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Media companies using this technology claim it is now possible for the “mood” of the reader or viewer to be tracked in real time and the content of the advertising to be changed accordingly

ads targeted at readers based on their predicted moods rather than their previous behaviour improved the click-through rate by 40%.

Given that the average click through rate (the number of times anyone actually clicks on an ad) is about 0.4%, this number (in gross terms) is probably less impressive than it sounds.

Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused Facebook data and, according to its own claims, helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, used psychographic segmentation.

For many years “contextual” ads served by not very intelligent algorithms were the bane of digital editors’ lives. Improvements in machine learning should help eradicate the horrible business of showing insurance advertising to readers in the middle of an article about a devastating fire.

The words “brand safety” are increasingly used by publishers when demonstrating products such as Project Feels. It is a way publishers can compete on micro-targeting with platforms such as Facebook and YouTube by pointing out that their targeting will not land you next to a conspiracy theory video about the dangers of chemtrails.

the exploitation of psychographics is not limited to the responsible and transparent scientists at the NYT. While publishers were showing these shiny new tools to advertisers, Amazon was advertising for a managing editor for its surveillance doorbell, Ring, which contacts your device when someone is at your door. An editor for a doorbell, how is that going to work? In all kinds of perplexing ways according to the ad. It’s “an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbours. This position is best suited for a candidate with experience and passion for journalism, crime reporting, and people management.” So if instead of thinking about crime articles inspiring fear and advertising doorbells in the middle of them, what if you took the fear that the surveillance-device-cum-doorbell inspires and layered a crime reporting newsroom on top of it to make sure the fear is properly engaging?

The media has arguably already played an outsized role in making sure that people are irrationally scared, and now that practice is being strapped to the considerably more powerful engine of an Amazon product.

This will not be the last surveillance-based newsroom we see. Almost any product that produces large data feeds can also produce its own “news”. Imagine the Fitbit newsroom or the managing editor for traffic reports from dashboard cams – anything that has a live data feed emanating from it, in the age of the Internet of Things, can produce news.

Henry James did the limited third person really well, showing us the way to do it. He milked that cow successfully. And it’s a great cow, it still gives lots of milk. But if you read only contemporary stuff, always third-person limited, you don’t realize that point of view in a story is very important and can be very movable. It’s here where I suggest that people read books like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to see what she does by moving from mind to mind. Or Tolstoy’s War and Peace for goodness’ sake. Wow. The way he slides from one point of view to another without you knowing that you’ve changed point of view—he does it so gracefully. You know where you are, whose eyes you are seeing through, but you don’t have the sense of being jerked from place to place. That’s mastery of a craft.

Any of us who grew up reading eighteenth- or nineteenth-century fiction are perfectly at home with what is called “omniscience.” I myself call it “authorial” point of view because the term “omnisicence,” the idea of an author being omniscient, is so often used in a judgmental way, as if it were a bad thing. But the author, after all, is the author of all these characters, the maker, the inventor of them. In fact all the characters are the author if you come right down to the honest truth of it. So the author has the perfect right to know what they’re thinking. If the author doesn’t tell you what they are thinking … why? This is worth thinking about. Often it’s simply to spin out suspense by not telling you what the author knows. Well, that’s legitimate. This is art. But I’m trying to get people to think about their choices here, because there are so many beautiful choices that are going unused. In a way, first person and limited third are the easiest ones, the least interesting. 

to preach that story is conflict, always to ask, “Where’s the conflict in your story?”—this needs some thinking about. If you say that story is about conflict, that plot must be based on conflict, you’re limiting your view of the world severely. And in a sense making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue. To see life as a battle is a narrow, social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one. Conflict, of course, is part of life, I’m not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it’s not their only lifeblood. Stories are about a lot of different things

The first decade of her career, beginning in the sixties, included some of her most well-known works of fiction: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven. Each of these works imagined not just worlds, but homes, homes that became real for her readers, homes where protagonists were women, people of color, gender fluid, anticapitalist—imaginary homes that did not simply spin out our worst dystopic fears for the future like so many of the apocalyptic novels of today, but also modeled other ways of being, other ways to create home.

