“Recorded music and the formats that deliver it have always influenced each other profoundly. Pop songs tend to be three minutes long because five decades ago, that’s how much music fit on one side of a vinyl single. The compact disc is said to be 74 minutes long to handle longer operas and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. MTV made recording artists get more adventurous haircuts. The list goes on.”
—TIME.com, ‘How The Business of Streaming Music Will Change Our Culture…For The Better’
October 2012
2 posts
“Misinformation is even more likely to travel and be amplified by the ongoing diversification of news sources and the rapid news cycle. Today, publishing news is as simple as clicking “send.” This, combined with people’s tendency to seek out information that confirms their beliefs, tends to magnify the effects of misinformation. Nyhan says that although a good dose of skepticism doesn’t hurt while reading news stories, the onus to prevent misinformation should be on political pundits and journalists rather than readers. “If we all had to research every factual claim we were exposed to, we’d do nothing else,” Nyhan says. “We have to address the supply side of misinformation, not just the demand side.”
Correcting misinformation, however, isn’t as simple as presenting people with true facts. When someone reads views from the other side, they will create counterarguments that support their initial viewpoint, bolstering their belief of the misinformation. Retracting information does not appear to be very effective either. Lewandowsky and colleagues published two papers in 2011 that showed a retraction, at best, halved the number of individuals who believed misinformation.” —Scientific American, Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into “Facts”? (via futurejournalismproject)
Correcting misinformation, however, isn’t as simple as presenting people with true facts. When someone reads views from the other side, they will create counterarguments that support their initial viewpoint, bolstering their belief of the misinformation. Retracting information does not appear to be very effective either. Lewandowsky and colleagues published two papers in 2011 that showed a retraction, at best, halved the number of individuals who believed misinformation.” —Scientific American, Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into “Facts”? (via futurejournalismproject)
September 2012
2 posts
Quote Me: Nas Discusses Being Accessible in the Digital Age
Rapper Nas shared his thoughts about being accessible in the Digital Age with Tech Crunch this past weekend.
Read what Nas had to say below.
July 2012
3 posts
News You Can Use
The other night I was watching Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series, The Newsroom, with my mother. For the uninitiated, Sorkin is the writer of many excellent TV shows (The West Wing, SportsNight) and screenplays (The Social Network, A Few Good Men), and The Newsroom is his latest attempt at making the responsibility of live television production seem heroic and sexy. Being best known for writing bold examinations of political morality, a show centered around a cable news program fighting against the corruption and frivolity inherent in television media seems like a good fit. And so far, I enjoy it.
In last week’s episode, the news team decides to step up to the plate and take-on the truth behind the hijacking of the Tea Party. The episode was rife with facts and stories that reveal the true nature of the present-day Tea Party (I should mention here that the show takes place in the summer of 2010 and thus tackles issues that were relevant during that time). I wouldn’t say anything in the episode seemed misleading or false (although one interview did seem, to me, to violate a promise in an earlier episode “not to present [stories] in an emotional context”, but that can hardly be avoided, I guess?), but the concentrated bashing of the Right hit a nerve with my mother, a socially liberal, otherwise conservative republican.
“This is bullshit. [Aaron Sorkin] said [in interviews] that this show wasn’t going to lean politically. This is totally hypocritical,” She said. Or something like that.
This led to a long and fruitless debate about whether “quality news” or even “truthful news” has to be perfectly balanced. This is tricky. Machale, the executive producer character, said herself in the previous episode “There aren’t two sides to every story. Some stories have one side, some stories have five sides”. The concept of, as FOX News puts it, “Fair and Balanced News”, is a much more complicated bargain than it first appears.
That brings me to Eli Pariser.
Eli Pariser delivered an excellent TED Talk on the subject of Filter Bubbles. It’s truly fascinating, and very much worth your time.
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For those who do *not* have the time, it’s like this:
-Personalization provides us with options that computer alghorithms calculate we “want” while filtering out things that we might “not want”. This is a great way to find movies or music that you like, for instance.
-Personalization is also applied to news, search results, and just about everything else we interact with digitally.
-What happens when the things the internet thinks we “don’t want” are actually really important and/or could change our perspective?
-A man in London and a man in New York City both google “Egypt”. one man receives news of the protests there, the other receives only travel advice.
Another way of looking at it:
-Our perception of the world is increasingly dominated and informed by entertainment media, especially through interaction with digital content.
-Entertainment is, of course, produced with the satisfaction of the viewer in mind, above all else.
