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Opinion: How streaming can avoid the same fate as cable TV - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html opinion cnn streaming
shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Streaming networks were the center of attention last month when the television industry — or, more accurately now, the entertainment industry — staged its annual ritual known as the "upfronts."
  • The program distributors (what used to be called studios) are trying to navigate a marketplace that is not entirely sure where it's going. Streaming was expected to take over as the be-all/end-all of not just TV, but also the film industry. But the sudden crash for Netflix, the industry leader, in both subscribers and stock price, has the business collectively hitting the pause button. After all, who knows whether an overall better idea than streaming is only a few years away?
  • on. After
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  • hugely successful media giants dominating the entertainment scene, growing fat and cocky, dismissive of upstart competitors, followed by a humbling slide toward marginalization, if not outright irrelevance.
  • First radio was so dominant that surely no one thought television could ever replace it. Then broadcast TV was such an enormous presence in American life, some network executives dismissed cable TV as destined to be small-timey forever.
  • A viewer could watch a whole series in a single day and never be bothered by somebody selling corn flakes.
  • There could be a number of reasons for the huge subscriber drop, but the biggest seems to be increased competition, with a slew of companies with great resources and deep libraries of content entering the streaming world in recent years, including Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company of CNN).
  • Netflix, following in the footsteps of streaming competitors like Hulu and HBO Max, is reportedly exploring a new option for financial security. Or rather an old one, a really old one.
  • The one that brought all those people together in Manhattan for the upfronts: ad dollars.
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Is That Even a Thing? - The New York Times - 3 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...is-that-even-a-thing new york times language trends things social media
shared by kushnerha on 17 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Speakers and writers of American English have recently taken to identifying a staggering and constantly changing array of trends, events, memes, products, lifestyle choices and phenomena of nearly every kind with a single label — a thing.
  • It would be easy to call this a curiosity of the language and leave it at that. Linguistic trends come and go.
  • One could, on the other hand, consider the use of “a thing” a symptom of an entire generation’s linguistic sloth, general inarticulateness and penchant for cutesy, empty, half-ironic formulations that create a self-satisfied barrier preventing any form of genuine engagement with the world around them.
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  • My assumption is that language and experience mutually influence each other. Language not only captures experience, it conditions it. It sets expectations for experience and gives shape to it as it happens. What might register as inarticulateness can reflect a different way of understanding and experiencing the world.
  • The word “thing” has of course long played a versatile and generic role in our language, referring both to physical objects and abstract matters. “The thing is …” “Here’s the thing.” “The play’s the thing.” In these examples, “thing” denotes the matter at hand and functions as stage setting to emphasize an important point. One new thing about “a thing,” then, is the typical use of the indefinite article “a” to precede it. We talk about a thing because we are engaged in cataloging. The question is whether something counts as a thing. “A thing” is not just stage setting. Information is conveyed.
  • What information? One definition of “a thing” that suggests itself right away is “cultural phenomenon.” A new app, an item of celebrity gossip, the practices of a subculture. It seems likely that “a thing” comes from the phrase the coolest/newest/latest thing. But now, in a society where everything, even the past, is new — “new thing” verges on the redundant. If they weren’t new they wouldn’t be things.
  • Clearly, cultural phenomena have long existed and been called “fads,” “trends,” “rages” or have been designated by the category they belong to — “product,” “fashion,” “lifestyle,” etc. So why the application of this homogenizing general term to all of them? I think there are four main reasons.
  • First, the flood of content into the cultural sphere. That we are inundated is well known. Information besieges us in waves that thrash us against the shore until we retreat to the solid ground of work or sleep or exercise or actual human interaction, only to wade cautiously back into our smartphones. As we spend more and more time online, it becomes the content of our experience, and in this sense “things” have earned their name. “A thing” has become the basic unit of cultural ontology.
  • Second, the fragmentation of this sphere. The daily barrage of culture requires that we choose a sliver of the whole in order to keep up. Netflix genres like “Understated Romantic Road Trip Movies” make it clear that the individual is becoming his or her own niche market — the converse of the celebrity as brand. We are increasingly a society of brands attuning themselves to markets, and markets evaluating brands. The specificity of the market requires a wider range of content — of things — to satisfy it
  • Third, the closing gap between satire and the real thing. The absurd excess of things has reached a point where the ironic detachment needed to cope with them is increasingly built into the things themselves, their marketing and the language we use to talk about them. The designator “a thing” is thus almost always tinged with ironic detachment. It puts the thing at arm’s length. You can hardly say “a thing” without a wary glint in your eye.
  • Finally, the growing sense that these phenomena are all the same. As we step back from “things,” they recede into the distance and begin to blur together. We call them all by the same name because they are the same at bottom: All are pieces of the Internet. A thing is for the most part experienced through this medium and generated by it. Even if they arise outside it, things owe their existence as things to the Internet. Google is thus always the arbiter of the question, “Is that a real thing?”
  • “A thing,” then, corresponds to a real need we have, to catalog and group together the items of cultural experience, while keeping them at a sufficient distance so that we can at least feign unified consciousness in the face of a world gone to pieces.
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George Packer: Is Amazon Bad for Books? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...140217fa_fact_packer book industry Amazon
shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business
  • Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.
  • It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.