“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real,” Le Guin once said. “But they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”

“Fake rules” and “alternative facts” are used in our time not to increase moral understanding and social possibility but to increase power for those who already have it. A war on language has unhinged words from their meaning, language from its capacity as truth-teller. But perhaps, counterintuitively, it is in the realm of the imagination, the fictive, where we can best re-ground ourselves in the real and the true.

you can’t find your own voice if you aren’t listening for it. The sound of your writing is an essential part of what it’s doing. Our teaching of writing tends to ignore it, except maybe in poetry. And so we get prose that goes clunk, clunk, clunk. And we don’t know what’s wrong with it

You emphasize the importance of understanding grammar and grammar terminology but also the importance of interrogating its rules. You point out that it is a strange phenomenon that grammar is the tool of our trade and yet so many writers steer away from an engagement with it. In my generation and for a while after—I was born in 1929—we were taught grammar right from the start. It was quietly drilled into us. We knew the names of the parts of speech, we had a working acquaintance with how English works, which they don’t get in most schools anymore. There is so much less reading in schools, and very little teaching of grammar. For a writer this is kind of like being thrown into a carpenter’s shop without ever having learned the names of the tools or handled them consciously. What do you do with a Phillips screwdriver? What is a Phillips screwdriver? We’re not equipping people to write; we’re just saying, “You too can write!” or “Anybody can write, just sit down and do it!” But to make anything, you’ve got to have the tools to make it.

In your book on writing, Steering the Craft, you say that morality and language are linked, but that morality and correctness are not the same thing. Yet we often confuse them in the realm of grammar. The “grammar bullies”—you read them in places like the New York Times—and they tell you what is correct: You must never use “hopefully.” “Hopefully, we will be going there on Tuesday.” That is incorrect and wrong and you are basically an ignorant pig if you say it. This is judgmentalism. The game that is being played there is a game of social class. It has nothing to do with the morality of writing and speaking and thinking clearly, which Orwell, for instance, talked about so well. It’s just affirming that I am from a higher class than you are. The trouble is that people who aren’t taught grammar very well in school fall for these statements from these pundits, delivered with vast authority from above. I’m fighting that. A very interesting case in point is using “they” as a singular. This offends the grammar bullies endlessly; it is wrong, wrong, wrong! Well, it was right until the eighteenth century, when they invented the rule that “he” includes “she.” It didn’t exist in English before then; Shakespeare used “they” instead of “he or she”—we all do, we always have done, in speaking, in colloquial English. It took the women’s movement to bring it back to English literature. And it is important. Because it’s a crossroads between correctness bullying and the moral use of language. If “he” includes “she” but “she” doesn’t include “he,” a big statement is being made, with huge social and moral implications. But we don’t have to use “he” that way—we’ve got “they.” Why not use it?

“If we started teaching students the basics of feminism at a very young age,” Wilcox says, “they would have a far better appreciation for how different perspectives will lead to different outcomes, and how the distribution of power and privilege in society can influence who gets to speak in the first place.”

Not only do smartphones affect our memory and our concentration, research shows they are addictive – to the point where they could be a ‘gateway drug’ making users more vulnerable to other addictions.

Smartphones are also linked to reduced social interaction, inadequate sleep, poor real-world navigation, and depression.

“The more time that kids spend on digital devices, the less empathetic they are, and the less they are able to process and recognise facial expressions, so their ability to actually communicate with each other is decreased.”

“Casino-funded research is designed to keep people gambling, and app software developers use exactly the same techniques. They have lots of buzzes and icons so you attend to them, they have things that move and flash so you notice them and keep your attention on the device.”

Around 90 per cent of US university students are thought to experience ‘phantom vibrations', so the researcher took a group to a desert location with no cell reception – and found that even after four days, around half of the students still thought their pocket was buzzing with Facebook or text notifications.

“Collaboration is a buzzword with software companies who are targeting schools to get kids to use these collaboration tools on their iPads – but collaboration decreases when you're using these devices,”

“All addiction is based on the same craving for a dopamine response, whether it's drug, gambling, alcohol or phone addiction,” he says. “As the dopamine response drops off, you need to increase the amount you need to get the same result, you want a little bit more next time. Neurologically, they all look the same.“We know – there are lots of studies on this – that once we form an addiction to something, we become more vulnerable to other addictions. That’s why there’s concerns around heavy users of more benign, easily-accessed drugs like alcohol and marijuana as there’s some correlation with usage of more physically addictive drugs like heroin, and neurological responses are the same.”

parents can also fall victim to screens which distract from their child’s activities or conversations, and most adults will experience this with friends and family members too.

