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.
Because social media is public.
Is it, really? I think this confuses the issue.
Digital Hydra: Security Implications of False Information Online (NATO StratCom COE, Nov 2017)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Back in 2012, Zeynep Tufecki pointed out that election campaigns driven by big-data and social media could be bad for democracy.
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.
"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.
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.
, 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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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 :-)
Some ways to identify bots on Twitter.
he canonical divergence D induces the metric g and the connections∇and∇∗. The same holds for the mean canonical divergence D∇mcd
if∇is integrable, then it is notgenerally true that X(q,p) =−gradqD∇mcd(p‖·)
mean canonical divergenceD∇mcd(p‖q):=12(D(p‖q) +D∗(q‖p))(64)which obviously satisfiesD(∇∗)mcd(p‖q) =D∇mcd(q‖p)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592
Bot tweets are retweeted by humans at the same rate as human tweets. Stories propped up by 1,000 bots spread just like stories propped up by a thousand humans.
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The Business News Network main portal . No archived material related to the Alberta oil sands, unfortunately.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
The Shouting Class -- people who criticize things as a way of life.
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.
Analysis of a subreddit for Trump supporters, based on comparisons of the users of various subreddits.
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.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
The history of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.<br> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/20/the-seth-rich-conspiracy-shows-how-fake-news-still-works/
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Accuracy in Media
This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.
Participatory Propaganda - an analysis of current techniques for exploiting our online behavior. https://twitter.com/lageneralista
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.
research on how ideas spread through social media
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.
New Hampshire state legislator discovered to be the founder of the misogynistic online group The Red Pill.(Which has nearly 200,000 subscribers. Yikes.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Trump-Russia sock puppets posing as "Bernie bros" targeted women and black men with harassment on Twitter when they expressed support for Hillary Clinton.
2 April, 2017 - International Fact-Checking Day Lesson plan and several how-to guides.
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.
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
The Rise of Video Is Making 2016 a Weird Year to Be a Digital Publisher
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.
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.
A powerful media and information literacy project from UNESCO
Here’s the Full Text of Mark Zuckerberg’s Manifesto
Useful: Zuckerberg's article is here available outside the Facebook silo.
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.
media
Even back in the day, media played a crucial role to rhetoric
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?
The data Facebook collects, and what they do with it.
Welcome to the Toolshed!
free media tools for nonprofits
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.
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!
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.
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.
#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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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
The meaning of the term "fake news" and the dilution of that meaning.
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.
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.
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.
personal responsibility
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.
accurately,clearly,engagingly,imaginatively,beautifully,andreliabl
Don't forget adverbially. JJ=MSM tool
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.
Tweets deleted by public officials and candidates.
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.
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.
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.)
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.”
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.
Donna Zuckerberg on replying to writers who are being harassed.
Helpful responses:
Less helpful:
Unhelpful:
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.
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.
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.
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.
"We told them it was BS and what they were doing with a public platform was incredibly reckless and dangerous," wrote Coby of the back-and-forth between the Trump operation and Twitter.
Twitter may be a platform that mostly lives in the public, but it isn't a public platform. It's also one of the reasons I have my own site.
http://digipo.io/doku.php<br> The Digital Polarization Initiative<br> "The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."
http://phys.org/news/2016-12-pro-trump-bot-colonised-pro-clinton-twitter.html
http://politicalbots.org/?p=787 Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.S. Election
http://politicalbots.org/ An international research group studying political bots.
The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.
A survey of voters asked if they remembered seeing a headline, and if so, whether they believed it was true.
It may come as no surprise that high percentages of Trump voters believed stories that favored Trump or demonized Clinton. But the percentage of Clinton voters who believed the fake stories was also fairly high!
familiarity equals truth: when we recognize something as true, we are most often judging if this is something we’ve heard more often than not from people we trust.
...
if you want to be well-informed it’s not enough to read the truth — you also must avoid reading lies.
An analysis of links among "fake news" sites and mainstream news sites and social media.
There’s a vast network of dubious “news” sites. Most are simple in design, and many appear to be made from the same web templates. These sites have created an ecosystem of real-time propaganda: they include viral hoax engines that can instantly shape public opinion through mass “reaction” to serious political topics and news events. This network is triggered on-demand to spread false, hyper-biased, and politically-loaded information.
Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and the newly appointed chief strategist to Trump, is on Cambridge Analytica’s board and it has emerged that the company is in talks to undertake political messaging work for the Trump administration. It claims to have built psychological profiles using 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It knows their quirks and nuances and daily habits and can target them individually.
Boy, we have problems:
This is our internet. Not Google’s. Not Facebook’s. Not rightwing propagandists. And we’re the only ones who can reclaim it.
This is our nation, and our world.<br> It is up to us to reclaim it.
The fact that people are reading about these fake news stories and realising that this could have an effect on politics and elections, it’s like, ‘Which planet have you been living on?’ For Christ’s sake, this is obvious.”
It's only obvious once you realize how many people are exposed to bullshit daily, and how many people are stupid enough to listen to it.
If you aren't an idiot, and you don't associate with idiots, you can spend all day on the web every day and rarely see any of this shit.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of Web sites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.
http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy
Another group, PropOrNot, is supposed to be releasing their study on Russian propaganda tomorrow, 25 November. [Update: PropOrNot apparently labelled so many sites as "Russian propaganda" that it is practically a piece of disinformation all by itself. Maybe they're Russian. :) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-propaganda-about-russian-propaganda
She said I am the one who will dance on the floor in the round
The significance of the "Billie Jean" when it came out was do to the fact that the song was about a person being told that they are some kids father.
The users of a subreddit devoted to Donald Trump have been a big hassle for Reddit moderators
“At this point, I think reddit is a lost cause because of the admins inability to take action on the group while simultaneously being overwhelmed with dealing with the individual,” a moderator told us. “No other subreddit has been able to be used [as] a platform for harassment for this long in Reddit’s history. And it’s likely going to be what kills it.” Said another: “The social experiment has run its course.”
The names and pseudonyms of multiple sources in this story have been omitted to protect their anonymity due to credible threats.
they won’t be under the burden of ObamaCare,
Businesses aren't "burdened" by Obamacare.
Interview with a man who has run several fake news sites since 2013.
Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue.
...
We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
Journalism faces an 'existential crisis' in the Trump era, Christine Amanpour
As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison
...
First, like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate.
It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.
...
The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever -- the tsunami of fake news sites -- aka lies -- that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.
...
The conservative radio host who may be the next white house press secretary says mainstream media is hostile to traditional values.
I would say it's just the opposite. And have you read about the "heil, victory" meeting in Washington, DC this past weekend? Why aren't there more stories about the dangerous rise of the far right here and in Europe? Since when did anti-Semitism stop being a litmus test in this country?
Paul Horner publishes fake news that is often shared widely. He claims that his stories are intended to be taken as satire like The Onion.
Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.
My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
this is not exclusive to Facebook and Twitter, or just during this election. We suck at understanding history or considering the future when we adopt new technologies -- this is often intentional. We need to make sure we are this critical when any new technology comes along, and work hard to understand the historical motives and ideology behind the tech, as well as get better at exploring possible dystopian futures brought on by each technological tool
https://iheartmob.org/<br> http://www.troll-busters.com/<br> http://wmcspeechproject.com/
HeartMob, TrollBusters, and the Women's Media Center Speech Project provide support for people being harassed online.
But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.”
The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly.
The problem is not JUST social media and fake news. But most of the false stories do not come from mainstream media. The greatest evils of mainstream media are sensationalism, and being too willing to spin stories the way their sources want them to.
But a former employee, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, disagrees and says his old boss is being "more than a little disingenuous here."
...
"There's an entire political team and a massive office in D.C. that tries to convince political advertisers that Facebook can convince users to vote one way or the other," Garcia-Martinez says. "Then Zuck gets up and says, 'Oh, by the way, Facebook content couldn't possibly influence the election.' It's contradictory on the face of it."
I do not advocate that we turn television into a 27-inch wailing wall, where longhairs constantly moan about the state of our culture and our defense.
But this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future.
prescient words ....
One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.
So what does it mean now when our President-elect is a star of television reality show?
The Dust Never Settles
it remains a fact that the newspapers and magazines are the only instruments of mass communication which remain free from sustained and regular critical comment.
