Perception

"Like gambling, interacting on social media activates the part of the brain involved with rewards, Bengtson said. Just as gamblers get a rush of good feelings when they win, a social media junkie feels gratification when their Facebook posts get lots of "likes," when their Twitter followers multiply, and when their Instagram photos are big hits. The repeated, positive reinforcement can turn an occasional user into a constantly connected fanatic who neglects normal human contact. "The addiction may not be as destructive as alcohol or drugs, but it can be destructive to your personal relationships and in your professional life if it interferes with your job," said Kelli Burns, a mass communications professor and social media researcher at USF."—Irene Maher Tampa Bay Times"Social media can become an addiction, but you can break free" 25 July 2013 (link)

"The tendency is to draw a circle around language, to herd neat sentences into the corral and wrangle out the parts of speech. But most problems with language, the problems that come up when you try to use it to communicate, aren’t about sentences and parts of speech. They have to do with wild herds of sentences, out on the open range. Don’t get me wrong. Had there been a shared grammar and dictionary in the midst of that passionate confrontation between Hispanics and police in Mount Pleasant, it couldn’t have hurt. But, as the meetings and arguments and newspaper articles since the riot make clear, the confrontation in Mount Pleasant was an encounter between different worlds of meaning, meaning that travels well beyond the dictionary, meaning that tells you who you are, whom you’re dealing with, the kind of situation you’re in, how life works and what’s important in it—meaning that ties language inside the circle, grammar and the dictionary, to the world outside. If you want to use language, if you want to communicate, language inside the circle isn’t enough. The circle is a lie. It’s like saying that if you can put rings on a piston, you can drive in traffic. To understand language, you have to understand that differences in language go well beyond what you find in the grammar and the dictionary. Otherwise, why would my Black and female colleagues and I have had trouble, even though we all spoke the “same” language?"—Michael Agar Language Shock: Understanding The Culture Of Conversation 1996 (link)

"This study finds that homicides with a white perpetrator and a black victim are ten times more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a black perpetrator and a white victim, and the gap is larger in states with Stand Your Ground laws. After accounting for a variety of factors, such as whether the victim and perpetrator were strangers, the gap is smaller, but still significant. Cases with a white perpetrator and a black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim."—John Roman Urban Institute "Race, Justifiable Homicide, and Stand Your Ground Laws" 26 July 2013 (link)