“We also know that if you learn something on an iPad you are less likely to be able to transfer that to another device or to the real world,”

a series of studies have tested this with children who learn to construct a project with ‘digital’ blocks and then try the project with real blocks. “They can’t do it - they start from zero again,”

“Our brains can’t actually multitask, we have to switch our attention from one thing to another, and each time you switch, there's a cost to your attentional resources. After a few hours of this, we become very stressed.” That also causes us to forget things

A study from Norway recently tested how well kids remembered what they learned on screens. One group of students received information on a screen and were asked to memorise it; the second group received the same information on paper. Both groups were tested on their recall.Unsurprisingly, the children who received the paper version remembered more of the material. But the children with the electronic version were also found to be more stressed,

The famous ‘London taxi driver experiments’ found that memorising large maps caused the hippocampus to expand in size. Williams says that the reverse is going to happen if we don’t use our brain and memory to navigate. “Our brains are just like our muscles. We ‘use it or lose it’ – in other words, if we use navigation devices for directions rather than our brains, we will lose that ability.”

numerous studies also link smartphone use with sleeplessness and anxiety. “Some other interesting research has shown that the more friends you have on social media, the less friends you are likely to have in real life, the less actual contacts you have and the greater likelihood you have of depression,”

12-month-old children whose carers regularly use smartphones have poorer facial expression perception

turning off software alarms and notifications, putting strict time limits around screen use, keeping screens out of bedrooms, minimising social media and replacing screens with paper books, paper maps and other non-screen activities can all help minimise harm from digital devices including smartphones

Some parents said they were alarmed and frightened by schools’ new monitoring technologies. Others said they were conflicted, seeing some benefits to schools watching over what kids are doing online, but uncertain if their schools were striking the right balance with privacy concerns. Many said they were not even sure what kind of surveillance technology their schools might be using, and that the permission slips they had signed when their kids brought home school devices had told them almost nothing

“They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”

As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.

“They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.

Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”

“It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”

Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.

there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.

Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.

“More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”

some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing

“I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”

The articles and videos I first found all backed up what I was seeing on Reddit—posts that asserted a skewed version of actual reality, using carefully selected, out-of-context, and dubiously sourced statistics that propped up a hateful world view. On top of that, my online results were heavily influenced by something called an algorithm. I understand algorithms to be secretive bits of code that a website like YouTube will use to prioritize content that you are more likely to click on first. Because all of the content I was reading or watching was from far-right sources, all of the links that the algorithms dangled on my screen for me to click were from far-right perspectives.

I spent months isolated in my room, hunched over my computer, removing and approving memes on Reddit and watching conservative “comedians” that YouTube served up to me.

The inflammatory language and radical viewpoints used by the alt-right worked to YouTube and Google’s favor—the more videos and links I clicked on, the more ads I saw, and in turn, the more ad revenue they generated.

the biggest step in my recovery came when I attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., in September 2017, about a month after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia

The difference between the online persona of someone who identifies as alt-right and the real thing is so extreme that you would think they are different people. Online, they have the power of fake and biased news to form their arguments. They sound confident and usually deliver their standard messages strongly. When I met them in person at the rally, they were awkward and struggled to back up their statements. They tripped over their own words, and when they were called out by any counter protestors in the crowd, they would immediately use a stock response such as “You’re just triggered.”

Seeing for myself that the people I was talking to online were weak, confused, and backwards was the turning point for me.

we’re too far gone to reverse the damage that the alt-right has done to the internet and to naive adolescents who don’t know any better—children like the 13-year-old boy I was. It’s convenient for a massive internet company like Google to deliberately ignore why people like me get misinformed in the first place, as their profit-oriented algorithms continue to steer ignorant, malleable people into the jaws of the far-right

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015, was radicalized by far-right groups that spread misinformation with the aid of Google’s algorithms.

Over the past couple months, I’ve been getting anti-immigration YouTube ads that feature an incident presented as a “news” story, about two immigrants who raped an American girl. The ad offers no context or sources, and uses heated language to denounce immigration and call for our county to allow ICE to seek out illegal immigrants within our area. I wasn’t watching a video about immigration or even politics when those ads came on; I was watching the old Monty Python “Cheese Shop” sketch. How does British satire, circa 1972, relate to America’s current immigration debate? It doesn’t.

tech companies need to be held accountable for the radicalization that results from their systems and standards.

anyone can be manipulated like I was. It’s so easy to find information online that we collectively forget that so much of the content the internet offers us is biased

the risk of trusting competition to an interoperability mandate is that it will create a new ecosystem where everything that's not forbidden is mandatory, freezing in place the current situation, in which Facebook and the other giants dominate and new entrants are faced with onerous compliance burdens that make it more difficult to start a new service, and limit those new services to interoperating in ways that are carefully designed to prevent any kind of competitive challenge

Facebook is a notorious opponent of adversarial interoperability. In 2008, Facebook successfully wielded a radical legal theory that allowed it to shut down Power Ventures, a competitor that allowed Facebook's users to use multiple social networks from a single interface. Facebook argued that by allowing users to log in and display Facebook with a different interface, even after receipt of a cease and desist letter telling Power Ventures to stop, the company had broken a Reagan-era anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In other words, upsetting Facebook's investors made their conduct illegal.

