HCRHS Media Lit

"John Lanchester on how Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four capture the age of Facebook and Trump"

"Tech platform trust and safety employees are charged with policing the impossible. They open up to Medium's head of trust and safety."

"A generation that rarely reads books or emails, breathes through social media, feels isolated and stressed but is crazy driven and wants to solve the world's problems (not just volunteer) is now on campus. Born from 1995 to 2012, its members are the most ethnically diverse generation in history, said Jean Twenge, psychology professor at San Diego State University. They began arriving at colleges a few years ago, and they are exerting their presence. They are driving shifts, subtle and not, in how colleges serve, guide and educate them, sending presidents and deans to Instagram and Twitter. They are forcing course makeovers, spurring increased investments in mental health - from more counselors and wellness messages to campaigns drawing students to nature (hug a tree, take a break to look at insects) - and pushing academics to be more hands-on and job-relevant."

"The floss is everywhere. Ted Danson did it. Mark Ingram did it. A 96-year old World War II veteran did it. And it's in Fortnite, where a wide range of emotes, or character actions, are sold by developer Epic Games. Fortnite characters can also dance using the "fresh" emote, which directly cribs from the "Carlton dance" Alfonso Ribeiro made famous on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or "swipe it," a copy of 2 Milly's Milly Rock dance. None of the creators of these dances see a cent from the game's in-app purchases, which, in aggregate, reportedly led Epic to $1 billion in revenue midway through last year. So, naturally, the creators sued. And quickly hit a brick wall."

"Viewers of 'Scandal,' 'Madam Secretary' and 'The Good Wife' reported increased political interest and participation in rallies, circulation of petitions and/or calling of public officials, according to a new paper co-authored by a Purdue University political communications assistant professor."

"How a group of teenagers pivoted from Vine to venture capital"

"Hospitals are leaning on the distracting power of immersive technology "

"Bails and Godwin are riding that wave of popularity to build their followings and cash in on an accessible kind of fame they dreamed about as children, influenced not by movies or television but by YouTube stars. Fame on TikTok is a full-time job. The money Bails makes from his TikTok videos pays for the apartment he'd just moved into a few days before in the artsy, up-and-coming neighborhood of North Hollywood. Bails and Godwin said a combination of sponsorships, YouTube revenue and donations from fans watching livestreams on TikTok have given them the financial independence to afford their Instagram-worthy lifestyle."

"Social media is awash with glossy images of our friends having fun - but how does that impact our wallets?"

"ast September, Apple proudly rolled out a Screen Time feature that was designed to help people manage how much they use their devices, and even get away from them altogether with a related Downtime setting. This was a canny marketing move from the maker of the most attractive and addictive screen ever invented. And it came against the backdrop of Apple's unusually public campaign against Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Screen Time's promotional materials prominently featured both Facebook and Instagram, as if suggesting these two apps in particular might be a waste of your time. Never mind that Facebook's very real privacy liabilities aren't connected to how often you use the product. Apple had an opportunity to position itself on the higher ground of the branding battlefield, and it took it."

"Is the collective horror of the world's tragedies diminishing the weight of each individual crisis?"

"These fast, fun and engaging activities provide teens and adults with the opportunity to test their skills and learn new authentication techniques. On the internet, it can be hard to tell what's true and what's false-but we have to make a lot of decisions based on how reliable we think things are. In Reality Check, you'll learn how to find clues like finding where a story originally came from and comparing it to other sources, as well as how to use tools like fact-checking sites and reverse image searches. In each mission, you'll be presented with a story on your social network feed that might be entirely true, entirely false, or somewhere in between. To find out, click on the different parts of the page where you see a magnifying glass. Once you've seen all the clues, you can decide how reliable you think it is and how to respond to it. Because fact-checking shouldn't be a chore, each scenario is designed to be played in 15 minutes or less. The game can be played in any internet browser on computers or mobile devices."

"Or how we sacrifice our privacy and receive nothing in return"

"No trend has reshaped the media landscape more dramatically than the open web "

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

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

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