When did preaching to the choir become such a virtue? I can take a guess.
When did preaching to the choir become such a virtue? I can take a guess.
“We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.”
—Carl Sagan
I genuinely worry about people who use TikTok heavily.
I'm really enjoying Seth's Blog. Today, he published an excellent, short post about why proper data archival is so important.
Passwords are lost, providers are hacked, and people pass away. Moreover, as Seth mentions, most companies aren't incentivized to make data reliability a priority because data reliability isn't exciting. Besides, human beings aren't very good at making long-term decisions. Very few people are clamoring for safeguards that will help them in ten years.
The lesson? Back up your data! Make extra copies of important files and share them with people you trust. If you have the need and the means, work with a company that truly understands archival. Otherwise, you may find, at the least opportune moment, that no one is doing it for you.
“Somehow, we survived as a culture for centuries without exposing ourselves to thousands of profit-driven manipulations dumped on our living room carpet all day, every day.”
—Seth Godin in Shields up
#Belief #Business #Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
“Don't make the mistake of thinking you're Facebook's customer. You're not. You're the product. Its customers are the advertisers.”
—Bruce Schneier
“The advertising man is the enfant terrible of the time, unabashed before the eternities. He does not conceal his awareness of the fact that he is the cornerstone of the most respectable American institutions; the newspapers and magazines depend on him; Literature and Journalism are his hand maidens. Even war needs him.”
—S. N. Behrman in The New Republic, 1919
Do social media advertisers realize they have the same power today, by funding the new engines of literature, journalism, and war?
#Belief #Business #Communication #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
“As anyone who has actually gone outside to touch grass will attest, what you see in social media is typically so exaggerated and distorted that it may as well be entirely fictional.”
—Viktor in Are you okay?
Don't let anyone make you a jerk, no matter how pure their intentions.
#Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology
I've been listening to The Attention Merchants, my first foray into the world of audiobooks, having begrudgingly ceded more freedom to DRM. I was struck by this passage, discussing the disillusionment of Walter Lippmann, a journalist and media critic:
“Any communication, Lippmann came to see, is potentially propagandistic, in the sense of propagating a view. For it presents one set of facts, or one perspective, fostering or weakening some 'stereotype' held by the mind. It is fair to say, then, that any and all information that one consumes—pays attention to—will have some influence, even if just forcing a reaction.”
—Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants
It's easy to notice this happening today. So many memes, videos, and tweets advance ludicrously simplistic perspectives. Fake news spreads 6 times more quickly than true news. Whether we agree or disagree with the content we see, we react, and antisocial media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok monetize those reactions.
If Lippmann is correct that “any and all information that one consumes… forces a reaction,” and if the information we consume today is vast, simplistic, and even wrong, then perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by the extreme reactions we witness.
#Belief #Communication #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Technology