code, Minecraft has become a stealth gateway to the fundamentals, and the pleasures, of computer science.

McGill’s Dr. Sterne calls it “the gamification of research,”

“I don’t trust academia.edu,”

the platform essentially bans access for academics who, for whatever reason, don’t have an Academia.edu account. It also shuts out non-academics.

35 million academics, independent scholars and graduate students as users, who collectively have uploaded some eight million texts

massmediarefers to those means of transmission

I watch as their networks expand, and as followers find one another as they voice ever more extreme opinions.

As an academic, I study social media and social movements, from the uprising in Egypt to Black Lives Matter

if we were to ask people whether clicking on a “like” button next to a short video clip is identical to leaving a detailed comment, the answer would probably be a clear “no.”

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services.

When the tasks that users were prompted to engage in were not presented in increasing order of effort level, users tended to donate and participate less than when tasks were ordered that way.

“calls to action,” issued at different points in time

Media Bias?

In this regard, it’s interesting to note that the viewing of TV programs at the time of their broadcast went up 20% with the advent of Twitter, indicating a desire to consume collaboratively. My ten year experience with social reading suggests that we might see a similar increase if long-form texts began appearing in platforms enabling people to gather in the margins with trusted friends and colleagues.

insert reflective pause to acknowledge the power of weak tie networks here

Land defenders are dying but the news don’t talk about this. Most of media and politics are owned by companies so, we have to force them to serve the people instead. We can’t depend on these guys.

not clear that researchers — who have proved reluctant in repeated trials to comment on published articles — will take to annotation, even if they can share their comments privately.

The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding

I was in Disney World recently,

Apps like Instagram are blind, or almost blind. Their gaze goes inwards, reluctant to transfer any of their vast powers to others, leading them into quiet deaths.

Why should contemporary literary scholarship take an interest in contemporary social computing? How should it take an interest?

That’s how Isis is recruiting and growing.

The core set of functionality we've tried to capture in the HTML5 video compositor is the timing and synchronisation of the playback of videos and other media sources. The library allows you to cut together two separate videos near seamlessly, synchronise the playback of multiple videos in parallel and manage the pre-loading of videos in a just-in-time fashion.

My solution to the problem posed by the incompatibility of depression and social media didn’t aim to change anyone’s life but my own. Yet maybe it was no less radical: Ruthlessly dispose of all fake intimacy and superficial interactions and focus what little energy I had on real connection. Take my feeble attention span and put it into the equivalent of an incubator. Learn to consider myself a worthy human being without the positive reinforcement of Twitter favs.

Professor Heuser thought for a moment. “That’s only indirectly related to social media,” she finally said. “People suffering from depression are incredibly creative at convincing themselves they are losers. But we live in a world that’s hyper-communicative — not really communicative, but narcissistic. Everybody is always ‘sharing’ something, only that it isn’t really sharing, it’s posting something to a wall in the hope that as many people as possible will come past and ‘like’ it. The purpose is to feed our narcissism. It is a many-voiced monologue, a cacophony. Everybody is posting something, but we aren’t talking to each other.”

However, the positive feeling that usually follows — your organism can’t mount that response anymore. That’s a classic symptom of depression. You can’t feel joy or connection to others anymore.” And because my brain knows what joy used to feel like, she explained, its absence, that emptiness, is experienced subconsciously as painful. The fact that I found it so hard to resist the lure of said dopamine release was also easy to explain, she said: “Will has to do with energy. And depression is characterised precisely by a lack of energy.”

Specifically, the study’s authors found two types of information skills that correlated with maximum ideation power: idea scouting and idea connecting. Idea scouts are good at identifying external ideas from diverse experts and resources on Twitter, and they convert weak ties to strong ties, including in offline face to face conversations. Idea connectors are good at identifying business opportunities from the Twitter ideas they discover; they curate and direct those ideas to the best business stakeholders across their organizations.

The more diverse your network of friends on Twitter, the more innovative your ideas tend to be. That’s the conclusion of a five-year study of hundreds of people across five companies, in industries ranging from technology to food production to higher education.

share their thoughts about a site with friends or colleagues

Pixar Animation co-founder Ed Catmull has warned that virtual reality technology may not be the revolution in storytelling that some of its evangelists have claimed. “It’s not storytelling. People have been trying to do [virtual reality] storytelling for 40 years. They haven’t succeeded. Why is that? Because we know that if they succeed then people would jump on it.”

For me the interesting part of Stiegler’s work is the idea that it is technics that invents human beings; it is technics that constitutes the human.

