Reading Is Fundamental for Some
December 21, 2021
Reading is not a dead habit as the media would have you believe. It has only changed, but not necessary for the best. Ben Wajdi discussed how reading habits have changed in, “Is Internet Addiction Eradicating The Habit Of Reading?” He does not approach the world’s current reading situation as a condescending elitist that believes any new technology is subpar to the old. He instead focuses on how reading habits have changed and how they could improve.
Wadji discusses how famous writers view technology, reading, and writing. Some love it, while others hate it, but Wadji remains neutral to a point. The writers he examines are privileged because they live in developed countries, but Wadji did not have the same advantages as them and explains why the Internet is a great tool:
“On the one hand, I resonate with Franzen’s take on the internet, and on corporations, yet on the other hand, I can’t deny that for someone like me, a marginalized North African kid whose first interaction with any part of the internet dates back to circa 2005, the internet was the only way I could’ve accessed the body of knowledge that could fulfill my curiosity, and my eternal search for a way out of the “sh%thole”. Without the internet, I would have been a very different man. Without it, I would have succumbed to all the currents of local nationalism, religious fanaticism, and the currents of elite leftists running the “shithole” and confining everyone with them in eternal misery.”
People do spend way too much time attached to their screens. It has become a addiction. Depending on the individual, it could be as mentally consuming as alcoholism or as limiting as biting one’s nails. Wadji encourages people to become consciousness of their habits, relearn how to absorb what they read, and think think critically about it. Was the same argument made when young Egyptians spent too much time staring at hieroglyphics?
Whitney Grace, December 21, 2021
Red Kangaroos? Maybe a Nuisance. Online Trolls? Very Similar
December 16, 2021
It is arguable that trolls are the worst bullies in history, because online anonymity means they do not face repercussions. Trolls’ behavior caused innumerable harm, including suicides, psychological problems, and real life bullying. Local and international governments have taken measures to prevent cyber bullying, but ABC Australia says the country continent is taking a stand: “Social Media Companies Could Be Forced To Give Out Names And Contact Details, Under New Anti-Troll Laws.”
Australia’s federal government is drafting laws that could force social media companies to reveal trolls’ identities. The new legislation aims to hold trolls accountable for their poor behavior by having social media companies collect user information and share it with courts in defamation cases. The new laws would also hold social media companies liable for hosted content instead of users and management companies. Australia’s prime minister stated:
“Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he wanted to close the gap between real life and discourse online. ‘The rules that exist in the real world must exist in the digital and online world,’ he said. ‘The online world shouldn’t be a wild west, where bots and bigots and trolls and others can anonymously go around and harm people and hurt people.’”
The new law would require social media companies to have a complaints process for people who feel like they have been defamed. The process would ask users to delete defamatory material. If they do not, the complaint could be escalated to where users details are shared to issue court orders so people can pursue defamation action.
One of the biggest issues facing the legislation is who is responsible for trolls’ content. The new law wants social media companies to be held culpable. The complaints system would allow the social media companies to use it as a defense in defamation cases.
The article does not discuss what is deemed “defamatory” content. Anything and everything is offensive to someone, so the complaints system will be abused. What rules will be instituted to prevent abuse of the complaints system? Who will monitor it and who will pay for it? An analogous example is YouTube system of what constitutes as “appropriate” children’s videos and how they determine flagged videos for intellectual theft as well as inappropriate content. In short, YouTube’s system is not doing well.
The social media companies should be culpable in some way, such as sharing user information when there is dangerous behavior, i.e.e suicide, any kind of abuse, child pornography, planned shooting attacks and other crimes. Sexist and abusive comments that are not an opinion, i.e., saying someone should die or is stupid for being a woman, should be monitored and users held accountable. It is a fine line, though, determining the dangers in many cases.
Whitney Grace, December 16, 2021
New Management Method: High School Science Club Wants to Run the School District
December 8, 2021
I love those confident, ever youthful, and oh-so enthusiastic high school science club members. Many of these individuals maintain their youthful insights into adulthood. In the after life, maybe these imbibers of the fountain of youth-type thinking are in charge. Milton, bless his poetic soul, learned that blind poets are best left to menial duties. Are there Augean stables in heaven? Nope, just techno-wizards.
I read “CTO to CEO: The Case for Putting the Tech Expert in Charge.” After an incident of Dorseying, Twitter has a new captain at the helm. The article is interesting because the author uses the Twitter appointment of Parag Agrawal as the start of a new management trend.
