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Author: Cherie Gilmour

  • AUSTRALIA

    Gamification nation

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 03 November 2022
    1 Comment

    Gamification affects almost all our online activities, from communicating to shopping, with gaming elements omnipresent in the form of points, avatars, badges, leader boards, and real-life rewards. Stripping activities of their intrinsic value, virtually any online activity could be transformed into a challenge to win. Yet users make the mistake of focusing on the game rewards without seeing how the game itself is subtly changing  behaviour.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    #Kindness

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 02 August 2022
    4 Comments

    We all know the Internet can be a seething cesspool of vitriol, so the presence of heart-warming videos of people slipping $20 into someone’s coat pocket or randomly complimenting a stranger, even the ubiquitous handing out of flowers, is largely welcome. But is this actually kindness? If an act of kindness happens and no one is there to film it, did it really happen?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Longing for the multiverse

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 02 June 2022
    1 Comment

    At a time when a second baby meant my own choices were fading into the background, I thought a lot about Nora and her life-jumping. What if I’d had kids later? What if I’d finished that degree? What if I’d taken that job? What if, what if, what if… The multiverse casts a web of different lives, all endlessly diverging like branches from a tree. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Opening up the world: The Utopian vision of Cole’s Book Arcade

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 19 April 2022

    Edward Cole understood that books encouraged community. The businessman could rub shoulders with the tramp in his Arcade. Now, in an age of division and isolation, more than ever we need spaces which facilitate community; light-filled cathedrals dedicated to the love of knowledge and stories, and their power to cross borders, politically, ideologically and culturally.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Carrying the weight of the daily news

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 29 March 2022

    A house bursts into flames as it’s submerged in floodwaters. A doctor tells a cameraman filming a dying Ukrainian child to send the footage to Putin. A newspaper delves into the murder of a young woman. It’s like a fever dream: a pandemic bleeds into the edges of a global war. The news presents information, and it has no moral duty to tell us how we should feel about it or help us untangle the knot of feelings which emerge. 

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