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  • it’s impossible to know for sure, but, according to one publisher’s estimate, book sales in the U.S. now make up no more than seven per cent of the company’s roughly seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue.
  • A monopoly is dangerous because it concentrates so much economic power, but in the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.
  • “The key to understanding Amazon is the hiring process,” one former employee said. “You’re not hired to do a particular job—you’re hired to be an Amazonian. Lots of managers had to take the Myers-Briggs personality tests. Eighty per cent of them came in two or three similar categories, and Bezos is the same: introverted, detail-oriented, engineer-type personality. Not musicians, designers, salesmen. The vast majority fall within the same personality type—people who graduate at the top of their class at M.I.T. and have no idea what to say to a woman in a bar.”
  • According to Marcus, Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” Publishers kept no data on customers, making their bets on books a matter of instinct rather than metrics. They were full of inefficiences, starting with overpriced Manhattan offices.
  • For a smaller house, Amazon’s total discount can go as high as sixty per cent, which cuts deeply into already slim profit margins. Because Amazon manages its inventory so well, it often buys books from small publishers with the understanding that it can’t return them, for an even deeper discount
  • According to one insider, around 2008—when the company was selling far more than books, and was making twenty billion dollars a year in revenue, more than the combined sales of all other American bookstores—Amazon began thinking of content as central to its business. Authors started to be considered among the company’s most important customers. By then, Amazon had lost much of the market in selling music and videos to Apple and Netflix, and its relations with publishers were deteriorating
  • In its drive for profitability, Amazon did not raise retail prices; it simply squeezed its suppliers harder, much as Walmart had done with manufacturers. Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees and better shipping terms; publishers knew that they would stop being favored by the site’s recommendation algorithms if they didn’t comply. Eventually, they all did.
  • Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
  • ithout dropping co-op fees entirely, Amazon simplified its system: publishers were asked to hand over a percentage of their previous year’s sales on the site, as “marketing development funds.”
  • The figure keeps rising, though less for the giant pachyderms than for the sickly gazelles. According to the marketing executive, the larger houses, which used to pay two or three per cent of their net sales through Amazon, now relinquish five to seven per cent of gross sales, pushing Amazon’s percentage discount on books into the mid-fifties. Random House currently gives Amazon an effective discount of around fifty-three per cent.
  • In December, 1999, at the height of the dot-com mania, Time named Bezos its Person of the Year. “Amazon isn’t about technology or even commerce,” the breathless cover article announced. “Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play.” Yet this was the moment, Marcus said, when “content” people were “on the way out.”
  • By 2010, Amazon controlled ninety per cent of the market in digital books—a dominance that almost no company, in any industry, could claim. Its prohibitively low prices warded off competition
  • In 2004, he set up a lab in Silicon Valley that would build Amazon’s first piece of consumer hardware: a device for reading digital books. According to Stone’s book, Bezos told the executive running the project, “Proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”
  • Lately, digital titles have levelled off at about thirty per cent of book sales.
  • The literary agent Andrew Wylie (whose firm represents me) says, “What Bezos wants is to drag the retail price down as low as he can get it—a dollar-ninety-nine, even ninety-nine cents. That’s the Apple play—‘What we want is traffic through our device, and we’ll do anything to get there.’ ” If customers grew used to paying just a few dollars for an e-book, how long before publishers would have to slash the cover price of all their titles?
  • As Apple and the publishers see it, the ruling ignored the context of the case: when the key events occurred, Amazon effectively had a monopoly in digital books and was selling them so cheaply that it resembled predatory pricing—a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Since then, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped, levelling off at about sixty-five per cent, with the rest going largely to Apple and to Barnes & Noble, which sells the Nook e-reader. In other words, before the feds stepped in, the agency model introduced competition to the market
  • But the court’s decision reflected a trend in legal thinking among liberals and conservatives alike, going back to the seventies, that looks at antitrust cases from the perspective of consumers, not producers: what matters is lowering prices, even if that goal comes at the expense of competition. Barry Lynn, a market-policy expert at the New America Foundation, said, “It’s one of the main factors that’s led to massive consolidation.”
  • Publishers sometimes pass on this cost to authors, by redefining royalties as a percentage of the publisher’s receipts, not of the book’s list price. Recently, publishers say, Amazon began demanding an additional payment, amounting to approximately one per cent of net sales
  • brick-and-mortar retailers employ forty-seven people for every ten million dollars in revenue earned; Amazon employs fourteen.
  • Since the arrival of the Kindle, the tension between Amazon and the publishers has become an open battle. The conflict reflects not only business antagonism amid technological change but a division between the two coasts, with different cultural styles and a philosophical disagreement about what techies call “disruption.”
  • Bezos told Charlie Rose, “Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.”
  • n Grandinetti’s view, the Kindle “has helped the book business make a more orderly transition to a mixed print and digital world than perhaps any other medium.” Compared with people who work in music, movies, and newspapers, he said, authors are well positioned to thrive. The old print world of scarcity—with a limited number of publishers and editors selecting which manuscripts to publish, and a limited number of bookstores selecting which titles to carry—is yielding to a world of digital abundance. Grandinetti told me that, in these new circumstances, a publisher’s job “is to build a megaphone.”
