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Javier E

We Are Just Not Digging The Whole Anymore : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...-not-digging-the-whole-anymore

fragmentation reading media attention integration internet information surplus

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. Long-form reading, listening and viewing habits are giving way to browse-and-choose consumption. With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span. - Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at George Mason University We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society.
  • One Duke University student was famously quoted in a 2006 Time magazine essay telling his history professor, "We don't read whole books anymore."
  • Now there are lots of websites that present whole books and concepts in nano form
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • nearly half of all adults — 47 percent — get some of their local news and information on mobile computing devices. We are receiving our news in kibbles and bits, sacrificing context and quality for quickness and quantity.
  • Here is the ultra-condensation of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Mr. Darcy: Nothing is good enough for me. Ms. Elizabeth Bennet: I could never marry that proud man. (They change their minds.) THE END
  • Fewer and fewer gamers are following gaming storylines all the way to completion, according to a recent blog post on the IGN Entertainment video game website.
  • "With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span." He ticks off a long list of bandied-about terms. Here's a shortened version: cognitive overload; information paralysis; techno stress; and data asphyxiation.
  • Rockmore believes that the way many people learn — or try to learn — these days is via this transporter technique. "The truth is," he says, "that modern pedagogy probably needs to address this in the sense that there is so much information out there, for free, so that obtaining it — even in bits and pieces — is not the challenge, rather integrating it into a coherent whole is. That's a new paradigm."
Javier E

Older Really Can Mean Wiser - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...der-really-can-mean-wiser.html

aging brain reasoning youth brain science

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • mental faculties that improve with age.
  • Knowledge is a large part of the equation, of course. People who are middle-aged and older tend to know more than young adults, by virtue of having been around longer, and score higher on vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles and other measures of so-called crystallized intelligence.
  • the older brain offers something more, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. Elements of social judgment and short-term memory, important pieces of the cognitive puzzle, may peak later in life than previously thought.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The researchers found that the broad split in age-related cognition — fluid in the young, crystallized in the old — masked several important nuances.
  • A year ago, German scientists argued that cognitive “deficits” in aging were caused largely by the accumulation of knowledge — that is, the brain slows down because it has to search a larger mental library of facts
  • Experts said the new analysis raised a different question: Are there distinct, independent elements of memory and cognition that peak at varying times of life?
  • The strength of the new analysis is partly in its data. The study evaluated historic scores from the popular Wechsler intelligence test, and compared them with more recent results from tens of thousands of people who took short cognitive tests on the authors’ websites, testmybrain.org and gameswithwords.org
  • The one drawback of this approach is that, because it didn’t follow the same people over a lifetime, it might have missed the effect of different cultural experiences
  • most previous studies have not been nearly as large, or had such a range of ages. Participants on the websites were 10 to 89 years old, and they took a large battery of tests, measuring skills like memory for abstract symbols and strings of digits, problem solving, and facility reading emotions from strangers’ eyes.
  • “We found different abilities really maturing or ripening at different ages,” Dr. Germine said. “It’s a much richer picture of the life span than just calling it aging.”
  • At least as important, the researchers looked at the effect of age on each type of test.
  • Processing speed — the quickness with which someone can manipulate digits, words or images, as if on a mental sketch board — generally peaks in the late teens
  • memory for some things, like names, does so in the early 20s
  • But the capacity of that sketch board, called working memory, peaks at least a decade later and is slow to decline. In particular, the ability to recall faces and do some mental manipulation of numbers peaked about age 30,
  • The researchers also analyzed results from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. The test involves looking at snapshots of strangers’ eyes on a computer screen and determining their moods from a menu of options like “tentative,” “uncertain” and “skeptical.”
  • people in their 40s or 50s consistently did the best, the study found, and the skill declined very slowly later in life
  • The picture that emerges from these findings is of an older brain that moves more slowly than its younger self, but is just as accurate in many areas and more adept at reading others’ moods — on top of being more knowledgeable. That’s a handy combination, given that so many important decisions people make intimately affects others.
  • for now, the new research at least gives some meaning to the empty adjective “wily.”
Javier E

Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-their-print-predecessors.html

