Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s (1970) important essay “The Author as Producer,” Chris Atton (2002) argues that alternative media “are crucially about offering the means for democratic communication to people who are normally excluded from media production” (p. 4). That is to say, alternative media are defined as much by their content (i.e., radical, progressive, socialist, anarchist, feminist, queer, or anti-racist) as by the contours and practices of their underlying conditions of production, which are meant to allow democratic participation in making media.

One way to look at this is that when a new powerful medium of expression comes along that was not enough in our genes to be part of traditional cultures, it is something we need to learn how to get fluent with and use. Without the special learning, the new media will be mostly used to automate the old forms of thought. This will also have effects, especially if the new media is more efficient at what the old did: this can result in gluts, that act like legal drugs (as indeed are the industrial revolution’s ability to create sugar and fat, it can also overproduce stories, news, status, and new ways for oral discourse.

The internet is fundamentally participatory.

To put our toxic relationship with Big Tech into perspective, critics have compared social media to a lot of bad things. Tobacco. Crystal meth. Pollution. Cars before seat belts. Chemicals before Superfund sites. But the most enduring metaphor is junk food: convenient but empty; engineered to be addictive; makes humans unhealthy and corporations rich.

So this is where some older paths-not-taken, such as Ted Nelson’s original many-to-many, multidirectional model for hypertext, and some more recent potential paths, such as Herbert van de Sompel’s decentralized, distributed vision for scholarly communication, might come in.

INFERNO VIII↩⚓✪ The Fifth Circle. Intemperance in Indignation⚓✪ The Wrathful and Sullen. Styx. The City of Dis

in the right rail

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Path did indeed succeed in becoming the anti-Facebook: a network without enough users. Some businesses work best at scale, and if you believe that people want to accumulate social capital as efficiently as possible, putting a bound on how much they can earn is a challenging business model, as dark as that may be.

Most of these near clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.

It's true that as more people join a network, more social capital is up for grabs in the aggregate. However, in general, if you come to a social network later, unless you bring incredible exogenous social capital (Taylor Swift can join any social network on the planet and collect a massive following immediately), the competition for attention is going to be more intense than it was in the beginning. Everyone has more of an understanding of how the game works so the competition is stiffer.

[An aside about exogenous social capital: you might complain that your tweets are more interesting and grammatical than those of, say, Donald Trump (you're probably right!). Or that your photos are better composed and more interesting at a deep level of photographic craft than those of Kim Kardashian. The difference is, they bring a massive supply of exogenous pre-existing social capital from another status game, the fame game, to every table, and some forms of social capital transfer quite well across platforms. Generalized fame is one of them. More specific forms of fame or talent might not retain their value as easily: you might follow Paul Krugman on Twitter, for example, but not have any interest in his Instagram account. I don't know if he has one, but I probably wouldn't follow it if he did, sorry Paul, it’s nothing personal.]

One reason is that products are often designed in ways that make us act impulsively and against our better judgment. For example, suppose you have a big meeting at work tomorrow. Ideally, you want to spend some time preparing for it in the evening and then get a good night’s rest. But before you can do either, a notification pops up on your phone indicating that a friend tagged you on Facebook. “This will take a minute,” you tell yourself as you click on it. But after logging in, you discover a long feed of posts by friends. A few clicks later, you find yourself watching a YouTube video that one of them shared. As soon as the video ends, YouTube suggests other related and interesting videos. Before you know it, it’s 1:00 a.m., and it’s clear that you will need an all-nighter to get ready for the following morning’s meeting. This has happened to most of us.

Summarization:When an original message is passed on,it is frequently compressed, focusing on the essence whileomitting unnecessary details.

Social media is not a thing that needs to be fixed. People connecting with people is a thing. Jerks are a thing. Jerks are not a digital problem. Jerks are a real-world problem that has been around for a long time. We need to get past the digital and fix our real-world jerk problem. And, as we go along, we have to think about how our systems help create those jerks.

The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power.

It is the augmentation means that serve to break down a large problem in such a way that the human being can walk through it with his little steps

integrated domain

separate public domain illustrations

exhorted them directly

“A violência anti-intelectualista das novas classes médias é, afinal, uma falta de educação, ou, antes, o fruto de uma falsa educação”

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were much too offended by thissudden invasion into their academic habitat to ask what theoretical jus-tification lay behind this forced entry.

new media

ck Box Fallacy. Sooner or later, the argument goes, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (

isa Gitelman, who offers a model of media that works on two levels: on the first, a medium is a technology that enables communication; on the second, a medium is a set of associated "protocols" or social and cultural practices that have

Do we want technology to keep giving more people a voice, or will traditional gatekeepers control what ideas can be expressed?

