1,759 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2019
    1. Do we want technology to keep giving more people a voice, or will traditional gatekeepers control what ideas can be expressed?

      Part of the unstated problem here is that Facebook has supplanted the "traditional gatekeepers" and their black box feed algorithm is now the gatekeeper which decides what people in the network either see or don't see. Things that crazy people used to decry to a non-listening crowd in the town commons are now blasted from the rooftops, spread far and wide by Facebook's algorithm, and can potentially say major elections.

      I hope they talk about this.

    1. “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.”

      I love his use of the word "ephemera" in relation to social media, particularly as he references his podcast about ancient history.

    1. 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

      Palen and Hughes raise concern about boundaries and classification in mass emergency research. They define crisis as an overarching term that incorrectly generalizes sociobehavioral phenomena during natural and criminal events.

    2. 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.

      Not sure I entriely agree with this argument that misinformation in natural disaster/exogenous events.

      Mis/Dis-information definitely matters for those affected. (see Neal, 1997 and Phillips work on phases of response for minority groups).

      What about misinformation campaigns during mass migration or other politically-tinged humanitarian crises where the exogenous factor (long-standing war, religious conflict/persecution, colonialism, etc.) is far removed from the immediate crisis? (Think 2015 migration crisis in Europe, Rohingya genocide in Myanmar implications for Bangaldesh).

      Is there a middle ground between endogenous and exogenous hazards?

    3. 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).

      Describes differences in social media response between 2012 Hurricane Sandy (exogenous) and 2013 Boston Bombing (endogenous) mass emergencies.

    4. 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.

      Definition of social media and crisis confound

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

      Nicely put observation on how social media changed the way in which we discover information.

  2. Dec 2018
    1. 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.

      An early statement of what would eventually become all of social media.

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

      The trouble is how is this "reputation engine" built? What metrics does it include? Can it be gamed? Social media has gotten lots of this wrong and it has caused problems.

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

      Mind you he's saying this in 2001 before the creation of more wide spread social networks.

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

      Seems like this is a critical assumption to examine for current media literacy/misinformation discussions. As networks become very large and very flat, does this assumption of reciprocity and good faith hold? (I'm thinking, here, of people whose expertise I trust in one domain but perhaps not in another, or the fact that sometimes I'm talking to one part of my network and not really "actively seeking information" for other parts.)

    1. 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.
    1. 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've been seeing a lot about (Japanes) minimalism this past year in relation to physical goods, but hadn't considered what a minimal social media presence would look like.

    1. 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.
  3. Nov 2018
    1. Facebook’s lofty aims were emblazoned even on securities filings: “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”

      Why not make Facebook more open and connected? This would fix some of the problems.

      As usual, I would say that they need to have a way to put some value on the "connections" that they're creating. Not all connections are equal. Some are actively bad, particularly for a productive and positive society.

    1. 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.

      This sort of research should make it eaiser to find and stamp out from the social media side of things. We need regulations to actually make it happen however.

    1. 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.”

      Sounds like a guy who is winning all of the spoils.

    1. Using Model Strategies forIntegrating Technology into Teaching

      In this pdf, there are many helpful tips and techniques in creating a foundation for technology. The introduction of model strategies are laid out with lots of supporting detail and examples and weblinks. It includes nearly 400 pages of peer-reviewed lessons, models and various strategies.

      RATING: 5/5 (rating based upon a score system 1 to 5, 1= lowest 5=highest in terms of content, veracity, easiness of use etc.)

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

      This is a key point. Social media and the way it amplifies almost anything for the benefit of clicks towards advertising is one of its most toxic features. Too often the extreme voice draws the most attention instead of being moderated down by more civil and moderate society.

  4. Oct 2018
    1. Why do people troll? Eight factors are given, which might boil down to:

      • Perceived lack of consequences.
      • Online mob mentality.
    1. 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.

      This sounds a bit like my college experience, though I didn't avoid it because of stressful news (and there wasn't social media yet). I generally missed it because I didn't subscribe directly to publications or watch much television. Most of my news consumption was the local college newspaper.

    1. When students are shown quick techniques for judging the veracity of a news source, they will use them. Regardless of their existing beliefs, they will distinguish good sources from bad sources.

      https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/

    1. The Online Disinhibition Effect (John Suler, 2004) - the lack of restraint shown by some people when communicating online rather than in person. (It can be good as well as bad. How can we reduce the bad behavior?)

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect http://truecenterpublishing.com/psycyber/disinhibit.html

    1. 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.
    1. The last thing most people need is another microphone. They need something to say. (And time to say it.)

      Interesting to hear this from 2006 and looking back now...

    1. 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?

      In this passage, the author is claiming that with transhumanism and the growing appeal of technology as tools to advance or "extend" the human body, it can blur the lines between what is considered human and what is considered technology. For example, the author previously mentions social media and cell phone use in today's world. In today's society, using smartphones has become second nature. The author is implying that in the near future tools and technology such as anabolic steroids, laser surgery, advanced prosthetic limbs, etc can also become as prominent to humans as cellphones/social media is now.

  5. Sep 2018
    1. 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

      Snapchat becomes confident due to being the new form of communication and it happens to be the most activated and number one form of social media. This allows people to be reached out because almost everyone has a Snapchat account.

