another social blog

This is (largely) a blog about digital culture, the impact social media has on our behaviour and what we can learn from the conversations that take place on these networks.

[barthel]

How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood

[robhorninginternalexile]

barthel:

Since taste is socially constructed, a far better indication of whether we’ll like a movie isn’t whether the movie has a happy or sad ending, but whether other people who like the movies we like also like that movie. That’s why Amazon’s “people who viewed this also viewed” recommendation system is still the best one yet devised. It doesn’t seem interested in why someone searched for two books on the same day, just that the connection was made. And because we’re probably looking for books in the same way that other person was looking for books, Amazon can predict our search before we make it. Taste is social—and social phenomena are far harder to break down than what Netflix is doing with movies.

I agree with this, Taste is social, existing between people and not in isolation. People don’t just like what they like in a vacuum; they like what they can talk to others about or what will make them seem smarter or cooler to others or whatever. But as Felix Salmon points out, Netflix has to work to convince users that they don’t want to watch the quality stuff people talk about but the second-rate stuff the company can license but users are less likely to recommend.

What Netflix accomplishes by trying to atomizing taste in the ways Madrigal details is to give users a different to game to play with their identity that is nonsocial, that consists of manipulating decontextualized toy blocks into effigies of their identity — catering to the dream (if anyone really wants this) of a nonsocial self that can be built and entertainingly toyed without the risk of others’ judgment. Algorithms stand in for the approving other in the circuit of self-production.

[toffeemilkshake]

[blackbeardblog-blog]

Niiice.

[gareth-price]

"When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience"

Marshall McLuhan

[gareth-price]

Ian Bogost suggests that what modern technology might be creating is a kind of parody of that utopia — a Rube Goldbergian treadmill of small, neverending tasks. The regulation of online production is turning us into jittery information-processing generalists, jacks of all media trades.

http://www.roughtype.com/?p=3974

[theverge]

One other thing to which Franzen is interestingly blind: Whatever else Twitter is, it’s a literary form, which goes some way toward explaining why I find it so seductive. A tweet is basically a genre in which you try to say an informative thing in an interesting way while abiding by its constraint

Kathryn Schulz - How Twitter Hijacked My Mind — Daily Intelligencer (via thisistheverge)

[hautepop]

There’s always the sense, with Sontag, of reading as a process of acquisition and assimilation, as a kind of territorial expansionism of the self. All those itemized resolutions in the journals, all those lists of things to be read and absorbed; her project was, as she put it, “taking all of knowledge as my province.” And this is one of the most striking things about her, this conquistadorial spirit brought to bear on a basically democratic sensibility—the famous imperative to be interested in everything. She seems to have read all of Western literature, and to have learned from it everything that might be worth knowing.

The Intellectual: Susan Sontag’s 1978 Rolling Stone interview in all its brilliant, self-assured, ridiculous glory. By Mark O’Connell Slate, 5 Nov 2013

reviewing Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by Jonathan Cott. Yale University Press

(via hautepop)

[gareth-price]

Invoking the very existence of a “true self” is a tactic that lower-status people can use to force higher-status people into an truth game with them — or at least marshal an audience that will put them on the same playing field by default. So when people (like me, sometimes) argue that social-media use encourages us to be calculating and inauthentically reflexive, this argument is itself an attempt at parrhesia — a status claim. To argue that people jeopardize their “real” self in using social media to make a personal brand is to try to stage a truth game, to interpolate people into an authenticity competition. That argument takes people’s ordinary performative discourse online and scrutinizes it as parrhesia. Thus, denying others the right to exist in different contexts, to have different social roles, is always an option available to “trolls” and other people seeking to garner a stronger sense of self. Staging a context collapse starts a truth game that the lower-status person has everything to gain by and relatively little to lose.

http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/games-of-truth/

[gareth-price]

