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December 17 TikTok threat: Schools across Philadelphia region on alert due to threat of... - 0 views

6abc.com/...11350254
shared by criscimagnael on 17 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • Earlier this year, TikTok challenges encouraged students to destroy school property. Now there's another one spreading nationwide. It started out as a challenge to ditch school, which morphed into a threat of violence at schools on Friday, December 17
  • "Years ago, not being as well versed in handling these situations, I think we would've reacted a little bit differently. But now our number one objective is to keep schools open and keep kids safe,"
  • "If you see a change in behavior in a student who is experiencing something profound: it could be deep depression, it could be anxiety, it could be them mentioning or displaying a weapon. It could be they're talking about suicide. Any kind of self-harm discussions. Please don't keep that inside,"
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The Thread Vibes Are Off - by Anne Helen Petersen - 0 views

annehelen.substack.com/...the-thread-vibes-are-off social media twitter instagram tiktok facebook linkedin comparison
shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • The way people post on Twitter is different from the way people post on LinkedIn which is different than how people post Facebook which is different from the way people post on Instagram, no matter how much Facebook keeps telling you to cross-post your IG stories
  • Some people whose job relies on onlineness (like me) have to refine their voices, their ways of being, across several platforms. But most normal people have found their lane — the medium that fits their message — and have stuck with it.
  • People post where they feel public speech “belongs.”
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • For some, the only speech they feel should be truly public should also be “professional.” Hence: LinkedIn, where the only associated image is a professional headshot, and the only conversations are those related to work.
  • The Facebook of the 2010s was for broadcasting ideological stances under your real name and fighting with your close and extended community about them; now it’s (largely) about finding advice (and fighting about advice) in affinity groups (often) composed of people you’ve never met.
  • Twitter is where you could publicly (if often anonymously) fight, troll, dunk, harass, joke, and generally speak without consequence; it’s also where the mundane status update/life musing (once the foundation of Facebook) could live peacefully.
  • On TikTok, you don’t reshare memes, you use them as the soundtrack to your reimagining, even if that reimagining is just “what if I do the same dance, only with my slightly dorky parents?
  • Which is how some people really would like to navigate the public sphere: with total freedom and total impunity
  • On the flip side, Twitter was where you spoke with your real (verified) name — and with great, algorithm-assisted importance. You could amass clout simply by rephrasing others’ scoops in your own words, declaring opinions as facts, or just declaring. If Twitter was gendered masculine — which it certainly was, and is arguably even more so now — it was only because all of those behaviors are as well.
  • Tiktok is for monologues, for expertise, for timing and performance. It’s without pretense.
  • It rewards the esoteric, the visually witty, the mimetic — even more than Twitter.
  • Twitter was for publicly observing — through the scroll, but also by tweeting, retweeting, quote tweeting — while remaining effectively invisible, a reply-guy amongst reply-guys, a troll amongst trolls.
  • Like YouTube, far fewer people are posting than consuming, which means that most people aren’t speaking at all.
  • And then there’s Instagram. People think Instagram is for extroverts, for people who want to broadcast every bit of their lives, but most Instagram users I know are shy — at least with public words. Instagram is where parents post pictures of their kids with the caption “these guys right here” or a picture of their dog with “a very good boy.”
  • The text doesn’t matter; the photo speaks loudest. Each post becomes overdetermined, especially when so readily viewed within the context of the greater grid
  • The more you understand your value as the sum of your visual parts, the more addictive, essential, and anxiety-producing Instagram becomes.
  • That emphasis on aesthetic perfection is part of what feminizes Instagram — but it’s also what makes it the most natural home for brands, celebrities, and influencers.
  • a static image can communicate a whole lifestyle — and brands have had decades of practice honing the practice in magazine ads and catalogs.
  • And what is an influencer if not a conduit for brands? What is a celebrity if not a conduit for their own constellation of brands?
  • If LinkedIn is the place where you can pretend that your whole life and personality is “business,” then Instagram is where you can pretend it’s all some form of leisure — or at least fun
  • A “fun” work trip, a “fun” behind-the-scenes shot, a brand doing the very hard work of trying to get you to click through and make a purchase with images that are fun fun fun.
  • Instagram is serious and sincere (see: the success of the social justice slideshow) and almost never ironic — maybe because static visual irony is pretty hard to pull off.
  • Instagram is a great place to post an announcement and feel celebrated or consoled but not feel like you have to respond to people
  • The conversation is easier to both control and ignore; of all the social networks, it most closely resembles the fawning broadcast style of the fan magazine, only the celebs control the final edit, not the magazine publisher
  • Celebrities initially glommed to Twitte
  • But its utility gradually faded: part of the problem was harassment, but part of it was context collapse, and the way it allowed words to travel across the platform and out of the celebrity’s control.