    1. 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.
    1. 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."
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    1. 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.
    1. 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.)

      Amen!

  6. Aug 2018
    1. 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?
    1. 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).
    2. 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.”
    1. 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.

      This relates to another article on gender dysphoria in teens.

      Among the noteworthy patterns Littman found in the survey data: 21 percent of parents reported their child had one or more friends become transgender-identified at around the same time; 20 percent reported an increase in their child’s social media use around the same time as experiencing gender dysphoria symptoms; and 45 percent reported both.

      Is rapid-onset gender dysphoria a response—if only partially—to the identity paralysis borne out of an age of pervasive social media?

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    1. 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.
    1. 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.

      Cited paper references social media and DHN work.

    1. 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

      Just reading this table of contents reminds me that this "analysis of teens" seems a lot like the perennial contemplations of adults who think that the generations of teenagers coming behind them is different, weird, or even deviant.

      A typical case in point is that of the greatest generation looking at the long-haired 60's hippy teens who came after them. "Why do they like rock and roll? They do too many drugs. There's no hope for the future." "Damn kids. Get off of my lawn!"

      Is the way that current teens and millennials react to social just another incarnation of this general idea?

    1. 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.
    1. 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.

      Why have we gotten away from this? In short, I think it's because it was easier for big companies with massive resources to do the initial heavy lifting.

      If we look at history, Gutenberg created the first printing press and guarded it heavily for years. Eventually others figured out how to do it and printing presses spread like wildfire.Now, with some modest means and some time, almost anyone can publish.

      With simple standards and accessible hosting people can now broadly own their own domain name and create their own websites using a variety of content management systems. In a few years, this will be even more ubiquitous. Facebook is going to be just like Gutenberg attempting to hold onto his monopoly, but failing miserably.

      The best part, I think, is that the speed of digital technology means that the Facebook edifice is going to crumble faster than Gutenberg's.

  7. Jul 2018
    1. 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.
    2. 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?
    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    1. For instance, what would the sound of an image be, or what would sound look like, should the data be processed in another fashion?

      referring to databending

    1. 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.

      Touch is still active. How do they sustain?

    2. 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

      Finding peers like you is very important. How did he run into them?

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

      Many parents think this is true- while there are differing opinions on technology use, this is one such example where the stereotype needs to be broken

    1. 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.

      The game theory of things tends to pull the society apart, particularly when it is easier to see who is paying what. If the richer end feels they're paying more than their fair share, this can tend to break things down.

      I suspect that Francis Fukuyama has a bit to say about this in how democratic societies built themselves up over time. Similarly one of his adherents Jonah Goldberg provides some related arguments about tribalism tending to tear democracies down when we revert back to a more primitive viewpoint instead of being able to trust the larger governmental structures of a democracy.

    1. But Blair is not just posting about her own life; she has taken non-consenting parties along for the ride.
    1. 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?
    1. 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.
    1. open access to the skills and know-how needed to use the web to improve their lives, careers, and organizations.

      Teaching media literacy is an important skill!

  8. Jun 2018
    1. 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."

      Artificially limiting reach of large accounts to then turn around and demand extortion money? It's the social media mafia!

    1. FB dominates news distribution

      If this assertion is based on the Pew "News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017" (http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/) please note the question asked in the survey reads:

      "Do you ever get news or news headlines on any of the following sites? By news we mean information about events and issues that involve more than just your friends or family."

      Do you ever... I'm surprised the figure wasn't higher.

  9. Apr 2018
    1. The public papers will be expeditious messengers of intelligence to the most remote inhabitants of the Union.

      Many useful and interesting ideas swirl around this and the nearby paragraphs and passages relating to the role of the media in American government. First - The A.P. Gov't exam, textbooks etc. The College board is fond of, and expects students to know and understand the following:

      1. The role of media as a "linkage institution" between citizens and the gov't.
        1. The role of media in "agenda setting" i.e. deciding which issues / events will be put in front of the public.
        2. The tendency toward "horse race journalism" which focuses upon who leads in the polls rather than what their principles and positions on significant issues might be.

      Secondly: I would be inclined to introduce students to this passage after a look at the history and influence of the media in politics & gov't especially as it has made political parties less crucial for candidates hoping to achieve nominations and elections (this is also a notion that the college board will deliver in its test questions)

      Finally - in some of my other research, I came across this quotation by English editor Roger L'Estrange in THE INTELLIGENCER (Aug 3rd 1663) as quoted by Les Adams in his book THE SECOND AMENDMENT PRIMER on p. 115 "A public newspaper makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and councils of its superiors . . . and gives them, not only an itch, but a kind of colourable right and license to be meddling with the government" Perhaps a nice aristocratic counter position to lay alongside the remarks of Brutus concerning the media!

    1. 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.

      Gobo, a proof of concept.

  10. Mar 2018
    1. 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.

      I'm reminded of a JavaScript tool written by Aaron Parecki that automatically adds a start fragment to the URL of his page when the audio on the page is paused. He's documented it here: https://indieweb.org/media_fragment

    1. 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,

      Advocacy, leadership, social media

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

      social media use

  11. Feb 2018
    1. 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.
    1. While it’s foolish to assign coherent political meaning to Rodriguez’s film, it cannot be denied that the machete is a powerful symbol of violent, popular revolt, a tool/weapon freighted with centuries of significance.

