Tech Insiders Call Out Facebook for Literally Manipulating Your Brain | KQED Future of You | KQED Science
Recently, a former Google “design ethicist” named Tristan Harris has been on a crusade of sorts calling out tech companies like Facebook, Google and Apple for using behavioral techniques and neuroscience to keep you compulsively glued to your phone and computer screens.
The Art Story: Modern Art Movements, Artists, Ideas and Topics
The Art Story is an educational 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2009 to demystify Modern Art and further art appreciation. Our founder, Michael Zurakhinsky: "Modern Art is about ideas that should be exposed to the world, and this website and the organization as a whole strive to achieve this goal."
From politics to poetry, bots are playing an increasingly visible role in culture. Veronica Belmont investigates the rise of social media bots with Lauren Kunze and Jenn Schiffer. Butter.ai’s Jack Hirsch talks about what happens when your profile is stolen by a political bot. Lisa-Maria Neudert measures how bots influence politics. Ben Nimmo teaches us how to spot and take down bot armies. And Tim Hwang explores how bots can connect us in surprising, and meaningful, new ways.
Immersive Storytelling with 5th Graders: Documenting A Field Trip to Levi’s Stadium
This is a brief summary of the project focusing on organizing the students’ work; setting goals, planning, data collection, and editing. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on what more could we do to support the development of the 4Cs through digital — or immersive — storytelling.
This week on Glitch: Rise of the Bots! – Glitch – Medium
Convenient, powerful bots can make common tasks just as easy as having a conversation. This week, Glitch shows you how to get the most out of Bots, and even how to build your own.
Zeynep Tufekci: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | TED Talk | TED.com
We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.
Jennifer Golbeck: Your social media "likes" expose more than you think | TED Talk | TED.com
Do you like curly fries? Have you Liked them on Facebook? Watch this talk to find out the surprising things Facebook (and others) can guess about you from your random Likes and Shares. Computer scientist Jennifer Golbeck explains how this came about, how some applications of the technology are not so cute -- and why she thinks we should return the control of information to its rightful owners.
Stewardship in the "Age of Algorithms" | Lynch | First Monday
This paper explores pragmatic approaches that might be employed to document the behavior of large, complex socio-technical systems (often today shorthanded as “algorithms”) that centrally involve some mixture of personalization, opaque rules, and machine learning components. Thinking rooted in traditional archival methodology — focusing on the preservation of physical and digital objects, and perhaps the accompanying preservation of their environments to permit subsequent interpretation or performance of the objects — has been a total failure for many reasons, and we must address this problem. The approaches presented here are clearly imperfect, unproven, labor-intensive, and sensitive to the often hidden factors that the target systems use for decision-making (including personalization of results, where relevant); but they are a place to begin, and their limitations are at least outlined. Numerous research questions must be explored before we can fully understand the strengths and limitations of what is proposed here. But it represents a way forward. This is essentially the first paper I am aware of which tries to effectively make progress on the stewardship challenges facing our society in the so-called “Age of Algorithms;” the paper concludes with some discussion of the failure to address these challenges to date, and the implications for the roles of archivists as opposed to other players in the broader enterprise of stewardship — that is, the capture of a record of the present and the transmission of this record, and the records bequeathed by the past, into the future. It may well be that we see the emergence of a new group of creators of documentation, perhaps predominantly social scientists and humanists, taking the front lines in dealing with the “Age of Algorithms,” with their materials then destined for our memory organizations to be cared for into the future.
The World Wide Web has been around for long enough now that we can begin to evaluate the twists and turns of its evolution. I wrote this book to highlight some of the approaches to web design that have proven to be resilient. I didn’t do this purely out of historical interest (although I am fascinated by the already rich history of our young industry). In learning from the past, I believe we can better prepare for the future. You won’t find any code in here to help you build better websites. But you will find ideas and approaches. Ideas are more resilient than code. I’ve tried to combine the most resilient ideas from the history of web design into an approach for building the websites of the future. I hope you will join me in building a web that lasts; a web that’s resilient.
The Only Good Thing About Winter Is This Story Written in Snow
he east coast of the U.S. recently had its first major snow of the winter, which sucks in almost every conceivable way but one. The silver lining: the continuation of author Shelley Jackson’s story written in snow, which was started back in 2014 and, four years later, is still only a few sentences long. (This might be a wildly different story if we were in Iceland, but Jackson lives in New York, a city with an average snowfall of 25 inches per year and falling, and the story is written one or maybe two words at a time.)
Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down? - The Globe and Mail
A decade ago, smart devices promised to change the way we think and interact, and they have – but not by making us smarter. Eric Andrew-Gee explores the growing body of scientific evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds
How—And Why—Apple, Google, And Facebook Follow You Around In Real Life
Even the most absent-minded smartphone user is probably aware that apps keep tabs on where they go. Many apps wouldn’t work without location data. But few realize just how often that location tracking is happening—even when it’s not necessary, even when their apps aren’t being used, and, increasingly, even when a user isn’t even carrying their phone. Tracking you across the map isn’t always about improving user experience, of course, but rather about better understanding who you are and what kind of advertising to show you. If, for instance, a company knows that you’ve just stepped foot in one of their stores, they might start targeting you with ads touting a sale. It’s hard to dispute the value of a good sale, but location tracking raises all sorts of privacy concerns. (Not to mention that using the GPS will drain your smartphone’s battery faster.) Should app makers know where we live, where our children go to school, where we go to get away from it all? And if so, how much should they tell us about it? Those complicated questions help explain why the biggest tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Verizon, filed a pro-privacy amicus brief in last month’s Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, in which they argued that police should have a warrant before accessing cell phone location data. After all, if we thought the police could easily access our data, we might start asking more questions about what our phones know about us, and become less comfortable with using these companies’ products.