book reading stories tech

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • efforts to reimagine the core experience of the book have stumbled. Dozens of publishing start-ups tried harnessing social reading apps or multimedia, but few caught on.
  • Social Books, which let users leave public comments on particular passages and comment on passages selected by others, became Rethink Books and then faltered. Push Pop Press, whose avowed aim was to reimagine the book by mixing text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics, was acquired by Facebook in 2011 and heard from no more. Copia, another highly publicized social reading platform, changed its business model to become a classroom learning tool. The latest to stumble is Small Demons, which explores the interrelationship among books. Users who were struck by the Ziegfeld Follies in “The Great Gatsby,” for instance, could follow a link to the dancers’ appearance in 67 other books. Small Demons said it would close this month without a new investor.
  • “A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.”
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  • The notion that books require too much time to read dates back, at least, to midcentury entrepreneurial operations like Reader’s Digest and CliffsNotes, which offered up predigested texts. So some start-ups chose a basic approach: Take a text and break it up. Safari Flow, a service from Safari Books, offers chapters of technical manuals for a $29 monthly subscription fee. Inkling does the same with more consumer-oriented titles like cookbooks. If you want only the chapter on pasta, you can buy it for $4.99 instead of having to buy the whole book. Citia is a New York start-up with a much more ambitious approach. Working in collaboration with an author, Citia editors take a nonfiction book and reorganize its ideas onto digital cards that can be read on different devices and sent through social networks
  • One of the first books given the Citia treatment was Kevin Kelly’s “What Technology Wants.” Material directly from the book is in quotation marks and the author is referred to in the third person, which lends a somewhat academic distance to the summaries. Sections of the book are summarized on one card, then the reader can drill down into subsections on cards hidden underneath.
  • What to label these stories is another question. The Internet by its nature breaks down borders and unfreezes text. Put a book online and set it free to grow and shrink with new arguments, be broken up and reassembled as readers demand, and it might be only nostalgia that calls it by its old name.
  • “We will continue to recognize books as books as they migrate to the Internet, but our understanding of storytelling will inevitably expand,” Mr. Brantley said. Among the presentations at Books in Browsers this fall: “A Book Isn’t a Book Isn’t a Book” and “The Death of the Reader.”
  • Much of the design innovation at the moment, Mr. Brantley believes, is not coming from publishers, who must still wrestle with delivering both digital and physical books. Instead it is being developed by a tech community that “doesn’t think about stories as the end product. Instead, they think about storytelling platforms that will enable new forms of both authoring and reading.”
  • He cited the enormous success of Wattpad, a Canadian start-up that advertises itself as the world’s largest storytelling community. There are 10 million stories on the site.
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.
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  • 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.
sissij

Bacon Shortage? Calm Down. It's Fake News. - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...bacon-shortage.html

new york times social media language

shared by sissij on 02 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The alarming headlines came quickly Wednesday morning: “Now It’s Getting Serious: 2017 Could See a Bacon Shortage.”
  • The source of the anxiety was a recent report from the U.S.D.A., boosted by the Ohio Pork Council, which reported that the country’s frozen pork belly inventory was at its lowest point in half a century.
  • To create a panic “was not our intent,” Mr. Deaton added with a laugh. “We can’t control how the news is interpreted.”
  • sissij on 02 Feb 17
     
    With the development of Internet and social media, we find the news on the website, paper, TV more unreliable. Partly because we can easily find alternate statement that points out the flaws, but mostly, it's because the news today likes to use exaggeration to grab the attention of the general population. Media should realize the impact and panic it can cause in the society before they report news. Although freedom of speech is appreciated, that doesn't mean the media can put aside its responsibility to guide the general population in a good direction. I remember there was a fake news after the big earthquake in Japan saying that salt can prevent nuclear radiation, then people were all panic and bought salt. It was very funny that in some places, some people were even fighting for a pack of salt. The media should make sure that people won't misunderstand the message before they publish. --Sissi (2/1/2017)
Javier E

The Tech Industry's Psychological War on Kids - Member Feature Stories - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...gical-war-on-kids-c452870464ce

psychology tech industry smartphone social media ethics manipulation children research brain science

