Updates from the Lab

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Latest News

• As the multiverse becomes more pervasive, what might this mean for culture at large? Harmony Labs’ Executive Director Brian Waniewski, Harmony Labs’ Culture Analyst Sem Devillart, and Head of LabXR Andres Leon-Geyer wrote a new piece on the multiverse, and how it might act as a new organizing principle for understanding reality. Read it here.
• Liberation Ventures needed to understand whether current narratives about reparations in the U.S. were helping or hindering Black audiences’ belief that reparations are possible. They recently wrote a piece about how our values-based audience research provided the necessary insights to develop a strategy for moving people toward a new narrative of reparations.
• How are our partners using research to tell better stories? In 2022, we partnered with Caring Across Generations on narratives of care, and we recently followed up with Ishita Srivastava, Chief of Narrative & Culture Change, to see how this research became the foundation for their largest advertising campaign to date. Listen to the conversation.
• Connecting with audiences means speaking their language — and sometimes their language is Spongebob, anime, and NSFW memes. Our longtime partner Nuclear Threat Initiative worked with TaskForce, a cultural organizing agency, to develop new media for a denuclearization campaign, producing GIFs that used symbols, colors, and tones most familiar to their audience. Check out what they made here.
• Earlier this year, we worked with Narrative Initiative to support a cohort of artists, organizers, and educators prototyping new approaches to storytelling that could challenge problematic Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural narratives, particularly the Model Minority Myth. Explore our research insights (and a notable success) here.
• More ongoing projects at the Lab: climate change, immigration, education, and video games. Subscribe to our email newsletter for future updates on this exciting work.

What We’re Into

• From Coco to Leo, the U.S. Open drew widespread attention this month, with the @usopen account on TikTok playing with sounds, templates, and captions to create flashy narratives about the spectacle of tennis, discussed by James Hansen for The Dirt.
• Streaming reigns, media conglomerates rule, and the WGA and SAG strikes persist, demanding data transparency and AI regulation as necessary for the future of creators’ rights and compensation. Read more in a piece from the LA Times.
• AI demands electricity and generates heat, and heat requires water — specifically, 500mL of water per 5–50 ChatGPT prompts. Learn more in this AP report about the hidden environmental impact of this rapidly evolving industry.
• Imagine the internet as a sanitation system, not just a town square: content is water, websites are pumps, and unintended consequences are infections. This piece from The Atlantic looks at how we might reimagine platform design to make social media safer for everyone.

Have an interesting media research idea? Let’s talk!