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Heart & Soul Magazine Keyword Breakdown
As promised earlier, I thought I would do a page-by-page breakdown of Heart & Soul magazine. I went through it and annotated it with a Sharpie to indicate what the main keywords are on each page. Bear in mind that this is a “women’s health” magazine. Obviously my perception of it and selection of keywords is biased, but by this point I would imagine you understand probably what my biases are; I try to be open with them, which is more than I can say for this magazine.
Note: each word itself counts for 1 instance, and each tally mark counts for another. So, for instance, “Family |||” indicates four major occurrences of that concept, usually on a full page though this tallying is far from scientific in its precision.
Cars |||
Family ||||
Safety
Weight loss (fat) ||||
Exercise/Fitness ||||||||
Cosmetics ||||||||||
Diabetes |||
Health syndromes
Cancer |||||
HIV ||
Nutrition |||||||
Marriage
STD
Prescription chemicals ||||||
Depression
Injury
Memory
Media products/personalities ||||||
Violence
Fashion accessories ||
Insurance
Home ownership
Illness ||||||
Multiple sclerosis |
Healing
Race |
Addiction
Guilt
Despair
Shopping
Paralysis
Business/Work |
Psychology/Emotion
Debt
Vacation/Tourism
Clearly I am “cherry-picking” in order to prove a point, but I believe it to be a valid point. This magazine purports to be designed to encourage a “Healthy. Wealthy. Wise.” lifestyle, but in fact its contents paint a very different picture. When the keywords are abstracted out of the context, it all seems rather ugly, in fact! It screams out page after page of blatant and covert ads for drug companies, focuses on illness in a multitude of terrible forms, and is buttressed by plentiful ads for cars, media products and cosmetics. The take-away message from the magazine seems to me to be: you can overcome illness (ie, “feel good”) by purchasing our suite of products.
Does that mean don’t read magazines? That’s your decision, like everything. But for me, I find that it pays to be aware of what I am really exposing myself to, and what the substance of things truly are that I fill myself up with. There are better choices that can be made than this.
- Internet Currency Movement
- Peer-to-Peer Banking w/ Shared Value Communities
- Eliminate Pesky Periods For Good!
- Sophia Stewart in Uptown Magazine
- Meaning of “psychedelic”
- Prev: Sex & Emotional Need
- Next: Electricity+
October 9th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
*insert New Age phrase about accentuating the positive in order to attract it*
I’m reminded of what you mentioned recently about “anti-[something] campaigns” being destined to fail. It almost makes a fashion magazine look more productive, forward-moving, and healthy than a Health magazine.
Let’s reverse it though, what keywords would be the best for a more positive Health magazine? Would there be an equal readership that took it seriously, and would there be sponsors to pay for the advertising?
October 9th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
The only magazine worth reading was the Weekly World News and they went out of business. What does that tell you? Actually I don’t know. I don’t read magazines, for the same reason I don’t watch commercials.
October 10th, 2007 at 1:06 am
Hey Tim, I have something to say about this that’s extremely hard to put into words, because its still fetal in my mind. I’m just going to ramble random thoughts at you and hope it helps me gather my thoughts. If it helps anybody else here that’s an added benefit. (I hope you don’t mind me using your site as a place to think out loud…)
1) The Ouroborus, the snake with its tail in its mouth, is an ancient symbol of power.
2) Powerful languages, those which can encapsulate meaning, have the qualities of the ouroborus in that they consume what they output. (Evalutation of an expression in such a langage results in a new expression in the language, like with regular english and boolean logic.)
3) The weakness of evaluating a page based on its keywords as you did it is that it doesn’t have the ouroborus quality, which is to say that combinations of keywords don’t themselves output keywords for instance, a high occurence of “getting drunk” with “12 step” in the same page should evaluate to the keyphrase “getting sober” while a high occurence of “getting drunk” with “bong” should evaluate to “getting wasted”. That the pages both talk of getting drunk is insignificant to their real meaning. To percieve the real meaning, we must let the oroborus quality work its magic, and allow the many layers to blossom. Of course the combinations are infinite, though…
4) What is the most interesting thing about having a brain? To me, its not what it keeps, but what it discards, and what it can later reconstruct from fragments. Have you ever heard of Kim Peek? He is a savant who can remember the contents of whole phonebooks, etc. But he is utterly disfunctional. His photographic memory overloads his brain in a certain way so he is essentially disabled in the world.
Now the things we can observe about the world, are vast. And the thoughts we can have in combining those observations are vast squared, and the thoughts about those thoughts are vast to the power of 2323. (thought is of course an ouroborus process) But what is most interesting is that we don’t think about nonsense…we don’t (unlike Kim Peek) even remember all the blah blah we see. We discard huge amounts of information, in favor of what’s important.
5) I practiced something called “chaos magick” for some time, whats interesting is something about it called “paradigm shifting” where you change your assumptions or “core values”, those thoughts that aren’t derived from experience but you just believe on faith, the axioms that everybody has but often denies. The effect seems incredibly magical, because your whole reality changes. But a large part of what’s happening is that you change what’s important and this changes the information you discard. (Kim Peek could be said to have no “values”)
6) Ouroborus languages also let people think together, as groups. The most optimal collective thinking seems to happen in groups that have the same core values, the same fundamental assumptions about reality. Shared value communities, if you will. (though I hope I’m not vandalizing your idea here)
7) The Ouroborus, the snake with its tail in its mouth, is an ancient symbol of power.