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • she cried, “They took my f***ing phone!” Attempting to engage Kelly in conversation, I asked her what she liked about her phone and social media. “They make me happy,” she replied.
  • Even though they were loving and involved parents, Kelly’s mom couldn’t help feeling that they’d failed their daughter and must have done something terribly wrong that led to her problems.
  • My practice as a child and adolescent psychologist is filled with families like Kelly’s. These parents say their kids’ extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media is the most difficult parenting issue they face — and, in many cases, is tearing the family apart.
  • ...88 more annotations...
  • What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology.
  • Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”
  • These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit.
  • psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.
  • This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.
  • Likewise, social media companies use persuasive design to prey on the age-appropriate desire for preteen and teen kids, especially girls, to be socially successful. This drive is built into our DNA, since real-world relational skills have fostered human evolution.
  • Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”
  • Persuasive technology (also called persuasive design) works by deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives.
  • Kids spend countless hours in social media and video game environments in pursuit of likes, “friends,” game points, and levels — because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood.
  • While persuasion techniques work well on adults, they are particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain.
  • “Video games, better than anything else in our culture, deliver rewards to people, especially teenage boys,” says Fogg. “Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second.”
  • it’s persuasive design that’s helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.
  • Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction.
  • As she says, “If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100…. Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”
  • there are costs to Casey’s phone obsession, noting that the “girl’s phone, be it Facebook, Instagram or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework, sleep, or conversations with her family.
  • Casey says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”
  • B.J. Fogg may not be a household name, but Fortune Magazine calls him a “New Guru You Should Know,” and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design.
  • “No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg.”
  • the core of UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities.
  • As Fogg is quoted in Kosner’s Forbes article, “Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, these companies have been using computers to influence our behavior.” However, the driving force behind behavior change isn’t computers. “The missing link isn’t the technology, it’s psychology,” says Fogg.
  • UX researchers not only follow Fogg’s design model, but also his apparent tendency to overlook the broader implications of persuasive design. They focus on the task at hand, building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line.
  • the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers.
  • “We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.”
  • Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use
  • Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications
  • moral questions about the impact of turning persuasive techniques on children and teens are not being asked. For example, should the fear of social rejection be used to compel kids to compulsively use social media? Is it okay to lure kids away from school tasks that demand a strong mental effort so they can spend their lives on social networks or playing video games that don’t make them think much at all?
  • Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.”
  • the startup Dopamine Labs boasts about its use of persuasive techniques to increase profits: “Connect your app to our Persuasive AI [Artificial Intelligence] and lift your engagement and revenue up to 30% by giving your users our perfect bursts of dopamine,” and “A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.”
  • Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”
  • Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices.
  • Banks of computers employ AI to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked
  • A persuasion profile of a particular user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.
  • “The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.”
  • Social media and video game companies believe they are compelled to use persuasive technology in the arms race for attention, profits, and survival.
  • Children’s well-being is not part of the decision calculus.
  • one breakthrough occurred in 2017 when Facebook documents were leaked to The Australian. The internal report crafted by Facebook executives showed the social network boasting to advertisers that by monitoring posts, interactions, and photos in real time, the network is able to track when teens feel “insecure,” “worthless,” “stressed,” “useless” and a “failure.”
  • The report also bragged about Facebook’s ability to micro-target ads down to “moments when young people need a confidence boost.”
  • These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers. This isn’t some strange future… this is now.
  • The official tech industry line is that persuasive technologies are used to make products more engaging and enjoyable. But the revelations of industry insiders can reveal darker motives.
  • Revealing the hard science behind persuasive technology, Hopson says, “This is not to say that players are the same as rats, but that there are general rules of learning which apply equally to both.”
  • After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming system
  • “If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”
  • This is the dominant effect of persuasive design today: building video games and social media products so compelling that they pull users away from the real world to spend their lives in for-profit domains.
  • Persuasive technologies are reshaping childhood, luring kids away from family and schoolwork to spend more and more of their lives sitting before screens and phones.
  • “Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”
  • Today, persuasive design is likely distracting adults from driving safely, productive work, and engaging with their own children — all matters which need urgent attention
  • Still, because the child and adolescent brain is more easily controlled than the adult mind, the use of persuasive design is having a much more hurtful impact on kids.
  • But to engage in a pursuit at the expense of important real-world activities is a core element of addiction.
  • younger U.S. children now spend 5 ½ hours each day with entertainment technologies, including video games, social media, and online videos.
  • Even more, the average teen now spends an incredible 8 hours each day playing with screens and phones
  • U.S. kids only spend 16 minutes each day using the computer at home for school.
  • Quietly, using screens and phones for entertainment has become the dominant activity of childhood.
  • Younger kids spend more time engaging with entertainment screens than they do in school
  • teens spend even more time playing with screens and phones than they do sleeping
  • kids are so taken with their phones and other devices that they have turned their backs to the world around them.
  • many children are missing out on real-life engagement with family and school — the two cornerstones of childhood that lead them to grow up happy and successful
  • persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments
  • A too frequent experience for many is being cyberbullied, which increases their risk of skipping school and considering suicide.
  • And there is growing recognition of the negative impact of FOMO, or the fear of missing out, as kids spend their social media lives watching a parade of peers who look to be having a great time without them, feeding their feelings of loneliness and being less than.
  • The combined effects of the displacement of vital childhood activities and exposure to unhealthy online environments is wrecking a generation.
  • as the typical age when kids get their first smartphone has fallen to 10, it’s no surprise to see serious psychiatric problems — once the domain of teens — now enveloping young kids
  • Self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, that are serious enough to require treatment in an emergency room, have increased dramatically in 10- to 14-year-old girls, up 19% per year since 2009.
  • While girls are pulled onto smartphones and social media, boys are more likely to be seduced into the world of video gaming, often at the expense of a focus on school
  • it’s no surprise to see this generation of boys struggling to make it to college: a full 57% of college admissions are granted to young women compared with only 43% to young men.
  • Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.
  • The destructive forces of psychology deployed by the tech industry are making a greater impact on kids than the positive uses of psychology by mental health providers and child advocates. Put plainly, the science of psychology is hurting kids more than helping them.
  • Hope for this wired generation has seemed dim until recently, when a surprising group has come forward to criticize the tech industry’s use of psychological manipulation: tech executives
  • Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, has led the way by unmasking the industry’s use of persuasive design. Interviewed in The Economist’s 1843 magazine, he says, “The job of these companies is to hook people, and they do that by hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities.”
  • Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud computing company Salesforce, is one of the voices calling for the regulation of social media companies because of their potential to addict children. He says that just as the cigarette industry has been regulated, so too should social media companies. “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,”
  • “If there’s an unfair advantage or things that are out there that are not understood by parents, then the government’s got to come forward and illuminate that.”
  • Since millions of parents, for example the parents of my patient Kelly, have absolutely no idea that devices are used to hijack their children’s minds and lives, regulation of such practices is the right thing to do.
  • Another improbable group to speak out on behalf of children is tech investors.
  • How has the consumer tech industry responded to these calls for change? By going even lower.
  • Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”
  • the American Psychological Association (APA) — which is tasked with protecting children and families from harmful psychological practices — has been essentially silent on the matter
  • APA Ethical Standards require the profession to make efforts to correct the “misuse” of the work of psychologists, which would include the application of B.J. Fogg’s persuasive technologies to influence children against their best interests
  • Manipulating children for profit without their own or parents’ consent, and driving kids to spend more time on devices that contribute to emotional and academic problems is the embodiment of unethical psychological practice.
  • “Never before in history have basically 50 mostly men, mostly 20–35, mostly white engineer designer types within 50 miles of where we are right now [Silicon Valley], had control of what a billion people think and do.”
  • Some may argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their children from tech industry deception. However, parents have no idea of the powerful forces aligned against them, nor do they know how technologies are developed with drug-like effects to capture kids’ minds
  • Others will claim that nothing should be done because the intention behind persuasive design is to build better products, not manipulate kids
  • similar circumstances exist in the cigarette industry, as tobacco companies have as their intention profiting from the sale of their product, not hurting children. Nonetheless, because cigarettes and persuasive design predictably harm children, actions should be taken to protect kids from their effects.
  • in a 1998 academic paper, Fogg describes what should happen if things go wrong, saying, if persuasive technologies are “deemed harmful or questionable in some regard, a researcher should then either take social action or advocate that others do so.”
  • I suggest turning to President John F. Kennedy’s prescient guidance: He said that technology “has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.”
  • The APA should begin by demanding that the tech industry’s behavioral manipulation techniques be brought out of the shadows and exposed to the light of public awareness
  • Changes should be made in the APA’s Ethics Code to specifically prevent psychologists from manipulating children using digital machines, especially if such influence is known to pose risks to their well-being.
  • Moreover, the APA should follow its Ethical Standards by making strong efforts to correct the misuse of psychological persuasion by the tech industry and by user experience designers outside the field of psychology.
  • It should join with tech executives who are demanding that persuasive design in kids’ tech products be regulated
  • The APA also should make its powerful voice heard amongst the growing chorus calling out tech companies that intentionally exploit children’s vulnerabilities.
Javier E

