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Javier E

Who You Are on Facebook Is Probably Pretty Much Who You Are - Megan Garber - Technology... - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...251318

social media personality attributes research results

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • , Dr. Sam Gosling and his colleagues first asked participants to complete the Ten Item Personality Inventory, which asked them to assess the extent to which factors like extroversion, anxiety, and calmness applied to them. The researchers used the results of those surveys to assess the participants according to the big five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. They then compared those findings to the information represented in participants' Facebook profiles
  • What the researchers found was a big correlation between the personalities represented on Facebook and the personalities suggested by the test. The extroverts had more Facebook friends than the introverts; those who were open to new people and experiences in the physical world replicated that tendency in the digital. "The study determined that online social networks are not an escape from reality," RWW's Alicia Eler put it, "but rather a microcosm of peoples' larger social worlds and an extension of offline behaviors."
summertyler

Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...riving-us-apart-after-all.html

technology research sociology social media

shared by summertyler on 07 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • raised a camera atop a 16-foot tripod to film down into Bryant Park
  • They hit record, then milled about nearby pretending they had nothing to do with the rig, as it semi-surreptitiously filmed the comings and goings of hundreds of New Yorkers.
  • groundbreaking granular studies of the city’s public spaces, spending hours filming and photographing and taking notes about how people behave in public
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the sociologist William H. Whyte
  • The Street Life Project, as it was called, was revolutionary in urban planning, changing not only the way we think about public spaces but also what can be learned in this kind of close observational research of human interaction.
  • affected people’s enjoyment of a public space
  • We could make people happier.
  • Are we really talking to one another? Is modernity making us lonely?
  • Project for Public Spaces
  • time-lapse films of four major urban nodes — Bryant Park; the front steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; a corner of Chestnut Street in Center City Philadelphia; and Downtown Crossing in Boston — in order to better understand how people used the spaces and how they might be improved.
  • studies how digital technology changes our lives
  • summertyler on 07 Mar 15
     
    Human behavior, or sociology, in major areas was filmed and studied in order to get a better understanding of how people used the spaces and how the could be improved.
maddieireland334

Is this the secret to living longer? - 0 views

diigo.com/07oryv

social media technology science research

shared by maddieireland334 on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 05 Jun 15
     
    Time for a digital detox? Fight information overload The man who leads with no limbs Is this the cure for work stress? Ten surprising paths to success Where has the weekend gone? For that matter, what happened to last month?
Javier E

Joichi Ito Named Head of M.I.T. Media Lab - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...26lab.html

role model creative

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Raised in both Tokyo and Silicon Valley, Mr. Ito was part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet. His career includes serving as a board member of Icann, the Internet’s governance organization; becoming a “guild master” in the World of Warcraft online fantasy game; and more than a dozen investments in start-ups like Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter. In 1994 he helped establish the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan.
  • He was also an early participant in the open-source software movement and is a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the development of the Firefox Web browse, as well as being the co-founder and chairman of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that has sought to create a middle ground to promote the sharing of digital information.
  • “You embrace serendipity and you pivot as you go along this longer term arc. That’s the way I have lived my life. I’ve jumped around in terms of career and geography,” he said. Mr. Ito, who maintains a home outside of Tokyo, became a resident of Dubai at the end of 2008 to gain a better understanding of the Middle East. He said that was part of his desire to understand intellectual property issues internationally and to become what he described as a “global citizen.”
Javier E

When Autocorrect Goes Wrong (and So, So Right) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oes-wrong-and-so-so-right.html

