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Clive Thompson on Memory Engineering | Magazine - 0 views

www.wired.com/...st_thompson_memoryengineeriing memory engineering digital data social media
shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • a new trend I call memory engineering — the process of fashioning our inchoate digital pasts into useful memories.
  • Many of us generate massive amounts of personal data every day — phonecam pictures, text messages, status updates, and so on. By default, all of us are becoming lifeloggers. But we almost never go back and look at this stuff, because it’s too hard to parse.
  • Memory engineers are solving that problem by creating services that reformat that data in witty, often artistic ways.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Lifeloggers have long touted the “total recall” that’s achievable if you obsessively store and organize personal records: Never forget a thing! But Wegener has found that less can be more. When you show someone their year-old check-ins and nothing else, it’s a very crude signal — just a bunch of points on a map. But our brains seize these cues and fill in the details
  • these techniques can also work with “semantic” memories of facts and info. Last winter, Amazon released a clever app called Daily Review, which takes your Kindle clippings and redisplays them for you weeks or months later — timed on a schedule that’s designed to help you absorb your reading more deeply into your brain
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Opinion | 24 Hours Without My Phone - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...technology-shut-off.html phone Technology social media
shared by sanderk on 13 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Eventually, Shlain, a filmmaker, extended the idea into a full day without screen use. She called it a tech shabbat — after the Jewish day of rest — and she has written several articles and a recent book, called “24/6,” about the idea.
  • “The digital revolution has blurred the lines between time on and time off, and time off is disappearing,” she wrote in The Boston Globe. “As for our leisure time, we’ve created a culture in which we’re still ‘working’ while we play: needing to photograph every moment, then crafting witty posts of our ‘fun, relaxing activities’ on Instagram, then obsessively checking responses. We can barely catch our breath in the tsunami of personal and work digital input, which results in us not being truly present for any of it.”
  • The break did require some adjustments. On Friday night, we printed out directions to a restaurant where we were eating on Saturday, but we forgot to print directions home and had to use an old-fashioned road map. Imagine that.
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  • We’re not quite ready to sign up for a tech shabbat every weekend, given various obligations. But we are ready to do it again soon, and it served as a good reminder that putting away phones for even short stretches of time is an excellent idea.
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You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/ion-to-be-a-smartphone-skeptic smartphone weaponisation tech psychology manipulation internet social media education
shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?
  • One camp says yes, the kids are fine
  • complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.
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  • No, says the other camp, led by Jonathan Haidt; the kids are not all right, their devices are partly to blame, and here are the studies showing why.
  • we should not wait for the replication crisis in the social sciences to resolve itself before we consider the question of whether the naysayers are on to something. And normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to make us at least wary of smartphones.
  • These powerful instruments represent a technological advance on par with that of the power loom or the automobile
  • The achievement can be difficult to properly appreciate because instead of exerting power over physical processes and raw materials, they operate on social processes and the human psyche: They are designed to maximize attention, to make it as difficult as possible to look away.
  • they have transformed the qualitative experience of existing in the world. They give a person’s sociality the appearance and feeling of a theoretically endless open network, while in reality, algorithms quietly sort users into ideological, aesthetic, memetic cattle chutes of content.
  • Importantly, the process by which smartphones change us requires no agency or judgment on the part of a teen user, and yet that process is designed to provide what feels like a perfectly natural, inevitable, and complete experience of the world.
  • Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave
  • One reason commonly offered for maintaining our socio-technological status quo is that nothing really has changed with the advent of the internet, of Instagram, of Tiktok and Youtube and 4Chan
  • It is instead a complete shadow world of endless images; disembodied, manipulable personas; and the ever-present gaze of others. It lives in your pocket and in your mind.
  • The price you pay for its availability—and the engine of its functioning—is that you are always available to it, as well. Unless you have a strength of will that eludes most adults, its emissaries can find you at any hour and in any place to issue your summons to the grim pleasure palace.
  • the self-restraint and self-discipline required to use a smartphone well—that is, to treat it purely as an occasional tool rather than as a totalizing way of life—are unreasonable things to demand of teenagers
  • these are unreasonable things to demand of me, a fully adult woman
  • To enjoy the conveniences that a smartphone offers, I must struggle against the lure of the permanent scroll, the notification, the urge to fix my eyes on the circle of light and keep them fixed. I must resist the default pseudo-activity the smartphone always calls its user back to, if I want to have any hope of filling the moments of my day with the real activity I believe is actually valuable.
  • for a child or teen still learning the rudiments of self-control, still learning what is valuable and fulfilling, still learning how to prioritize what is good over the impulse of the moment, it is an absurd bar to be asked to clear
  • The expectation that children and adolescents will navigate new technologies with fully formed and muscular capacities for reason and responsibility often seems to go along with a larger abdication of responsibility on the part of the adults involved.
  • adults have frequently given in to a Faustian temptation: offering up their children’s generation to be used as guinea pigs in a mass longitudinal study in exchange for a bit more room to breathe in their own undeniably difficult roles as educators, caretakers, and parents.
  • It is not a particular activity that you start and stop and resume, and it is not a social scene that you might abandon when it suits you.
