1,806 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2020
    1. Bex, F., Lawrence. J., Snaith. M., Reed. C., (2013) implementing the Argument Web. Communications of the ACM. (56). (10). Retrieved from chrome-extension://bjfhmglciegochdpefhhlphglcehbmek/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=http%3A%2F%2Farg-tech.org%2Fpeople%2Fchris%2Fpublications%2F2013%2FbexCACM.pdf

    1. Evaluate

      I believe this is an important skill to have and to teach nowadays. Especially with the readily shareable content on social media people could post things with out critically evaluating what content is saying/where it comes from/if it is credible or not.

  2. Jun 2020
    1. News can no longer be (only) about the mass update. Stories need to be targeted to those who might be able to improve the situation. And journalism’s products — which are more than its stories — must be designed to facilitate this. News needs to be built to engage curiosity about the world and the problems in it — and their solutions. People need to get lost in the news like they now get lost in Wikipedia and Facebook. There must be comprehensive stories that get the interested but uninformed up to speed quickly. Search and navigation must be improved to the point where satisfaction of curiosity is so easy it becomes a reflex. Destination news sites need to be more extensively hyperlinked than almost anything else (and not just insincere internal links for SEO, but links that are actually useful for the user.) The news experience needs to become intensely personal. It must be easy for users to find and follow exactly their interests, no matter how arcane. Journalists need to get proficient at finding and engaging the audience for each story. And all of this has to work across all modes of delivery, so it’s always with us. Marketers understand this; it’s amazing to me that the news industry has been so slow to catch on to multi-modal engagement.

      everything would work perfectly if we had all of these and people are actually rational and diligent with infinite resource.

    2. I don’t want the product with the best content overall, I want the product that is going to serve me up the best content every single time, regardless of whether or not it was created in-house.

      discovery, aggregation, curation. narrator

    3. People spend hours roaming Wikipedia; they don’t spend hours on bbc.co.uk or cnn.com or nytimes.com or news.yahoo.com (which actualy has a far bigger audience than any traditional news outlet.) Wikipedia also tends to take the top spot in Google results, which means that more people link to it than they do to any news site.

      or google just ups the ranking of Wikipedia in their algo

    1. The web also rewards news providers who provide context. People are far more likely to re-visit the wikipedia page or the topics overview a year after a news event. Thompson’s “The Money Meltdown” site pulled together the best links to explain the financial crisis. Matt posted it on his blog and in one month, 50,000 unique visitors came along and looked at it 75,000 times. It speaks to a desire. It’s all about pulling together links, in some cases. What’s difficult right now is automating it. Link barns as topic pages aren’t working.

      basically: there's a demand for evergreen essays. but there's also demand / place for soundbites and torrent of throwaway patchy breaking news

    1. We’re presently living through what feels like a remarkably turbulent time. In fact, we might be tempted to think that ours is a uniquely chaotic moment. Of course, most of us know that human beings have lived through more chaotic, violent, and calamitous times than ours. What is novel in our experience isn’t the depth of the health crisis or the scale of the protests, the economic volatility, or the political instability. What is novel is the information ecosystem in which all of this and more is unfolding. Most of us now have far greater access to information about the world, and we are—arguably, I grant—exposed to a far wider array of competing narratives attempting, without notable success, to make sense of it all. In short, it would appear that our basic sense-making technology, the narrative, is a bit glitchy, both failing to operate as we might expect and causing some issues of its own. You won’t be surprised to learn that I think Marshall McLuhan can be helpful here. While many have found McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message” confounding, McLuhan actually offered a rather straightforward explanation. “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” McLuhan wrote, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” McLuhan added, “but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”Digital media introduced a new scale, pace, and pattern to human communication, and, in this way, altered how the world is perceived. With regards to scale, we encounter an unprecedented amount of information about the world at large through digital media. With regards to pace, we encounter this information with previously unknown and unrelenting immediacy. And, with regards to pattern, we encounter it both in novel social contexts and in a form that bears greater resemblance to a database than a story.

      L. M. Sacasas providing a very brief summary of McLuhan's "medium is the message" quote applied to the Coronavirus pandemic in June 2020.

    1. Altay, S., de Araujo, E., & Mercier, H. (2020, June 4). “If this account is true, it is most enormously wonderful”: Interestingness-if-true and the sharing of true and false news.