Note that Trump is already engaged in a war of words with the New York Times, which has vowed to redouble its efforts to keep our leaders accountable. Trump doesn't like that, apparently. http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/the-new-york-times-tweets-reply-to-trump-comments-on-coverage-1.12612278
For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive.
We can make the leap from the radio that he is talking about to the social media in our lives today. Perhaps no matter the age, some form of media is shaping the way we think and interact with the world, as we shape the media. (Some would argue it is only one way or the other -- it shapes us or we shape it, but I suspect it is both)
do-it-yourself
This just might do nobody any good.
Not always the best way to start an essay. But this rhetorical stance certainly sets the stage for what Murrow is talking about and why he is articulating his thoughts
Mike Caulfield says Facebook's feed algorithms are far from its only problem. The entire site design encourages sharing of items that users haven't inspected beyond reading the headline.
what posting a photo today might mean for their future employment opportunities
People are definitely losing jobs and opportunities based on their social media presence. Distasteful photos should not even be taken let alone shared online.
Digital literacy
Everything listed here is important. Are we skipping too quickly past what is commonly called media literacy? Does choosing appropriate images include these considerations--for example, who made the image, for what purpose, with which viewpoints included or excluded, etc.? http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/five-key-questions-form-foundation-media-inquiry
Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends. Which, they hope, will induce people to return to the site over and over again.
This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends’ cutest baby pictures. But it’s more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether articles are fair, accurate, or important.
This is a modern update to a classic confidence game—find a risky scenario with limited possibilities, bet on every single combination, and then hide your failures.
Today, all possible outcomes can be posted to any website that allows accounts to be set to private, or that isn't likely to be noticed. After the fact, the incorrect results can be deleted before making the account public.
This post points out that this trick could be used to "predict" election results, making it appear that they were fixed ahead of time. So it's potentially very dangerous.
AT&T shouldn't be allowed to merge with Time-Warner. A merger only increases their monopoly. It would do nothing to increase quality or competition in the high-speed Internet market, It will motivate them to give unfair advantages to entertainment from Time-Warner. It will give them too much control of news sources.
23 suggested improvements for Twitter, mostly related to dealing with harassment. (13 Feb 2016)
I worry that the industry has no idea how much research already goes on, or how vital it is to fund.
Maybe my fears are unfounded, but the stakes are high. Startups are the very tip of the iceberg, floating by virtue of work that was done by other people long ago. If people forget we need to fund research now, we’re going to feel it decades later and not know why. Imagine where we’d be without the government-funded research of the 60s!
-- Vi Hart
eleVR is a research team that experiments with immersive media, particularly virtual and augmented reality.
They are NOT a startup.
“Among millennials, especially,” [Ross] Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”
...
“I don’t see sufficient evidence to buy the argument about siloing and confirmation bias,” Jeff Jarvis,a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism said. “That is a presumption about the platforms – because we in media think we do this better. More important, such presumptions fundamentally insult young people. For too long, old media has assumed that young people don’t care about the world.”
“Newspapers, remember, came from the perspective of very few people: one editor, really,” Jarvis said. “Facebook comes with many perspectives and gives many; as Zuckerberg points out, no two people on Earth see the same Facebook.”
Freedom of speech is guaranteed by the constitution of the republic and the government respects these rights, leading to a diverse selection of independent media outlets.
This is great, because Freedom of speech just makes the people in the country even more free, because they can say what they want to.
There are also a variety of magazines available in El Salvador, in both Spanish and English.
This is pretty good for salvadorians who want to practice their english, if they are choosing to learn it. It is also nice for the visiting americans, to read the news if they can't read/speak spanish.
nobody takes social media lightly.
They knew that the story mattered; that people in the real world looked up to Superman, even though he was fictional, and could thus be persuaded to use him as a moral compass
Stephen Downes on why he's quitting Facebook.
Facebook has me going both ways. They make me pay money in order to allow people to read my content, and then they throw advertising at the people who are trying to read that content. And now they're tightening the screws.
And even as it clamps down on content, Facebook favours the wrong people, siding once again with the bottom-dwellers of the internet.
The problem, as Taylor explained, is that the rise of e-commerce and social media has lowered the cost of entry for new competitors.
Sounds like a very quick summary of what Ben Thompson was saying two weeks ago. But, in this case, it’s from “the horse’s mouth”.
