Soon after Quinn Norton joined the editorial board, social media users discovered tweets in which she used slurs and spoke of her friendship with a Nazi.
Category: Read
👓 An inside look at how Trump’s infamous jobs day tweet roiled some government economists | Quartz
The email subject lines run the gamut: "Interesting," "In case you didn't see this," "Holy moley," "Breach by POTUS," "Is it OK for us now too?"
👓 How Public? Why Public? | finiteeyes.net
In the Interdisciplinary Studies program where I have begun working, we encourage students to go public with their work. It’s a common idea well beyond interdisciplinary studies: for students to feel more engaged with the work they do, to feel that what they are doing matters, they need to do that...
This article is sure to be germane to those reading on the topic of Open and Privacy for #EDU522. Within that realm I have automatically defaulted to posting everything public, in part to act as a potential model for my fellow classmates as well as for how teachers and students in general could potentially execute on open pedagogy using an IndieWeb model built on webmentions.
While my website apparently gets about 400 views a day lately, I suspect it’s a very small and specific niche audience to the set of topics I tend to write about. Since I post everything that I post online to my own website first, I have a more concentrated posting velocity than many/most, but it also means that some specific topics (like #EDU522 for example) can get lost in the “noise” of all the other posts on my site. If one compares this to others in the class who’ve only recently set up sites which have less than 10 views a day likely, there is a marked difference in public/private for them. (The concept of “privacy through obscurity” similar to its predecessor “security through obscurity” comes to mind, but one must remember it only takes one intruder to cause a problem.) Of course this doesn’t discount the fact that one’s public posts today, which seemingly disappear from the immediate rush of information, may still be found in the long-tails of their personal data to potentially be found years hence. With recent examples of people being fired for Tweets they made years ago (often taken out of context, or with serious context collapse) this can be a troubling issue.
Some recent examples:
-
- Disney Fires ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Director Over Offensive Tweets1
- New York Times Editorial board hired and fired Quinn Norton on the same day because internet trolls created a digital effigy of her using old social media posts from years prior. Even more ironic, she’s written and extensively studied context collapse.2–4
Public figures and journalists5 are actively deleting their tweets as a result, though this isn’t really a new phenomenon as people know that employers and others can search for their old content. As Ella Dawson has indicated, “We’re all public figures now”.
I don’t suspect there may be anything too particularly controversial in my #EDU522 posts recently that I might want to make private at a later date following the course (or even delete altogether), but who knows? Perhaps the public thinking on these topics changes drastically and I would wish to make them disappear a decade or two hence? It’s definitely something worth thinking about.
One of the benefits of supporting many of the IndieWeb tools and philosophies is that I can quickly make my old posts private to just me and with syndication links on them indicating where I’ve syndicated them in the past, I could very quickly go to those silos and delete them there as well. Of course this doesn’t get rid of copies out of my control or in locations like the Internet Archive.
Within the realm of open pedagogy, IndieWeb technology (and Webmention), one could certainly default their classes websites to private or semi-private. The WithKnown platform may presently be the best one for doing such a thing, though there are a few hoops one may need to jump through to set it up properly. As a brief example, there would need to be a private class hub site on which the teacher and students would need their own accounts. Then, so that students might own all of their own work, they would need their own sites to which they might post privately as well. The hub and the students’ sites could then use the Known OAuth2 server so that students could post their work privately on their own site, but still automatically syndicate it into their account on the semi-private class website. Of course, even here a student is relying on reasonable data security for the semi-private class site as well as having the expectation that their professor, fellow classmates, or the institution itself wouldn’t put their semi-private data into the public sphere at a future date.
As a proof of concept and an example of this type of workflow, I’ll highlight two posts (though in this case, both public instead of private so that you can actually see them) which I’ve made on two separate domains both running WithKnown:
- A post on my personal website
- A syndicated copy of that post on a public and openly aggregated multi-user Known install
image credit (also used on Matthew Cheney’s original post): “Dundas Square in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada” by Pedro Szekely, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
References
👓 Colin Walker takes a break (so I will too) | Colin Devroe
I’ve recently thought about doing something similar. Lately publishing to Facebook, Instagram, and my blog have felt like a bit of a chore. As such, I’m actually behind on my blogging. Which starts to create this odd pressure (that is only self-induced). I’ve taken many breaks in the past. They feel great and usually result in coming back with fresh perspectives. So I’m going to join my friend-from-across-the-ocean Colin and hop off of this blog, all social media, YouTube and my RSS reader for all of August. Comments are closed. See you in September.
