Annotation | Chris Aldrich

👓 My book, Twitter and Tear Gas, is out! News and Details! | Zeynep Tufekci

Read My book, Twitter and Tear Gas, is out! News and Details! by Zeynep Tufekci (technosociology)

Dear Friends, My book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, is officially out today, as of May 16th! It is published by Yale University Press, and it weaves stories w…

Some news: there will be a free creative commons copy of my book. It will be available as a free PDF download in addition to being sold as a bound book. This is with the hopes that anyone who wants to read it can do so without worrying about the cost. However, this also means that I need to ask that a few people who can afford to do so to please consider purchasing a copy. This is not just so that Yale University Press can do this for more authors, but also because if it is not sold (at least a little bit!) in the initial few weeks, bookstores will not stock it and online algorithms will show it to fewer people. No sales will mean less visibility, and less incentive for publishers to allow other authors creative commons copies. ❧

I negotiated the creative commons copy with my (wonderful!) publisher Yale University Press because I really wanted to do what I could to share my insights as broadly as I could about social movements and the networked public sphere. If I make a penny more from this book because it sells well by some miracle, I will donate every extra penny to groups supporting refugees, and if I ever meet you in person and you purchased a copy of the book in support, please let me know and I’ll buy the coffee or beer. 😀 This isn’t at all about money for me.

An excellent example of academic samizdat
November 28, 2018 at 11:24AM

👓 How the media should respond to Trump’s lies | Vox

Read How the media should respond to Trump’s lies by Sean Illing (Vox)

A linguist explains how Trump uses lies to divert attention from the "big truths."

I like that he delves into the idea of enlightment reasoning here and why it doesn’t work. This section of this article is what makes it a bit different from some of the interviews and articles that Lakoff has been appearing in lately.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

I take your point, but I wonder if Trump is just kryptonite for a liberal democratic system built on a free press. ❧

The key words being “free press” with free meaning that we’re free to exert intelligent editorial control.

Editors in the early 1900’s used this sort of editorial control not to give fuel to racists and Nazis and reduce their influence.Cross reference: Face the Racist Nation from On the Media.

Apparently we need to exert the same editorial control with respect to Trump, who not incidentally is giving significant fuel to the racist fire as well.
November 20, 2018 at 10:11AM

A lot of Democrats believe in what is called Enlightenment reasoning, and that if you just tell people the facts, they’ll reach the right conclusion. That just isn’t true. ❧

November 20, 2018 at 10:12AM

📑 How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes | Nieman Lab

Annotated How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes (Nieman Lab)

As deepfakes make their way into social media, their spread will likely follow the same pattern as other fake news stories. In a MIT study investigating the diffusion of false content on Twitter published between 2006 and 2017, researchers found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth in all categories of information.” False stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth and reached 1,500 people six times more quickly than accurate articles. ❧

This sort of research should make it easier to find and stamp out from the social media side of things. We need regulations to actually make it happen however.

📑 An Illustrated Guide to Making People Get Lost | New York Times

Annotated How to Say ‘No’ This Thanksgiving by Darcie Wilder (New York Times)

Why, though, do we not romanticize our preservation? The same matter of chance, of the fleeting nature of fate exists on the other side of the coin. What would have happened if we were better rested, if our energy was better preserved, if we managed our time and said what we really mean? Rarely do we approach whether we get eight hours of sleep with the same guilt as we do whether or not we attended a party, even when, according to sleep expert Matthew Walker, sleep deprivation prevents the brain from remembering information, creating new memories, and sustaining emotional well-being. ❧

A great observation!

📑 Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination | Billy Meinke

Annotated Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination by Billy Meinke (billymeinke.com)

the technology platforms we rely on are changing and to leave things the way they are is to put our work at risk. ❧

📑 How Google and Amazon Got So Big Without Being Regulated | Wired

Annotated How Google and Amazon Got So Big Without Being Regulated by Tim Wu (WIRED)

But now it was all for the best: a law of nature, a chance for the monopolists to do good for the universe. The cheerer-in-chief for the monopoly form is Peter Thiel, author of Competition Is for Losers. Labeling the competitive economy a “relic of history” and a “trap,” he proclaimed that “only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.” ❧

Sounds like a guy who is winning all of the spoils.

👓 Distributed Digital Transformation | Interdependent Thoughts

Read Distributed Digital Transformation by

Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

This is a start to more fully describe and explore a distributed version of digitisation, digitalisation and specifically digital transformation, and state why I think bringing distributed / networked thinking into them matters. Digitising stuff, digitalising routines, the regular way Over the past ...

We need to learn to see the cumulative impact of a multitude of efforts, while simultaneously keeping all those efforts visible on their own. There exist so many initiatives I think that are great examples of how distributed digitalisation leads to transformation, but they are largely invisible outside their own context, and also not widely networked and connected enough to reach their own full potential. They are valuable on their own, but would be even more valuable to themselves and others when federated, but the federation part is mostly missing.
We need to find a better way to see the big picture, while also seeing all pixels it consists of. A macroscope, a distributed digital transformation macroscope. ❧

This seems to be a related problem to the discovery questions that Kicks Condor and Brad Enslen have been thing about.