising new project.
It was also possible for the public to ignore the critics and vote with their money, or build a reputation through word of mouth, but for everybody involved it’s like paddling against the stream when the critics are against you. Social media such as blog comments, forums and comment-enabled media sharing sites would appear to hold promise to have the effect of bringing the critics opinions under the active scrutiny of the masses. But is it happening yet? Take the Guardian for example. They have a series of blogs with comments enabled and many of the main writers do indeed engage there to some extent. There’s even a dedicated theatre blog which covers regional and international theatre but the main West End Reviews are published on the news site without comments.
The other newspaper websites are the same. It’s interesting because Linda wrote a roundup of Imagine This Reviews on our own London Theatre Breaks blog. Imagine This is a new musical which had it’s preview press night in London’s West End last week. The critics reviews were nearly all bad, but the blog garnered a series of positive and well written “user generated” reviews that seem to urge others to defy the bad reviews and go and enjoy the show.
So I’m just kind of brainstorming what’s going on here:
Why is there such a gulf between the opinions of the journalist professional critics and the public? I’ve seen comments before which accuse the critics of perhaps being jaded through reviewing so many pieces that they can’t really appreciate them in the same way as the public any more, and that’s a process which makes sense. Critics have also retorted, somewhat snobbishly, that the appreciative audiences are merely victims of not very subtle propaganda or marketing manipulation. It’s also perfectly possible that the blog commenters are not all rank and file theatre goers themselves but could be relatives of the cast or even financial backers with a vested interest in talking up the show. Who reads newspaper critics anyway! Google provides the instant answers these days, in the form of an assortment of reviews from which we have to decide for ourselves which is relevant, but how do we make that decision?
Posted by Andy Roberts The Critics and Social Media
November 24 2008, 6:32am | Comments »
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