  • it offers an extremely popular self-publishing platform. Authors become Amazon partners, earning up to seventy per cent in royalties, as opposed to the fifteen per cent that authors typically make on hardcovers. Bezos touts the biggest successes, such as Theresa Ragan, whose self-published thrillers and romances have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But one survey found that half of all self-published authors make less than five hundred dollars a year.
  • The business term for all this clear-cutting is “disintermediation”: the elimination of the “gatekeepers,” as Bezos calls the professionals who get in the customer’s way. There’s a populist inflection to Amazon’s propaganda, an argument against élitist institutions and for “the democratization of the means of production”—a common line of thought in the West Coast tech world
  • “Book publishing is a very human business, and Amazon is driven by algorithms and scale,” Sargent told me. When a house gets behind a new book, “well over two hundred people are pushing your book all over the place, handing it to people, talking about it. A mass of humans, all in one place, generating tremendous energy—that’s the magic potion of publishing. . . . That’s pretty hard to replicate in Amazon’s publishing world, where they have hundreds of thousands of titles.”
  • By producing its own original work, Amazon can sell more devices and sign up more Prime members—a major source of revenue. While the company was building the
  • Like the publishing venture, Amazon Studios set out to make the old “gatekeepers”—in this case, Hollywood agents and executives—obsolete. “We let the data drive what to put in front of customers,” Carr told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have tastemakers deciding what our customers should read, listen to, and watch.”
  • book publishers have been consolidating for several decades, under the ownership of media conglomerates like News Corporation, which squeeze them for profits, or holding companies such as Rivergroup, which strip them to service debt. The effect of all this corporatization, as with the replacement of independent booksellers by superstores, has been to privilege the blockbuster.
  • The combination of ceaseless innovation and low-wage drudgery makes Amazon the epitome of a successful New Economy company. It’s hiring as fast as it can—nearly thirty thousand employees last year.
  • the long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don’t read as many books as they used to—they are too busy doing other things with their devices—but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces.
  • he digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while r
  • Amazon believes that its approach encourages ever more people to tell their stories to ever more people, and turns writers into entrepreneurs; the price per unit might be cheap, but the higher number of units sold, and the accompanying royalties, will make authors wealthier
  • In Friedman’s view, selling digital books at low prices will democratize reading: “What do you want as an author—to sell books to as few people as possible for as much as possible, or for as little as possible to as many readers as possible?”
  • The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”
  • Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.
  • These trends point toward what the literary agent called “the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.” A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy.
  • “If they did, in my opinion they would save the industry. They’d lose thirty per cent of their sales, but they would have an additional thirty per cent for every copy they sold, because they’d be selling directly to consumers. The industry thinks of itself as Procter & Gamble*. What gave publishers the idea that this was some big goddam business? It’s not—it’s a tiny little business, selling to a bunch of odd people who read.”
  • Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? ♦
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Hacker Leaks Episodes From Netflix Show and Threatens Other Networks - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-orange-is-the-new-black.html
shared by haubertbr on 01 May 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 01 May 17
     
    The thefts are the latest in a long line of ransom and extortion attacks perpetuated by cybercriminals over the past year. Security experts have been responding, with greater frequency, to breaches in which these criminals threaten to expose or delete proprietary information unless companies pay a ransom.
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'The Goop Lab': Gwyneth Paltrow's Shiny, Cynical Netflix Show - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...605107 psychology science fraud
shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • to watch The Goop Lab as a series, with its arcing assumptions about the limitations of medical science, is also to wonder where to locate the line between open-mindedness and gullibility. It is to wonder why Gwyneth Paltrow, celebrity and salesperson, should be trusted as an arbiter of healt
  • The Goop Lab continues that lulzy approach—each episode begins with a title-card disclaimer that the show is “designed to entertain and inform” rather than offer medical advice—but combines the mirth with deep earnestness. That creates its own kind of chaos. What is the meaningful difference, legal niceties aside, between “information” and “advice”?
  • The Goop Lab is streaming into a moment in America that finds Medicare for All under discussion and the Affordable Care Act under attack. It presents itself as airy infotainment even as many Americans are unable to access even the most basic forms of medical care. That makes the show deeply uncomfortable to watch.
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The End of Courtship? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-end-of-courtship.html courtship romance dating
shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • “The word ‘date’ should almost be stricken from the dictionary,” Ms. Silver said. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret.”
  • Raised in the age of so-called “hookup culture,” millennials — who are reaching an age where they are starting to think about settling down — are subverting the rules of courtship.
  • Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.
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  • Blame the much-documented rise of the “hookup culture” among young people, characterized by spontaneous, commitment-free (and often, alcohol-fueled) romantic flings. Many students today have never been on a traditional date,
  • Hookups may be fine for college students, but what about after, when they start to build an adult life? The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture,”
  • In interviews with students, many graduating seniors did not know the first thing about the basic mechanics of a traditional date. “They’re wondering, ‘If you like someone, how would you walk up to them? What would you say? What words would you use?’ ”
  • Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of “asynchronous communication,” as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it’s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.
  • Online dating services, which have gained mainstream acceptance, reinforce the hyper-casual approach by greatly expanding the number of potential dates. Faced with a never-ending stream of singles to choose from, many feel a sense of “FOMO” (fear of missing out), so they opt for a speed-dating approach — cycle through lots of suitors quickly.
