To corner the audio ad market, of course. But execs insist that the company is not going to be evil: “Having watched how companies like Facebook and Google built up the digital ad ecosystem, Spotify’s Jay Richman, who heads the company’s ads business and platform, says the streamer is determined not to focus on scale … Continue reading “Why Has Spotify Been Moving So Heavily Into Podcasts?”
“Joshua Hawkins said a man named “Nate” hired him last month to paint a mural on his building and offered Hawkins more than he was asking to do it. Hawkins said he met that man twice, first when the man dropped off paint and the first half of the payment, and again when the man … Continue reading “Man Posing As Building Owner Hires Artist To Paint Mural, Then Disappears”
The news came up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok; in text messages, surprised WhatsApp screenshots, and amused or horrified phone calls. But it wasn’t news at all. Spotify’s “Wrapped” function is actually a big ad for … Spotify, which “bet that its users, flattered by being designated top fans, would share their statuses on social … Continue reading “Spotify’s ‘Wrapped’ Function Is Actually About Grift”
The experience of some high-profile tech companies calls into question whether a diverse board leads to a more diverse workforce. Straight white men are a minority on the boards at Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google parent Alphabet. None of the four would have to make changes to comply with Nasdaq’s rule. But none has shown … Continue reading “NASDAQ Proposes Rule To Diversify Boards. Will It Accomplish Diversity?”
Nikil Saval — a Bernie Sanders–endorsed democratic socialist, former editor of the literary magazine n+1, New York Times contributor, author of Cubed: Secret History of the Workplace, and community organizer — is replacing Larry Farnese Jr. a Democrat who has been state senator since 2009. He is also the first Asian American to be elected … Continue reading “Architecture Critic Wins Pennsylvania State Senate Seat”
The comparison is more than metaphorical. It’s a framework for thinking about how public opinion needs to shift so that the true costs of misinformation can be measured and policy can be changed. – MIT Technology Review
Jill Lepore: “Things are briefly upended by new technologies before finding a new equilibrium. With social media, that equilibrium has not happened. The question is how do you repair the fabric of democracy when the technology is itself built to polarise us? It is like we have built a perfect trap for ourselves. That is … Continue reading “Why Do We Let Social Media Control Us?”
Ovenden notes that, in 2019, 18.1 million text messages were sent every minute, as well as 87,500 tweets. Wikipedia has five to six thousand hits per second. A California-based digital service, the Wayback Machine, has archived 441 billion websites. “Archiving the datasets created by the big tech companies, such as the advertisements on Facebook, the … Continue reading “Burning Knowledge – It’s Happened Before. In The Digital Age, Even More A Threat”
Two years ago ArtsEngaged created the Facebook group Become Indispensable as a mechanism for people interested in community engagement in the arts to learn and share. That group’s advisory board has had its first meeting, and here are some of the changes and ideas we discussed. – Doug Borwick
Zoom fatigue is the feeling of utter hopelessness after your ninth video call of the day, and experts say it’s brought on because the technology overtaxes your brain. Presented with a cropped, often blurry image of a human and a few milliseconds of lag throughout the conversation, your mind splits its attention between what people … Continue reading “What Next After Zoom Fatigue”
