A Facebook group started in Moscow now has tens of thousands of members worldwide, making art of the mundanities of lockdown. “They have been posting their work at a clip of more than 1,000 items a day, each time attaching their own photo alongside an image of the original art. They have corralled family members, … Continue reading “The Best Art Parodies Seem To Have Started In Russia, And Now They’re Everywhere”
“Less than a month after canceling its spring season because of the coronavirus pandemic, New York City Ballet is back with a six-week slate of online programming. The company announced on Monday that it would broadcast full ballets and excerpts twice a week, from Tuesday through May 29, for free on its YouTube channel, Facebook … Continue reading “New York City Ballet Announces A Virtual Spring Season”
As they fight viral virus misinformation, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others are making some choices that, while they may be good for public health in the short term, have some First Amendment consequences. – The Atlantic
Normally, Josh Kantor is in a perch at Boston’s venerable baseball park, churning out tunes as the home team’s official organist. In late March, with the season put on pause due to coronavirus concerns, he decided he would try a single video stream from behind his Yamaha Electone and leave it at that. But the … Continue reading “Fenway Park’s Organist Is Playing The Games Even Though Baseball Has Been Canceled”
And, turns out, it was. This is why New York just banned it as a tool for teachers: “Zoom contains a number of critical privacy and security flaws, as educators have been learning the hard way. Anyone with a Zoom meeting link can ‘Zoombom’ attendees and broadcast inappropriate content, including pornography, depending on settings established … Continue reading “Zoom Seemed Too Good To Be True”
The group is called Huqqullaaqatigiit, and the drum dancers have been getting together every week for more than a decade to preserve language, music, and the words of elders in the community. Last week, they decided to try it all over Facebook Live. – CBC
It would be easy to dismiss the rise of “social distance socializing” as a product of pure necessity, a stopgap until we are, hopefully, able to safely congregate in person again. But these online gatherings are the culmination of a much broader cultural shift: the revelation that so much of our lives is already lived … Continue reading “Awareness: Our Digital Selves Are Our Real Selves”
Venetians are posting photos to the Facebook group Venezia Pulita (Clean Venice), saying that they’ve never seen the water in the canals so clear. It’s not that they’re suddenly far less polluted than before, says the mayor’s office: the lack of boat traffic means that no sediment is getting stirred up from the bottom. – … Continue reading “An Upside Of Italy’s Lockdown: You Can Now See Fish And Waterfowl In Venice’s Canals”
As much as it sounds like something out of Isaac Asimov, we have to say it: we can’t surrender our discernment to the computers. What we need now — what will make our social media feeds and our national discourse saner — is not better artificial intelligence but more actual intelligence. We don’t need better … Continue reading “How Dallas Opera Ran Afoul Of Social Media Algorithms”
It will be the job of Ofcom to “ensur[e] that firms such as Twitter and Facebook comply with a new legal ‘duty of care’ requiring them to protect their users from illegal material. … Under the government’s original proposals, outlined in last year’s online harms white paper, a website that does not fulfil that duty … Continue reading “UK’s Broadcasting Authority Gets Responsibility For Policing Web And Social Media”