language bias technology communications context prediction

shared by Javier E on 10 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists — or “natural language programmers,” as they are known — to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture.
  • they can do amazing things: correct when you hit the wrong keys (the “fat finger” phenomenon) and analyze whom you are texting, how you have spoken with that person in the past, even what you’ve talked about.
  • It adjusts for whom you are communicating with, knowing that your choice of words with a buddy is probably more laid-back than it would be with your boss.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, the structure of your sentences and tone.
  • All of which is fine, except that it turns the notion of the guiltless autocorrect on its head. These days, autocorrections are likely to tell the person on the receiving end something about you.
  • a digital consultant, has a colleague named Aran with whom she texts regularly. Yet even though his name is saved in her contacts list, to the iPhone he is simply “Arab Aran.” Bridget Todd, a social media editor at MSNBC, has on more than one occasion referred to a friend (“Whitney”) as “Whitey.” (Ms. Todd is African-American.)
  • Kathrin Lausch, a film and television producer, described texting with a director after a difficult shoot that involved a woman in a bathtub. “Hey, why don’t you masturbatemarinate| over the boards and get back to me tomorrow,” she told him. She did not notice until the next day, when he told her that he loved “how Europeans are so sexually free.” (She is from Germany.)
Javier E

The Scoreboards Where You Can't See Your Score - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-you-cant-see-your-score.html

privacy data mining corporations profiling reputation transparency ranking

shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The characters in Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Super Sad True Love Story” inhabit a continuously surveilled and scored society.
  • Consider the protagonist, Lenny Abramov, age 39. A digital dossier about him accumulates his every health condition (high cholesterol, depression), liability (mortgage: $560,330), purchase (“bound, printed, nonstreaming media artifact”), tendency (“heterosexual, nonathletic, nonautomotive, nonreligious”) and probability (“life span estimated at 83”). And that profile is available for perusal by employers, friends and even strangers in bars.
  • Even before the appearance of these books, a report called “The Scoring of America” by the World Privacy Forum showed how analytics companies now offer categorization services like “churn scores,” which aim to predict which customers are likely to forsake their mobile phone carrier or cable TV provider for another company; “job security scores,” which factor a person’s risk of unemployment into calculations of his or her ability to pay back a loan; “charitable donor scores,” which foundations use to identify the households likeliest to make large donations; and “frailty scores,” which are typically used to predict the risk of medical complications and death in elderly patients who have surgery.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In two nonfiction books, scheduled to be published in January, technology experts examine similar consumer-ranking techniques already in widespread use.
  • While a federal law called the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires consumer reporting agencies to provide individuals with copies of their credit reports on request, many other companies are free to keep their proprietary consumer scores to themselves.
  • Befitting the founder of a firm that markets reputation management, Mr. Fertik contends that individuals have some power to influence commercial scoring systems.
  • “This will happen whether or not you want to participate, and these scores will be used by others to make major decisions about your life, such as whether to hire, insure, or even date you,”
  • “Important corporate actors have unprecedented knowledge of the minutiae of our daily lives,” he writes in “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard University Press), “while we know little to nothing about how they use this knowledge to influence important decisions that we — and they — make.”
  • Data brokers amass dossiers with thousands of details about individual consumers, like age, religion, ethnicity, profession, mortgage size, social networks, estimated income and health concerns such as impotence and irritable bowel syndrome. Then analytics engines can compare patterns in those variables against computer forecasting models. Algorithms are used to assign consumers scores — and to recommend offering, or withholding, particular products, services or fees — based on predictions about their behavior.
  • It’s a fictional forecast of a data-deterministic culture in which computer algorithms constantly analyze consumers’ profiles, issuing individuals numeric rankings that may benefit or hinder them.
  • Think of this technique as reputation engine optimization. If an algorithm incorrectly pegs you as physically unfit, for instance, the book suggests that you can try to mitigate the wrong. You can buy a Fitbit fitness tracker, for instance, and upload the exercise data to a public profile — or even “snap that Fitbit to your dog” and “you’ll quickly be the fittest person in your town.”
  • Professor Pasquale offers a more downbeat reading. Companies, he says, are using such a wide variety of numerical rating systems that it would be impossible for average people to significantly influence their scores.
  • “Corporations depend on automated judgments that may be wrong, biased or destructive,” Professor Pasquale writes. “Faulty data, invalid assumptions and defective models can’t be corrected when they are hidden.”
  • Moreover, trying to influence scoring systems could backfire. If a person attached a fitness device to a dog and tried to claim the resulting exercise log, he suggests, an algorithm might be able to tell the difference and issue that person a high score for propensity toward fraudulent activity.
  • “People shouldn’t think they can outwit corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars,” Professor Pasquale said in a phone interview.Consumers would have more control, he argues, if Congress extended the right to see and correct credit reports to other kinds of rankings.
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates defines a new race beat - Columbia Journalism Review - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...ehisi_coates_defines_a_new.php

history culture race racism American idea exceptionalism journalism slavery freedom empathy white privilege

