https://www.krapp.org/

Professor of Film & Media Studies, Informatics, English, and Music - UC Irvine

Wolf, Mark, ed. The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence. 1st ed. 63 vols. Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions. New York: Routledge, 2019.

https://nostr.com/

Peter Kominski likes this generally.

From late 2022

https://trakt.tv/dashboard

https://atomicbooks.com/pages/john-waters-fan-mail

John Waters receives fan mail via Atomic Books in Baltimore, MD.

A.3 A força

https://firesky.tv/

New to me form of censorship evasion: easter egg room in a mainstream online game that itself is not censored. Finnish news paper Helsingin Sanomat has been putting their reporting on the Russian war on Ukraine inside a level of online FPS game Counter Strike, translated into Russian. This as a way to circumvent Russian censorship that blocks Finnish media. It saw 2k downloads from unknown geographic origins, so the effect might be very limited.

A project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media https://rrchnm.org/portfolio-item/tropy/

reply to u/bestlunchtoday at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12gadut/benefits_of_sharing_permanent_notes/

I love the diversity of ideas here! So many different ways to do it all and perspectives on the pros/cons. It's all incredibly idiosyncratic, just like our notes.

I probably default to a far extreme of sharing the vast majority of my notes openly to the public (at least the ones taken digitally which account for probably 95%). You can find them here: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich.

Not many people notice or care, but I do know that a small handful follow and occasionally reply to them or email me questions. One or two people actually subscribe to them via RSS, and at least one has said that they know more about me, what I'm reading, what I'm interested in, and who I am by reading these over time. (I also personally follow a handful of people and tags there myself.) Some have remarked at how they appreciate watching my notes over time and then seeing the longer writing pieces they were integrated into. Some novice note takers have mentioned how much they appreciate being able to watch such a process of note taking turned into composition as examples which they might follow. Some just like a particular niche topic and follow it as a tag (so if you were interested in zettelkasten perhaps?) Why should I hide my conversation with the authors I read, or with my own zettelkasten unless it really needed to be private? Couldn't/shouldn't it all be part of "The Great Conversation"? The tougher part may be having means of appropriately focusing on and sharing this conversation without some of the ills and attention economy practices which plague the social space presently.

There are a few notes here on this post that talk about social media and how this plays a role in making them public or not. I suppose that if I were putting it all on a popular platform like Twitter or Instagram then the use of the notes would be or could be considered more performative. Since mine are on what I would call a very quiet pseudo-social network, but one specifically intended for note taking, they tend to be far less performative in nature and the majority of the focus is solely on what I want to make and use them for. I have the opportunity and ability to make some private and occasionally do so. Perhaps if the traffic and notice of them became more prominent I would change my habits, but generally it has been a net positive to have put my sensemaking out into the public, though I will admit that I have a lot of privilege to be able to do so.

Of course for those who just want my longer form stuff, there's a website/blog for that, though personally I think all the fun ideas at the bleeding edge are in my notes.

Since some (u/deafpolygon, u/Magnifico99, and u/thiefspy; cc: u/FastSascha, u/A_Dull_Significance) have mentioned social media, Instagram, and journalists, I'll share a relevant old note with an example, which is also simultaneously an example of the benefit of having public notes to be able to point at, which u/PantsMcFail2 also does here with one of Andy Matuschak's public notes:

[Prominent] Journalist John Dickerson indicates that he uses Instagram as a commonplace: https://www.instagram.com/jfdlibrary/ here he keeps a collection of photo "cards" with quotes from famous people rather than photos. He also keeps collections there of photos of notes from scraps of paper as well as photos of annotations he makes in books.

It's reasonably well known that Ronald Reagan shared some of his personal notes and collected quotations with his speechwriting staff while he was President. I would say that this and other similar examples of collaborative zettelkasten or collaborative note taking and their uses would blunt u/deafpolygon's argument that shared notes (online or otherwise) are either just (or only) a wiki. The forms are somewhat similar, but not all exactly the same. I suspect others could add to these examples.

And of course if you've been following along with all of my links, you'll have found yourself reading not only these words here, but also reading some of a directed conversation with entry points into my own personal zettelkasten, which you can also query as you like. I hope it has helped to increase the depth and level of the conversation, should you choose to enter into it. It's an open enough one that folks can pick and choose their own path through it as their interests dictate.