In my second year of PhD coursework, I am beginning to prepare for the general exam — a massive reading and writing effort that will help me discover the conversations, methods, and theories that matter to those I most want to write with, to, and for. I will spend hours, weeks, months reading, digesting, and synthesizing. I will then demonstrate my understanding through writing and an oral defense. I do not want that experience to feel like some unrelenting ultra-marathon. I want it to feel alive and loving, nourishing and compelling. I want to feel hungry and then full and then hungry again. To build the skills to do that, I spent the last quarter — about ten weeks time — experimenting with contemplative reading. I do not mean I spent the quarter reading texts that were contemplative in nature. While I read a few poems and contemplative texts to experience contemplatively reading contemplative writing, most of my readings were of the typical academic style. By contemplative reading, I mean that I made space for the experience of reading itself. I acknowledged what happened in my heart and body, not just my brain. I explored ways of reading that honored presence, slowness, creativity, and embodiment. I also, at times, tried to read for reading’s sake, rather than to finish or know (that was the hardest of all!). This post is a reflection on that experience. It is meant to be an offering to anyone who experiences reading as burdensome or joyless. It is not meant to suggest what contemplative reading might be for you or to be an authority on which ways of reading are or are not contemplative. It is also not meant to devalue any way of reading, useful or otherwise.
I built a tool to analyze Twitter accounts – Luca Hammer – Medium
I like Twitter and I like data. Over the last years I published hundreds of Twitter analyses on Twitter. Often I get asked how I create them. I use the Python CLI tool twecoll to collect the data and a mix of Gephi, Excel and custom Python (Jupyter ❤) scripts to extend and analyse it. This makes it hard for most people to re-create my results. When people suggest I look at a specific keyword or account, I often have to decline and point at guides how to do it themselves or ask them to pay me to do the analysis. The Account Analysis Tool helps people to analyze Twitter accounts themselves. Without the need to install anything or learn how the Twitter API works. Just open the tool in your browser (desktop works best), login with your Twitter account (read-only oAuth) and enter the account you want to analyze.
urlscan.io is a service which analyses websites and the resources they request. Much like the Inspector of your browser, urlscan.io will let you take a look at the individual resources that are requested when a site is loaded. The idea behind urlscan.io is to allow even inexperienced users to get a look at what a particular website is requesting in the background. For people new to modern web development, this will often have a certain wow-effect.
How to Take a Picture of a Stealth Bomber From Above - The Atlantic
The first thought that comes to mind staring at the photograph above is: This has got to be fake. The B-2 stealth bomber looks practically pasted onto the field. The flag is unfurled just so. The angle feels almost impossible, shot directly down from above. And yet, it’s real, the product of lots of planning, some tricky flying, and the luck of the moment. The photographer, Mark Holtzman, has been flying his Cessna 206 around taking aerial images for years, since before the digital-photography days, and he’s developed his technique for just this sort of shot.
Your memories are digital: they’re on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, on your devices... Meet Kumbu, the Souvenir Box designed for the Digital Era - the one place where to save for later the digital memories that you love.
We challenged teens to pick a story and create an alternate scenario through art or story format where a famous hero is the villain or an infamous villain, the hero, and we invited them to submit entries.
Using ‘Visitors and Residents’ to visualise digital practices | White | First Monday
Visitors and Residents’ is a continuum of modes of engagement which has been well established as a valuable way of understanding how individuals engage online. This paper discusses how the original metaphor of Visitors and Residents has been developed into a mapping process which helps individuals to visualise, and reflect on, the digital tools and places they use or spend time in. The paper explores ways that the Visitors and Residents work has developed and proposes a method of analysing a body of maps through ‘engagement genres’ to discover broader trends in behaviour across groups
New media art refers to artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, video games, computer robotics, 3D printing, cyborg art and art as biotechnology. The term differentiates itself by its resulting cultural objects and social events, which can be seen in opposition to those deriving from old visual arts (i.e. traditional painting, sculpture, etc.)
Digital art is an artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as an essential part of the creative or presentation process. Since the 1970s, various names have been used to describe the process, including computer art and multimedia art. Digital art is itself placed under the larger umbrella term new media art
What is Narrative Art? - The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Narrative art is art that tells—or narrates—a story through imagery. The power of a story is in how and what it makes us feel. Images ignite imagination, evoke emotions and capture universal cultural truths and aspirations. We think you will see a bit of yourself in the collection—even in stories from long ago or depictions of worlds in the distant future.
Spamnesty is a way to waste spammers' time. If you get a spam email, simply forward it to sp@mnesty.com, and Spamnesty will strip your email address, pretend it's a real person and reply to the email. Just remember to strip out any personal information from the body of the email, as it will be used so the reply looks more legitimate. That way, the spammer will start talking to a bot, and hopefully waste some time there instead of spending it on a real victim. Meanwhile, Spamnesty will send you an email with a link to the conversation, so you can watch it unfold live!