  • “I’ve seen men put more effort into finding a movie to watch on Netflix Instant than composing a coherent message to ask a woman out,” said Anna Goldfarb, 34, an author and blogger in Moorestown, N.J. A typical, annoying query is the last-minute: “Is anything fun going on tonight?” More annoying still are the men who simply ping, “Hey” or “ ’sup.”
  • The mass-mailer approach necessitates “cost-cutting, going to bars, meeting for coffee the first time,” he added, “because you only want to invest in a mate you’re going to get more out of.”
  • in  a world where “courtship” is quickly being redefined, women must recognize a flirtatious exchange of tweets, or a lingering glance at a company softball game, as legitimate opportunities for romance, too.
  • THERE’S another reason Web-enabled singles are rendering traditional dates obsolete. If the purpose of the first date was to learn about someone’s background, education, politics and cultural tastes, Google and Facebook have taken care of that.
  • Dodgy economic prospects facing millennials also help torpedo the old, formal dating rituals. Faced with a lingering recession, a stagnant job market, and mountains of student debt, many young people — particularly victims of the “mancession” — simply cannot afford to invest a fancy dinner or show in someone they may or may not click with.
  • “Maybe there’s still a sense of a man taking care of a woman, but our ideology is aligning with the reality of our finances,” Ms. Rosin said. As a man, you might “convince yourself that dating is passé, a relic of a paternalistic era, because you can’t afford to take a woman to a restaurant.”
  • “A lot of men in their 20s are reluctant to take the girl to the French restaurant, or buy them jewelry, because those steps tend to lead to ‘eventually, we’re going to get married,’ ” Mr. Edness, 27, said. In a tight economy, where everyone is grinding away to build a career, most men cannot fathom supporting a family until at least 30 or 35, he said.
  • Even in an era of ingrained ambivalence about gender roles, however, some women keep the old dating traditions alive by refusing to accept anything less. Cheryl Yeoh, a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco, said that she has been on many formal dates of late — plays, fancy restaurants. One suitor even presented her with red roses. For her, the old traditions are alive simply because she refuses to put up with anything less. She generally refuses to go on any date that is not set up a week in advance, involving a degree of forethought. “If he really wants you,” Ms. Yeoh, 29, said, “he has to put in some effort.”
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Sexual Freelancing in the Gig Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ancing-in-the-gig-economy.html dating couples marriage courtship love economic
shared by Javier E on 15 May 16 - No Cached
  • We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.
  • he ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.
  • If you want to understand why “Netflix and chill” has replaced dinner and a movie, you need to look at how people work.
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  • Today, people are constantly told that we must be flexible and adaptable in order to succeed. Is it surprising that these values are reshaping how many of us approach sex and love?
  • part-timers, contractors and other contingent workers — who constitute some 40 percent of the American work force — are more inclined to text one another “u still up?” than to make plans in advance
  • Smartphones have altered expectations about when we are “on” and “off,” and working from home or from cafes has blurred the lines between labor and leisure.
  • The 2013 and 2014 Work and Education Poll conducted by Gallup found that the average full-time American worker reported working 47 hours per week. Moreover, 21 percent of the people surveyed reported working 50 to 59 hours per week; and another 18 percent said they worked 60 or more hours a week.
  • marriage rates have declined significantly since 1960. The median age of first marriage has risen to a record high: 27 for women and 29 for men.
  • “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” observed that young adults have gone from seeing marriage as a “cornerstone” of adult life to its “capstone,” something you enter only after you complete your education and attain professional stability
  • DATING itself is a recent invention. It developed when young people began moving to cities and women began working outside private homes. By 1900, 44 percent of single American women worked. Previously, courtship had taken place under adult supervision, in private places: a parlor, a factory dance or church social. But once women started going out and earning wages, they had more freedom over where and how they met prospective mates. Because men vastly out-earned women, they typically paid for entertainment.
  • In the 1920s and ‘30s, as more and more middle-class women started going to college, parents and faculty panicked over the “rating and dating” culture, which led kids to participate in “petting parties” and take “joy rides” with members of the opposite sex.
  • By the 1950s, a new kind of dating took over: “going steady.
  • by the post-war era of full employment, this form of courtship made perfect sense. The booming economy, which was targeting the newly flush “teen” demographic, dictated that in order for everyone to partake in new consumer pleasures — for everyone to go out for a burger and root beer float on the weekends — young people had to pair off
  • The generation of Americans that came of age around the time of the 2008 financial crisis has been told constantly that we must be “flexible” and “adaptable.” Is it so surprising that we have turned into sexual freelancers? Many of us treat relationships like unpaid internships: We cannot expect them to lead to anything long-term, so we use them to get experience. If we look sharp, we might get a free lunch.
  • this kind of dating isn’t any more transactional than it was back when suitors paid women family-supervised visits or parents sought out a yenta to introduce their children at a synagogue mixer.
  • Courtship has always been dictated by changes in the market. The good news is that dating is not the same thing as love. And as anyone who has ever been in love can attest, the laws of supply and demand do not control our feelings.
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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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For Some, 'Tis a Gift to Be Simple - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inary-experiences-of-life.html happiness aging ordinary research psychology experience
shared by Javier E on 31 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • older people often draw as much happiness from ordinary experiences — like a day in the library — as they do from extraordinary ones.
  • If you can cover basic expenses, pursuing inexpensive, everyday things that bring comfort and satisfaction can lead to happiness equal to jetting about on international trips in your 70s and 80s.
