2,025 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2015
    1. It’s the nature of Twitter to not research further, we all know, but if that nature is influencing the way we run museums, school lectures, and conferences, the future might be more bleak than any of us dared to predict.

      It would be worth interrogating what it is about "the nature of Twitter" that makes this so.

      I think it has to do with the intersection of a number of things:

      • 140 character limit
      • Broadcast and re-broadcast that de-couples the Tweet from the authorial context
      • Sub-tweeting and shaming as attire and slacktivism

      I'm sure that's only the surface.

    2. “AWP has removed Vanessa Place from the AWP Los Angeles 2016 Subcommittee. We did so after taking into consideration the controversy her Twitter feed has generated. Place has been tweeting the text of Gone with the Wind and using a photograph of Hattie McDaniel as the profile picture. The context of this and similar work is explained by a few literary theorists and advocates of conceptual poetry, such as Jacob Edmond and Brian M. Reed. AWP believes in freedom of expression. We also understand that many readers find Vanessa Place’s unmediated quotes of Margaret Mitchell’s novel to be unacceptable provocations, along with the images on her Twitter page. AWP must protect the efficacy of the conference subcommittee’s work. The group’s work must focus on the adjudication of the 1,800 submitted proposals, not upon the management of a controversy that has stirred strong objections and much ill-will toward AWP and the subcommittee. Perpetuating the controversy would not be fair to the many writers who have submitted the proposals.”

      "Unmediated"?

      That depends on where you're looking. Here we have a poet, with their own history and an established dialogue with race, transcribing in a completely different medium than the original text, surrounded by controversy. How in hell can this be said to be "unmediated"?

  2. Jun 2015
    1. Although it currently shows Google AdSense ads and Taboola’s content marketing, Ottman said those will soon go away. Point-selling will be the main revenue source.

      I find Taboola to be so awful that I question the judgment of these people for ever having used it.

    2. Users earn points by doing things on the network — uploading, voting, referring, posting, or commenting about content. Users vote on whether they like content or not by swiping, with the most-liked content driven to the top of charts. You can post content to your entire Channel, which is Minds’ term for your fans. To post outside your Channel, you need to use points, like offering 10 of your points to another user for 10 views of your post on their Channel. Points can be also be exchanged with Minds for site-wide sharing.

      The absolute worst incentives. Engagement generates reach? This network is going to amplify the people who already participate the most. This is absolutely upside down. This is rewarding the powerful with more power.

    1. "Was wir sehen können, ist, dass 1,4 Milliarden Menschen eine Plattform zu einem mehr oder weniger zentralen Teil ihres Lebens gemacht haben, die von einem Menschen an der Spitze gesteuert wird", nämlich Mark Zuckerberg. "Niemand ist uns bisher so nahe an uns herangekommen."
  3. May 2015
    1. Or more plainly: attention on social media both compensates for and is the logical endpoint of commoditized care work.

      I don't fully understand this but it was the most intriguing sentence in the piece for me. Are our social media services doing the care work of attending to our need for in-control socialization? Are they our new safe spaces that replace the therapist's office? I also wonder about whether people who work in a caring capacity have a unique relationship with social media.

    1. They go on to discuss the energy (voltage) necessary to stimulate the audience, but they caution against using an amount of energy “ so great as to destroy the circuit.

      I wonder what other electric words might prove useful here. I'm thinking explicitly about something like rhetoric's "conductive" character. Can rhetorical practice be thought through conduction?

  4. Apr 2015
    1. The non-sequential nature of the file medium and the use of dynamic manipulation allows a story to have many accessible points of view; Durrell’s Alexa ndria Quar t et, f or instance, could be one book in which the reader may pursue many paths through the narrative

      The most shocking thing about this 1977 article is we used to have tech people who knew who Durrell was.

  5. Feb 2015
    1. The disaggregation of news in the Internet age has inverted this relationship, and made news outlets hypersensitive to the interests of their readers. This is a positive development. It’s good that the media covers stories that its constituents are interested in and want to read about. It’s good when news outlets are connected to the communities they serve.

      I'm not so sure this is the case across the board. Our desires don't always serve us.

      I sometimes do want gatekeepers to prevent me from hurting myself.

      I don't know how to translate this into advice for the next generation of media, though.

  6. Jan 2015
    1. How interesting! It's the same in my family. Certain members will take as gospel, the opinions of the people they deem to have credibility, but eschew - and even satirically cauterize - the wisdom and factual evidence of people with the authority and knowledge.

      It's most frustrating. As for me, I try not to read comments. They just make me so angry!

    1. "Burroughs’ output predicted the affective temporalities that social networks would make ubiquitous half a century after Naked Lunch appeared: a continuous stream of emissions less concerned with the definitiveness of any individual utterance than with the continued elaboration of a familiar presence."

      I get the click of recognition with this particular quote. The world isn't so much flat as that Pharisee Friedman asserts as it has been leveled like the top of a mountain, all the energy goodies ripped out and the overburden midden gravity fed below, holler fill.

    1. Pinterest—It’s mainly female-dominated and is for those who have an artsy/hipster focus. Not too many people talk about it.

      I find this quote troubling. Because it is mainly female dominated or for the art corwd no one talks about it....or maybe Andrew does not talk to many females or "artsy/hipster" types.

    2. Almost all of them work in the tech industry and many of them are tech executives or venture capitalists

      I know of no one who reads Medium outside of tech journalists and my #edtech crowd. If I mentioned medium to a "norm" I would get a strange look.

  7. Nov 2014
    1. When we get to the point where someone sees the mere existence of a political conflict that requires us to criticize allies as a no-win scenario, something has gone very wrong. For the actual work of politics– convincing people to come over to our side in order to make the world a more just and equitable place– those politics have utterly failed. We have been talking about privilege theory for 30 years. We’ve been talking about intersectionality for 25 years. We’ve been getting into cyclical, vicious Twitter frenzies for a half decade. This is not working. And I doubt hardly anyone actually believes that this is working. They’re just having too much fun to stop.

      I've recently decided, for myself, that Twitter is not a viable platform for political discussions. I simply can't do it anymore. I spend more time getting derailed by confusion stemming from trying to be terse when discussing subtleties than I do actually discussing the issues I wanted to discuss.

    1. But these features also make it ripe for conflict between sex worker activists and anti-trafficking activists who oppose sex work. One of the most frequent attacks on Twitter is that these activists are pimps pretending to be sex workers. This argument defeminizes sex workers into the masculine identity of a pimp and paints them as co-conspirators in trafficking. It’s a form of gendered shaming against female-identified sex workers that pits them over and against victimized women and girls
  8. Oct 2014
    1. Details on the EU dinner are sparse. But there is increasing concern over the role social media plays in disseminating extremist propaganda, as well as being used as a direct recruitment tool. However, there is also a significant worry that placing strict controls on social networks could actually hinder counter-terrorism efforts. "The further underground they go, the harder it is to gleam information and intelligence," said Jim Gamble, a security consultant, and former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop). "Often it is the low level intelligence that you collect that you can then aggregate which gives you an analysis of what's happening." Mr Gamble was formerly head of counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland. There were, he said, parallels to be drawn. "There's always a risk of becoming too radical and too fundamentalist in your approach when you're trying to suppress the views of others that you disagree with. "In Northern Ireland, huge mistakes were made when the government tried to starve a political party of the oxygen of publicity. I would say that that radically backfired."
  9. Feb 2014