Posts tagged social media

We now live in a world where we have public lives and private lives — and for over a century now, since roughly the point at which the above article appeared, the portion of our lives considered “public” has been expanding, while the portion of our lives we can consider “private” has been contracting.

Felix Salmon, How Technology Redefines Norms, Reuters.

What’s more, Jarvis himself is a prominent proponent of the idea that we should maximize the speed at which we move our lives into the public realm; he also equates a desire for privacy with being “scared of the public” .

Never before have we faced so many opportunities to turn the formerly-private into the newly-public. As those opportunities arise, many people adopt them, and turn “public” into the new norm for such activities. Eventually, the norms become societally entrenched, to the point at which it is now utterly unobjectionable for those who once would have been labeled “kodak fiends” to take photographs outside a Newport tennis tournament.

My point here is that technology has a tendency to create its own norms.

Which means, according to Salmon, that if wearable computing (like Google Glass) is successful, norms about what is public and private will continue to change, so if you are attached to what’s normal now, it’s better not to be, or you have every reason to worry.

We Promise Not to Screw Quick, someone teach the Yahoo social team how to use the Tumblr Twitter box. STAT. Image: Automated tweet from Yahoo’s Tumblr to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s Twitter account.

We Promise Not to Screw

Quick, someone teach the Yahoo social team how to use the Tumblr Twitter box. STAT.

Image: Automated tweet from Yahoo’s Tumblr to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s Twitter account.

We promise not to screw it up.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, announcing the company’s agreement to acquire Tumblr. On Tumblr, of course. Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!

FJP: We’re wary, but let’s hope so.

Rupert Murdoch, offering advice to Facebook, via Twitter. Murdoch’s News Corp (in)famously bought Myspace in 2005 for $580 million and sold it in 2011 to Specific Media for $35 million. During a 2011 annual meeting, he admitted that News Corp managed to “mismanage it in every possible way.”

Rupert Murdoch, offering advice to Facebook, via Twitter.

Murdoch’s News Corp (in)famously bought Myspace in 2005 for $580 million and sold it in 2011 to Specific Media for $35 million. During a 2011 annual meeting, he admitted that News Corp managed to “mismanage it in every possible way.”

Is Yahoo Trying to Acquire Tumblr? All Things D reports that Yahoo is trying to get its cool on with a potential Tumblr acquisition: Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.” …According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr. Adweek follows up saying a deal could be done by this weekend, adding: Such an acquisition could be just what CEO [Marissa] Mayer has been looking for to turn around Yahoo’s momentum; Tumblr has the potential to excite the engineering/Silicon Valley community (even though it’s based in New York) while recapturing the imagination of advertisers, who have grown to view Yahoo as big but stale. While its revenue is modest, Tumblr has positioned itself as one of the few players in the digital ad world that is well suited for brand advertising. And Tumblr is also the domain of the young, cool and creative crowd—not currently a Yahoo sweet spot. From Tumblr’s point of view, the deal also would seem to make a lot of sense. The company has been looking to make a big exit to justify its huge valuation. Over at GigaOm, Om Malik suggests Facebook might try to swoop in on a deal.: We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If the Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt [Mark] Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. [Tumblr’s David] Karp is said to have a close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment. Word of warning via 37signals: What happens after Yahoo acquires you: Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag. Sweet.

Is Yahoo Trying to Acquire Tumblr?

All Things D reports that Yahoo is trying to get its cool on with a potential Tumblr acquisition:

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.” …According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Adweek follows up saying a deal could be done by this weekend, adding:

Such an acquisition could be just what CEO [Marissa] Mayer has been looking for to turn around Yahoo’s momentum; Tumblr has the potential to excite the engineering/Silicon Valley community (even though it’s based in New York) while recapturing the imagination of advertisers, who have grown to view Yahoo as big but stale.

While its revenue is modest, Tumblr has positioned itself as one of the few players in the digital ad world that is well suited for brand advertising. And Tumblr is also the domain of the young, cool and creative crowd—not currently a Yahoo sweet spot.

From Tumblr’s point of view, the deal also would seem to make a lot of sense. The company has been looking to make a big exit to justify its huge valuation.

Over at GigaOm, Om Malik suggests Facebook might try to swoop in on a deal.:

We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If the Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt [Mark] Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. [Tumblr’s David] Karp is said to have a close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Word of warning via 37signals: What happens after Yahoo acquires you:

Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

Sweet.

