👓 There’s Nothing Wrong With Posing for Photos at Chernobyl | Taylor Lorenz | The Atlantic

Read There’s Nothing Wrong With Posing for Photos at Chernobyl by Taylor Lorenz (The Atlantic)
Influencer-style pictures are simply the way we document our lives now.
Strip away the headline and the social media influencer angle which is a canard.

There’s an interesting societal shift happening here in photography. For counterpoint, compare this with Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography by Nancy West (The Atlantic).

👓 The Day the Music Burned | New York Times Magazine

Read The Day the Music Burned (New York Times Magazine)
It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.
This brings back some memories of when I worked for several months for Iron Mountain at their Hollywood facility right next to Anawalt lumber. They had quite a large repository of music masters stored there as well as a custom nitrate film vault. At the time I remember thinking many of the same things mentioned here. I suspect that there’s an even bigger issue in film preservation, though this particular article makes it seem otherwise.

I’m surprised that the author doesn’t whip out any references to the burning of the Library at Alexandria, which may have been roughly on par in terms of cultural loss to society. It’s painfully sad that UMG covered up the devastating loss.

The artwork for the piece is really brilliant. Some great art direction here.

👓 To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over | NPR

Read To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over by Nell GreenfieldboyceNell Greenfieldboyce (NPR)
Mike Morrison hardly looks like a revolutionary. He's wearing a dark suit and has short hair. But we're about to enter a world of conformity that hasn't changed in decades — maybe even a century. And in there, his vision seems radical. "We are about to walk into a room full of 100 scientific posters, where researchers are trying to display their findings on a big poster board," says Morrison, a doctoral student in psychology at Michigan State University. The idea of a science poster is simple. Get some poster-making materials and then slap on a title, the experimental methods and the results. Almost everyone has created a poster like this at some point — often in childhood, for a school assignment or a science fair.
I like the idea of this, but most conferences worth their salt also publish short abstracts of most poster presentations which have roughly this type of short overview of poster presentations. Prepared researchers will have scanned through them all and highlighted a dozen or so they want to stop by to see more about or meet the researchers.

Of course, all this to say that this method isn’t a potential improvement for the lazy drive-by poster visitor.

👓 Twitter Just Suspended My Account After The Cover Of My Book Offended Their Algorithm | Crooks and Liars

Read Twitter Just Suspended My Account After The Cover Of My Book Offended Their Algorithm (Crooks and Liars)
The cover of my book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right, is now being equated to actual hate speech that I report on.

👓 WordPress VIP Go sites are experience outages (yes, us included) | TechCrunch.tumblr.com

Read Wordpress VIP Go sites are experience outages (yes, us included) (TechCrunch)
You might have notice something funny if you visited TechCrunch dot com this morning (aside form the usual dryly hilarious tech commentary, that is). Our site, along with others, was hit by a major...
Fascinating to see TechCrunch is syndicating content to a Tumblr so they’re still “up” during a hosting outage.

🔖 Embedded in the Fabric: Georgetown Domains and the Master’s of Learning, Design, and Technology | Lee Skallerup Bessette, Randal Ellsworth

Bookmarked Embedded in the Fabric: Georgetown Domains and the Master's of Learning, Design, and Technology by Lee Skallerup Bessette, Randal Ellsworth (YouTube )

The mission of the new Master’s of Learning, Design, and Technology program at Georgetown University is “to give our students a deep foundation in the tools and theory of learning design, technology innovation, learning analytics, and higher education leadership, a foundation on which they can create engaging and innovative learning experiences for all students.” Working in and with Georgetown Domains is a key part of this engagement; the students learn about and create their domains during the opening week-long foundations course, and build on it throughout the duration of the degree, ending with a final portfolio on their domain of their work. In between, the students have the option of taking a one-credit course in Domains, as well as showcasing their coursework and projects on the site. For some, their personal Domains specifically and Georgetown Domains more generally have become the subject of their research and study. What this allows is for students to engage directly with the technology, as well as questions of accessibility, privacy, surveillance, and tools. They learn about and apply these lessons as they move through the program, perform and reflect on their research, and build their sites. But most importantly, this allows for students to own their own intellectual property, as well as provide the tools to apply what they have learned in a practical and holistic way. The e-portfolio requirement at the end of the degree highlights this commitment to students’ intellectual property as well as professionalization, while also providing an experimental and reflective space for students to connect their work. This short presentation will discuss curricular examples (Intro week, Domains course, Studio and Studio Capstone) of how Domains has been integrated into the program, sharing some student sites, projects, and portfolios.

hat tip:

🎧 Is True Crime Jinxed? | On the Media | WNYC Studios

Listened to Is True Crime Jinxed? by Bob Garfield from On the Media | WNYC Studios

We revisit Bob's conversation with filmmaker Joe Berlinger, about the ethics of HBO's "The Jinx."