How to avoid covid-19 hoax stories? - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ry-citizens-identify-fake-news

disinformation fake news detection misinformation false

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • How good are people at sifting out fake news?
  • we’ve been investigating whether ordinary individuals who encounter news when it first appears online — before fact-checkers like Snopes and PolitiFacts have an opportunity to issue reports about an article’s veracity — are able to identify whether articles contain true or false information.
  • Unfortunately, it seems quite difficult for people to identify false or misleading news, and the limited number of coronavirus news stories in our collection are no exception
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Over a 13-week period, our study allowed us to capture people’s assessments of fresh news articles in real time. Each day of the study, we relied on a fixed, pre-registered process to select five popular articles published within the previous 24 hours
  • The five articles were balanced between conservative, liberal and non-partisan sources, as well as from mainstream news websites and from websites known to produce fake news. In total, we sent 150 total articles to 90 survey respondents each
  • We also sent these articles separately to six independent fact checkers, and treated their most common response — true, false/misleading, or cannot determine — for each article as the “correct’’ answer for that article.
  • When shown an article that was rated “true” by the professional fact checkers, respondents correctly identified the article as true 62 percent of the time. When the source of the true news story was a mainstream news source, respondents correctly identified the article as true 73 percent of the time.
  • However, for each article the professional fact checkers rated “false/misleading,” the study participants were as likely to say it was true as they were to say it was false or misleading. And roughly one-third of the time they told us they were unable to determine the veracity of the article. In other words, people on the whole were unable to correctly classify false or misleading news.
  • four of the articles in our study that fact checkers rated as false or misleading were related to the coronavirus.
  • All four articles promoted the unfounded rumor that the virus was intentionally developed in a laboratory. Although accidental releases of pathogens from labs have previously caused significant morbidity and mortality, in the current pandemic multiple pieces of evidence suggest this virus is of natural origin. There’s little evidence that the virus was manufactured or altered.
  • Only 30 percent of participants correctly classified them as false or misleading.
  • respondents seemed to have more trouble deciding what to think about false covid-19 stories, leading to a higher proportion of “could not determine” responses than we saw for the stories on other topics our professional fact checkers rated as “false/misleading.” This finding suggests that it may be particularly difficult to identify misinformation in newly emerging topics
  • Study participants with higher levels of education did better on identifying both fake news overall and coronavirus-related fake news — but were far from being able to correctly weed out misinformation all of the time
  • In fact, no group, regardless of education level, was able to correctly identify the stories that the professional fact checkers had labeled as false or misleading more than 40 percent of the time.
  • Taken together, our findings suggest that there is widespread potential for vulnerability to misinformation when it first appears online. This is especially worrying during the current pandemic
  • In the current environment, misinformation has the potential to undermine social distancing efforts, to lead people to hoard supplies, or to promote the adoption of potentially dangerous fake cures.
  • our findings suggest that non-trivial numbers of people will believe false information to be true when they first encounter it. And it suggests that efforts to remove coronavirus-related misinformation will need to be swift — and implemented early in an article’s life-cycle — to stop the spread of something else that’s dangerous: misinformation.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Aren't We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About? - The New... - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...curiosity-brain.html