“I’m always genuinely happy to interact with listeners,” he said, “and since some prefer social media, I use it. But my (thus far only modestly effective) strategy has been to try and produce enduring content and let it speak for itself, rather than posting ephemera on Facebook and Twitter at regular intervals.”

This distinction enlightens the reading of thegrowing social media and mass emergency lit-erature for three reasons. First, without it, thisnew literature risks undoing decades of work bysocial scientists who have dismantled the mythsof disaster, with a dominant discourse thatincludes panic and unlawful behavior by victims.But in disasters arising from natural hazards, weknow such behaviors are not typical. Massemergencies arising from criminal behavior canhave a much wider range of collective behaviorbecause the source of the hazard is unknown,unpredictable and perhaps more imminentlydangerous

Misinforma-tion arising from natural hazards or exogenousevents might be greater in kind, but less inimpact, with fewer in-common readers as it tra-verses a network that can move a little slowerthan it might in criminal mass emergency events.Because the problem-solving tends to be morediffuse in exogenous events, the same messagemight not reach enough people; in other words,the misinformation might also be thinly diffused.Misinformation in such events is more likely toage out, or not be relevant to enough locations topose a big threat—in other words, all informationin thefirst place is less likely to be categoricallycorrect or incorrect, and as such, it is hard tofindas much value in pursuing the threat of misin-formation in such situations.

Wefindendogeneityandexogeneityof haz-ards to be a meaningful distinction in socialmedia in mass emergencies research, one thatreadily clarifies for a range of researchers andreaders who are outside the social science disci-pline. Just as events that arise from exogenousand endogenous hazards differently impact legal,political, health, and other societal systems, so dothey differently impact social media behavior.8With exogenous events, the culprit is beyondreach, and unstoppable. With endogenous agents,the suspect lies within. Therefore, organizingfeatures of the communication are distinctlydifferent, because the source(s) of the problem(s),the nature of their solutions,and the ability forthe perception of the collective control of theoutcomeare different. Online participation focu-ses on in-common salient problems when theyare present; when the problems are lessin-common and must be addressed in parallel, thecrowd organizes in many smaller groupings and,often endogeneity and exogeneity of hazardspredicts this (Palen & Anderson,2016).

We make this point because we worrythat the very idea of“social media”flattens themany meanings of“crisis”and“emergency”forwhich social sciencefields have worked to pro-vide insight. For example, because Twitter orFacebook are available for use in any kind ofcrises, it is easy to make these applications thesalient concern, and ask“Is Twitter or Facebookbetter in emergency response?,”rather thanquestion how the very nature of emergencyresponse might beg for different forms of infor-mation seeking and reporting. We refer to thisflattening of communication medium and hazardas thesocial media and crisis confound.

What social media did was to transform discovery into a passive rather than an active process.

One must always be beware of the advice-giver’s context.

His dream is to put a live Web server with easy-to-edit pages on every person's desktop, then connect them all in a robust network that feeds off itself and informs other media.

The Weblog community is basically a whole bunch of expert witnesses who increase their expertise constantly through a sort of reputation engine."

Man, this is a beast that's hungry all the time."

It is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other.

On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.

Maybe during this Christmas break I will find the guts to do a purge but I know that it will be a "fake purge".

I adopted a ‘horses for courses’ approach to keep it in check. I used Facebook primarily to keep in touch with family and real-world friends, I used Twitter for tech discussions and networking, I used LinkedIn sparingly, and I dropped any social media that didn’t fulfill a specific function for me.

signal-boost

Facebook’s lofty aims were emblazoned even on securities filings: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

As deepfakes make their way into social media, their spread will likely follow the same pattern as other fake news stories. In a MIT study investigating the diffusion of false content on Twitter published between 2006 and 2017, researchers found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth in all categories of information.” False stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth and reached 1,500 people six times more quickly than accurate articles.

societies without trust come to bad ends.

combat prescriptive approaches to grammar, mechanics, and usage.

But now it was all for the best: a law of nature, a chance for the monopolists to do good for the universe. The cheerer-in-chief for the monopoly form is Peter Thiel, author of Competition Is for Losers. Labeling the competitive economy a “relic of history” and a “trap,” he proclaimed that “only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.”

Using Model Strategies forIntegrating Technology into Teaching

They can spew hate amongst themselves for eternity, but without amplification it won’t thrive.

http://www.zachwhalen.net/posts/how-to-make-a-twitter-bot-with-google-spreadsheets-version-04

news is stressful and has little impact on the day-to-day routines —use it for class assignments, avoid it otherwise.” While a few students like this one practiced news abstinence, such students were rare.

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

Local- using social media, technology, keeping it horizontal, keeping it simple and humble, celebration is important.

We live in a world of bots and trolls and curated news feeds, in which reality is basically up for grabs.