Today, Facebook is viewed as holding all the cards because it has corralled everyone who might join a new service within its walled garden. But legal reforms to safeguard the right to adversarial interoperability would turn this on its head: Facebook would be the place that had conveniently organized all the people whom you might tempt to leave Facebook, and even supply you with the tools you need to target those people.

Such a tool would allow someone to use Facebook while minimizing how they are used by Facebook. For people who want to leave Facebook but whose friends, colleagues or fellow travelers are not ready to join them, a service like this could let Facebook vegans get out of the Facebook pool while still leaving a toe in its waters.

In a competitive market (which adversarial interoperability can help to bring into existence), even very large companies can't afford to enrage their customers

the audience for a legitimate adversarial interoperability product are the customers of the existing service that it connects to.

anyone using a Facebook mobile app might be exposing themselves to incredibly intrusive data-gathering, including some surprisingly creepy and underhanded tactics.

If users could use a third-party service to exchange private messages with friends, or to participate in a group they're a member of, they can avoid much (but not all) of this surveillance.

Facebook users (and even non-Facebook users) who want more privacy have a variety of options, none of them very good. Users can tweak Facebook's famously hard-to-understand privacy dashboard to lock down their accounts and bet that Facebook will honor their settings (this has not always been a good bet). Everyone can use tracker-blockers, ad-blockers and script-blockers to prevent Facebook from tracking them when they're not on Facebook, by watching how they interact with pages that have Facebook "Like" buttons and other beacons that let Facebook monitor activity elsewhere on the Internet. We're rightfully proud of our own tracker blocker, Privacy Badger, but it doesn't stop Facebook from tracking you if you have a Facebook account and you're using Facebook's service.

As Facebook's market power dwindled, so would the pressure that web publishers feel to embed Facebook trackers on their sites, so that non-Facebook users would not be as likely to be tracked as they use the Web.

Today, Facebook's scandals do not trigger mass departures from the service, and when users do leave, they tend to end up on Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook.

For users who have privacy needs -- and other needs -- beyond those the big platforms are willing to fulfill, it's important that we keep the door open to competitors (for-profit, nonprofit, hobbyist and individuals) who are willing to fill those needs.

helping Facebook's own users, or the users of any big service, to configure their experience to make their lives better should be legal and encouraged even (and especially) if it provides a path for users to either diversify their social media experience or move away entirely from the big, concentrated services. Either way, we'd be on our way to a more pluralistic, decentralized, diverse Internet

The funny thing about history is that you always look back from the luxury of time and you can see these massive events taking place, you can understand the dynamics. We don't have that perspective when we are in it, so my idea of studying history was to remap the past onto the present, so that we might gain insight into what’s happening now.

This weird concept that we have developed, essential, non-essential work, this arbitrary division of what will matter and what will not matter. It wasn't until I was swept up in the uprising and really asking myself what's happening—there was this amazing video of this silent moment of people with their fists up, thousands of people on their knees, and it was just incredibly moving—I had this realization that this was the essential work, the work that we need to be doing.

I think we all lack a historical distance right now to make sense of this moment. But art can provide us with an abstracted or a historical lens, that gives us distance or a sense of a time bigger than the moment we're in.

When you were describing this 1990s utopian idea of the internet as public space, I was struck by the contrast with how things turned out. In both our physical and digital reality, we have lost the commons. Is Instagram a public space?

there's something virus-like about social media anyway, in the way that it operates, in the way that it taps into our physiology on a chemical level in our brain. It’s designed to function that way. And combining that kind of functionality with our addiction to or the dominance of visual culture, it's just sort of like a deadly combination. We get addicted and we just consume incredible amounts of visual information every day.

It really is true that very rarely you will see a photograph of a dead body in the printed newspaper. It reminds me, for example, of the absence of the flag-draped coffins that come when soldiers return from war. Because we're taught to think about COVID-19 as a kind of war, maybe it makes sense to really think about that.

If you don't see the picture of the dead body, there's no dead body. It's the reason why if I teach a foundation class, I always show the students this famous Stan Brakhage film, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971). It’s a half hour silent film of multiple autopsies. We have this extended conversation about just how completely absent images of our bodies like that are from our cultural experience.

those are the images that people wanted to see. They were widely distributed; you could buy postcards of lynched men and women because people wanted to celebrate that. There is a completely different attitude at work. One could say they're doing the work of the same ideology, but in opposite directions. It would be hard to talk about a history of photography in this country and not talk about lynching photographs.

There's nothing inevitable about an ad market that requires surveillance. Contextual advertising – advertising based on the content of articles, rather than data on the readers – is far more profitable for publishers than behavioral ads.