Tag: Atlantic

Bookmarked Twitter Should Eliminate the Retweet by Taylor Lorenz (The Atlantic)

The feature derails healthy conversation and preys on users’ worst instincts.

Taylor Lorenz discusses the retweet functionality in Twitter and what it might mean to get rid of it. A number of add-ons and extensions are shared for modifying your timeline. Personally, I rarely retweet these days. I usually ‘like’ as a sign to the author or reply. It is also a reminder that technology never stops changing and evolving.
Bookmarked Raised by YouTube by Alexis C. Madrigal (The Atlantic)

Maybe better or more refined solutions exist, but if the history of children’s television teaches us anything, it’s that the market alone will not generate the best outcomes for kids. Nor is the United States government likely to demand change, at least not without prompting. Heroes will have to emerge to push for change in the new YouTube’d world, just as they did in the early days of broadcast children’s TV. And not all of those heroes will come from the Western world. They’ll come from all over the globe, maybe even Chennai.

Alexis Madrigal looks at the rise of YouTube and its impact on children. She focuses on Chu Chu TV and how it came to be. Madrigal also makes an attempt to place YouTube on a longer timeline associated with children’s media.
Bookmarked The Dangers of Distracted Parenting by Erika Christakis (The Atlantic)

When it comes to children’s development, parents should worry less about kids’ screen time—and more about their own.

Erika Christakis discusses the challenges of parenting in a digital age. This all comes down to distractions and as I have touched on before, this is not always digital. I really like danah boyd’s strategy for dealing with this, that is to say why you are using a device. This openness offers a useful point of reflection. I think that the conclusion to this article says it all though:

Parents should give themselves permission to back off from the suffocating pressure to be all things to all people. Put your kid in a playpen, already! Ditch that soccer-game appearance if you feel like it. Your kid will be fine. But when you are with your child, put down your damned phone.

via Doug Belshaw

Bookmarked Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read (The Atlantic)

To me, it doesn’t seem like narcissism to remember life’s seasons by the art that filled them—the spring of romance novels, the winter of true crime. But it’s true enough that if you consume culture in the hopes of building a mental library that can be referred to at any time, you’re likely to be disappointed.

Books, shows, movies, and songs aren’t files we upload to our brains—they’re part of the tapestry of life, woven in with everything else. From a distance, it may become harder to see a single thread clearly, but it’s still in there.

Julie Beck discusses reading and suggests that unless we do something with it within 24-hours then it often disappears. Associated with this, she recommends reading more slowly if we are to take them in. This builds on Ryan Halliday’s point to do something with what you read. I am also left wondering about the connections with digital literacies to support this.
Bookmarked The Social-Media Star and the Suicide (The Atlantic)

There were no gatekeepers to stand in his way, and YouTube itself only acted after the video became news. In every step but the filming of the dead body, this is not the system breaking, but the system functioning as intended. And as with the recent discovery of widespread exploitation on “child-safe” parts of YouTube, it points to a dark tendency in today’s engagement-optimized web. As online platforms have pursued engagement to the detriment of everything else, they have come to favor content that dehumanizes us. Meanwhile, the same platforms dominate more and more of teen culture.

Robinson Meyer discusses the situation in which Logan Paul posted a corpse on YouTube. The post provides some wider context associated with the Paul brothers and the dehumanised web that they are a part of.