Sheri

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Writer of word both truth and tale. Video producer, editor, artist, still human. Hire me?

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Slowly making a visual novel called We Will Not See Heaven, demo is free. Sometimes I stream, or post adult things. Boys' love novel enthusiast. Take care, yeah?

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Sheri
@Sheri

so the recent defunctland piece on The Wiggles has got me remembering how involved they were in my childhood. as in, my mother was friends with Murray, so there's pics of me hanging out at events and stuff. i was half worried a kid version of me would show up in some of the stock promo footage Kevin used. either way,

a thing i noticed during the video is The Wiggles' signature hand gesture- overexaggerated finger guns, is pretty much always present in every single pic

The original cast of The Wiggles at a Toys R Us promo, doing finger guns to the camera.

and then i remembered oh yeah! that's very much by design! so now let's talk about

42nd President of The United States Bill Clinton

42nd President of The United States Bill Clinton.

some of you probably know where i'm going with this. others probably panicked. but thankfully we're not talking about the other Bill Clinton thing yet this is about hand gestures.

but not just finger guns, rest assured. more specifically, The Clinton Thumb:

A photo from Boston Globe from the 90s of former President Bill Clinton, fist clenched, thumb held up, leaning over a podium.

a focus tested hand gesture which is less threatening than a fist, but grants emphasis that an open hand makes look clumsy. it could be a period or an exclamation point, and all

over time, variations of this have improved on the formula, leading to several competing gestures erroneously called "The Clinton Thumb"

a delightfully narrow-scoped study in the National Library of Medicine dives into politician's choices of hand gestures, and audience response.

i LOVE extremely specific research papers!
let's see what they had to say:

Candidates from both parties showed a similar pattern as was found in
the full analysis, and overall, the association of hand and valence
remained significant when the effect of political party was controlled by
conditional logistic regression (Wald χ2 = 4.43, df = 1, p = .01; odds ratio
estimate = 1.56, 95% C.I. = 1.03−2.35). The implicit association of dominant
hand gestures with positive valence is something that Democrats and
Republicans appear to agree on.
     -Good and Bad in the Hands of Politicians: Spontaneous Gestures during
          Positive and Negative Speech, NLM 2010

sweating uh yeah see they controlled by... c-conditional logistic regression. uh. Wald seemed to be on it, whoever that is

math isn't real, i've decided. still! emphasizing your positive or important points with a gesture that the audience recognizes as approachable, friendly, and competent, is politician 101, however many numbers that is

Politicians are performers, too.

Picture from Carlos Barria for Reuters of former President Barrack Obama and at-the-time-Vice President Joe Biden. Obama is doing a half-fist hand gesture. Joe Biden looks... somewhere?

we have hundreds of years of American politics to look back on and find patterns in their performance. but consider: it is a performance, therefor the rules aren't dissimilar to a play or stage show, something humans have a lot more history to pull from. and as it turns out,

looking emphatic for what you're talking about is important for edutainment, too!

Bill Nye sitting in a chair in 2019 at the University of Notre Dame, photo by Santiago Flores for the South Bend Tribune. He's doing the half-fist.

stage performance gestures don't go unnoticed by people, consciously or subconsciously. and children are, get this: also people. however, kids are more likely to pay attention at all if they feel like they're involved.

in an interview with The Feed for SBS in Australia, Murray talked about the design behind their classic Hot Potato dance:

The trick is to have things for the children to do, involve them.
So actions, dances, teaching strategies like modelling. The
teacher just does something, doesn't say anything about it,
and the children will start copying them.
     -Murray Cook to SBS The Feed, 2019

they then go on to demonstrate that this is a very human response, early childhood or not:

SBS The Feed interview from 2019. Murray Cook does the Hot Potato dance, saying: "You just do it, you don't say this is a hot potato." Mark Fennel then starts repeating the dance, surprising himself, and exclaims: "That's so funny, as soon as you started doing that I instinctively wanted to follow you."

neat, huh? and useful when it comes to teaching. kids love to sing and dance and play, so if you give them a useful educational additive to that, all the better! so long as it doesn't dilute their fun so much that they start to spite the education itself, it'll help said education stick

however, sadly uh. it doesn't take a genius to know that men with media training can do absolutely heinous things, and get away with it thanks in part to their slick presentation. (told ya i'd talk about it)

when it comes to children's performers, parents are going to scrutinize the heck out of the adult men singing the songs to their kids. it's a part of the job. and this all ties back to the very purposeful design behind the cricket hooligan finger waggle:

The thing of being a man in early childhood, when you're a teacher in
early childhood, you have to be aware that, you know, you can be
accused of things. Part of it is in photos for instance, when you've
got kids there, if you're got your hands doing this, everyone sees
where your hands are. It's a shame that it's an issue, but it is an
issue, and you have to protect yourself as well.

     -Murray Cook to SBS The Feed, 2019

wow. uh. grim! but i mean... i would prefer there be literally no ambiguity, that's fair. even just the air that a group of adult men performers for children are creeps can be enough to cause serious harm.

and like, The Wiggles songs were designed to actually be useful for early childhood development! helping teach basic concepts in a way that actually holds in a kid's mind. so it's better to design from the outset around making it as clear as possible what your hands are doing, using a gesture that any kid with at least one hand can do

Promo piece for The Wiggles, this time without Greg, thankfully. All performers, including Captain Feathersword, are doing the signature finger guns.

it's a dance move that scales to the kids' physical ability, and keeps the performers appearance' unambiguously clean.

especially useful for allegedly unclean political performers

and if articles making fun of Bill wagging his finger are any indication, this kind of stuff actually matters to the public.

Picture of Bill Clinton giving a speech in 2012 from NPR. Photo by Robyn Beck. Bill points accusatorily at the audience.

i guess wiggle, not waggle!


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