  • And this we must do without waiting for social science to hand us a comprehensive mandate it is fundamentally unable to provide; without cowering in panic over moral panics
  • The pre-internet advertising world was vicious, to be sure, but when the “pre-” came off, its vices were moved into a compound interest account. In the world of online advertising, at any moment, in any place, a user engaged in an infinite scroll might be presented with native content about how one Instagram model learned to accept her chunky (size 4) thighs, while in the next clip, another model relates how a local dermatologist saved her from becoming an unlovable crone at the age of 25
  • developing pathological interests and capacities used to take a lot more work than it does now
  • You had to seek it out, as you once had to seek out pornography and look someone in the eye while paying for it. You were not funneled into it by an omnipresent stream of algorithmically curated content—the ambience of digital life, so easily mistaken by the person experiencing it as fundamentally similar to the non-purposive ambience of the natural world.
  • And when interpersonal relations between teens become sour, nasty, or abusive, as they often do and always have, the unbalancing effects of transposing social life to the internet become quite clear
  • For both young men and young women, the pornographic scenario—dominance and degradation, exposure and monetization—creates an experiential framework for desires that they are barely experienced enough to understand.
  • This is not a world I want to live in. I think it hurts everyone; but I especially think it hurts those young enough to receive it as a natural state of affairs rather than as a profound innovation.
  • so I am baffled by the most routine objection to any blaming of smartphones for our society-wide implosion of teenagers’ mental health,
  • In short, and inevitably, today’s teenagers are suffering from capitalism—specifically “late capitalism,
  • what shocks me about this rhetorical approach is the rush to play defense for Apple and its peers, the impulse to wield the abstract concept of capitalism as a shield for actually existing, extremely powerful, demonstrably ruthless capitalist actors.
  • This motley alliance of left-coded theory about the evils of business and right-coded praxis in defense of a particular evil business can be explained, I think, by a deeper desire than overthrowing capitalism. It is the desire not to be a prude or hysteric of bumpkin
  • No one wants to come down on the side of tamping off pleasures and suppressing teen activity.
  • No one wants to be the shrill or leaden antagonist of a thousand beloved movies, inciting moral panics, scheming about how to stop the youths from dancing on Sunday.
  • But commercial pioneers are only just beginning to explore new frontiers in the profit-driven, smartphone-enabled weaponization of our own pleasures against us
  • To limit your moral imagination to the archetypes of the fun-loving rebel versus the stodgy enforcers in response to this emerging reality is to choose to navigate it with blinders on, to be a useful idiot for the robber barons of online life rather than a challenger to the corrupt order they maintain.
  • The very basic question that needs to be asked with every product rollout and implementation is what technologies enable a good human life?
  • this question is not, ultimately, the province of social scientists, notwithstanding how useful their work may be on the narrower questions involved. It is the free privilege, it is the heavy burden, for all of us, to think—to deliberate and make judgments about human good, about what kind of world we want to live in, and to take action according to that thought.
  • I am not sure how to build a world in which childrens and adolescents, at least, do not feel they need to live their whole lives online.
  • whatever particular solutions emerge from our negotiations with each other and our reckonings with the force of cultural momentum, they will remain unavailable until we give ourselves permission to set the terms of our common life.
  • But the environments in which humans find themselves vary significantly, and in ways that have equally significant downstream effects on the particular expression of human nature in that context.
  • most of all, without affording Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk the defensive allegiance we should reserve for each other.
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The 'E-Pimps' of OnlyFans - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-pimps-onlyfans.html social media psychology sex exploitation commercial business model technology
shared by Javier E on 17 May 22 - No Cached
  • Over the course of two dozen interviews spanning six countries, I’ve discovered a thriving warren of companies employing a similar business model, using ghostwriters on OnlyFans to provide digital intimacy at scale. These agencies operate, out of necessity, a little below the radar. They collectively represent hundreds of models, and some claim to bring in profits that can range into the seven figures annually.
  • OnlyFans started in 2016, and has since emerged as the top platform worldwide for creators to sell monthly subscriptions for self-produced erotic content. The platform has become synonymous with this sort of business, though some use it for other purposes.
  • The real product is relationships. Money from subscriptions can be trivial compared with the profits earned by selling custom videos, sexting sessions and other forms of fan interaction that require more concerted engagement than simply posting to a feed.
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  • Above all, the manual emphasized efficiency. Managers were told to answer DMs in less than five minutes, since users were coming to OnlyFans for immediate gratification and would go elsewhere if ignored. It encouraged the creation of keyboard shortcuts, so that managers could deploy an arsenal of rote sexual phrases with a few keystrokes, steering conversations toward the hard sell. It also outlined a series of strategies to boost engagement on the pages, including a gambit in which models would offer to rate a picture of a subscriber’s penis for a fee.
  • “Every page needs to have an established back story to make the person seem more believable,” it stated. OnlyFans works because people pay for a connection that feels deeper than porn. The document encouraged Ekko’s employees, called page managers, to identify “big spenders” who would part ways with more than $200 in short order, and cultivate a deep rapport by asking about their life and what they do for a living.
  • This can be extremely time-consuming: In an interview with this magazine last year, an OnlyFans creator said she spends six hours a day just sexting with subscribers. But these relationships are important to cultivate. In a blog post on its website, OnlyFans encourages creators to cater to their “superfans,” who pay for custom content and will “give more if they feel they’re getting something special.”
