MetaFilter posts tagged with internet and media

"All of your favorite shows are ratings dogs."

mediareport — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:23:46 -0800

The Nielsen Family Is Dead. Nielsen Now Tracks (Almost) Everything You Buy: Credit, Debit and Bank Data Now Combined With TV, Online Viewing. Nielsen Offers Focus on ‘Zero-TV’ Homes. Nielsen Agrees to Expand Definition of TV Viewing. The 23,000 U.S. homes Nielsen currently samples are going to see some changes this year. Previously: Why Nielsen Ratings Are Inaccurate, and Why They'll Stay That Way

Born Digital Folklore

Miko — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 07:43:40 -0800

"Its not like we all sat in silence and stared blankly at our TVs waiting for the Internet to show up. We have probably always had vernacular webs of communication." Digital studies scholar Robert Glenn Howard talks about vaccines, the Christian right [PDF], AC/DC guitar tutorials and other "born-digital folklore" on the "vernacular web."

A Quiet Opening - North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment

DiesIrae — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 07:02:19 -0800

As this research report will show, North Koreans today are learning more about the outside world than at any time since the founding of the country. North Korea is consistently ranked by Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders as the country with the least free media in the world. This ranking reflects the country's complete lack of an independent domestic media, its legal restrictions against accessing foreign media and the harsh punishments it metes out against citizens who violate those restrictions. Yet, since the late 1990s the information environment in North Korea has undergone significant changes. Although the media environment remains extremely restricted by international standards, North Koreans' access to outside media has grown considerably over the past two decades. Many inside the country continue to develop new ways to access information while avoiding the ever-present risk of detection and punishment.

"I realized we have a community of people that are highly informed but not well informed."

flex — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 08:38:15 -0800

Eating Only Dessert: Why your information diet is probably terrible - "[Clay] Johnson is the author of The Information Diet, a book with a unique core metaphor: heavily processed information, like heavily processed food, isn’t healthy but for some reason we can’t get enough of it. Email. Social networks. Blogs. Online video. People today consume more information than ever before, and typically only consume the things they really, really like. Johnson compares this to a bad diet. “If you only ate what you want then we’d probably put the dessert section at the top of the menu, rather than at the bottom,” he says. “I think the same thing is happening with journalism: we’re going straight to dessert every time.”" PBS Newshour interview with Johnson (~6 min. video with full transcript). Previously: Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear they're right?

People just don’t value journalism as much as journalists do.

shakespeherian — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:59:04 -0800

Fungible: A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead. The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear they're right?

desjardins — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:54:23 -0800

Is SEO killing America? Clay Johnson about how media gives us what we want, not what we need, and how it's destroying democracy. If you don't have time or can't watch a 17 minute video, read this article discussing and summarizing the video.

Digital Images are SomeThing to aspire to? (A reflection on Hito Steyerl's proposal)

0bvious — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:13:43 -0800

Artist and film-maker, Hito Steyerl, asks us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our digital equivalents. Digital images are Things (like you and me) - a plethora of compressed, corrupted representations pushed and pulled through increasingly policed and capitalised information networks. If 80% of all internet traffic^* is SPAM - a liberated excess withdrawn^** from accepted channels of communication - perhaps it is in The Poor Image we find our closest kin? * In her recent October Journal article (Digital Debris: Spam and Scam), Steyerl claims that "80% of today's email messages are spam" ** This piece by Finn Brunton, (Roar so wildly: Spam, technology and language), is referenced by Steyerl in the same October Journal article

An optimist lectures his children...

downing street memo — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:58:25 -0800

10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution. An optimist's take on how the lives of future generations will improve based on technology.

Wild West on the internet

infini — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 04:45:00 -0800

Is the internet rewriting history? Teaching the difference between truth and propaganda online via BBC As part of their research into the influence of the internet on young people, Demos teamed up with creative agency Bold for a workshop exploring digital literacy at a secondary school in Tower Hamlets, in East London. Pupils were asked to rate various sources of information - the government, Twitter, the Guardian newspaper, their family - according to how much they trusted it. The results were telling. Closest to the heading 'Trust' the pupils placed YouTube; somewhere near the heading 'Distrust', they placed the government.

This tweet was sadly not "Edited. By. Brooke."

joshwa — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:43:11 -0800

On the Media's Bob Garfield demonstrates How to Turn a Fan into an Enemy in Under 140 Characters.

"You can't fake a tape! Pictures don't lie! At least not until you've assembled them creatively. "

loquacious — Mon, 30 May 2011 23:02:34 -0800

Newstweek: fixing the facts. Newstweek is a device that injects fake news into unsecured wireless connections. More info at hackaday.

Does it make me more money now?

