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Javier E

(1) A Brief History of Media and Audiences and Twitter and The Bulwark - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...history-of-media-and-audiences

writer media institutions audience access success gatekeepers twitter history social media

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • In the old days—and here I mean even as recently as 2000 or 2004—audiences were built around media institutions. The New York Times had an audience. The New Yorker had an audience. The Weekly Standard had an audience.
  • If you were a writer, you got access to these audiences by contributing to the institutions. No one cared if you, John Smith, wrote a piece about Al Gore. But if your piece about Al Gore appeared in Washington Monthly, then suddenly you had an audience.
  • There were a handful of star writers for whom this wasn’t true: Maureen Dowd, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion. Readers would follow these stars wherever they appeared. But they were the exceptions to the rule. And the only way to ascend to such exalted status was by writing a lot of great pieces for established institutions and slowly assembling your audience from theirs.
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  • The internet stripped institutions of their gatekeeping powers, thus making it possible for anyone to publish—and making it inevitable that many writers would create audiences independent of media institutions.
  • The internet destroyed the apprenticeship system that had dominated American journalism for generations. Under the old system, an aspiring writer took a low-level job at a media institution and worked her way up the ladder until she was trusted enough to write.
  • Under the new system, people started their careers writing outside of institutions—on personal blogs—and then were hired by institutions on the strength of their work.
  • In practice, these outsiders were primarily hired not on the merits of their work, but because of the size of their audience.
  • what it really did was transform the nature of audiences. Once the internet existed it became inevitable that institutions would see their power to hold audiences wane while individual writers would have their power to build personal audiences explode.
  • this meant that institutions would begin to hire based on the size of a writer’s audience. Which meant that writers’ overriding professional imperative was to build an audience, since that was the key to advancement.
  • Twitter killed the blog and lowered the barrier to entry for new writers from “Must have a laptop, the ability to navigate WordPress, and the capacity to write paragraphs” to “Do you have an iPhone and the ability to string 20 words together? With or without punctuation?”
  • If you were able to build a big enough audience on Twitter, then media institutions fell all over themselves trying to hire you—because they believed that you would then bring your audience to them.2
  • If you were a writer for the Washington Post, or Wired, or the Saginaw Express, you had to build your own audience not to advance, but to avoid being replaced.
  • For journalists, audience wasn’t just status—it was professional capital. In fact, it was the most valuable professional capital.
  • Everything we just talked about was driven by the advertising model of media, which prized pageviews and unique users above all else. About a decade ago, that model started to fray around the edges,3 which caused a shift to the subscription model.
  • Today, if you’re a subscription publication, what Twitter gives you is growth opportunity. Twitter’s not the only channel for growth—there are lots of others, from TikTok to LinkedIn to YouTube to podcasts to search. But it’s an important one.
  • Twitter’s attack on Substack was an attack on the subscription model of journalism itself.
  • since media has already seen the ad-based model fall apart, it’s not clear what the alternative will be if the subscription model dies, too.
  • All of which is why having a major social media platform run by a capricious bad actor is suboptimal.
  • And why I think anyone else who’s concerned about the future of media ought to start hedging against Twitter. None of the direct hedges—Post, Mastodon, etc.—are viable yet. But tech history shows that these shifts can happen fairly quickly.
Javier E

It's Not Just the Discord Leak. Group Chats Are the Internet's New Chaos Machine. - The... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673738

social media chaos internet group in-group dynamics

shared by Javier E on 15 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011.
  • As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”
  • unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.
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  • In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in
  • Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.
  • It’s enough to make one think, as the writer Max Read argued, that “venture-capitalist group chats are a threat to the global economy.” Now you might also say they are a threat to national security.
  • thanks to the private nature of the group chats, this information largely stayed out of the public eye. As Bloomberg reported, “By the time most people figured out that a bank run was a possibility … it was already well underway.”
  • The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.
  • Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor.
  • as our digital social lives start to splinter off from feeds and large audiences and into siloed areas, a different kind of unpredictability and chaos awaits. Where social networks create a context collapse—a process by which information meant for one group moves into unfamiliar networks and is interpreted by outsiders—group chats seem to be context amplifiers
  • group chats provide strong relationship dynamics, and create in-jokes and lore. For decades, researchers have warned of the polarizing effects of echo chambers across social networks; group chats realize this dynamic fully.
  • Weird things happen in echo chambers. Constant reinforcement of beliefs or ideas might lead to group polarization or radicalization. It may trigger irrational herd behavior such as, say, attempting to purchase a copy of the Constitution through a decentralized autonomous organization
  • Obsession with in-group dynamics might cause people to lose touch with the reality outside the walls of a particular community; the private-seeming nature of a closed group might also lull participants into a false sense of security, as it did with Teixiera.
  • the age of the group chat appears to be at least as unpredictable, swapping a very public form of volatility for a more siloed, incalculable version
karenmcgregor

Is ComputerNetworkAssignmentHelp.com a Legitimate Source for Network Security Assignmen... - 0 views

In the dynamic landscape of academic support services, finding a trustworthy platform for network security assignment writing help is crucial. Today, we'll delve into the legitimacy of https://www....

#networksecurityassignmentwritinghelp #networksecurity #onlineassignmenthelp education

started by karenmcgregor on 08 Jan 24 no follow-up yet
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