  • Instagram was just so much simpler, the communication so clearly in the celebrity wheelhouse. There is very little context collapse on Instagram — it’s all curation and control. As such, you can look interesting but say very little.
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The Israel-Hamas War Shows Just How Broken Social Media Has Become - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675614 social media media disinformation news crisis information culture
shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. In response, some users have left for smaller competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon. Some have simply left. The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle
  • Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as to be disorienting, even terrifying.
  • At the same time, Facebook’s user base began to erode, and the company’s transparency reports revealed that the most popular content circulating on the platform was little more than viral garbage—a vast wasteland of CBD promotional content and foreign tabloid clickbait.
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  • What’s left, across all platforms, is fragmented. News and punditry are everywhere online, but audiences are siloed; podcasts are more popular than ever, and millions of younger people online have turned to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok as trusted sources of news.
  • Social media, especially Twitter, has sometimes been an incredible news-gathering tool; it has also been terrible and inefficient, a game of do your own research that involves batting away bullshit and parsing half truths, hyperbole, outright lies, and invaluable context from experts on the fly. Social media’s greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you feel connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually being informed.
  • At the center of these pleas for a Twitter alternative is a feeling that a fundamental promise has been broken. In exchange for our time, our data, and even our well-being, we uploaded our most important conversations onto platforms designed for viral advertising—all under the implicit understanding that social media could provide an unparalleled window to the world.
  • What comes next is impossible to anticipate, but it’s worth considering the possibility that the centrality of social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years has come to an end—that this particular window to the world is being slammed shut.
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Is it TikTok or global crisis? How the world lost its trust in scientists like me | Gio... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...trust-scientists-online-attack crisis response science knowledge history trust confidence progress culture
shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • At the height of the pandemic in October 2020 I’d had a similar experience. At the time, I was president of the Accademia dei Lincei, Italy’s most important scientific academy, and the second deadly wave of Covid was arriving. I argued in a long and reasoned article, highlighting the epidemiological situation in detail, that either drastic measures would need to be taken immediately or 500 deaths a day could be expected by mid-November (unfortunately the prediction was accurate). Immediately after publication, I received emails telling me in the strongest of terms that I had better not get involved in other people’s business.
  • These episodes made me experience first-hand a phenomenon that I was becoming increasingly familiar with: the vanishing of confidence in science. It seems almost a paradox: as our societies become more and more dependent on advanced technology based on scientific discoveries, people are becoming more and more suspicious of scientists.
  • How can we make sense of this? There are many factors to consider
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  • the decreasing importance of the printed word, over the past decades, in favour of visual and hyper-concise forms of media, from TV to TikTok. Televised debates require fast reaction times, whereas scientists are used to studying issues at length and only talking about them after thinking.
  • a successful visual performance is not just about being correct but evoking sympathy in the viewer – about performing. This doesn’t always come easy to scientists.
  • Whereas once it was thought that the future would necessarily be better than the present, faith in progress – in the magnificent and progressive fortunes of humans – has been eroded
  • And just as science used to get the credit for progress, so now it receives the blame for decline (real or just perceived, it doesn’t matter). Science is sometimes felt to be a bad teacher who has led us in the wrong direction, and changing this perception is not easy.
  • In a nutshell, scientists are thought to be part of the elite and, therefore, not trustworthy. And the increasing interest by a fraction of scientists in patenting knowledge and making individual financial gains from discoveries reinforces this identification with the elite
  • a fundamental reality: science makes fair predictions that become reliable after the gradual formation of a scientific consensus. The construction of consensus is the process that makes the real difference – it involves the whole scientific community and that cannot be manipulated.
  • this lack of trust can have disastrous effects: if citizens do not trust science, we will not be able to fight global warming, infectious diseases, poverty and hunger, and the depletion of the planet’s natural resources.
  • A great coordinated effort is needed, and this will only be possible if there is a full understanding of the dramatic nature of the problem
  • A part of the human and financial resources devoted to the advancement of science must be used to discuss with citizens, through education and media and outreach programmes, what science really is: the most reliable and honest tool for understanding the world and predicting the future.
  • It is also important that we scientists talk about not just our successes, but our mistakes, doubts and hesitations. Often there is no trace, in the public scientific discourse, of the toil of the scientific process and the doubts that accompany it.
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'Childhood has been rewired': Professor Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones are damaging ... - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...ones-are-damaging-a-generation social media smartphone kids suicide mental health psychology culture crisis policy
shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharpl
  • He is working on a book, due out next year, and is ready to share his thesis.
  • his message is quite horrifying.
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  • He argues that the tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair
  • For girls, the effect is especially acute. ‘What we’re seeing is a very sharp, sudden change in girls’ mental health all around the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries,’ he says. A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat. ‘But you cannot grow up in networks. You have to grow up in communities.’