From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs "was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person."
"Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history," Chen wrote. "And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space."
Q&A session with Alan Kay, June 2016.
un régime spectaculaire, fonctionnant sur une coupure scénique et une convergence des regards vers un espace-temps attentionnel unique
société du spectacle
So its really 1894 to 2100- correct -without the Supers. She didnt cross the threshold, the author needs to be corrected.
I can even annotate folks comments WITHIN threads.. hmm Yet it will all pop up here.. as opposed to being linked to the actual post.. hmmm
Testing the amazing hypothes.is on FB.
Here’s a presentation at the 2013 Personal Democracy Forum that provides a little more context for our project.
Where is the Facebook shareable link for this video? I would like to hit share, for it to look pretty and for you -hypothes.is- to earn and retain new subscribers?
(If I share this via youtube, the funnel flows to youtube. Do you have a dedicated "landing page" with simply this vid? I'll reply here if I find a "pretty" way.. Thanks Guys!)
"The BBC Domesday Project was a pair of interactive videodiscs made by the BBC in London to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book and published in November 1986. It was one of the major interactive projects of its time, and it was undertaken on a scale not seen since."
"In 1983, a BBC Television producer named Peter Armstrong wondered if it would be possible to harness the Domesday philosophy to modern Britain. With the large user base of microcomputers in British schools (helped by a government subsidy) it was feasible to ask schools around the UK to survey their areas to produce a database of how Britain looked to the British in 1986."
"...the original Domesday book is still readable after (at the time) 925 years while our 15 year old one is not ... unless you have the original computer/videodisc system and it still works of course."
"The first visible manifestation of a reappearance of the BBC Domesday Project was achieved in a project called CAMiLEON, which was a research project that investigated emulation as a digital preservation strategy and was based at the Universities of Michigan and Leeds. [CAMiLEON web site ... with supreme irony this is now only available via the internet archive]"
None of us, students and faculty included, have really figured out how to live, learn, and work in the emerging digital media-cognitive ecology. So it is certainly true that we can struggle to accomplish various purposes with technologies pulling us in different directions
What could educators do to better prepare students to interact with digital media that leverages tech to go far beyond what paper and pen affords (tools, skills, etc.)?
A man who is chancellor of a higher education facility blocked one of his students on the first day of his job.
(Who is “we”?)
As per the linked post:
Using Snow’s essay as a jumping off point, I want to consider a problem that’s been on my mind a great deal since joining the MIT Media Lab five years ago: how do we help smart, well-meaning people address social problems in ways that make the world better, not worse?
Not to defend Ethan, but he’s typically quite explicit about such thing. At least, he doesn’t evade responsibility.
From his about page (also in narrative version in the Do Not Track doc):
Those annoying pop-up windows? My fault, at least in part. I designed a vertically-oriented popup window that included navigation tools and an ad for inclusion on webpages at some point in late 1996 or early 1997. It was intended to be less intrusive than inserting an ad into the middle of a user’s homepage. I won’t claim responsibility (irresponsibility?) for inventing the damned things, and I disclaim any responsibility for cascading popups, popups that move to the top, and those annoying “bot” windows that open different popups every few minutes. Still, the fault is at least in part mine, and I’m sorry. :-)
Automated posts from social media accounts pretending to be real individuals are being used to influence public opinion. (The Chinese government uses regular employees to post "real" messages at strategic times.)
Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehensio
Ellison, Nicole B., and Yuehua Wu. 2008. “Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehension.” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 17 (1): 99–122.
If you want people to find and read your research, build up a digital presence in your discipline, and use it to promote your work when you have something interesting to share. It’s pretty darn obvious, really: If (social media interaction is often) then (Open access + social media = increased downloads).
Harvard researchers estimate the Chinese government fabricates 488 million social media posts each year. This is only about 1 in 178 posts, but they are made in strategic bursts, with the intent to distract. The posts are made by government employees as an additional job duty.
It's the same propaganda we get in the West.
according to Peggy Orenstein who noticed these, and a lot of other troubling trends when she interviewed 70 college-age girls about their personal lives. She wrote a book about it called "Girls & Sex," and talked to us this week about some of the things she learned.
This book is on my list. It seems to echo the thoughts in American Girls.
What Amber explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted.