Here’s an example:
CTOs are increasingly being groomed by corporate boards as part of their CEO succession planning, according to Ash Athawale, senior managing director for Robert Half’s executive search division. Athawale told Protocol that he’s witnessed an increase in attention towards technology leaders as potential future chief executives. The reason? Tech is now central to core business functions across all industries…
Logical, no? A technology centric CEO at Twitter is just the ticket.
And what have technology capable adults with a history in their secondary schools’ science clubs wrought?
Here are a handful of examples:
- Twitter and its unique ability to provide left and right coasters with a platform to direct their thoughts at those who kick back and enjoy a filter bubble equipped with a one click response mechanism.
- Facebook and its remarkable impact on social constructs, including vulnerable people who have their self worth inflated or crushed in a mouse click
- The wonderful world of online advertising which introduced the concept of zero privacy to the world
- Amazon and its race with Walmart to reduce small businesses to delivery drop off points
There are other examples of what happens when tech-savvy folks run giant companies with money generating feedback mechanisms.
My hunch is that the ideal manager is not likely to be as well received as individuals with a slightly different profile.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2021
Who Says Teachers Do Not Understand Social Media? Not TikTok
December 8, 2021
It can be difficult to keep up with what the kids are doing on video-sharing app TikTok, and much of it is just playful fun. However, here is an unnerving shift in direction—weaponized short videos being deployed against teachers and staff at schools in the UK. BBC News tells us about “TikTok School abuse: Teachers Quitting Over Pedophile Slurs.” Reporter Nicola Bryan writes:
“Some teachers are leaving the profession after being labeled pedophiles on TikTok, a union says. A craze on the social media app has seen children share videos of staff with inappropriate hashtags and comments and, sometimes, superimposing their faces onto pornography.”
See the write-up for a few examples. The situation is difficult because, while the children may be too young to fully understand the consequences of their actions, it is naturally causing staff and their families considerable angst. Neither of the schools have suspended any students—maybe because the content was posted anonymously. They are focusing instead on educating the children and, perhaps especially, their parents. But what is TikTok doing about the trend? A union representative states the company has been all talk and no action, and one school’s staff member reports it took a long time for videos to be taken down. However, another school’s head teacher says TikTok responded promptly to her school’s complaint. That is an odd inconsistency. The write-up quotes the company’s spokesperson:
“‘We are crystal clear that hateful behavior, bullying and harassment have no place on TikTok. We regret the distress caused to some teachers as a result of abusive content posted to our platform.’ She said the company had deployed additional technical measures and guidance and continued to ‘proactively detect and remove violative content and accounts’. She said the partner had partnered with the Professional Online Safety Helpline (POSH) to provide teachers with an additional way to report content and written to every school in the UK to ensure all staff had access to the resources they need.”
The Welsh government, for one, is not convinced TikTok is doing enough. Recognizing the seriousness of the issue, it demands TikTok remove this content immediately as it is reported. Will the company comply?
Cynthia Murrell December 8, 2021
A New Word Dorseying: Leaving Before the Fried Turkey Explodes
December 3, 2021
Full disclosure. We post Beyond Search tweets to Twitter. We use a script, and we use an account set up years ago. I don’t recall who on my team did this work, and I am not sure I know the password. We did this as a test for one of my lectures to a group of law enforcement and intelligence professionals to illustrate how a content stream could be implemented with zero fuss and muss. The mechanism is similar to the ones used by certain foreign entities to inject content into the Twitter users’ content pool.
Why’s this important?
Twitter is a coterie service; that is, the principal users are concentrated on the left and right coasts of the US. The service meets the needs of this group because tips, facts, and observations about technology and its world are essential to the personas of the most enthusiastic tweet generators. There are secondary and tertiary uses as well. Spectrum pretends to care when its customers point out yet another service outage. Political big sparklers generate outputs for their constituents. Vendors of diet supplements find the service helpful as well.
But Twitter, like other social media services, is in the spotlight. The trucks carting these high intensity beams are driven by wild eyed and often over enthusiastic elected officials and laborers in the gray and beige government cubicles.
Write ups like “Twitter Has a New CEO; What About a New Business Model?” and “Twitter Bans Sharing Private Images and Videos without Consent” provide purported insight into the machinations of the new Twitter. But the main point is that Twitter allows humans and smart software to create personas and push content to others in the tweetiverse.