  • The first is that they are fragile and can be harmed by speech and words.
  • But if you’re a secular liberal girl, you’re probably more than twice as likely to have a mental health problem.’
  • a University of Michigan survey into ‘self-derogation’ – i.e., how likely teenagers are to say they are ‘no good’ or ‘can’t do anything right’. Figures had been stable for years but started rising sharply ten years ago – except for among boys who identified as conservative and said that religion was important to them.
  • irls simply use social media more. But Professor Haidt also thinks they are more likely to buy into what he calls the ‘three great untruths’ of social media
  • boys who have religion in their lives seem to be less susceptible. ‘If you’re a kid who’s a religious conservative, on average, your mental health is not really much worse than it was ten years ago
  • Next, that their emotions, and especially their anxieties, are reliable guides to reality.
  • And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors. All this, he says, is the subtext to social media discourse.
  • ‘It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,’
  • So we had playdates in childhood, up until around 2010.’ In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply.
  • Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but ‘performing on a platform’. Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, ‘where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people
  • Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re 18. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.’
  • I ask if he thinks all platforms are equally dangerous
  • if you get your news from social media (which many people do – in the UK, Instagram has overtaken all newspapers as a news source), this can change your view of the world, especially as the algorithms tend to promote the most provocative views.
  • ‘TikTok is probably the worst for their intellectual development. I think it literally reduces their ability to focus on anything while stuffing them with little bits of stuff that was selected by an algorithm for emotional arousal. Not for truth.’
  • If asked to choose whether they side more with Israel or Hamas, ‘the great majority of Americans side with Israel, except for Gen Z, which is split 50-50’,
  • ‘There was a Twitter thread recently showing how if you look at what people are saying on TikTok, you can understand why
  • TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’
  • Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?
  • why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14
  • we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’
  • he increased number of suicides since 2010 is so large that I suspect this is among the largest public health threats to children since the major diseases were wiped out
  • His third rule: no phones in schools.
  • What should parents do? They know that if they try to remove their teenager’s smartphone, their child will accuse them of destroying his or her social life. ‘That’s a perfect statement of what we call a collective action problem,’
  • ‘Any one person doing the right thing is in big trouble. But why do we ever let our kids on social media? It’s only down to the dynamic you just said.’ New norms are needed, he says. And his book will suggest four.
  • Rule one, he says: no smartphones before the age of 14.
  • ‘Give them a flip phone. Millennials had flip phones. They texted each other
  • Rule two: no social media before 16
  • In Britain, suicide rates started rising in 2014, up about 20 per cent for boys (to 420 a year) and 60 per cent for girls (to 160 a year).
  • finally: more unsupervised play. ‘Both of our countries freaked out in the 1990s, locked up our kids because we lost trust in each other. We thought everyone was a child molester or a rapist.’ Children and teens could do with six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents, he argues. Keeping them inside risks more harm than the outside world would pose.
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Opinion | Meet the Self-Described 'Bimbos' of TikTok - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bimbo-tiktok-feminism.html feminism revisionist culture sexism
shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Ms. Chlapecka told me she identifies as feminist but that a lot of feminism needs to be “reworked.”
  • Like critiques of many women of her generation, hers include the historical whiteness of many strains of feminism, its heteronormativity and the persistence of anti-trans voices within the movement today.
  • The #BimboTok sphere is a diffuse collective of creators with different ideas and personas, but generally, it’s sex-positive and sex-work-positive
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  • It often borrows the language of social justice movements
  • BimboTok came about at a time when the girlboss had more or less faded as a trendy cultural type
  • “I don’t know what the economy is, I don’t know what supply and demand is,” Ms. Chlapecka says in one video. “All I know is that our problems would be solved if we’d just print more money.” There’s a way in which her monologues can come to feel almost incisive — why can’t we print more money? The answer is complicated, obviously, and on some level Ms. Chlapecka knows that. “I’m asking a lot of questions that, yes, I have the answer to, but are also valid,” she said. “The whole world we made is literally made up, so we can make up solutions to the issues we have.”
  • It encourages asking the dumb questions that get to the heart of things.
  • Bimboism is the antithesis of the mode of feminism that was dominant in the 2010s, a kind of hyperambitious you-can-have-it-all feminism that can be summed up by the label “girlboss.”
  • Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not.
  • That girlboss model was critiqued for its lack of inclusivity — its overwhelming whiteness and its focus on a level of economic success that was never attainable for a vast majority of women.
  • Not to mention, girlboss aesthetics are simply cringe, for a generation steeped in internet irony.
  • In its most interesting form, bimboism also makes a connection between the ideas of pleasure — sexual pleasure, pleasure in clothes, pleasure in simply existing as a woman in the world with a body on display — and political gains that would make it more possible, like universal health care, student loan debt cancellation and abortion rights.