  • Ms. Mogilner wanted to know what sort of experiences made people the most happy and why.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • they conducted eight studies in which they asked participants about their recollections of, planning for or daydreaming about various happiness-making experiences. They also checked to see what sort of things their subjects were posting about on Facebook
  • ordinary experiences happen often and occur in the course of everyday life while extraordinary ones are much more rare.
  • the older people got, the more happiness ordinary experiences delivered. In fact, the happiness-making potential of everyday pursuits eventually grows equal to that of ones that are rarer.
  • Ms. Mogilner explored some of the factors besides frequency that separate ordinary and extraordinary experiences and seized on one in particular: the tendency for extraordinary experiences to be self-defining in some way.
  • One way to think about this is to consider the various adventures younger people pursue to find themselves. “That sort of exploration to see what fits and feels like you may be the process by which you can start to figure out what sort of ordinary life to build,”
  • Once you know yourself, the deliberate pursuit of more ordinary things can then deliver that same level of happiness. It doesn’t hurt, either, that you may appreciate the ordinary much more once you’re more aware of the decreasing number of years you have left to enjoy it.
  • there ought to be much comfort in the evidence that everyday things that cost little or nothing can deliver the same amount of joy. A garden. The elaborate meal that emerges from it and the spare time to invent the recipes. A return to a neglected musical instrument. All-you-can-consume subscriptions to Netflix and Spotify, with watchlists and playlists that stretch on for years.
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Meaningful Activities Protect the Brain From Depression - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...360988 depression psychology brain science research
shared by Ellie McGinnis on 22 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Aristotle famously said there were two basic types of joy: hedonia, or that keg-standing, Netflix binge-watching, Nutella-from-the-jar selfish kind of pleasure, and eudaimonia, or the pleasure that comes from helping others, doing meaningful work, and otherwise leading a life well-lived.
  • "Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,
  • “While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do ... Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • scientists have found they can measure the amount that a person enjoys something by taking MRIs of activation levels in the ventral striatum—the “reward center” nestled in the bullseye of the brain. The ventral striata of teens, in particular, tend to light up especially brightly in response to all kinds of rewards
  • teens brains are so sensitive to these little jolts of pleasure—or lack thereof—late adolescence is also when depression peaks for many people.
  • the researchers followed a group of 39 teenagers over the course of one year to see whether the way their brains reacted to either eudaimonic or hedonic rewards correlated with how depressed they felt over time.
  • the teens who had the greatest brain response to the generous, family-donation financial decision had the greatest declines in depressive symptoms over time. And those who got a boost from the risk-taking game were more likely to have an increase in depression. The types of rewards the teens responded to, it seems, changed their behavior in ways that altered their overall well-being.
  • It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean parents can inoculate their teens against depression by forcing them to seek happiness through volunteering. But it could be that teens who already do that kind of thing because it really does lift their spirits are likely to have that lift stick with them.
  • “Taken together, our findings suggest that well-being may depend on attending to higher values related to family, culture, and morality, rather than to immediate, selfish pleasure,”
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A Super-Simple Way to Understand the Net Neutrality Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-net-neutrality-debate.html net-neutrality
shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?
  • For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.
  • Comcast, my cable provider, offers me a menu of packages from which I might choose, each with a different mix of channels. It goes through long and sometimes arduous negotiations with the owners of those cable channels and has a different business arrangement with each of them. The details of those arrangements are opaque to me as the consumer; all I know is that I can get the movie package for X dollars a month or the sports package for Y dollars and so on.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • One theory of the case, and the one that the Obama administration embraced Monday, is that the Internet is like electricity. It is fundamental to the 21st century economy, as essential to functioning in modern society as electricity. It is a public utility. “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” the president said in his written statement.
  • just as your electric utility has no say in how you use the electricity they sell you, the Internet should be a reliable way to access content produced by anyone, regardless of whether they have any special business arrangement with the utility.
  • Those arguing against net neutrality, most significantly the cable companies, say the Internet will be a richer experience if the profit motive applies, if they can negotiate deals with major content providers (the equivalent of cable channels) so that Netflix or Hulu or other streaming services that use huge bandwidth have to pay for the privilege.
  • It would also give your Internet provider considerably more economic leverage. It would, in the non-net-neutrality world, be free to throttle the speed with which you could access services that don’t pay up, or block sites entirely, as surely as you cannot watch a cable channel that your cable provider chooses not to offer (perhaps because of a dispute with the channel over fees).
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'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technol... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iction-silicon-valley-dystopia dystopia distraction attention fb google manipulation advertising addiction psychology technology social media brain science
shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.
  • “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”
  • most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
  • Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
  • Without irony, Eyal finished his talk with some personal tips for resisting the lure of technology. He told his audience he uses a Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” he writes about in his book, and recommended an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus”.
  • “One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.
  • One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.
  • Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.
  • “The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended”
  • He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create “a craving”, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as “triggers”. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal writes.
  • The most seductive design, Harris explains, exploits the same psychological susceptibility that makes gambling so compulsive: variable rewards. When we tap those apps with red icons, we don’t know whether we’ll discover an interesting email, an avalanche of “likes”, or nothing at all. It is the possibility of disappointment that makes it so compulsive.
  • Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.
  • But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?
  • Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”
  • Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.
  • “I don’t know a more urgent problem than this,” Harris says. “It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.” Harris went public – giving talks, writing papers, meeting lawmakers and campaigning for reform after three years struggling to effect change inside Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
  • He explored how LinkedIn exploits a need for social reciprocity to widen its network; how YouTube and Netflix autoplay videos and next episodes, depriving users of a choice about whether or not they want to keep watching; how Snapchat created its addictive Snapstreaks feature, encouraging near-constant communication between its mostly teenage users.
  • The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.
  • Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.
  • It was Rosenstein’s colleague, Leah Pearlman, then a product manager at Facebook and on the team that created the Facebook “like”, who announced the feature in a 2009 blogpost. Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman confirmed via email that she, too, has grown disaffected with Facebook “likes” and other addictive feedback loops. She has installed a web browser plug-in to eradicate her Facebook news feed, and hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so that she doesn’t have to.
  • Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.
  • It’s this that explains how the pull-to-refresh mechanism, whereby users swipe down, pause and wait to see what content appears, rapidly became one of the most addictive and ubiquitous design features in modern technology. “Each time you’re swiping down, it’s like a slot machine,” Harris says. “You don’t know what’s coming next. Sometimes it’s a beautiful photo. Sometimes it’s just an ad.”
  • The reality TV star’s campaign, he said, had heralded a watershed in which “the new, digitally supercharged dynamics of the attention economy have finally crossed a threshold and become manifest in the political realm”.
  • “Smartphones are useful tools,” he says. “But they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about. I’m not saying I’m mature now, but I’m a little bit more mature, and I regret the downsides.”
  • All of it, he says, is reward-based behaviour that activates the brain’s dopamine pathways. He sometimes finds himself clicking on the red icons beside his apps “to make them go away”, but is conflicted about the ethics of exploiting people’s psychological vulnerabilities. “It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product,” he says. “It’s capitalism.”
  • He identifies the advent of the smartphone as a turning point, raising the stakes in an arms race for people’s attention. “Facebook and Google assert with merit that they are giving users what they want,” McNamee says. “The same can be said about tobacco companies and drug dealers.”
  • McNamee chooses his words carefully. “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences,” he says. “The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models.”
  • But how can Google and Facebook be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into two of the most profitable companies on the planet?
  • McNamee believes the companies he invested in should be subjected to greater regulation, including new anti-monopoly rules. In Washington, there is growing appetite, on both sides of the political divide, to rein in Silicon Valley. But McNamee worries the behemoths he helped build may already be too big to curtail.
  • Rosenstein, the Facebook “like” co-creator, believes there may be a case for state regulation of “psychologically manipulative advertising”, saying the moral impetus is comparable to taking action against fossil fuel or tobacco companies. “If we only care about profit maximisation,” he says, “we will go rapidly into dystopia.”
  • James Williams does not believe talk of dystopia is far-fetched. The ex-Google strategist who built the metrics system for the company’s global search advertising business, he has had a front-row view of an industry he describes as the “largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history”.
  • It is a journey that has led him to question whether democracy can survive the new technological age.
  • He says his epiphany came a few years ago, when he noticed he was surrounded by technology that was inhibiting him from concentrating on the things he wanted to focus on. “It was that kind of individual, existential realisation: what’s going on?” he says. “Isn’t technology supposed to be doing the complete opposite of this?
  • That discomfort was compounded during a moment at work, when he glanced at one of Google’s dashboards, a multicoloured display showing how much of people’s attention the company had commandeered for advertisers. “I realised: this is literally a million people that we’ve sort of nudged or persuaded to do this thing that they weren’t going to otherwise do,” he recalls.
  • Williams and Harris left Google around the same time, and co-founded an advocacy group, Time Well Spent, that seeks to build public momentum for a change in the way big tech companies think about design. Williams finds it hard to comprehend why this issue is not “on the front page of every newspaper every day.
  • “Eighty-seven percent of people wake up and go to sleep with their smartphones,” he says. The entire world now has a new prism through which to understand politics, and Williams worries the consequences are profound.
  • g. “The attention economy incentivises the design of technologies that grab our attention,” he says. “In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions.”
  • That means privileging what is sensational over what is nuanced, appealing to emotion, anger and outrage. The news media is increasingly working in service to tech companies, Williams adds, and must play by the rules of the attention economy to “sensationalise, bait and entertain in order to survive”.
  • It is not just shady or bad actors who were exploiting the internet to change public opinion. The attention economy itself is set up to promote a phenomenon like Trump, who is masterly at grabbing and retaining the attention of supporters and critics alike, often by exploiting or creating outrage.
  • All of which has left Brichter, who has put his design work on the backburner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey, questioning his legacy. “I’ve spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking about whether anything I’ve done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all,” he says. He has blocked certain websites, turned off push notifications, restricted his use of the Telegram app to message only with his wife and two close friends, and tried to wean himself off Twitter. “I still waste time on it,” he confesses, “just reading stupid news I already know about.” He charges his phone in the kitchen, plugging it in at 7pm and not touching it until the next morning.
  • He stresses these dynamics are by no means isolated to the political right: they also play a role, he believes, in the unexpected popularity of leftwing politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the frequent outbreaks of internet outrage over issues that ignite fury among progressives.