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “The Case for Reparations,” Coates’ 16,000-word cover story for The Atlantic, where he is a national correspondent. Published online in May, it was a close look at housing discrimination, such as redlining, that was really about the need for America to take a brutally honest look in the mirror and acknowledge its deep racial divisions.
  • The story broke a single-day traffic record for a magazine story on The Atlantic’s website, and in its wake, Politico named him to its list of 50 thinkers changing American politics
  • Coates believes that if there is an answer to contemporary racism, it lies in confronting the pas
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • For Coates, true equality means “black people in this country have the right to be as mediocre as white people,” he says. “Not that individual black people will be as excellent, or more excellent, than other white people.”
  • he came to see black respectability—the idea that, to succeed, African-Americans must stoically prevail against the odds and be “twice as good” as white people to get the same rights—as deeply immoral.
  • He is no soothsayer, telling people what to think from on high, but rather is refreshingly open about what he doesn’t know, inviting readers to learn with him. Coates is not merely an ivory-tower pontificator or a shiny Web 2.0 brand. He is a public intellectual for the digital age.
  • we miss the real question of why there is a systemic, historical difference in the way police treat blacks versus whites.
  • Another term for that road is “white supremacy.” This refers not so much to hate groups, but, as Coates defines it, a system of policies and beliefs that aims to keep African-Americans as “a peon class.”
  • To be “white” in this sense does not refer merely to skin color but to the degree that someone qualifies as “normal,” and thus worthy of the same rights as all Americans
  • The pool where all these ideas eventually arrive is a question: “How big-hearted can democracy be?” he says. “How many people can it actually include and sustain itself? That is the question I’m asking over and over again.”
  • it is a question of empathy. Are humans capable of forming a society where everyone can flourish?
  • there was the coverage of Michael Brown (or Jordan Davis, or Renisha McBride, or Eric Garner): unarmed African-Americans killed by police or others under controversial circumstances. In each case, the storyline was that these horrific encounters were caused either by genuine provocation, or by race-fueled fear or hatred. Either way, they were stories of personal failings.
  • When an event becomes news, there is often an implication that it is an exception—that the world is mostly working as it should and this event is newsworthy because it’s an aberration. If the race-related stories we see most often in the media are about personal bigotry, then our conception of racism is limited to the bigoted remarks or actions—racism becomes little more than uttering the n-word.
  • he cites research that in 1860 slaves were the largest asset in the US economy. “It is almost impossible to think of democracy, as it was formed in America, without the enslavement of African-Americans,” he says. “Not that these things were bumps in the road along the way, but that they were the road.”
  • a lack of historical perspective in the media’s approach to race. “Journalism privileges what’s happening now over the long reasons for things happening,” he says. “And for African-Americans, that has a particular effect.”
  • Even the very existence of racism is questioned: A recent study published by the Association of Psychological Science has shown that whites think they are discriminated against due to race as much if not more than blacks.
  • “So when you’re talking about something like institutional racism and prejudice, how do you talk about that as an objective reality?”
  • Coates’ strength is in connecting contemporary problems to historical scholarship. “I think if I bring anything to the table it’s the ability to synthesize all of that into something that people find emotionally moving,” he says. The irony of the reparations piece, as unoriginal as it may have been to scholars, is that it was news to many people.
  • Reporting on race requires simultaneously understanding multiple, contradictory worlds, with contradictory narratives. Widespread black poverty exists; so do a black middle class and a black president
  • Progress is key to the myth of American Exceptionalism, and the notion that America is built on slavery and on freedom are discordant ideas that threaten any simple storyline. Coates, together with others who join him, is trying to claim the frontier of a new narrative.
  • reading Coates is like building a worldview, piece by piece, on an area of contemporary life that’s otherwise difficult to grasp.
  • “To come and tell someone may not be as effective in convincing them as allowing them to learn on their own. If you believe you come to a conclusion on your own, you’re more likely to agree.”
  • It’s brave to bare yourself intellectually on the Web, and to acknowledge mistakes, especially when the capital that public intellectuals appear to have is their ability to be “right.”
  • Coates is equally demanding of his followers. Online he is blunt, and willing to call people out. He cares enough to be rigorous
  • despite being a master of online engagement, Coates insists he does not write for others, an idea he explained in a recent post: “I have long believed that the best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself. The best thing I can say about the reparations piece is that I now understand.”
  • To him, it’s an open question whether or not America will ever be capable of fostering true equality. “How big-hearted can democracy be? It points to a very ugly answer: maybe not that big-hearted at all. That in fact America is not exceptional. That it’s just like every other country. That it passes its democracy and it passes all these allegedly big-hearted programs [the New Deal, the G.I. Bill] but still excludes other people,
  • In a 2010 post about antebellum America, Coates mentioned feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimke. “Suffice to say that much like Abe Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant, Angelina Grimke was a Walker,” he wrote. “What was the Walker reference?” Rosemartian asked in the comments section. “Just someone who spends their life evolving, or, walking,” Coates replied. “Grant and Lincoln fit in there for me. Malcolm X was another Walker. Walkers tend to be sometimes—even often—wrong. But they are rarely bigots, in the sense of nakedly clinging to ignorance.”
Javier E

Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-829c-26ffb874a18d_story.html

social media misinformation bias troll hysteria epistemic

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Thomas Jefferson often argued that an educated public was crucial for the survival of self-government
  • We now live in an age in which that education takes place mostly through relatively new platforms. Social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — are the main mechanisms by which people receive and share facts, ideas and opinions. But what if they encourage misinformation, rumors and lies?
  • In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
  • in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person brings tears of joy to my eyes.”
  • Disgusting. So much so that the item would collapse from its own weightlessness, right? Wrong. Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.
  • The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.” So, when the occasional debunker would point out that there was no evidence of the post anywhere, it made little difference. When confronted with evidence that the story was utterly false, it only convinced many that there was a conspiracy and coverup.
  • conversations on Facebook are somewhat more civil, because people generally have to reveal their identities. But on Twitter and in other places — the online comments section of The Post, for example — people can be anonymous or have pseudonyms. And that is where bile and venom flow freely.
  • an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.”
  • This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.
Javier E

Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-829c-26ffb874a18d_story.html

facebook fake news cocoon polarization internet social media

shared by Javier E on 20 May 17 - No Cached
  • In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.”
  • The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
  • in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.
  • The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.”
  • an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.” This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.
Javier E

Resist the Internet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...resist-the-internet.html

internet crisis culture social media psychology education addiction

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Definitely if you’re young, increasingly if you’re old, your day-to-day, minute-to-minute existence is dominated by a compulsion to check email and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram with a frequency that bears no relationship to any communicative need.
  • it requires you to focus intensely, furiously, and constantly on the ephemera that fills a tiny little screen, and experience the traditional graces of existence — your spouse and friends and children, the natural world, good food and great art — in a state of perpetual distraction.
  • It certainly delivers some social benefits, some intellectual advantages, and contributes an important share to recent economic growth.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • They are the masters; we are not. They are built to addict us, as the social psychologist Adam Alter’s new book “Irresistible” points out — and to madden us, distract us, arouse us and deceive us.
  • We primp and perform for them as for a lover; we surrender our privacy to their demands; we wait on tenterhooks for every “like.” The smartphone is in the saddle, and it rides mankind.
  • the internet, like alcohol, may be an example of a technology that should be sensibly restricted in custom and in law.
  • Used within reasonable limits, of course, these devices also offer us new graces. But we are not using them within reasonable limits.
  • there are also excellent reasons to think that online life breeds narcissism, alienation and depression, that it’s an opiate for the lower classes and an insanity-inducing influence on the politically-engaged, and that it takes more than it gives from creativity and deep thought. Meanwhile the age of the internet has been, thus far, an era of bubbles, stagnation and democratic decay — hardly a golden age whose customs must be left inviolate.
  • So a digital temperance movement would start by resisting the wiring of everything, and seek to create more spaces in which internet use is illegal, discouraged or taboo. Toughen laws against cellphone use in cars, keep computers out of college lecture halls, put special “phone boxes” in restaurants where patrons would be expected to deposit their devices, confiscate smartphones being used in museums and libraries and cathedrals, create corporate norms that strongly discourage checking email in a meeting.
  • Then there are the starker steps. Get computers — all of them — out of elementary schools, where there is no good evidence that they improve learning. Let kids learn from books for years before they’re asked to go online for research; let them play in the real before they’re enveloped by the virtual
