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How Twitter Changed Megan Phelps-Roper

The New Yorker has a really good article about Megan Phelps-Roper’s experience on Twitter. Phelps-Roper is a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church, the church famous for picketing the funerals of gay men who died of AIDS and soldiers killed in the Middle East. Initially joining Twitter to spread the church’s message, over time it became a place for her to have discussions with people that lead to her questioning her ideas, as well as those of the church, leading to her leaving the church and the neighborhood the church members live in.

Filtering Your Ex

Facebook is currently testing ways to let people manage how people they interact with their former partners on Facebook. People who change their relationship stats to single after being in a relationship, will be prompted to try the new tools.

The beginning of the filtering process.

The options include seeing less of a persons name and profile picture around Facebook, hiding their posts from the news feed, and being able to hide your activity from your former partner.

(Via FB Newsroom)

An Emoji Is The Word of The Year

Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year is: 😂(the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji). This is the first time that a non-word has been named word of the year.

An announcement from Oxford Dictionaries stated “[Face with Tears of Joy] was chosen as the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood and preoccupations of 2015.”

Through a partnership with SwiftKey, they were able to determine that 😂was the most frequently used emoji in 2015, making up 14% of emojis used in the US, up from 9% in 2014.

Amazon Opens Physical Bookstore

Amazon is opening a physical bookstore. The store is heavily connected to the site, using all of the sites data as the basis for decisions on what to stock, what to promote, etc. They’re even including customer reviews and ratings from the site into displays.

A display of "Highly Rated" books.

A customer review of a book.

Probably the most interesting thing that the stores are doing is displaying the books with the cover, rather than the spine, showing, perhaps intended to mirror the experience of browsing books on their site.

(Via The Verge)

What Shape Is The Internet

Noah Veltman’s project ‘What Shape Is The Internet’ collects and displays the way that the Internet is visualized in patent drawings. The website contains a nice collection, with everything from a cloud to a net, and all kinds of amorphous blob type shapes.

What Ashley Madison PW Say About Its Users

CynoSure Prime, a password research collective, has studied the passwords leaked in the Ashley Madison hacks. Aside from the obvious, like the most popular passwords being ‘123456′ and ‘password’, they uncovered that some of the passwords spoke to the mindset of the users on the site.

“With entries including goodguydoingthewrongthing, ishouldnotbedoingthis, thisiswrong, and whatthehellamidoing, the list suggests some of the people felt guilty about setting up accounts on the site, or at least feigned feeling guilty.”

Their blog post includes passwords organized into categories like ‘Those that are having doubts about using the site’ and ‘Those that are in denial’.

(Via Ars Technica)

MoMA’s Digital Archive

The MoMA recently posted about their system for archiving digital works of art. It’s made of three parts: the packager, the warehouse, and the indexer.

Often times when you think about digital content, you think about the computers and software required to open the files and bring the content to life. There have been stories in the past of early works of computer art being lost because there was no way to get the information off the tape they were contained in.

To avoid that, The MoMA uses an open source archiving software called Archivematica (part 1). This software creates an obsolescence-proof file that is packaged along with the original.

MoMA's data center

The second part is the warehouse, a large cluster of hard drives that contain all of the files. Currently, they have around 80 terabytes of data stored, but project that they will have as much as 1.2 petabytes (1.2 million gigabytes) by 2025.

(Read more on Inside/Out)

Sharing Food With Strangers

Live streaming extravagant dinners in Korea, called mukbang, has grown extremely popular this year. At night, as many as 45,000 people will sit at their computer and watch mukbang stars consume anything from 2 XL pizzas, to a punch bowl full of ramen.

The mukbang star Aebong-ee

These stars surround their laptops with dishes of food and chat in real time with hundreds of people at a time. The viewers watching through AfreecaTV often times donate to the eaters, whom can make over $200 in the first hour.

You can watch recordings of the videos on Aebong-ee's YouTube Channel.

(Via NPR)

Seeing Networks

Seeing Networks is an ongoing project from author and artist Ingrid Burrington that explores the infrastructure of the Internet in New York City. The culmination of this research is Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide, a small guide book that includes illustrations and descriptions of the various physical manifestations of the Internet present in the city.

Cover of the booklet

Section on street markings

Section on street markings (cont.)

