I’ve stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse other platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on IG (friends only) and here. What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life—I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great. This is how I approach learning and communicating online.
While I’m cleaning up the cruft around my social presence, I’m finding more references to the heyday of blogging that explain how people organized online (Web 1.0) before the era of platforms (Web 2.0). One is this interview with Jill Filipovic, my one-time co-blogger and comrade at Feministe, with the folks at LGM who interviewed me on the subject a few years ago. Jill and I differed (and still do) on the meat of many issues, but have a lot of our thinking in common about how to handle disagreement and advance our ideas in common (and risky!
I met a friend for dinner, we had a time, and as she left she mentioned her long-time book club and how much everyone hated their latest read. What was it? I asked. She said, “Have you heard of ‘The Heart in Winter’?” 😭
Yet another playlist added to my playlists page.
Why emphasis on literacy, writing, reading and the canon is always politically prescient. Also why the cyborg’s mark remains one of my favorite metaphors.
There are certain pieces of writing I return to when thinking about our relationship with technology. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” published in 1985, is one of them. Despite being nearly forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technology’s role in our lives. Haraway used the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, as a metaphor for understanding identity in an increasingly technological and scientific world.
I miss Twitter because I’m full of big opinions and inappropriate one-liners. Anyway, here’s an analysis from WIRED on the implications of this month’s AWS outage.
Very much enjoying the Netflix series “Dark Winds,” based on the series of novels by Tony Hillerman. Not only does the storytelling slap, but it’s visually beautiful, with sweeping Southwest vistas and a fleet of classic vehicles that look so good in widescreen.
Wisconsin Watch profiled the Pulaski News, the newspaper of record in a ~3500 person village in northeast Wisconsin, run by high school students.
France is taking the “not now, sweetie, mommy is cyberbullying the mayor” meme to new legal arenas.
On prompt injections: Because AI chatbots are trained to be helpful and to understand context, jailbreakers are able to engineer scenarios where the AI believes ignoring its usual ethical guidelines is appropriate. Is it currently possible to safeguard LLMs from injection attacks at scale?
What made blogging different? Reflections on 25 years of digital media.
Out: SEO; In: GEO.
“LOLgislation,” or how memes become policy, and posting becomes praxis.
For many years, “shitposting” has been a staple of internet culture in which individuals riff on the moment using nonsense and irony, derailing threads for fun. In today’s influencer-driven attention economy, however, shitposting as a practice is now a meaningful comms and engagement strategy.
Purdue Exponent students distributed 3,000 copies of a special “solidarity edition” newspaper in Bloomington after IU spanked their student paper for insubordinance, ending the IDS print edition and firing their director. The media landscape in Indiana is bleak, generally, after years of disinvestment, so student reporters fill a social and political gap that the free market left behind. Given those conditions, the wider community depends on student media, much like public radio, to fill the information gaps.
A difficult number for so many reasons.
The next big trend in AI that I’m watching is platform integration. First company to produce the interoperability required for a united platform experience wins.
RIP D’Angelo. And a good occasion to reread this excellent 2012 profile discussing fame, religion, and how his status as a sex symbol in his youth negatively impacted D’Angelo’s self-esteem - and ultimately his career.
What happens to college towns after they’re hit by the so-called enrollment cliff?