  3. May 2020
    1. Common Types of College Writing Assignments

      In this section of Chapter 3, you can see a difference in the way the text is delivered. The design changed and has different graphics and layout.

    1. In medieval learned cultures (all the material in this volume was producedin learned, even academic circles for purposes of reading and new compo-sition), such a thorough mixing of media, especially the visual and the ver-bal, was commonplace

      This sounds much more like the "learned" world in the modern era using multi-media on the internet.

    1. Part of the problem of social media is that there is no equivalent to the scientific glassblowers’ sign, or the woodworker’s open door, or Dafna and Jesse’s sandwich boards. On the internet, if you stop speaking: you disappear. And, by corollary: on the internet, you only notice the people who are speaking nonstop.

      This quote comes from a larger piece by Robin Sloan. (I don't know who that is though)

      The problem with social media is that the equivalent to working with the garage door open (working in public) is repeatedly talking in public about what you're doing.

      One problem with this is that you need to choose what you want to talk about, and say it. This emphasizes whatever you select, not what would catch a passerby's eye.

      The other problem is that you become more visible by the more you talk. Conversely, when you stop talking, you become invisible.

    1. How can we portray emotions, gestures, and attention in an authentic way through a computational medium?

      This reminds me a bit of Kevin Marks' post about phatic reactions in social media: http://epeus.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-twitter-works-in-theory.html

    1. It feels a lot like the reason we are unable to offer real alternative social networks is not that we cannot do so. It is because most people with the abilities to do so spend their time working on things that only work for the tiny audience that is the tech sector, while happily ignoring the needs of all those billions of non-technical humans out there. This is something that frustrates me more than I want to admit.
  4. Apr 2020
    1. Traditional annotations are marginalia, errata, and highlights in printed books, maps, picture, and other physical media
  5. Feb 2020
    1. Social media research ethics faces a contradiction between big data positivism and research ethics fundamentalism. Big data positivists tend to say, ‘Most social media data is public data. It is like data in a newspaper. I can therefore gather big data without limits. Those talking about privacy want to limit the progress of social science’. This position disregards any engagement with ethics and has a bias towards quantification. The ethical framework Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics (Townsend and Wallace, 2016) that emerged from an ESRC-funded project tries to avoid both extremes and to take a critical-realist position: It recommends that social scientists neither ignore nor fetishize research ethics when studying digital media.Research ethics fundamentalists in contrast tend to say,You have to get informed consent for every piece of social media data you gather because we cannot assume automatic consent, users tend not to read platform’s privacy policies, they may assume some of their data is private and they may not agree to their data being used in research. Even if you anonymize the users you quote, many can still be identified in the networked online environment.
    2. One important aspect of critical social media research is the study of not just ideolo-gies of the Internet but also ideologies on the Internet. Critical discourse analysis and ideology critique as research method have only been applied in a limited manner to social media data. Majid KhosraviNik (2013) argues in this context that ‘critical dis-course analysis appears to have shied away from new media research in the bulk of its research’ (p. 292). Critical social media discourse analysis is a critical digital method for the study of how ideologies are expressed on social media in light of society’s power structures and contradictions that form the texts’ contexts.
    3. Marx is certainly not the only relevant critical social theorist who matters for under-standing social media. The critical study of social media should be based on a broad range of critical theories of society. The crisis of capitalism and the devastating social and political effects of austerity and neoliberalism have made evident that political econ-omy can no longer be ignored in the study of society. This does not mean that the econ-omy determines society but rather that all social phenomena have an economy and are economic and non-economic at the same time (Fuchs, 2015a).
    4. There are at least six elements in Marx’s works that are of key relevance for understanding communications today (Fuchs, 2016b; Fuchs and Mosco, 2016a, 2016b):(1) Praxis communication: Marx was not just a critical political economist but also a critical journalist and polemicist, whose writing style can inspire critical thought today.(2) Global communication: Marx stressed the connection of communication technol-ogy and globalization. In an age, where there are lots of talk about both the Internet and globalization, we should remind ourselves that technology-mediated globalization has had a longer history.(3) Dialectical philosophy: Marx elaborated a critical theory of technology that is based on dialectical logic. Dialectical philosophy can help us to avoid one-sided analyses of the media (Fuchs, 2014c).(4) Class analysis: Marx stressed the relevance of the connection of labour, value, commodities and capital. He analysed modern society as a class society. Focusing on class today can counter the positivism of analyses of society as information society, net-work society, knowledge-based society, post-industrial society and so on.(5) Crisis and social struggles: Marx described class struggle and crisis as factors in the historical dynamics of class societies. Class structures and struggles are in complex ways reflected on and entangled into mediated communication.(6) Alternatives: Marx envisioned alternatives to capitalism and domination. Given capitalist crisis and monopoly control of social media today, it is important to envision alternatives to capitalism and capitalist social media.
    5. The term ‘social media’ takes on different meanings depending on what concept of the social is foregrounded. Example understandings of the social are Émile Durkheim’s concept of social facts, Max Weber’s categories of social action and social relations, Ferdinand Tönnies’ notion of community or Karl Marx’s understanding of the social as social problems and social co-production that implies the need for social ownership