As in 1957, 1966 and 1989, Chinese intellectuals are feeling more or less the same fear as one does before an approaching mountain storm. The scariest [fear] of all is not being silenced or sent to prison; it is the sense of powerlessness and uncertainty about what comes next… It’s as if you are walking into a minefield blindfolded.

Hao Qun, as quoted in The Guardian. China Tries to Rein in Microbloggers.

The News, via The Guardian:

China has launched a new drive to tame its boisterous microblogging culture by closing influential accounts belonging to writers and intellectuals who have used them to highlight social injustice.

The strict censorship of mainstream media in China has made social media an essential forum for public debate, but authorities have shown increasing determination to control it. Previous campaigns have warned the public against spreading rumours – a theme that has recurred in this crackdown – and ordered users to register with their real names.

Now attention has turned to the country’s opinion formers. A recent commentary in the state-run Global Times newspaper warned that “Big Vs” – meaning verified accounts with millions of followers – had become “relay stations for online rumours” and accused them of “harming the dignity of the law”.

Somewhat Related: The South China Morning Post reports that the central government has ordered universities to stop teaching seven subjects, among them civil rights, press freedom and the communist party’s past mistakes.

Now The Internet Will Write My Essay For Me Via Reddit/quickmeme.

Now The Internet Will Write My Essay For Me

Via Reddit/quickmeme.

The Worst Room

drewvigal:

A blog about trying to find affordable housing in New York City.

One might think that this is an exaggeration. But I remember checking out an apartment in Chinatown years ago and I was just dumbfounded for how little you get for so how much you pay. These images may be the worst of the worst but it’s not far from the truth.

FJP: Eeeek. Filed under “what Tumblr is good for”.

The Geography of a Tweet A team of researchers lead by GDELT co-creator Kalev Leetaru gained access to the Twitter decahose last October and November and examined 1.5 billion tweets from 71 million users. Among the many things they parsed from the two terabytes of data was the average physical distance between an original tweet its retweet: Some 749 miles (1205 km). For @ mentions, the average distance between one user referencing another when exact geolocation is known is 744 miles (1197 km). The paper, Mapping the Global Twitter Heartbeat: The Geography of Twitter, also includes the geographic difference between mainstream news media and news items from Twitter: Mainstream media appears to have significantly less coverage of Latin America and vastly better greater of Africa. It also covers China and Iran much more strongly, given their bans on Twitter, as well as having enhanced coverage of India and the Western half of the United States. Overall, mainstream media appears to have more even coverage, with less clustering around major cities. Image: Detail, Network map showing locations of users retweeting other users (geocoded Twitter Decahose tweets 23 October 2012 to 30 November 2012), via FirstMonday.org. Select to embiggen.

The Geography of a Tweet

A team of researchers lead by GDELT co-creator Kalev Leetaru gained access to the Twitter decahose last October and November and examined 1.5 billion tweets from 71 million users.

Among the many things they parsed from the two terabytes of data was the average physical distance between an original tweet its retweet: Some 749 miles (1205 km).

For @ mentions, the average distance between one user referencing another when exact geolocation is known is 744 miles (1197 km).

The paper, Mapping the Global Twitter Heartbeat: The Geography of Twitter, also includes the geographic difference between mainstream news media and news items from Twitter:

Mainstream media appears to have significantly less coverage of Latin America and vastly better greater of Africa. It also covers China and Iran much more strongly, given their bans on Twitter, as well as having enhanced coverage of India and the Western half of the United States. Overall, mainstream media appears to have more even coverage, with less clustering around major cities.

Image: Detail, Network map showing locations of users retweeting other users (geocoded Twitter Decahose tweets 23 October 2012 to 30 November 2012), via FirstMonday.org. Select to embiggen.