curiosity psychology research

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • why do I so often learn things I don’t want to know? When I’m surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe’s political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about?
  • if you understand what prompts curiosity, you may be able to channel it a little better.
  • Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments;
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • it’s good to know about your environment even if it doesn’t promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today, but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don’t expect any concrete payoff
  • What’s more, curiosity doesn’t just ensure new opportunities for learning, it enhances learning itself
  • subjects better remembered those appearing after trivia questions that made them curious. Curiosity causes a brain state that amplifies learning.
  • This function of curiosity — to heighten memory — is the key to understanding why we’re curious about some things and not others. We feel most curious when exploration will yield the most learning.
  • Suppose I ask you, “What’s the most common type of star in the Milky Way?” You’ll obviously feel no curiosity if you already know the answer. But you’ll also feel little interest if you know nothing about stars; if you learned the answer, you couldn’t connect it to other knowledge, so it would seem nearly meaningless, an isolated factoid
  • We’re maximally curious when we sense that the environment offers new information in the right proportion to complement what we already know.
  • Note that your brain calculates what you might learn in the short term — your long-term interests aren’t a factor
  • Many websites that snare your time feature scores of stories on the front page, banking that one will strike each reader’s sweet spot of knowledge. So visit websites that use the same strategy but offer richer content, for example, JSTOR Daily, Arts & Letters Daily or ScienceDaily.
  • Curiosity arises from the right balance of the familiar and the novel. Naturally, writers vary in what they assume their audience already knows and wants to know; when you find an author who tends to have your number, stick with her.
adonahue011

Opinion | Take a Social Media Break Until You've Voted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-election-misinformation.html

opinion new york times social media research technology education bias

shared by adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is an interesting idea to me because people are so set in their views, how staying on social media leading up to the election will affect their vote is a bit confusing.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I think the idea of believing what you see on social media could be a logical fallacy. The idea of following the mases on a specific idea, or an authority figure
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I think the idea of believing what you see on social media could be a logical fallacy. The idea of following the mases on a specific idea, or an authority figure
  • Americans who rely the most on social media to get their news are also far less likely to have accurate or complete knowledge of political events
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • 60 percent of people who primarily get their news from social media had minimal knowledge of current political events, according to the study, compared with 23 percent who primarily get their news directly from news websites or apps
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Very interesting statistic. I think social media allows for too much individual opinion when it comes to news. Our brains are very deceptive so I find it easy to believe things I personally read on social media.
  • 18- to 29-year-olds, 48 percent get most of their political news from social media sites
  • are breeding a generation of the misinformed — a situation that has only grown more dire at a time when the president spreads falsehoods about public health and the election.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      I don't agree with this at all. I think the younger generation is seeing the older generation use social media as a news outlet many times. This is the logical fallacy I previously mentioned.
  • while false information flows unimpeded through Facebook groups, user posts and advertisements.
  • The company says it will limit political advertising in the week before Election Day — but with huge numbers of mail-in ballots already being sent in around the country, that will amount to too little, too late.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The writer of this article is very bias on this topic, at least facebook is trying to help.
  • “I don’t think there is any question at this point voters will be more informed by seeking out news brands they trust rather than spending their time on social media where it’s less than clear,”
  • Twitter sometimes forces users to first click through a warning that a tweet violates its rules on election integrity,
  • The problem with such posts is that they are widely spread, echoed and believed — and that happens far more quickly than moderators can react with a warning label.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
       
      This is an important point which is why when we look at media we need to try and analyze it, and not allow ourselves to believe everything we read.
  • Mr. Trump that falsely claimed the seasonal flu is responsible for more deaths than coronavirus
  • here are many positives to social media, of course — particularly as millions of Americans struggle to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • available more reliably elsewhere, from your local board of elections website and from good government groups
  • People believe them.
  • Social media is a cesspool
  • however, aren’t taking the threat of spreading misinformation seriously enough ahead of the election.
  • Stay off social media at least until you’ve voted.
runlai_jiang

Coca-Cola Plans Its First Alcoholic Drink - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...rst-alcoholic-drink-1520423751

Coco-colaJapan New beverage drink strategy sales

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Coca-Cola Co.’s KO -0.68% Japan unit plans to introduce a fizzy alcoholic drink in the country, in what the company describes as the first alcoholic product it has ever developed.
  • Jorge Garduño, president of Coca-Cola’s Japan unit, said in an article posted on the company’s website that it is “going to experiment” with a canned drink that contains alcohol—a product category known as chu-hai in Japan.
  • Coca-Cola’s Japan unit has long sold many drinks that aren’t available elsewhere, including various teas and coffees and a laxative version of Coke called Coca-Cola Plus that was marketed as a health drink.
    • runlai_jiang
      runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18
       
