Media Mechanics

Understanding media and its effects.

[media-mechanics]

As ever at Downing Street press conferences, Boris Johnson’s scientific advisers deployed their graphs skilfully to back up the warnings of potential catastrophe.

The by now all-too-familiar vertiginous lines were intended to leave the public in no doubt about the consequences of not delaying freedom until July 19.

But take a closer look and the choice of graphs is arguably disingenuous: the slides are most revealing for what they failed to include.

We were shown a graph comparing the change in the proportion of under and over-65s admitted to hospital in January and in May/June.

This showed a big jump in the under-65s column, a point Prof Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, took pains to emphasise.

The problem is that this fails to show just how much lower the raw numbers are now.

In reality, there were 95,172 admissions for Covid in England between Jan 1 and 28, compared with 2,851 between May 16 and June 12.

However, a brief glance at the Downing Street graph - and that’s all the general public will have had the chance to do - could well give the impression that the situation in hospitals is worse than last winter.

This comparison is also weakened by the timing chosen by the Government.

Cases are generally distributed in younger age groups towards the start of a period of opening up, as these people are more likely to return to work in person or to socialise.

In September, at the start of the second wave, those aged 18-to-64 comprised 51 per cent of admissions compared with 60 per cent in May. This was higher than it was for the over-65 age group.

The Telegraph’s own graph below - showing, crucially, the actual numbers of patients in hospitals - demonstrates how incomparably better the current situation is.

On Tuesday morning, Sir Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, revealed that just one per cent of hospital beds are currently occupied by Covid patients, with most of those young.

Sir Simon also said hospitals are in a “much better position” than last year.

The age distribution has “flipped” he said, so those under-65 now make up 70 per cent of cases.

source: telegraph

[media-mechanics]

Once viewed as less desirable than real data, synthetic data is now seen by some as a panacea. Real data is messy and riddled with bias. New data privacy regulations make it hard to collect. By contrast, synthetic data is pristine and can be used to build more diverse data sets. You can produce perfectly labeled faces, say, of different ages, shapes, and ethnicities to build a face-detection system that works across populations.

But synthetic data has its limitations. If it fails to reflect reality, it could end up producing even worse AI than messy, biased real-world data—or it could simply inherit the same problems. “What I don’t want to do is give the thumbs up to this paradigm and say, ‘Oh, this will solve so many problems,’” says Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and founder of the algorithmic auditing firm ORCAA. “Because it will also ignore a lot of things.”

source: MIT technological review

[media-mechanics]

“Known Victims” allows online slander victims to request suppression of explicit search results.

When people report to the Google that they have been attacked on sites that charge to remove posts, the company will automatically suppress similar content when their names are searched for. “Known victims” also includes people whose nude photos have been published online without their consent.

source: Google Seeks to Break Vicious Cycle of Online Slander- NY Times

[media-mechanics]

Tragic but true: how podcasters replaced our real friends.

The pandemic has, no doubt, expedited the podcaster-friend trend. After a brief dip in listener numbers during the first lockdown (something attributed to the change in people’s daily routines, particularly the absence of a commute), audience figures leapt up again – in December, BBC Sounds reported a 21% increase in podcast listening over the year. The number of podcasts also ballooned, filling voids in the professional lives of the hosts and the social lives of the listeners, and in some cases replacing both. There were periods during lockdown where I was hearing more from certain podcasters than anyone else on Earth – even the people I was sharing a home with.

But believing that people you encounter through the media are your friends is not a new phenomenon. It is called parasocial interaction, a term coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956. Obviously, they did not have podcasts in mind, but everything about the form seems perfectly pitched for such a relationship to blossom.

Podcasts are intimate, with no in-the-room audience to remind you of your own distance. They can also be very long, and very long-running, which means masses of information about the podcaster can be communicated and a network of in-jokes and callbacks established. They are often collaborative, fuelled in part by listener correspondence. There are a lot of them and the bar to entry is far lower than for other forms of media (everyone could be a podcaster; sometimes it feels as though they are). That means you are not only more likely to find a podcaster who shares your outlook and sense of humour, but also one who shares the material reality of your life. In other words, someone who might truly be your friend.

source: guardian

[media-mechanics]

Google Search Aiding in Scourge of Fake, Inaccurate News About Election 2016.

source: Mediate

[media-mechanics]

Right to be forgotten.

In a May 2014 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Court found that individuals have the right to ask search engines like Google to delist certain results for queries on the basis of a person’s name. The search engine must comply if the links in question are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive,” taking into account public-interest factors including the individual’s role in public life. Pages are only delisted from results in response to queries that relate to an individual’s name. We delist URLs from all of Google’s European search results—results for users in France, Germany, Spain, etc.—and use geolocation signals to restrict access to the URL from the country of the requester. The chart below shows the total number of requests received and the total number of URLs requested to be delisted since May 29, 2014.

source: google

[media-mechanics]

I attribute the majority of the uptick to the Zoom phenomenon, because it truly provided a novel vantage point. We were seeing ourselves from a new perspective — and it was eye-opening.

Corey Hartman, MD

source: The Cosmetic Surgery “Zoom Boom” Is Real — But There’s More To The Story- Refinery29

[media-mechanics]

Facebook banned Instagram ads by encrypted messaging service Signal that shows users how much Facebook knew about them.

“Being transparent about how ads use data is enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing.”

source: signal

[media-mechanics]

Modern adult friendships aren’t just challenging to create and maintain — some evidence suggests they are also in decline. Twenty-two percent of millennials in a 2019 YouGov poll said they had “no friends,” compared to 16 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of baby boomers. The reasons can be pinned on a variety of factors: Americans today lead increasingly busy lives, and as members of our friend groups grow into their careers and relationships, incomes and schedules start to vary. People move away for new jobs or to be closer to family. Distance and time become barriers in a way they weren’t when everyone was young, single, and devoted to their found families.