Now, I've made a number of documentaries about fake news. And what interests me is the first person to use the phrase mainstream media was Joseph Goebbels. And he, in one of his propaganda sheets, said “It's very important that you don't read the mainstream media because they'll tell you lies.” You must read the truth by the ramblings of his boss and his associated work. And you do have to watch this. This is a very, very well-established technique of fascists, is to tell you, don't read this stuff, read our stuff.<br /> —Ian Hislop, Editor, Private Eye Magazine 00:16:00, Satire in the Age of Murdoch and Trump, The Problem with Jon Stewart Podcast

Introducing Substack Notes<br /> by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi

Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

Table of contents

• Introduction: Through the Ludic Glass
• Why Algorithmic Images Now?
• Computed Representations / Represented Computations
• Technical Images
• Operational Images
• Watching through the Ludic-Glass
• Layers of Spectated Meaning
• Towards Aesthetics of Spectated Play

Notes

Structures and Transformations of the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Text and Knowledge Culture in Ancient Egypt. “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften 1999,” 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/index.html.

Google translation:

The sheer quantity exceeds the possibilities of book publication, the complex, multidimensional structure of a networked information base cannot be reproduced in print, and finally the dynamic of a constantly growing and constantly correcting material does not fit into the rigid rhythm of book production, in which each expanded and corrected new edition is associated with an incalculable amount of effort. A book publication could only offer a snapshot of such a database, reduced to a specific perspective. This too can be very useful from time to time, but it does not solve the problem of publishing the entire material.

While the writing criticism of "dumping out one's zettelkasten" into a paper, journal article, chapter, book, etc. has been reasonably frequent in the 20th century, often as a means of attempting to create a linear book-bound context in a local neighborhood of ideas, are there other more complex networks of ideas which we're not communicating because they don't neatly fit into linear narrative forms? Is it possible that there is a non-linear form(s) based on network theory in which more complex ideas ought to better be embedded for understanding?

Some of Niklas Luhmann's writing may show some of this complexity and local or even regional circularity, but perhaps it's a necessary means of communication to get these ideas across as they can't be placed into linear forms.

One can analogize this to Lie groups and algebras in which our reading and thinking experiences are limited only to local regions which appear on smaller scales to be Euclidean, when, in fact, looking at larger portions of the region become dramatically non-Euclidean. How are we to appropriately relate these more complex ideas?

What are the second and third order effects of this phenomenon?

An example of this sort of non-linear examination can be seen in attempting to translate the complexity inherent in the Wb (Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache) into a simple, linear dictionary of the Egyptian language. While the simplicity can be handy on one level, the complexity of transforming the entirety of the complexity of the network of potential meanings is tremendously difficult.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/U95jEs0eEe20EUesAtKcuA

Is this phenomenon of "complex narratives" related to misinformation spread within the larger and more complex social network/online network? At small, local scales, people know how to handle data and information which is locally contextualized for them. On larger internet-scale communication social platforms this sort of contextualization breaks down.

For a lack of a better word for this, let's temporarily refer to it as "complex narratives" to get a handle on it.

Paris on the Amazon?: Postcolonial Interrogations of Benjamin’s European Modernism (pp. 216-245) Willi Bolle From: A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin, Camden House (2009) Edition: NED - New edition https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt14brv7g

...and complete but constitutes an open repertoire, always in movement, expressing and stimulating the spirit of experimentation and invention. Let us remember that Benjamin, in his early work Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street, 1923/28), argued in favor of direct communication between the “ Zettelkasten ” (card box...

communication between?! though it is 2009 and after Luhmann's reference to communication with slip boxes....