      Media shapes culture, culture shapes society, and society can shape politics. It is cultural examples such as these that really show how influential media can be. Especially in movies that glorify tools to be weapons. Haltman states that there are metaphysical aspect that embody culture.

  12. Jan 2018
  13. Dec 2017
  14. Nov 2017
    1. Mike Hearn, formerly with Google, calls a recent report on Twitter bots promoting Brexit "deliberate lying, or if you like, fake news."

      Without having looked into it further than reading his response, I'm doubtful about his doubtfulness. I suspect the kind of bots he was trying to identify were a different variety. He says he never saw "cyborg" accounts. He doesn't mention that Russia is known to employ people for social media propaganda.

    1. Online kommunizieren "Social-Media-Verweigerer" auch durch ihr Fernbleiben von Facebook und Co.

      Wer den Social Media fernbleibt, ist vielleicht online, vielleicht auch nicht. In beiden Fällen können die, die online sind und bei Social Media mitmachen, denjenigen, der fernbleibt, nicht «sehen», auch nicht als Leerstelle. Wer nicht bei den Social Media mitmacht, existiert – aus der Innensicht – in gewisser Weise nicht. Es sei denn, das Fernbleiben wird innerhalb der Social Media thematisiert. Und das kann nur, wer mitmacht oder prominent mitgemacht hat. Aus den Social Media heraus könnte zwar nach außen auf jemanden verwiesen werden, der nicht mitmacht – aber wäre das Kommunikation? Doch nur dann, wenn diese Person innerhalb der Social Media bekannt ist. «Ich mache bei Euch nicht (mehr) mit!» mach bei Social Media keinen Sinn. Ich würde also behaupten: im Zusammenhang mit Social Media ist Nicht-Kommunizieren durchaus möglich.

    1. Jonathan Albright says that Instagram is another major channel of Russian propaganda.

      IRA (Internet Research Agency) - a Russian troll factory.

      David Karpf argues that actual user engagement among US citizens can be hard to estimate, since a lot of apparent activity comes from fake accounts.

    1. This (“[hearts] increased likes by a billion!”) is said by an actual employee of Twitter as if it means something, but it means nothing. Clicking on a heart is not some inherent good like increasing exercise, or upping the amount of fiber in your diet, or decreasing poverty. It’s a decision to provide Twitter with more data. That’s it.

      The truth is many people working these jobs are so far into the machine they don’t see the difference between platform engagement (clicking on hearts) and civic and personal engagement (enjoying life more fully, thinking about things more deeply, empathizing more broadly, imagining and building a better world). They upped the click rate on a heart which is good for marketing. They are food scientists trying to tweak a flavor profile to get people to consume thirteen more Doritos a day.

    1. As they stand, and especially with algorithmic reinforcement, “reactions” and “likes” are like megaphones for echo chambers and news outrage.

      This is something that's been nagging at me for the last couple of weeks.

      Does it all matter? Does that tweet, share, thumbs up, like really matter at all? If you/we/I share out of tweet of support, outrage, or indifference, does it really matter on the grand scale.

      Yes, I might have some likeminded individuals value it, read it, use it, share it. But, ultimately aren't we really just shouting into the echo chambers that have been built up for us thanks to these algorithms and networks? We're preaching to the choir.

      I'd like to think that open can/will combat this...but unsure.

      I think this is a post for Hybrid Ped or elsewhere. Lemme know if this resonates with anyone and you want to write it out.

    1. Kris Schaffer distinguishes bots, sockpuppets, and trolls, and talks about how to identify botnets. Twitter and other social media sites should be able to eliminate many of the bogus accounts. But they don't.

  15. Oct 2017
    1. ollowing President Trump’s calls for “extreme vetting” of immigrants from seven Muslim majority countries, then–Department of Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly hinted that he wanted full access to visa applicants’ social-media profiles.

      Interesting section

    1. Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state's real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.

      The account, @TEN_GOP, was enormously popular, amassing at least 136,000 followers between its creation in November 2015 and when Twitter shut it down in August

    1. The Bystander Effect - Crowds sometimes fail to help someone in trouble: everyone assumes someone else will do it.

      Similarly, people in groups often fail to check facts as carefully as they would if they were alone. They assume someone else has already checked.

      Careless people, and bots, tend to share news quickly, without bothering to fact check. Once something has been shared thousands of times, even fairly careful people are likely to assume it must be true.

      Again, if social media was to think a bit bigger, there are ways to apply this insight to deprivilege the influence of the quickest, and privilege the influence of those making informed decisions.

    1. Mike Monteiro's short history of Twitter from the point of view of a long-time user. They went bad when they started tolerating racists for the sake of continued growth. And now Trump's tweets are a genuine threat to the entire world.

    1. John Dewey

      Dewey and Lippmann had a well-documented public feud over the role of citizens in democracy.