  • All of which, Williams says, is not only distorting the way we view politics but, over time, may be changing the way we think, making us less rational and more impulsive. “We’ve habituated ourselves into a perpetual cognitive style of outrage, by internalising the dynamics of the medium,” he says.
  • It was another English science fiction writer, Aldous Huxley, who provided the more prescient observation when he warned that Orwellian-style coercion was less of a threat to democracy than the more subtle power of psychological manipulation, and “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
  • If the attention economy erodes our ability to remember, to reason, to make decisions for ourselves – faculties that are essential to self-governance – what hope is there for democracy itself?
  • “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” he says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.”
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Parents' Dilemma: When to Give Children Smartphones - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...r-americas-children-1515772695 smartphone children addiction psychology brain science technology
shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Experience has already shown parents that ceding control over the devices has reshaped their children’s lives, allowing an outside influence on school work, friendships, recreation, sleep, romance, sex and free time.
  • Nearly 75% of teenagers had access to smartphones, concluded a 2015 study by Pew Research Center—unlocking the devices about 95 times a day on average,
  • They spent, on average, close to nine hours a day tethered to screens large
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The more screen time, the more revenue.
  • The goal of Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Snap Inc. and their peers is to create or host captivating experiences that keep users glued to their screens, whether for Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat or Facebook
  • Snapchat users 25 and younger, for example, were spending 40 minutes a day on the app, Chief Executive Evan Spiegel said in August. Alphabet boasted to investors recently that YouTube’s 1.5 billion users were spending an average 60 minutes a day on mobile.
  • Facebook’s stock slid 4.5% to close at $179 Friday after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans Thursday to overhaul the Facebook news feed in a way that could reduce the time users spend.
  • Tech companies are working to instill viewing habits earlier than ever. The number of users of YouTube Kids is soaring. Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a messaging app for children as young as 6.
  • Ms. Ho’s 16-year-old son, Brian is an Eagle Scout and chorister, who at times finds it hard to break away from online videogames, even at 3 a.m. The teen recently told his mother he thinks he is addicted. Ms. Ho’s daughter, Samantha, 14, also is glued to her device, in conversations with friends.
  • “You think you’re buying a piece of technology,” Ms. Shepardson said. “Now it’s like oxygen to her.”
  • Psychologists say social media creates anxiety among children when they are away from their phones—what they call “fear of missing out,” whether on social plans, conversations or damaging gossip teens worry could be about themselves.
  • About half the teens in a survey of 620 families in 2016 said they felt addicted to their smartphones. Nearly 80% said they checked the phones more than hourly and felt the need to respond instantly to messages
  • Children set up Instagram accounts under pseudonyms that friends but not parents recognize. Some teens keep several of these so-called Finsta accounts without their parents knowing.
  • An app called Secret Calculator looks and works like an iPhone calculator but doubles as a private vault to hide files, photos and videos.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg told investors late last year that Facebook planned to boost video offerings, noting that live video generates 10 times as many user interactions. Netflix Inc. chief executive Reed Hastings, said in April about the addictiveness of its shows that the company was “competing with sleep on the margins.”
  • Keeping children away from disturbing content, though, is easier than keeping them off their phones.
  • About 16% of the nation’s high-school students were bullied online in 2015, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children who are cyberbullied are three times more likely to contemplate suicide
  • Smartphones “bring the outside in,” said Ms. Ahn, whose husband works for a major tech company. “We want the family to be the center of gravity.”
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The Choose-Your-Own-News Adventure - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...news-choice-jim-rutenberg.html new york times bias social media technology
shared by sissij on 14 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.
  • No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week.
  • “You used to be a consumer of reality, and now you’re a designer of reality.”
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  • It started with President Trump’s Twitter posts accusing former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower.
  • The proof, you would have heard him say, was already out there in the mainstream media — what with a report on the website Heat Street saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had secured a warrant to investigate ties between people in Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and articles in The New York Times, in The Washington Post and elsewhere about intelligence linking people in Mr. Trump’s campaign to Russia, some of it from wiretaps.
  • You could throw on the goggles, become a bird and fly around. If virtual reality can allow a human to become a bird, why couldn’t it allow you to live more fully in your own political reality — don the goggles and go live full time in the adventure of your choosing: A, B or C.
  • Just watch out for that wall you’re about to walk into IRL (in real life). Or, hey, don’t — knock yourself out.
  • sissij on 14 Mar 17
     
    This new design reminds me of how the internet is limiting us in our comfort zone. Although in theory, there is almost infinite amount of information on the internet, we can only get a very small proportion of it. And people tends to read the information that support their idea or fit their interests. So the news servers start to design system that only provide readers with what they want to see or like to see. It does not do good to diversify people's mind as what internet should be doing. In the quote, Dan Wagner said: "you're a designer of reality", but I interpret this as we are the designer of our own reality. This will only isolate people from each other. Without living in the same reality, people won't have real communication, so I think this new design does have cons. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
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S&P 500 jumps more than 1% to hit a record high, Nasdaq rallies 2.5% - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...market-open-to-close-news.html economics
shared by martinelligi on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The S&P 500 climbed 1.3% to reach an all-time high, its first record since Feb. 16. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 350 points to hit another intraday record. The Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.5% amid a rotation back into tech shares. Tesla was up 4%. Apple, Facebook and Netflix all jumped at least 2%, while Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft shares were also higher.
