1,850 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2020
    1. Maybe I’m getting older, or just more patient I’m aware of what I’m doing at every step in the process, rather than having it be fully automated. It’s harder to shitpost if you’re thinking everything through, just like it’s harder to make bad pizza if you know you can’t get instant gratification. I still occasionally make bad posts as well as bad pizza, but I am certainly more aware of the cases where I’m setting myself up for it.
    1. Obviously not every group chat counts as a “conspiracy”. But it makes the question of how society coheres, who is associated with whom, into a matter of speculation – something that involves a trace of conspiracy theory. In that sense, WhatsApp is not just a channel for the circulation of conspiracy theories, but offers content for them as well. The medium is the message.
    2. This means that while groups can generate high levels of solidarity, which can in principle be put to powerful political effect, it also becomes harder to express disagreement within the group. If, for example, an outspoken and popular member of a neighbourhood WhatsApp group begins to circulate misinformation about health risks, the general urge to maintain solidarity means that their messages are likely to be met with approval and thanks. When a claim or piece of content shows up in a group, there may be many members who view it as dubious; the question is whether they have the confidence to say as much. Meanwhile, the less sceptical can simply forward it on. It’s not hard, then, to understand why WhatsApp is a powerful distributor of “fake news” and conspiracy theories.

      Instead of positive feedback like this, is there a way to create negative feedback loops in these social media apps?

    3. Groups are great for brief bursts of humour or frustration, but, by their very nature, far less useful for supporting the circulation of public information. To understand why this is the case, we have to think about the way in which individuals can become swayed and influenced once they belong to a group.
  2. Jul 2020
    1. Expanding diversity and building capacity

      What about youth in reduced economic circumstances? What if they do not have access to this new media? Is this bridging a gap, or just creating a new one?

    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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.
  5. Apr 2020
    1. Traditional annotations are marginalia, errata, and highlights in printed books, maps, picture, and other physical media