Dorseying means that one individual is getting out of Dodge before the law arrives. This exit is less elegant than the proactive departure of Messrs. Brin and Page from the Google. From my vantage point, the former big dog of the Tweeter wants to be undisturbed and work in less well illuminated locations. Is Dorseying an action similar to running away from trouble? Interesting question.
Can Twitter be enhanced, fixed, or remediated?
My view is that anonymous and easily created “accounts” required some thought. The magic of censorship is likely to be less impactful than short lived special effects in the early Disney films. (Does anyone remember the cinegraphic breakthrough of “sparkles”?) The amping up of advertising is likely to lead to a destination that many have previously visited; that is, one with carefully crafted paths, exhibits, attractions, and inducements to buy, buy, buy.
Net net: Twitter, like other social media, will be difficult to control. My hunch is that the service will continue to snip through social fabrics. Because Twitter is a publicly traded company, management has to respond to the financial context in which it operates. Fancy talk, recommendations, and half hearted editorial measures may have unintended consequences. That’s what concerns me about the tweeter thing.
Dorseying was a good move.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2021
The Most Potent American Export: The Social Media Violence System
November 29, 2021
The United States is not the country affected by social media. The Interpreter shares how religious minorities in Bangladesh are harmed when misinformation spreads via social media: “Minorities Under Attack In Bangladesh.” Bangladesh’s major religion is Islam with various minorities, including Buddhism and Hindu. The country is described as religiously tolerant compared to its neighbors.
Unfortunately rumors spread over Facebook that the Quran was desecrated during the Hindu Durga Puja festival. Buddhist and Hindu temples and holy sites were attacked, while seven people were killed. Bangladesh authorities arrested a man who claimed to have left a copy of the Quran at the festival. This is not the first time violence prompted by social media occurred:
“However, almost every year since 2012 religious minorities have been attacked somewhere in Bangladesh after online posts promulgating false allegations. The pattern runs like this: rumors begin within a local community that people from a minority background have defamed Islam, and such orchestrated “fake news” quickly spreads online to incite violence against minorities.”
Violence in Bangladesh stems from three factors: growing fear in the Islamic majority of atheism and blasphemy, growing supranational Muslin and Hindu identities, religious minority attacks are actually attempts to stem Hindu land.
Social media in Bangladesh is used as a propaganda tool to fuel prejudice and fear amongst its people. It is unfortunate that all religions in Bangladesh are victims of social media misinformation. Mob mentally runs rampant on social media and it is not any different from other violence that stems from newspapers, TVs, or radios. Social media just spreads it faster.
Whitney Grace, November 29, 2021
Apple Podcast Ratings: A Different Angle
November 24, 2021
I read “Apple Podcasts App Ratings Flip after the Company Starts Prompting Users.” The write up explains that Apple’s podcast application was receiving the rough equivalent of a D or D- from its users. How did Apple fix this? Some big monopolies wou8ld have just had an intern enter the desired number. This works with search results pages on some Web and enterprise search systems. Not Apple. The write up reports:
The iPhone maker told The Verge that iOS 15.1 started prompting users for ratings and reviews “just like most third-party apps.” However, many people thought they were rating the show they were listening to, not the app — and that led to a flood of scores and reviews for podcasts.
Two points:
- Users were confused
- Prompts sparked ratings.
I interpreted this information to mean that users are not too swift even thought Apple’s high priced products are supposed to appeal to the swift and sure. Second, the prompts caused an immediate user reaction at least for some of the app’s users.
My takeaway: Online services can cause behaviors. Power in the hands of the just and true or evidence of the impact of digital nudges? Do higher ratings improve the app? Probably not.
Stephen E Arnold, November 24, 2021
Ommmm, Ommmm: Pundit Zen
November 21, 2021
I read “How Twitter Got Research Right.” Okay, Twitter. Short messages. Loved by a comparatively modest coterie of Left and Right Coasters. Followers. Blue. Management hate from the rock star professor Scott (buy my book and invest in Shopify) Galloway. Okay, Casey Newton. Verge-tastic. Silicon Valley savvy. Independent journalist. Budding superstar with Oprah’s staff checking him out.
The write up explains “got right” as a fine expression of business savvy. The write up offered this observation:
Twitter hosted an open competition to find bias in its photo-cropping algorithms.
I think I failed a college class because I was unable to find a suitable definition for the concept “mea culpa.” I think the instructor was unhappy with my one word research paper which pivoted on the acronym PR. I was supposed to write down something like a person or entity says something that is one’s fault. (See, I am writing in a gender neutral way.” Ommmmm. Ommmmm.
