I still use blogs.setonhill.edu, which I started in 2003. Not for every class, but for most of my discussion-heavy in-person classes. Weblogs@Harvard, as it was then known, was considered pioneering. Facebook didn’t yet exist. Social media was in its infancy. And starting a blog usually required some knowledge of code. Harvard’s blogging platform, now known…
Young men are more than twice as likely than the general public to say they changed their mind on an issue because of social media. Americans who identify as Democrats, black, or Hispanic are also more likely than the general public to report change their minds because of social media. The survey seems to have…
Because what he never managed to grok then was that the company he created was destined to become a template for all of humanity, the digital reflection of masses of people across the globe. Including — and especially — the bad ones. Was it because he was a computer major who left college early and…
After I read Mark Sample’s blog post “What about Blogging Keeps Me from Blogging,” I tried to post a comment lamenting that I miss blog comments. I ran into these fun problems. Similar:An overnight traffic spike on an older online handout prompted me to touch it up. #techwri… Those are the stats for my…
Verrit, like Snopes, Politifact, and a host of other fact-checking sites, reflect fundamental misunderstandings about how information circulates online, what function political information plays in social contexts, and how and why people change their political opinions. Fact-checking is in many ways a response to the rapidly changing norms and practices of journalism, news gathering, and…
On this date in 1999, I first dated an entry in the collection of web links I had been curating since at least that January. Similar:Recording Christmas Stories for WAOB Audio TheatreFor WAOB Audio Theater, my family spent …Personal"Chores" — Clip from Snow White: The Musical (Stage Right Greensburg, Sept 2012)Here’s what it sounded like…
Facebook is discontinuing the “trending” list. After the employees hired by Facebook to curate the trending news items were found to bury news they didn’t like, Facebook fired them all and tried to automate the process. If it matters to you whether their bias was liberal or conservative you can look it up, but my…
Don’t blame “the media” for using this photo, often identified as immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in a cage. I saw this image in my social media feed numerous times over the weekend; it wasn’t journalists who kept sharing it, it was random people (and probably a non-trivial number of bots) on…
In the Washington Post, Greg Sargent analyzes a pattern in Trump’s very effective rhetoric. As you’ll recall, after Trump made his “animals” comment, his defenders — and Trump himself — erupted in anger at news organizations that had not explained that it had come amid a discussion of MS-13 members. It’s not clear from the…
I just noticed an option for viewing a Facebook timeline in “grid” mode. For the past several years I have been trying to add a square image to all my blog posts, and the style I created for my blog uses these square images (in different ways based on the width of the user’s screen).…
Reducing the reach of abusive tweets is better than censorship on the one hand, and nothing on the other. Of course, this is another reminder that the social media titans can and do manipulate what we see. Reducing the impact of bullies benefits Twitter’s bottom line, which is the same reason for every change to…
In its efforts to combat the spread of false news online (whether by malicious people who knew it was propaganda, or through the wishful thinking of overly-credible sheep who saw a post as confirmation of a value they already held), Facebook experimented with flagging stories as “disputed by third-party fact-checkers.” It turns out that a…
Today’s students have also lived most of their lives in the shadow of a systemic financial collapse. Some of us can still remember the extent to which the worldview of our parents or grandparents was shaped by having grown up during the Great Depression. While the Great Recession was objectively not as severe, it has…
Don’t trust the scary bad interweb. Do trust us, your local TV talking heads, who will do all the scary thinking for you! Seeing local TV devote air time to discuss fairness and accuracy in journalism is a good thing. But when scores of newscasters read word-for-word the exact same statement, which blames social…
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is drawing attention to malicious data thieves and brokers. But every Facebook app—even the dumb, innocent ones—collected users’ personal data without even trying.
Instagram dialed in early to the power of building community through visual communication. From the start, Instagram was a mobile app that revolved around snapshots, not snippets of text. This visualization of social media was propelled by young people who, bombarded by text messages, status updates and blog posts, gravitated to a simpler, faster and more expressive medium…
Misspelled tweets and typos in press releases are becoming the norm under President Trump, but critics say it points to a pervasive carelessness in the White House.
Wired, obviously having worked on a thinkpiece about Zuckerberg’s silence, manages to repurpose it in light of this afternoon’s statement. The Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s SilenceWhat has happened in the last five days has been the biggest crisis of Facebook’s existence. But Zuckerberg’s five-day silent treatment may prove more damning for Facebook than any…
Facebook does not care what Hobbit you are, whether your name is on the list of people who deserve a nap, which side of the controversy your temporary profile supports, or whether the news you shared is fake. Or, to be more precise, Facebook cares only to the extent that it can control our behavior,…
This is a welcome step, but we cannot trust big corporations to solve the fake news problem for us. (Slow down and think before you share that infuriating or inspiring detail you see in your feed.) In a move to combat the epidemic of false and unreliable information on the internet, Google is pledging to…