      Understanding and contextualizing social media

    1. Upon the efficient consumption and summarizing of news from around the world. Remember? from when we though the internet would provide us timely, pertinent information from around the world? How do we find internet information in a timely fashion? I have been told to do this through Twitter or Facebook, but, seriously… no. Those are systems designed to waste time with stupid distractions in order to benefit someone else. Facebook is informative in the same way that thumb sucking is nourishing. Telling me to use someone’s social website to gain information is like telling me to play poker machines to fix my financial troubles.. Stop that.
    1. When we talk about political media, we tend to cut a sharp line between the political elites who create the media and the audience that consumes it. But that’s a mistake. No one consumes more political, and politicized, media than political elites. This is part of the reason political media has an enormous effect on politics, even though only a small fraction of the country regularly consumes it.
    2. This is a damning result: The more political media you absorb, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes.
  6. Jan 2020
    1. McCarthy next asks: “Who selects what is to be recorded or transmitted to others, since not everything can be recorded?” But now, everything can be recorded and transmitted. That is the new fear: too much speech.
    1. One of the key critiques of the study is that the researchers didn’t log in. That is to say that they could not experience the full impact of the algorithm as it impacts their findings.

      As Becca Lewis suggests, is the problem associated with methodology? This reminds me of some of the discussions associated with [social media and teens] (https://collect.readwriterespond.com/social-media-has-not-destroyed-a-generation/)

  7. Dec 2019
    1. And I am planning on cutting back on my personal use of social media (easier said than done) and want to try to return to using my blog more than Twitter for sharing.

      certainly a laudable goal!

      It helped me a lot to simply delete most of the social media apps off of my phone. I scribbled a bit about the beginning of the process back in November and there's a link there to a post by Ben doing the same thing on his own website.

      More people are leaving social feeds for RSS feeds lately. I've recently started following Jeremy Felt who is taking this same sort of journey himself. See: https://jeremyfelt.com/tag/people-still-blog/

      Kudos as well to making the jump here:

      Taking a bit of a Twitter break. I'm going to try to stay off until the new year, but likely lack the willpower to stay off for more than a few hours. Wish me luck!<br><br>....but silently. Not via reply to to this tweet. Cause that'll just suck me back into the vortext.

      — Clint Lalonde (he/him) (@edtechfactotum) December 19, 2019
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      In part, it's what prompted me to visit your site to write a comment. (Sorry for upping your cis-gendered white male count, but 2019 was a bad year, and hopefully we can all make 2020 better as you've indicated.)

    2. Most of the convo, if any, seems to happen on the socials vs comments left on the blog these days.

      The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.

      I find that using Webmentions on my site adds a lot of value because it brings all the conversation back to my site, where it really should be for more context.

    3. By the numbers

      I'm curious what things would look like if you similarly did an analysis of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Where are you putting more time? What's giving you the most benefit? Where are you getting value and how are you giving it back?

    1. Moving back to a focus on protocols over platforms can solve many of these problems.

      This may also only be the case if large corporations are forced to open up and support those protocols. If my independent website can't interact freely and openly with something like Twitter on a level playing field, then it really does no good.

