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Ed Webb

Arianna Huffington: Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Cost... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...social-media_b_1333499.html

socialmedia opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The media world's fetishization of social media has reached idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should actually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al Jazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, "The lack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it harder to know what the most important story is at any given time."
  • locked in the Perpetual Now
  • There's no reason why the notion of the scoop can't be recalibrated to mean not just letting us know 10 seconds before everybody else whom Donald Trump is going to endorse but also giving us more understanding, more clarity, a brighter spotlight on solutions
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • We're treating virality as a good in and of itself, moving forward for the sake of moving
  • "Twitter's algorithm favors novelty over popularity."
  • there were too many tweets about WikiLeaks, and they were so constant that Twitter started treating WikiLeaks as the new normal
  • as we adopt new and better ways to help people communicate, can we keep asking what is really being communicated? And what's the opportunity cost of what is not being communicated while we're all locked in the perpetual present chasing whatever is trending?
  • "What it means to be social is if you want to talk to me, you have to listen to me as well." A lot of brands want to be social, but they don't want to listen, because much of what they're hearing is quite simply not to their liking, and, just as in relationships in the offline world, engaging with your customers or your readers in a transparent and authentic way is not all sweetness and light. So simply issuing a statement saying you're committed to listening isn't the same thing as listening.
  • Fetishizing "social" has become a major distraction, and we're clearly a country that loves to be distracted. Our job in the media is to use all the social tools at our disposal to tell the stories that matter -- as well as the stories that entertain -- and to keep reminding ourselves that the tools are not the story. When we become too obsessed with our closed, circular Twitter or Facebook ecosystem, we can easily forget that poverty is on the rise, or that downward mobility is trending upward, or that over 5 million people have been without a job for half a year or more, or that millions of homeowners are still underwater. And just as easily, we can ignore all the great instances of compassion, ingenuity, and innovation that are changing lives and communities.
  • conflates the form with the substance
  • new social tools can help us bear witness more powerfully or they can help us be distracted more obsessively
  • humans are really a herd animal and that is what we are doing on these social sites, Herding up
Ed Webb

Common Knowledge : CJR - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...common_knowledge.php

media identity democracy USA cjr analysis socialmedia newspapers journalism politics

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Berelson’s analysis documented what we denizens of the burgeoning ecosystem often shorthanded as “the new media landscape” understand instinctively: that news is much more than information. That it is more, even, than a cultural commodity. Berelson highlighted news’s status as a source both of intimacy and anxiety: news is not only a reflection of the world we live in. It is also a reflection of ourselves.
  • Aren’t consumers better served by many outlets that are specialized than by a few outlets that are generalized? And national news, even in its halcyon days—one thinks of Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America”—was never a paragon of cultural comprehensiveness. Master narratives, the closest we’ve ever gotten to macro-communal news, have been, as well, products of oligarchic exclusivity.
  • consumers are increasingly presented with, and made to choose among, an expanding variety of ever-narrowing news sources
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • the inconvenience of being challenged in our beliefs.
  • Increasingly, we are able to choose not just which opinions to embrace, but also something more foundational: which facts to know in the first place.
  • a troubling paradox: the democratization of information, it turns out, is in some ways at odds with democracy itself.
  • Where is the middle ground between monopoly and chaos? How do we balance the individually empowering elements of the niche—and the passion and participation they encourage—with news that is empowering in a wider sense of civic life? How do we reconcile the intimacy of news consumption with Berelson’s insight that news is, at is core, a solidarity good? How do we structure a system of news that acts, in varying ways, as democracy’s common denominator?
  • news consumption itself has taken on a quality of itinerancy: audiences, per Pew’s most recent State of the News Media report, now “hunt and gather what they want when they want it, use search to comb among destinations and share what they find through a growing network of social media.” And consumption itself has thus taken on an increasingly self-definitional property: to read The New York Times, or to watch Fox News—or MSNBC—or the NewsHour—or to curate a personalized RSS feed, is, of course, to make not merely a commercial decision. It is also to make a declaration about who you are and how you see the world.
  • There has always been more information in the world than there have been news outlets to convey it; but the explosion of outlets, in particular, means that no longer is slant the key self-definitional distinction in news
  • “The news” itself, as a unitary entity, is no longer something we can take for granted. On the contrary: it is increasingly incoherent—“a mass of niches,” Jeff Jarvis has it. Indeed, the notion of a master narrative itself—the communal melody that, even in its exclusivity, also binds us together in its tunes and tones—is slowly dissolving into white noise.
  • echo chambers—even those that many might think of as ‘the good ones’—have an insularity that impedes broader political and cultural discourse. They distort reality through their very presumption of multiple realities. They assume—and, then, foster—a disconnect between sub-truths and, simply, truth.
  • In And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Bill Wasik describes the “feedback loop among bloggers and readers,” citing a study finding that 85 percent of blog links led consumers to blogs of the same political bent—“with almost no blog showing any particular respect for any blog on the other side.” In this way, selective exposure becomes a communal activity.
  • “The problem is when extremism emerges from the logic of social interactions”—from, in other words, a system of discourse that allows for self-segregation. And that’s the problem we’re seeing, increasingly, in our journalistic infrastructure. On the one hand, people have access to more dissenting views than ever before; on the other, paradoxically, they are more able to ignore those views than ever before. My reality here. Your reality there.
  • Without “popular information,” we lose not only our baseline of knowledge about the political world, but also our bearings within it. We risk becoming subject, as it were, to subjectivity itself—and ending up with a society, as William James had it, in which “people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
  • That journalism is crucial to modern democracy seems clear; that it is not by any means sufficient to democracy seems equally clear
  • News serves the public not only by feeding it information; it also fosters, in the phrase of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the “sociological imagination”—the habit of mind required to connect one’s private concerns to the “public issues” that give rise to them. News itself is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy. In learning about our fellow citizens, we come to see their lives as they are: inextricably linked to ours. News begets empathy—and, in that, social capital. Connection is key: as Robert Putnam notes, “a society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.”
  • Mediated knowledge, in other words, united the country. Not by whitewashing differences among its consumers, but rather by giving those consumers a baseline of shared information and discourse that, eventually, transformed an awkward amalgam of loosely connected states—the experiment—into the United States. The nation.
  • The challenge, as we navigate the chasm between old ways and new, is to find a way to mingle the productive properties of commotion with the enduring value of community.
  • “It is hardly possible,” Mill had it, “to overstate the value in the present state of human improvement of placing people in contact with others dissimilar to themselves, and in contact too with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.”
  • Ed Webb on 21 Sep 09
     