👓 Making changes | Colin Walker
I’ve also been thinking about it in light of the Greg McVerry’s EDU522 course which has a bit of a social media purge built into it.
That said, I’m not sure what I’ll ultimately be doing, but I find it refreshing that Colin’s made this decision for himself. It sounds like it’s coming from a genuine place and I know he probably needs the break as much as many of us do.
Colin, I know many of your friends stretched across the world will miss your regular presence, even if we don’t say it on a regular basis, but good luck, and know that we’re always here for you if you need anything!
I miss him already…
👓 That Meme You’re Sharing Is Probably Bogus | The Atlantic
Why linguistic urban legends go viral online
Of course, how are we to architect such a thing?!
👓 Lawrence Krauss, Celebrity Scientist, Is Replaced At Top University Job Amid Harassment Allegations | BuzzFeed
The Arizona State University professor has been accused of inappropriate behavior spanning more than a decade.
👓 How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions | The Daily Beast
Jerome Jacobson and his network of mobsters, psychics, strip-club owners, and drug traffickers won almost every prize for 12 years, until the FBI launched Operation ‘Final Answer.’
👓 Fox, Ben Affleck & Matt Damon Win Hot Package On Multi-Million Dollar Theft Of McDonald’s Monopoly Game | Deadline
EXCLUSIVE: Fox is poised to win the hot lit property in the marketplace at the moment, a giant Happy Meal that everyone wanted. Ben Affleck is attached to direct and Matt Damon to star in a true-crime story written by Jeff Maysh and published in The Daily Beast several days ago about an ex-cop who rigged the McDonald’s Monopoly game, allegedly stealing over $24 million and sharing it with an unsavory group of co-conspirators who offered kickbacks to the mastermind. The Pearl Street partners will produce with David Klawans, latter of whom got rights to the article and was exec veep on the Affleck-directed Best Picture Oscar winner Argo. Deadpool scribes Paul Wernick & Rhett Reese will write the script. Deal was a $350,000 option against $1 million if the film gets made. Affleck, Damon and the screenwriters get paid a lot more than that.
👓 Mayor de Blasio and Rabbis Near Accord on New Circumcision Rule | New York Times
The practice of sucking blood from a baby’s incision is defended by ultra-Orthodox rabbis, and the Bloomberg administration requirement that parents sign a consent form has been largely ignored.
👓 The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley | Kara Swisher for New York Times
They have weaponized social media, and we are all paying the price.
I still find it interesting that no one seems to be taking him to either enough task or calling him out on potential political bids. He could very easily and quickly use the platform to drastically reshape the political scenery in America and around the world.
Aside: Interesting to note that Kara Swisher’s byline here doesn’t have a link on it, even to a default NY Times page for her.
👓 abc News | Peter Woit
The last couple months I’ve heard reports from several people claiming that arithmetic geometers Peter Scholze and Jakob Stix had identified a serious problem with Mochizuki’s claimed proof of the abc conjecture. These reports indicated that Scholze and Stix had traveled to Kyoto to discuss this with Mochizuki, and that they were writing a manuscript, to appear sometime this summer. It seemed best then to not publicize this here, better to give Mochizuki, Scholze and Stix the time to sort out the mathematics and wait for them to have something to say publicly. Today though I saw that Ivan Fesenko has put out a document entitled Remarks on Aspects of Modern Pioneering Mathematical Research.
The intrigue of this case is quite interesting. Take a look at some of the comments on these posts. Some border on religious zealotry, and even this when I know Peter heavily curates his comments section to make them useful.
👓 The Information on School Websites Is Not as Safe as You Think | New York Times
Some tracking scripts may be harmless. But others are designed to recognize I.P. addresses and embed cookies that collect information prized by advertisers.
Administrators: But they were give us the technology for free…
Really? Why not try pooling small pieces of resources within states to make these things you want and protect your charges? I know you think your budget is small, but it shouldn’t be this expensive.
👓 Why cartoon characters wear gloves | Vox
Those little gloves reveal the fascinating origins of animation.
👓 Funny memes often come from dark places — remember that before you make your own | The Verge
Memes, just like every other joke format, don’t exist in a vacuum, which is why being aware of their origins is crucial