  • It’s anticapitalist, even anti-work. (In one video, another BimboTok comedian, @brattybarbiana, dances behind text that reads, “Rule of thumb: All relationships should be 50/50 … He works for his money, I spend it!”)
  • Amid the resurgence of leftist politics, and the disillusionment with capitalism among millennials and Gen Z, the framing of careerism and individualism as feminist rings hollow
  • But to dismiss this corner of the internet as totally backward would be to miss the point.
  • Is it really leftist for a woman to want to just go shopping and never get a job?
  • “Are you a leftist who likes to have their tits out? Do you like to flick off pro-lifers?” Chrissy Chlapecka asks the camera in a 51-second TikTok captioned “BIMBOS, RISE
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Opinion | Relentless Nostalgia Is Numbing Our Brains - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...super-bowl-ads.html nostalgia repetition memes culture history
shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • On advertising’s biggest day, I longed for anything that would propel our popular culture or even create a new catch phrase rather than tepid nostalgia recycling random celebrities.
  • “Hollywood’s dependence on old intellectual property has been a source of hand-wringing for at least the past two decades.”
  • Our internet experience is suffused with unearned and soulless nostalgia, disconnected from any original source of true feeling. Over a decade ago, BuzzFeed realized it was easy to make cheap nostalgia go viral and introduced a section “geared to bringing you back in time.”
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  • TikTok has pushed all this further and faster
  • for months afterward, the tune was the backdrop of an endless stream of TikTok videos, almost none of which evoked the song’s spirit. But the algorithm liked it, so TikTokers obliged and this went on and on and on.
  • I have the same reaction when Facebook or Instagram serves me an image from “this day” umpteen years ago: Why do I need to be reminded of the moment I was trying to sell an old bureau?
  • It’s harder to have new ideas when everything is pulling you back to the past — not in a way that inspires, or draws from a well of keen emotion, but in a way that rewards you for just repeating or reliving it.
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Russia's opposition roars on social media as Putin's allies plod along on state TV - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-a177-7765f29a9524_story.html russia opposition social media putin Politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 30 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • As social media sites such as TikTok and Instagram help energize young Russians against Putin, the Kremlin’s attempts at counter­messaging seem stuck in another age.
  • Another wave of demonstrations is planned for Sunday, with TikTok videos from last weekend’s protests acting as an engine driving more youths to the movement.
  • “We were shocked by the police violence, because we weren’t expecting such violence,” recounted Moscow protester Maria Isayeva, 24, who said riot police hit her several times on the head, requiring six stitches. “The main thing that keeps our protests smaller than they could be is that people are afraid of violence.”ADBut she said she would take part in a planned protest Sunday.
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  • “It’s important not just to me, to prove to myself that I am not afraid, but also for them to see that people are not afraid of violence anymore,” she said. “Staying at home feels safer, but it’s not safer, because you’re still without any human rights.”
  • “The most fundamental thing about Russian politics is that young people don’t watch TV,”
  • He said youths were “much less trusting of the government and much less loyal” because they were not seeing state television’s portrayals of Russia as a strong, self-reliant power with great leadership but surrounded by enemies.
  • “The biggest challenge for the government is a generational shift in news sources, and this is why they’re so afraid,” he added.
  • 39 percent of Russians would vote for Putin if elections were held. But the percentage of people age 18 to 24 willing to vote for him fell from 36 percent to 20 percent over the previous year.
  • the Kremlin was banking on the fact that few young people bothered to vote, but its efforts to stop young protesters through force might only energize many of them. Intimidation might deter some of them but will not win over their hearts and minds, he said.
  • “Now it’s trendy to be in the opposition,” Gallyamov said. “Several years ago, those in opposition were hopeless marginals. Now, supporting the authorities is becoming marginal.”
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This Is How TikTok Responded To The Chaos In Washington - 0 views

www.buzzfeednews.com/...ded-to-the-chaos-in-washington
shared by ritschelsa on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This is Gen Z–style coping.
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 11 Jan 21
       
      The use of dark humor is really enlighting on how Gen-Z copes with anything
  • Now, hours later, the tone has shifted again to people trying to make sense of what happened.Like, how are we just going about our days as normal right now?
    • ritschelsa
      ritschelsa on 11 Jan 21
       
      It wasn't normal and it was very hard to go through classes while trying to process this
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TikTok Deal Exposes a Security Gap, and a Missing China Strategy - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-trump-national-security.html China politics policy culture
shared by tsainten on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • The United States wants to have it all. It seeks to reap the benefits of a global internet yet limit its citizens to made-in America products, ensuring that the data that flows through American networks is “clean.”
  • the State Department has begun what it calls “the clean network initiative,” making sure that data is not tainted by adversaries, starting with China.
