A New York Jewess goes south for the holidays.
A great send up of Reece Witherspoon’s book. Such great satire, I wish Rachel was writing on more than just culture and film.
Tag: culture
📺 The Biggest ‘Baby Shark’ Ever w/ Sophie Turner & Josh Groban | The Late Late Show with James Corden on YouTube
Let's face it: Baby Shark is an undeniable force. James invites his guests, Sophie Turner, playing the role of Mommy Shark, and Josh Groban, taking on the role of Daddy Shark, for the definitive performance of this global phenomenon.
This is just too awesome.
Hat tip: Aaron Davis
🎧 Episode 57: Domination (MEN, Part 11) | Scene on Radio
Host John Biewen dips into the world of sports talk radio, where guys talk not just about sports but also about how to be a man in twenty-first-century America. What John finds is more complicated than he expected, with revelations both encouraging and sobering. With co-host Celeste Headlee and experts David Nylund and Terry Real.
The lie of patriarchy is dominion. The lie of patriarchy is hierarchy—that you’re above the world you’re above nature and you’re imposing your will like a doctor on a patient, or a mechanic on a car—you are above the system. This is called hubris.
—Terry Real, psychologist
Running away from your vulnerability is like running away from your rectum.
—Terry Real, psychologist [33:20]
Subscribed to Buried Truths | NPR via WABE 90.1
Hank Klibanoff (NPR.org via WABE 90.1)In 1948, three black farmers decided they'd had enough. They were going to vote in rural South Georgia, where white supremacists held power by suppressing the black vote. Pulitzer-Prize winning author, journalist and Emory University professor Hank Klibanoff explores the mysteries and injustices of history through civil rights cases that few have seen. How far would white supremacists go — on the streets, in the courtrooms, in the legislatures — to preserve their racial dominance? And, most importantly, why? Who were we back then? The truth is restless, relevant and revealed in Buried Truths.
Subscribing at the recommendation of John Biewen who has been promoting it on the front end of his new season of Scene on Radio (on the topic of Men). How could I not listen after his stupendous season of episodes on race and culture entitled Seeing White last year?
🔖 Racial Equity Institute
We are an alliance of trainers, organizers, and institutional leaders who have devoted ourselves to the work of creating racially equitable organizations and systems. We help individuals develop tools to challenge patterns of power and grow equity. Join us today.
🔖 My White Friends by Myra Greene
A photo series of Myra Green's white friends. A study of whiteness in America.
hat tip: Seeing White on Scene on Radio
👓 How the GOP Gave Up on Porn | Politico
Once, the fight against pornography was the beating heart of the American culture war. Now porn is a ballooning industry—and maybe a harmful one—with no real opponents. What happened?
👓 About | Data & Society
Data & Society is a research institute in New York City that is focused on the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric and automated technologies. The issues that Data & Society seeks to address are complex. The same innovative technologies and sociotechnical practices that are reconfiguring society – enabling novel modes of interaction, new opportunities for knowledge, and disruptive business paradigms – can be abused to invade people’s privacy, provide new tools of discrimination, and harm individuals and communities.
👓 Distributed Digital Transformation | Interdependent Thoughts
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.
👓 New York Is Killing Me | The New Yorker
Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker)Gil Scott-Heron is frequently called the “godfather of rap,” which is an epithet he doesn’t really care for. In 1968, when he was nineteen, he wrote a satirical spoken-word piece called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” It was released on a very small label in 1970 and was probably heard of more than heard, but it had a following. It is the species of classic that sounds as subversive and intelligent now as it did when it was new, even though some of the references—Spiro Agnew, Natalie Wood, Roy Wilkins, Hooterville—have become dated. By the time Scott-Heron was twenty-three, he had published two novels and a book of poems and recorded three albums, each of which prospered modestly, but “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him famous.
👓 I am 18. I belong to the massacre generation. | Washington Post
It was last Saturday when it hit me that my entire life has been framed by violence. I don’t remember being born on Jan. 28, 2000, and I don’t remember being a year and a half old when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember the panic of my mother as she stepped outside our house in Washington and smelled the smoke of the burning Pentagon. I don’t remember her knowing I would grow up in a changed world.
👓 I live among the neo-Nazis in eastern Germany. And it’s terrifying | Anonymous | Opinion | The Guardian
Chemnitz is the tip of an ugly iceberg, says an anonymous writer
📑 Social Media Bans Actually Work | Motherboard
Deplatforming works “best” when the people being deplatformed don’t have any power to begin with. ❧
👓 How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians | Project Information Literacy Research Institute
Abstract: The News Study research report presents findings about how a sample of U.S. college students gather information and engage with news in the digital age. Results are included from an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 U.S. colleges and universities selected for their regional, demographic, and red/blue state diversity. A computational analysis was conducted using Twitter data associated with the survey respondents and a Twitter panel of 135,891 college-age people. Six recommendations are included for educators, journalists, and librarians working to make students effective news consumers. To explore the implications of this study’s findings, concise commentaries from leading thinkers in education, libraries, media research, and journalism are included.
A great little paper about how teens and college students are finding, reading, sharing, and generally interacting with news. There’s some nice overlap here on both the topics of journalism and education which I find completely fascinating. In general, however, I think in a few places students are mis-reporting their general uses, so I’m glad a portion of the paper actually looks at data from Twitter in the wild to see what real world use cases actually are.
Perhaps there are some interesting segments and even references relevant to the topics of education and IndieWeb for Greg McVerry‘s recent project?
As I read this, I can’t help but think of some things I’ve seen Michael Caulfield writing about news and social media over the past several months. As I look, I notice that he’s already read and written a bit about a press release for this particular paper. I’ll have to take a look at his take on it tomorrow. I’m particularly interested in any insights he’s got on lateral reading and fake news above and beyond his prior thoughts.