  • But all of them take advantage of the same raw materials: the endless reproducibility of digital images; the widespread global availability of cheap English-speaking labor; and the world’s unquenchable desire for companionship.
  • The key to this business model is the ready availability of cheap English-speaking labor around the globe. Job postings for OnlyFans chatters are widespread on freelance sites like Upwork, many offering as little as $3 an hour. Agency heads told me they’ve hired workers from Eastern Europe, Africa and all across Southeast Asia. “At the end of the day, it is a geo-arbitrage business,”
  • This phenomenon is part of a broader boom in homespun online businesses that connect cheap developing-world labor with American consumers, allowing the proprietor to step back and reap the profits
  • During his stint as a chatter, Andre has become intimately familiar with the quirks and desires of the subscribers. Over time, he’s learned something of a sex-work cliché: More than sexual gratification, he said, many of the guys just want someone to talk to
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When Was America Greatest? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...when-was-america-greatest.html new york times politics memory bias greatness patriotism research
shared by kushnerha on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The slogan evokes a time when America was stronger and more prosperous. But Mr. Trump doesn’t specify whether he’s expressing nostalgia for the 1950s — or 10 years ago. That vagueness is reflected by his voters, according to the results of a new survey, conducted online by the digital media and polling company Morning Consult.
  • Trump supporters offered a wide range of answers, with no distinct pattern. The most popular choice was the year 2000. But 1955, 1960, 1970 and 1985 were also popular. More than 2 percent of Trump’s supporters picked 2015, when Mr. Trump’s campaign began.
  • Political science research suggests that Americans’ optimism can be influenced by whether their political party is in the White House. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Democrats feel better than Republicans about current circumstances.
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  • In March, Pew asked people whether life was better for people like them 50 years ago — and a majority of Republicans answered yes. Trump supporters were the most emphatic, with 75 percent saying things were better in the mid-1960s.Democrats, though, were less enthusiastic about the past. Forty-eight percent said life was better now than it was 50 years ago, while 17 percent of Democrats said it was the same, and only 28 percent said it was worse.
  • In the Morning Consult survey, 44 percent of people over all said America’s greatest years were ahead of it, while 36 percent said those years had already passed. But in an election when America’s past greatness has played such a starring role, we wanted to see more details about just how voters saw the past and the future.
  • So, when was the greatest year?Over all, 2000 was the most popular choice, a preference that cut across political party, candidate preference, gender and age. The year’s popularity may partly reflect people’s fondness for round numbers. But many voters explained their choice by referring to a greater sense of security. The Sept. 11 attacks occurred the following year. (An election year also has something for all partisans to grab onto. Bill Clinton was president that year, but George W. Bush won the election to replace him.)
  • Some people, of course, reached farther back into history. The year the Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776, got a few votes. One person chose 1789, the year the Constitution took effect. One person chose 1800. One chose 1860, the year Southern states began to secede from the Union. But most answers were of a more recent vintage.
  • partisan patterns in views of America’s greatness. Republicans, over all, recall the late 1950s and the mid-1980s most fondly. Sample explanations: “Reagan.” “Economy was booming.” “No wars!” “Life was simpler.” “Strong family values.” The distribution of Trump supporters’ greatest years is somewhat similar to the Republican trend, but more widely dispersed over the last 70 years.
  • Democrats seem to think America’s greatest days were more recent; they were more likely to pick a year in the 1990s, or since 2000. After 2000, their second-most-popular answer was 2016. Sample explanations: “We’re getting better.” “Improving social justice.” “Technology.” Even 2008, a year of financial collapse, was pretty popular, perhaps because President Obama was also elected that year.
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Digital Life: Breaking urge to use smartphone while driving - 0 views

diigo.com/07orzg social media technology danger
shared by maddieireland334 on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 05 Jun 15
     
    You've likely seen some of the headlines about AT&T's most recent survey about smartphones and driving. Frankly, they're frightening: 40 percent of smartphone users admit to tapping into social media while driving; nearly 30 percent say they go web surfing while in the driver's seat; and more than 60 percent of us confess that we text and drive.
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Mark Zuckerberg, Let Me Pay for Facebook - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-let-me-pay-for-facebook.html social media micropayments ad-financed business model privacy facebook
shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • 93 percent of the public believes that “being in control of who can get information about them is important,” and yet the amount of information we generate online has exploded and we seldom know where it all goes.
  • the pop-up and the ad-financed business model. The former is annoying but it’s the latter that is helping destroy the fabric of a rich, pluralistic Internet.
  • Facebook makes about 20 cents per user per month in profit. This is a pitiful sum, especially since the average user spends an impressive 20 hours on Facebook every month, according to the company. This paltry profit margin drives the business model: Internet ads are basically worthless unless they are hyper-targeted based on tracking and extensive profiling of users. This is a bad bargain, especially since two-thirds of American adults don’t want ads that target them based on that tracking and analysis of personal behavior.
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  • This way of doing business rewards huge Internet platforms, since ads that are worth so little can support only companies with hundreds of millions of users.
  • Ad-based businesses distort our online interactions. People flock to Internet platforms because they help us connect with one another or the world’s bounty of information — a crucial, valuable function. Yet ad-based financing means that the companies have an interest in manipulating our attention on behalf of advertisers, instead of letting us connect as we wish.