      Japan has always been innovative and creative in food industry
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Japan confirmed Wednesday that low-alcohol products are being “considered as an experimental approach.” She declined to give details of the proposed product, including when it might go on sale, and declined to make Mr. Garduño available for an interview.
  • Analysts and those in the drinks industry have long speculated that traditional divisions between alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverage companies will fade as more stores and websites sell both types of drinks.
  • The Coca-Cola spokesman declined to comment Wednesday on whether the company is exploring alcohol sales outside of Japan.
  • “While I don’t think this represents a global shift in company strategy, I do think we can expect Coca-Cola and its competitors to continue looking for new opportunities as traditional category lines and beverage occasions blur,
    • runlai_jiang
      runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18
       
      It might be a new strategy for companies to break through tradition and absorb and explore wider business aspects
  • Japan has a highly competitive beverage market, where companies can introduce as many as 100 new drinks a year.
  • According to Suntory, the total market in Japan for canned ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages has grown for 10 consecutive years. It grew 9% in 2017 to the equivalent of 183 million 24-can cases.
tongoscar

Recycling News: China to Ban Single-Use Plastic in Cities - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...uce-single-use-plastic-by-2025

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • China’s top economic planner said it would cut the production and use of plastic over the next five years, helping reduce one of the world’s biggest sources of plastic pollution.By the end of this year, non-degradable plastic bags will be banned in places such as supermarkets and shopping malls in major cities, as well as in the country’s ubiquitous food delivery services, according to a plan released by the National Development and Reform Commission on Sunday.
  • China will significantly reduce the use of disposable plastic in e-commerce, express deliveries and takeaway food by 2022, while promoting alternative materials,
  • The use of plastic in the world’s most populous nation has risen as online shopping and food delivery apps have become part of everyday life, even in rural areas.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • China has taken steps to address the deluge of plastic, including introducing a mandatory recycling system that’s being piloted in cities such as Shanghai.
Javier E

No, Trump's sister did not publicly back him. He was duped by a fake account. - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-duped-by-a-fake-account.html

fake account twitter trump social media

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • That article, on the website of a conservative talk-radio host named Wayne Dupree, quoted a post from a Twitter account named “Betty Trump” that used a photo of Ms. Trump Grau as its profile picture.
  • “This election inspired me to break my silence and speak out on behalf of my family,” the account said in a post on Wednesday. “My brother Don won this election and will fight this to the very end. We’ve always been a family of fighters.”
  • Had the article’s author looked more closely, though, she would have noticed some suspicious details about the account. It was a day old. The photos it used of Ms. Trump Grau were taken from Getty Images and past news articles about her. And since that first post, the account had tweeted increasingly bizarre messages, sharply criticizing Democrats, journalists and Republicans who had questioned the false claim that Mr. Trump was re-elected.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The bizarre episode illustrates how easily misinformation spreads online, often with the help of the president himself. Right-wing websites that seek to support the president’s baseless claims, or simply attract clicks so they can sell more ads, often eschew the traditional principles of journalism, such as simple fact-checking. And the social media companies aid the cycle by making it simple to share misinformation, including via fake accounts, and by training their algorithms to promote material that attracts more attention, as sensational and divisive posts often do.
peterconnelly

Virtual learning apps tracked and shared kids' data and online activities with advertis... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

cnn data

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Millions of students who participated in virtual learning during the Covid-19 pandemic had their personal data and online behaviors tracked by educational apps and websites without their consent and in many cases shared with third-party advertising technology companies, a new report has found.
  • Human Rights Watch found 146 (89%) appeared to engage in data practices that "risked or infringed on children's rights."
  • Han said the majority of the apps and websites examined by Human Rights Watch sent information about children to Google and Facebook, which collectively dominate the digital advertising market.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and a fellow at the NYU School of Law, said the findings add to mounting concerns around the collection of data among young people. In recent months, there has been intense scrutiny from lawmakers about the impact tech platforms have on teens.
  • "We already knew technologies were being abused and putting children at risk, but this report is really important because it shows the scale of harm and how the same mistake is being made by educators and governments around the world," he said.
  • "Students must be able to do their schoolwork without surveillance by companies looking to harvest their data to pad their bottom line," said Samuel Levine
  • "The data must serve a purpose, but the purpose cannot be advertising," he said. "If it is not something we do in physical classrooms, it is not something that should be part of digital school life."
Javier E

