Agalia Tan
@agaaalia
Senior Strategist at We Are Social
RADAR Chapter Lead for Singapore
Agalia Tan
bio.site
We each carry an individual archive of different music, books, films, rituals. When we bring them into contact with another person’s own library of experience - through conversation, recommendation, or the simple act of gifting - we are no longer discovering solely through algorithmic consumption but through human exchange. We may not be... See more
Noah Lipschitz • Discovery in the Age of the Discovered
q2 musings and new forms of gathering
it’s always been about dialogue
Remi Carlioz calls this the Logged World , where your sense of self only becomes legible through data and metrics. Carlioz coins the Logged World as the modern inversion to what philosopher Edmund Husserl called the Lebenswelt: the lifeworld , the world which is simply there and can only truly be known “through seeing, touching, feeling, hearing... See more
Discovery in the Age of the Discovered
Werther’s infamous blue coat - a symbol of his romanticism
Werther fever (Wertherfieber).
Young men took to dressing in the blue-and-yellow combination as a statement of Romantic sensibility, melancholy, and passionate suffering. It was arguably one of the first examples of a literary character directly driving fashion trends.
The "Werther Effect"
The novel's impact went darker than fashion. There were widespread reports — disputed by modern historians but culturally potent — of young men across Europe imitating Werther's suicide, some allegedly dressed in the blue coat. This gave rise to the term the "Werther Effect," which is still used today in psychology and sociology to describe the phenomenon of suicide contagion following high-profile coverage of a death.
Literary Significance
The novel essentially launched the Sturm und Drang movement (Storm and Stress) in German literature — a precursor to full Romanticism — championing intense emotion, individual feeling, and rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism. Goethe himself later grew somewhat ambivalent about the work, feeling it had unleashed something he couldn't fully control. Napoleon reportedly read it seven times and brought it on his Egyptian campaign.
to feel intensely is not a liability, that to be moved by a sentence, a glance, a flower is not proof of naïveté but evidence that we are still alive to textures algorithms cannot catalogue.
Romanticism Is Not A Weakness
Just two humans behaving as if tenderness were still newsworthy.
Romanticism Is Not A Weakness
Romanticism is often accused of being impractical, yet it tends to manifest in the most practical currency we have – our time, our labour, our willingness to be inconvenienced. A bouquet may be a cliché, but leaving work early to accompany someone to a doctor’s appointment is never mistaken for theatre. The real risk isn’t in the gesture itself,... See more
Romanticism Is Not A Weakness
q2 musings and
These gestures rarely photograph well, which is precisely why they count; they’re not designed to impress an audience but to ease another person’s passage through the world.
Romanticism Is Not A Weakness
Grand gestures don’t have to be cinematic; most of them happen off-screen, in the silent economy of effort and attention. Sometimes they’re logistical: rearranging a calendar to attend a performance that matters to someone else, driving across the city in rush hour to hand-deliver a forgotten document. Sometimes they’re linguistic: the text that... See more
Romanticism Is Not A Weakness
A love letter kept in a drawer, a photograph faded at the edges, a toast raised each year on an anniversary... these are gestures of affection and also improvised rituals of preservation, ways of smuggling something fragile and mortal into a semblance of permanence. They insist that the intensity we once felt will not be entirely lost to time, that... See more