#02: Animojis, Gender-neutral Dolls and Mental Health
Hi, and thanks for joining me for the second edition of this newsletter! This past week I tried to get Glastonbury tickets (alongside other 2.4 million people) - they went on sale on Thursday and Sunday, but had no luck. It’s going to be their 50th anniversary next year, so still hoping I might get some in their official resale in April. Right, on with this week’s edition.
⚡️Fast culture (something popular/trendy/viral this week)
This week my timeline was all of the sudden flooded with Animoji videos (which I had honestly forgotten about). But when this Twitter user shared a video of her niece as an octopus, she started an avalanche of cute videos. It went on for days (the original video has 12M views and counting, but this one is my favourite)
It’s no surprise that Animojis are fun for kids, they allow you to essentially create an animated cartoon of yourself, a caricatured, personalized avatar that smiles, blinks, and talks in sync with your own movement in real-time. It’ll be interesting to explore the psychology behind the digital expression of kids who grow up with this kind of tech. More broadly, with the new Memojis building on the craze started by Bitmojis, personalised avatar inch towards being an ineradicable part of our culture.
🌎Slow culture (related to deeper changes in society)
Just how much are younger generations’ attitudes toward gender and sexuality changing? According to JWT Innovation Group, 56% of US Gen Zers know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns, and 81% of them believe that a person shouldn’t be defined by gender. Aligned to this, Mattel recently launched a gender-neutral doll.
The separation between male and female is becoming irrelevant for young people who want to live their life without labels invented by adults. The design of the doll is excellent: they did tons of iterations to make sure that faces, body shape, clothes and even colours would appeal to all kids and “welcome everyone”. Their communication strategy and messaging have been extremely careful and consistent across all channels, and it’s really good to see that a company that for so long perpetuated unrealistic standards of beauty, is now moving past the binary approach to gender. (BTW, the doll is on sale for £ 34.99 on Amazon UK, if you are keen to get one)
🖌Unusual pattern (exploring the relationship between the unrelated)
This week it really surprised me to hear that Airbnb has developed a product around animal tourism called “Airbnb Animal Experiences”.
This product sits at the intersection between urban life, technology, travel, and animal welfare. Considering that by 2050, 68% of the world population will live in urban areas, we are distancing ourselves from the natural world. Animals are already part of travel experiences (you can quickly think of riding elephants, swimming with dolphins, etc) but a new standard for animal tourism is needed to end shady practices. Even if technology can make it easier to access these experiences, it’s vital that this doesn’t mean that only a few people can do this ethically and that we find humane ways to grow our connection to nature for all.
🎯Cultural insight (the insight from culture behind an advert)
This weekend ITV interrupted Britain’s Got Talent final to launch a mental wellness campaign, created by Uncommon Creative Studio. The presenters introduced the initiative and paused the show to encourage people to use the one-minute break to talk to each other and break the silence surrounding mental health.
Each culture sets the tone of how mental health is treated (and seen) through its institutions - these establish how mental health services are organised, delivered and paid for. In the UK, mental health is treated with an individualistic view of self: separateness, independence, self-sufficiency. This, paired up with the fact that families and community structures are suffering under the demands of modern life, makes it even more important to have a campaign shift the approach from the individual to the group. Our health depends on our relationships with the wider social, cultural and natural environments, and we need to return to them. In this context, a campaign that prioritises connections with others and sets this as the basis of psychological well-being is a huge driver for cultural change.
🕶 Bonus track
TikTok of the week: POV (for "point of view") videos are shot from a first-person perspective, so the viewer is the main character of the video and who reacts to an imaginary situation being played by the TikToker. In this one, a TikTok obsessed parent wakes you up for school, performing 5 different viral dances to encourage you to get out of bed. I can imagine some real parents actually learning this routine.
And some extra links:
Experts say that Brexit vocabulary is growing too fast for the public to keep up.
The Beatles’ Abbey Road album returned to Number 1 in the UK and Paul McCartney had something to say
The Glenlivet just invented whiskey cocktail pods, as if the Tide Pod crisis had never happened
Thanks so much for reading, and you can always reply to this email to share your thoughts, and get in touch with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. See you next time.
Florencia
Cultural Patterns is a newsletter by Florencia Lujani about cultural insight, creativity and strategy. If you’ve enjoyed it, consider subscribing :)