Top Memes considers memes used or created by our social movements to challenge the status quo, and the mass memes shaping politics and pop culture. For us, memes spread meaning through story, via symbols and practices and are transmitted through writing, speech, gestures, images, rituals, and phenomena.
Read MoreTop Memes considers memes used or created by our social movements to challenge the status quo, and the mass memes shaping politics and pop culture.
Read MoreEvery year at the Advanced Training (AT), CSS gathers together change agents from all parts of the country to learn, collaborate and to immerse themselves with their peers in story-based strategy. A huge part of the AT is the ever-popular campaign lab, where participants are divided into small groups to apply story-based strategy to a real world campaign of one of the participants.
Read MoreOur work here at CSS is grounded in a narrative analysis of power—a recognition that humans use stories to understand the world and our place in it. Stories are embedded with power— the power to explain and justify the status quo as well as the power to make change imaginable and urgent.
Read MoreInspiration Porn – the second best thing about the internet. The other day I threw my back out while visiting DC, a painful three hours of travel from my home in Brooklyn. After two days laid out on a friend’s bed, unable put on my own socks, I took a handful of Advil and got on a plane.
Read MoreAds are a great study in compelling emotionally driven storytelling with one very clear purpose and goal - to sell you something. Good advertisers are ahead of the curve when it comes to: creativity, cultural resonance, applied psychology, and ultimately emotional manipulation.
Read MoreSometimes it is good to just shut up and listen, especially if like me you have a tendency to mansplain things. This week when I shut up, or rather stopped trying to write something very brilliant for the CSS blog, I found some really great stuff out there on the internets written by some really smart people.
Read MoreWhen I went to my Dad’s house recently there was a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos on top of the fridge. Not one to turn down the gracious offerings of any host I ate most of the bag, licking the magical MSG dust off my fingers between each handful. My once youthful lust for Doritos – scarfing down bags of them with friends while watching VHS tapes rented from Blockbuster – was reignited. That was until I saw the brand hack ad targeting Doritos parent company PepsiCo for their over usage of palm oil.
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