The last thing most people need is another microphone. They need something to say. (And time to say it.)

In the past, technology has extended the human body, providing it with tools to act upon the world. But at some point, a tool becomes something more. When does it become part of its user?

Snap is also confident that it can reach a high amount of new voters: 80 percent of its users are over 18, so this campaign won't just fall on well-meaning (but still too young) thumbs

Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.

Trump’s digital strategy, Singer and Brooking argue, is not unlike militant groups and street gangs that leverage the viral web to tell a compelling story about policy, religious dogma, or their own perceived fearsomeness, all in an engaging voice, while repeatedly targeting exactly the right audience to trigger a dopamine response or sheer terror, both online and IRL. "To 'win' the internet, one must learn how to fuse these elements of narrative, authenticity, community, and inundation," Singer and Brooking write. "And if you can 'win' the internet, you can win silly feuds, elections, and deadly serious battles."

In 1968, two psychologists wrote a paper theorizing that computers could become communications devices. The US Department of Defense ran with the idea, and in 1969 the precursor of the internet as we know it today, the military-operated ARPANET, went live. The National Science Foundation took over in the 1980s before business began to dominate in the 90s, at which point, things started to grow in exponential leaps. There were 28,000 internet users in 1987, according to Singer and Brooking. Today, there are billions.

Trump's unlikely rise to the White House was symptomatic of social, political, and technological trends decades in the making—trends that gave rise to the internet and social media and which, in turn, transformed the way we control, spy on, and kill each other.

All tribes need tribal leaders, who in turn need loyalty. Followers of Corbyn and Trump will both detest the comparison, but note how both have the merch, the chants, the hagiography. They’re radically different, but both are products of the tribalism that social media has accidentally brought about.

My relationship is a lot healthier with blogs that I visit when I please. This is another criticism I have with RSS as well—I don’t want my favorite music blog sending me updates every day, always in my face. I just want to go there when I am ready to listen to something new. (I also hope readers to my blog just stop by when they feel like obsessing over the Web with me.)

merican public life has become increasingly ideologically segregated as newspapers have given way to screens. But societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries. And the polarization in the US began long ago, with the rise of 24-hour cable news. So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? And are they really as bad as they seem?

Half of Americans say news and current events matter a lot to their daily lives, while 30 percent say the news doesn’t have much to do with them. The rest aren’t sure. A quarter of Americans say they paid a lot of attention to the news on Tuesday, with 32 percent paying just some attention, 26 percent paying not very much attention and 18 percent paying no attention at all. Forty-seven percent thought the news was at least a little busier than average. Of those who paid any attention to the news on Tuesday, 32 percent spent an hour or more reading, watching or listening. About 23 percent spent 30 minutes to an hour, 18 percent spent 15 minutes to half an hour, and 21 percent spent less than 15 minutes. Just 15 percent of those who paid any attention to the news Tuesday have a great deal of trust in the media to state the facts fully, accurately and fairly. Thirty-eight percent have a fair amount of trust, 28 percent don’t have much trust in the media, and 11 percent have none at all. Those who followed the news on Tuesday were most likely to say they had gotten their news from an online news source (42 percent) or local TV (37 percent), followed by national cable TV (33 percent), social media (28 percent), national network news (23 percent), radio (19 percent) and conversations with other people (19 percent). The least popular source was print newspapers and magazines (10 percent).

Most Americans pay at least a little attention to current events, but they differ enormously in where they turn to get their news and which stories they pay attention to. To get a better sense of how a busy news cycle played out in homes across the country, we repeated an experiment, teaming up with YouGov to ask 1,000 people nationwide to describe their news consumption and respond to a simple prompt: “In your own words, please describe what you would say happened in the news on Tuesday.”

Social media is well-understood to be contributing to identity politics, but I’d argue it’s contributing to something deeper: identity paralysis. This condition is one in which we have a forced awareness of how everything we say and do — even the seemingly inconsequential, like the shoes we wear, or the airline we fly — reflects on us.

we can’t just recreate the same thing we’re trying to escape, and we can’t expect the solution to be precisely as easy on us as the problem was.

Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one.

To start you thinking, here’s a quote from lead educator Jean Burgess. Jean considers how Twitter has changed since 2006 and reflects on her own use of the platform in the context of changing patterns of use. In response to the suggestion that Twitter is a dying social media platform, Jean states that: the narratives of decline around the place at the moment […] have to do with a certain loss of sociability. And to those of us for whom Twitter’s pleasures were as much to do with ambient intimacy, personal connections and play as they were to do with professional success theatre, celebrity and breaking news, this is a real, felt loss: sociability matters.