    Essential reading on media, identity, democracy, community.
Ed Webb

US buys ads on Facebook to fight militants - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...ook-fight-militants-1393912816

CT terrorism Facebook data US USA ISIS socialmedia propaganda

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • the US has found this year that online ads on social media websites like Facebook, rather than posts, are a cost-effective way to fight the propaganda of the Islamic State (IS) and other militant groups
  • Facebook's detailed metrics for advertisers helps the government campaign reach its targets - people who might be groomed online by militants."Using Facebook ads, I can go within Facebook, I can grab an audience. I can pick country X, I need age group 13 to 34, I need people who liked Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or any other set, and I can shoot and hit them directly with messages," he said."In some places in the world, it's literally pennies a click to do it," he said.  
  • Facebook, he noted, offers the government access to affordable amassed and collated user data for singling out target groups and individuals for anti-militant ads the US government runs."The best I can do right now is to have access to big data and to use the analytics tools on the social media platforms, the Facebooks and the others,"
Ed Webb

Egypt: Open letter to President-elect Biden and Vice-President-elect Harris - Cairo Ins... - 0 views

cihrs.org/nd-vice-president-elect-harris

Egypt Sisi Trump rights media freedom dictatorship authoritarianism prisoners US USA Biden foreignpolicy

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Referring to President Sisi as “my favorite dictator,” President Trump and his administration have condoned the Egyptian government’s persistent and grave violations of human rights.  The tragedy for Egyptians is that President Sisi has taken these patronizing and demeaning words as a compliment, and has spent the last four years living up to his reputation as a dictator.
  • your pledge that there will be “no more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator’.”
  • should release the tens of thousands of prisoners held after grossly unfair trials, or without adequate procedural safeguards
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • we advise you to set specific benchmarks for a drastic improvement in the Sisi government’s human rights practices according to Egypt’s international obligations, and according to the fundamental standards and principles to which you will expect a partner adheres
  • should end its sustained crackdown on independent civil society organizations, including human rights organizations.
  • should end institutional discrimination against religious minorities
  • should stop using the pretext of combatting terrorism to justify and legitimize grave violations of human rights including disappearances, extrajudicial killing and widespread torture
  • must enable local and international journalists to conduct their journalistic work freely and publish freely on its counterterrorism operations in parts of the country, like Sinai, that have become information black holes
  • should end its restrictions on media freedoms that have resulted in the closure of independent news outlets, the jailing and prosecution of journalists, and the banning of websites
Ed Webb

U.S. presses Tunisia, once a bright spot of Arab Spring, on democracy - The Washington ... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...nited-states-tunisia-democracy

USA US democracy diplomacy Tunisia saied EU migration CT

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Sep 22 - Cached
  • The Biden administration is pressing Tunisia’s leaders to reverse steps weakening the country’s democracy, exposing friction with a nation once seen as the most promising of those who experienced Arab Spring revolutions.
  • talks between Saied and Barbara Leaf, the State Department’s top official for the Middle East. During a visit to Tunis last month, Leaf conveyed worries about a new constitutional framework “that weakens Tunisia’s democracy and how crucial going forward an inclusive and transparent reform process is to restore confidence of the Tunisian people,”
  • In July, Saied’s government reacted angrily to a statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken raising questions about a constitutional referendum vote marked by low voter turnout.
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  • U.S. officials have sought to forcefully nudge Tunisia while avoiding a total rupture with a nation whose cooperation on counterterrorism is seen as a crucial element of U.S. strategy for North Africa. Tunisia, with a population of nearly 12 million, for its part values U.S. military support and needs America’s backing as it seeks a deal with the International Monetary Fund.
  • The Biden administration has adopted a more critical stance than its European allies, many of whom are focused on deterring migration via North Africa
  • U.S. officials believe their pressure may be having the effect of heading off even more problematic steps, like a more dramatic crackdown on the media and civil society groups.
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