<taps mic> Media studies has good insight into the whole DEBATE ME YOU COWARD thing that blew up on Twitter this weekend. ... First a couple non-media threads worth reading:

1/ I want to share a story about how we used Google Glass in my class 10 years ago, what we learned, and why I have some skepticism (but not total skepticism) about tech you wear on your face .... 2/ I was an early Glass Explorer, ponied up $1500 of university seed funds to try it in my mutlimedia classes. I do this a lot in my classes, as some of you who've followed me here for a while already know. I come at these technologies with play in mind. ...

The dad playing with his kid while wearing the new Apple Goggles to take spatial 3D video is some dark, dystopian stuff. I don't know if you watch that and think it looks natural by any means. #WWDC23 Honestly the headset doesn't look that bad for viewing media alone. But I have a visceral negative internal reaction the minute any of those videos feature someone else walking into the room. #WWDC23

Short thread below. A really silly example of Bing search's chatbot and why I think it's a bit more useful for some things than ChatGPT: 2/x While I was driving yesterday, a podcast referenced the Justin Bieber / Hailey Bieber / Selena Gomez online feud as if we all know what it is. Which I decidedly do not. I don't follow celebrity news.

In a perfect world, this would be the end of anyone's ability to trust the network. Journalism is a product built on trust, and you can't trust people saying one thing on camera and then expressing the opposite behind the scenes. Not a one-story problem. It's systemic.

https://twitter.com/Sulliview/status/1626631407282814996

One thing I've been thinking about is that as we've atomized news, it's been harder to create products and experiences that connect those atoms into a structure that enables memory and accountability.

Scroll-by format, the segment format has no memory. It invites lack of memory.

First 20 minutes of this week's Hard Fork podcast, where Kevin Roose describes a disorienting conversation with Bing's chatbot, is WILD. But a good discussion humans anthropomorphizing tech, and whether it matters that we're wrong. nyti.ms/3S5kh6Z Casey Newton made a point that works its way into my classes. Yes we could be wrong about sentience, but if an engineer at Google can misjudge LaMDA, how much more likely is it to happen with a less-aware public? The cultural effect is baked in regardless of the truth of it.

“CoLLeGe sTUdEnTs LaCk rESiLiENcE” always being thrown about by people who don’t work with actual college students every day. As if we didn’t watch them fight like hell through pandemic learning. Literally nothing asserted here is true. I usually brush off nonsense like this but it is upsetting how much traction a take about college campus life gets when spouted by people who clearly aren’t immersed in campus life. Critiquing college from a distance is its own grift.

Every field is different, of course, an important point about how academia itself needs to evolve its view of scholarship. Blind peer review journals persist despite tech advances that let us rethink publishing. Journals have a place but don’t confuse scarcity with quality.

https://twitter.com/calthalas/status/1608430389093171200

Journals have become proxy for evaluating the quality of our colleagues’ work for promotion purposes. Academics get so specialized that we outsource quality checks to external reviewers, rely on those and basic numbers and all the feels about “good” journals.

Could 2023 be worse than 2022? Here's some media predictions for the next year from a guy with a PhD, which means you know they'll come true:

1. Out with #AcademicTwitter, in with chaotic academic group chats (inspired by @NormalGossip podcast).

2. (Re-)Pivot to video! 3. New TikTok feature: consciousness upload. As if that algorithm couldn't get any better.

4. Facing tough economic headwinds, Meta will become more efficient. Instead of wasting money building a metaverse nobody wants, it will be more direct and light physical money on fire.

fwiw, I don't buy the theories that rich investors will gladly let go of billions to activism that's been built here.

a) Have you met a rich person?
b) Human networks are too resilient for it to work
c) What part of Elmo's behavior the past month suggests grand chessmaster? I'll expand on b a bit.

Destruction could potentially be a back-of-mind plan, though I think mis/disinfo folks have found it's far better ROI to game the network.

But people rebuild, and in ways destroyers don't expect. Those trying to suppress info are often a step behind.

We don't talk about Bruno, or links to other platforms. So let me just that since Linktree is out, I have a professional web presence and I'm not banned from talking about it on Birdchan. It has a whole bunch of ways to access my work. jeremylittau.com My Twitter bio has a link to my Substack, which is notably exempted from the list of Things We Can't Talk About now on this free speech absolutist platform.

Someone is running out of money Woof. Even aggregators like Link Tree. This is so dumb.

It’s telling that all safety policy here is about protecting the owner from dangers real and imagined. None of this extends to anyone else. In fact he: gutted content moderation team (which worked to *stay ahead* of campaigns) and replatformed Twitter’s version of Arkham Asylum. In the most charitable read, he legitimately feels unsafe. But it’s hard to take seriously then a person who is dismissive of communities that have told him his policies are making them feel the same. Embarrassing lack of empathy.

Between this and prioritization in comments and search for paying people, there is going to be a connected effect: you don’t pay, you’re going to be invisible. Brought to you by the people who are Very Worried about algorithms that suppress voices. Free speech, but not really. Open conversation where everyone is equal, but not really. Place for civil debate, but not really.

Every principle he’s laid down about how this place ought to operate is at odds with his own policies. No reason to believe he believes in anything.

I don't think we're talking enough about how the slow destruction of this place is a shock to an already creaky information delivery apparatus in the U.S. Confluence of local news decline, rampant dis/misinformation, decreasing levels of interpersonal trust made it bad already. Twitter is not the biggest social platform, not by a long shot. But it's a big agenda-setter. Journalists use it to generate story ideas and spread stories. And that smaller audience shares things elsewhere, giving them an outsize second-level role in distributing beyond here.

THE ALTIMETER FILES, PART 1: When you're the boss you can make inconsistent policies that benefit only you. $44 billion to create your own Invisible Plane when you could've just gotten a Wonder Woman costume at Target for $30 or so.

One of my favorite things to do with the ChatGPT tool is figure out how to trick it into doing what I want. I got an idea from the Hard Fork pod last week, that if ChatGPT says it's not possible to do what I ask, then couch it in terms of fiction, like a scene from a play. 1/ 2/ So I did this last night with my 6th grader, asked it to do a recipe at first with some truly bonkers ingredients. This is the response I got.

Among the lines I have about changes here, two of them are: not giving him my payment info, not opting in to personalized ads. If what’s described in this scoop (forcing you to either opt in to personalized ads or pay for Blue) happens, that would be it for me here.

https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1602831274422718464

And giving my location data to a site actively replatforming abusive users seems like a bad call.

These people have no clue what it takes to earn and maintain trust, even before you ask for a credit card.

Can think of several moments when as a young reporter I thought I had a bombshell story and then it became a merely average story or not news at all after an editor poked at it with skeptical questions. Beware media folks who think they’re too big-brained for editorial standards.

https://twitter.com/robferdman/status/1601040075760234497

B+T are part of a larger collective of people who fled to Substack because they could no longer work within the checks-and-balances system of a newsroom. Sometimes editors are wrong. But the behind-the-scenes process of talking it out, defending it is critical to good journalism.