July 26, 2021

Selling or sold: influencers and the commodification of social media (The Michigan Daily)

The Michigan Daily: Selling or sold: influencers and the commodification of social media. “In some ways, social media has made beauty feel more imperative for the average woman. When you’re looking up to half a dozen models in magazines or TV, it’s easy to disassociate or consider their beauty unattainable. But when you look down at your phone and see hundreds of seemingly ‘normal’ women profiting off of their adherence to — or occasional rejection of — the prevailing beauty standard, it’s much harder to draw the line between the real and idealized woman.” This is the article that led me to Lane Kizziah and y’all, her writing just sparkles. So solid.

Research & Opinion 0
July 24, 2021

New York Times: Why People Are So Awful Online

New York Times: Why People Are So Awful Online. “Increasingly, I’ve felt that online engagement is fueled by the hopelessness many people feel when we consider the state of the world and the challenges we deal with in our day-to-day lives. Online spaces offer the hopeful fiction of a tangible cause and effect — an injustice answered by an immediate consequence. On Twitter, we can wield a small measure of power, avenge wrongs, punish villains, exalt the pure of heart. In our quest for this simulacrum of justice, however, we have lost all sense of proportion and scale.”

Research & Opinion 0
July 23, 2021

BBC: The online data that’s being deleted

BBC: The online data that’s being deleted. “Thanks to the permanence of stone tablets, ancient books and messages carved into the very walls of buildings by our ancestors, there’s a bias in our culture towards assuming that the written word is by definition enduring. We quote remarks made centuries ago often because someone wrote them down – and kept the copies safe. But in digital form, the written word is little more than a projection of light onto a screen. As soon as the light goes out, it might not come back.”

Uncategorized 0
July 18, 2021

Wall Street Journal: Peppa Pig, a Pandemic Favorite, Has American Children Acting British

Wall Street Journal: Peppa Pig, a Pandemic Favorite, Has American Children Acting British. “Like 5-year-old Dani, children across the U.S. have binge-watched ‘Peppa Pig’ over the past year. They are emerging from the pandemic with an unusual vocabulary and a British accent just like the show’s namesake character. The Peppa Effect, as some parents call it, already had some children snorting like pigs and using cheeky Britishisms before the pandemic. Then lockdowns sent screen-time limits out the door, and children gorged on the cartoon in a silo away from their usual social interactions, amplifying the effect.”

COVID-19 0
July 18, 2021

CNN: Microsoft is bringing back Clippy

CNN: Microsoft is bringing back Clippy. “Saturday, Microsoft (MSFT) is announcing plans to replace its standard paperclip emoji with an image of big-eyed, happy helper Clippy. The move is part of a broader refresh of 1,800 emojis across all Microsoft apps and services, which will roll out later this year.”

Tweaks & Updates 0
July 16, 2021

Emojipedia: New Emojis in 2021-2022

Emojipedia: New Emojis in 2021-2022 . “A saluting face, biting lip, coral and a low battery are among the emojis up for approval later in the year. These are currently draft candidates for the next emoji release versioned Emoji 14.0. Other inclusions on the draft list are consistent gender options for pregnancy and royalty, ‘heart hands’, and the ability to choose from 15 different handshake combinations.”

Tweaks & Updates 0
July 16, 2021

YourStory: Top tech blogger Amit Agarwal on building a global content business for over 15 years

YourStory: Top tech blogger Amit Agarwal on building a global content business for over 15 years. “Amit Agarwal has developed projects with the likes of Airbus, LinkedIn, Disney, and even the US embassy. In a conversation with YourStory, the professional tech blogger shares his success secrets, building a global content business from Bharat, and more.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
July 15, 2021

New York Times: A New Digital Life, Same Old Problems

New York Times: A New Digital Life, Same Old Problems . “That’s a link among the gripes about selling products on Amazon, distributing apps on smartphone app stores, trying to make a living on YouTube or renting homes on Airbnb. In all of those cases, people and businesses are complaining about the costs, rules and precariousness of activities that were even more burdensome in the olden days, if they were possible at all.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
July 7, 2021

MIT Sloan: Social media is broken. A new report offers 25 ways to fix it

MIT Sloan: Social media is broken. A new report offers 25 ways to fix it. “Researchers, policymakers, and users have identified several key issues with the social media ecosystem. These include vast power held by a few corporations, which hurts innovation and competition; the spread of false news and debates about the limits of free speech; how social media threatens privacy, election integrity, and democracy; and platform oversight and transparency.”

Research & Opinion 0
July 5, 2021

The Atlantic: The Internet Is Rotting

The Atlantic: The Internet Is Rotting. “This absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
July 2, 2021

Mashable: 5 trends that have shaped TikTok so far this year

Mashable: 5 trends that have shaped TikTok so far this year . “TikTok has been growing in popularity year over year, but for an app that’s been around for a while now it’s surprising just how many new trends are still popping up on it every day. We sorted through it all so you don’t have to. Here are five of the biggest trends that have shaped TikTok this year — so far.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
June 11, 2021

PetaPixel: ‘Anti-Social’ Photo App Challenges What Social Media Should Be

PetaPixel: ‘Anti-Social’ Photo App Challenges What Social Media Should Be. “The randomized alarm is sent to every user at the same time (regardless of time zone), meaning most of the photos on the app are captured around the world at that same moment. Once the participants have taken their photos, they are then allotted just sixty seconds to browse their own chronological timeline or that of a random stranger they have been matched with. Once the minute is up, the app shuts down and users have to wait until the next random alarm to be able to use the app again.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
May 17, 2021

Discover Magazine: How To Spot Pseudoscience Online And IRL

Discover Magazine: How To Spot Pseudoscience Online And IRL. “Imagine a universe rife with cosmic catastrophes: Jupiter ejecting a comet into space that would later become the planet Venus. The comet whizzing past Earth and changing its rotation. The resulting chaos on Earth causing natural disasters of biblical proportions — literally — like the parting of the Red Sea. In the mid-1900s, Immanuel Velikovsky, a psychiatrist and author, claimed that he could prove these radical ideas. Velikovsky laid out his case in Worlds in Collision, a 1950 bestseller. But the book wasn’t billed as creative fiction or a fanciful hypothesis based on anecdotal accounts of the past; rather, Velikovsky presented these interplanetary theories, and others, as factual.” A lot of articles with this kind of headline are ten paragraphs of bromide. This is a deep dive with a lot of history. Recommended.

Research & Opinion 0

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