Social Media Responses to the Pandemic: What Makes a Coronavirus Meme Creative

The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, and to learn its lessons. Social media is a privileged space for mundane and participative creativity through the production and sharing of coronavirus Internet memes. In this article, we examine the creativity of such memes from a dedicated Reddit community. We ask, in particular, what makes a coronavirus meme creative and what this creativity tells us about the pandemic and popular understandings of it. To answer these questions, we use a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods by having 480 memes coded by three social media users for surprise, meaningfulness, elaboration, humor, and creativity and qualitatively analyzing those memes that score highly on each dimension. An interesting finding concerns the importance of elaboration and humor for the evaluation of creativity in the case of memes, above the more traditional criteria of surprise (proxy for novelty) and meaningfulness (proxy for appropriateness), perhaps a feature unique for Internet spaces. The article ends with reflections on what these findings tell us about creativity on social media more generally and the creative processes involved in the generation and reception of coronavirus memes in particular.

A Pattern Language for Social Field Shifts

The complex systemic issues of today, including climate change, racism, social inequality, mental health crisis, call for new ways of engaging the heart (feeling), mind (thinking), and will (doing) to actually change deep-rooted behaviors. To develop these new ways of engaging, one must learn how to cultivate first, one’s interior condition (the inner place from which we operate) and second, one's capacities to co-create with others the exterior conditions for healthy social relationships. In this paper, we claim that by living in a body we are embodied and that wisdom lives in a holistic knowing that includes embodied intelligence. We argue that to address the complex challenges of our times, we must cultivate embodied and perceptual capacities and a language for our embodied experience(s). Over three years of workshops with advanced practitioners of an embodied practice called Social Presencing Theater (SPT), we used embodied activities and design prompts (drawing, photo, video) to surface and make visible social patterns. This has led us to develop a language in the context of social systems change, in particular of social field shifts (i.e., transformations in the relational and felt qualities of our social systems). Through this paper we aim to contribute to social field research by proposing an embodied, visual, and verbal language for social groups to describe and reflect on social field shifts, made up of two parts: first, an aesthetic language to describe social field qualities; and second, three families of social field archetypes to describe social fields.

THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS. IS CAPITALISM AT A NEW TURNING POINT?

Mankind will prevail in the fierce war against the coronavirus, a hidden, treacherous foe that has been attacking randomly and leaving many human deaths behind. The struggle with this pandemic has an end in sight because we have effective weapons to combat it now, such as vaccines which are be used on a grand scale, worldwide. We will overcome the severe economic downturn as well; but this crisis will leave deep scars, given that economies are witnessing sweeping changes. These changes, adding to tensions and intricate issues and policy dilemmas that date back prior to the Pandemic and the current economic crisis, call for introspection, examination of economies’ functioning and a revisiting of public policies. The financial crisis that erupted a decade ago prodded social scientists and policy-makers to think about serious problems that afflict modern economies. In the text below I hook up with ideas that I have expressed in recent years and extrapolate them to the fallout from the current crises

Environmental Ethics in Akyem Abuakwa: Developing the Ecological Zone through the African Worldview

Akyem Abuakwa’s geographical location puts her in a different environmental condition. Both natural and human factors have combined in causing massive environmental degradation and ecological crisis. The environmental degradation and ecological crisis call for exploration of indigenous knowledge to construct indigenous ecological orientations and environmental concerns that could be relevant to recent times. Using qualitative design, the study found out that the traditional belief among the people of Abuakwa has created the awareness that human beings are answerable to the line of ancestors for their stewardship over the non-human parts of creation-land, flora and fauna; all these belong to the ancestors. The study proposes that environmental ethics through the African worldview and bioethical African worldview would dictate a fresh environmental concern and ecological orientation for the world today. The study is relevant as it contributes to traditional environmental conservation ethics.