  • On Capitol Hill, the China problem many politicians still fume about is cheap Chinese goods, ignoring the fact that China’s labor is no longer inexpensive.
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  • And the same algorithm that picks your next dance video could, in the future, pick a political video. (There is already more than a whiff of political content on the app.)
  • Trump has achieved his objective: preventing Chinese engineers, perhaps under the influence of the state, from manipulating the code in ways that could censor, or manipulate, what American users see.
  • Attorney General William P. Barr has already called for greater scrutiny — and perhaps abolition — of any such app that does not allow the United States a legal “back door.”
  • defeats the original intent of the internet. And that was to create a global communications network, unrestrained by national borders.
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Oracle Deal With TikTok to Undergo U.S. National Security Review - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...al-security-review-11600097811 politics us trump policy
shared by leilamulveny on 15 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • leilamulveny on 15 Sep 20
     
    President Trump signed an executive order implementing a 45-day deadline for an American company to purchase Tik Tok's US operatives. Current arrangements are with the business software provider - Oracle (currently lags behind behind Amazon and Microsoft in terms of "cloud" leaders) For Oracle the Arrangement could give a jolt to the Silicon Valley stalwart's efforts to transform its staid database business into a major player in cloud computing. However, this deal could draw scrutiny in Beijing as both governments have disrupted negations over Tik Tok's fate in recent weeks. A month ago China imposed export restrictions on the kind of AI algorithms that underpin Tik Tok. The Chinese government is calling this deal an abuse of power under the pretext of national security. Overall, I found this article appealing to our current discussions in the GP course because it represents different perspectives on the issue of President Trump's executive order (a new method to develop different ways to think). Also, this unit is dedicated to how politics relates to oneself and I think that this issue hits close to home for many high school students.
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How Abercrombie & Fitch went from proudly exclusionary to surprisingly inclusive - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...c-b05d-3cb9d96eb495_story.html fashion millennial culture
shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • One of the most important realizations she made was that Abercrombie needed to graduate from high school and target a new consumer — the young millennial. Horowitz wanted Abercrombie to be the place to shop for everything you’d throw in a carry-on for an ideal four days away. (You may notice A&F is not selling anything to wear to the office.)
  • Horowitz also prioritized the unsexy but critical work of just making the clothes nicer. The company invested in better fabrics, zippers and buttons. They expanded sizing; women’s denim now comes in sizes 23-37, extra-short to long.
  • And when it came to jeans — one of the products Abercrombie was best known for back in the day, and the item that can turn a doubter into a devotee — they went into research and development mode with a focus on fit. For Curve Love, the goal was twofold: eliminate the waist gap in jeans that are snug in the hips, and come up with a fabric with enough stretch to flatter without sacrificing the “design character” that makes jeans feel like denim and not leggings.
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  • Abercrombie’s brand evolution mirrors the evolving sensibilities of the customers it hopes to dress. Inaccessibility is out; inclusivity is in.
  • “Right now it’s about belonging to the community within the brand,” said Horowitz. “Before it was [about] fitting in. And there is a very, very big difference between belonging and fitting in. We no longer want people to change who they are just to fit in to be part of the brand. We want you to belong to the brand as you are.”
  • Shoppers are no longer reliant on brands’ choice of models and marketing but can see for themselves what people just like them are wearing and what real people think of their clothes.
  • “TikTok has democratized the haul video, the outfit video,” said Rebecca Jennings, a Vox senior correspondent covering Internet culture. “If you were posting that on YouTube or Instagram, you would’ve had to build an audience and already be a content creator. But on TikTok, anyone can do that … [so] we’re seeing a lot more regular people’s clothing. It can spread fashion trends really, really fast.”
  • “We are owning it,” Corey Robinson, senior vice president of design and merchandising at Abercrombie, said of company’s past. “Because we wouldn’t have made these changes without it … And people are seeing that we’re changing, just like they change.”
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The Age of Social Media Is Ending - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672074 social media network culture relationship discourse
shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
  • A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
  • “social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist
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  • A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.
  • As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts
  • The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.
  • That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts.
  • Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.
  • soon enough, all social networks became social media first and foremost. When groups, pages, and the News Feed launched, Facebook began encouraging users to share content published by others in order to increase engagement on the service, rather than to provide updates to friends. LinkedIn launched a program to publish content across the platform, too. Twitter, already principally a publishing platform, added a dedicated “retweet” feature, making it far easier to spread content virally across user networks.
  • The authors propose social media as a system in which users participate in “information exchange.” The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.
  • The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them
  • Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world. Twitter was for talking to everyone—which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it
  • on Twitter, anything anybody posted could be seen instantly by anyone else. And furthermore, unlike posts on blogs or images on Flickr or videos on YouTube, tweets were short and low-effort, making it easy to post many of them a week or even a day.
