An unlikely couple became unlikely internet celebrities overnight in the #PlaneBae saga, and their experience raises some serious questions about privacy and social media.
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👓 We Are All Public Figures Now | Ella Dawson
A woman gets on a plane. She’s flying from New York to Dallas, where she lives and works as a personal trainer. A couple asks her if she’ll switch seats with one of them so that they can sit together, and she agrees, thinking it’s her good deed for the day. She chats with her new seatmate and ...
This story brings up some interesting questions about private/public as well as control on the internet. Social media is certainly breaking some of our prior social norms.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
To summarize his argument, the media industry wants to broaden our definition of the public so that it will be fair game for discussion and content creation, meaning they can create more articles and videos, meaning they can sell more ads. The tech industry wants everything to be public because coding for privacy is difficult, and because our data, if public, is something they can sell. Our policy makers have failed to define what’s public in this digital age because, well, they don’t understand it and wouldn’t know where to begin. And also, because lobbyists don’t want them to. ❧
We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time. ❧
Even when the attention is positive, it is overwhelming and frightening. Your mind reels at the possibility of what they could find: your address, if your voting records are logged online; your cellphone number, if you accidentally included it on a form somewhere; your unflattering selfies at the beginning of your Facebook photo archive. There are hundreds of Facebook friend requests, press requests from journalists in your Instagram inbox, even people contacting your employer when they can’t reach you directly. This story you didn’t choose becomes the main story of your life. It replaces who you really are as the narrative someone else has written is tattooed onto your skin. ❧
What Blair did and continues to do as she stokes the flames of this story despite knowing this woman wants no part of it goes beyond intrusive. It is selfish, disrespectful harassment. ❧
Previously this was under the purview of journalists who typically had some ethics as well as editors to prevent this from happening. Now the average citizen has been given these same tools that journalists always had and they just haven’t been trained in their use.
How can we create some feedback mechanism to improve the situation? Should these same things be used against the perpetrators to show them how bad things could be? ❧
A friend of mine asked if I’d thought through the contradiction of criticizing Blair publicly like this, when she’s another not-quite public figure too. ❧
Did this really happen? Or is the author inventing it to diffuse potential criticism as she’s writing about the same story herself and only helping to propagate it?
There’s definitely a need to write about this issue, so kudos for that. Ella also deftly leaves out the name of the mystery woman, I’m sure on purpose. But she does include enough breadcrumbs to make the rest of the story discover-able so that one could jump from here to participate in the piling on. I do appreciate that it doesn’t appear that she’s given Blair any links in the process, which for a story like this is some subtle internet shade.
But Blair is not just posting about her own life; she has taken non-consenting parties along for the ride. ❧
the woman on the plane has deleted her own Instagram account after receiving violent abuse from the army Blair created. ❧
Feature request: the ability to make one’s social media account “disappear” temporarily while a public “attack” like this is happening.
We need a great name for this. Publicity ghosting? Fame cloaking?
👓 All In: A Bruin Guide to Campus Pools | UCLA Magazine
Here's where you can make a splash at UCLA this summer.
👓 Flogging the Dead Horse of RSS | Ideas and Thoughts
I have included a module on RSS to allow my students to create their own research teams on topics of interest. Because I’m old, I still have my students set up Feedly accounts and plug in the RSS feeds of their classmates and hopefully add other blogs to their feeds as well. And like blogging, I realize only a handful will continue but I want to expose them to the power of sharing their own research/learning via blogging and how to find others who do as well via Feedly.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Because I’m old, I still have my students set up Feedly accounts and plug in the RSS feeds of their classmates and hopefully add other blogs to their feeds as well. And like blogging, I realize only a handful will continue but I want to expose them to the power of sharing their own research/learning via blogging and how to find others who do as well via Feedly. ❧
I also value reading a person’s blog over time to understand better their voice and context. So I’m asking for some advice on how to update my module on finding research. What replaces RSS feeds? What works for you that goes beyond “someone on Twitter/Facebook shared….” to something that is more focused and intentional? ❧
👓 Retroactive Webmentioning | Peter Rukavina
Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)By way of testing out my Webmention module for Drupal, I took the 256 posts I’ve written here this year, ferreted out all the external links, discovered their Webmention endpoints, and sent a Webmention. Those 256 posts contained 840 links in total; of those links, 149 were to a target that suppor...
There are some interesting/useful statistics here. There’s also an interesting kernel of an idea about how one links to one’s own website internally as well. I find this very intriguing with respect to owning a digital commonplace book. Perhaps there are some ways to modify IndieMap for extracting some useful metadata out of one’s own website?
👓 U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials | New York Times
Trade sanctions. Withdrawal of military aid. The Trump administration used both to try to block a measure that was considered uncontroversial and embraced by countries around the world.
You know what I want for my birthday? Stupidity like that described in this article not to exist.
Nestle gave a half-assed response here. They can do far better. Now that their US headquarters has left Glendale, California for Virginia, I suspect their political stance will actually get worse on these issues.
A 2016 Lancet study found that universal breast-feeding would prevent 800,000 child deaths a year across the globe and yield $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk. ❧
Pure corruption here. Protectionism to prop up profits of approximately 630 million versus major benefits and savings of 300 billion. Even if you look at the calculus of the entire industry of 70 billion it becomes a no brainer.
👓 Controlling How Webmentions are Rendered | ruk.ca
Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)Ton continues to wrap his head around Webmention, and wonders about how mentions should be displayed on the “mentioned” site: What strikes me as odd now is how little control I have over how the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins actually deal with webmention data. The stuff I’d like to...
👓 Wrapping My Head Around Webmentions Pt 2 | Interdependent Thoughts
Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)I very much appreciate how Sven Knebel extensively responded to my previous posting on some Webmention issues I came across. Some of his responses do make me have new questions. About the wrong URL, i.e. not the source of the webmention, showing up in a Webmention, Sven writes: …. There’s a href...
👓 A short update about microformats | Digging the digital – Full blogdrift
Het voordeel van bloggen en zo je gedachten publiek maken, is dat anderen mee kunnen denken en je van mogelijke oplossingen voorzien. Na mijn vragen over webmentions, kwam Ton al snel met een eigen blogpost, gevolgd door Peter (digging the title and URL there Peter!). Ton geeft een korte uitleg over...
👓 Digging into Webmention | Peter Rukavina
Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)One of the points of writing on the Internet is our ability to link pages together in a web. We do this in HTML with links, like this: My friend Ton writes about Webmention. When that HTML appears here on my websi...
👓 Wrapping My Head Around Webmentions | Ton Zijlstra
Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)Webmentions is what makes it possible for me to write here about someone else’s blogpost and have my response show up beneath theirs. And vice versa. Earlier mechanisms such as pingback and trackback did the same thing, but slipped under the radar or succumbed to spam. Webmention is a W3C recommen...
👓 What is IndieWeb & why should you care? | W. Ian O’Byrne
I’m a researcher and educator in the intersection between education, literacy, and technology. As such, my framing of this is primarily informed by those perspectives. I believe literacy and education, in all of its forms, are essential human rights. I also believe that the Internet is the dominant text of our generation. As such, it is imperative that we help all individual build and utilize the competencies required to not only survive, but be successful online.
👓 Why Refback Still Matters | Gokberk Yaltirakli
Yes, even in the age of the Modern Web™ Let’s say you have a blog and you just published an article. Ideally, that article will be shared on the web, linked from other people’s blog posts and mentioned in social media comments. These links that point back to your article are fittingly called LinkBacks. Monitoring these linkbacks is important to website owners and bloggers. They allow you to follow the spread of your articles through the internet. The idea is; when someone on the internet links to your article, you get a linkback notification from them. Some bloggers choose to display those publicly (usually under the article), some of them only save them to their database while others just disable the functionality entirely. Regardless of your intent, you will eventually receive them. Handling them will prove useful to you.
👓 Read Write Respond #030 | Read Write Collect
Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)I moved departments and subsequently desks. It is interesting how the space you work can influence you. It has provided me a totally different perspective on the project, as well as feel more at home as I was the only one in my old team bridging the ...
👓 There is no single solution to making the internet more decentralised – The art of the possible | The Economist
Stopping the internet from getting too concentrated will be a slog, but the alternative would be worse
This has generally been an interesting series of articles in The Economist.
As John Sherman, the senator who gave his name to America’s original antitrust law in 1890, put it at a time when the robber barons ruled much of America’s economy: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” ❧