Oil Wealth, Corruption, and the Multiple F(Ph)aces of Internal Colonialism in Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground

This paper explores Ahmed Yerima’s play Hard Ground (2011) to show how Yerima employs dramatic elements to interrogate manifestations of corruption and internal colonialism engendered by violent struggles for oil wealth in the Niger Delta region. Some scholars from the Niger Delta region have alleged that Yerima’s Hard Ground falls short of being a “realistic” portrayal of the oil crisis in the Niger Delta. Their claim suggests that the play is an exercise in the service of the establishment. However, this study contends that Yerima’s representations of corruption and internal colonialism in the crisis are meant neither to underestimate the role of the establishment nor to overlook the suffering of the people in the region. The playwright’s portrayals of corruption and various forms of internal colonialism generating the oil crisis are informed by postcolonial, multiple, contradictory, and complementary realities/truths, which often reveal the complexities of socio-economic and political crises in the postcolonial African state. The study reveals that leadership egoism and failure are among the key factors that aggravate violent crises which recur in the region. In its conclusion, the paper asserts that the multiple insights that Yerima’s Hard Ground offers on the oil crisis call for collective efforts within the Niger Delta region in particular and Nigeria as whole at finding lasting solutions to the region’s crises orchestrated by the violent struggle for oil wealth.

Recent Advances in the Design & Development of A Drone Used for Bio-Medical Engineering Applications : Medi-Sky

The primary target or the motivation behind this paper is to build up a model of the automaton rescue vehicle to help the ambulances in sparing human lives by sending the drugs to the working environment where the influenced patients are available. A huge number of individuals bite the dust in light of rescue vehicle delays. The time taken by emergency vehicle to achieve a patient depends a great deal on the course and the traffic on the way. At the point when a medicinal crisis happens, the reaction time can have a significant effect between a real existence spared and an actual existence lost. Shockingly, ambulances can stall out in rush hour gridlock and arrive of late after the crisis call has been made, in which an unfortunate casualty may have endured a great deal of wounds and can even lose his/her life. The utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or "Automatons" has been utilized for quite a while for a wide range of uses. The motivation behind this paper is to build up a model of automaton emergency vehicle to help the ambulances in sparing human lives. The emergency vehicle automaton enters the scene at the moment time and constant directions are given by the administrator. The automaton can gauge different constant wellbeing parameters of the patient, for example, temperature, pulse and heartbeat. The estimations of these basic parameters are then transmitted to the specialists present in a rescue vehicle. Well, the idea is to implement the same in the rural areas where penetration of healthcare is poor. The system is being designed to look after the infants and aged people in the fast-moving urban lives. The work developed in this paper along with the results shown depicts the effectivity of the methodology proposed.

The Unfinished History of European Integration

When the Treaty of Lisbon went into effect in December 2009, the event seemed to mark the beginning of a longer phase of institutional consolidation for the EU. Since 2010, however, the EU has faced multiple crises, which have rocked its foundations and deeply challenged the narrative of 'the end of the history of integration'. The military crisis in eastern Ukraine and the refugee crisis call for a joint approach, but in practice reveal the difficulty of maintaining even the appearance of European solidarity and political unanimity. The financial and socio-economic crisis in southern Europe and Brexit present the EU with the latest set of challenges. If seventy years of European integration have taught us anything, it is that fundamental crises as well as moments of rapid institutional change form integral parts of its history. The Unfinished History of European Integration presents the reader with historical and theoretical knowledge on which well-founded judgements can be based. This textbook on European integration history has been written as a student textbook for a bachelor's or master's programme in European integration history, as a manual for the analysis of EU sources and, finally, as an information resource for a bachelor's or master's thesis.

Konsolidierung, Effizienz und Stabilität: Sind große Banken leistungsfähiger als kleine?

SummaryAlthough recent experiences made during the ongoing international financial crisis call for smaller entities in banking systems, consolidation still takes place in many industrialized economies. The often stretched argument that large banks are able to establish economies of scale as well as economies of scope, ignores at least the risks of financial intermediaries becoming ‚too big to fail‘ or ‚too interconnected to fail‘. Our analysis presents reliable evidence that even the assumption that big banks are less inefficient than small ones is far away from being convincing. We apply a range of indicators to test for both performance and risk taking capability of banks in different financial systems. Our findings suggest empirical merits of diversified banking systems and higher systemic risk for financial industries dominated by global players.