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Javier E

Grand Tour of the Self - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-grand-tour-of-the-self.html

travel narcissism selfie photos tourism self experience psychology

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • selfie sticks, the latest and most obnoxious tool in the kit of digital narcissism.
  • viewing the world through a selfie stick is like skiing in that artificial snow park in Dubai. It further isolates and cocoons the visitor inside a zone of self-projected experience.
  • these elongated facial recorders are all the rage among travelers. “Like it or not,” a recent post on BuzzFeed reported, “everyone is going to be wielding a selfie stick.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • when technology changes the travel experience itself — from immersion and surprise to documentary one-upmanship — it defeats the point of the journey. We travel to freshen senses dulled by routine. We travel for discovery and reinvention.
  • a park ranger in Washington State told me about a group of kids trying to get a fix on 500-year-old trees at the lower elevation of Mount Rainier. They could not fully fathom what they were experiencing, he said, until they could filter it through their phones — as pictures or Wikipedia definitions. Nature deficit disorder, so called, is a symptom of being connected to everything, while being unable to connect to anything.
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.
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  • 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.
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