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At least 846 public libraries have been closed since 2010, according to figures from library association Cilip, which has left several local authorities with the lowest library provision in Europe. Meanwhile, an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 professional library workers have lost their jobs. Stats show some £400m has been cut from local library and culture budgets since 2010. The situation led Cilip’s boss, Nick Poole, to comment last year: “This is not normal. This is not ‘living within our means’. This is a wholesale assault on a vital civic institution that is, in turn, a vital part of the fabric of an equal, prosperous and inclusive society.”

“Those who suffer most when a library closes down often aren’t the loudest in society,” Burton says. “Isolation is becoming a huge issue. The social type clubs have all gone, they were the first to go, they were an easy cut. We’ve literally got disabled people, older people, stuck in on their own.” Libraries, she says, are a crucial community space which have come to help alleviate many of the everyday problems people who are isolated face.

Libraries are one of the few places you can spend a day without a charge.

In a virtual library found in Minecraft -— a game where users can build virtual worlds out of blocks and create their own storylines — users can access the work of journalists who have been killed, jailed or exiled by governments, including articles by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The project, launched by Reporters Without Borders, design collective Blockworks, advertising agency DDB Germany and production company MediaMonks, gives users access to articles banned in five countries that rank poorly on the nongovernmental organization's World Press Freedom Index: Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam.

Work in the library, launched Thursday to mark the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, is available in English and the original language in which the texts were written.

"Young people grow up without being able to form their own opinions. By using Minecraft, the world's most popular computer game, as a medium, we give them access to independent information,"

As a Marxist, Benjamin was alert to the political implications of patrician disdain, and suggested that what he called “reception in distraction” might actually help in understanding the kaleidoscopic bustle of modern urban life. However, the association of new media with crises of attention goes back much further. In Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature, the literary scholar Natalie Phillips describes how the proliferation of early print publications changed reading habits. Instead of devoting one’s attention to a small library of precious books, it was now possible to dip into things, to divert oneself with articles in gossipy magazines such as The Tatler and The Spectator, even—horror of horrors—to skim. In the introduction to Alexander Pope’s mock epic The Dunciad, the pseudonymous Martinus Scriblerus (writing from the future) explains that the poet lived at a time when “paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors covered the land.” The result was information overload. Samuel Johnson complained that readers were so distracted that they “looked into the first pages” before moving on to other options. One of the lasting monuments to this new print culture, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, makes a comedy of its narrator’s distraction, which he attributes to his mother having interrupted his father at the crucial moment of conception to ask whether he’d remembered to wind the clock.

In 1754, the encyclopedist Denis Diderot wrote that distraction arises from an excellent quality of the understanding, which allows the ideas to strike against, or reawaken one another. It is the opposite of that stupor of attention, which merely rests on, or recycles, the same idea.

Distraction is certainly bad when driving a car or reading philosophy, but in other contexts, toggling between activities and juxtaposing different registers of information can be fertile and productive. Indeed, it’s key to creativity—at least this is what I (and my ninety-five open browser tabs) will maintain if you ask. It isn’t that the distracted writer is unable to focus on anything at all; his attention is captured, fleetingly, by various things, and whether that’s useful or not depends very much on context.

Some 80% of journalists come from professional and upper class backgrounds

This compares to 42% of the general workforce coming from higher class backgrounds

social class was the only factor surveyed where the UK news industry is getting increasingly unequal over time.

Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.

Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.

Because the term “AI” is ambiguous, it makes having clear discussions more difficult. In one sense, it is the name of a subfield of computer science. In another, it can refer to the computing techniques developed in that subfield, most of which are now focused on pattern matching based on large data sets and the generation of new media based on those patterns. Finally, in marketing copy and start-up pitch decks, the term “AI” serves as magic fairy dust that will supercharge your business.

The problem waiting round the corner for universities is essays generated by AI, which will leave a textual pattern-spotter like Turnitin in the dust. (Earlier this year, I came across one essay that felt deeply odd in some not quite human way, but I had no tangible evidence that anything untoward had occurred, so that was that.)

To accuse someone of plagiarism is to make a moral charge regarding intentions. But establishing intent isn’t straightforward. More often than not, the hearings bleed into discussions of issues that could be gathered under the heading of student ‘wellbeing’, which all universities have been struggling to come to terms with in recent years.

an injunction against creative interpretation and writing, a deprivation that working-class children will feel at least as deeply as anyone else.

The institution of local broadcast news is a young one, but among the most ubiquitous in the United States. It’s a pair of routines that unfold each night: As Americans gather to wind down their days, the medium has worked to deepen racial tensions and reinforce racial stereotypes about communities of color.

This format launched in Philadelphia, first with the birth of Eyewitness News in 1965, and then with Action News in 1970. Over the next few generations, the pervasive and seductive twin broadcasts would spread to stations across the country — and with them, negative narratives about neighborhoods that would effectively “other” certain groups based largely on race, class, and zip code.

The new breed of local news would transform how Americans received the day’s headlines. It would even change the substance of the news itself. Before Eyewitness appeared on America’s small screens, local television news hardly existed, with national stories dominating the day’s headlines as anchors vied for spots at big-city network markets. And it was delivered largely behind a desk, by a suited white man in a series of passive sentences.