HCRHS Media Lit

"The Atlantic piece "The Binge Breaker" explores Tristan Harris's plan to stop smartphone addiction. He's a former Google employee and the founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group that wants the world to disengage more easily from devices. In this interview with PBS Newshour, Harris explains how companies profit from keeping people entranced with their phones. "For any company whose business model is advertising, or engagement-based advertising, meaning they care about the amount of time someone spends on the product, they make more money the more time people spend," he says. "These services are in competition with where we would want to spend our time, whether that's our sleep or with our friends. There's this war going on to get as much attention as possible.""

"From President Donald Trump threatening members of the press to the tech platforms revealing they'd sold advertising to Russian operatives trying to sway the electorate, there was never a slow news day. Below are 10 of the biggest media stories from a year of very big stories."

"What is it that makes you...you? NPR's Shankar Vedantam explores new research that suggests the labels we use to categorize people affect not just who they are now, but who they'll be in the future."

Teens reveal perceptions and impact of misinformation - from PBS NewsHour

"Former Facebook vice president of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya said that social media is "eroding the core foundations of how people behave" and that he feels "tremendous guilt" about creating tools that are "ripping apart the social fabric." During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in November, Palihapitiya echoed the words of other Facebook dissenters who have recently taken their guilt and grievances public. (h/t The Verge) "You don't realize it, but you are being programmed … but now you got to decide how much you're willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence," he warned the audience. He said he didn't want to be programmed himself, emphasizing he "doesn't use this shit" and his kids are not allowed to use "this shit" either-also recommending that everyone take a "hard break" from social media."

"The debate about mis- and dis-information has intensified, but, as our report argues, we're still failing to appreciate the complexity of the phenomenon at hand. The report refrains from using the term 'fake news' and urges journalists, academics and policy-makers to do the same. This is for two reasons. First, the term is woefully inadequate to describe the complexities of information disorder. Second, it has been appropriated by politicians worldwide to describe news organizations whose coverage they find disagreeable, and, in this way, has become a mechanism by which the powerful clamp down upon, restrict, undermine and circumvent the free press. Our new definitional framework introduces three types, elements and phases of information disorder. We describe the differences between the three types of information using dimensions of harm and falseness: Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant. Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm. Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving private information into the public sphere."

"I don't think we can have an honest conversation about sexual harassment and sexual assault right now without talking about all the ways we have taken women's bodies and turned them into vessels. We use them on billboards. We use them to sell gym memberships, plastic surgery, cars, magazines, liquor, bikini waxes, multivitamins, underwear, shampoo, perfume, bottled water and all-inclusive resorts."

"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I've seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring."

"Here are a selection of statements based on examples from a Facebook training document and real-world comments found on social media. Most readers will find them offensive. But can you tell which ones would run afoul of Facebook's rules on hate speech?"

"Now that Google, Facebook, Amazon have become world dominators, the questions of the hour are, can the public be convinced to see Silicon Valley as the wrecking ball that it is? And do we still have the regulatory tools and social cohesion to restrain the monopolists before they smash the foundations of our society?"

"A handful of people working at a handful of tech companies steer the thoughts of billions of people every day, says design thinker Tristan Harris. From Facebook notifications to Snapstreaks to YouTube autoplays, they're all competing for one thing: your attention. Harris shares how these companies prey on our psychology for their own profit and calls for a design renaissance in which our tech instead encourages us to live out the timeline we want."

"Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention"

"That Facebook post about a super-secret conspiracy mainstream media doesn't want you to know about? It could soon be accompanied by a link to actual reporting repudiating those claims. Facebook began rolling out a new initiative to debunk fake news Thursday that automatically serves up related links from reliable sources for stories that have been flagged by fact-checkers as potential hoaxes."

"More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis."

"How a children's toy can be an identity marker for adults"

"Object Lessons is an essay and book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things, from faiths to intentions, saiths to teenagers."

"Plastic surgery, private jets, toddlers in designer clothes, magnums of champagne - Lauren Greenfield's 500-page photo collection, Generation Wealth, shows all of that. But this book isn't just about people who are wealthy, it's about people who want to be wealthy."

""Consumers have been confronted by fake news, fake online reviews, fake phishing emails, fake applications that install malware, fake accounts on social media platforms-and the list goes on," explained consumer psychologist Kenneth Faro, Ph.D., who worked with Origin/Hill Holliday on a new study that explores how the fake economy is affecting brands. "There's one big learning here, and it's the fact that we are seeing the emergence of a new consumer need-the need for truth." Faro recommends that brands view this need as an opportunity, not a challenge. "Valuing 'truth' can be a differentiating brand platform and a point of view that brands can stand for and rally consumers around," he said."

"Things can make people happier than experiences, a study finds, depending on the kind of happiness being measured"