Perhaps I missed it hiding in there reading so late at night, but another potentially good source for this paper’s recommended section would be Caulfield’s book Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
The purpose of this study was to better understand the preferences, practices, and motivations of young news consumers, while focusing on what students actually do, rather than what they do not do. ❧
October 22, 2018 at 08:28PM
YouTube (54%), Instagram (51%) or Snapchat (55%) ❧
I’m curious to know which sources in particular they’re using on these platforms. Snapchat was growing news sources a year ago, but I’ve heard those sources are declining. What is the general quality of these sources?
For example, getting news from television can range from PBS News Hour and cable news networks (more traditional sources) to comedy shows like Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah which have some underlying news in the comedy, but are far from traditional sources.
October 22, 2018 at 08:35PM
Some students (28%) received news from podcasts in the preceding week. ❧
October 22, 2018 at 08:38PM
news is stressful and has little impact on the day-to-day routines —use it for class assignments, avoid it otherwise.” While a few students like this one practiced news abstinence, such students were rare. ❧
This sounds a bit like my college experience, though I didn’t avoid it because of stressful news (and there wasn’t social media yet). I generally missed it because I didn’t subscribe directly to publications or watch much television. Most of my news consumption was the local college newspaper.
October 22, 2018 at 08:46PM
But on the Web, stories of all kinds can show up anywhere and information and news are all mixed together. Light features rotate through prominent spots on the “page” with the same weight as breaking news, sports coverage, and investigative pieces, even on mainstream news sites. Advertorial “features” and opinion pieces are not always clearly identified in digitalspaces. ❧
This difference is one of the things I miss about reading a particular newspaper and experiencing the outlet’s particular curation of their own stories. Perhaps I should spend more time looking at the “front page” of various news sites?
October 22, 2018 at 08:57PM
Some (36%) said they agreed that the threat of “‘fake news’ had made them distrust the credibility of any news.” Almost half (45%) lacked confidence with discerning “real news” from “fake news,” and only 14% said they were “very confident” that they could detect “fake news.” ❧
These numbers are insane!
October 22, 2018 at 09:04PM
As a matter of recourse, some students in the study “read the news laterally,” meaning they used sources elsewhere on the Internet to compare versions of a story in an attempt to verify its facts, bias, and ultimately, its credibility.25 ❧
This reminds me how much I miss the old daily analysis that Slate use to do for the day’s top news stories in various outlets in their Today’s Papers segment.
October 22, 2018 at 09:15PM
Some respondents, though not all, did evaluate the veracity of news they shared on social media. More (62%) said they checked to see how current an item was, while 59% read the complete story before sharing and 57% checked the URL to see where a story originated (Figure 7). Fewer read comments about a post (55%) or looked to see how many times an item was tweeted or shared (39%). ❧
I’m not sure I believe these self-reported numbers at all. 59% read the complete story before sharing?! 57% checked the URL? I’ll bet that not that many could probably define what a URL is.
October 22, 2018 at 10:00PM
information diet ❧
October 22, 2018 at 11:02PM
At the tactical level, there are likely many small things that could be tested with younger audiences to help them better orient themselves to the crowded news landscape. For example, some news organizations are more clearly identifying different types of content such as editorials, features, and backgrounders/news analysis.57More consistent and more obvious use of these typological tags would help all news consumers, not just youth, and could also travel with content as itis posted and shared in social media. News organizations should engage more actively with younger audiences to see what might be helpful. ❧
October 22, 2018 at 11:37PM
When news began moving into the first digital spaces in the early 1990s, pro-Web journalists touted the possibilities of hypertext links that would give news consumers the context they needed. Within a couple of years, hypertext links slowly began to disappear from many news stories. Today, hypertext links are all but gone from most mainstream news stories. ❧
October 22, 2018 at 11:38PM
“Solutions journalism’ is another promising trend that answers some of the respondents’ sense of helplessness in the face of the barrage of crisis coverage.62 ❧
October 22, 2018 at 11:40PM
👓 The Man Who Broke Politics | The Atlantic
Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump's rise. Now he's reveling in his achievements.
An interesting look back at the history, and it seems a bit surprising to me because Gingrich has always seemed so calm, reasonable and staid in his television appearances. Apparently he wasn’t quite so behind the scenes.
What I find false in some of his assumptions however is that while his idea about killing or being killed from an evolutionary standpoint is broadly true, humans have been able to do so much more by possessing logic and civility than the base “animals” he apparently idolizes. His premise has brought down our democratic structures and is causing us to devolve backwards instead of forwards–both within the larger animalistic structure he proposes as well as among our fellow people of the world. While Americans are infighting among ourselves, we’re losing ground to other countries who are rapidly catching up to us.
Somehow I feel like Gingrich is missing a chunk of modern history and the value of a Western liberal democracy, by which I’m talking about the philosophical version of liberal, and not his version of liberal meaning Democrat or “enemy.”
While he may think the Republicans are “winning” presently, what is generally happening is that a larger rift is opening up within the democracy and the two sides which really aren’t very apart are moving even further apart, particularly in their fighting. As a result, we’re spending far more time and energy fighting each other rather than competing against countries externally. From a game theoretic perspective each side fights harder in opposite directions, but the equilibrium point doesn’t really move very much for all the extra effort. Meanwhile, we’re exhausting our resources (and general happiness) which we could be employing to better ourselves, and particularly with respect to all the external factors (foreign powers, climate change, etc.) we should be working against.
He can continue to look at things from the Nixonian “man in the arena” perspective of his youth, but I would submit he should be looking at it from the wider “person in the world” perspective we’re all operating in in this millennia.