Content moderation is the hard part of any online social platform. It was a big problem early on with email and email lists, with Usenet, and with any chatroom. It’s a problem on websites, particularly discussion sites and lately with social media. Each platform has its own challenges, but they all have the common issue of dealing with giving jerks a big megaphone to be jerks to others. (Human sinfulness, etc.) There have been all […]
A few months ago, I was part of a team that made a presentation to the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church about the intersection of the Science, Technology and Faith. It was, as is typical, a wide-ranging conversation. But during the Q&A session, one bishop asked me, “given what I know, what keeps me up at night with worry about the future?” My answer was “The misuse of Artificial Intelligence.” I stand by that. […]
I’ve misunderstood the Luddites. The point they were making back then is still valid today. From an essay by Cory Doctorow: As Merchant explains, the Luddites were anything but technophobes: they were skilled high-tech workers whose seven-year apprenticeships were the equivalent to getting a Master’s in Engineering from MIT. Their objection to powered textile machines had nothing to do with fear of the machines: rather, it was motivated by a clear-eyed understanding of how factory […]
The Collapse of a Digital Nation: What the Demise of Twitter Means to the Internet and the World Beyond It / Post.: What makes the internet magical is that it is ultimately us, not itself. We decide when and where and how the “magic” of the internet will happen. We do it slowly, over time, and collectively. Often haltingly, yes, with diversions and backward leaps interspersed with forward momentum, but we do do it. And […]
I Was Wrong About Mastodon: The crucial mistake of social media was trying to force people with wildly incompatible views to co-exist in the same space. In real-life, I can choose who I associate with. Now, I’m most certainly not looking for an echo chamber. I need my views to be questioned and debated, but it must be by people capable of civil discourse. We should discuss, we should reassess, we should admit when we’re […]
This is a quick note that will only be important to a few of you, I imagine. As you probably have noticed by now, grammar is not my strongest gift. I sometimes struggle (ofttimes?) to get the words to communicate the thoughts I want to express. I’ve subscribed to Grammarly for a while now, but it’s been hard to access the service when writing on a desktop computer. (Either a windows pc or a Macintosh.) […]
Walter Ong, a Jesuit who studied linguistics was fascinated by the difference between oral and literary cultures. Oral cultures value one sort of communication structure and literate ones another. (The difference is explained in The Atlantic article by Robinson Meyer linked below.) Twitter (and to a similar degree Facebook, and I guess in a way even Instagram and Snapchat) represents an intersection between the oral and literary communication paradigms. Meyer writes: Before Ong died in […]
We’ve become slaves to the pace of the technology in our lives. My “epiphany” this first week of Epiphany was that I don’t have to let myself get caught up in the machine pace of daily life, especially when I’m on a break.
Here’s hoping that this helps real journalists find a way to make a living doing what we need them to do.
In an article that examines the root cause of the problem with most of all of social media, but particularly about Facebook, Nichil Sonnad makes the following observation: Arendt [the Israeli psychologist who analyzed Nazi Adolf Eichman] concludes that it was neither sadism nor hatred that drove Eichmann to commit these historic crimes. It was a failure to think about other people as people at all. A “decisive” flaw in his character, writes Arendt, was […]
