"The winner of this year's Modern Love college essay contest explores the comforts and limits of online connection."

"Naturally, they know what you've browsed or bought on their main service. They also know what you've asked Alexa, watched on Prime, and read on your Kindle. They know even more thanks to their ownership of Whole Foods, Ring, Eero, Twitch, Goodreads, IMDB and Audible."

"When the Harvard psychiatrist and tech consultant John Torous learned that Facebook monitors its users' posts for warning signs that they might be at risk of suicide, he was shocked. Having grown accustomed to working with tech giants like Microsoft on scientific research, he wondered why he'd never heard about Facebook's program. He was even more surprised to find out that as part of its efforts, Facebook was sending emergency responders to people's homes. Facebook's monitoring tool has been running since 2017 and was involved in sending emergency responders to people more than 3,500 times as of last fall, the company said. But the reason Torous hadn't heard of it is because the company hasn't shared information about the tool with researchers such as him, or with the broader medical and scientific community."

"We're under social media assault from paid personalities willing to sell us anything - even a music festival that doesn't exist"

"The cost of being always available. The cost of having fragmented conversation. The cost of a rewired brain. The cost of our privacy. The literal, spiraling cost of buying the latest technology. For these and other economic reasons, sales of iPhones and other smartphones have recently plateaued and even declined. At the same time, some people have gone back to the simpler, less addictive phones used in the late 1990s and early 2000s: the flip phone, the "candybar" phone, and other basic "feature" phones that can only talk and text."

"The tech giant records people's locations worldwide. Now, investigators are using it to find suspects and witnesses near crimes, running the risk of snaring the innocent."

Multimedia package that illustrates how facial recognition software work and could be used.

"It's easy to blame adolescent angst on technology. After all, the suddenness of technology's sheer ubiquity makes it the obvious culprit. But isn't it also possible that technology just amplifies all of the world's other problems-like climate change, gun violence, the difficulty of getting into college, and more? Plus, technology provides youth a place to escape from these problems and to commiserate with peers. It's complex and there's still a lot we don't know."

"The company showed off a bunch of creative new ideas, from an in-app gaming platform to Snap stories coming to outside apps like Tinder. But the standout was a new feature called Landmarkers, which allows you to remix the world around you with augmented reality filters in real time."

"A lot of us must be wondering if we're hooked on our tech: Searches for "phone addiction" have risen steadily in the past five years, according to Google Trends, and "social media addiction" trails it closely. "

"A new musical explores life in high school in a way that's eerily familiar. It's called Ranked, and it's set in a dystopian world where your class rank - determined by grades and test scores - governs everything from where you sit to what your future holds." This musical, written by a high school teacher, explores some really interesting questions inspired by the students including: "How do we know the difference between who we actually are and what people want from us?" Usually, Granite Bay announces its spring musical by posting headshots of the performers in the hallway. But this year, it tried something a little different: Holmes asked students to anonymously submit personal text messages, exchanges and emails that depicted the pressure the students were under from parents and counselors. One text exchange reads: A: How was the test? B: I got an 86%! A: Oh no what happened? Another: A: I'm watching you B: Where am I currently then A: Failing class They used the messages in a collage that included headlines from recent news stories ("The Silicon Valley Suicides," "Is class rank valid?") and hung it in the hallway instead of the headshots. A banner at the top reads: "Pain is temporary. Grades last forever."

"Many of the images are exactly what you'd think: blood, chunks of flesh, brains, and apocalyptic messages written in shit on prison walls. Then come the "after" pictures of spotless tiles-these new social media stars are crime scene cleaners, the people who clean up the worst messes in America. Why would anyone want to look at mattresses caked with the ooze of decomposing bodies? "People love to see the aftermath," said Neal Smither, 52, proprietor of Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc, based in Richmond, California, and its Instagram page @crimescenecleanersinc. "They're gore freaks... They have a certain curiosity we just seem to fit.""

"ost of us understand by now that we're being followed across the web. But how much do we know about how the smartphone apps we use track our every move? Thanks to tiny pieces of code that millions of developers use to make their lives easier, an array of companies gets free access to data they can employ to understand your habits. The process is invisible, and it's worse news for you than you might think. When we browse the web through Google Chrome, for example, a dizzying array of companies follow us. Such is the Wild West of our modern web, but you still remain in control of which sites you visit and which social networks you log into. The shift to native apps changes this equation, however. Suddenly you're no longer in full control of what's loaded, nor of who is tracking you, and you must trust app developers to do the right thing."

"If Stadia works as described, it has the potential to upend how the gaming industry works. But it will also give Google a trove of data it didn't have before. Basic information like what games a user buys, how long they play, and what devices they play on can provide valuable insights that might help Google do what it does best: sell ads. "A good psychologist should be able to watch how most of us game and understand a whole lot about us." But how you play your games may be the most valuable data of all, according to Jon Festinger, a professor at the Centre for Digital Media, a graduate program in Canada that focuses on design. While Google can already gauge your interests or political leanings from things like your search history, video games involve actively making decisions that reveal a surprisingly intimate picture of who you are."

"Expanded genetic testing of embryos represents a new era of family planning. But how far should the technology go?"

"The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon."

"Researchers have been writing about the so-called highlight reel effect of social media since at least 2014. The idea is that people tend to post mostly flattering or humblebrag-worthy stuff about themselves, and spending too much time absorbing these gilded depictions of other people's lives could distort how you view your own. The evidence backing this theory is mixed. Some of the early studies linked the highlight reel effect to symptoms of depression, while others found that its impact varied from one person to the next. Some of the latest research suggests that exposure to idealized images - especially those posted by influencers on Instagram - may be fueling the kinds of negative social comparisons that make people feel bad about themselves."

"Another study, from 2018, looked at the impact of smartphones' presence on interactions between strangers. It found that strangers smiled at each other less, and smiled less intensely, when they had their smartphones with them than when they didn't. "People just don't feel that the person is paying attention to them, and then they report having a [worse] conversation," says John Hunter, a PhD candidate in psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, who conducted the smiling study with Kushlev and others. Even if your phone is not in use but still in front of you, "that makes the conversation worse, because the other person kind of feels that, well, that phone in front of you is maybe more important to you than the conversation we're having.""

"For the past couple years, I've been complaining rather emphatically about the way digital technology has been used to desocialize us - how platforms like Facebook and YouTube turn us against one another by emphasizing our differences and encouraging us to behave like threatened reptiles. This is indeed lamentable, but in many ways, it's nothing new. Our media and technologies have been undermining our social bonds for centuries. So, what's different now? Is this digital alienation the same thing amplified, or is something else going on? Only when we understand how tech has been working all along can we begin to reckon with what's different about the digital landscape in which we're living."

"Alternative facts. Post-truth. Fake news. When the president of the United States declares media the "enemy of the American people," you know we're in for a moment of reckoning. In adapted excerpts from their forthcoming book, "Reimagining Journalism in a Post-Truth World: How Late-Night Comedians, Internet Trolls, and Savvy Reporters Are Transforming News," Ed Madison and Ben DeJarnette examine how journalism went wrong, and what it means for democracy."