(Sorry to post such a long rant here. Love the ideas I’m hearing out of you these days…)
October 10th, 2007 at 1:40 am
It sure does, which says a lot about what “Health” really means today.
Let’s find out. Somebody make one. Ted Heistman (Green Leader), I see this falling into your general category as Secretary of the Interior.
October 10th, 2007 at 1:41 am
Yeah, reading magazines is like getting yelled at for pleasure!
October 10th, 2007 at 1:50 am
I would really like to fully grasp what this means as it sounds completely amazing!
This too. Keep trying to put this all into words though because it feels heavily like it’s going somewhere valuable.
How best to harness that innate tendency of man to selectively forget and discard? Optimization, the sixth stratagem.
I wrote to someone the other day: Reality is that which you believe to be unavoidable.
Evaluation is valuation. See also: Digg, various “lab” views.
Languages themselves do that. I don’t still see what the Ouroborous is.
http://uroboros.wordpress.com/
Perfect! Shared value communities need currency that functions as a language for the exchange of value.
And then there are trades amongst disparate shared value communities.
It’s not my idea. It’s there to be written on by others and improved.
October 10th, 2007 at 3:33 am
> Evaluation of an expression …
In any language of sufficient complexity, you can make statements in the language that can’t be proved one way or another. I can never remember how the proof of this goes (though you have to be able to make a statement about another statement), but the chap responsible is one Kurt Goedel (often spelt Godel with an umlaut) who was bezzie mates with Einstein back in the day.
The oruoboros for me is about Time. This is a biggie, but what the hey, I’m just gonna throw it out there cos I’m feelin’ crazy…
* Is the ouroboros eating its tail, or vomiting it out? *
*
So about words and their negatives. Clearly negation and opposite are different, (or not-the-same-thing
). Like left and right and not-right. And this makes me think of ‘blessed are the meek’ and ‘the light that shines in the darkness’ and ’salt of the earth’ and stuff like that. Funnily enough, all this is bundled together at the start of Matthew 5. Kinda scary actually.
October 10th, 2007 at 4:27 am
Hey Tim, thanks for your response. I was really just vommiting out a bunch of ideas that are still basically in the cocoon phase…There are forming, the butterflies haven’t manifested yet. Your post allowed me to make a critical link in my own head. It was probably wrong to use your site as a place to get my thoughts together, but whatever.
What I mean by that first statement you commented on: When I ask “Is Tim a writer?” and somebody says “yes, he is a writer” then the answer is in the same language as the question, and can be used to make more questions, so there is a constant feedback process. (”Has he written long?” etc.) Its the same with math and logic. “2+2″ evaluates to “4″, and this answer can be added as part of a new equation, etc. Its an infinite process, because the answer to the last question becomes part of the next one, the serpent is constantly swallowing its tail.
Basically, your post made me realize that when you take the appearance of clusters of keywords, this same process can be used to derive stuff about the meaning of the web page, but for this thing to work, you need to have significant clusters of keywords reduce down to keywords themselves, (the ouroborus thing) and clusters of these “meta-keywords” to reduce down to keywords themselves. For this to happen in reality huge amounts of insignificant data needs to be discarded, because there are a huge amount of possible combinations…but that happens to be what our brains are really good at…But what we discard is based on our values…
Anyway, the bottom line is this post caused me to have an epiphone, but what I probably need to do is STFU and program it this in some meaningful way. Anyway, Rock on.
October 10th, 2007 at 4:41 am
speedbird, GOD is everybody around here enlightened? I just keep getting the perfect little piece of information I need…Yes, its all about the Incompleteness Theorem. If we take it out of math into our regular experience, we could translate the theorem as “There will always be something that is true that cannot be explained by our assumptions” which basically just acknowledges the limitations of our own knowledge, and the importance that choosing our own values plays in constructing our own expereince of reality. Freaking awesome, you guys!!!
October 10th, 2007 at 5:00 am
Oh, and Tim. Imagine a peer-to-peer search engine, where the pages are indexed by surfers computers as they visit them, and everybody answers searches that get sent to them. (So you query the computers of peers on the network instead of Google.com) For efficiency, each computer is only directly connected to a few others, who are connected to a few others and so on (so the whole network can be searched by any computer.) However, imagine the network topology is based on “shared values”. What this means is that the people who your search query go to first are the people who share the same values, because that’s who you are directly connected to. So the first pages that come up for a search for “love” might be Christian websites on divine love if you are part of that shared value community, or dating sites for a different shared value community, existing on a different part of the network. The point is that the whole network structure is based on who you share values with, and the idea that the data that is most relevant to you will be the data that is most relevant to people in your SVC.
Anyway, this is the kind of beautiful thing you’ve been spawning in my head, and its also why I’m so deeply contemplating ways to assess the deeper “meaning” in web pages people visit, which you inspired me on tonight.