All technologies create cultures of use around themselves; they create new techniques and new ways of doing things that were unthinkable prior to the technology.

If we look back to the beginnings of the university in ancient Greece, there was a struggle even then against a new technology – writing. Plato thought this new-fangled device would ‘implant forgetfulness in [men’s] souls’; it would destroy their memory. People in his day were taught to memorise thousands of lines of poetry and long speeches as part of rhetoric, the art of ‘enchanting the soul’. He thought writing was an artificial memory that would eat away at our natural skills.

Tertiary education must adapt to the technological changes that are occurring at the moment, from the way that courses are written and delivered to the way that students are assessed. This is not just because we will ‘lose’ students, but because what we teach will become irrelevant.

Most mobile applications incorporating location-based services (LBS) are about finding information, which is like the first phase of the web discussed above. I think we’ll be seeing a second phase soon, where location and community converge, which will be really really interesting. For a while there on the web it didn’t matter where you were from, and in a way this will make location important again.

Over the last five years in particular I think the shift in usage has been dramatic; the web is not just a place you go to find information, to do your banking and shopping; it is a place to actively create and publish fragments of your life, to develop a virtual persona in a virtual community, to build stories and objects and then share them.

In the early 90’s I was convinced that the internet was going to revolutionise literature, art and even education. Many writers and artists were at that time. This initial period of excitement tends to happen with the introduction of every new communications technology – radio, TV, computing, and now mobile devices.

It’s a useful term if you work in marketing, PR or business development – but I think academics and media students should be more critical. The idea of Media Studies 2.0 is quite funny; is that where the students collaboratively write the course material and give the lectures to each other? Love it.

The term "Web 2.0" is useful to describe some recent trends, but we need to remember it’s a marketing term. It was coined by the online publishers O’Reilly Media to describe a whole grab-bag of different applications and business models.

Mobile users have a constant low-level awareness of their device; the possibility that communication may arrive at any instant inhabits their awareness. It’s like you’re expecting a visitor sometime or have a pot slowly boiling in the other room, your attention is split.

So for the first time in history, we have a citizenry who are in perpetual contact with the network, who are able to send and receive images wherever they are, who are never ‘offline’ unless they choose to be. If there is any kind of news event, a natural disaster or celebrity sighting for example, then someone is usually there with a camera in their pocket to capture it; perpetual surveillance.

literary Facebook

Removing the VR goggles, the adrenaline continues to course through me. I have only been inside the Project Syria immersive for a few minutes, but the effect is dramatic. It was commissioned for the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos to give politicians an insight into everyday life in Syria. And it works.

"You will have a pair of sunglasses, and you can switch it from glasses mode, to VR mode as you wish. The VR will expand to fill your field of vision, or you can watch it in a little window.” This device of the future will not only bring virtual reality into our everyday lives, according to Urbach, but also destroy the primary way we use many other electronics. “You’ll be done with any other screen,” he says. “You won’t need it. It will be generated on a surface in the air. Put your finger over your palm, it’s a phone. Your desk becomes a laptop. "The resolution two generations from now will give you a 4K experience, so you probably won’t go to a movie theater. Why would you buy a wall-sized TV?”

most blogs have a feature called “pingbacks,”

My friend also told me that when he removed PowerPoint from lecture theatres, his students demanded it back, because without it they had to organise their own notes.

Not for nothing did Brigadier General McMaster, of the US military, subsequently liken the proliferation of PP presentation in the military to an “internal threat”, saying: “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems are not bullet-izable.”

Through PowerPoint, everything has a tendency to resemble a pitch rather than a discussion

If this were true for modern society, it has multiplied in ourage of social media, in which control and value are indissolubly linked to the machine ensemblesthat comprise contemporary digital infrastructures.

and disaster flooding in from the media that have generated a pervasive fear of catastrophe but also a more deep-seated sense of misanthropy which urban commentators have been loath to acknow- ledge, a sense of misanthropy too often treated as though it were a dirty secre

Calderón, who is a proud Afro-Puerto Rican independentista —his son’s name is Malcolm X and his daughter’s name is Ebony Nairobi— is in fact an interesting paradigm for further discussing the issue of gaining independence or progress in Puerto Rico. The fact of the matter is that most independentistas are white Hispanophiles who have socio-economic mobility and are invested in respectability politics. On the contrary, Calderón not only criticizes the United States and their mendacious treatment toward Puerto Rico, but also criticizes Puerto Rico’s racism, classism, corruption and, more important, advocates for people with few resources. He does not romanticize the country by blaming Puerto Rico’s current crisis on Puerto Rico’s colonial status but instead takes a firm and critical approach to a range of issues that affect the country altogether.

