Erin Kissane on the Social Internet
From the dearly departed XOXO festival, which I sadly was never able to attend. Erin Kissane talks about the degradation of the social internet and her own role in the remarkable Covid Tracking Project.
From the dearly departed XOXO festival, which I sadly was never able to attend. Erin Kissane talks about the degradation of the social internet and her own role in the remarkable Covid Tracking Project.
The state of news media in Canada, and elsewhere, is certainly not at a good place. Newsrooms are closing, or contracting across the country. A Canadian law designed to get social media companies to share part of their revenue with news outlets backfired spectacularly when Facebook decided to remove news outlets from all of their feeds rather than share their ample profits with them.
I would never have predicted what would happen next. Facebook banishing news made an already dire news vacuum even worse. In the small prairie city of Regina, a literal dumpster company with a penchant for sharing local news on their social media accounts has stepped into the void, and has become one of the biggest sources of local news in the city. The company has amassed tens of thousands of followers for their
In writing this post, I’ve rewritten the same basic joke about media these days being ‘trash’ or ‘a dumpster fire’ over and over, but honestly it’s more exasperating than funny.
Read More (and listen to the story in Podcast form) at Canadaland →
The New Yorker writes up one of my favourite iPhone apps, Halide, and goes into depth about the aesthetics of phone photographs. Cue the Brian Eno quote:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit—all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
Via Rafa
the most recent episode of Ezra Klein featured author Zadie Smith, who gave a summary of social media and phones which has been bouncing around my head since I heard it:
the facts of this technology is that it was designed as and is intended to be a behaviour modification system. That is the right term for it … the phone tells me exactly what to think about, where to think about it and often how to think about it, and it’s not even to me the content of those thoughts, like there’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics to express on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me, it’s the structure. It’s not the content of what’s on them. It’s that it’s structured in a certain way. That an argument is this long that there are two sides to every debate that they must be in fierce contest with each other is actually structuring the way you think about thought…
I don’t think any one of my age who knows anyone they knew in 2008 thinks that that person has not been seriously modified. In many different directions but the fundamental modification is the same, and that’s okay, all mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you, the social life of a 16th century village modifies you, but the question becomes who do you want to be modified by and to what degree? That’s my only question, and when I look at the people who have designed these things, what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be…This machinery is not worthy of them. That’s the best way I can put it, and I speak of someone who grew up as an entirely TV addicted human. I love TV. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter, and when the internet came, I was like, “Hallelujah. Finally, we’ve got a medium which isn’t made by the man or centralized. We’re just going to be like talking to each other, hanging out with each other. It’s going to be amazing.” That is not the internet that we have. That is not what occurred.
Years and years ago I designer a weather app called Skyline. Little of it exists on the internet anymore, but the core idea of the app was to present an hourly forecast as a series of icons which would rise and fall with the temperature, giving you an easy-to-read graph of the day ahead. I don’t believe we were the first to ever present a daily forecast this way, we were the first I know of to package a whole app around it.
App developer Carrot recently launched a new version of their Carrot Weather app, which has what I consider the best version of this concept yet, and the best overall weather app I know of for iPhone or iPad (it also runs on newer Macs, though it’s a bit less good there). It’s got good data, presented well, and it looks pretty.
I make a point on this blog of never worrying about my posts being ‘timely’. I post whenever I find something, and don’t much care if something is 2 days or 2 decades old (I also don’t track visits or incoming links in any way, but that’s another story). Sometimes, though, I luck into something relatively current, like my visiting artist Jenny Holzer‘s Lightline show at the Guggenheim on its 4th day.
The main attraction was the immense video screen that sent scraps of words flowing up the helix of the Guggenheim’s inner hall, in a reworking of the artist’s own 1989 show in the same space.
Skywriting was done outside the show, though I don’t know if it was related to the words inside. The shape echoes the work, though I don’t know who Alejandro is, and couldn’t angle myself to read more than this small excerpt.
And lastly, a bit of a spoiler, the very final words at the top of the Guggenheim:
My day job as a designer of Mac apps gives me a special fondness for computer concepts. This is a little-known Apple prototype from the 80’s which was a candidate to be a new platform alongside, or instead of, the Mac. Inspired by a bookshelf, “This concept envisioned a computer that would expand with the needs of the user, through the use of modular components”.
The user would add modules depending on what they needed to do, like disk, drives, storage, video cards, or specialized components. Modular designs often work out better in theory than in practice, and it’s likely that in this case getting all the pieces to work with each other would have been a technical nightmare.
Via Daring Fireball
Until the age of about 14 I was certain I wanted to do movie special effects when I got old enough. Plans changed, but I still enjoy watching how special effects are done. In this case, a small studio resurrected a decades-old technique for making a “green screen” effect using sodium vapour lighting and prisms. Neat!
Italian artist Leonardo Ulian makes some delightful mandalas out of electronics and other symbols of our digital world. Beautiful.
The New Yorker has a piece about how much worse the internet has gotten. It’s not exactly a secret, but this article sums up a lot of the current state of things online:
Elsewhere online, things are similarly bleak. Instagram’s feed pushes months-old posts and product ads instead of photos from friends. Google search is cluttered with junky results, and S.E.O. hackers have ruined the trick of adding “Reddit” to searches to find human-generated answers.
Later it hits on what I think is one of the key issues at play:
According to Eleanor Stern, a TikTok video essayist with nearly a hundred thousand followers, part of the problem is that social media is more hierarchical than it used to be. “There’s this divide that wasn’t there before, between audiences and creators,” Stern said. The platforms that have the most traction with young users today—YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch—function like broadcast stations, with one creator posting a video for her millions of followers; what the followers have to say to one another doesn’t matter the way it did on the old Facebook or Twitter.
Thanks Rafa