Title: Fox News producer files explosive lawsuits against the network, alleging she was coerced into providing misleading Dominion testimony

// - This is an example of how big media corporations can deceive the public and compromise the truth - It helps create a nation of misinformed people which destabilizes political governance - the workspace sounds toxic - the undertone of this story: the pathological transformation of media brought about by capitalism - it is the need for ratings, which is the indicator for profit in the marketing world, that has corrupted the responsibility to report truthfully - making money becomes the consumerist dream at the expense of all else of intrinsic value within a culture - knowledge is what enables culture to exist, modernity is based on cumulative cultural evolution - this is an example of NON-conscious cumulative cultural evolution or pathological cumulaitve cultural evolution

Michel Thomas Method Review

Michel Thomas method also includes: - atomic pieces built up as building blocks into larger pieces - lots of encouragement to prevent the feeling of failure

Downsides: - there is no failure mode which can nudge people into a false sense of performance when using their language with actual native speakers

This reviewer indicates that there is some base level of directed mnemonic work going on, but the repetition level isn't such that long term retention (at least in the space repetition sort of way) is a specific goal. We'll need to look into this piece more closely to firm this up, however.

The Michel Thomas Method in a nutshell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Xh-by50pI

This video indicates that small mnemonic hooks are inserted for some words in the Michel Thomas method. This was not immediately apparent or seen in the 1997 BBC documentary about his method and wasn't immediately apparent in Harold Goodman's discussion.

Is it apparent in Goodman's session with his nephews? Was it part of Thomas' method originally or was it added later? Is it truly necessary or does it work without it as in the SSiW method which doesn't use it.

Piotr Cichocki, Sieć przyjaciół. Serwis społecznościowy oczami etnografa, Instytut Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2012.

Książka w katalogu Nukat: http://katalog.nukat.edu.pl/lib/item?id=chamo:2727292&fromLocationLink=false&theme=nukat

Książka w katalogu Worldcat: https://worldcat.org/title/920454035

This looks intriguing...

autocomplete tells me I've seen her before....

update: it's a Rowan Wilken reference! https://hypothes.is/a/xwRnzr-REeyvvDd7YBbLVA

Related here is the horcrux problem of note taking or even social media. The mental friction of where did I put that thing? As a result, it's best to put it all in one place.

How can you build on a single foundation if you're in multiple locations? The primary (only?) benefit of multiple locations is redundancy in case of loss.

Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene are counter examples, though Greene's books are distinct projects generally while Holiday's work has a lot of overlap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyBIT0Q7fOc

Dealing with someone who is passive aggressive:

• Hold eye contact
• maintain the benefit of the doubt
• give a warning shot: "I don't know why we're talking about this"
• call it out: "What are we doing here? What are you trying to do?"
• if it continues, remove yourself from the situation

Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’ by [[Taylor Lorenz]]

shifts in language and meaning of words and symbols as the result of algorithmic content moderation

instead of slow semantic shifts, content moderation is actively pushing shifts of words and their meanings

article suggested by this week's Dan Allosso Book club on Pirate Enlightenment

Could it be the sift from person to person (known in both directions) to massive broadcast that is driving issues with content moderation. When it's person to person, one can simply choose not to interact and put the person beyond their individual pale. This sort of shunning is much harder to do with larger mass publics at scale in broadcast mode.

How can bringing content moderation back down to the neighborhood scale help in the broadcast model?

follow up on this for the relevant forthcoming paper....

Where's the balance for professionalism with respect to dodging the algorithmic filters for serious health-related conversations online?

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/uBq9HKqWEe22Jp_rjJ5tjQ

What about non-marginalized toxic communities like Neo-Nazis?

Social media has slowly moved away from communication between people who know each other to people who are farther apart in social spaces. Increasingly in 2021 onward, some platforms like TikTok have acted as a distribution platform and ignored explicit social connections like follower/followee in lieu of algorithmic-only feeds to distribute content to people based on a variety of criteria including popularity of content and the readers' interests.

Orkut – dawny internetowy serwis społecznościowy o charakterze międzynarodowym. Jego nazwa pochodzi od imienia inżyniera pracującego w Google – Turka Orkuta Büyükköktena. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut?useskin=vector

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/2/2/donovan-forced-leave-hks/

This is a massive loss for HKS, but a potential major win for the school that picks the project up.

It seems to be a sad use of "rules" to shut down a project which may not jive with an administrations' perspective/needs.

Read on Fri 2023-02-03 at 7:14 PM

https://factr.com/

A social network for "organizing and sharing your knowledge".

