Archives for February 2016

Rich Juzwiak in Gawker on the questionnaire staff writers at Bustle fill out to determine whether they have personal stories that would make good copy:

The market rewards personal storytelling with attention — the more lurid and specific, the better. Just a few weeks ago, we saw a young xoJane writer seemingly pushed to the brink by what she perceived to be the demands of her job and her reluctance to reveal. Nora Ephron’s signature mantra “everything is copy” has become the norm, except everything can’t ever be enough when your job is to churn out posts on a routine basis.

What this survey looks like to me is a crystallization of the industrialization of confession. It’s an efficient, logical method for testing how much of their guts writers want to spill, and which guts exactly. It was probably inevitable that something like this would be invented, even if it didn’t come from a company whose entire genesis reportedly derived from a rather cynically deterministic view of what women want to read about. Its depressing inevitability resembles that of factory farming…

We think of the digital world as a playground for con artists and shape-shifters, but they don’t require computers to do their thing, and never have. From “The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor,” by James C. McKinley Jr. and Rick Rojas in the New York Times:

Investigators say Mr. Wilson is a professional impostor and a skilled forger. Though fraud has become an increasingly invisible offense in a digital world, Mr. Wilson has stuck with a decidedly old-fashioned approach, stealing checks and creating new personas, occasionally with accents and falsified papers, the police said.

He has portrayed himself as a Scottish-born D.J., a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer and a professor at M.I.T. He has posed as executives from Microsoft, British Airways and Apple, always with a military background. He pretended to be a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States. He once maintained an Irish accent so well and for so long that his cellmate in an Indiana jail was convinced that he was an Irish mobster….

Tattooed across his fingers in green ink is a Gaelic phrase, “Mair Fior.” He says it means “Stay True.”

What Facebook’s On This Day shows about the fragility of our online lives — Leigh Alexander in the Guardian:

In many senses, we’ve lost control of our own stories online — the ongoing “right to be forgotten” discussions that began in the European Court of Justice in 2014 act as a partial concession to that point.

Instead of a shoebox of pictures and a diary, your child will grow up depending on interconnected platforms and services. Her entire history, from the first ultrasound picture you share to your network to the day she has a headache to the day she makes a snack, and on like that, will be documented — and could belong to service providers. Unless we can regain control of our narratives online, unless we can discover a way to value our social content, thisflickering constellation of forgettable “moments” and social media “memories”, is the main way our histories will be kept.

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.