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Scott Rosenberg

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Teens opt out of online “public square”

February 4, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Felicity Duncan writes in The Conversation:

Teens engage in complex management of their self-presentation in online spaces; for many college students, platforms like Snapchat, that promise ephemerality, are a welcome break from the need to police their online image.

Increasingly, young people are being warned that future employers, college admissions departments and even banks will use their social media profiles to form assessments. In response, many of them seem to be using social media more strategically. For example, a number of my students create multiple profiles on sites like Twitter, under various names. They carefully curate the content they post on their public profiles on Facebook or LinkedIn, and save their real, private selves for other platforms.

This dynamic has been underway for some time. Of course, Facebook and Twitter each began as new ways for us to connect “authentically” with each other on the Internet of a decade ago, which some users felt had grown impersonal and become overrun by ads. These services won us over with their personalizations and intimacies; then, in the quest for revenue and growth, they became polluted public spaces themselves. So the cycle turns again.

Filed Under: Links, Project

“I take them as my unpaid bodyguards and let them do battle out there for me”

February 3, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

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From a Vanity Fair interview with Werner Herzog on the release of his new documentary about the Internet:

Herzog has similarly kept himself removed from the Web, only using it for e-mail and Google Maps directions. As for those convincing Werner Herzog Twitter accounts?

“Oh, that’s all fake,” he says. “Voice impersonators too. And Facebook accounts, you just name it. I have at least 35 or more doppelgängers out there. The Internet is full with them. And that is fine. I take them as my unpaid bodyguards and let them do battle out there for me. It’s funny because there are Werner Herzogs out there who answer questions about filmmaking and do all sorts of funny things like create films I’ve never heard of. There’s a new form of public life, which we have to adapt to.”

Filed Under: Project

How Donald Trump is like a podcast

February 2, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

In Medium, Matt Haughey puts his finger on the peculiar intimacy Trump conjures with his listeners — a skill he shares with that other performer-turned-pol, Ronald Reagan:

When you see Trump speaking at his stops, he’s clearly talking off the top of his head, and that can be refreshing when compared other political candidates that go off prepared remarks. Politics tackles big important problems that require research, so remarks are usually prepared well in advance. I came away from watching Trump realizing he’s the next phase of George W. Bush, who famously spoke in simple terms that when analyzed for grammar showed up as 8th grade level (most political speeches are at 11th-12th grade level). Everyone watching can understand every word and every sentence, even though what he says usually doesn’t have any specific steps or concrete information on how he’d combat problems.

In these venues Trump is clearly a guy talking off the top of his head, telling you what he really thinks, and it really did feel like he was “not like all the other guys” as he would describe it. People like that for the same reason they liked George W. Bush who I often heard described as “a guy you’d like to have a beer with.”

Trump talking at one of his events is like listening to a podcast, and people might like him for all the same reasons they’d like podcasts. There’s a combo of informality and intimacy that makes you feel like this one person is talking to just you, and telling you amazing things.

Filed Under: Project

“Other people will create the standards defining our emotional lives”

February 1, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

John C. Havens in Mashable:

In the near future, multiple devices equipped with facial, vocal and biometric sensors utilizing affective computing will be competing to analyze and influence our feelings… Soon you won’t need to prompt Siri, but simply respond when “she” says, “Your expression seems sad — should I download Trainwreck from iTunes?”

This Internet of Emotions has no ethical standards. While manufacturers’ intentions may be positive, how can people tell? And who decides what “positive” even means? Unless we control our identities other people will create the standards defining our emotional lives….

By definition the benefits of emotional intelligence don’t apply to autonomous devices since they don’t genuinely experience feelings. What they’re great at is recognizing our micro-expressions and then emulating empathy to generate a positive response from us.

Filed Under: Project

Twitter makes humans look like bots

January 31, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Martin Weigert at MeshedSociety:

To some extend, Twitter, with its 140 character limit and its encouragement of instantness and impulsive comments, has turned its users into bot-like creatures, who keep tweeting the same lines, the same reactions, the same ideas, the same arguments. If you are a Twitter user and don’t believe this, just type “[often used word(s)] from:yourusername” into Twitter search. Looking at my own results was pretty uncomfortable.

Sure, there is more humor and irony on Twitter than what you can expect from the encounter with a customer service bot. But only among a subset of users. And only as long as the discussion doesn’t touch sensitive topics such as [enter random object of outrage]. If that happens, everyone sticks to their pre-fabricated text blocks and appears to follow a very narrow conversation protocol.

Filed Under: Project

“You’re a big lizard, and I’m an ice cream cone”

January 29, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

A quarter-century ago when I first wrote about VR, Jaron Lanier was talking about how we could all become lobsters. Today, porn-VR entrepreneurs are talking about how we can all become lizards. Plus ca change…

From “Behind the Scenes of Tori Black’s Virtual Reality Porn Debut,” by Sarah Ratchford in Vice:

[VR porn exec] Young says this is a good opportunity for people to gain more agency over their identity.