  • Many users think their feed shows everything that their friends post. It doesn’t. Facebook runs its billion-plus users’ newsfeed by a proprietary, ever-changing algorithm that decides what we see. If Facebook didn’t have to control the feed to keep us on the site longer and to inject ads into our stream, it could instead offer us control over this algorithm.
  • we’re not starting from scratch. Micropayment systems that would allow users to spend a few cents here and there, not be so easily tracked by all the Big Brothers, and even allow personalization were developed in the early days of the Internet. Big banks and large Internet platforms didn’t show much interest in this micropayment path, which would limit their surveillance abilities. We can revive it.
  • What to do? It’s simple: Internet sites should allow their users to be the customers. I would, as I bet many others would, happily pay more than 20 cents per month for a Facebook or a Google that did not track me, upgraded its encryption and treated me as a customer whose preferences and privacy matter.
  • Many people say that no significant number of users will ever pay directly for Internet services. But that is because we are misled by the mantra that these services are free. With growing awareness of the privacy cost of ads, this may well change. Millions of people pay for Netflix despite the fact that pirated copies of many movies are available free. We eventually pay for ads, anyway, as that cost is baked into products we purchase
  • A seamless, secure micropayment system that spreads a few pennies at a time as we browse a social network, up to a preset monthly limit, would alter the whole landscape for the better.
  • Many nonprofits and civic groups that were initially thrilled about their success in using Facebook to reach people are now despondent as their entries are less and less likely to reach people who “liked” their posts unless they pay Facebook to help boost their updates.
  • If even a quarter of Facebook’s 1.5 billion users were willing to pay $1 per month in return for not being tracked or targeted based on their data, that would yield more than $4 billion per year — surely a number worth considering.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg has reportedly spent more than $30 million to buy the homes around his in Palo Alto, Calif., and more than $100 million for a secluded parcel of land in Hawaii. He knows privacy is worth paying for. So he should let us pay a few dollars to protect ours.
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Grubwithus Organizes Dinners - Social, Minus Media - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...05ping.html social media friendship digital
shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • My newfound friends came courtesy of a Chicago start-up business called Grubwithus, an online service with the seemingly modest aim of bringing strangers together to have a meal. The concept is simple enough: People browse through a list of dinners in their cities and buy tickets, usually for around $25. Before the event, they can share a few online tidbits about themselves with their dining partners
  • It is using contemporary techniques to foster a kind of social networking that predates the dawn of services like Facebook and Twitter: old-fashioned conversation among casual acquaintances, without keyboards and screens.
  • a new generation of services that rely on the ubiquity of social networking to prompt contact that the Web calls IRL, or “in real life,” sometimes known as the real world.
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  • “Friendship networks dwindle as you get older, so this is an easy and nonawkward way to meet new people,” said Sen Sugano, the development director of Grubwithus. “You have your circle of friends, of course, and the people you work with, but expanding beyond that can be hard.”
  • Sonar, for example, is a new mobile application that combs a user’s connections on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and alerts them if they have any friends in the vicinity.
  • the company wants to leverage the dozens, or even hundreds, of connections that many people have already made online and see if they can use those to form new, meaningful friendships.
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The Narrative Frays for Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...anos-and-elizabeth-holmes.html science research narrative confirmation bias method entrepreneur medicine startup
shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Few people, let alone those just 31 years old, have amassed the accolades and riches bestowed on Elizabeth Holmes, founder and chief executive of the blood-testing start-up Theranos.
  • This year President Obama named her a United States ambassador for global entrepreneurship. She gave the commencement address at Pepperdine University. She was the youngest person ever to be awarded the Horatio Alger Award in recognition of “remarkable achievements accomplished through honesty, hard work, self-reliance and perseverance over adversity.” She is on the Board of Fellows of Harvard Medical School.
  • Time named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World this year. She was the subject of lengthy profiles in The New Yorker and Fortune. Over the last week, she appeared on the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Glamour anointed her one of its eight Women of the Year. She has been on “Charlie Rose,” as well as on stage at the Clinton Global Initiative, the World Economic Forum at Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival, among numerous other conferences.
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  • Theranos, which she started after dropping out of Stanford at age 19, has raised more than $400 million in venture capital and has been valued at $9 billion, which makes Ms. Holmes’s 50 percent stake worth $4.5 billion. Forbes put her on the cover of its Forbes 400 issue, ranking her No. 121 on the list of wealthiest Americans.
  • Thanks to an investigative article in The Wall Street Journal this month by John Carreyrou, one of the company’s central claims, and the one most exciting to many investors and doctors, is being called into question. Theranos has acknowledged it was only running a limited number of tests on a microsample of blood using its finger-prick technology. Since then, it said it had stopped using its proprietary methods on all but one relatively simple test for herpes.
  • “The constant was that nobody had any idea how this works or even if it works,” Mr. Loria told me this week. “People in medicine couldn’t understand why the media and technology worlds were so in thrall to her.
  • that so many eminent authorities — from Henry Kissinger, who had served on the company’s board; to prominent investors like the Oracle founder Larry Ellison; to the Cleveland Clinic — appear to have embraced Theranos with minimal scrutiny is a testament to the ageless power of a great story.