Yet, at the same time as power is exercised by both the state and corporations, power is gathering from the bottom up in new ways. In disaster response, a dynamic interplay between publics and experts is captured by the concept of social collective intelligence (Büscher et al. 2014); a disruptive innovative force that is challenging the social, economic, political and organisational practices that shape disaster response.

identity why do teens seem strange online?292privacy why do youth share so publicly?543addiction what makes teens obsessed with social media?774danger are sexual predators lurking everywhere?1005bullying is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty?1286inequality can social media resolve social divisions?1537literacy are today’s youth digital natives?1768searching for a public of their own199

I had been a victim of something the sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd call context collapse, where people create online culture meant for one in-group, but exposed to any number of out-groups without its original context by social-media platforms, where it can be recontextualized easily and accidentally.

Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours.

We’ve built an information ecosystem where information can fly through social networks (both technical and personal). Folks keep looking to the architects of technical networks to solve the problem. I’m confident that these companies can do a lot to curb some of the groups who have capitalized on what’s happening to seek financial gain. But the battles over ideology and attention are going to be far trickier. What’s at stake isn’t “fake news.” What’s at stake is the increasing capacity of those committed to a form of isolationist and hate-driven tribalism that has been around for a very long time. They have evolved with the information landscape, becoming sophisticated in leveraging whatever tools are available to achieve power, status, and attention. And those seeking a progressive and inclusive agenda, those seeking to combat tribalism to form a more perfect union —  they haven’t kept up.

How many years did it take for the US military to learn that waging war with tribal networks couldn’t be fought with traditional military strategies? How long will it take for the news media to wake up and recognize that they’re being played? And how long after that will it take for editors and publishers to start evolving their strategies?

there’s no cost to the administration to be helpful to the media because the people the Trump Administration cares about don’t trust the media anyhow.

News agencies, long trained to focus on reporting information and maintaining a conceptual model of standards, are ill-equipped to understand that they may have a role in this war, that their actions and decisions are shaping the way the war plays out.

For instance, what would the sound of an image be, or what would sound look like, should the data be processed in another fashion?

From 1996 to 2002 four of Ikeda’s early records found a rightful home with Touch, a label who have shown themselves as being similarly committed to exploring sound and music down to their fundaments.

use of space and indeed some of his future ideas can be found within his work with Dumb Type and their unique approach to theatre and performance

Despite its power to advance learning, many parents, educators, and policymak-ers perceive new media as a distraction from academic learning, civic engagement,

I am generous with what I have—I choose to be generous with what I have—precisely because we are no longer committed to one another as members of a shared social structure. Instead, the shift of responsibility for the public welfare toward private entities displaces our obligations to one another in favor of individual liberties and, I think, leaves us queasy about the notion of obligation altogether.

But Blair is not just posting about her own life; she has taken non-consenting parties along for the ride.

I also value reading a person’s blog over time to understand better their voice and context. So I’m asking for some advice on how to update my module on finding research. What replaces RSS feeds? What works for you that goes beyond “someone on Twitter/Facebook shared….” to something that is more focused and intentional?

When it comes to democracy and human rights, a Jeffersonian internet is clearly a safer choice. With Web 3.0 still in its infancy, the West at least will need to find other ways to rein in the online giants. The obvious alternative is regulation.

open access to the skills and know-how needed to use the web to improve their lives, careers, and organizations.

Sreekumar added: "Interestingly enough, the change was made after Instagram opened the doors to brands to run ads." But even once they pay for visibility, a brand under pressure to remain engaging: "Playing devil's advocate for a second here: All the money in the world cannot transform shitty content into good content."

FB dominates news distribution

Social Media Marketing

The public papers will be expeditious messengers of intelligence to the most remote inhabitants of the Union.

This fall, my colleagues and I released gobo.social, a customizable news aggregator. Gobo presents you with posts from your friends, but also gives you a set of sliders that govern what news you see and what’s hidden from you. Want more serious news, less humor? Move a slider. Need to hear more female voices? Adjust the gender slider, or press the “mute all men” button for a much quieter internet. Gobo currently includes half a dozen ways to tune your news feed, with more to come.

This selection tool has nothing intrinsically to do with annotation. It’s job is to make your job easier when you are constructing a link to an audio or video segment.

At that time I was working with this umbrella group for languages to support communications using social media and to raise awareness of the need for better government support for languages in the UK.  I have always been a passionate advocate of language learning,

A majority of Americans use Facebook and YouTube, but young adults are especially heavy users of Snapchat and Instagram

The influence of the media on the psychosocial development of children is profound. Thus, it is important for physicians to discuss with parents their child’s exposure to media and to provide guidance on age-appropriate use of all media, including television, radio, music, video games and the Internet.The objectives of this statement are to explore the beneficial and harmful effects of media on children’s mental and physical health, and to identify how physicians can counsel patients and their families and promote the healthy use of the media in their communities.