HCRHS Media Lit

"When using technology, we often focus optimistically on all the things it does for us. But I want to show you where it might do the opposite. Where does technology exploit our minds' weaknesses? I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people's buttons, you can play them like a piano. And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it."

"Spurred by the changing norms of social media, soon-to-be newlyweds are clamoring for professional photos even before their wedding day."

"When Marsha Richins started researching materialism in the early 1990s, it was a subject that had mostly been left to philosophers and religious thinkers. One focus of Richins's research has been how that pursuit begins in childhood, and in particular accelerates in middle school. That's the time when kids, on average, give the most materialistic responses to the question of what makes them happy. In a paper published last year, Richins described how the social dynamics of middle school can lead children to place more importance on owning and having things. (Movies, TV, the internet, media, advertising, and parents' own habits, of course, can have similar effects.)"

"KFC is promising $11,000 to the first baby named after Colonel Sanders and born on his birthday."

"Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes-car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle-that it almost seems easier to list the things they don't mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices. Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids' development, but it's probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents."

"On a recent clear-skied autumn morning, families milled about Rockefeller Center in Manhattan-clasping shopping bags, gazing into their phones, waiting on benches for straggling loved ones-unaware that 31 floors above them, in a sleek meeting space, a room full of marketers were trying to get inside their heads. "Moms are the most powerful influencers on the planet," said one. "She is caring for new life-she will buy anything for that baby," another said later. They were onstage at M2Moms, a two-day "marketing to moms conference" in its 14th year. Its 80-odd attendees and speakers-who came from consumer-product companies such as Volvo, Crayola, and Kohl's, as well as from marketing firms-were gathered to learn how to reach, in the words of Nan McCann, the conference's organizer, "the females you want to become your customers once, twice, and always." This knowledge was delivered to M2Moms' mostly female, mostly white audience in the form of presentations with titles such as "From Bras to Booze: The Principles of Marketing to Mom," "Decoding High Stressed Moms-How Brands Can Make a Difference," and "Do You Move at the Speed of Mom?""

"The goodness of social media is in the smaller communities that focus on learning something new or doing something better. And, with the Future of Work upon us, and the need for lifelong learning being critically important, there's never been a better time to discover the good of social media."

"If, like an ever-growing majority of people in the U.S., you own a smartphone, you might have the sense that apps in the age of the pocket-sized computer are designed to keep your attention as long as possible. You might not have the sense that they're manipulating you one tap, swipe, or notification at a time. But Tristan Harris thinks that's just what's happening to the billions of us who use social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, and he's on a mission to steer us toward potential solutions - or at least to get us to acknowledge that this manipulation is, in fact, going on."

"What does life look like for girls turning 18 in 2018? We gave young women photographers around the world an assignment: Show us 18 in your community. This is 18 - through girls' eyes."

"Every Sunday for two hours, Drake jumps into Fortnite, bringing climate-themed guests - such as Dessler and Peter Griffith, the founding director of NASA's Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Office - with him. While they play (and stream to Twitch), they chat about climate change. The three-month-old squad has set out to make climate change information accessible to Fortnite fans. The setup is akin to a TV chat show with virtual gunplay: the squad hopes their streams will be watched by climate-curious gamers who can send in questions for them to answer midgame. The sessions are invite-only, so the chat is private until the streams are uploaded. Right now, the only thing the squad exchanges with other gamers is gunfire. You must view the videos in order to hear the climate banter."

"Shiru Cafe looks like a regular coffee shop. Inside, machines whir, baristas dispense caffeine and customers hammer away on laptops. But all of the customers are students, and there's a reason for that. At Shiru Cafe, no college ID means no caffeine. Ferris will turn away customers if they're not college students or faculty members. The cafe allows professors to pay, but students have something else the shop wants: their personal information. To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas."

"How Face ID affects the Fifth Amendment and opens the door for law enforcement to have easier access to your phone"

"How did misinformation spread during the 2016 presidential election and has anything changed since? A new study of more than 10 million tweets from 700,000 Twitter accounts that linked to more than 600 misinformation and conspiracy news outlets answers this question. The report reveals a concentrated "fake news" ecosystem, linking more than 6.6 million tweets to fake news and conspiracy news publishers in the month before the 2016 election. The problem persisted in the aftermath of the election with 4 million tweets to fake and conspiracy news publishers found from mid-March to mid-April 2017. A large majority of these accounts are still active today. Here are eight findings that stood out to us:"

"Since Taylor Swift flexed her star power Sunday with an Instagram post that encouraged her 112 million followers to register to vote, Vote.org has experienced an unprecedented flood of new voter registrations nationwide. "We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T. Swift's post," said Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for Vote.org. For context, 190,178 new voters were registered nationwide in the entire month of September, while 56,669 were registered in August. In Swift's home state of Tennessee, where she voiced support for two Democratic candidates running in this year's midterms, voter registrations have also jumped."

"Know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type, and packet you route, is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not." This's what Edward Snowden wrote to filmmaker Laura Poitras when he first made contact with her in 2013 regarding the NSA's tracking and interception systems. Yet, ever since Facebook came under closer public scrutiny following the 2016 election, Snowden's warning to Poitras reads increasingly like it could have been written about the social platform as well. We now know the seemingly unlimited reach of Facebook's data mining operation. We know that it has in the past, and may still, track what you write - and delete - from its site, monitor the websites you visit, where you go (even when you're offline), record the applications you and your friends install, and more. Somewhere, Facebook may even know how much money you have."

"Kelsey Russell isn't a real person, and there's no such school as Bouldin High. Both are fictional creations of a new teen drama called SKAM Austin. Produced in partnership with Facebook, the show blends earnest storytelling, an innovative new format, and sometimes-graphic and sexually explicit dialogue to authentically depict the role of social media in teenagers' lives. SKAM Austin also further blurs the line between fake and real, unfolding via snippets of social media content that pop up alongside the posts of viewers' real-life friends. To follow along, the show's fans-just like its characters-have to go down the digital rabbit hole, hopping from platform to platform in the hopes of finding out what's really happening. Media-literacy experts say schools should pay close attention to SKAM Austin. They describe it as both as a potential teaching tool and a cautionary tale about where social media is headed."

"ne year ago today, The New York Times published a landmark investigation about how Harvey Weinstein had for decades paid off sexual harassment accusers. Culturally, the article hit like a meteor, drastically altering the landscape around how sexual misconduct is perceived, sending the #MeToo hashtag viral and, in turn, triggering an avalanche of accusations against powerful men. It wasn't long before #MeToo wasn't just a turn of phrase - it was a movement. That's a lot for one year … and it felt like it."

"Five years ago Mark Zuckerberg debuted a bold, humanitarian vision of global internet. It didn't go as planned - forcing Facebook to reckon with the limits of its own ambition."

"A wealth of music research has argued that musical choices correctly reflect personality features. Findings across studies and geographic regions converged to show that the Big Five personality traits are consistently linked to musical preferences. In tune with this line of thinking, researchers at University of Cambridge wanted to determine how individual differences in music preferences are differentiated by cognitive type, based on the link between empathy [the ability to identify with other's mental states] and systemizing [responding to behavior based on set rules] - the Empathizing-Systemizing Theory (ES). In other words, does the music that makes your soul happy predict your thinking style?"

"For the most part, research suggests that listening to music can improve your efficiency, creativity and happiness in terms of work-related tasks. However, there are stipulations to these benefits. For example, studies seem to agree that listening to music with lyrics is distracting for most people. Therefore, it's often recommended that we avoid listening to music featuring lyrics when working on tasks that require intense focus or the learning of new information."