The illustrations and descriptions cover everything from the different manhole covers, to the meanings behind the orange markings on the streets, to where to find carrier hotels across the city. You can support the project by pre-ordering the book here.

(Via Hyperallergic)

Glowing Rectangles

The Atlantic Photo has posted a collection of photos from stories that capture the changing relationship between people and their phones, aiming to expose a world "transfixed by screens".

Pope Francis being photographed on his way into the Vatican

Protestors in Hong Kong

Mobile devices recovered from the rubble of the World Trade Center

There are a lot more, check them out on The Atlantic Photo site.

Presidential Portrait in 3D

Obama is the first president to have a high resolution 3D portrait taken. The portrait was taken by Smithsonian Digitization. The Telegraph posted a video documenting the process and setup used in capturing the portrait.

The video is pretty short and available to watch on their site.

(Via The Telegraph)

Is Santa Real?

Kids don't have to ask their parents anymore, they can just Google it.

“And kids are definitely Googling it. A survey from the UK found that 54 percent of children go to Google or another search engine first when they have a question, compared to 26 percent of respondents who said they ask their parents first when they have a query.”

(Via Motherboard)

Internet Ugly

Nick Douglas published a piece in the most recent issue of the Journal of Visual Culture about what he calls “Internet ugly”. He argues that the aesthetics of memes and Internet jokes are intentionally ugly, celebrating the amateur, reflecting the crude nature of the tools used to generate the forms (often times a computer mouse and Microsoft Paint).

“As opposed to media like TV or print, where the amateurish is marginalized and audience attention centers on mainstream blockbusters, the Internet is built to give outsized attention to the amateurish, the accidental, and the surprise hit.”

Journal of Visual Culture, December 2014

The December 2014 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture is dedicated to memes. You can check out other articles on the journal’s site.

(Via The Atlantic)

URL == IRL

An article from The Atlantic talks about how services like Uber helped 2014 become the year where the line between the Internet and the real world blurred and became indistinguishable.

From the article:

“Uber's simple brilliance, Atlantic contributing editor Alexis Madrigal once pointed out, can be explained like this: You touch a button on your phone and something happens in the world. Or, as venture capitalist and early Uber userJon Callaghan wrote in 2010, "what started as a one button push ended up with me zooming across time and space merely 3 minutes later.”

“Consider this message, from America Online to its users in 1996: ‘When you first get online, you don't quite know how it will intersect with your life. How many times will you log in, and how much time will you spend? What will you do once you're there?’”

(Via The Atlantic)

Joining The Network

A Professor named Daniele Trinchero from Polytechnic University of Turin has helped bring wireless Internet to the village of Verrua Savoia in Italy. In the process, he created a nonprofit organization who will help bring the Internet to villages in Italy, one of the least connected countries in Europe (a third of Italians have never used the Internet according to the article).

Internet network infrastructure in Verrua Savoia

“Over eight years, he and his team have built a radio link with parts scavenged from computers and provided City Hall with several routers to distribute the Internet to five access points. The access points, perched on peaks, direct the signal to homes with cheap receivers on their roofs or balconies.”

(Via New York Times)

Secret Life of Passwords

NYTimes Magazine published an article about passwords and what they say about their owners. Interesting to think about the words and phrases we create and use as passwords, how we remember them, and the meaning behind them.

From the article:

“I discovered, for example, that my father — a recently retired federal judge and generally a pretty serious guy — derived his passwords from a closeted love for goofy, novelty songs from the late ’50s and early ’60s (“The Purple People Eater,” “Monster Mash”).”

“Keepsake passwords, he suggested, ritualize a daily encounter with personal memories that often have no place else to be recalled. We engage with them more frequently and more actively than we do, say, with the framed photo on our desk.”

(Read full article)

A Box of Emails

I've long been a fan of Richard Banks and his work at Microsoft Research around the theme of "the future of looking back". They've looked at different digital devices that might collect and archive things like tweets, photos posted online, etc. Maybe the future of looking back will be as easy as buying your parents emails from Google. Matt Novak posed the question of whether Google will sell all your emails to your grandchildren in a recent blog post where he looks at the implications of the Sony hack and what it means for history and transparency.

From the post:

“Whether it's governments or private corporations, they will all have an enormous amount of your information. So what's to stop Facebook from selling your data to your kids and grandkids?”

(Read full post)

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