Parrhesia bases its claim to truth in trying to point behind the curtain and thus throw the roles into confusion, reveal how they are masks or how people are playing multiple roles at once. Exposing the “inauthenticity” of the powerful doesn’t automatically nullify their power, but the force of parrhesia depends on asserting that it should.

http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/games-of-truth/

[gareth-price]

So there is some pleasure and relief in making a print thing that isn't all SEO-termed, searchable, and scarily transparent. People talk about the tangibility of print, the way the paper feels. I'm just hung up on its opacity. At the same time, the magazine is a product of the Internet, because the Internet is where we live. It's not a place we go to anymore; it's a layer over everything. I live in and for screens.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/10/adult-mag-boobs-but-from-a-female-perspective.html

[gareth-price]

"Using the absurd as a framework for finding profound truths does not make a mockery of genuine thinking, it is its very essence."

http://www.mrteacup.org/post/zizek-and-the-academic-industrial-complex.html

[gareth-price]

All too real

Inspired by the InRealLife documentary, a piece by the consistently thought-provoking Dorian Lynskey and another on The New Inquiry, I've written a blog post looking at "why social media feels all too real".  

I think there's still a massive problem with the language too many of us use to describe social media. If you refer to anything offline as "real life" you're implicitly suggesting there are no consequences to what you do or say online, which is a very dangerous message to send out. 

[gareth-price]

Rather than trying to protect teens from all fears and risks that we can imagine, let’s instead imagine ways of integrating them constructively into public life. The key to doing so is not to create technologies that reinforce limitations, but to provide teens and parents with the mechanisms and information needed to make healthy decisions. Some young people may be ready to start navigating broad audiences at 13; others are not ready until they are much older. But it should not be up to technology companies to determine when teens are old enough to have their voices heard publicly. Parents should be allowed to work with their children to help them navigate public spaces as they see fit. And all of us should be working hard to inform our younger citizens about the responsibilities and challenges of being a part of public life. I commend Facebook for giving teens the option and working hard to inform them of the significance of their choices.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/22/keeping-teens-private-on-facebook-wont-protect-them/#ixzz2iTad0Ag7

[peterspear]

So in business and society, culture, politics, we found substantial susceptibility to positive herding, whereas in general news, economics, IT, we found no such herding effects in the positive or negative direction.

Sinan Aral “Crowdsource Control” (via peterspear)

[blackbeardblog-blog]

There is, however, a much more serious problem underlying this: what I call ‘the failure to take the group seriously’. Nearly all of us, practitioners, clients, psychologists alike really harbour the notion that the group is actually a collection of individuals whose statements can be aggregated or counted to generate an analysis. But what if the group can be considered as an entity with character and personality in its own right. And that the people in it, for the time of the group, are parts of a whole? In other words that the voices in the group are sub-personalities of the group personality and that this is in truth the aspect of the group worth attending to. How did it feel to be with this composite person? What parts of this person did you meet (sub-personalities)? What feelings came up in you, the facilitator whilst with this ‘person’? Could these have been feelings travelling around the group? If you had to offer a sensible explanation of this feeling, how would you explain it?

http://www.langmaidpractice.com/blog/myths-silly-rules-how-many-of-them-actually-said-that/

From Roy Langmaid’s article that I just linked to.

This is all also true of social media, of course. Except the group is invisible and hard-to-define: a combination of platform, assumed audience, actual audience, participatory audience, etc etc. So naturally most researchers just ignore it and pretend social media is made up of individuals saying what they really think and do. This is a much bigger issue, I think, than the old questions about whether Twitter (or whatever) is “representative” or not.

(via blackbeardblog)

[alexithymiadaily]

[blackbeardblog-blog]

Stats alert!

[tomewing-blog]

The thing you always have to remember about the Daily Mail is that the Daily Mail is old and very strange. It is also very bad, of course, but its malignancy is quite unlike, say, Murdoch’s. Murdoch knows what he wants and his newspapers are instruments for getting it - and inasmuch as what he...