[medialist.]

In which some thoughts are thought about new media, culture, and society. I use this blog to collect relevant articles and also to log some of my own musings.

[everythingisdisrupted]

Here’s the thing about Twitter. You don’t need to be logged into Twitter to see these tweets. You can see them on Twitter logged out. Or you can see them embedded in other places on web and mobile or on TV and elsewhere. You only need to be logged into Twitter to tweet. So anyone who is focusing on the logged in monthly active user number is missing something bigger. Twitter is where people who have something to say go to say it. And right now we are witnessing Twitter being used for what is arguably the biggest thing out there. A run for President of the United States. That is the contradiction of Twitter.

http://avc.com/2016/02/the-twitter-contradiction/ (via everythingisdisrupted)

[pewinternet]

Have you ever wondered what a Twitter conversation looks like from 10,000 feet?

The six types of Twitter conversations

[dennys]

ah, a rare set of salt and pepe 

[elena]

….thank you for ruining something I LOVE with all of my heart!!!

[dennys]

oh man! honestly, we’d never want to do that! v, v, v sorry that our pepe joke contribution obliterated your enjoyment of a meme*

*an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation.

ps- if this fun stuff bothers you, we recommend never searching youtube for “[insert your favorite song here] cover”

[posting-disliker]

dennys is trying to fight back and its reminiscent of every time you see someone try to come back from an sjw tumblr beatdown

[baroquespiral]

people are reacting as if the CEO of Denny’s personally had his marketing team get a focus group together to test this poor quality Pepe and will be rolling it out in an advertising campaign across the nation, whereas what clearly happened is this Denny’s Tumblr that nobody follows but they made because a consultant told them to is staffed by the one Professional Millennial they hired as a Social Media Intern who can’t get a job other than by hawking the Weird Twitter account they have on the side I mean have you seen the Denny’s Tumblr on the grand scale of meme commercialization this is nothing

[elisegoeseast]

We've Moved Into A Post-Literate Communication Era

In Japan and Taiwan, the killer messaging app is LINE. In Korea, it’s KakaoTalk. China is ruled by WeChat, of course. I use them all, depending on the chat partner. These days I only get actual SMS text messages from Americans in America. 

LINE is funny. It pretty much defaults you to using its emoji and super-emoji – stickers – to express yourself. I know this because my mom has been running our Hu family group chat on LINE for the last couple of years, and we barely use words to talk with one another. In the Hu group is Mom, Dad, my little brother Roger and my husband Matt. Here is a sample chat from last weekend:

[npr]

Who needs written language, anyway? ;) -Emily

[reservoircat]

shevathegun:

spidergvven:

tumblr linguists pls explain why ‘you’ sometimes needs to be ‘u’ and ‘u’ needs to be ‘you’ and how come i will mix and match my u’s and you’s within the same post or even the same sentence

the difference between “u” and “you” is really interesting to me too, and while there haven’t been a lot of plausible conclusions drawn about variable usage of the two, i’ve observed a few things about it.

one: tumblr has, effectively, its own dialect. in fact, different part of tumblr have different variants of this dialect. usage of “you” vs “u” is a part of this dialect.

(here’s a great video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDPasRas5u0)

two: a key feature of the “tumblr dialect” is fluidity — tumblr posts generally maintain a very specific cadence. variable usage of “u”/”you” occurs most frequently in order to increase fluidity of speech. the pattern is generally “you” at the beginning of a statement and “u”s in the body thereof. (this pattern is relatively consistent even if there is no beginning “you”.)

three: another factor seems to be emphasis, and authorial intent. “you” is used more frequently when the subject matter is serious, or, as one person already pointed out, if the statement is intended to be forceful. alternatively, “u” has an intrinsic flippancy that speakers frequently use in conjunction with humor, irony, or sarcasm.

four: authors will vary usage of “you”/”u” in instances of repetition, in part because the “tumblr dialect” involves a minimalistic approach to punctuation. (example: “omg i was so worried about u you know”)

five: users often use “u” instead of “you” to address people they know well or feel close to, almost as a form of endearment. (example: “i love u”, “are u ok”, etc.) because “you” carries with it a forcefulness or seriousness, “u” is used more frequently in casual, affectionate exchanges between friends.

six: users use “u” more often if they use other such abbreviations in the same post.

the key difference seems to be that “u” — as a single letter — feels diminutive, casual, and cute, in comparison to the full word “you”, which feels more serious, more professional, or more severe. though the have the same meaning on tumblr, their different connotations can be chalked up to their different visual presentations. 

somebody who’s a more skilled linguist than i am should pick this up tbh, would love to hear about any conclusions that have been drawn about this

I am not a linguist, but I also note that some people use the “You” instead of “u” when “ya” could also be used like “I like u, ya know?” and it would be perfectly understandable like that too.