Thank you!!!
October 10th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Svenson - I worked in a company with a peer-to-peer network once. It really rocked. We had one machine that would go and back up the rest of them once a week, but other than that the data storage (and the printers, etc.) was distributed. If you wanted stuff, you’d look first at the people you knew well, and only then further afield. To add a new machine, you plugged it in. Peer-to-peer networking is a really interesting paradigm that seems to have fallen into disuse. [I know why ours failed: some machines arrived that had OS’s that would only work with a server. So we got a server. So that was the end of that…]
October 10th, 2007 at 7:17 am
> I don’t watch commercials
Brooke - Y’know, I’m sure Marshall McLuhan wrote something about this, along the lines of ‘for someone to actively say they don’t watch commercials means that the commercials must actually be having a significant influence on them’. That is, the content of the commercials is irrelevant; the very existence and awareness of commercials affects behaviour and thought. Which is the very essence of ‘the medium is the message’. Watch or don’t watch, it’s all a kind of watching. Which is kinda scary, I guess.
October 10th, 2007 at 8:31 am
I don’t know what this means but my Mom reports that as a baby I would wake up when the commercials came on and go right back to sleep when the show started. I remember as a child treating commercials as a sort of Name That Tune contest. It took a few weeks but when I got to the point that I could determine which commercial was coming on almost instantly I got overwhelmingly bored and started treating them like everything else on TV. This reminds me of what Tim said about rituals being so ingrained that we don’t notice them anymore.
October 10th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Awesome!
October 10th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Whoo!
October 10th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
YES!
October 11th, 2007 at 5:05 am
Peer-to-peer internet. Nice.
Actually, wasn’t that the original idea when DARPA conceived of a network that couldn’t easily be destroyed? Many peers, many paths between point ‘A’ and point ‘B’.
October 11th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Yeah, I believe that was the original plan after all! Sort of a confederated internet, which eventually got more and more centralized - just like the government itself. There’s a parable in there somewhere
October 11th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
And when you stop noticing the commercials is when they start working (or having more likelihood of working).
Yeah, kind of. But not watching is still better than watching. : )
No Svenson. Think out loud even more! Your ‘random fetal’ thoughts are blowing my mind.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Somebody do it! : )
October 11th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
[…] Take this idea from Svenson: Imagine a peer-to-peer search engine, where the pages are indexed by surfers computers as they visit them, and everybody answers searches that get sent to them. (So you query the computers of peers on the network instead of Google.com)…… the idea that the data that is most relevant to you will be the data that is most relevant to people in your SVC. […]
October 12th, 2007 at 7:52 am
> Somebody do it! : )
There’s the rub! If only someone could set it all up for us… ;-D
I think the only valid solution is some sort of standard language for doing it in. So then all anyone needs to be able to contribute is a keyboard and an instruction manual. My web-skills are non-existent so maybe this exists already. The point is that any proprietary tool that doesn’t work to an open standard is an absolute no-no. The open standard must be maintained. You can have proprietary tools to make things easier so long as the core of the language remains accessible.
October 12th, 2007 at 7:54 am
> not watching is still better than watching. : )
Well, if you’re forced to watch, then how you go about it has got to be the important thing
October 12th, 2007 at 8:04 am
And I think the fact that computers don’t come with manuals any more is /really significant/. Let’s start a pro-manual campaign. Or something. And by ‘manual’ I mean a list of commands the machine will respond to, not a list of commands to be responded to. A manual is about free exploration of the environment, like a good map.
October 12th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Wow, holy shit, I never thought of that!
October 12th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
i always wondered why there was such a desire to fiddle with a telecommunication appliance. we didn`t have the same fascination with the telephone, other than hackers and phreaks. i`m not surprised that the boxes are becoming more modular and consumerist. i would feel quite comfortable if the computer just sparked up and worked seamlessly for e-mail, video and audio and surfing. (i originally typed serfing…….i make myself laugh sometimes.) i like larry ellison`s idea of dumb terminals with less shit to crash………with all the real softare and hardware cetrally held……i know, i know. fascist.
i appreciate the idea that if we know the inner workings of the computer somehow we have more power and control but i think that`s just another lie we tell ourselves.
i think the internet is going to be taken from our grasp as soon as a solid commercial model emerges and we will see an escalation in user fees for certain aspects of what we assume is free now.
my first wife would sing tv commercial jingles like a five-year-old. i catch myself doing that occasionally and miss her as a result.
i don`t watch tv or read newspapers and i find that the mucluhanesque pressure is still there no matter what.
we live in a state of constant media.
we are, of course, merely media ourselves………..
shame to to think that the content is meaningless.
but it is nice to attain those quiet moments of nothingness.
like terence mckenna would say……”from a time before language”, or certainly outside of language and the paradigm it creates.
October 12th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
That’s like saying it’s better if we don’t know how the brain/mind functions. May as well not be into NLP and hypnosis then!
October 12th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Same here. When I moved, one year ago, I got rid of my TV and use a small, portable one every once in a while. I don’t know what the storyline is on a few shows I followed but it doesn’t feel like I almost never watch TV anymore.