  • Ms. Holmes seems to have perfectly executed the current Silicon Valley playbook: Drop out of a prestigious college to pursue an entrepreneurial vision; adopt an iconic uniform; embrace an extreme diet; and champion a humanitarian mission, preferably one that can be summed up in one catchy phrase.
  • She stays relentlessly on message, as a review of her numerous conference and TV appearances make clear, while at the same time saying little of scientific substance.
  • The natural human tendency to fit complex facts into a simple, compelling narrative has grown stronger in the digital age of 24/7 news and social media,
  • “We’re deluged with information even as pressure has grown to make snap decisions,”
  • “People see a TED talk. They hear this amazing story of a 30-something-year-old woman with a wonder procedure. They see the Cleveland Clinic is on board. A switch goes off and they make an instant decision that everything is fine. You see this over and over: Really smart and wealthy people start to believe completely implausible things with 100 percent certainty.”
  • Ms. Holmes’s story also fits into a broader narrative underway in medicine, in which new health care entrepreneurs are upending ossified hospital practices with the goal of delivering more effective and patient-oriented care.
  • as a medical technology company, Theranos has bumped up against something else: the scientific method, which puts a premium on verification over narrative.
  • “You have to subject yourself to peer review. You can’t just go in a stealthy mode and then announce one day that you’ve got technology that’s going to disrupt the world.”
  • Professor Yeo said that he and his colleagues wanted to see data and testing in independent labs. “We have a small army of people ready and willing to test Theranos’s products if they’d ask us,” he said. “And that can be done without revealing any trade secrets.”
  • “Every other company in this field has gone through peer review,” said Mr. Cherny of Evercore. “Why hold back so much of the platform if your goal is the greater good of humanity?”
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Opinion | Trump May Start a Social Network. Here's My Advice. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-social-network.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Trump May Start a Social Network. Here’s My Advice.
  • Recast your past failures as successes, engage in meaningless optics, and other tips from the Silicon Valley playbook.
  • So Donald Trump wants to start a social network and become a tech mogul?
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  • I am an expert in all things digital, and I’m willing to help.
  • Tech is hard stuff, and new ventures should be attempted with extreme care, especially by those whose history of entrepreneurship is littered with the carcasses of, say, Trump Steaks.
  • Or Trump Water. Or Trump University. Or Trump magazine. Or Trump Casinos. Or Trump Mortgages. Or Trump Airlines. Or Trump Vodka. Or the Trump pandemic response. Or, of course, the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.
  • So, Mr. Trump, here’s my advice.
  • I advise you to embrace your myriad failures as if they’re your best friends.
  • Even if “fail” and “don’t work” are the same thing, in tech these are seen as a badge of honor rather than as a sign that you are terrible at executing a business plan and engage in only meaningless optics.
  • Engage in meaningless optics.
  • uckily, this fits right in your wheelhouse — a talent that you have displayed in spades since the beginnings of your career.
  • “genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” I might rephrase that for your entry into tech by saying, genius is 1 percent instigation and 99 percent perfidy.
  • Instigation and perfidy, in fact, make the perfect formula for a modern-day social network, so you are already well on your way, given your skill set.
  • Baseless conspiracies? Check
  • Crazy ALL-CAP declarations designed to foment anger? Check.
  • Incessant lies? Check.
  • Self-aggrandizing though badly spelled streams that actually reveal a profound lack of self-esteem? Check.
  • Link-baiting hateful memes? Double check.
  • Inciting violence over election fraud with both explicit and cryptic messages to your base, in order to get them to think they should attack the Capitol, like, for real? Checkmate
  • hate-tweet at you, and, of course, all the fake media
  • You didn’t start the fire — well, maybe you did — but you definitely need to keep stoking it.
  • A social network requires a lot of it, including servers, apps and content moderation tools. You’ll need a whole army of geeks whom you’ll have to pay real money.
  • As for your future competitors … Twitter has seen its shares rise sharply since it tossed you off for life.
  • You still might get a reprieve over at Facebook, where an oversight board is contemplating your fate. We’ll see what the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, decides after the board makes a ruling.
  • Keep in mind, Mr. Zuckerberg really is the most powerful man in the world; that was even the case when you were in the Oval Office.
  • And while he once bear-hugged your administration, he is now sidling up to President Biden.
  • Avoid MeinSpace and InstaGraft, for obvious reasons. The narcissist in you might go for The_Donald, which you might now be able to use, since Reddit banned the 800,000-member forum with that name for violating its rules against harassment, hate speech, content manipulation and more.
  • (Sounds like just the kind of folks you like and who like you.)
  • Trumpets are brash and loud, and they’re often badly played and tinny. Right on brand, I’d say.
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Children's Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers - T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-kids-tech-use.html psychology research social media technology education bias brain science new york times pandemic
shared by adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • overlooked the vastly increasing time that his son was spending on video games and social media
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Very important and notable to all of our lives
  • calling his phone his “whole life.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      This seems extreme and unreasonable, but technology is very important to our generation.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m not losing my son to this.”
  • are watching their children slide down an increasingly slippery path into an all-consuming digital life.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Very important note because some want this all-virtual to be a future but forget the toll it takes on us as humans.