  • The age of consent should be 16, not 13, for Facebook accounts. Kids under 16 shouldn’t be allowed on gaming networks. High school students shouldn’t bring smartphones to school. Kids under 13 shouldn’t have them at all.
  • I suspect that versions of these ideas will be embraced within my lifetime by a segment of the upper class and a certain kind of religious family. But the masses will still be addicted, and the technology itself will have evolved to hook and immerse — and alienate and sedate — more completely and efficiently.
sissij

Resist the Internet - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...resist-the-internet.html

new york times technology social media bias

shared by sissij on 12 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • So now it’s time to turn to the real threat to the human future: the one in your pocket or on your desk, the one you might be reading this column on right now.
  • your day-to-day, minute-to-minute existence is dominated by a compulsion to check email and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram with a frequency that bears no relationship to any communicative need.
  • Used within reasonable limits, of course, these devices also offer us new graces. But we are not using them within reasonable limits. They are the masters; we are not.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Which is why we need a social and political movement — digital temperance, if you will — to take back some control.
  • Temperance doesn’t have to mean teetotaling; it can simply mean a culture of restraint that tries to keep a specific product in its place. And the internet, like alcohol, may be an example of a technology that should be sensibly restricted in custom and in law.
  • Meanwhile the age of the internet has been, thus far, an era of bubbles, stagnation and democratic decay — hardly a golden age whose customs must be left inviolate.
  • sissij on 12 Mar 17
     
    Although I agree with the author on his point that Internet does cut down our time spent in natural world and traditional socialization, I don't think this problem is serious or bad enough that Internet should be sensibly restricted in custom and in LAW. Internet is the product of the changing of the society. There is always losing coming with gain. I think what we gain from the Internet is greater than what we lose. We do need temperance for internet, but I think it's ones' personal right to decide whether to control himself or not. Internet is more life people's personal life style rather than something that need to be regulated. --Sissi (3/12/2017)
sissij

I know they've seen my message - so why haven't they replied? | Culture | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...age-so-why-havent-they-replied

social media bias psychology

shared by sissij on 17 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Ah, the tyranny of read receipts – enough to put you off digital communication for good.
  • It sounds straightforward enough, even perfunctory, and indeed it is if it’s only a blip in the back-and-forth. But when a message lingers on “seen” without explanation for anything beyond a few minutes, you’ve been “left on read”. It’s enough to make even the most self-assured individuals question their worth.
  • It works both ways, too: if you’ve read a message that you’re either unable or unwilling to respond to immediately, the countdown has already started.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • You never picture them driving, or in the bath, or with relatives who don’t believe in phones at the table. In the moment, the likelihood of their secretly resenting you, or agonising over a reply that is certain to disappoint, seems far greater than it actually is.
  • The anxiety of being left on read is silly but it is real, and unique to this time. There is no analog equivalent.
  • but in that case I’d like to think you’d give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume they’d fallen over in the shower or something.
  • There’s no such goodwill in web 2.0, when everyone is assumed to be available at all times. And if not – it’s personal.
  • well, is it any wonder anxiety is so rife among Generation Y?
  • People will go to some lengths to avoid being seen to have “seen” a message – on Snapchat and Facebook, downloading the message then turning on flight mode and opening it can stop it from registering as opened.
  • Turning on “previews” that display on the lock screen will, in many cases, show enough to get the gist of a message (“I think we should break ... ”) without opening it.
  • But while some people contort themselves to avoid being seen to have “seen”, others manipulate that anxiety to their own ends.
  • But maybe read receipts and the games people play with them have just ruined my ability to trust.
  • When we’re used to good things happening instantly, time taken to craft a thoughtful reply is considered a bad thing.
  • sissij on 17 Mar 17
     