But you’d never know that from watching television. From Friends to Living Single to Grey’s Anatomy to New Girl, TV reinforces the fantasy that true friendships are and should be deeply close but require no real effort to maintain. It’s a stark difference from the way we know friendships operate in our own lives — as meaningful but sometimes fleeting relationships that can eventually dissolve because we have no language, script, or social expectation for how to seriously integrate friendships into our adult lives.

source: “Friends” and the illusion of perfect adult friendships - The TV show sold us an idealized vision of these relationships. For young adults, the real thing is far harder to find. Vox

[media-mechanics]

“The money’s the problem. Anytime you put dollar signs and human beings in the same sentence, you have a recipe for disaster.

Adam Pertman, author of Adoption Nation and president of the National Center on Adoption and Permanency.

source: The Baby Brokers: Inside America’s Murky Private-Adoption Industry. Time

[media-mechanics]

Collective bargaining via app.

Workers have long tried to outwit the gig platforms, with strategies such as using apps from multiple companies. Now, an increasingly popular tactic is declining cheap rides or orders to boost pay.

In October 2019, two DoorDash drivers started a #DeclineNow Facebook group urging members to reject any delivery that doesn’t pay a minimum of $7, Bloomberg reported. The group now has at least 32,000 members.

Willy Solis, a gig worker based in Denton, Texas and who is part of the group, has taken it a step further. Since March, he has been using third-party apps to automatically decline cheap fares, once declining 122 orders in a day. Solis, who drives about 35 hours a week, sets the minimum pay, before tips, on the third-party apps at $6 an hour. Solis says he has seen his average earnings increase 45% to 55% each day after using this tactic.

“To better economic conditions is to decline orders,” he told Quartz. “The orders we get—the large majority is way below minimum wage and would result in non-sustainable living wage if we accepted all those orders.”

Solis says the DoorDash movement has inspired other gig platform workers. In the Facebook group Instacart Shoppers, with over 17,000 members, a post this week reminded drivers not to accept low-paying batches.

Declining rides is “growing in its movement [and is] more effective than trying to unionize at this time,” says Solis. Declining riders also gives drivers more control over what orders they want to pursue.

Unionization efforts in the US have been slow to gain traction. In New York, Uber and Lyft are working with labor unions to develop legislation that would give gig workers a path to unionization, while keeping workers classified as independent contractors. Labor advocates say it could carve the gig companies out of the labor movement’s biggest goal, which is to get Congress to enact the Protect the Rights to Organize (PRO) Act, a bill that would extend federal bargaining rights to app-based workers.

[media-mechanics]

Amazon wants all its devices to automatically share a web connection with each other.

With Sidewalk, Amazon are aiming to create a ‘mesh network’, which consists of its smart home devices linking to each other, creating a low-bandwidth network that encompasses homes with an Echo or Ring.

The network has several advantages for Amazon: it means users won’t need an internet connection to set up their devices, just an in-range device from a neighbour. It also means low-bandwidth devices, like smart locks or Amazon Tile widgets, can be used without an internet connection.

‘When enabled, Sidewalk can unlock unique benefits for your device, support other Sidewalk devices in your community, and even locate pets or lost items.’

But technology experts have raised alarm at the move, which would see Amazon effectively become an internet service provider with the ‘flick of a switch’.

source: metro

[media-mechanics]

Indian police visit Twitter office to serve notice about inquiry.

Indian police said on Monday they visited a Twitter office to serve notice to its country managing director about an investigation into the social media giant's tagging of a post by a ruling party spokesman as "manipulated media".

Leaders of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party last week shared portions of a document on Twitter they said was created by the main opposition Congress and highlighted government failures in handling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Congress complained to Twitter saying the document was fake, after which the U.S. company marked some of the posts - including one by BJP spokesman Sambit Patra - as "manipulated media".

Twitter says it applies its "manipulated media" tag to posts "that include media (videos, audio, and images) that have been deceptively altered or fabricated".

source: reuters

[media-mechanics]

“The first color you read in your optical receptors is that super-bright lime. It’s possibly an evolutionary take from poisonous animals and signals danger. A physical thing happens when you see it. Nike triangulated that and repeated it forever.

We consider multiple views of a sneaker at a very early stage in its design. We’re looking at gloss and backlighting more critically How does this hue of blue translate at 8 p.m. on your Instagram feed when your phone battery is low? It’s worth overthinking.”

-Bryan Cioffi, Reebok’s vice president for footwear design.

source: The Secret Psychology of Sneaker Colors, NY Times

[media-mechanics]

The rise of the recommendation. How machines figure out the things we want, and how they might be changing what we want.

Recommendation systems like Netflix's or Spotify's have revolutionized the way we discover new things. They were built to help us find what we'll like faster and with less friction. Now, we don't even have to search for something that will fit our tastes: algorithms can pool information from millions of users to create better recommendations, tailored perfectly to us. Or ... perfectly enough. As these systems become more and more sophisticated, it's becoming less clear who is influencing whom.

source: planet money

[media-mechanics]

[media-mechanics]

Virtually overnight, SoundScan changed the rules on who got to be a mega, mega superstar, and the domino effect—in terms of magazine covers, TV bookings, arena tours, and the other spoils of media attention and music-industry adulation—was tremendous, if sometimes maddeningly slow in coming. Garth, Metallica, N.W.A, Nirvana, and Skid Row were already hugely popular, of course. But SoundScan revealed exactly how popular, which of course made all those imperial artists exponentially more popular.

How SoundScan Changed Everything We Knew About Popular Music. The Ringer