  • There
  • “There will be a period of epic withdrawal,”
  • that children’s brains, well through adolescence, are considered “plastic,” meaning they can adapt and shift to changing circumstances.
  • elling parents not to feel guilty about allowing more screen time, given the stark challenges of lockdowns. Now, she said, she’d have given different advice if she had known how long children would end up stuck at home.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think that her advice was good for the beginning of quarantine because anything to allow our brains to be stimulated during that period helped.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think that her advice was good for the beginning of quarantine because anything to allow our brains to be stimulated during that period helped.
  • I probably would have encouraged families to turn off Wi-Fi except during school hours so kids don’t feel tempted every moment, night and day,”
  • nine months of 2020, an increase of 82 percent over the year before.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I wonder how this effects younger kids mental progression
  • In the United States, for instance, children spent, on average, 97
  • minutes a day on YouTube in March and April, up from 57 minutes in February, and nearly double the use a year prior
  • “The Covid Effect.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Have never heard of "the covid effect" makes perfect sense though.
  • What concerns researchers, at a minimum, is that the use of devices is a poor substitute for activities known to be central to health, social and physical development, including physical play and other interactions that help children learn how to confront challenging social situations.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Similar to TOK and how our brains learn to interact with others
  • Dr. Briasouli said. Some days, she said, she watches her son sit with three devices, alternating play among them.
  • These are the tools of their lives,” he said. “Everything they will do, they will do through one of these electronic devices, socialization included.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Seems to be the clear counter argument
  • “he laughs and has some social interaction with his buddies,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      The social aspect is also very important
  • said he believed that adults and children alike could, with disciplined time away from devices, learn to disconnect. But doing so has become complicated by the fact that the devices now are at once vessels for school, social life, gaming and other activities central to life.
  • Dr. Radesky said that the mingling of all of these functions not only gives children a chance to multitask, it also allows young people to “escape” from any uncomfortable moment they may face.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is so true and I think almost everyone I know does this all the time.
  • Instead, he hangs out online with his old frie
  • I’ve failed you as a father,”
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Children's Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers - T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-kids-tech-use.html science research knowledge brain science social media technology education psychology
shared by kaylynfreeman on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • During the long months of lockdowns and shuttered schools, Mr. Reichert, like many parents, overlooked the vastly increasing time that his son was spending on video games and social media. Now, James, who used to focus his free time on mountain biking and playing basketball, devotes nearly all of his leisure hours — about 40 a week — to Xbox and his phone. During their argument, he pleaded with his father not to restrict access, calling his phone his “whole life.”
  • Nearly a year into the coronavirus pandemic, parents across the country — and the world — are watching their children slide down an increasingly slippery path into an all-consuming digital life. When the outbreak hit, many parents relaxed restrictions on screens as a stopgap way to keep frustrated, restless children entertained and engaged. But, often, remaining limits have vaporized as computers, tablets and phones became the centerpiece of school and social life, and weeks of stay-at-home rules bled into nearly a year.
  • Before the pandemic, James had so many options, she said, adding: Now, “it makes me feel badly when I try to restrict him. It’s his only socialization.”
24More

A Theory About Conspiracy Theories - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ology-conspiracy-theories.html social media conspiracy theories susceptibility knowledge education
shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • More than 1 in 3 Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a weapon, and another third are convinced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated the threat of Covid-19 to undermine President Trump.
  • Another is less so: a more solitary, anxious figure, moody and detached, perhaps including many who are older and living alone.
  • all conspiring to use Covid-19 for their own dark purposes.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Taking advantage of a very realistic fear and making it much more dramatic
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Still, psychologists do not have a good handle on the types of people who are prone to buy into Big Lie theories, especially the horror-film versions.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      To an extent, most people are prone to buy into these theories
  • The theories afford some psychological ballast, a sense of control, an internal narrative to make sense of a world that seems senseless.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      People don't like thinking things are random!! They like having some semblance of control!!
  • “With all changes happening in politics, the polarization and lack of respect, conspiracy theories are playing a bigger role in people’s thinking and behavior possibly than ever,”
  • Conspiracy theories are as old as human society, of course, and in the days when communities were small and vulnerable, being on guard for hidden plots was likely a matter of personal survival,
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Believing conspiracy theories could have been important to survival at one point in time
  • More than 1 in 3 Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a weapon, and another third are convinced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated the threat of Covid-19 to undermine President Trump.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Conspiracy theories affect everyone around us. Constantly.
  • “You really have a perfect storm, in that the theories are directed at those who have fears of getting sick and dying or infecting someone else,”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Theories take advantage of those who already are extremely vulnerable and stressed
  • About 60 percent scored low on the scales, meaning they were resistant to such theories; the other 40 percent ranged above average or higher.
  • For example, qualities like conscientiousness, modesty and altruism were very weakly related to a person’s susceptibility. Levels of anger or sincerity bore no apparent relation; nor did self-esteem.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Are these the results scientists were expecting?
  • The personality features that were solidly linked to conspiracy beliefs included some usual suspects: entitlement, self-centered impulsivity, cold-heartedness (the confident injustice collector), elevated levels of depressive moods and anxiousness (the moody figure, confined by age or circumstance).
  • It’s a pattern of magical thinking that goes well beyond garden variety superstition and usually comes across socially as disjointed, uncanny or “off.”
