First Looks category archive

The EFF has released a guide on how to wean yourself off Facebook entitled “How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends.” If you’re tired of being assimilated by the Zuckerborg, you may want to check it out.

Here’s a bit from their announcement, in which they discuss the dialectic of Facebook, that is, that persons keep using it even though they’ve come to loathe it:

Both Facebook and its critics have an explanation for this seeming paradox: people use Facebook even though they don’t like it because it’s so compelling. For some critics, this is proof that Facebook has perfected an “addictive technology” with techniques like “dopamine loops.” Facebook is rather fond of this critique, as it integrates neatly with Facebook’s pitch to advertisers: “We are so good at manipulating our users that we can help you sell anything.”

We think there’s a different explanation: disgruntled Facebook users keep using the service because they don’t want to leave behind their friends, family, communities and customers.

Aside:

Yesterday, I was on the phone with a representative of a local service company arranging for a routine service call. Somehow, the small talk turned to “social” media. The person on the other end of the line said (I’m paraphrasing here), “I canceled my Facebook account. I was afraid that I would feel less connected, but actually I feel more connected . . . .”

This television episode from six decades ago is eerily prescient.

Via The Bob Cesca Show After Party.

The AP reports (much more at the link):

TikTok may be the platform of choice for catchy videos, but anyone using it to learn about COVID-19, climate change or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to encounter misleading information, according to a research report published Wednesday.

Researchers at NewsGuard searched for content about prominent news topics on TikTok and say they found that nearly 1 in 5 of the videos automatically suggested by the platform contained misinformation.

Remember, the algorithms aren’t about accuracy, they are about “engagement.”

And “social” media isn’t.

Off to drink liberally.

Noz thinks we need to follow the money.

Yet another cookie crumbles.

Joe Patrice is a believer.

As of today, this blog has spent 17 years chronicling the decline of the American polity.

Of course, that was not the original intent.*

But that seems to be what it has become.

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*The original intent was to simply self-host a website from a server in my guest room and learn stuff because I could, after an acquaintance told me that, by using Linux, I could self-host my website. I moved my existing website from members.aol.com to my home web server, one of the original IBM Pentiums which a coworker had given to me, and, on a whim, I added a blog. I brought the site live from my guest room with the help of noip.com on Slackware v. 10.x 17 years ago today.

Of course, I no longer self-host, and the blog is all that remains of my original site, as the rest of it became so outdated as to be no longer relevant to anything. But I shall keep the blog relevant . . . .

At Psychology Today Blogs, Suzanne Degges-White explores how “social” media isn’t.

Family matters.

Blogging will be sporadic this week.

When I was a kid, I would come home from school and then go on long walks or, later, bicycle rides (being, as I was, out in the country surrounded by woods and fields). Today as I drive around my neighborhood, I rarely to see children playing outside.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Jenny Perkel argues cogently that children who remain inside their rooms hidden behind their screens are losing out on valuable growth experiences.

Honest to Betsy, you can’t make this stuff up.

Off to drink liberally.

At Above the Law, Joe Patrice decodes de code:

. . . Originalism is brilliant public relations, invoking the visceral sense that “original” means “authentic” to cover a lot of nonsense.

Follow the link for Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C, Exhibit D . . . .

Aside:

I would not be surprised if the “originalists” are awaiting breathlessly to re-implement the 3/5ths clause, with all that it entails.

After all, racism is their driving force.

The theme to the BBC radio series of Lord Peter Wimsey murder mysteries.

What can I say? I’m a mystery buff. I’m currently working my through the original Ellery Queens. (I must say, in the early stories, Ellery was rather a supercilious jerk.)

Good news is ipso facto no news.

And, when something goes viral enough, it becomes a pestilence.

One more time, “social” media isn’t.