Putting Economic Data Into Context - The New York Times - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...ing-economic-data-into-context

economic data context historical analysis history research

shared by Javier E on 17 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • economic historians have been wrestling with this problem for years and have produced an excellent calculator for converting historical data into contemporary figures. The site is called Measuring Worth,
  • Today we use price indexes to convert monetary values from the past into “real” values today. The best-known such index is the Consumer Price Index published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For those interested only in a simple inflation adjustment, the bureau maintains a useful calculator.
  • The area where this is the biggest problem is probably large budget numbers. The raw data is almost universally useless. Saying that the budget deficit was $680.3 billion in fiscal year 2013 tells the average person absolutely nothing of value. It’s just a large number that sounds scary. It would help to at least know that it is down from $1.087 trillion in 2012 and a peak of $1.413 trillion in 2009, but that’s not entirely adequate.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • it makes no sense to compare the federal budget to a family budget, which is what the Consumer Price Index is based on. One needs to use a broader index, like the gross domestic product deflator, which measures price changes throughout the entire economy.
  • For large numbers, the percentage of the gross domestic product is both the easiest to find and best to use.
  • Since the “burden” of the debt basically falls on the entire economy, the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio is generally considered the best measure of that burden. It also facilitates international comparisons without having to worry about exchange-rate adjustments.
  • international price comparisons can be especially tricky because current market exchange rates may not accurately reflect relative values or standards of living. Economists generally prefer to use something called “purchasing power parity,” but such data is not always easy to come by
  • There is much more to say on this topic. I recommend an essay on the Measuring Worth website that discusses different measures of value over time and how they materially affect our perceptions. There are also new statistical measures coming online that may provide even better data, like the Billion Prices Project from M.I.T., which gathers price data in real time directly from store price scanners.
  • This is an area where trial and error is the best strategy. The important thing is to make an effort to provide proper context where it appears necessary and not to simply ignore the problem.
Javier E

Nate Silver, Artist of Uncertainty - 0 views

prospect.org/...artist-uncertainty

uncertainty risk probability statistics prediction social science

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • In 2008, Nate Silver correctly predicted the results of all 35 Senate races and the presidential results in 49 out of 50 states. Since then, his website, fivethirtyeight.com (now central to The New York Times’s political coverage), has become an essential source of rigorous, objective analysis of voter surveys to predict the Electoral College outcome of presidential campaigns. 
  • Political junkies, activists, strategists, and journalists will gain a deeper and more sobering sense of Silver’s methods in The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t (Penguin Press). A brilliant analysis of forecasting in finance, geology, politics, sports, weather, and other domains, Silver’s book is also an original fusion of cognitive psychology and modern statistical theory.
  • Its most important message is that the first step toward improving our predictions is learning how to live with uncertainty.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The second step is starting to understand why it is that big data, super computers, and mathematical sophistication haven’t made us better at separating signals (information with true predictive value) from noise (misleading information). 
  • Silver’s background in sports and poker turns out to be invaluable. Successful analysts in gambling and sports are different from fans and partisans—far more aware that “sure things” are likely to be illusions,
  • he blends the best of modern statistical analysis with research on cognition biases pioneered by Princeton psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics  Daniel Kahneman and the late Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky. 
  • One of the biggest problems we have in separating signal from noise is that when we look too hard for certainty that isn’t there, we often end up attracted to noise, either because it is more prominent or because it confirms what we would like to believe.
  • In discipline after discipline, Silver shows in his book that when you look at even the best single forecast, the average of all independent forecasts is 15 to 20 percent more accurate. 
  • Silver has taken the next major step: constantly incorporating both state polls and national polls into Bayesian models that also incorporate economic data.
  • Silver explains why we will be misled if we only consider significance tests—i.e., statements that the margin of error for the results is, for example, plus or minus four points, meaning there is one chance in 20 that the percentages reported are off by more than four. Calculations like these assume the only source of error is sampling error—the irreducible error—while ignoring errors attributable to house effects, like the proportion of cell-phone users, one of the complex set of assumptions every pollster must make about who will actually vote. In other words, such an approach ignores context in order to avoid having to justify and defend judgments. 
Javier E

How Facebook Warps Our Worlds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-warps-our-worlds.html

facebook social network shaming groupthink fragmentation partisan epistemic tribal conformity crisis culture psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform
  • We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.
  • I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • “And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added. “The Facebook effect isn’t trivial. But it’s catalyzing or amplifying a tendency that was already there.”
  • prevalent for many users are the posts we see from friends and from other people and groups we follow on the network, and this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make
  • The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is
  • So it goes with the fiction we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to and, scarily, the ideas we subscribe to. They’re not challenged. They’re validated and reinforced.
  • this colors our days, or rather bleeds them of color, reducing them to a single hue.
  • Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.
  • Carnival barkers, conspiracy theories, willful bias and nasty partisanship aren’t anything new, and they haven’t reached unprecedented heights today. But what’s remarkable and sort of heartbreaking is the way they’re fed by what should be strides in our ability to educate ourselves.
  • The proliferation of cable television networks and growth of the Internet promised to expand our worlds, not shrink them. Instead they’ve enhanced the speed and thoroughness with which we retreat into enclaves of the like-minded.
  • there’s no argument that in an era that teems with choice, brims with niche marketing and exalts individualism to the extent that ours does, we’re sorting ourselves with a chillingly ruthless efficiency. We’ve surrendered universal points of reference. We’ve lost common ground.
  • Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.
  • We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.
  • We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it
  • It’s not about some sorcerer’s algorithm. It’s about a tribalism that has existed for as long as humankind has and is now rooted in the fertile soil of the Internet, which is coaxing it toward a full and insidious flower
Javier E

