HCRHS Media Lit

"How does Twitter change the way people get news? What kinds of thought leaders, journalists and organizations do people follow on the network? How are these Twitter followers different than those on other social networks? And how are people reacting to added elements on Twitter, such as advertising and promoted tweets?"

"Trust was the issue at hand. The bookish professor had been asked to assess the article as part of an experiment run by Stanford University psychologist Sam Wineburg. His team, known as the Stanford History Education Group, has given scores of subjects such tasks in hopes of answering two of the most vexing questions of the Internet age: Why are even the smartest among us so bad at making judgments about what to trust on the web? And how can we get better?"

"Waiting for the next e-mail or internet "hit" means we are constantly distracted from our everyday tasks. But don't blame technology because the causes are human,"

"The company, the world's largest digital advertiser, is being criticized more and more for its vast data-collection practices, which feed its powerful ad targeting. "

"Stories about the founding of any company begin with motivation. Whatever it was -- an idea, an epiphany or the aftermath of a mistake -- every business founder has a story about how and why they created a company, and that story inevitably includes the tribulations, milestones, pivots and hopefully successes that they faced along the way. "

""The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time,""

"'Teens turn to, and are obsessed with, whichever environment allows them to connect to friends. Most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other.'"

"SALT LAKE CITY - Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world, even though he makes $81,840 a year, CNN reports. He's made that salary for the last 10 years, according to CNN. "

"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. "

"For the parents of today's teens, getting a driver's license was a rite of passage often considered crucial to everything from dating to working -- and feeling like an adult. For today's teens themselves? Not as much. "

"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.""