Whether Robert Durst confessed on camera will become a relevant legal matter in the real estate figure's upcoming trial. The supposed confession — "What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course." — at the end of HBO's The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst has recently been revealed to have been seriously, deceptively edited. In 2015 Bob spoke with documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger, co-creater of the Paradise Lost trilogy, about modern filmmaker, the responsibility of the artist and different interpretations of "truth." It's a relevant conversation to revisit, this week in particular.

Some interesting ethical questions here. Something to think about with respect to documentaries, truth, and entertainment value. Some pieces not too dissimilar to how some cable news stations are approaching the news these days.
Listened to A New Look at "The View" from On the Media | WNYC Studios

The View is a sort of mythical beast, with the head of a chat show, the body of a reality show and the tail of a politics forum. And it also plays like a pro-wrestling spectacle: a lowbrow morality play with protagonists, antagonists and a lot of conflict. Ruth Graham writes in Slate that "The View is the show you watch if you want to see a former Survivor contestant debate a former professional wrestler on the morality of waterboarding. On the other hand, it’s the daytime show that debated waterboarding." Ramin Setoodeh is the author of Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View and the New York bureau chief for Variety. Bob and Setoodah talk about how a show populated with B-list celebrities has become a center of gravity for political discourse.  

Joe Biden appears on The View

Listened to Werner Herzog on Gorbachev from On the Media | WNYC Studios

Bob sits down with acclaimed director and documentarian Werner Herzog to discuss his latest film "Meeting Gorbachev."

Renowned director and documentarian Werner Herzog's latest filmmaking endeavor examines the legacy of the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. For the film, Herzog sat down with the 88 year-old former General Secretary for a candid conversation about his complicated legacy. In the latest installment of Bob's Docs, Herzog joins Bob to discuss his filmmaking process and the history of the man he profiled.

Herzog and Gorbachev

👓 Duxtape | Kicks Condor

Read Duxtape by Kicks Condor (Kicks Condor)

While messing with Dat last night, I got carried away in nostalgia and began… recreating Muxtape in Dat. I wanted to see how far I could get. (If you don’t know what Muxtape was—it was a way of sharing mp3 mixtapes online for a brief window of time in 2008, until it was shut down by the grown-ups.)

So, it seemed interesting to try to replicate Muxtape, because it would be very hard to “shut down” on the Dat network. And, sure enough, I was able to get it working quite well: you can upload songs, tweak the colors and titles, order the songs and such—I think this is quite faithful.

And, yes, it’s peer-to-peer. You can edit your tape using the URL created for you. Then you can pass that same URL out to share your tape. Visitors can listen to the music and seed the tape for everyone else.

If you’re interested in seeing what a mix looks like, try: dat://8587f3…aa/. (You’ll need Beaker.)

Source code is here. Inspired by Tara Vancil’s dat-photos-app. Thanks, Tara!

This is an awesome idea. I really wish I had the bandwidth to dig into DAT. Who wouldn’t want to be able to make mixtapes like this for the internet? It’s not too dissimilar to my listen feed (aka faux-cast), but could be more customized and curated for friends/family.

👓 The Good Social Internet | Bennett Tomlin

Read The Good Social Internet by Bennett TomlinBennett Tomlin (Bennett's Blog)
Social media often sucks. The social internet is a magical place full of rich relationships, new connections, intriguing ideas, and true community. What do I mean when I say the social internet? It…
Some great little quotes hiding in here:

The simple reason is that the dynamics of most social media are very different from the dynamics of other social internet applications. For one there seems to be a fundamental push vs pull difference in the way that you normally come to view the content.

The internet was on demand, instead of demanding.

👓 Feed Reading By Social Distance | Ton Zijlstra

Read Feed Reading By Social Distance by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
At the Crafting {:} a Life unconference one of the things that came up in our conversations was how you take information in, while avoiding the endlessly scrolling timelines of FB and Twitter as well as FOMO. My description of how I read feeds ‘by social distance‘ was met with curiosity and ‘c...
Ton’s archives have some more material on this topic, but it’s definitely an interesting way to sort and filter one’s feeds.