      Here are two articles a about their frequent debates:

      http://schugurensky.faculty.asu.edu/moments/1922lippdew.html

      https://www.infoamerica.org/teoria_articulos/lippmann_dewey.htm

      Dewey, unlike Lippmann, believed in the underlying principle that humans were capable of discernment and if they were taught the skills to correctly identify inaccurate media sources, then we would have better journalism because citizens demanded it. This theme of human agency in media is a dominant one throughout this section.

    2. "What we're experiencing," says Carr, "is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest."

      Rheingold includes a large swath of Nicholas Carr's quotes on this page and next, which I'm not sure is helping his larger point. I happen to agree with some of Carr's arguments including this one. While I do believe its overstated, I think that his point that with there being so much content just 'out there' on the Internet, its hard to wade through the sludge for correct information, particularly if you don't have well-developed digital literacy skills.

      This is another area where media stratification comes into play. The Internet has exacerbated the issue of confirmation bias in current events, because of its democratized nature. Everyone can publish content on the web, and because of that then anyone can find a source that aligns perfectly with their beliefs and biases, whether they're grounded in fact or not.

      This is a huge contributor to the rise of the alt-right over the past year and a half. The publication of conspiracy theories, of abhorrent racist content, of confederate rage that make up alt-right circles on the Internet was a major news story during America's most recent election. Carr's point about the Internet forcing us to become 'hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest' means that people naturally flock to sources that confirm biases they already hold.

    3. The fact is that this invention will produce for-getfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimu-lus of external marks that are alien to themselves.

      Again, the theme of people fearing the potential consequences of disruptive media that has become absolutely essential to the flow of modern day life. This quote from Plato demonstrates that even the wisest among us sometimes can't see past their own nose. Yes, Plato correctly predicted that writing and literacy would lead to a decrease in memorization and a de-emphasis on the intellectual oral tradition. But if not for disruptive media, we would all be lounging in the Athenian agora like Plato, believing the sun revolved around the Earth.

      Often times, the zenith of disruptive media brings with it exaggerated hysteria over the potential ill-effects of what it will do to our current forms of media. But these doomsday predictions never seem to come to pass. The television didn't kill the radio. Email didn't kill face-to-face human interaction, and neither did the telephone. Writing didn't kill knowledge. Many of these Luddites forget human agency, the ability of humans to balance media consumption and manage the emerging new forms of media with classic forms.

      Rheingold begins this section called '(Using) the Internet Makes Us Stupid (or Not)' in order to promote restraint and emphasize the forgotten element in all of these negative predictions for disruptive media: choice.

    4. , I'll zoom in on the long debate that sociologists have had about the effects of trains, telephones, or televi-sions on the quality of human social connection in large social groups, or "society" in the aggregate.

      One of Rheingold’s central rhetorical devices for building ethos in this introductory chapter is to highlight the now-laughable negative reactions to technology that has become irreplaceable to our daily lives. This article from Vaughn Bell in Slate is useful in amplifying Rheingold’s point, that the new digital forms of media are just the latest in a long tradition of disruptive media sources. Bell writes, “Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain.”.In it, he mentions a long litany of naysayers against technologies like the printing press, the radio, and the television. Obviously all of these technologies have fostered human progress more than it has hindered it. I think this is the position Rheingold would take as well, that cries that the Internet is making us dumb or that social media is ruining our politics are huge overreactions to small kinks in a technology that’s benefits vastly outweigh its costs.

      Is Google Making Us Stupid? - the Atlantic (this is an article that Rheingold references several times) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

      Did Social Media Ruin Election 2016? - NPR http://www.npr.org/2016/11/08/500686320/did-social-media-ruin-election-2016

    5. Unproductive for the goal oriented • Unhealthy for everybody • Fatal for a growing number • Addictive for some • An invitation to bad parenting • Sodally alienating • A cause for a dangerous loss of solitude

      This list of potential consequences of media-related distraction that Rheingold gives us also happen to create conditions for how ISIS recruits online, according to this Brookings article

      https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/11/09/how-terrorists-recruit-online-and-how-to-stop-it/

      Digital isolation is a key component in the ‘Discovery’ phase of terrorist recruitment that J.M. Berger lays out and also identified as a consequence in Rheingold’s assessment. Now of course, it’s not as if every time you get distracted from your homework and take a BuzzFeed quiz you’re a target for terrorist recruitment. It requires a concerted effort to learn more about ISIS in order for the organization to pick up on a recruit’s interest. The idea is that the more distracted you become by delving into ISIS-friendly spaces on the Internet, the more you become a potential target of ISIS recruiters. This is also an example of media stratification. The way that terrorists radicalize targets is by surrounding them with a digital community in the ‘Create micro-community’ stage of recruitment, further segregating the potential recruit into pro-ISIS circles. This experience of ISIS recruitment shows the extremes of media-triggered distraction.

  16. Sep 2017
    1. You don’t go to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or Instagram because you’re looking for something, rather, you want to see what it has found for you.

      This is a critical distinction.

    1. e development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

      This quote is how Rheingold introduces one of his central themes: distraction, its evolving role in our constantly connected world, and how to deal with it productively.