“I think there’s going to be almost like a renaissance. People are going to be able to explore their sexuality in a way that they’ve never been able to before.”

“It’s crazy too, because people may not choose to represent themselves the way that they are in the real world in a VR space,” he says. “You know, I might talk to you and you like lizards, and you’re a big lizard. And I’m an ice cream cone. But if that’s how I choose to represent myself as an avatar, then so be it. And we can still step into a space and have an exciting, interactive and intimate connection with each other.

“[You can] assume the body you like, assume the gender you like, the race you like, and be yourself and explore sexuality. It’s amazing; it’s what we’re on this planet to do.”

…I ask [actress Tori] Black what she thinks, whether she needs her real world boundaries to apply in virtual land.

“I don’t care what my avatar does,” she says, “because my avatar isn’t who I am. So yeah, all the things that you want me to do that I decline, go ahead and have my avatar do them and be like, ‘Hey, look! She finally did it!’ I’ll be like yeah, great. It didn’t cross any of my boundaries because it’s all in the computer… I’m completely disconnected.”

She says the virtual porn landscape is a place for exploration, and those who are uncomfortable with the idea of lack of consent just shouldn’t get involved with it.

Filed Under: Project

“Everything is worthless” — and that’s just great

January 28, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

From a 2012 Pitchfork interview with Patrick Stickles of Titus Andronicus:

Pitchfork: Why is that car-crash track called “Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape With the Flood of Detritus”?

Stickles: We had this song [on The Airing of Grievances] called “Upon Viewing Brueghel’s ‘Landscape With the Fall of Icarus'”, so I borrowed the syntax. It’s kind of the sequel. In the painting from the original song, in the corner, you see this tiny guy falling into the ocean. It’s been interpreted as: It’s a big world, and people go about their business, and little tragedies are happening all the time, and what are you going to do?

That was my experience in seeing this car crash. It’s horrible, but you can’t do anything but get on with your life, however insignificant it may seem. In our case, we were going to play a concert. What can you do? Nothing. It is scary. It is brutal.

Pitchfork: On the album’s first track, “Ecce Homo”, you sing about how everything’s worthless…

Stickles: … I meant for that to be hopeful. Because in the absence of meaning we have the power to create meaning. Everything is worthless, yes. But because of that, it’s our privilege to decide what is actually worthwhile for ourselves and our own standards. We have the power to create our own morality and determine our own values.

Filed Under: Links, Project

Should we outsource emotional labor to robots?

January 26, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Christine Rosen in Slate:

What happens when we know that someone is faking a feeling? We might sense implicitly that our overworked waiter isn’t actually happy to see us when we sit down at his table, but unspoken social conventions allow us to make as much of a pretense of believing his feelings as the waiter does of performing them. But when we interact with robots that we know have been programmed to give everyone the same friendly greeting regardless of anyone’s actual feelings, that unspoken compact disappears… The risk is not a world run by robots (although employers in Japan already use Smile-Scan machines to analyze the smiles of their service workers). The risk is that outsourcing emotional labor to robots and machines could lead to mass emotional deskilling on the part of people.

Filed Under: Project

“The mask tell you more”

January 24, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

unmasked

Cast of thousands
But we were the real two
And when I’m alone
Before a mirror late at night
I will reveal you
I will reveal you

–Unmasked!

The most recent Mountain Goats album, Beat the Champ, is a song cycle about professional wrestling. Paste magazine interviewed singer/songwriter John Darnielle and asked him if he would ever write a novel on the topic. He responded with ambivalence.

Darnielle: The thing to do would be to believe it. Most of the time when people write about wrestlers, they want to talk about the conflict between the actual person and this character and so on and so forth. Whereas I think Wrestler’s Cruel Study did this — had the character be the character, like believe that Kevin Sullivan is into the occult. And if you believe that stuff, then it’s more interesting than I think some human interest angle of the man behind the mask.

Paste: Yeah. You should work on that.

Darnielle: Because the mask tell you more about the man than the man ever can.

Filed Under: Links, Project

Stolen, the problematic app that lets you “buy and sell people” on Twitter

January 16, 2016 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Stolen is an app that let you buy and sell people’s Twitter accounts — not access to the accounts, just a kind of bogus claim to ownership — in a play marketplace. With no opt-in or grant of permission. The developers seem to have been thinking “trading cards,” but that’s not what it felt like, and people began sounding the alarm very quickly.

Holly Brockwell of Gadgette interviewed Siqi Chen, CEO of the company behind the app, during its brief, two-week run; Stolen is now shut down.

We don’t say, ‘Oh, I own you now,’ like, that’s not in the app. That’s not a thing that we want to do. It’s gross.

Well, it is in the app at the moment, because obviously it says, ‘You own this person now. This person belongs to you.’

We don’t say that. We’re just saying, like, ‘This card belongs to you.’ That’s the intention of it right now.

I’m looking at the screen right now. It says, ‘Boom, Holly Brockwell belongs to you now.’ That’s not a card, that’s me as a person.

Yes. That- we need to fix that.

Filed Under: Links, Project

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