Tag: Internet

I actually don’t remember the day I started this blog—it was June or July somethingth 2004- so I’ve arbitrarily decided today will henceforth be The Beat’s anniversary. Ten long years of late nights, sleeping five hours, web crashes, Vietnamese Instant Coffee, Amon Tobin, Luke Vibert, Vitalic, Tipsy, Mahler, Stravinsky and Amy Winehouse. Ten years of stopping whatever else I was doing at some point to say “I gotta do The Beat now.” Ten years of watching the graphic novel industry grow, 10 years of a new golden age of comics, the rise and fall of manga, the rise and rise of comic book movies and TV shows, firings, hirings, 10 days that shook the world. Ten years of the internet changing every week or minute. When I began there was no Tumblr, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Youtube, no smart phones. People were so starved for entertainment that they actually read websites run by one person in their pajamas.

Truth Goggles is by no means the only annotation tool out there. There is Scrible, MarkUp.io (which says it will be relaunching), and a plethora of tools to help web designers, educators and others markup websites with notes and feedback. There’s also efforts like Hypothes.is, which aims to create a fact-based annotation layer for the web. Earlier this month, it received a grant of just over $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to “investigate the use of annotation in humanities and social science scholarship over a two year period.”

Schultz said his project is different in that it enables content creators like journalists to embed their own annotations on their work for all to see, and because it’s oriented to creating public annotations that are “about getting people to ask better questions and be more critical.”

During a January week in 2012, around 700,000 English-speaking Facebook users were chosen, without their knowledge or consent, to be emotional lab rats. The researchers found that if you tweak what people see in their Facebook news feed – the scrolling information on your page –to suppress or heighten certain emotive words, readers’ emotions will shift to match.

It’s not only emotions Facebook can nudge. It can make you vote, too. On the US presidential election day in 2010 it offered one group a graphic with a link to find nearby polling stations, along with a button that would let you announce that you’d voted, and the profile photos of six “friends” who had already done so. Users shown that page were 0.39% more likely to vote than those in the control group who hadn’t seen the link, button or photos.

The researchers reckoned they’d mobilised 60,000 voters and that the ripple effect caused 340,000 extra votes.

Yahoo’s decision to keep the show running now is the television business equivalent of trying to start a new political party by focusing on an issue with a tiny, but passionate constituency. Maybe the Yahoo “Community” will be great. But however wonderful it is, that success does not mean that Yahoo can produce good original television of its own, or that network television will take that success as a sign that it ought to find better ways of nurturing either high-concept television or kind comedy.

Treating the television industry like politics is an appealing idea, but a limited one. Networks can afford to have narrower brands, and in the present television environment, they actually have to — the days of big-tent broadcast are dead. You cannot turn Yahoo, Hulu, or Netflix into the tea party and hope the Big Four get the message.

What was insidious about the ’00s view of the world was that it assumed certain cynical things as a given: that the fashion world is and always will be corrupt, that the molestation of young women by older and more powerful men is tradition, that people can be manipulated through fear. It assumed that what was in the interest of a few powerful men was naturally what was right for the masses. The decade kicked off with Bush’s victory over Al Gore, in which the general public will was overridden on a technicality, and went right into a misguided response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, which established a general atmosphere of fear and sparked a depressing wave of American anti-Islamic sentiment the Bush presidency rode into an unnecessary war. The ’00s were a bully. The whole decade revolved around the public and private erasure of consent.

The Washington Post has pulled the portion of its online job advertisement for a social media editor that lists, among its job requirements, the “ability to explain to those twice your age what Reddit or Snapchat or Whisper or Fark is.”

Further, it’s a “bonus if you’ve convinced them to use any of these platforms.”

The new version of the social media editor job posting, found here, does not include the ability to explain social media to older people in its job requirements.

Current job requirements include working knowledge of HTML (“and quite simply, how the Internet works”); audience building experience; and five or more years of journalism experience.

Kris Coratti, The Post’s communications director, called the initial job advertisement a “draft” rather than a final version. It appeared online at various job search sites beginning June 20.

On Tuesday, the reference to explaining social media to older people was deleted.