  • when distracted, people are far more likely to forward headlines and stories without vetting their sources much, if at all.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Distractions can easily be undermined and make people believe conspiracy theories
  • They have a core constituency, and in the digital era its members are going to quickly find one another.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Spread through the internet and social media
11More

Opinion: Budweiser's very smart Super Bowl call - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html cnn opinion
shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • This year's Super Bowl will be full of firsts: the first without a packed stadium; the first requiring players and coaches to follow Covid-19 protocol; and the first broadcast in a long time to go without ads from some of its big, perennial advertisers.
  • That is surprising considering the Super Bowl, which typically draws around 100 million viewers
  • has been frequently rated the most-watched broadcast of th
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Budweiser has also released a 90-second digital ad encouraging people to embrace vaccination.
  • What's even more extraordinary is Anheuser-Busch's decision to scrap its Budweiser Super Bowl ad in favor of supporting the Ad Council and COVID Collaborative's vaccine awareness initiative and donating money to go toward the organizations' future ad campaigns.
  • e year
  • This move by Budweiser is big, and it gives humanitarian organizations like mine hope and optimism.
  • who among the wealthiest corporations will join Budweiser? Which will put a fraction of their profits to push back against urgent and catastrophic events — and potentially save lives?
  • I'll be honest. It is hard for me to have a rosy outlook on companies reporting tens of billions of profits in 2020.
  • I know corporate success helps our economy, rewards innovators and brings job security to middle class workers. But I also know that with investment we can solve hunger. If ordinary American donors can contribute enough to feed a family of five for a month, corporations and those who've done well during the pandemic could do exponentially more.
  • By applying their ad money to public service, Budweiser is not only anticipating a better future -- it is helping make it a reality.
10More

Explained: Social media and the Texas shooter's messages | Explained News,The Indian Ex... - 0 views

indianexpress.com/...exas-shooters-messages-7942576
shared by criscimagnael on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • Could technology companies have monitored ominous messages made by a gunman who Texas authorities say massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school? Could they have warned the authorities? Answers to these questions remain unclear
  • But if nothing else, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, seems highly likely to focus additional attention on how social platforms monitor what users are saying to and showing each other.
  • Shortly thereafter, Facebook stepped in to note that the gunman sent one-to-one direct messages, not public posts, and that they weren’t discovered until “after the terrible tragedy”.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Some reports appear to show that at least some of the gunman’s communications used Apple’s encrypted iPhone messaging services, which makes messages almost impossible for anyone else to read when sent to another iPhone user.
  • Facebook parent company Meta, which also owns Instagram, says it is working with law enforcement but declined to provide details.
  • A series of posts appeared on his Instagram in the days leading up to the shooting, including photos of a gun magazine in hand and two AR-style semi-automatic rifles. An Instagram user who was tagged in one post shared parts of what appears to be a chilling exchange on Instagram with Ramos, asking her to share his gun pictures with her more than 10,000 followers.
  • Meta has said it monitors people’s private messages for some kinds of harmful content, such as links to malware or images of child sexual exploitation. But copied images can be detected using unique identifiers — a kind of digital signature — which makes them relatively easy for computer systems to flag. Trying to interpret a string of threatening words — which can resemble a joke, satire or song lyrics — is a far more difficult task for artificial intelligence systems.
  • Facebook could, for instance, flag certain phrases such as “going to kill” or “going to shoot”, but without context — something AI in general has a lot of trouble with — there would be too many false positives for the company to analyze.
  • A recent Meta-commissioned report emphasized the benefits of such privacy but also noted some risks — including users who could abuse the encryption to sexually exploit children, facilitate human trafficking and spread hate speech.
  • Security experts say this could be done if Apple were to engineer a “backdoor” to allow access to messages sent by alleged criminals. Such a secret key would let them decipher encrypted information with a court order.
4More

Molly Russell died while suffering from effects of online content, coroner says | Inter... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...f-online-content-rules-coroner social media suicide safety children
shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Molly viewed more than 16,000 pieces of content on Instagram in the final six months of her life, of which 2,100 were related to suicide, self-harm and depression. The inquest also heard how she had compiled a digital pinboard on Pinterest with 469 images related to similar subjects.
  • Elizabeth Lagone, the head of health and wellbeing policy at Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, apologised and admitted Molly had viewed posts that violated its content policies.
  • A senior Pinterest executive also apologised for the platform showing inappropriate content and acknowledged that the platform was not safe at the time Molly was on it.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The inquest heard evidence from a child psychiatrist, Dr Navin Venugopal, who said Molly had been “placed at risk” by the content she had viewed. The headteacher at Molly’s secondary school also gave evidence, describing how it was “almost impossible” to keep track of the risks posed to pupils by social media.
12More

Does a Protest's Size Matter? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...es-a-protests-size-matter.html new york times social media psychology
shared by sissij on 29 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The Women’s March on Saturday, which took place in cities and towns all across the United States (and around the world), may well have been the largest protest in American history. There were an estimated 3.5 million participants.
  • After studying protests over the last two decades, I have to deliver some bad news: In the digital age, the size of a protest is no longer a reliable indicator of a movement’s strength.