    1. Alexander Samuel reflects on tagging and its origins as a backbone to the social web. Along with RSS, tags allowed users to connect and collate content using such tools as feed readers. This all changed with the advent of social media and the algorithmically curated news feed.

      Tags were used for discovery of specific types of content. Who needs that now that our new overlords of artificial intelligence and algorithmic feeds can tell us what we want to see?!

      Of course we still need tags!!! How are you going to know serendipitously that you need more poetry in your life until you run into the tag on a service like IndieWeb.xyz? An algorithmic feed is unlikely to notice--or at least in my decade of living with them I've yet to run into poetry in one.

    1. Madison’s design has proved durable. But what would happen to American democracy if, one day in the early 21st century, a technology appeared that—over the course of a decade—changed several fundamental parameters of social and political life? What if this technology greatly increased the amount of “mutual animosity” and the speed at which outrage spread? Might we witness the political equivalent of buildings collapsing, birds falling from the sky, and the Earth moving closer to the sun?

      Jonathan Haidt, you might have noticed, is a scholar that I admire very much. In this piece, his colleague Tobias Rose-Stockwell and he ask the following questions: Is social media a threat to our democracy? Let's read the following article together and think about their question together.

  8. Nov 2019
    1. Loading this iframe allows Facebook to know that this specific user is currently on your website. Facebook therefore knows about user browsing behaviour without user’s explicit consent. If more and more websites adopt Facebook SDK then Facebook would potentially have user’s full browsing history! And as with “With great power comes great responsibility”, it’s part of our job as developers to protect users privacy even when they don’t ask for.
    1. I believe that many of the current challenges in public sectors link back to two causal factors: googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1560300455224-0'); }); The impact of increasing reactivism to politics and 24-hour media scrutiny, in public sectors (which varies across jurisdictions); and The unintended consequences of New Public Management and trying to make public sectors act like the private sector.
    1. A multimedia approach to affective learning and training can result in more life-like trainings which replicate scenarios and thus provide more targeted feedback, interventions, and experience to improve decision making and outcomes. Rating: 7/10

    1. Using Technology to Help First-Gen Students

      This article highlights the need for and benefits of implementing more technology tools to support first-generation college students' learning, engagement, and success. For many first-gen students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, the transition to college can be challenging; this leads to lower retention rates, performance, and confidence. The authors, drawing off of research, suggest mobile devices and Web 2.0 technologies to prevent these challenges. Example of such tools include dictionary and annotation apps that are readily-accessible and aid in students' understanding of material. Fist-gen students can also use social media apps (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to maintain supportive connections with family, peers, and mentors. Rating: 8/10

  9. Oct 2019
    1. ecognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and cre-­ate procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship

      Also key.

    1. When these signals are intercepted, collected, co-opted, or stolen, they have the potential to confuse, weaken, or compromise an individual or initiative.

      I can't help but thinking here about stories of native peoples feeling like photographs of them were like having their soul stolen.

    1. A former union boss jailed over receiving a coal exploration licence from his friend, former NSW Labor minister Ian Macdonald, was an "entrepreneur" who found a "willing buyer" in the disgraced politician, a court has heard.

      This is a flawed proposition and both misleading and deceptive in relation to the subject matter, considering its prominence in a court media report of proceedings which largely centre on the propriety or otherwise of an approvals process.

      Using a market analogy mischaracterises the process involved in seeking and gaining approval for a proposal based on an innovative occupational health and safety concept.

      In this case, the Minister was the appropriate authority under the relevant NSW laws.

      And while Mr Maitland could indeed be described as a "entrepreneur", the phrase "willing buyer" taken literally in the context of the process to which he was constrained, could contaminate the reader's perception of the process as transactional or necessitating exchange of funds a conventional buyer and seller relationship.

      Based on evidence already tendered in open court, it's already known Mr Maitland sought both legal advice on the applicable process as well as guidance by officials and other representatives with whom he necessarily engaged.

      But the concept of finding a "willing buyer", taken literally at it's most extreme, could suggest Mr Maitland was presented with multiple approvals processes and to ultimately reach his goal, engaged in a market force-style comparative assessment of the conditions attached to each of these processes to ultimately decide on which approvals process to pursue.

      Plainly, this was not the case. Mr Maitland had sought advice on the process and proceeded accordingly.

