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markfrankel18

BBC - Culture - The Instagram artist who fooled thousands - 3 views

  • Artist Amalia Ulman created an online persona and recorded it on Instagram to ask questions about gender online. Cadence Kinsey asks what her project tells us about our own social media identities. facebook Twitter reddit WhatsApp Google + Email
markfrankel18

The Limits of Friendship - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • The Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred and fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends—the people, say, you’d invite to a large party.
  • On an even deeper level, there may be a physiological aspect of friendship that virtual connections can never replace. This wouldn’t surprise Dunbar, who discovered his number when he was studying the social bonding that occurs among primates through grooming. Over the past few years, Dunbar and his colleagues have been looking at the importance of touch in sparking the sort of neurological and physiological responses that, in turn, lead to bonding and friendship. “We underestimate how important touch is in the social world,” he said.
  • So what happens if you’re raised from a young age to see virtual interactions as akin to physical ones? “This is the big imponderable,” Dunbar said. “We haven’t yet seen an entire generation that’s grown up with things like Facebook go through adulthood yet.”
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  • One concern, though, is that some social skills may not develop as effectively when so many interactions exist online. We learn how we are and aren’t supposed to act by observing others and then having opportunities to act out our observations ourselves. We aren’t born with full social awareness, and Dunbar fears that too much virtual interaction may subvert that education. “In the sandpit of life, when somebody kicks sand in your face, you can’t get out of the sandpit. You have to deal with it, learn, compromise,” he said. “On the internet, you can pull the plug and walk away. There’s no forcing mechanism that makes us have to learn.”
markfrankel18

How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly.
  • But there’s still a low-grade urgency to save our social media for posterity — and it’s particularly urgent in cases in which social media itself had a profound influence on historic events.
  • Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians. Such an abundance presents a logistical challenge (the total number of tweets ever written is nearing half a trillion) as well as an ethical one (will people get to opt out of having ephemeral thoughts entered into the historical record?). But this plethora of new media and materials may function as a totally new type of archive: a multidimensional ledger of events that academics, scholars, researchers and the general public can parse to generate a more prismatic recollection of history.
Lawrence Hrubes

Rehana the 'Angel of Kobani': Social Media Myths in the War Against Isis Terror - 0 views

  • The old saying "truth is the first casualty of war" springs to mind with the story of Kurdish jihadi-slayer "Rehana" - a woman who reportedly killed 100 Islamic State (IS) fighters but who may well be a ghost.
markfrankel18

Faking Cultural Literacy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them.
  • Who decides what we know, what opinions we see, what ideas we are repurposing as our own observations? Algorithms, apparently, as Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social media postindustrial complex rely on these complicated mathematical tools to determine what we are actually reading and seeing and buying.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story AdvertisementWe have outsourced our opinions to this loop of data that will allow us to hold steady at a dinner party, though while you and I are ostensibly talking about “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” what we are actually doing, since neither of us has seen it, is comparing social media feeds.
markfrankel18

Twitter histories of events are vanishing - Salon.com - 1 views

  • Nowadays, we’re very good at telling history in real time. Live-tweeting, livestreaming, Instagraming, link sharing, instant commenting — everyday lives and major events are recorded and narrated from every angle as they happen. A new study has found, however, that these minutes-old histories may not be built to last.
  • As the Technology Review reported:A significant proportion of the websites that this social media [around the Arab Spring] points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising. In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.
  • So it seems that social media sites like Twitter do not remain as fecund a resource over time as they do in real time. But no historian has ever worked on the assumption that all, or even most, information about an event is preserved, let alone even recorded. Not even Twitter has changed that.
Lawrence Hrubes

Fighting ISIS With an Algorithm, Physicists Try to Predict Attacks - The New York Times - 0 views

  • And with the Islamic State’s prolific use of social media, terrorism experts and government agencies continually search for clues in posts and Twitter messages that appear to promote the militants’ cause.A physicist may not seem like an obvious person to study such activity. But for months, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami, led a team that created a mathematical model to sift order from the chaotic pro-terrorism online universe.
  • The tracking of terrorists on social media should take a cue from nature, Dr. Johnson said, where “the way transitions happen is like a flock of birds, a school of fish.”
  • The researchers also said there might be a spike in the formation of small online groups just before an attack takes place.
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  • Both Mr. Berger and Ms. Patel noted a tricky question raised by the research: When is it best to try to suppress small groups so they do not mushroom into bigger groups, and when should they be left to percolate? Letting them exist for a while might be a way to gather intelligence, Ms. Patel said.
Michael Peters

How Blogging And Twitter Are Making Us Smarter : All Tech Considered : NPR - 0 views

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    The nuturing effect of social media networks.
Lawrence Hrubes

What You Look Like to a Social Network - 0 views

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    "This infographic allows you to explore the categories of information that various social networks make available to other applications."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Missing Malaysia plane: 10 theories examined - 0 views

  • As the search for Malaysia Airlines missing Boeing 777 moves into its 11th day, a multitude of theories about the plane's fate are circulating on forums and social media. Here, former pilots and aviation experts look at some of those theories.
  • As the search for Malaysia Airlines missing Boeing 777 moves into its 11th day, a multitude of theories about the plane's fate are circulating on forums and social media. Here, former pilots and aviation experts look at some of those theories.
markfrankel18

Facebook psychology: How social media changes the way we mourn. - 0 views

  • Facebook allows us to be public about our sorrows, but to be heard they must sound some joyous note. Research suggests that social media is uncommonly good at making us miserable. The irony may be that Facebook itself is also making us more reluctant to voice that misery.
Vicki Close

