The *real* future of Facebook-ordered groupthink
We're several days into the FACEBOOK TRENDING SCANDAL, and I don't think anyone's asking the right questions yet. Like: If there's a human controlling my lil trending box, why are the Kardashians always in it?! That concerns me more, frankly, than the image of some liberal zealot zapping Breitbart links. Celebrity news and reality TV is the *real* future of Facebook-ordered groupthink.
HEY! SPEAKING OF FACEBOOK ... I'm running a small, unscientific, possibly futile experiment to try to figure out what stories Facebook displays to what people at what times. It is very easy/painless, but will only work if I can get a critical mass of people to contribute to it. Plz check it out and consider sharing with your friends. (Srsly, I appreciate it.)
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1. Inside the quest to design an AI that can flirt with us. It's the first step toward developing robots capable of love. The technology has a long way to go still, but maybe that's sort of superfluous. Just the fact that we're working toward tech that can flirt says so much about us.
2. We don't know very much about the 25-year-old building one of the world's ascendant technologies. Snapchat's Evan Spiegel mostly doesn't talk to press, and is obsessed with protecting his own privacy. What we DO know, however, suggests Snapchat is charting a v. different path than companies like Facebook have. Which, given recent revelations, seems not so bad...
3. How online videos of police shootings change the people who watch them. Jawad Pullim won't wear hoodies to parties, or leave his campus without a white friend. The sudden ubiquity of these images on Vine, Twitter and Facebook have created what one analyst calls "long-standing, race-based trauma" among the young black people who have seen them.
4. Apple Music and the tortured end of music-collecting. Fans who once spent hours hordeing deep cuts and demos now face a technological reckoning: Apple Music wants to curate your collection from the cloud, which sort of ruins the effort of personally curating anything. Is this the death of the diehard collector, or just a step along that road? Idk, but I don't even buy music anymore...
5. Who's in the Beyhive, actually? The fans/trolls who swarm around Beyonce's critics are largely normal 20-somethings, shielded by online anonymity.
>> You can download these links (and several others) as a free ebook here.
** new favorite Instagram alert **
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Postscripts: Twitter cross-stitch. Emoji ladies. Reddit loans, which sound kinda shady. The computer virus that haunted AIDS researchers and the guy who gets millions to study games. Dating sites for Americans fleeing Trump and for conspiracy theorists seeking same. When kids like your tweets, but not your tacos. Why your Facebook feed is full of ladies selling press-on nails. That great story of a kid finding lost ruins on Google is actually ... a big media fail! Crowdfunding bad; glow-stick meme worse; revenge-porn-hoaxing unforgivable. Emotion as seen through interactive graphics and food as seen through Google. Aristotle on trolling; suicide on Periscope; 4chan on ... assorted things. FINALLY, how Air Jordan became Crying Jordan -- and how to explain without mansplaining.
... WHEW. Until next week!
@caitlindewey
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