  • Tech and growth stocks are rebounding from a swift correction triggered by rising interest rates. Higher rates make profits in far-off years seem less attractive to investors and can knock down stocks with relatively high valuations.
  • “The stimulus is beating the virus at least as far as the market is concerned,”
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  • President Joe Biden is expected to sign the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package Thursday afternoon. The plan will send direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, and will also put nearly $20 billion into Covid-19 vaccinations and $350 billion into state, local and tribal relief.
  • The economic reopening, coupled with additional fiscal stimulus, accelerated the rotation into more cyclical sectors, such as energy. The S&P 500 energy sector has been the biggest winner this year, up 40% so far.
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Analysis: TV news is realigning, with Fox's ratings sagging and CNN's soaring - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by mshilling1 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Furthermore, a big chunk of Fox's base audience was demoralized by Trump's loss in November and disheartened by the pro-Trump riot last week. Fox's average viewership levels are about 20% lower than they were before the election, even though overall TV news viewership is elevated due to the current combination of crises.
  • But for the conservative media ecosystem, just what should be affirmed has suddenly become an existential question."
  • "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information'
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Fox sources say that some viewers have sampled Newsmax, yes, but many have just chosen to turn off the news altogether. They're watching Hallmark, HGTV or Netflix instead.
  • Confusion is certainly apparent among many conservative media producers and commentators -- trying to find their footing as the story of the Capitol assault, and the President's reaction, keeps getting worse."
  • Fox is focusing on what it calls "Big Tech censorship" instead, but I strongly suspect that most people want news about the terror threat right now, not Twitter. Frankly, many Fox shows are running away from the news rather than reporting on it.
  • Second: Fox's decision to de-emphasize the news division "in favor of more opinion programming." Third: The opinion shows going "all-in on conspiracies.
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Imagine a World Without Apps - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...smartphones-apps.html apps browser smartphone
shared by Javier E on 04 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • Allow me to ask a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps?
  • the downsides of our app system — principally the control that Apple and Google, the dominant app store owners in much of the world, exert over our digital lives — are onerous enough to contemplate another path.
  • in recent months, Microsoft’s Xbox video gaming console, the popular game Fortnite and other game companies have moved ahead with technology that makes it possible to play video games on smartphone web browsers.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • if apps weren’t dominant, would we have a richer variety of digital services from a broader array of companies?
  • In the early smartphone era, there was a tug of war between technologies that were more like websites and the apps we know today. Apps won, mostly because they were technically superior.
  • control. Apple and Google dictate much of what is allowed on the world’s phones. There are good outcomes from this, including those companies weeding out bad or dangerous apps and giving us one place to find them.
  • ith unhappy side effects. Apple and Google charge a significant fee on many in-app purchases, and they’ve forced app makers into awkward workarounds.
  • You know what’s free from Apple and Google’s iron grip? The web. Smartphones could lean on the web instead.
  • This is about imagining an alternate reality where companies don’t need to devote money to creating apps that are tailored to iPhones and Android phones, can’t work on any other devices and obligate app makers to hand over a cut of each sale.
  • Maybe more smaller digital companies could thrive. Maybe our digital services would be cheaper and better. Maybe we’d have more than two dominant smartphone systems
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The Year of Blur - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-year-of-blur.html
shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “The days are long, but the years are short.” Except in the pandemic, she said, “the days are long, and the year is also long.”
  • You’re not alone if you feel that 2020, perhaps the most dramatic and memorable year of our lifetimes — and that’s before Election Day — seems shuffled and disordered, like a giant blur. A dream state, or perhaps a nightmare.
  • That’s the paradox of 2020, or one of them: A year so momentous also feels, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.
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  • Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories,
  • the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time
  • there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing
  • For some who have recovered from Covid-19
  • Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.
  • Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation,
  • t doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually
  • If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.
  • The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability.
  • In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”
  • But even people in solitary confinement will tell you that the essence of that experience is something we’re all experiencing now — the deprivation of normal social contact. And human beings really do depend on each other to structure our lives and tell us who we are.”
  • “We’ve all had basically enough of wearing our masks and having our lives disrupted,” Ms. Spinney said, “which is what we’re seeing now with Covid fatigue.”
  • Or perhaps we just need to remember that time is a human construct.
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Did '13 Reasons Why' lead to a spike in adolescent suicides? Researchers are divided - CNN - 0 views

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  • When Netflix debuted "13 Reasons Why" in 2017, some mental health experts argued the show was "dangerous" for its depiction of teen suicide.
  • Research Director Daniel Romer of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania reanalyzed the data while adjusting for the broader increase in suicide between 2013 and 2017. His study was published in PLOS One, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Public Library of Science.
  • "When you have a jump in suicides starting in March and going into April, it's hard to say it's because of the show," he said.Meanwhile, for 10- to 17-year-old girls, Romer said there was a small increase, though so small, that it's not actually statistically significant. It could have been because of the show, but because the jump isn't statistically significant, they can't say for sure, he said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "13 Reasons Why" is based on bestselling author Jay Asher's 2007 young adult book of the same title, following the story of a teenage girl who leaves behind 13 audio recordings on cassette tapes before killing herself. Each tape is addressed to a person who she says played a role in her decision to die.
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