In many ways, the proliferation of news sources has been a wonderful thing. The public now has multiple ways to check facts and learn about differing points of view. In theory, this access should improve our ability to have meaningful discussions with one another and our ability to form informed opinions. But this isn't always the case. One of the most significant developments is that media has become like a Las Vegas buffet-we have too many choices. When you consider all of the information options-including niche media and personalized social media networks where developers utilize algorithms to serve up ideal content-there just isn't enough time to explore them all. In this space it is easy to become trapped in an echo chamber, where your own opinions are reinforced by others without introducing new or conflicting content into the mix, which restricts public discourse and can lead to extremes. This is most evident in the realm of politics. Traditionally, mass media has been a place to tune in and hear nonpartisan reporting of facts about a situation or candidate, giving everyone equal access to the vital information necessary to form opinions and make decisions. Cable news networks and partisan online sources can limit the audience's ability to access accurate, full-picture information. In some cases, audience members have made the conscious decision to only engage with content that is in line with their ideals.

While user habits are a boon to companies fortunate enough to generate them, their existence inherently makes success less likely for new innovations and startups trying to disrupt the status quo. The fact is, successfully changing long-term user habits is exceptionally rare. Altering behavior requires not only an understanding of how to persuade people to act but also necessitates getting them to repeat behaviors for long periods, ideally for the rest of their lives. Companies that succeed in building a habit-forming business are often associated with game-changing, wildly successful innovation. But like any discipline, habit design has rules that define and explain why some products change lives while others do not. For one, new behaviors have a short half-life, as our minds tend to return to our old ways of thinking and doing. Experiments show that lab animals habituated to new behaviors tend to regress to their first learned behaviors over time. To borrow a term from accounting, behaviors are LIFO-"last in, first out ."

According to its dictionary definition, an anthem is both a song of loyalty, often to a country, and a piece of ‘sacred music', definitions that are both applicable in sporting contexts. This genre is dominated, although not exclusively, by football and has produced a number of examples where popular songs become synonymous with the club and are enthusiastically adopted by the fans. More than this they are often spontaneous expressions of loyalty and identity and, according to Desmond Morris, have ‘reached the level of something approaching of the appeal of such sports songs is a local art form'. A strong element that they feature ‘memorable and easily sung choruses in which fans can participate'. This is a vital part of the team's performance as it makes the fans' presence more tangible. This form of popular culture can be said to display pleasure and emotional excess in contrast to the dominant culture which tends to maintain ‘respectable aesthetic distance and control'.

Europe's first Homo sapiens lived primarily on large game, particularly reindeer. Even under ideal circumstances, hunting these fast animals with spear or bow and arrow is an uncertain task. The reindeer, however, had a weakness afloat, it is uniquely vulnerable that mankind would mercilessly exploit: it swam poorly. While , moving slowly with its antlers held high as it struggles to keep its nose above water. At some point, a Stone Age genius realized the enormous hunting advantage he would gain by being able to glide over the water's surface, and built the first boat. Once the easily overtaken and killed prey had been hauled aboard, getting its body back to the tribal camp would have been far easier by boat than on land. It would not have taken long for mankind to apply this advantage to other goods.

In the post-World War II years after 1945, unparalleled economic growth fueled a building boom and a massive migration from the central cities to the new suburban areas. The suburbs were far more dependent on the automobile, signaling the shift from primary dependence on public transportation to private cars. Soon this led to the construction of better highways and freeways and the decline and even loss of public transportation. With all of these changes came a privatization of leisure. As more people owned their own homes, with more space inside and lovely yards outside, their recreation and leisure time was increasingly centered around the home or, at most, the neighborhood. One major activity of this home-based leisure was watching television. No longer did one have to ride the trolly to the theater to watch a movie; similar entertainment was available for free and more conveniently from television.

It is important to recognise the interdependence between individual, culturally formed actions and the state of cultural integration. People work within the forms provided by the cultural patterns that they have internalised, however contradictory these may be. Ideas are worked out as logical implications or consequences of other accepted ideas, and it is in this way that cultural innovations and discoveries are possible. New ideas are discovered through logical reasoning, but such discoveries are inherent in and integral to the conceptual system and are made possible only because of the acceptance of its premises. For example, the discoveries of new prime numbers are ‘real' consequences of the particular number system employed. Thus, cultural ideas show ‘advances' and ‘developments' because they are outgrowths of previous ideas. The cumulative work of many individuals produces a corpus of knowledge within which certain ‘discoveries' become possible or more likely. Such discoveries are ‘ripe' and could not have occurred earlier and are also likely to be made simultaneously by numbers of individuals.

The entrance to a honeybee colony, often referred to as the dancefloor, is a market place for information about the state of the colony and the environment outside the hive. Studying interactions on the dancefloor provides us with a number of illustrative examples of how individuals changing their own behavior in response to local information allow the colony to regulate its workforce. For example, upon returning to their hive honeybees that have collected water search out a receiver bee to unload their water to within the hive. If this search time is short then the returning bee is more likely to perform a waggle dance to recruit others to the water source. Conversely, if this search time is long then the bee is more likely to give up collecting water. Since receiver bees will only accept water if they require it, either for themselves or to pass on to other bees and brood, this unloading time is correlated with the colony's overall need of water. Thus the individual water forager's response to unloading time (up or down) regulates water collection in response to the colony's need.

If you are unconvinced that our beliefs influence how we interpret facts consider the example of the "flying horse." Depictions of galloping horses from prehistoric times up until the mid-1800s typically showed horses' legs splayed while galloping, that is, the front legs reaching far ahead as the hind legs stretched far behind. People just "knew" that's how horses galloped, and that is how they "saw" them galloping. Cavemen saw them this way, Aristotle saw them this way, and so did Victorian gentry. But all of that ended when, in 1878, Eadweard Muybridge published a set of twelve pictures he had taken of a galloping horse in the space of less than half a second using twelve cameras hooked to wire triggers. Muybridge's photos showed clearly that a horse goes completely airborne in the third step of the gallop with its legs collected beneath it, not splayed. It is called the moment of suspension. Now even kids draw horses galloping this way.

Culture operates in ways we can consciously consider and discuss but also in ways of which we are far less cognizant. When we have to offer an account of our actions, we consciously understand which excuses might prove acceptable, given the particular circumstances we find ourselves in. In such situations, we use cultural ideas as we would use a particular tool. We select the cultural notion as we would select a screwdriver: certain jobs call for a Phillips head while others require an Allen wrench. Whichever idea we insert into the conversation to justify our actions, the point is that our motives are discursively available to us. They are not hidden. In some cases, however, we are far less aware of why we believe a certain claim to be true, or how we are to explain why certain social realities exist. Ideas about the social world become part of our worldview without our necessarily being aware of the source of the particular idea or that we even hold the idea at all.