Connected Learning, has emerged as a powerful way to connect fragmented spheres of a young person’s life—interests, academic and work opportunities, and peer culture.

Shared information

“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”

Platform content policies—many of which are short and vague, and written mainly with typical users in mind—will be tested as editorial guidelines

. In exchange for audience, platforms ask for some degree of labor and conformity and control.

Strengthen standards and curricula for digital media literacy and coordinate digital media literacy and civic education.

But what we all know about social media is that it’s designed to keep you safe from the things you don’t want to see. In real life, if you see somebody and you don’t care for them, you still have to somehow engage with them. Online, there’s a whole series of algorithms that keep it from coming to you, even on the level of advertising you’re not interested in. In many ways we’re very happy about that. We love that. We also love the little antagonisms that come up, the pile-on that will happen, the call-outs that will happen. That gets into a really interesting thing in social media which I think is new. Now, you have to say something in order to be seen. You have to like or you have to affirmatively make a comment. And if you don’t, then that can be looked at.

“[GWTW] is in part about social media, and the way social media works,” says Place. “And social media is an aesthetic medium. What happens when you have overt antagonism or antagonistic content, on social media? On the surface, it’s so much based on affinity, and liking, and following, and a sense of community. But at the same token, the only way to consistently affirm your community is by having something to rally against. And then we can find out who our friends really are. It’s predicated on [the fact that] we all think the same thing. We don’t go to social media to be confronted by things we don’t understand or don’t agree with, which is maybe why we go to museums, or conferences, or universities. Do we really want museums and galleries, especially museums, to be curating based upon what people know they already like?”

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

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

Leveraging the capabilities of interactive technology to create an educational experience that isn’t possible in a physical, paper - based world

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

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

"Was wir sehen können, ist, dass 1,4 Milliarden Menschen eine Plattform zu einem mehr oder weniger zentralen Teil ihres Lebens gemacht haben, die von einem Menschen an der Spitze gesteuert wird", nämlich Mark Zuckerberg. "Niemand ist uns bisher so nahe an uns herangekommen."

the social media narrative recalled Cold War ideas that capitalist technology would triumph over communist inefficiency, as if people in the Middle East couldn’t have rebelled on their own without the gifts of American entrepreneurs. In the end, whatever was tweeted, there was no Twitter revolution in Iran.

Or more plainly: attention on social media both compensates for and is the logical endpoint of commoditized care work.

including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

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

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

Why is it that Putin has no problem getting his message out? The reason, of course, is that most of what Russians see and hear is Putin’s point of view and Putin’s point of view only.

The Big Myth About Hotel Metasearch (Travel Tuesday)

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

The researchers examined social media patterns for 1.2 million Facebook users and found that nearly 92 percent of those who engage with Italian conspiracy theory pages interact almost exclusively with conspiracy theory pages.

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

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

The biggest trolls, assholes, and bullies set the trajectory of many controversies and start to distort our notion of what most people in the other tribes are like. It doesn't help that it's perversely satisfying to gaze at those other tribes, the ones with whom you did not associate yourself, and to imagine that they're inferior.

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

But these features also make it ripe for conflict between sex worker activists and anti-trafficking activists who oppose sex work. One of the most frequent attacks on Twitter is that these activists are pimps pretending to be sex workers. This argument defeminizes sex workers into the masculine identity of a pimp and paints them as co-conspirators in trafficking. It’s a form of gendered shaming against female-identified sex workers that pits them over and against victimized women and girls

Details on the EU dinner are sparse. But there is increasing concern over the role social media plays in disseminating extremist propaganda, as well as being used as a direct recruitment tool. However, there is also a significant worry that placing strict controls on social networks could actually hinder counter-terrorism efforts. "The further underground they go, the harder it is to gleam information and intelligence," said Jim Gamble, a security consultant, and former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop). "Often it is the low level intelligence that you collect that you can then aggregate which gives you an analysis of what's happening." Mr Gamble was formerly head of counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland. There were, he said, parallels to be drawn. "There's always a risk of becoming too radical and too fundamentalist in your approach when you're trying to suppress the views of others that you disagree with. "In Northern Ireland, huge mistakes were made when the government tried to starve a political party of the oxygen of publicity. I would say that that radically backfired."

Alyattes, who waged war against Deioces' descendant Cyaxares and the Medes