Have You Seen this Book? Lexicographers, philologists and bibliophiles unite: there’s a book that needs to be found. As the Oxford English Dictionary overhauls its dictionaries it’s reexamining the more than 300,000 entries in the OED. Sometimes though, the original sources are hard to find. Case in point, Meanderings of Memory by Nightlark, which is referenced 49 times from 1852. The OED can’t find the book in its catalog or databases. All it has to work with is the fragment seen above from a bookseller. Via Sasha Weiss in the New Yorker: I asked Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press, about how the search had come about. Her answer amounted to a mini-history of the O.E.D.’s longtime practice of calling on the general public to aid its lexicographers. “We like to say the O.E.D. has been crowdsourcing since before there was a word for crowdsourcing,” she said. In 1879, James Murray, a leading member of the British Philological Society who edited the first edition of the O.E.D., put out “An Appeal to English Speaking Readers,” asking for volunteers to comb through periodicals, pamphlets, works of literature, and scientific and philosophical treatises, and note down unusual words and to quote the sentences in which they appeared. “Anyone can help,” Murray wrote, “especially with modern books.” Readers took down their findings on six-by-four index cards—called “slips”—and submitted them to the dictionary’s editors. Over a million quotations were collected before the publication of the dictionary’s first installment. (The practice has continued, with a few lapses, since then—now it exists in digital form.) According to the O.E.D.’s Web site, “The quotations are one of the most important aspects of the entries contained in the OED. They document the history of a term from its earliest to its most recent recorded usage.” So, word nerds, the hunt is on. A global search for a single book. Image: Catalog entry for Meanderings of Memory, via the OED.

Have You Seen this Book?

Lexicographers, philologists and bibliophiles unite: there’s a book that needs to be found.

As the Oxford English Dictionary overhauls its dictionaries it’s reexamining the more than 300,000 entries in the OED. Sometimes though, the original sources are hard to find. Case in point, Meanderings of Memory by Nightlark, which is referenced 49 times from 1852. The OED can’t find the book in its catalog or databases. All it has to work with is the fragment seen above from a bookseller.

Via Sasha Weiss in the New Yorker:

I asked Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press, about how the search had come about. Her answer amounted to a mini-history of the O.E.D.’s longtime practice of calling on the general public to aid its lexicographers. “We like to say the O.E.D. has been crowdsourcing since before there was a word for crowdsourcing,” she said.

In 1879, James Murray, a leading member of the British Philological Society who edited the first edition of the O.E.D., put out “An Appeal to English Speaking Readers,” asking for volunteers to comb through periodicals, pamphlets, works of literature, and scientific and philosophical treatises, and note down unusual words and to quote the sentences in which they appeared. “Anyone can help,” Murray wrote, “especially with modern books.” Readers took down their findings on six-by-four index cards—called “slips”—and submitted them to the dictionary’s editors. Over a million quotations were collected before the publication of the dictionary’s first installment. (The practice has continued, with a few lapses, since then—now it exists in digital form.) According to the O.E.D.’s Web site, “The quotations are one of the most important aspects of the entries contained in the OED. They document the history of a term from its earliest to its most recent recorded usage.”

So, word nerds, the hunt is on. A global search for a single book.

Image: Catalog entry for Meanderings of Memory, via the OED.

Intern with The FJP this summer: Apps due Friday!

It’s Spring. Which means it’s time to start thinking about summer. And working with the FJP is assured to be a summer well spent. 

NYC applicants, see details here.
If you’re not in NYC, send us a note anyway.

It is the responsibility of scientists and journalists to work together in stopping such empathy fatigue, because empathy is the primary human quality that fuels our instinct to protect human rights around the world.

Jamil Zaki, Empathy Fatigue and What the Press Can Do About It, The Huffington Post.

Background:

Circa 2009, I geeked out over Zaki’s article because, well, hearing a psychologist weigh in on the objectivity-is-perilous-in-journalism debate is refreshing. No one’s really arguing anymore over the fact that objectivity is a tricky, nuanced, sub-standard ethic for journalism, but a new, better ethic hasn’t quite emerged. A singular sterling standard probably won’t. 

Last fall, some of the best and brightest in media sat down to talk about it all and thanks to Poynter, this book emerged. Really smart people all over the world are creating and debating around accurate and value-creative reporting. You can explore our ethics tag for past coverage of some of those conversations.

The News:

Zaki, who is on the science side of things, very much heeded his own call to action and today I’m geeking out over his newest project, The People’s Science, a digital public space where scientists and the public can meet, share, and talk about science.

The site’s purpose is to encourage scientists to write posts about their research in easy-to-understand language and for the public to have conversations with those scientists directly.