One of the values of social media is that it can allow you to practice or rehearse the potential value of ideas and potentially getting useful feedback on individual ideas which you may be aggregating into larger works.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/29/a-real-moment-cymraegs-the-star-as-netflix-buys-welsh-language-drama

https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/

Link to Robert J. Flaherty

Where does she sit with respect to Robert J. Flaherty and Nanook of the North (1922)? Would she have been aware of his work through Boaz? How is her perspective potentially highly more authentic for such a project given her context?

https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb

We become what we behold, a game by Nicky Case.

A commentary on news cycles and social media.

https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109677171177320098

This technical jargon, in the context of Cohost.org, means "a website".

https://events.jhu.edu/form/HopInHollywood2023

reply to u/theinvertedform at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zkguan/is_zettelkasten_gamification_of_notetaking/

Social media and "influencers" have certainly grabbed onto the idea and squeezed with both hands. Broadly while talking about their own versions of rules, tips, tricks, and tools, they've missed a massive history of the broader techniques which pervade the humanities for over 500 years. When one looks more deeply at the broader cross section of writers, educators, philosophers, and academics who have used variations on the idea of maintaining notebooks or commonplace books, it becomes a relative no-brainer that it is a useful tool. I touch on some of the history as well as some of the recent commercialization here: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.

https://wiki.rel8.dev/co-write_a_neobook

A playlist of related index cards from a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten could be considered a playlist that comprises an article or a longer work like a book.

Just as one can create a list of all the paths through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, one could do something similar with linked notes. Ward Cunningham has done something similar to this programmatically with the idea of a Markov monkey.

Results for the YouTube field experiment (study 7), showing the average percent increase in manipulation techniques recognized in the experimental (as compared to control) condition. Results are shown separately for items (headlines) 1 to 3 for the emotional language and false dichotomies videos, as well as the average scores for each video and the overall average across all six items. See Materials and Methods for the exact wording of each item (headline). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals.

John B. Kelly highlighted this disparity in a memorable passage published in 1973:

Distance, the filtering of news through so many intermediate channels, and the habitual tendency to discuss and interpret Middle Eastern politics in the political terminology of the West, have all contrived to impart a certain blandness to the reporting and analysis of Middle Eastern affairs in Western countries. ... To read, for instance, the extracts from the Cairo and Baghdad press and radio ... is to open a window upon a strange and desolate landscape, strewn with weird, amorphous shapes cryptically inscribed "imperialist plot," "Zionist crime," "Western exploitation," ... and "the revolution betrayed." Around and among these enigmatic structures, curious figures, like so many mythical beats, caper and cavort - "enemies," "traitors," "stooges," "hyenas," "puppets," "lackeys," "feudalists," "gangsters," "tyrants," "criminals," "oppressors," "plotters" and deviationists". ... It is all rather like a monstrous playing board for some grotesque and sinister game, in which the snakes are all hydras, the ladders have no rungs, and the dice are blank.

Misinformation exposure and extreme right-wing ideology appear associated in this report. Others find that it is partisanship that predicts susceptibility.

This suggests the misinformation sharing elites may influence whether followers become more extreme. There is little incentive not to stoke outrage as it improves engagement.

Estimated ideological extremity is associated with higher elite misinformation-exposure scores for estimated conservatives more so than estimated liberals.

Political ideology is estimated using accounts followed10. b Political ideology is estimated using domains shared30 (Red: conservative, blue: liberal). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

Estimated ideological extremity is associated with higher language toxicity and moral outrage scores for estimated conservatives more so than estimated liberals.

The relationship between estimated political ideology and (a) language toxicity and (b) expressions of moral outrage. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

In the co-share network, a cluster of websites shared more by conservatives is also shared more by users with higher misinformation exposure scores.

Nodes represent website domains shared by at least 20 users in our dataset and edges are weighted based on common users who shared them. a Separate colors represent different clusters of websites determined using community-detection algorithms29. b The intensity of the color of each node shows the average misinformation-exposure score of users who shared the website domain (darker = higher PolitiFact score). c Nodes’ color represents the average estimated ideology of the users who shared the website domain (red: conservative, blue: liberal). d The intensity of the color of each node shows the average use of language toxicity by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher use of toxic language). e The intensity of the color of each node shows the average expression of moral outrage by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher expression of moral outrage). Nodes are positioned using directed-force layout on the weighted network.

Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with the use of toxic language and moral outrage.

Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the toxicity of the language used in their tweets, measured using the Google Jigsaw Perspective API27, and (b) the extent to which their tweets involved expressions of moral outrage, measured using the algorithm from ref. 28. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with sharing news from lower-quality outlets and with conservative estimated ideology.

Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by professional fact-checkers21, (b) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by layperson crowds21, and (c) estimated political ideology, based on the ideology of the accounts they follow10. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin.

Notice that Twitter’s account purge significantly impacted misinformation spread worldwide: the proportion of low-credible domains in URLs retweeted from U.S. dropped from 14% to 7%. Finally, despite not having a list of low-credible domains in Russian, Russia is central in exporting potential misinformation in the vax rollout period, especially to Latin American countries. In these countries, the proportion of low-credible URLs coming from Russia increased from 1% in vax development to 18% in vax rollout periods (see Figure 8 (b), Appendix).

We applied two scenarios to compare how these regular agents behave in the Twitter network, with and without malicious agents, to study how much influence malicious agents have on the general susceptibility of the regular users. To achieve this, we implemented a belief value system to measure how impressionable an agent is when encountering misinformation and how its behavior gets affected. The results indicated similar outcomes in the two scenarios as the affected belief value changed for these regular agents, exhibiting belief in the misinformation. Although the change in belief value occurred slowly, it had a profound effect when the malicious agents were present, as many more regular agents started believing in misinformation.

Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.

Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.

https://atproto.com/guides/faq

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jackjack/issues/a-native-internet-protocol-for-social-media-1503112?via=twitter-card&client=DesktopWeb&element=issue-card

This list is particularly good.

Proper regulation of end to end services would encourage the creation of filtering and other tools which would tend to benefit users rather than benefit the rent seeking of the corporations which own the pipes.

Origin of the FCC Fairness Doctrine

🤗

https://meso.tzyl.nl/2022/12/04/a-two-month-experiment/

[https://a.gup.pe/ Guppe Groups] a group of bot accounts that can be used to aggregate social groups within the [[fediverse]] around a variety of topics like [[crafts]], books, history, philosophy, etc.

https://zephoria.medium.com/what-if-failure-is-the-plan-2f219ea1cd62

How is this sort of bloodsport similar/different to the news media coverage of Donald J. Trump in 2015/2016?

The similarities over creating engagement within a capitalistic framing along with the need to only garner at least a minimum amount of audience to support the enterprise seem to be at play.

Compare/contrast this with the NBAs conundrum with the politics of entering the market in China.

Our media and social media systems have been structured along with the people who use them such that debate is stifled because information doesn't flow coherently across the political partisan divide.

danah boyd argued in two separate pieces that teenagers self-segregated between MySpace and Facebook based on race and class and that the news media coverage of social media created fear, uncertainty, and doubt which fueled the split.

http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

https://oulipo.social/about

Social media without the letter "e".

http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/10755-Warning-signs-with-social-media-platforms

https://blog.erinshepherd.net/2022/11/a-better-moderation-system-is-possible-for-the-social-web/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Erin Alexis Owen Shepherd</span> in A better moderation system is possible for the social web (<time class='dt-published'>12/03/2022 11:10:32</time>)</cite></small>

https://zirk.us/@shengokai/109440759945863989

If the individuals in an environment don't understand or perceive the affordances available to them, can the interactions between them and the environment make it seem as if the environment possesses agency?

cross reference: James J. Gibson book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)

People often indicate that social media "causes" outcomes among groups of people who use it. Eg: Social media (via algorithmic suggestions of fringe content) causes people to become radicalized.

https://tomfinley.co/friends/

https://projects.propublica.org/represent/

I went through some of the pieces in the collection. It is important to give a platform to the voices that are missing from the conversation usually.

Just a few similar initiatives that you might want to check out:

Storycorps - people can record their stories via an app

Project Voice - spoken word poetry

Living Library - sharing one's story

Freedom Writers - book and curriculum based on real-life stories