About twenty years ago the novelist Umberto Eco, noting like George Orwell how loose the word fascism had become, wrote that the ideology is like a virus that changes to reflect the contours of the society in which it exists. Mussolini’s version was quite different from Franco’s, for example. But wherever it went, claimed Eco, …
Tag: social media
📑 How social media makes fascists of us all | UnHerd
All tribes need tribal leaders, who in turn need loyalty. Followers of Corbyn and Trump will both detest the comparison, but note how both have the merch, the chants, the hagiography. They’re radically different, but both are products of the tribalism that social media has accidentally brought about. ❧
👓 It’s time to say goodbye to Twitter | sonniesedge
sonniesedge (sonniesedge.co.uk)When I first got on Twitter it was like usenet in the 90s. Just a bunch of people talking shit about things that they enjoyed. It was small enough that everyone seemed to know each other, but large enough that there were still interesting nerdy people to find and get to know and enjoy the company of. The perfect little club.
But at some point it went horribly wrong.
I hope that as you wean yourself away from Twitter that you regain the ability to do longer posts–I quite like your writing style. This is certainly as well-put a statement about why one should leave Twitter as one could imagine.
I remember those old days and miss the feel it used to have as well. The regrowing blogosphere around the IndieWeb and Micro.blog are the closest thing I’ve seen to that original feel since ADN or smaller networks like 10 Centuries and pnut. I enjoy finding that as I wean myself away from Twitter, I do quite like going back to some of the peace and tranquility of reading and thinking my way through longer posts (and replies as well). Sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t take more than ten minutes of thought and work, it’s probably not worth putting on the internet at all, and even then it’s probably questionable… I’m half tempted to register the domain squirrels.social and spin up a Mastodon instance–fortunately it would take less than the ten minute time limit and there are enough animal related social silos out there already.
As an aside, I love the way you’ve laid out your webmentions–quite beautiful!
👓 Custom Domains service deprecation | Medium
Medium is no longer offering new custom domains as a feature. Instead, you can create a publication on Medium that will live on a medium.com/publication-name URL. Existing publications on custom do...
The amount of work required to support this feature should be exceedingly low. It’s probably a good indication that Medium won’t be around within a year or so.
This definitely signals the fact that Medium has moved toward the more silo end of the spectrum from a data ownership standpoint. While I might have recommended it with reservations as a potential IndieWeb solution, this change means I can’t recommend it at all.
👓 Twitter’s UX and ‘bullying’ | natdudley.com
The longer you've been on Twitter, the more likely it is that you've seen, been part of, or been on the receiving end of what I would politely term a Twitter Clusterfuck. Someone, somewhere has said something controversial. It might be something mean. It might be something offensive. It might be something stupid or funny or smart. Whatever it is, it draws the attention of a larger proportion of the Twitter network than would normally interact with that single person’s tweet on a daily basis.
👓 Another scenario for higher education’s future: the triumph of open | Bryan Alexander
Let me offer another scenario for academia’s future. As is usual with the scenario forecasting methodology, this is based on extrapolating from several present-day trends – here, several trends around open.
In the past I’ve called this “The Fall of the Silos.” It’s a sign of our urban- and suburban-centric era that this rural metaphor doesn’t get a lot of traction. It’s also possible that contemporary American politics leads many to embrace silos. So I’ve renamed the scenario “The Triumph of Open.”
tl;dr version – In this future the open paradigm has succeeded in shaping the way we use and access most digital information, with powerful implications for higher education.
👓 When the Social Silos Fall | Kicks Condor
Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)The silos did help mainstream users form communities. This is still useful—carriers of rare diseases can organize on Facebook, stuff like the ‘TomNod’ group that coordinates to scan satellite photos. On Twitter, humor and art (pixel art, for instance) communities formed that can be casually ob...
👓 When the Social Silos Fall | Brad Enslen
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)I hear a lot of people wanting the social network silos (mainly Facebook and Twitter) to go away. I too want them to go. Eventually. But before they do, I want to examine some things in this little essay. Some Good Things that the Silos Did Searc...
👓 Logged off: meet the teens who refuse to use social media | The Guardian
Generation Z has grown up online – so why are a surprising number suddenly turning their backs on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat?
👓 Teachers Are Moonlighting As Instagram Influencers To Make Ends Meet | BuzzFeed
One teacher in Texas told BuzzFeed News she makes a $50,000 a year, but made over $200,000 in a year through Instagram.
Reply to Rethinking My Social Media Use | Chris Wiegman
Chris Wiegman (Chris Wiegman)Most of you who know me know that I’ve struggled for a while now with how social media currently fits into my life and how I would prefer it to fit into my life. Ten years ago it was nothing for me to sign up for every service and post to them like there was no tomorrow. Heck, during my days at SIU doing so was actually part of my job as I managed all the social media for the Aviation departments. It was fun, I guess. Today I’m not so sure if that was the right approach, or, for that matter, what the “right” approach even means. Over the last few months I’ve scrubbed or deleted most of my online accounts and worked to severely limit the time I’ve spent on the rest (often with even more limited success). I’ve done this not because I want to but, in many ways, because I feel like I have to for a number of reasons.
Chris, many of us have been having the same thoughts for quite a while. Since you’re rethinking things, and you’ve already got your own website/blog, why not just switch over to that and let the internet be your social network? Many of us in the IndieWeb movement have been working on helping others do just that for several years now.
We’ve been working on W3C specs like Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub to recreate some of the infrastructure offered by social media sites, but that allows website owners more control and ownership over their content–something I suspect you’re behind in using WordPress as your CMS of choice. In the very near future we’ll even have first class feed readers either on our own sites or that allow us to interact with others’ sites using our own.
If you still need to interact with sites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, et al. You can still do that if you like by posting to your own site and syndicating out while still allowing comments and interactions from many of these sites back to your own using backfeed via the Webmention protocol with tools like Brid.gy. Slowly over the past several years more and more CMSes are adding these bits of functionality to let peoples’ personal sites become first class social media sites that they can own and control.
I suspect that given your skills and how you’re already using your site, you could be supporting a lot of these technologies with a few simple plugins and without a lot of additional work to give you most of what you’re looking for. A group of us are happy to help if you’ve got questions about implementation.
👓 On Twitter, Students Want to Know: How Many Retweets for a Full-Ride Scholarship? | The Chronicle
In the self-serving subculture of retweeting for fame, some universities have been hit with repeated requests for free tuition — if a prospective student can spur a storm of retweets.
👓 Let’s all go back to Tumblr | Hacker News
There’s some interesting commentary on this post about social media in general.
👓 ‘Inclusive access’ takes off as model for college textbook sales | Inside HigherEd
Hundreds of colleges are signing on to publishers’ programs, with apparent savings to students. Some applaud the movement, while others are skeptical.
Inclusive Access is a great marketing term. It sounds nice, but has some insidious implications. It would be interesting to do some additonal in-depth reporting on the economics of these models. The article could have done at least a back of the envelop calculation and been far more skeptical of what was going on here.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
The “inclusive” aspect of the model means that every student has the same materials on the first day of class, with the charge included as part of their tuition. ❧
It almost sounds to me like they know they’re not getting a cut of the money from poorer students who are finding the material for free online anyway, so they’re trying to up the stakes of the piece of pie that they’re getting from a different angle.
This other model of subscription at the level of the college or university is also one that they’re well aware of based on involvement with subscription fees for journal access.
August 21, 2018 at 10:17PM
She said that her institution, which has inclusive-access agreements with more than 25 publishers, had saved students more than $2 million this semester alone. Morrone said this figure was calculated by taking the retail price of a textbook, subtracting the cost that students paid for the equivalent etextbook and then dividing the cost saving in half to account for the fact that many students would not have bought the book new. ❧
$ 2million compared to what? To everyone having purchased the textbooks at going rates before? This is a false comparison because not everyone bought new in the first place. Many bought used, and many more still probably either pirated, borrowed from a friend, from the library, or simply went without.
August 21, 2018 at 10:21PM
Students like the convenience of the system, said Anderson, and all have access to the most up-to-date content, instead of some students having different editions of the same textbook. ❧
They’re also touting the most up-to-date content here, when it’s an open secret that for the majority of textbooks don’t really change that much from edition to edition.
August 21, 2018 at 10:24PM
A key difference between inclusive access and buying print textbooks is that students effectively lease the content for the duration of their course, rather than owning the material. If students want to download the content to access it beyond the duration of their course, there is often an additional fee. ❧
So now we need to revisit the calculation above and put this new piece of data into the model.
Seriously?! It’s now a “rental price”?
August 21, 2018 at 10:26PM
Campus stores are often the ones driving inclusive-access initiatives, as they receive a cut of the sales. While the profit margins are smaller than for print, inclusive access means that the stores receive revenue from a larger number of customers. Donovan Garcia, course materials manager at the University of Mary Washington, said that lower margins were also mitigated by lower overheads. “We’re not purchasing books, we’re not paying shipping, we’re not having to put any time or effort into returning unused books or paying restocking fees,” said Garcia. ❧
I suspect the publisher is also saving on sales commissions to their sales staff as well.
August 21, 2018 at 10:27PM
👓 Can We Ever Reset the Field? | Smokey Ardisson
Smokey Ardisson (ardisson.org)The rise of the massive corporate-run social networks—silos, where everything was stored inside and nothing left—changed distributed online social relationships. The silos replaced distributed with centralized; all of your social connections were now in one place, making it faster and “easier” to keep up with everyone. Easier in some ways, yes, but now everyone could see every aspect of you, even if you didn’t want them to. Worse, your constant software talk annoyed your bowling-league friends, and your one uncle could not stand the fact you supported the Democratic Party. All of that didn’t happen at once; it took time for these corporate social networks to consume all of your communities, to seize ownership of all of your connections and relationships, transforming something very human into mere pieces of computer data, eventually hollowing out your communities and your humanness in the process. But once it had happened, and once you realized those downsides (and others, such as abuse, Nazis, and anti-democratic propaganda), how could you escape? Was there even anywhere to escape to?
To a large extent, some of the questions and observations in this article are the things that drive me to have my own domain and have my own website. I and many others in the IndieWeb are still working on the infrastructure to support the web we’d like to have instead of the web we’re given. We’re still not there yet, and it may never be the utopia we’re hoping for, but we’ll never get there if we don’t try.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:19PM
our brains have been trained to believe that we want, that we need, a single place where all of “our people” can gather, where it is “easy” to keep up with all of them: a massive network service, just without all the “bad stuff” of the existing ones. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:21PM
You find them in a place that you curate yourself, not one “curated” for you by a massive corporate social network intent on forcing you to be every part of yourself to everyone, all at once. You should control how, when, and where to interact with your people. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:23PM
web we lost ❧
https://indieweb.org/lost_infrastructure
August 21, 2018 at 01:24PM
we can’t just recreate the same thing we’re trying to escape, and we can’t expect the solution to be precisely as easy on us as the problem was. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:25PM