      The only exception that could exist in relation to the availability of alternative processes could be a situation silimilar to the handling of unsolicited proposals by former Premier Barry O'Farrell over casino licenses which were not constrained by any of the regular transparency-related requirements including community engagement, notification or competitive tender.

      Again, this situation does not and could not apply to the process applicable to Mr Maitland's proposal.

      The misleading concepts introduced from the outset in this article also represent an aggravating feature of the injustice to which Mr Maitland has been subjected.

      To be found criminally culpable in a matter involving actions undertaken in an honest belief they were required in a process for which Mr Maitland both sought advice process and then at no stage was told anything that would suggest his understanding of the process was incorrect, contradicts fundamental principles of natural justice.

    1. Liberal and Conservative Representations of the Good Society: A (Social) Structural Topic Modeling Approach

      I chose this article, because it is timely, relevant, easy-to-follow (because it is intuitive), and innovative (using data sources, Twitter, and an innovative method, textual analysis). I hope you enjoy the reading. Please follow my annotations (comments + questions) and respond to the questions I pose. Try to answer them in your own words.

  10. Sep 2019
    1. On social media, we are at the mercy of the platform. It crops our images the way it wants to. It puts our posts in the same, uniform grids. We are yet another profile contained in a platform with a million others, pushed around by the changing tides of a company's whims. Algorithms determine where our posts show up in people’s feeds and in what order, how someone swipes through our photos, where we can and can’t post a link. The company decides whether we're in violation of privacy laws for sharing content we created ourselves. It can ban or shut us down without notice or explanation. On social media, we are not in control.

      This is why I love personal web sites. They're your own, you do whatever you want with them, and you control them. Nothing is owned by others and you're completely free to do whatever you want.

      That's not the case with Facebook, Microsoft, Slack, Jira, whatever.

    1. I feel by far less distracted. My attention span feels more robust than it ever has. I also clocked in at 1000 consecutive days of meditation this past year so I’m not sure which can lay claim to more of these benefits, but my hunch is that getting rid of social media helped.

      No Facebook/Instagram/"social media" better concentration. I'm quite sure that this adheres to a lot of people.

  11. Aug 2019
    1. Social media network TikTok is testing an advertising platform that will let advertisers target users across third-party apps, as well as within TikTok.

      As of 2018-08, TikTok has 500M users worldwide. 2/3 are under 30. In the US, more than half are 16-24.

    1. In minimal media, cell growth and division slow considerably, while protein overproduction from plasmids can continue
    1. As such, we can read Yelp and similar review sites as curated collections of texts that provide annotators.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) !important; }2Troy Hicks, Maha Bali with a public and networked opportunity to express their truth and author counternarratives.

      Here I'm reminded of Tom Standage's book Writing on the Wall: Social Media: The First 2,000 Years as potentially having some interesting examples that include the ideas of social media as an annotation layer on life.

    2. notes are tediously authored for the profit of multinational corporations.

      social media: live annotations on life itself

  12. Jul 2019
    1. Another solution might be to limit on the number of times a tweet can be retweeted.

      This isn't too dissimilar to an idea I've been mulling over and which Robin Sloan wrote about on the same day this story was released: https://platforms.fyi/

    1. The initial promise of Web 2.0—that gatekeepers have their power reduced and that “ordinary” users can make media—is still true, even for for-profit firms such as Facebook and Twitter.

      While this is generally true that everyone can now create, the real inequity is the fact that distribution is not equal for all players. We might also ask the question: Should distribution be equal for all?

      Robin Sloan has an "essay" on this topic that mirrors my own long held distribution questions/problems: https://platforms.fyi/

    2. In the years between 2004 and 2012, many media critics proclaimed a promising new mediascape of democratic production and thus democratic organization (Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008; Shirky, 2009)—precisely what alternative media theorists had been calling for in previous decades.

      I note here that they mention production and organization, but there is a missing piece of "distribution". In large part, part of the problem with current corporate social media is one of how their content is distributed and the advertising model that drives what sorts of content are distributed.

    3. In this sense, it isn’t the medium that is the message as McLuhan (1994) famously states; rather the process of producing media is the message as Benjamin (1970; See also Waltz, 2005) argued, whether the media in question be print, radio, TV, or online.