  • A protest does not have power just because many people get together in one place. Rather, a protest has power insofar as it signals the underlying capacity of the forces it represents.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Protesters are saying, in effect, “If we can pull this off, imagine what else we can do.”
  • The march drew a quarter of a million people, but it represented much more effort, commitment and preparation than would a protest of similar size today.
  • This is one reason that recent large protests have had less effect on policy than many were led to expect.
  • The protesters failed to transform into an electoral force capable of defeating him in the 2004 election.
  • Two enormous protests, two disappointing results. Similar sequences of events have played out in other parts of the world.
  • A large protest today is less like the March on Washington in 1963 and more like Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus. What used to be an endpoint is now an initial spark.
  • But the Tea Party protesters then got to work on a ferociously focused agenda: identifying and supporting primary candidates to challenge Republicans who did not agree with their demands, keeping close tabs on legislation and pressuring politicians who deviated from a Tea Party platform.
  • But there is no magic power to marching in the streets that, on its own, leads to any other kind of result.
  • sissij on 29 Jan 17
     
    This article explains how protest work. I have always been thinking that protests are all about the number of people we can gather. The larger the population, the more powerful the protests are. However, I have never looked deep into the mechanism behind protests. I really like the analogy made in the article. The main purpose of a protest should be showing the potential strength the public have over the issues. If we don't do anything after the gathering, then the protest won't be power enough to influence the policy of the government because the government will know that we are actually not that firm on our position. The analogy I come up with is that our attendance can't reflect how much we learn in school. Attending the school doesn't ensure that we are taking away knowledge from school. Merely attending a protest doesn't mean we can put pressure on the government. --Sissi (1/29/2017)
9More

Why Tech Support Is (Purposely) Unbearable - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-is-purposely-unbearable.html tech tech support psychology
shared by Javier E on 04 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • “Don’t think companies haven’t studied how far they can take things in providing the minimal level of service,” Mr. Robbins said. “Some organizations have even monetized it by intentionally engineering it so you have to wait an hour at least to speak to someone in support, and while you are on hold, you’re hearing messages like, ‘If you’d like premium support, call this number and for a fee, we will get to you immediately.’”
  • The most egregious offenders are companies like cable and mobile service providers, which typically have little competition and whose customers are bound by contracts or would be considerably inconvenienced if they canceled their service.
  • When things don’t make sense and feel out of control, mental health experts say, humans instinctively feel threatened. Though you would like to think you can employ reason in this situation, you’re really just a mass of neural impulses and primal reactions. Think fight or flight, but you can’t do either because you are stuck on the phone, which provokes rage.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Mr. Valenti, like several other tech support workers who have posted confessions online, said rudeness generally gets customers placed on hold for long periods or “accidentally” disconnected. It also may result in the agent fixing the immediate problem but not the root cause.
  • Don’t bother demanding to speak to a supervisor, either. You’re just going to get transferred to another agent who has been alerted ahead of time that you have come unhinged,
  • Customer support experts recommended using social media, like tweeting or sending a Facebook message, to contact a company instead of calling.
  • To get better service by phone, dial the prompt designated for “sales” or “to place an order,” which almost always gets you an onshore agent, while tech support is usually offshore with the associated language difficulties.
  • You can also consult websites like DialAHuman.com and GetHuman.com for phone numbers and directions on what digits to press to bypass the automated system and get a live person.
  • Failing that, apps like Lucy Phone and Fast Customer will wait on hold for you and call you when an actual person picks up. No need to stoke your rage listening to grating hold music.
4More

Instagram introduces two-factor authentication | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ect-accounts-password-phishing the guardian technology social media bias
shared by sissij on 25 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Instagram has become the latest social network to enable two-factor authentication, a valuable security feature that protects accounts from being compromised due to password reuse or phishing.
  • Instagram joins Facebook, Twitter, Google and many others in offering some form of two-factor verification.
  • Confusingly for users, all the methods are slightly different: Twitter requires logging in to be approved by opening the app on a trusted device, and Google uses an open standard to link up with its authenticator app, which generates new six-digit codes every 30 seconds.
  • sissij on 25 Mar 17
     
    Internet security has been a big problem since the development of internet technology. There are a lot of worries especially on the safety of the account. People put more and more things online and security risk become an issue. For example, there are a lot of pay online apps that enable you to pay without using actually money, just charging automatically from your bank account. Although it is very convenient to have everything online, it is very unstable and risky at the same time. --Sissi (3/25/2017)
4More

The Sweet Caress of Cyberspace - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...weet-caress-of-cyberspace.html futuristic mechanistic cyberspace psychology social media
shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • “Her” imagines a society in which human beings are so thoroughly marginalized that they’re being edited out of courtship and companionship, because they’re superfluous, messy. It’s a love story as horror story. If we no longer need anyone in the passenger seat, do we need anyone at all?
  • It’s a parable of narcissism in the digital world, which lets you sprint to the foreground of everything, giving you an audience or the illusion of one.
  • But “Her” also traces the flip side of the coin — that with our amassed knowledge and scientific accomplishments, we may be succeeding in rendering ourselves obsolete.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I savored a few themes in particular. One is the Internet’s extreme indulgence of the seemingly innate human impulse to contrive a habitat that’s entirely unthreatening, an ego-stroking ecosystem, a sensibility-controlled comfort zone.
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