[genderqueermulder]

imho the internet has effectively brought back the formal/informal ‘you’ that was phased out of the english language hundreds of years ago, albeit in a purely text-based system (i have my own ideas about text-based language being the language of the future but i won’t get into that here) u takes the place of a less formal and less polite pronoun- you wouldn’t say ‘u’ in an email to the president, but you’d say that shit online or to friends and family conversely, ‘you’ has evolved to be more serious- receiving a ‘fuck you’ text is way more alarming than if it says ‘fuck u’ TL;DR- the internet allowed formal/informal you to re-evolve in english

[kenyatta]

There are tumblr bloggers who obfuscate their communication by hiding entire posts in tags. My colleague, Molly Templeton introduced me to what she calls “delete culture”—the act of removing social media posts from the Internet that are no longer relevant to the exact moment you are in. She’s shown me Instagram users who limit their accounts to a carefully curated collection of nine photographs that fit in the above-the-scroll grid. We’ve seen super-long Twitter conversations disappear the moment a TV show’s credits roll. This is not the way “users” are supposed to behave. You cannot data mine deletion. This is the opposite of permanence. And this is beautiful. I think there’s a lot to learn from these behaviors that are less about meeting consumer needs and more about respecting the human desire to be understood.

I did an interview with psfk about Internet culture and everybodyatonce and we touched on a bunch of the things we obsess about like folks who hide their communication from the rest of the internet. (h/t mememolly)

Related: I’m speaking at PSFK2015 this year. Come through if you’re around!

(via kenyatta)

[bravenewwhat]

[photographsonthebrain]

Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof. Presumptions of obsolescence, which are often nothing more than the marketing techniques of corporate behemoths, need to be scrupulously examined. By now we are familiar enough with the magnitude of the changes in all the spheres of our existence to move beyond the futuristic rhapsodies that characterize much of the literature on the subject. We can no longer roll over and celebrate and shop. Every phone in every pocket contains a “picture of ourselves,” and we must ascertain what that picture is and whether we should wish to resist it. Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

Among the Disrupted - NYTimes.com (via photographsonthebrain)

[stoweboyd]

Now the Internet is centralizing, bringing with it Mass Net Fame. The top 100 sites are almost entirely commercial, with many of the old media well-represented there. Much of Net culture is driven by the old forces of mass media shoveling the Same Old Crap down our waiting maws. Sites like Facebook filter our feeds, leading to the snowballing of works from commercial entities. (Note that this anti-democratizing of our culture is proportional not to the size of the site but to the degree of algorithmic filtering they do.)

David Weinberger, Fame, Web Fame, Mass Web Fame  

(via stoweboyd)

[sparklehime-blog]

I think meme culture on tumblr really thrives since whenever a new meme pops up all the old memes that we thought were dead reappear to be “supporting memes” to the new “trending meme” and I think that if memes were an economy tumblr would be very rich

[kateoplis]

“As protests sparked by a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson began spreading nationwide, furor was also growing in cyberspace, in the social-justice halls of Tumblr, a social-blogging platform dominated by users in their teens, 20s and early 30s.

Their feeds were vivid mash-ups of articles, GIFs, cleverly labeled images, court documents, smartphone videos, stickers and cartoons, and their posts contained news about Ferguson, along with tidbits about identity, inequality, police abuse, racism, body shaming and more.”

"There are more than 215 million blogs on Tumblr and, according to comScore, an analytics company, 50 percent of Tumblr users are from 15 to 34 years old. The company’s internal surveys show that 64 percent of users say that they care about social causes and look into them on Tumblr. These numbers suggest that millennials, who have long been pigeonholed as an apathetic bunch, have a strong interest in social issues — it’s just hidden from the eyes of their elders. …

“You can create your own identity via Tumblr,” said Moya Bailey, 31, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University in women’s studies and digital humanities. “I see many more diverse images on Tumblr than I see anywhere else. It’s one of the few places where I see fat people, trans women and trans women of color who are celebrated.” …

Ms. Moore… recalled organizing a moment of silence in San Diego after Michael Brown was killed. Nearly 400 people attended the event — a number that’s large for the small and conservative San Diego, Ms. Moore said — and many others followed up with emails asking to participate in the future. “I was blown away at how engaged and how passionate people can be on Tumblr,” she said.”

Millennials and the Age of Tumblr Activism | NYT 

[photographsonthebrain]

AgingBooth lets you make such images at any increment you select, not just 25 years; you can save those files and then do as you will with them. This means that you can make a portrait of yourself as you may have evolved by 2050—and then, using the above-mentioned Vintage Scene (which can make your photos look as if they were taken in different eras, going all the way back to the birth of photography), you can see how you’d have appeared as an octogenarian in 1850. Analog photography as we knew it in its first 150 years allowed skilled practitioners to blend fact and fiction. Digital imaging gives those powers to the most amateur picture-maker. As a result, photography’s service as a vehicle for fantasy now stands alongside its function as a recording system and may supersede it. We have just begun to adjust our cultural assumptions about the photograph to keep up.

Does Instagram Change the Meaning of Memories? | MIT Technology Review (via photographsonthebrain)

[nathanjurgenson]

It’s useful here to recall social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson’s critique of digital dualism. Namely, cyperspace is not some separate or tacked-on reality to meatspace — we live fully enmeshed, augmented on-and-offline lives. And as much as concrete cities are home to malice and murder, so are online communities. Whether or not 4Chan deserves censure for enabling the proliferation of horrific content belongs to debate that also predates the internet — how much evidence of human brutality, especially when visually graphic, should be available for public consumption?

4Chan Is Just the Latest Medium For an Age-Old Murder Message | VICE News (via nathanjurgenson)

[nathanjurgenson]

failure to acknowledge a lack of diversity suggests that, once again, the driving force behind social networking does not reflect the complicated workings of hierarchy, power, and vulnerability that shape the very social space a site like Ello aims to mirror and mediate. “They are creating a social product with a political manifesto, without good knowledge of the social,” Jurgenson said. “The lack of diversity also applies to expertise — social media creators tend to all come from the same background and the same professional spheres.”

What the Hell Is Ello? | VICE News (via nathanjurgenson)

[bethanyactually]

We have lost phone conversations, because talking on cell phones is no fun at all, and it’s harder than texting or typing. I do think we’ve lost that, but we’ve gained a lot with the internet. I feel like the internet has turned us all into letter writers. I think of my mother when I was a kid, she never wrote down anything but a grocery list. People didn’t write, because you’d call. Why would you write anything? But now we’re all writers. So when people complain about grammar and punctuation, I think it isn’t that our grammar and punctuation have gotten worse, but that it used to be that only writers wrote. Only people who were in education wrote, but now we all write: we all text, we all post. I feel like we’ve lost phones but we’ve gained this whole different type of correspondence that hasn’t existed since the age of letter writing.

Rainbow Rowell interview on Den of Geek: Landline, fangirls, the internet (via bethanyactually)

[kenyatta]

Virality isn’t a function of content. It’s a function of the network in which the content is placed.

I just want to make sure that we’re all clear on this. (via kenyatta)

[oliviatheelf-deactivated2013120]

The saddest thing is that most people will find this humorous instead of serious. We’re standing right beside one another, and yet we text others instead of actually speaking to each other. Have you ever sat down and thought about how uncomfortable we now are around one another that it’s so bad that we literally pretend to be texting someone when we’re not, just so it’s less awkward to stand beside people? What’s supposed to strengthen our bonds has taken away from it. It’s time to take our faces out of our phones and notice the world, give a kind gesture to someone, and go SEE your friends instead of just texting them.

I’m going to let that sink in.

[oldfrax]

Ah yes let me just up and leave school right in between my classes so I can go see the friend 40 miles away that i’m currently texting instead of making idle chit chat with the people around me that I don’t particularly care for. Fuck your pretentious shit.

[definitelynotsatann]

"whines evil technology is making people antisocial its not real communication if its not face to face and im a pretentious self righteous shitbaby that asks random people on the street for the time and feels good about it"