-Television and Internet news and information is judged firstly by it’s entertainment value. Most people won’t consume information willfully unless it is funny/shocking/interesting. And now, with personalization, it must be all of these things as well as being “relevant to the users interests”.
It’s a brilliant talk, and much has been said about it, so I’ll move on (for now. more on filter bubbles another day!)
By this logic, one strategy of “quality news” could be to utilize entertainment value to get important information out to as many people as possible. This is the purported goal of Upworthy, an organization dedicated to spreading politically intriguing content via videos, infographics, and “pictures of cats”.
http://www.upworthy.com/35-billion-was-spent-on-corporate-lobbying-in-2010-what-did-it-buy
I’ve been subscribed to Upworthy’s Facebook page since I read about it on Pariser’s website a few months ago. They often post interesting statistics I was not aware of. It can be very informative. But it is, unarguably, totally liberal.
Which is fine!
I’m not one of those people who goes on and on about “liberal media bias”, or whatever. I’m liberal. I’m hip. I’ve tweeted about Occupy. I’m down with stuff!
It’s not Upworthy’s lean that I’m interested in. Obviously, an internet media startup that posts cat image macros to energize people politically is not likely to be representative of any form of The Conservative Right, reasonable or otherwise. And there’s no reason they should.
However, it was my understanding that Upworthy’s mission was to challenge my views. They haven’t. They’ve certainly posted some controversial things, and I’m more than willing to admit that they’ve shown me ideas and opinions I had not considered before. And therefore, I have nothing against Upworthy, they’re doing a fantastic job.
What frustrates me is that the hypothetical organization of my expectations doesn’t exist yet. I dream of an organization (or just an aggregator) that literally personalizes a devils advocate news feed designed to absolutely offend your sensibilities. I’m gonna work on this, brb.
Sympathy
It happened about two weeks ago now. I’m late to the game. But what a bizarre event.
For a straightforward, concise rundown of The Bus Monitor incident illustrated with a chronological collection of related Twitter posts, comments, videos and news articles, read this Storify article.
short version:
(1) A youtube video of a sobbing elderly woman being harrassed by a bus full of middle school children surfaces.
(2) The video trends, generates discussion of general bullying as well as notions of vigilante-style justice
(3) A campaign is established to collect donations in order to send the woman on a nice vacation
(4) campaign raises $650,000, internet creepshow Anonymous predictably plans to harrass minors in the name of justice
(5) somewhat confused but flattered elderly woman appears on television, gives thanks, invests money in retirement
Karen Klein isn’t by any means a new type of celebrity. Even before the Internet, particularly touching or heart-breaking human interest stories have led to fundraising campaigns and fame. However, the Bus Monitor story piques my interest because of it’s utilization of several relatively new media mechanisms to arrive at it’s goal, the immediacy of the reaction and subsequent fundraising. None of it would have been possible without the use of social media, primarily Twitter and Indiegogo (not to mention Storify’s relatively ingenious method of coherently narrating a “social media event” using assembly and curation of the mess of assets involved).
Innumerable events occur in the world everyday, every second, but so few of them are captured, fit into an attractive narrative and sold to the digital public.
Many people experience suffering in the world, and a few of them are bus monitors.
Karen Klein said in an interview with People Magazine, “…It’s like I almost don’t feel like I deserve it”. It’s understandable that she would feel that way, receiving this unusual monetary gift from a faceless mob of philanthropy. But of course she deserves it.
Every dollar Karen Klein received came from empathetic strangers online, people who have almost certainly experienced similarly unpleasant circumstances in their lives. Every one of us have experienced the cruelty of others. Every one of us feels like we deserve $650,000 for our hardships. That’s what The Internet gave Karen Klein, because now she represents all of our suffering. We feel good about ourselves, and Karen Klein gets to retire. It’s an excellent deal.
“I keep thinking, What have I done? It’s like I almost don’t feel like I deserve it.”
—Karen Klein, The Bullied Bus Monitor, to People Magazine, regarding the oddity of receiving the cumulative sympathy of the entire Internet, or receiving $650,000, or both.
June 2012
3 posts
Thesis Proposal
Abstract
This work will serve to reflect on the changing discourse on the subject of identity in virtual context, paying particular attention to race as a social construct carried over into the digital. I aim to push forward study that has contended with the budding sociality found on the internet in its early stages and appraising what has come to pass in the present. I ultimately intend to demonstrate that identity matters online, and its trappings – race, gender, socioeconomic strata — matter more insofar as its commodification in an economic system generated by the new social media by engaging in participant-observation within the social realms of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Second Life with a trained eye upon the social construction, language, interface semiotics, and practices of race among participants.