      But this quote also provides an avenue to a topic that Rheingold briefly touches on later that I think is at the core of the intersection of our current political and digital discussions. That is, what is the impact of media stratification on our society? In all manner of our current dialogues, from the 2016 election, to opinions on climate change, even to the strategies of 21st century terrorist recruitment, how do we as digital citizens fight through the noise of partisan, unaccredited content to find truth? In many instances, especially in cases where someone may not possess the digital skills necessary to adequately judge the veracity of sources, we end up falling into traps of only trusting media outlets that confirm the opinions we already believe to be true. Huxley, and by extension Rheingold, points to humanity's bent towards distraction as the main source of this media stratification and increasing digital isolation into circles that continually reinforce whatever beliefs are held up as true.

    1. Now that many of the biggest tech companies operate like media businesses, trafficking in information, they’re in a race to create new products to charm and track consumers.

      I want to explore this whole tech companies acting like media companies thing...

    1. something like this picture….

      Networks are like 'air'; they are all around us constantly. This class will not only help you see networks but also to see the complexity of them. They are growing more complex and more important to how our society functions. I often wonder if networks are not replacing institutions.

    1. what you see on the surface (individuals or bamboo shoots) is connected by a complicated path that run just below the surface (relationships between people or the root system of the bamboo plant).  

      I think this is why we are so fascinated by social media; it has revealed what has always been under the surface. To me, networks are like 'air'; all around us but hard to see. SNA reveals the air.

    1. connected teenagers  had decreased feelings of well-being. T

      I think this is a central question of our age--does social media make us happier? Increase democracy? Smarter? And the question always changes because the technology always changes. I now wonder about SnapChat. It functions a bit differently but with the same goal of connection. Does it produce better feelings than FB? Worse? More vicitimization? Less?

    1. networks are everywhere,

      I think this is why they are hard to analyze...it is like trying to see and understand air. It is everywhere so it feels so normal and invisible. Networks, particularly human networks are the same. Humans have always been embedded in networks; we live, thrive and die in networks. They are another form of 'air'. The difference is that today, social media has made them more visible. We can now see them and analyze them in new ways. Hence, why this class is online :-)

  17. Aug 2017
  18. Jul 2017
    1. he canonical divergence D induces the metric g and the connections∇and∇∗. The same holds for the mean canonical divergence D∇mcd
    2. if∇is integrable, then it is notgenerally true that X(q,p) =−gradqD∇mcd(p‖·)
    3. mean canonical divergenceD∇mcd(p‖q):=12(D(p‖q) +D∗(q‖p))(64)which obviously satisfiesD(∇∗)mcd(p‖q) =D∇mcd(q‖p)
    1. BNN Mobile TV  |  BNN Live Video Stream  |  Newsletter  |  Contact Us

      The Business News Network main portal . No archived material related to the Alberta oil sands, unfortunately.

    1. Skip to content Events 2014 C-Suites Awards Gala – Feb 5 Human Resources Best Practices for Energy Services Companies – March 18 C-Suite Awards The 2014 C-Suites Gala 2014 Award Winners 2013 Award Winners 2012 Award Winners 2011 Award Winners The 100 & Energy Service 50 Apply Event Articles Magazine Current Issue Columns Promoted Content Back Issues Media Releases Subscriber Address Change About Comment Policy Contact Us Where to get Alberta Oil Advertise Jobs Follow Alberta Oil On:

      Trade magazine on Alberta oil industry. Articles have named authors.

    1. The backfire effect is getting turbocharged online. I think we’re getting more angry and convinced about everything, not because we’re surrounded by like-minded people, but by people who disagree with us. Social media allows you to find the worst examples of your opponents. It’s not a place to have your own views corroborated, but rather where your worst suspicions about the other lot can be quickly and easily confirmed.

    1. 2. Staying with a closed, proprietary system & not moving to the adoption of open standards.

      I concur. Diigo could have been a leader in the social annotation space, way ahead of Hypothesis. But now I think H is gaining more momentum than Diigo, because it adheres to open standards.

  19. blog.diigo.com blog.diigo.com
    1. A major change will be our movement away from ‘social’ aspects in Diigo. While we may have been swayed by the ‘social media movement’, at the end of the day Diigo has always been more of a personal platform.

      Em.. this is an interesting statement. So Diigo is moving away from being social?

  20. Jun 2017
    1. In January 2018, the World Press Photo Foundation, in association with Newcastle University’s Open Lab, University of California Irvine and ArtEZ in the Netherlands will launch Talking Pictures, an open course in critical visual storytelling.

    1. Trump is here said to be a wizard at media manipulation because he changes the subject. Deftly! As if a determined reporter could not change it back.

      And isn't it common political practice for interviewees to not accept the premise of the question and then to pivot?

    1. we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.

      ...

      What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.

      ...

      The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself.

  21. May 2017
    1. But let's properly define the problem. History and experience tell me it's not a post-truth era: Facts have always been hard to separate from falsehoods, and political partisans have always made it harder. It's better to call this a post-trust era.

      We are not post-truth, we're post-trust.

      Kind of. A lot of people "trusted" the Denver Guardian because it fit within their pre-existing narrative framework. Maybe we are "post-trust" with the institutions and organizations that got us this far: traditional mainstream media, higher ed, researchers and scientists.

    1. cookbook

      Really tho, the influence of cookbooks and Ladies' Home Journal among other popular media catered to households and women is amazing in promoting food trends.

