It's a very odd feeling, having played a role in Web 1, 2, & 3, to be mentoring students who only know of those moments via third-party scholarship.
Much of that scholarship is very good. But it's all coalesced around received wisdom & fixed narratives, and those tend to leave out a lot of important details.
I'm always torn about whether and how much to use my own memory/experience of the events to add nuance, or to just let the official story be the official story.
The importance question is exactly what I'm asking.
Of course, all cultural distances are reduced in the rear-view mirror of history. Nobody knows or cares now about mods vs. rockers, OS vs FS, East Coast rap vs West Coast rap, bop vs. swing, AOL vs. FidoNet... and maybe they shouldn't.
But having once known, and cared, it's hard not to add a little bit of context to discussions that treat the camps and concepts as interchangeable.
More than 50 scholars of communication and #journalism from top universities have signed a letter calling on NYT to address questions about a major investigative report that described a “pattern of gender-based violence” in Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel
"The letter follows months of criticism raised by outside critics as well as some NYT staffers about the credibility of its sourcing and the editorial process for the story"
Listened to The Daily yesterday, which featured Cade Metz's reporting that OpenAI and its competitors have scraped the entire English-language Internet as input for their LLMs and it's almost as if it should be a limit problem from a @stevenstrogatz's book. What happens to the sum of copyright infringement penalties as the number of infractions approaches infinity?
@josh@stevenstrogatz@communicationscholars How can you use the output of an LLM for something in your business and have any amount of confidence that you won't get sued by someone for copyright infringement?
"This article places noise and sound at the center of an inquiry into the environmental impact of military occupations... noise as a source of harm was both obvious to civilians in militarized zones and illegible as such to military and government officials"
Complaining about the noise the US #military makes on the #California coast reminded me of this article about, in essence, sonic occupation
This National Academies workshop on "Evolving Technological, Legal and Social Solutions to Counter Disinformation in Social Media" starts today at noon (US EDT) and will be streamed to the Web. I'll be participating and will present in a panel tomorrow on changing the incentive structures around the propagation of disinformation.
We had to sign Very Official Copyright releases on our multimedia materials, so I drew my own images to avoid any accidental infringement. Please enjoy my terrible artwork.
Call for papers about "AI and Resilience" for a special issue of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. This is an interdisciplinary call for a range of perspectives. Critical, humanistic, cultural, historical perspectives are all welcome => https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/62761/ai-and-resilience
I had a really fun conversation with @jesse and the hosts of KPCW's "Cool Science Radio" about our forthcoming book "The Secret Life of Data" from @themitpress. Check it out here:
The East Asia Center and Miller Center at U of Virginia are hiring a Global China Post-doctoral Research Associate.
This position is open to applicants from a range of backgrounds including global studies, history, media studies, politics, science and technology studies, and sociology. Language proficiency in Chinese is preferred.
Pleased to be taking part in this National Academies workshop on April 10–11th, organized by Joan Donovan and Saul Perlmutter: "Evolving Technological, Legal, and Social Solutions to Counter Disinformation in Social Media"
Deadline extended to 3 April! Submit to our pre-conference at the 2024 ECREA conference in Ljubljana. Together, we want to dive into victimhood identities and their mediated negotiations in the past, present, and future. More information here: https://affectemotionandmedia.wordpress.com/events/#Commodon#mediastudies