This one's gonna be trouble.
Happy Monday, y'all! And by "Monday," I actually mean Creepy-Updates-To-Social-Platforms-That-No-One-Asked-For Day, because that's effectively what today was. First Facebook rolled out this new function called "Ask," which will let you pester friends and strangers for information they have explicitly chosen to keep private. Not to be outdone, anonymous-secret app Whisper then introduced categories, which let you view secrets by place and topic. This feature is very cool, actually, but also another reminder that your secrets are not-so-secret on many of these things. Why do we even use the Internet?! Anyway, to the links:
1. The world has more information than ever before -- but thanks to corporate interests and copyright-holders, we don't have access to it. What we need, argues Robert Darnton, is a true "world digital library" where the public can access books and journals that currently cost many thousands of $$ -- a place where information isn't "diverted away from ... where it can do most good."
2. On @darth, "doxing" and the weird politics of staying anonymous online. Outing the IRL identities of online personas has lately become a form of protest and journalism. But anonymity is a kind of power. And taking it away is a kind of power play.
3. More than 1 million people use the dating site "Farmers Only." Nope, there's no flannel fetish at play here -- it all relates to identity and efficiency. (Well, okay. And maybe beards.)
This one's gonna be trouble.
Pocketables: Why are we so busy? Because we're reading all these long articles, probably. (3037 words/12 minutes)
Postscripts: Rap shirts for white people. Lunchables for teens. How a porn star beat web payments and how Internet fandom changed TV. Ira Glass really could not care less about your bullshit. Joe Biden could indeed care less about the prom. This is the world's oldest cat. This is world's most-liked airport. Behold the future of: (1) breakfast, (2) clothing, (3) language as you know it. Oh yeah, and video games will teach your children empathy (!).
Until tomorrow,
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