1,812 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2015
    1. 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.

      I'm not so sure this is the case across the board. Our desires don't always serve us.

      I sometimes do want gatekeepers to prevent me from hurting myself.

      I don't know how to translate this into advice for the next generation of media, though.

    1. 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.

      Oh, no. No. Noooooo.

  2. Jan 2015
    1. How interesting! It's the same in my family. Certain members will take as gospel, the opinions of the people they deem to have credibility, but eschew - and even satirically cauterize - the wisdom and factual evidence of people with the authority and knowledge.

      It's most frustrating. As for me, I try not to read comments. They just make me so angry!

    1. "Burroughs’ output predicted the affective temporalities that social networks would make ubiquitous half a century after Naked Lunch appeared: a continuous stream of emissions less concerned with the definitiveness of any individual utterance than with the continued elaboration of a familiar presence."

      I get the click of recognition with this particular quote. The world isn't so much flat as that Pharisee Friedman asserts as it has been leveled like the top of a mountain, all the energy goodies ripped out and the overburden midden gravity fed below, holler fill.

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

      I find this quote troubling. Because it is mainly female dominated or for the art corwd no one talks about it....or maybe Andrew does not talk to many females or "artsy/hipster" types.

    2. I wonder if Anderw's note of express/complain has more to do with brands than with social movements by users of color.

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

      I know of no one who reads Medium outside of tech journalists and my #edtech crowd. If I mentioned medium to a "norm" I would get a strange look.

  3. Nov 2014
    1. 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.
    1. 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.

      I've recently decided, for myself, that Twitter is not a viable platform for political discussions. I simply can't do it anymore. I spend more time getting derailed by confusion stemming from trying to be terse when discussing subtleties than I do actually discussing the issues I wanted to discuss.

    1. 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
  4. Oct 2014
    1. 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."
  5. Feb 2014
    1. Alyattes, who waged war against Deioces' descendant Cyaxares and the Medes

      1.16. Alyattes, king of Lydia, wages ware against the Medes under Cyaxares, probably in the late 7th or early 6th c. BC.