    I totally agree with the author that the read receipts should be optional. I personally have some issue with the read receipt because I don't like to reply instantly except it is a urgent message. I like to take some time to think about what I want to comment on or write back. Although the society now likes to be fast and instant, I am still a slow person. I feel the read receipt is forcing me and giving me pressure to be fast and instant. 
Javier E

I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets | Techn... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ating-app-messages-hacked-sold

social media privacy Big Data intimacy psychology

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for. Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.
  • “You are lured into giving away all this information,” says Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University. “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon; we can’t feel data. This is why seeing everything printed strikes you. We are physical creatures. We need materiality.”
  • What will happen if this treasure trove of data gets hacked, is made public or simply bought by another company? I can almost feel the shame I would experience. The thought that, before sending me these 800 pages, someone at Tinder might have read them already makes me cringe.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In May, an algorithm was used to scrape 40,000 profile images from the platform in order to build an AI to “genderise” faces. A few months earlier, 70,000 profiles from OkCupid (owned by Tinder’s parent company Match Group) were made public by a Danish researcher some commentators have labelled a “white supremacist”, who used the data to try to establish a link between intelligence and religious beliefs. The data is still out there.
  • The trouble is these 800 pages of my most intimate data are actually just the tip of the iceberg. “Your personal data affects who you see first on Tinder, yes,” says Dehaye. “But also what job offers you have access to on LinkedIn, how much you will pay for insuring your car, which ad you will see in the tube and if you can subscribe to a loan. “We are leaning towards a more and more opaque society, towards an even more intangible world where data collected about you will decide even larger facets of your life. Eventually, your whole existence will be affected.”
  • As a typical millennial constantly glued to my phone, my virtual life has fully merged with my real life. There is no difference any more. Tinder is how I meet people, so this is my reality. It is a reality that is constantly being shaped by others – but good luck trying to find out how.
Javier E

I Sent All My Text Messages in Calligraphy for a Week - Cristina Vanko - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373477