  • a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,”
  • When we look back at this moment, social media had already arrived in spirit if not by name. RSS readers offered a feed of blog posts to catch up on, complete with unread counts. MySpace fused music and chatter; YouTube did it with video (“Broadcast Yourself”)
  • This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.
  • Other services arrived or evolved in this vein, among them Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, all far more popular than Twitter. Social networks, once latent routes for possible contact, became superhighways of constant content
  • Although you can connect the app to your contacts and follow specific users, on TikTok, you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm.
  • In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.
  • The ensuing disaster was multipar
  • “influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.
  • social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.
  • When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.
  • Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships.
  • when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale
  • Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.
  • On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive
  • Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach
  • people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.
  • From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.
  • That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.
  • If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse
  • Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.
  • Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation
  • The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain.
  • when I first wrote about downscale, the ambition seemed necessary but impossible. It still feels unlikely—but perhaps newly plausible.
  • To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well
  • We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.
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Who is Andrew Tate, the misogynist hero to millions of young men? | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-hero-to-millions-of-young-men misogyny influencer TikTok Gen Z
shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • what sets Mr Tate apart from other alt-right social-media personalities and previous anti-feminist online movements is the extent to which his views have found a ready audience among teenage boys.
  • In 2021 Mr Tate established Hustlers University, an online platform where young men could take courses in business and investing for $49.99 a month. It also gave students financial rewards for promoting Mr Tate’s misogynist ideas via a now-suspended affiliate marketing programme. Thanks to a continuing stream of fan-generated content, his views have proliferated on social media even though most platforms have banned his accounts.
  • Part of the reason why Mr Tate has found success specifically on TikTok is that its algorithm is uniquely predictive, appearing not only to rely on the content users watch and recommend, but making assumptions about their potential interests
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  • That has made him the most popular influencer among American Gen-Zers, according to a twice-yearly survey of 14,500 of the country’s teenage boys and girls by Piper Sandler, a finance company that researches consumer data. Teachers have reported boys as young as 11 praising and emulating him.
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There has never been more music made - but most artists go hungry - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...st-artists-go-hungry-nx7c2vg8m music industry costs success
shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • “Fifteen years ago,” says Will Burgess, of Practise Music, a management company, “if you wanted to record a song you needed two days in a studio, at £400 a day, plus a sound engineer at £100 a day. That’s the cost of a laptop, on which you can make unlimited amounts of music today.”
  • These days you don’t need to be able to play a musical instrument to be a musician and you don’t need a studio. All you need is a computer. “I’ve created songs that have gone to No 1 in my daughter’s bedroom downstairs,” says Crispin Hunt, former lead singer of the Longpigs and now a songwriter who has worked with Lana Del Rey, Rod Stewart and Ellie Goulding.
  • You can sketch out a musical idea on a laptop, you can add instrumentation, you can record your own vocals. If you want to collaborate with others around the world, no problem: when Luke Sital-Singh, a singer-songwriter who works in London, needs drums, he asks a friend with a studio in Lewes to send the files to his computer. He’s working with a guitarist in Santa Fe, to whom he sends a rough version of the song; his collaborator sends him back a guitar track.
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  • Special effects software can give your music all sorts of subtle vibes. For $299, for instance, you can make your song sound as though it was recorded in Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, on the $20,000 vintage microphones with the $100,000 mixing console that recorded Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana. For $259 you can simulate the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios
  • In the past, when you assembled all the tracks for a song, it would have to be mixed and mastered in a studio by a sound engineer adjusting the levels. Now an app will do it for you.
  • Now, all you need to do is get the files uploaded to streaming services. If you are signed with a label, they will do that for you, but you don’t need a record deal to do that. There are companies such as DistroKid that act as postmen: for £17.99 a year, you can ensure that the song you created in your bedroom is available on multiple streaming platforms.
  • Some artists thrive on social media. It suits lively, quirky performers like Ryder, and artists who want to experiment with different genres. Mxmtoon, a 23-year-old American YouTuber, singer-songwriter and ukulele player, is also a streamer on Twitch, a platform on which people watch others playing online games, has published graphic novels and made a podcast. Maia — the artist’s name — describes mxmtoon as “a multi-hyphenated project”.
  • More traditional musicians struggle with some aspects of tech. “We get together,” says Sital-Singh of his contemporaries in the business, “and have a little moan about how everyone’s telling us to do TikTok and we can’t bring ourselves to dance and we feel old and decrepit.”
  • Even digital natives struggle sometimes: “I already have nostalgia for a simpler past, even though I’m 23,” says Maia. “It’s exciting but it does put so much pressure on a normal individual to be an entrepreneur to advertise their own personal brand.”
  • Journalists, regrettably, no longer have the power they once did. What matters these days is social media. The A&R (artists and repertoire) people at record companies who would once have hung out in basement clubs scouting for new talent now sit in meetings examining the data on artists’ social media performance.
