Hobbyfications and Algorithmic Determinations
vibes rule everything around me
Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” hits 17th week at No. 1; Anya Taylor-Joy and Willow Smith star in Dior Beauty's latest campaign; and at least two Luigi Mangione documentaries are already in the works.
THE EXTREMELY OFFLINE JOY OF THE BOARD GAME CLUB, nyt
One of the biggest — or most reported-on — stories of the year is the rise of Gen Z hobbies, from birdwatching to pottery, from run clubs to book clubs. Here, Callie Holtermann writes about the sudden popularity of tabletop games, with groups like NYC Backgammon Club, Mahjong Mistress in Los Angeles, and Knightcap Chess Club events in Austin drawing young crowds. The number of board game events organized using the invitation service Partiful quadrupled in the past year, the company said. Now that we’ve sufficiently established that young people are looking for opportunities to spend time with like-minded people in pleasant surroundings away from screens, I can’t help but wonder what will happen next. Will the pendulum swing back? How many hobbies is too many hobbies?
NFL INKS DEAL WITH BETCHES TO PRODUCE FOOTBALL CONTENT TARGETED AT GEN Z, MILLENNIAL WOMEN, variety
As an NFL partner, Betches will produce content that “enables millennial and Gen Z women to tap into exciting NFL moments,” while also presenting advertising and sponsorship revenue opportunities for brands looking to reach the demo. The timing is auspicious: As Morning Consult’s Ellyn Briggs pointed out, the NFL's net favorability among Gen Z & millennial women has been climbing steadily since 2020, with five of the league's top 10 best-performing months among this audience occurring within the past calendar year.
HOW TO REMAKE A 70-YEAR-OLD LATE-NIGHT SHOW FOR THE TIKTOK ERA, hollywoodreporter
With 100 million-plus followers across platforms, The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon is the most-followed late night program, most-followed entertainment program, and most-followed talk show on social video platforms. On TikTok alone, the show has 22.3M followers, compared to, say, SNL, which has just under 10M. Over the last 12 months alone, The Tonight Show has drawn 8.3 billion views across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X. (Who knew?! Not I.)
FED UP WITH TWITTER, AMERICANS ARE FLEEING TO GROUP CHATS, businessinsider
Since the election, thousands have abandoned their X accounts — and while alternatives like Bluesky have seen growth, many people are turning further inward to smaller group chats, via text message or on platforms like Discord, where they can have conversations “free of algorithmic determinations.” (Re: “algorithmic determinations,” I really liked Teddy Brown’s piece about “the technology that actually runs our world.”)
‘IT’S GAME OVER FOR FACTS’: HOW VIBES CAME TO RULE EVERYTHING FROM POP TO POLITICS, theguardian
Facts are dead, writes Jess Cartner-Morley, and they’ve been replaced by vibes, “now item No 1 on boardroom agendas worldwide.” She continues:
Before we had vibes, we had the chillier, more Germanic zeitgeist. Both tap into our appetite for locating our lives within a bigger picture. But vibes are crowd-sourced and ground-up, where the zeitgeist was ordained by experts, a trickle-down form of cultural economics. And where the zeitgeist was future-facing, a relentless drive toward modernity, vibes are more unpredictable, prone to bouts of nostalgia (cottagecore: vintage Laura Ashley dresses, dried flowers, having chickens) and whimsy (dark academia: polaroid photos of gothic architecture, writing a journal in a fountain pen).
One last thought:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser