The intermission was especially long, with boys hyped up on sugar with nothing to do but ask their parents to purchase one of the doodads being hawked by vendors canvassing the seats. The mother in front of me balked at the $25 price tag on a watch that would light up at a key part of the performance. When her son insisted she held up his Captain America motorcycle, “Do you know much this cost? $15.” Then she held up his popcorn in a box covered in Marvel characters. “Do you know how much this cost? $7.” Then she held up a picture her son had taken in front of a green screen so it looked like he was posing with the Avengers amid some rubble. “Do you know much this cost? $27. Do you know how much that seat you’re sitting in cost?” He shook his head. “No. Well, Citibank does.”
The intermission was especially long, with boys hyped up on sugar with nothing to do but ask their parents to purchase one of the doodads being hawked by vendors canvassing the seats. The mother in front of me balked at the $25 price tag on a watch that would light up at a key part of the performance. When her son insisted she held up his Captain America motorcycle, “Do you know much this cost? $15.” Then she held up his popcorn in a box covered in Marvel characters. “Do you know how much this cost? $7.” Then she held up a picture her son had taken in front of a green screen so it looked like he was posing with the Avengers amid some rubble. “Do you know much this cost? $27. Do you know how much that seat you’re sitting in cost?” He shook his head. “No. Well, Citibank does.”
Here you see an internal Time Inc. spreadsheet that was used to rank and evaluate “writer-editors” at SI.com. (Time Inc. provided this document to the Newspaper Guild, which represents some of their employees, and the union provided it to us.) The evaluations were done as part of the process of deciding who would be laid off. Most interesting is this ranking criteria: “Produces content that [is] beneficial to advertiser relationship.” These editorial employees were all ranked in this way, with their scores ranging from 2 to 10.
Anthony Napoli, a union representative with the Newspaper Guild, tells us: “Time Inc. actually laid off Sports Illustrated writers based on the criteria listed on that chart. Writers who may have high assessments for their writing ability, which is their job, were in fact terminated based on the fact the company believed their stories did not ‘produce content that is beneficial to advertiser relationships.’” The Guild has filed an arbitration demand disputing the use of that and other criteria in the layoff decisionmaking process. In a letter to Time Inc., the Guild says that four writer-editors were laid off “out of seniority order” based on the rankings in the spreadsheet above.
…Holy shit. (From here.)
This morning, though, my Facebook feed is also very heavily dominated by discussion of Ferguson. Many of those posts seem to have been written last night, but I didn’t see them then. Overnight, “edgerank” –or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now — seems to have bubbled them up, probably as people engaged them more.
But I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure.
Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?
Would we even have a chance to see her?
This isn’t about Facebook per se—maybe it will do a good job, maybe not—but the fact that algorithmic filtering, as a layer, controls what you see on the Internet. Net neutrality (or lack thereof) will be yet another layer determining this. This will come on top of existing inequalities in attention, coverage and control.
This might literally be the best GIF of all time! Yet it’s still stunningly inadequate to fully encapsulate the endless vicissitudes of mourning. Just as we all experienced Robin Williams’ life differently, so we all are experiencing his loss differently. Yet we all retweet the same image ad infinitum, a one-size-fits-all sentiment that ultimately communicates nothing. From the endless nuances of our personal sadness, we all send up the same meaningless image as a token of our despair. The internet is a monster. It homogenizes grief. This GIF just doesn’t cut it.
But the comment sections on most highly-trafficked sites, the ones automatically included to drum up interaction, do nothing to collapse the distance between the journalist and her audience. Instead, they have only served to cement that vast chasm, lead to the strengthening of the ramparts. Ask any Internet writer, and they can recite you our creed and code: Don’t read the comments. The language widely used to discuss commenters is the same as for an invading barbarian army, because it’s easier to imagine a vast sea of abstracted piranhas than actual people behind their computer screens clamoring for blood… The comment section is the most vivid example of the failure to see other humans on the Internet as living, breathing people, ones with ambitions and failures and favorite snack foods and jobs to do, not avatars or figments of our imagination.
Twitter raised eyebrows last month when it suggested that many of its active users aren’t actually human. Now we know how many.
In a new filing, the company said that “up to approximately 8.5%” of the accounts it considers active are automatically updated “without any discernible additional user-initiated action.”
“Roughly 8.5%” translates as around 23 million Twitter accounts, apparently. (From here.)
Much has been made about the idea that mainstream comic books are driving all of pop culture – and they are. Superhero movies might seem silly and airy, but they’re extremely powerful. They have an impact on a whole lot of people (look at “Guardians’” $94 million opening weekend for the latest proof). Given that, we have the obligation to take them just as seriously as any other significant force in our culture. We have to talk about this stuff – be it diversity, gender politics, social commentary or any of the other larger issues these works may raise. It’s not a distraction or a digression, it’s a bare minimum expectation – and just as much of a relevant and necessary of a conversation for fans to be having as wondering when we’ll finally see “The Infinity Gauntlet” on the big screen.
The idea that the only reason to have these discussion is to “appease” some nebulous entity reduces the importance of these matters to a false “us vs. them” mentality. There’s nothing inherently political about wanting to see positive, diverse representation in popular entertainment, be it movies, television, video games or the comic books themselves that so much of them are based on. It’s life. It’s reality. It doesn’t have a left or right wing bias. I don’t want to see minorities in a superhero movie because I’m a minority; I want to see it because I live in society. Much like Peter Quill’s reason for wanting to save the galaxy – because he’s one of the idiots who lives in it – it benefits everybody.