  • Now that the whole world’s music is available all over the world at the click of a play button, there’s a greater diversity among top-selling artists.
  • People making videos of themselves performing or dancing to the song on TikTok helped propel it to the stratosphere. It has been streamed a billion times. Sethi now plays to packed venues in America and Europe; last year, he performed at Coachella, America’s Glastonbury. “Without digital technology I would be a south Asian indy musician, working on the fringes of Bollywood,” he says from his home in New York.
  • For musicians, it’s more ambiguous. Because the costs of making music are lower, anybody with ambition can have a go. Many more people, as a result, are getting into the music business. According to PPL, the organisation which distributes money to music performers and rights-holders, the number of registered artists has risen from 61,310, when the industry was at its nadir, to 165,039 last year.
  • That makes the business fiercely competitive. As Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of Tarzan Economics, points out, around 100,000 tracks are being uploaded on to Spotify every day: that’s more than were released in an entire calendar year in the 1980s
  • That has cemented the power of the record companies. When the digital revolution started, it was widely expected that record labels would cease to exist, and be replaced by a model in which everybody promoted and distributed their own music. That’s not what has happened: because it’s so difficult to get noticed, embryonic stars need record labels to promote them.
  • A label invests in the production of the music, the styling of the band, video content, interviews, touring and the crucial business of getting a song on a streaming service’s playlist that suggests the song to listeners to suit their tastes. Artists that are signed with major labels get paid more, per stream, than those that aren’t.
  • Three quarters of streamed tracks have one of the major record labels behind them. And even though streaming is booming, it doesn’t contribute much to the incomes of the vast majority of artists.
  • Most artists stay hungry. A single stream will earn a musician anywhere between 0.1p and 2.4p. Crispin Hunt reckons that on average a million streams for a song — a wild ambition for most musicians — will, if you have to pay a cut to a record company, probably make you £1,000
  • If you’ve then got to pay your manager 20 per cent, and divide the rest between the four band members, “it barely pays for a Sainsbury’s shop. That’s why music is dominated by middle-class people called Crispin whose parents can afford to buy them an electric guitar and a laptop.”
  • For Christie Gardner, half of Lilo, a two-woman band, it helps planning gigs. “You can see where your listeners are and you can tell what they’re listening to. We make decisions about shows on that basis.” But for most bands, the economics of live performance are pretty grim.
  • Deathcrash’s manager Joe Taylor says that the band has been offered the opportunity of a European tour supporting a much bigger act. It would be good for their career but not their bank balance. The fees per show would be €200; once the costs of a sound engineer, a tour van, a driver, fuel, hotels and a carnet for importing musical instruments into the EU had been factored in, they would lose £15,000.
  • music has always been an uneconomic business, which people subsidise through other activities. The fiddler in the village pub probably worked in the fields in the daytime and played for money and fun in the evenings and at the weekend, rather as Ryder ran a juice bar and sang at weddings. These days, there is also the wafer-thin chance that they might end up being one of the 1,200 artists who make more than $1 million a year on Spotify
  • There are some signs that in the new musical economy, the balance of power between artists and the big record companies may have tipped slightly in the artists’ favour
  • the share of streaming revenues going to artists increased from 19.7 per cent to 23.3 per cent between 2012 and 2021 and that going to songwriters has risen from 8 per cent in 2008 to 15 per cent in 2021. “Outcomes for consumers, artists and songwriters,” it concludes, “are getting better.”
  • Most of the extra revenues generated by streaming are going to the top earners. But the stars are not the only ones benefiting. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of artists earning over $1 million on Spotify more than doubled, but so did the number earning over $10,000
  • more than two fifths of artists who release their own music aren’t expecting to make a full-time career. They’re in it for fun, for the love of it, or to be able to show their mum that they have released a song on Spotify.
  • It seems likely that the more music is being created, the greater the chance that wonderful tunes are being written, but it’s not necessarily the case. The best stuff might get buried under a mound of mediocrity.
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How to strengthen your immunity during the coronavirus pandemic: Exercise, meditation, ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • As the coronavirus situation intensifies, you might be wondering: How can I keep myself healthy?
  • Engaging in regular physical activity is a great way to help manage stress and strengthen your immune system. In fact, research shows that "fit individuals" -- defined as those who partake in regular physical activity -- have a lower incidence of infection compared to inactive and sedentary individuals. What's more, being physically active may help reduce the risk of chronic diseases that could further weaken your immune system, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.
  • She also recommends looped bands to go around the calves or thighs, which strengthen the glutes and can help prevent knee and back injuries.
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  • For at-home fitness essentials, Browning recommends getting a set of yellow, green and red resistance bands (the colors correspond with varying levels of resistance). "These can be used for back, bicep, triceps, shoulders and leg work," Browning said.