writing texting message handwriting calligraphy communications social network

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I decided to blend a newfound interest in calligraphy with my lifelong passion for written correspondence to create a new kind of text messaging. The idea: I wanted to message friends using calligraphic texts for one week. The average 18-to-24-year-old sends and gets something like 4,000 messages a month, which includes sending more than 500 texts a week, according to Experian. The week of my experiment, I only sent 100
  • We are a youth culture that heavily relies on emojis. I didn’t realize how much I depend on emojis and emoticons to express myself until I didn’t have them. Handdrawn emoticons, though original, just aren’t the same. I wasn't able to convey emoticons as neatly as the cleanliness of a typeface. Sketching emojis is too time consuming. To bridge the gap between time and the need for graphic imagery, I sent out selfies on special occasions when my facial expression spoke louder than words.
  • That week, the sense of urgency I normally felt about my phone virtually vanished. It was like back when texts were rationed, and when I lacked anxiety about viewing "read" receipts. I didn’t feel naked without having my phone on me every moment. 
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  • So while the experiment began as an exercise to learn calligraphy, it doubled as a useful sort of digital detox that revealed my relationship with technology. Here's what I learned:
  • Receiving handwritten messages made people feel special. The awesome feeling of receiving personalized mail really can be replicated with a handwritten text.
  • Handwriting allows for more self-expression. I found I could give words a certain flourish to mimic the intonation of spoken language. Expressing myself via handwriting could also give the illusion of real-time presence. One friend told me, “it’s like you’re here with us!”
  • Before I started, I established rules for myself: I could create only handwritten text messages for seven days, absolutely no using my phone’s keyboard. I had to write out my messages on paper, photograph them, then hit “send.” I didn’t reveal my plan to my friends unless asked
  • Sometimes you don't need to respond. Most conversations aren’t life or death situations, so it was refreshing to feel 100 percent present in all interactions. I didn’t interrupt conversations by checking social media or shooting text messages to friends. I was more in tune with my surroundings. On transit, I took part in people watching—which, yes, meant mostly watching people staring at their phones. I smiled more at passersby while walking since I didn’t feel the need to avoid human interaction by staring at my phone.
  • A phone isn't only a texting device. As I texted less, I used my phone less frequently—mostly because I didn’t feel the need to look at it to keep me busy, nor did I want to feel guilty for utilizing the keyboard through other applications. I still took photos, streamed music, and logged workouts since I felt okay with pressing buttons for selection purposes
  • People don’t expect to receive phone calls anymore. Texting brings about a less intimidating, more convenient experience. But it wasn't that long ago when real-time voice were the norm. It's clear to me that, these days, people prefer to be warned about an upcoming phone call before it comes in.
  • Having a pen and paper is handy at all times. Writing out responses is a great reminder to slow down and use your hands. While all keys on a keyboard feel the same, it’s difficult to replicate the tactile activity of tracing a letter’s shape
  • My sent messages were more thoughtful.
  • I was more careful with grammar and spelling. People often ignore the rules of grammar and spelling just to maintain the pace of texting conversation. But because a typical calligraphic text took minutes to craft, I had time to make sure I got things right. The usual texting acronyms and misspellings look absurd when texted with type, but they'd be especially ridiculous written by hand.
cvanderloo

Lockdown, violence and understanding women's anger - 1 views

theconversation.com/erstanding-womens-anger-157180

women violence anger sexism stereotypes

shared by cvanderloo on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In early March, reports of a white, middle-class missing woman, Sarah Everard, had hit the news. A few days later, a white serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, was charged with her kidnap and murder.
  • Countless stories have been shared online of women being frightened to walk alone, of holding their keys as a weapon, and of feeling a sense of constant threat and anxiety. At a time when lockdown has curtailed freedom of movement, it felt especially cruel that women felt safe nowhere – in their homes, in the street or online.
  • If there is an image that has come to represent what transpired on the night of the vigil, it is the photo of a young woman, who we now know to be Patsy Stevenson, clad in a face mask and pinned to the ground by a group of male police officers, her head held up, as she stares into the camera.
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  • Much of the searing power of this viral image comes from how it captures what appears to be the aggressive demeanour of the police officers, while also showing the outrage and defiance of Stevenson. Serious questions are now being raised about the Met’s handling of the situation.
  • As a research team, we are not surprised by women’s outrage. But we are surprised at the government’s response of proposing that increased infrastructure alone, like better lighting or CCTV cameras, will make women’s lives any safer.
  • Rather than teaching women how to protect themselves, our research dating back over a decade shows there is a need for education that tackles the gendered and sexual inequities that normalise violent, predatory forms of masculinit
  • Young people struggle to know how to deal with this kind of online sexual harassment and abuse. The numbers of young people who reported their experiences were staggeringly low with only 6% reporting it to the social media platform, 3% telling parents and a mere 1% reporting it to their school.
  • As recent petitions show, there is a demand from young people for better education, regardless of their gender, on issues such as consent, healthy relationships and sexual violence. And in an increasingly digital world, this education must account for everyday online practices, like pestering girls for nudes or sending unwanted dick pics, in addition to offline forms of sexual violence.
  • Education is not just needed for young people, but also for teachers, school leaders and parents.
  • Although our evaluation of these resources is ongoing, our preliminary findings show that schools adopting our training and policies have led to dramatic reductions in online sexual harassment, increased teacher confidence in handling these issues and improved student mental health.
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