In the shadow of this “real news” Silicon Valley essay, I think the proper term is apologia. As I recall from another course in which I wallowed in academic desperation, an apologia means “speaking in defense.” I wonder if I ever finished reading Plato’s Apology.
Somewhere in my lousy college education I learned about the dialectic or motive force of an action that creates a thought or reaction. The subsequent events go off the rails, and the actors do the explaining away thing.
What’s up in the Twitter mea culpa / apologia event is that social media have been quite significant in several ways: Amplification of certain information and providing a free, unfettered mechanism to whip up frenzy. (Some examples come to mind, but I shall refrain from writing their names because stop word lists….
To sum up: Quite a rhetorical tour de force, and I don’t buy into the Twitter is trying to do good despite the got right assurance. Ommmmm. Ommmmm. That’s the sound of regulators calming themselves before actually regulating.
Stephen E Arnold, November 22, 2021
Giants of Social Media, Out of Touch, Are We?
November 17, 2021
Just a short item. I read “How to Hit the Top on Each Social Media Platform.” I ignored the how to part. I don’t want to hit the “top” on any social media platform. Not for this 77 year old, nope.
In the write up was a very suggestive item of information. Of course, I believe everything I read on the Internet. The statement which caught my attention was:
According to an Axios analysis of the top 50 most-followed accounts on each platform, TikTok is especially unique in minting its own stars who don’t blow up on other platforms.
- The top five most-followed accounts on TikTok — Charli D’Amelio, Khaby Lame, Addison Rae, Bella Poarch and Zach King — do not rank in the top 50 of any other social media network.
- Collectively, those five stars have 480 million followers on TikTok, but less than half of that amount of followers across Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook combined.
- Top TikTok personalities have been able to land massive Hollywood deals across film, TV and podcasts, without building audiences on other platforms.
If these data are accurate, it follows that “peak” US social media has come and is now officially going. The data, if on the money, suggest:
- Those with access to TikTok data have a valuable trove of signals. These can be used for many things; for example, which individual is most likely to have a predisposition to resist authority.
- A split between old school social media and new school social media is similar to the technical and intellectual bifurcation between those with traditional college educations and those who prefer short video content. Does this presage a new approach to thinking and decision making which outsiders may struggle to understand.
- The social damage sparked by old school social media platforms may be accelerated by the “velocity” and algorithmic steering of the TikTok type environment.
Now who owns TikTok? What outfits have access to these real time data? What managers have direct access to the stars identified as bright sparks in the TikTok universe? Time for some academics, real journalists, and researchers not accepting China centric funding to do some objective analysis.
Stephen E Arnold, November 17, 2021
Teens Protest Online: Social Media Feels the Chill
November 17, 2021
Facebook has created problems from the moment Zuckerberg released the social media platform. Facebook has contributed to human trafficking, child pornography, teen suicides, and widespread misinformation related to vaccines and politics. Facebook has also seen its users age with fewer young people interested in using the platform. Teen Vogue details how teens planned to protest Facebook’s bad acts in, “Facebook Log Out Campaign Aims To Hold Social Media Companies Accountable For Protecting Users.”
On November 10, the Kairos Fellowship encouraged Instagram and Facebook users to log out of their accounts. The movement called the Facebook (and Instagram) Log Out. The purpose is to remove users from the social media platforms’ profit streams. In other words, hurt the companies in the wallet in an attempt to gain their attentions. The protestors want effective content moderation, algorithm transparency, and direct accountability to the people on the platform:
“But here’s the thing: Social media users are not powerless. In Facebook’s case, 98% of their revenue comes from advertising, much of which is hyper-targeted towards each and every user. So when I say Facebook is nothing without users and user data, I literally mean it. We make or break platforms like Instagram and Facebook, and, together, we can begin the process of reimagining what these spaces could look like and how they can run. It’s because I see the importance of social media platforms in our society and for marginalized communities that I’m proud to be leading the Facebook (and Instagram) Logout.”
November 10 has come and gone, but there was little reported on the Logout’s impact. It is great for protests like the Logout to exist and gain the social media companies’ attentions. It would be even greater if they worked with politicians and more advertisers to make their voices heard. It is hard to get a message across unless something goes viral, but they need social media for that. Catch-22 anyone?
Whitney Grace, November 17, 2021
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