  22. Apr 2017
    1. Detection of fake news in social media based on who liked it.

      we show that Facebook posts can be classified with high accuracy as hoaxes or non-hoaxes on the basis of the users who "liked" them. We present two classification techniques, one based on logistic regression, the other on a novel adaptation of boolean crowdsourcing algorithms. On a dataset consisting of 15,500 Facebook posts and 909,236 users, we obtain classification accuracies exceeding 99% even when the training set contains less than 1% of the posts.

    1. digital identity, as a practice, operates counter to the collaboration and cooperation that need to be part of digital citizenship.

      This is our contemporary contradiction: identity as a construct in contemporary social media spaces makes for pretty rotten social spaces.

      ...

      We’re algorithmically manipulated. We’re surveilled. We’re encouraged to speak rather than listen. We’re stuck engaging in visibility strategies, whether we admit it or not, in order simply to be acknowledged and seen within a social or professional space.

      Our digital identities do not – and at the level of technological affordances and inherent structure, cannot – create a commons that is actually a healthy pro-social space.

    1. The key changes we can make in the short term (without requiring sites to relinquish their business models) are to teach social software to forget, to give it predictable security properties, and to sever the financial connection between online advertising and extremism.

    2. Orwell imagined a world in which the state could shamelessly rewrite the past. The Internet has taught us that people are happy to do this work themselves, provided they have their peer group with them, and a common enemy to unite against. They will happily construct alternative realities for themselves, and adjust them as necessary to fit the changing facts.

      Finally, surveillance capitalism makes it harder to organize effective long-term dissent. In an setting where attention is convertible into money, social media will always reward drama, dissent, conflict, iconoclasm and strife. There will be no comparable rewards for cooperation, de-escalation, consensus-building, or compromise, qualities that are essential for the slow work of building a movement. People who should be looking past their differences will instead spend their time on purity tests and trying to outflank one another in a race to the fringes.

    3. Obviously, in this situation whoever controls the algorithms has great power. Decisions like what is promoted to the top of a news feed can swing elections. Small changes in UI can drive big changes in user behavior. There are no democratic checks or controls on this power, and the people who exercise it are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist

    4. On Facebook, social dynamics and the algorithms’ taste for drama reinforce each other. Facebook selects from stories that your friends have shared to find the links you’re most likely to click on. This is a potent mix, because what you read and post on Facebook is not just an expression of your interests, but part of a performative group identity.

      So without explicitly coding for this behavior, we already have a dynamic where people are pulled to the extremes. Things get worse when third parties are allowed to use these algorithms to target a specific audience.

    5. any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content.

      ...

      This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.

    1. The digital social networks that have quickly become ubiquitous have made visiblemany of the patterns underlying existing academic personal and professional relationships,and the ways in which reputation and reliability circulate in these structures. Social andintellectual networks have long constituted the professional contexts of scholars, but digi-tal networks representing some subset of those contexts have exposed more of what takesplace at the margins of those networks.

      Digital Social Networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter.

      Makes an interesting point about homogenisation in Facebook and Twitter (i.e. people are a binary of friend or not friend, categories that collapse all different categories.

      Interestingly, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to address this recently.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. 1) No one can even agree on a definition of “fake news,” even though a ridiculous number of words are being spent trying to define it.2) Folks don’t seem to understand the evolving nature of the problem, the way that manipulation evolves, or how the approaches they propose can be misused by those with whom they fundamentally disagree.3) No amount of “fixing” Facebook or Google will address the underlying factors shaping the culture and information wars in which America is currently enmeshed.
  23. Mar 2017
    1. 74. Outreach and online training services at the Saccharomyces Genome Database Kevin A. MacPherson, Barry Starr, Edith D. Wong, Kyla S. Dalusag, Sage T. Hellerstedt, Olivia W. Lang, Robert S. Nash, Marek S. Skrzypek, Stacia R. Engel and J. Michael Cherry

      Nice talk and nice use of social media

    1. many students I met were being told that Wikipedia was untrustworthy and were, instead, being encouraged to do research

      Is this a problem with media literacy? Or does it stem from a mindless bias against Wikipedia? The problem described sounds like literacy taught poorly.

    1. Earlier this week, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport held a private ministerial meeting with news publishers and technology platforms to discuss the issue of fake news and the programmatic environment which supports it.
  24. Feb 2017
    1. So designers on the runway this week engaged in a continuing dialogue

      This "continuing dialogue" also seems to be further embraced on a bigger scale and globally due to influences like social media and bloggers.

    1. He has no public presence on Facebook or Twitter, which Sulzberger can get a ­little defensive about—he was promoted to management in 2015 to help implement the recommendations of the Innovation Report, and he knows there’s an easy joke to be made about how the person charged with leading the Times into a digital future has never liked, tweeted, or snapped.

      Maybe that distance is a good thing?

    1. So how many individuals from each nation have been involved in terror attacks in Europe since 9/11? 

      The following text shows that people from the seven countries picked both by the U.S. Congress,Obama, and Trump do pose a significant risk of terrorism, despite the mainstream media's statements to the contrary.