Artw — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:04:27 -0800

Why Gawker Nick Denton is a genius - he can smell the page views!. The redesign he's championed (previously) is a convoluted nightmare which breaks the web and left blog posts unindexed Google. Page views are in the toilet. He may loose that bet. It doesn't matter, Nick Denton is a genius. Look, pictures of a naked man!

notice that little 'f' (or 't') everywhere?

kliuless — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 06:00:19 -0800

How (crowd) curation is making a comeback in search and how Facebook is using it to "remake whole industries."

These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy

novenator — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:14:31 -0800

Right Wing astroturfing A non-scientific analysis of the patterns in forum board discussions on a variety of topics. The gist: discussions of issues in which there's money at stake (like climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance) are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption by rightwing libertarians who are pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Discussions of issues in which there's little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions.

Beyond the blog?

Artw — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:34:55 -0800

With it's new redesign Gawker, and it's affiliates, will be moving away from being blogs. They want to be like Television.

"Israel is our only hope as the post-American president is aiding and abetting a nuclear Iran. Barack Obama is enabling Iran’s Islamic bomb" - Pamela Geller

mek — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:27:42 -0800

As the "ground zero mosque" story approaches bipartisan consensus, thanks to unexpected statements by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (joining a growing opposition), several journalists trace the origins of how the Park 51 community center became(warning: CNN) a toxic subject. What they found was Pamela Geller, a blogger at Atlas Shrugs, who has some very interesting vlogs. You may previously know her from this cozy 2006 interview with Bush's infamous anti-UN UN ambassador John Bolton.

Internet as Social Movement: A Brief History of Webism

chunking express — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:16:38 -0800

Internet as Social Movement: A Brief History of Webism. An editorial from N+1 magazine.

kind of meandering

kliuless — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 05:55:30 -0800

Restoring Journalism Maureen Tkacik talks about her life as a journalist, the nothing-based economy, and the future of journalism. She suggests abandoning authority and productively channeling narcissism. (via 2p & dd) BONUS -Maxine Udall: 21st Century Regress -My name is my name: Ezra's model and mine -"Am I pretty?" -The Cocoons We Live In

Misreading Tehran

homunculus — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:00:17 -0800

Misreading Tehran: Leading Iranian-American writers revisit a year of dreams and discouragement. "With a full 12 months now between us and the election, the time is ripe to start revisiting the hype and hope in a year of writing: which stories were overblown, what stories were missed entirely, and what can be gleaned about Iran's annus horribilis from a more thorough understanding. FP asked seven prominent Iranian-Americans, deeply immersed in both the English- and Persian-language media, to look through the fog of journalism at what actually happened in Tehran -- and why so many of us got it so wrong." [Via]

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

homunculus — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:28:21 -0800

No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency. A New Yorker profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his "media insurgency."

Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June

blue funk — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 10:52:46 -0800

"The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced. Users will pay £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week's subscription. The move opens a new front in the battle for readership and will be watched closely by the industry."(BBC) Some early reactions from other newspapers. Interview with Times editor about the charges. Pre viously

Arcangel and the future of digi/net art

0bvious — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:44:50 -0800

Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most infamous hack, masher-upper, digi/net artist. His work stands for a growing culture of artists who run wildly through animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net art be set to infect the real, fleshy world, like a rampant Conficker Worm? Has YouTube become the truest reflection of our anthropological selves? Are we destined to roam the int3erw£bs like the mythic beasts of yore, hoping, in time, that digi art can free us from the confines of this fleshy void? [...previously]

Essential Internet Appliances

telstar — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:29:22 -0800

Crap Detection 101 Howard Rheingold offers a fairly in-depth primer on media and internet BS detection. Lots of links to resources for enabling critical analysis of various information sources included.

Black and White and Dead All Over

Joe Beese — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:21:06 -0800

My, how the tables have turned: Many of the same daily newspaper correspondents that not too long ago turned up their noses at us online journalism pioneers, claiming we weren't "real" journalists, now fill my email box daily with their resumes, looking to me and others like me to provide them with work. ... Memo to my remaining daily print colleagues and their nostalgia club: Get over it and get over yourselves. It’s not that the Internet is Mr. Wonderful. Much of it mimics the same bad qualities that drove the public away from daily newspapers. You lost the public to us because - there's no nice or sugar-coated way to say it - you guys really suck at what you do. In your arrogance, you established calcified “rules” of “journalism” and false “objectivity” that neutered and spayed all of your reporters, domesticated so they would never again afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted. When you took the honest advocacy out of reporting you emptied it of all passion and reason to exist. It was a nice ride on your profit ledger sheet during the recent decades when you turned your rags into propaganda arms for the wealthy and powerful, but a funny thing happened on the way to the ATM machine: You lost the trust of your readers, half of whom have already given you the finger and pursued alternate routes to inform themselves of current events. And the rest are on the way through the same EXIT sign. [Caution: mean things are said about David Simon]

Moyers, Greenwald and Rosen on politics and the media

homunculus — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:23:30 -0800

Politics, the Press, and the Public. Bill Moyers speaks with Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen about the role of the establishment press in America’s dysfunctional political system.