“People will want to study the labels that were put on tapes, or the tape stock, or the plastic case,” says Gary, who specializes in American history. “All that stuff tells a story about how it was produced and where it came from that future scholars will want to grapple with in some fashion.”
Jon Udell on productive social discourse.
changeable minds<br> What’s something you believed deeply, for a long time, and then changed your mind about?
David Gray's Liminal Thinking points out that we all have beliefs that are built on hidden foundations. We need to carefully examine our own beliefs and their origins. And we need to avoid judgment as we consider the beliefs of others and their origins.
Wael Ghonim asks us to design social media that encourages civility, thoughtfulness, and open minds rather than self-promotion, click-bait, and echo chambers.
Reasons Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have dominated the Web over blogs and independent sites:
Let go of the idea of people reading your stuff on your site, and develop or support interfaces that put your readers in control of how they view the web instead of giving the control to the people with the servers.
code, Minecraft has become a stealth gateway to the fundamentals, and the pleasures, of computer science.
learning code = computer science? I guess, but I also wonder if my need to learn code has come more from a desire to communicate on social media more effectively.
McGill’s Dr. Sterne calls it “the gamification of research,”
Most research is too expensive to really gamify. Many researchers are publishing to either get or keep their jobs. The institutionalization of "publish or perish" if anything has already accomplished the "gamification", Academia.edu is just helping to increase the reach of the publication. Given that research shows that most published research isn't even read, much less cited, how bad can Academia.edu really be?
“I don’t trust academia.edu,”
Given his following discussion, I can only imagine what he thinks of big publishers in academia and that debate.
the platform essentially bans access for academics who, for whatever reason, don’t have an Academia.edu account. It also shuts out non-academics.
They must have changed this, as pretty much anyone with an email address (including non-academics) can create a free account and use the system.
35 million academics, independent scholars and graduate students as users, who collectively have uploaded some eight million texts
35 million users is a lovely number, but their engagement must be spectacularly bad if only 8 million texts are available.
massmediarefers to those means of transmission
When I ask students to post on Youth Voices, I'm asking them to participate in mass media. It's a big jump for some who do very little by friend-to-friend communication.
I watch as their networks expand, and as followers find one another as they voice ever more extreme opinions.
This is the first time in a long time (maybe ever) that I've felt sympathy for the downfall of traditional journalism. Social media as a kind of echo chamber is really scary and almost sounds like a science fiction story.
As an academic, I study social media and social movements, from the uprising in Egypt to Black Lives Matter
Fascinating to think about the simultaneously democratic and demagogic potential of social media from #ArabSpring to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.
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.”
Sequencing calls to action from liking to commenting.
Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services.
So social engagement increases brand loyalty.
Seems like that could be a key to Medium's success.
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.
Awareness of a user's lifecycle from exploring to adoption to megauser is key.
“calls to action,” issued at different points in time
Media Bias?
Check out this sketch from Saturday Night Live that mocks the news media for being uncritically in love with then candidate Barack Obama. There first and second questions for him are whether he is completely comfortable or if they can get anything for him.
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
And references to Granovetter, with his famous 1973 article. This [article on sports media and Twitter](http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/20143219270.html sounds contextually relevant.
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.
We need to recognize different values and think that people value land entitlements, family and community, the elderly, connectivity. If we value these, we will want to hear these things reported all the time. Marketing will follow suit. Perhaps marketing will be the first to move...
Alice Maz on communication failures due to different cultures of conversation and values.
Most people value feelings, shared perspectives, and social status. They see correction as an attempt to knock them down a peg. Nerds value facts, logic, and the sharing of information. A genuine nerd shares information with no intention of knocking anyone down, and prefers being corrected to remaining misinformed.
Calendar of education Twitter chats, with US timezone selection EST, CST, MST, PST. Click on a chat for more information.
Twitter is rumored to be planning to increase maximum tweet length to 10,000 characters. They want to attract people who don't already use Twitter, and they want to keep users on Twitter for longer periods of time.
If these extended tweets are hidden until clicked, this doesn't bother me. But other recent changes are obnoxious and insulting. Much more of this will make Twitter useless.
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.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick has recently addressed this issue, suggesting implicitly that scholarly societies can mobilize their extant communities in this regard.