      Trump's temporary immigration ban from these seven countries was far from optimal, and may have actually caused considerably more harm than good, but it was not nearly as absurd at the mainstream media is propagandizing people to believe.

    1. when tion, which, without their aid, might have passed every one erects himself into a judge, and when unobserved; and which, though of a delicate na-we can hardly mingle in polite society without ture, frequently exert a powerful influence on bearing some share in such discussions;

      This sounds a lot like current complaints of the interwebs, particularly social media. Everyone's a critic!

    2. But allow him more experience in works of this kind, and his taste becomes by degrees more exact and enlightened. He begins to perceive not only the character of the whole, but the beauties and de-f eels of each part; and i~ able to describe the pe-culiar qualities which he praises or blames. The mist is dissipalcd which seemed formerly to hang over the object; and he can at length pronounce firmly, and without hesitation, concerning it. Thus, in taste, considered as mere sensibility, ex-ercise opens a great source of improvement.

      This reminds me of Hume: "A good palate is not tried by strong flavors; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest" (835).

      Anyone can praise or blame based on the most obvious and strongest characteristics of something. Taste is only at play when one is able to praise or blame based on the subtle and intricate details of the thing under review.

    1. Andrew Postman says his father Neil got it right in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": our situation is more like Brave New World than 1984. But it's like both. Constant entertainment is a big part of what got us here, but we also have politicians practicing newspeak, and excessive surveillance.

    1. #SayHerName movement draws attention to black women believed to be victims of police brutality, like Alexia Christian and Meagan Hockaday, whose deaths received a small fraction of the attention given to Eric Garner or Michael Brown.

      Black women using technology to advocate for their erasure.

  25. Jan 2017
    1. until black women on social media began calling out the press for ignoring the story. Many reached for one word — ‘‘erasure’’ — for what they felt was happening. ‘‘Not covering the #Holtzclaw verdict is erasing black women’s lives from notice,’’ one woman tweeted. ‘‘ERASURE IS VIOLENCE.’’ Deborah Douglas, writing for Ebony magazine, argued that not reporting on the case ‘‘continues the erasure of black women from the national conversation on race, police brutality and the right to safety.’’

      black women are being erased from the discussion. Race in general plays a role on how much a topic is spoken about. This case was not even mentioned or discussed until black women started the talk.

    1. In this sense it has a role very close to that of confession to the director, about which John Cassian will say, in keeping with Evagrian spirituality, that it must reveal, without exception, all the impulses of the soul (omnes cogitationes)

      To me, this idea of writing that speaks and reveals information to a "director" is the very basic idea for what first person narratives are.

      Furthermore, this idea of confessing to an audience through an interactive narrative translates to various media, as well. However, even though these confessions are seemingly necessary in textual renditions of narratives, they can often be misconstrued as more intrusive fourth wall breaks due to this change in media. This creates a very thin line between these confessions being additive to the narrative or if they take away from the overall intent of the author.

      To keep this idea going still, upon researching the definition of "cogitationes," the definitions were either of self-reflection, thoughts, or the act of thinking; something clearly represented through Foucault's writing, but a connection I found interesting, nonetheless.

    1. Researchers at University College London have discovered a Twitter botnet of more than 350,000 accounts created in 2013, and dormant since then. They've also found another one with more than 500,000 accounts.

    1. Fake news is just squatting in one part of one building in an entire landscape of neglect and corruption; evicting them will make no difference to the blight.
    2. never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

      "Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

    1. ‘Books,’ declared Thomas Edison in 1913, ‘will soon be ob-solete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.’57

      Thomas Edison. Love his quotes

    1. Asking questions via social media that are intentionally designed to elicit responses can provide a plethora of useful responses. Why wait until an end-of-year survey to find out about an issue when you can poll/question students throughout the year via social media?

      It doesn't have to be just student feedback about the operations and mechanics of the course, or as a replacement for a course survey tool. You can also use the platform as a way to engage students on the content relevant to the learning outcomes of the course. And use the platform to connect learners with people in the field of study.

    1. A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.
    2. The techniques that are unfolding are hard to manage and combat. Some of them look like harassment, prompting people to self-censor out of fear. Others look like “fake news”, highlighting the messiness surrounding bias, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. There is hate speech that is explicit, but there’s also suggestive content that prompts people to frame the world in particular ways. Dog whistle politics have emerged in a new form of encoded content, where you have to be in the know to understand what’s happening. Companies who built tools to help people communicate are finding it hard to combat the ways their tools are being used by networks looking to skirt the edges of the law and content policies. Institutions and legal instruments designed to stop abuse are finding themselves ill-equipped to function in light of networked dynamics.
    1. personal responsibility
    2. Children are indoctrinated into this cultural logic early, even as their parents restrict their mobility and limit their access to social situations. But when it comes to information, they are taught that they are the sole proprietors of knowledge. All they have to do is “do the research” for themselves and they will know better than anyone what is real. Combine this with a deep distrust of media sources. If the media is reporting on something, and you don’t trust the media, then it is your responsibility to question their authority, to doubt the information you are being given. If they expend tremendous effort bringing on “experts” to argue that something is false, there must be something there to investigate.
    1. Did Media Literacy Backfire?

      Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.

      ...

      Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.