  • And don't forget about the joy of dancing
  • While that program has a subscription-based app, you can also find free workouts on Alexia Clark's Instagram and IGTV.
  • If you haven't tried mediation, now might be a good time to start. A recent review involving 20 randomized, controlled trials including more than 1,600 people suggested that meditation may help keep our immune system functioning optimally.
  • "Life is messy, and although meditation isn't a cure all it can help us to remember to breathe and that we'll never be able to clean it all up," Gluck said.
  • Research dating back over 25 years has revealed that psychological stress increases susceptibility to illness (PDF).
  • To calm our anxiety during this stressful time, first acknowledge that it is okay to feel stressed, anxious and afraid. "It is okay to feel panicked ... look for ways to ground yourself in a safe and healthy way that does not cause harm to others," Forti said.
  • "Holding on to rigid patterns of thinking exacerbates stress and anxiety," Forti said. "Flexibility is required during this time of uncertainty and rapid change."
  • In my home, that means working with several interruptions, and allowing my girls to have some access to TikTok on my iPhone, along with some extra cookies.
  • Lastly, get your z's. Not doing so can negatively affect your immune system, according to the National Sleep Foundation.
  • According to the NSF, taking two naps that are no longer than 30 minutes each — one in the morning and one in the afternoon — has been shown to help decrease stress and offset the negative effects that sleep deprivation has on the immune system. If that's not realistic, a 20-minute catnap during a lunch break or before dinner can help too
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Russia Says It Is Slowing Access to Twitter - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russia-twitter.html Global Twitter Policy
shared by saberal on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Russian government said on Wednesday that it was slowing access to Twitter, accusing the social network of failing to remove illegal content and signaling that the Kremlin is escalating its offensive against American internet companies that have long provided a haven for freedom of expression.
  • With the aim of protecting Russian citizens and forcing the internet service to follow the law on the territory of the Russian Federation, centralized reactive measures have been taken against Twitter starting March 10, 2021
  • In a statement, Twitter said it was aware of reports that its platform was “being intentionally slowed down broadly and indiscriminately in Russia due to apparent content removal concerns.”
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  • Those social networks, along with Chinese-owned TikTok, played a pivotal role in the anti-Kremlin protests that accompanied the return and imprisonment of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny this year. Mr. Navalny has some 2.5 million Twitter followers, and his investigation published in January into a purported secret palace of Mr. Putin was viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
  • putting the brakes on Twitter traffic “will force all other social networks and large foreign internet companies to understand Russia won’t silently watch and swallow the flagrant ignoring of our laws.”
  • Twitter has a small user base in Russia, though it is popular among journalists, politicians and opposition activists. A report last year estimated the service had 690,000 active users in Russia, meaning that any public backlash over the move is likely to be far smaller than if the Kremlin imposed similar limits for Instagram or YouTube.
  • U.S. officials said over the weekend that they planned to retaliate against Russia for a sweeping hacking attack last year that exploited vulnerabilities in government and corporate computer systems in the United States.
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Israel-Hamas conflict: Jewish groups sound alarm on antisemitism in US - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...5220334001 conflict groups antisemitism politics
shared by aniyahbarnett on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Five Jewish groups penned a letter to President Joe Biden on Friday expressing concern about the recent surge of antisemitic hate crimes in the U.S
  • "We are grateful for the current ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas, but we fear that the way the conflict has been used to amplify antisemitic rhetoric,
  • Some 58,000 Palestinians have fled their homes, the Associated Press reported.
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  • The Anti-Defamation League said it has documented "disturbing antisemitism" on multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok
  • "ADL has also seen an increase in on-the-ground activity that demonizes Israel and that has crossed at times into antisemitism,
  • Thousands of people have marched in major U.S. cities in recent weeks to protest Israel's actions
  • In New York City Thursday evening, 26 people were arrested as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators clashed in Times Square, and police were investigating the assault of a Jewish man in the same area as a hate crime
  • "The anti-Semitism we're seeing across our country isn’t in isolation and isn’t just a few incidents
  • Americans largely support Israel – but sympathy for Palestinians is on the rise
  • "Since national data collection began in 1992, the worst months of each decade revolved around disputes in the Holy Land or around conflictual elections,
  • the month that saw the most antisemitic hate crimes in the U.S. was March 1994
  • when an American-Israeli man fatally shot 29 people and wounded more than a hundred in the West Bank
  • Over the last decade, however, the most hate crimes happened around the 2018 U.S. midterm elections
  • In 2019, antisemitic hate crimes hit multiyear highs and, for the first time in recent memory, Jews were the top target in America's three largest cities
  • Muslims in the U.S. have also been the targets of hate in recent weeks
  • "Death to Palestine
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