In Zaki’s words (via NPR): 

In an ideal world, I think TPS could provide a platform for scientists to feature their work to a broad audience and describe why they find it exciting and relevant. For non-scientists, I hope that the site can provide an insider’s perspective on how scientists think, and a way to go beyond the “punchlines” of a given study and understand the process that went into it. I also think the public should be able to use this to vet other media sources, testing claims made by reporters against scientists’ own descriptions. Finally, I’d like the site to be a true forum: instead of each “pop” abstract serving as a static document, I’d like non-scientists and scientists alike to be able to ask questions and engage in discussion about the work posted here. At the highest level, my dream for this site would be to help scientists and non-scientists into more dialogue, which I believe can only be a good thing for our culture at large.

FJP: We agree, obviously, on very many levels. It humanizes the researchers behind academia’s impenetrable walls by thrusting them into the social sphere. It’s a gold mine for science reporters to have easy and direct access to emerging research and scientists. As someone who (in my non FJP life) works for an academic journal and deals quite regularly with the incomprehensible abstract and insanely long paper title, it’s wonderful.

Now go explore the site and ask questions.—Jihii

The News Machine

Remember Operator, the game where you whisper a message to someone, they whisper the same to another who does the same to another until finally the message comes back to you full of distortions and embellishments? So too COLORS Magazine’s News Machine.

Created for last month’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, The News Machine is a commentary on how information systems work, and how discrete items within it get lost in translation — so to speak — as they pass from one medium to another.

Via COLORS:

Designed in collaboration with interactive designer Jonathan Chomko, the COLORS News Machine turns your tweets into headlines, but only after they’ve been passed through all the media filters and technological platforms that disseminate and distort the news today.

Twitter is the largest and least verifiable wire agency in the world. Tweet your story to @colorsmachine and watch the message change as it echoes through different media and into print.

A megaphone will read your tweet out loud. Its tape recorder listens, converting what it hears into text so that the television can show it onscreen. A camera watching the television converts what it sees into a signal to the radio antenna, which broadcasts the tweet. And the waiting microphone interprets this radio address as text again for printing.

Pick up your receipt. Compare the original tweet with the final report. Accuracy of reproduction varies according to the clarity of your writing and to chance.

As Fast Company’s Mark Wilson points out, The News Machine’s “tacit thesis is very difficult to reconcile: Even by stating the truth, you could be helping to spread misinformation.”

Likes Don’t Save Lives

UNICEF Sweden has a new ad campaign reminding people that while social media Likes are nice, what they really need is money to fund their vaccination campaigns.

As The Verge points out, “Facebook likes aren’t treated as currency in other commercial venues, so they shouldn’t be equated with charitable donations.”

And via The Atlantic:

In the beginning, organizations wanted you to like the heck out of their Facebook pages. Why? You know, community-building, awareness-raising, general “engagement”-upping…

…But one thing clicking “like” doesn’t do is, say, get malaria nets to African villages or boost funding for charity groups. And now that Facebook is nearly 9 years old and Twitter is 7, we’re seeing the inevitable backlash against social-media “slacktivism.”

Back to The Verge:

The campaign, created by ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors, takes a rather bold stance against the awareness campaigns that often spread across Facebook and other social media platforms. UNICEF officials acknowledge that such efforts can help introduce issues to a wider audience, though they fear that for most users, the action stops with the click of a button. To further stress this point, UNICEF Sweden released a bold poster alongside the video clips, saying that every like it receives on Facebook will result in exactly zero vaccinations.

That’s not to say “slacktivists” are a bad thing. Liking, sharing and reblogging do serve their purpose in bringing issues to a wider audience. But then what?

Last year, The Atlantic notes, Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, had this to say:

What is called commonly called slacktivism is not at all about “slacking activists;” rather it is about non-activists taking symbolic action—often in spheres traditionally engaged only by activists or professionals (governments, NGOs, international institutions.). Since these so-called “slacktivists” were never activists to begin with, they are not in dereliction of their activist duties. On the contrary, they are acting, symbolically and in a small way, in a sphere that has traditionally been closed off to “the masses” in any meaningful fashion.

The goal then for those working in social media is to simultaneously help the “slacktivist” set help you by building out ambient awareness of an issue through the messaging you create, while also giving activists and more consistently loyal proponents direct calls to action be it donations, volunteerism, network building, etc.

Meantime, if you’re moved to Like a cause, consider volunteering your time and/or other resources to it as well.

The other two commercials in UNICEF’s campaign can be viewed at The Verge. — Michael