    1. The problem isn’t the fake news itself, as much as the historical consciousness that allows so many to willingly believe it with no skepticism.
    1. Lindy West's thoughtful and amusing goodbye to Twitter. She concisely describes Twitter's good and bad sides. Then she leaves me wondering if any of us should be using it.

      I quit Twitter because it feels unconscionable to be a part of it – to generate revenue for it, participate in its profoundly broken culture and lend my name to its legitimacy. Twitter is home to a wealth of fantastic anti-Trump organising, as well, but I’m personally weary of feeling hostage to a platform that has treated me and the people I care about so poorly. We can do good work elsewhere.

      I’m pretty sure “ushered in kleptocracy” would be a dealbreaker for any other company that wanted my business.

  26. Dec 2016
    1. Selling user data should be illegal. And the customer data a company is allowed to collect and store should be very limited.

      Under the guidance of Jared Kushner, a senior campaign advisor and son-in-law of President-Elect Trump, Parscale quietly began building his own list of Trump supporters. Trump’s revolutionary database, named Project Alamo, contains the identities of 220 million people in the United States, and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 individual data points about the online and offline life of each person. Funded entirely by the Trump campaign, this database is owned by Trump and continues to exist.

      Trump’s Project Alamo database was also fed vast quantities of external data, including voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, and internet account identities. The Trump campaign purchased this data from certified Facebook marketing partners Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom Corporation. (Read here for instructions on how to remove your information from the databases of these consumer data brokers.)

    2. Trump's campaign used carefully targeted negative ads to suppress voter turnout.

      With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.

      “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official explained to reporters from BusinessWeek. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”

    3. 100,000 personalized collections of lies.

      Parscale also deployed software to optimize the design and messaging of Trump’s Facebook ads. Describing one such test, the Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Mims writes that “one day in August, his campaign sprayed ads at Facebook users that led to 100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters.” In total, Trump’s digital team built or generated more than 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content.

    1. Donna Zuckerberg on replying to writers who are being harassed.

      Helpful responses:

      • "You're doing great work."
      • "I'm sorry this is happening to you."
      • Signal boost, if that's what they want.
      • Support from old friends.
      • Help from close friends and coworkers.

      Less helpful:

      • "That's horrible." (They already know.)
      • "I reported the account." (She feels this doesn't accomplish anything. I think you should always report such accounts. You just don't need to tell the victim about it.)
      • "What has this country come to?" (This sounds like you never noticed racism and sexism until recently.)
      • "Hopefully it will stop soon." (The idea that the harassers have moved on to someone else is not a great comfort.)

      Unhelpful:

      • Don't ask, "What did you expect?"
      • Don't suggest the victim should avoid writing about particular topics.
      • Don't assume you know how they feel.
      • Don't criticize them for showing the threats. (If there's some reason it bothers you, mute or unfollow.)
      • Putin's hackers stole emails. Wikileaks published them.
      • News media covered the emails like a breaking scandal, while giving little attention to how and why the emails were stolen.
      • Before that, Republicans made as much noise as they could about Benghazi, and Clinton using a private email server. News media could hardly have been more helpful to them if they were all owned outright by the Republican party.
      • News media treated Trump like a serious candidate, rather than the lying, idiot lowlife that he is.
      • Days before election day, James Comey announces, maybe possibly kind of, more emails from Clinton's private server discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop. News media covers it enthusiastically. In a few days, Comey announces there was nothing new. How about that.

      Dave Pell's main point here is that news media wouldn't produce crap if people didn't eat it up.

      But we aren't all eating the crap. I don't think there's much we can do about the people who do. Many of them aren't being fooled by the lies and sensationalism. They're just choosing to "believe" what they want to "believe". (Though the number actually fooled was probably far more than enough to win the election for Trump.)

      We need to give as much support as we can to responsible journalism and commentary. And maybe we can collectively discourage media from producing crap by making sure they know that millions of us are angered by it. Maybe there should be independent journalists as a branch of government, tasked with choosing what the people should know, and granted privileges similar to those that members of Congress have.

    1. Alexander Hamilton’s writing in Federalist Paper No. 68, which states that the meeting of the electoral college “affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

      Yes, and Alexander Hamilton was in favor of property requirements for voting, which prevented a large majority of people from voting. Here we have the Democrats saying we should make our selection of the U.S. President less democratic, less responsive to voters -- not more democratic.

      I have fears Trump will be a bad President. But I don't like the incredible hypocrisy of those who slandered Trump for not agreeing to accept the results of the election, not only refusing to accept the result, but try to do so by -- not only overturning a tradition that is over a hundred years old -- but doing so in a manner that would make our selection of a president much less responsive to voters.

    1. Dave Pell points out that Trump's "grab her by the pussy" video was the big news on 7 October -- the same day the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence acknowledged that Russia was responsible for the DNC hacks. The latter should have been the main story that day, but it wasn't.

    1. Ninety-five percent of 12- to 17-year-olds already go online on a regular basis. They use social networks, and create and contribute to websites. Our work is focused on taking full advantage of the kinds of tools and technologies that have transformed every other aspect of life to power up and accelerate students’ learning. We need to do things differently, not just better.

      Hypothes.is nicely bridges the worlds of social media and formal education.