This week saw the further introduction of 280 characters to “most” Twitter users (not me as of this posting, but that’s probably for the best) as well as a lot of discussion centering awareness of the ongoing impact of technology on discourse. That’s the main theme of this week’s collection of long reads and videos:
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This week saw the further introduction of 280 characters to “most” Twitter users (not me as of this posting, but that’s probably for the best) as well as a lot of discussion centering awareness of the ongoing impact of technology on discourse. That’s the main theme of this week’s collection of long reads and videos:
James Bridle’s Medium article “Something is wrong on the internet” (warning for disturbing content) describes the strange world of farmed and tagged YouTube content that accompanies any popular character or trend, associated through tags and hashtags and lurking in the space of “watch next": “Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket. Many of these latest examples confound any attempt to argue that nobody is actually watching these videos, that these are all bots. There are humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I’m pretty worried about them too.”
In a circuitously related discussion of children’s media, A.J. O’Connell examines “The Secret History of Cricket Magazine, the New Yorker for Children” that chronicles the challenges faced by an educational and literary institution in adapting to a new era of media: “No one answers the phones at Cricket Media. The company has fully embraced the opaque, untouchable nature of most contemporary companies: a pretty website, a menu of general email addresses, and a fully automated phone system. You press 1 for one set of publications, 2 for another, 3 for the dial-by-name directory. Or you can hold the line for a receptionist who simply doesn’t exist. In the course of researching this story, I’ve dialed many names, held the line, emailed addresses both general and specific, and tweeted at Cricket. But I failed to reach anyone who currently works there.”
Kashmir Hill’s recent post on Gizmodo, “How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met,” is a useful introduction for anyone interested in the workings of the social network: “With its vast, hidden black book, Facebook can go beyond simply matching you directly with someone else who has your contact information. The network can do contact chaining—if two different people both have an email address or phone number for you in their contact information, that indicates that they could possibly know each other, too. It doesn’t even have to be an address or phone number that you personally told Facebook about.”
Last weekend, Trump’s Twitter account briefly disappeared. Ian Bogost’s Atlantic article “Even Trump is Vulnerable to Internet Chaos” examines the implications of this and similar incidents: “The internet has become the battlefield for this new type of asymmetrical power. Now that so much of life takes place online, it is also where the record of that life lives. For the journalists Ricketts put out of work, the homes for their portfolios are also lost. Their articles might be restored eventually, and other archives, like the Wayback Machine, could help. But in the short term, the writers put on the dole have no easy way to show their prior work when seeking new employment. Even if the entire matter blows over in days or weeks, Ricketts’s act serves as a reminder that information is mostly controlled by corporations, and those corporations have no commitment to long-term record keeping, let alone long-term employment.”
Looking for an even longer read this weekend? Emily Temple’s LitHub roundup post “Master List of Reading Lists for the Year of Trump” includes pointers to a year’s worth of recommended fiction and nonfiction, from the political to the existential, feminist, dystopian, and beyond.
My campus, University of Central Florida, just hosted HASTAC 2017 last week with some powerful discussions of the future of higher education and the digital humanities. Here’s a great storify of the opening plenary panel, and the two keynote videos are live for some weekend viewing: