#mat honan

[elcielosobremi]

Al darle Me Gusta a todo, convertí mi Facebook en un lugar donde no había nada que me gustara.

Matthew Honan 

[forgottengenres]

We set up our political and social filter bubbles and they reinforce themselves—the things we read and watch have become hyper-niche and cater to our specific interests. We go down rabbit holes of special interests until we’re lost in the queen’s garden, cursing everyone above ground.

Mat Honan

[jarrettfuller]

I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full of subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that.

Mat Honan, On Death and iPods

Part of me still misses my iPod's click wheel, too.

[inqk]

I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full of subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that.

Mat Honan

[rodbegbie]

The other reporters came back with those little white MP3 players, and big boxes of compact discs. See, Apple pre-loaded the music players—the iPods, but you knew I was talking about iPods—with music from Real Bands. But they couldn’t legally give out the iPods with MP3s unless they also purchased a copy of every CD. So everyone got two copies of each album: one on the iPod, the other on a piece of plastic. Nobody who went to the event kept the CDs, they just piled them up on a table at the office. I still have one, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends, because, while Apple design may be the coolest thing around, the company has always, always had shitty taste in music. (See also: U2.)

On Death and iPods: A Requiem | WIRED

[rtgonzalez]

A Dirge For The iPod Classic, October 23, 2001 – September 9, 2014

An excerpt from Mat Honan’s surprisingly affecting essay on the quiet death of the iPod Classic, which was discontinued Tuesday amidst Apple's iPhone 6 and Watch announcements.

In all likelihood we’re not just seeing the death of the iPod Classic, but the death of the dedicated portable music player. Now it’s all phones and apps. Everything is a camera. The single-use device is gone—and with it, the very notion of cool that it once carried. The iPhone is about as subversive as a bag of potato chips, and music doesn’t define anyone anymore…

I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. 

Read the rest at Wired.

[macaroniio]

"I liked everything I saw on Facebook". So what?

This article from Mat Honan at Wired has been showing up in a lot of blogs over the past few days.

If you haven't read it, the story is that the author likes everything on Facebook that he sees. Absolutely everything. As a result, the content of his news feed changes based on the likes. 

 My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. 

I hadn't realised that the Facebook news feed was affected by likes but it should've been obvious had I thought about it. In a way I'm surprised by the size of the effect, but I'm also surprised by the spread of such a non-story. This is a feature article based on a minor observation.

[transpondster]

(via I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here’s What It Did to Me | Gadget Lab | WIRED)

There’s this great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen before: “I think everybody should like everybody.” You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica. But the full quote, taken from a 1963 interview in Art News, is a great description of how we interact on social media today.

Warhol: Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It’s happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it’s working without trying, why can’t it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.

Art News: Is that what Pop Art is all about?

Warhol: Yes. It’s liking things.

Art News: And liking things is like being a machine?

Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.

'Liking' is an economic act. I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I liked—even if I hated it. I decided to embark on a campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I know this sounds like a stunt (and it was) but it was also genuinely just an open-ended experiment. I wasn’t sure how long I’d keep it up (48 hours was all I could stand) or what I’d learn (possibly nothing.) 

Great post about Facebook's dumb newsfeed algorithms. And by 'dumb', I just mean they do exactly what FB wants them to do, which is nothing for users of FB. For 48 hours, Mat Honan liked everything in his FB newsfeed, and he documented how Facebook modified his feed as a result.