Science Shows Something Surprising About People Who Still Read Fiction - Mic - 0 views

  • Literary fiction enhanced participants' empathy because they had to work harder at fleshing out the characters. The process of trying to understand what those characters are feelings and the motives behind them is the same in our relationships with other people. 
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    Brain research finds that readers of literary fiction demonstrate increased levels of empathy over readers of non-fiction, social media and popular fiction.
markfrankel18

Economics jargon promotes a deficit in understanding | Media | The Guardian - 1 views

  • There’s no Rosetta Stone for scientific translation. It’s quite simple really. The first step is getting rid of the technical language.
  • This sounds like a straightforward instruction, but many enormously intelligent people fail to follow it. The trick they fail to master is to train their brains to think in two ways. One, like a scientist; and two, like someone with no scientific training whatsoever.
  • And whenever I see or hear journalists or politicians discussing a particularly important social science – economics – I just don’t see them making the same efforts of jargon removal and technical translation. Whether it’s discussion of debt, or the argument for austerity, it’s hard to find good economics communication, where the language is rinsed free of jargon.
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  • All of this is worrying because it represents a genuine threat to democracy. If we can’t fully comprehend the decisions that are made for us and about us by government then how we can we possibly revolt or react in an effective way? Yes, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves more on the big issues,
markfrankel18

Whose Picture Is It, Anyway? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Could social media awareness be a new developmental milestone?  And if so, is my son part of the first wave of children who are nearing adolescence, and all the social awareness that entails, to realize their parents have been posting embarrassing pictures of them online since they were minutes old?Legally, I’m well within my rights as my son’s guardian, but what about ethically? Howard Cohen, a chancellor emeritus and a professor of philosophy at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, Ind., said that depended upon whether I agreed with the teachings of Aristotle or those of Immanuel Kant.
markfrankel18

Psychiatry's Mind-Brain Problem - The New York Times - 1 views

  • Recently, a psychiatric study on first episodes of psychosis made front-page news. People seemed quite surprised by the finding: that lower doses of psychotropic drugs, when combined with individual psychotherapy, family education and a focus on social adaptation, resulted in decreased symptoms and increased wellness.
  • Recently, a psychiatric study on first episodes of psychosis made front-page news. People seemed quite surprised by the finding: that lower doses of psychotropic drugs, when combined with individual psychotherapy, family education and a focus on social adaptation, resulted in decreased symptoms and increased wellness. But the real surprise — and disappointment — was that this was considered so surprising.
  • But the real surprise — and disappointment — was that this was considered so surprising.
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  • Unfortunately, Dr. Kane’s study arrives alongside a troubling new reality. His project was made possible by funding from the National Institute of Mental Health before it implemented a controversial requirement: Since 2014, in order to receive the institute’s support, clinical researchers must explicitly focus on a target such as a biomarker or neural circuit. It is hard to imagine how Dr. Kane’s study (or one like it) would get funding today, since it does not do this. In fact, psychiatry at present has yet to adequately identify any specific biomarkers or circuits for its major illnesses.
  • Unfortunately, Dr. Kane’s study arrives alongside a troubling new reality. His project was made possible by funding from the National Institute of Mental Health before it implemented a controversial requirement: Since 2014, in order to receive the institute’s support, clinical researchers must explicitly focus on a target such as a biomarker or neural circuit. It is hard to imagine how Dr. Kane’s study (or one like it) would get funding today, since it does not do this. In fact, psychiatry at present has yet to adequately identify any specific biomarkers or circuits for its major illnesses.
markfrankel18

And the Word of the Year Is... Selfie! : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Hold on to your monocles, friends—the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is “selfie.” It’s an informal noun (plural: selfies) defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” It was first used in 2002, in an Australian online forum (compare the Australian diminutives “barbie” for barbecue and “firie” for firefighter), and it first appeared as a hashtag, #selfie, on Flickr, in 2004.
  • The word “selfie” is not yet in the O.E.D., but it is currently being considered for future inclusion; whether the word makes it into the history books is truly for the teens to decide. As Ben Zimmer wrote at Language Log, “Youth slang is the obvious source for much of our lexical innovation, like it or not.” And despite its cloying tone, that Oxford Dictionaries blog post from August does allude to the increasingly important distinction between “acronym“ and “initialism”—either of which may describe the expression “LOL,” depending if you pronounce it “lawl” or “ell-oh-ell.” The kids are going to be all right. Not “alright.” But all right.
Lawrence Hrubes

How Social Media Is Changing Organ Donation : The New Yorker - 0 views

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    "How do we keep organ distribution from morphing into a popularity contest, where those with the most sympathetic stories win, or are allowed to change the rules? "
markfrankel18

How to Fake Your Next Vacation - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Yes, and no. “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media,” Ms. van der Born told Dutch journalists. “We create an online world which reality can no longer meet.” The ultimate goal was to “prove how easy it is to distort reality,” she said. “Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.”
Lawrence Hrubes

ConflictMap.org - 0 views

  • What's ConflictMap? This site aims to help shed light on wars and other armed conflicts around the globe. It contains summary information, links to more resources, and, most importantly, continuously updated lists of relevant news articles. We hope to make it easier to learn where wars are happening, who's involved, and what's going on right now, especially for smaller conflicts that may not be well covered in large media outlets. For those with a specific interest in conflicts, we hope to make it easier to follow the large volume of news in this field.
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