Fact Check: This Pizzeria Is Not a Child-Trafficking Site - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-a-child-trafficking-site.html

fake news disinformation discourse history culture communications social media

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • images, pilfered from the restaurant’s social media pages and the personal accounts of friends who had “liked” Comet Ping Pong online. Those photos have been used across dozens of websites. Parents, who declined to talk publicly for fear of retribution, have hired lawyers to get the photos removed.
  • Musicians who have performed at Comet Ping Pong have been pulled in, too. Amanda Kleinman, whose band, Heavy Breathing, has performed there several times, deleted her Twitter account after the abusive comments became overwhelming. Similar comments have flooded her YouTube music clips
  • “We are at a dangerous place in American culture where a good percentage of people aren’t distinguishing what is a real news source based on real reporting and fact-checking and only reinforcing pre-existing ideas they have,” Ms. Kleinman said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The frustration has been compounded by the lack of recourse for Mr. Alefantis, his friends and employees. Yelp blocked the comments sections of Comet Ping Pong’s review page after reports of abusive comments and fake news in reviews. YouTube said it prohibits threats, harassment and hate speech and has tools for flagging violations and filing complaints for the site to take further action, but has largely not blocked comments on these videos. Twitter declined to comment, and Facebook did not have any further comment.
  • After employees and Mr. Alefantis complained to Reddit about how Comet Ping Pong was being targeted on the site, the #pizzagate discussion thread posted a warning that revealing personal information about individuals was prohibited.“We know that we have more work to do and we take our responsibility to address online abuse seriously,” Reddit said in a statement
Javier E

Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ngela-merkel-donald-trump.html

obama fake news social media

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • “Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television,” Mr. Obama said. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made,
  • Bogus news stories appearing online and on social media appear to have had a greater reach in the final months of the campaign than articles by authoritative, mainstream news outlets, according to an analysis of Facebook activity by BuzzFeed
  • In the three months before Election Day, the most popular stories produced by hoax sites and “hyperpartisan blogs” generated more engagement — likes, shares and comments — on Facebook than the most popular articles by major news websites, the analysis found.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Among the 20 most popular fake election stories identified by BuzzFeed, all but three favored Mr. Trump or denigrated Hillary Clinton.
  • “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”
Javier E

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...g-trust-in-real-reporting.html

fake news facebook culture crisis informed citizenry reporting social media

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • It misunderstands a new media world in which every story, and source, is at risk of being discredited, not by argument but by sheer force.
  • During the months I spent talking to partisan Facebook page operators for a magazine article this year, it became clear that while the ecosystem contained easily identifiable and intentional fabrication, it contained much, much more of something else.
  • I recall a conversation with a fact checker about how to describe a story, posted on a pro-Trump website and promoted on a pro-Trump Facebook page — and, incidentally, copied from another pro-Trump site by overseas contractors. It tried to cast suspicion on Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier, who had spoken out against Donald J. Trump.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The overarching claims of the story were disingenuous and horrifying; the facts it included had been removed from all useful context and placed in a new, sinister one; its insinuating mention of “Muslim martyrs,” in proximity to mentions of Mr. Khan’s son, and its misleading and strategic mention of Shariah law, amounted to a repulsive smear. It was a story that appealed to bigoted ideas and that would clearly appeal to those who held them.
  • This was a story the likes of which was an enormous force in this election, clearly designed to function well within Facebook’s economy of sharing. And it probably would not run afoul of the narrow definition of “fake news.”
  • Stories like that one get to the heart of the rhetorical and strategic risk of holding up “fake news” as a broad media offensive position, especially after an election cycle characterized by the euphoric inversion of rhetoric by some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, and by the candidate himself
  • This tactic was used on the language of social justice, which was appropriated by opponents and redeployed nihilistically, in an open effort to sap its power while simultaneously taking advantage of what power it retained
  • Anti-racists were cast as the real racists. Progressives were cast as secretly regressive on their own terms
  • This was not a new tactic, but it was newly effective. It didn’t matter that its targets knew that it was a bad-faith maneuver, a clear bid for power rather than an attempt to engage or reason. The referees called foul, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the crowds. Or maybe they could, but realized that nobody could make them listen.
  • This wide formulation of “fake news” will be applied back to the traditional news media, which does not yet understand how threatened its ability is to declare things true, even when they are.
  • the worst identified defenders make their money outside Facebook anyway.
  • Another narrow response from Facebook could be to assert editorial control over external forces
  • Facebook is a place where people construct and project identities to friends, family and peers. It is a marketplace in which news is valuable mainly to the extent that it serves those identities. It is a system built on ranking and vetting and votin
  • Fake news operations are closely aligned with the experienced incentives of the Facebook economy
  • the outrage is at risk of being misdirected, and will be followed by the realization that the colloquial “fake news” — the newslike media, amateur and professional, for which truth is defined first in personal and political terms, and which must only meet the bar of not being obviously, inarguably, demonstrably false — will continue growing apace, gaining authority by sheer force
  • Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns
  • Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise.
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