16 Articles about Social Media & AI

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13 Articles about Social Media & AI

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Sharing photos may subtly change how we remember

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When we’re hunting for the perfect Instagram shot, we’re not listening, we’re not smelling, we’re not always paying attention to the beautiful, complex minutiae that make up the moment.  

Powerful experiences in the real world are immersive and often engage all the senses. On your last vacation, can you remember what the wind felt like on your back? Do you remember what was going on internally: Were you thrilled, excited, or scared? When you look back on the Instagram photos from the trip, will you remember what a dinner tasted like, or just that it was pretty?  

Brian Resnick writing in Vox

16 Articles about Social Media & AI

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Getting the Most out of Your Memories

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The principle for having something be memorable is to attend to what’s distinctive about it. The more you can attend to what is distinctive and be mindful of it, the more vivid the memory.

We’re constantly taking pictures and then throwing them on social media. But this is the ultimate form of electronic amnesia. You’re cheating your experiencing self because you don’t connect with what’s happening, and you’re cheating your remembering self because you’ve deprived yourself of a great memory. 

So instead of taking pictures of every moment of your vacation, pay attention to what makes a particular moment distinctive. Ask yourself: What is going to be most memorable in each picture I take? How can I compose the picture to focus on the vivid details that will bring me back to this time and place?  That’s when pictures become valuable — when they force you to pay attention to the things that are important to you in that moment.

Neuroscientist Charan Ranganath quoted in Big Think

Social media is Evolving

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As we hit the 20-year anniversary of Facebook, we’re finding that social media usage is changing in a fundamental way. The platforms are evolving:

 from displaying personal information publicly (“Here’s where I went on vacation”; “This is the food I ate at a fancy restaurant.”)

to a place to watch and listen to curated content (often resembling TV and streaming in short form)

Curated & Closed

Instead of status updates, there are algorithmically curated videos. Many of the users who were creating and posting are now just consuming—at least, in the public sphere. This is particularly pronounced among first-gen social media users, that is, millennials between the ages of 27 and 42. This is why Instagram has seem the most growth in the last five years in DMs and stories limited to friends. The type of content they used to share in public posting is moving into private messaging and closed groups.

The advantage of closed groups is:

  • Greater privacy

  • Less sensationalism

  • Improved mental health of users

The downside of closed groups includes:

  • The lack of moderation

  • The spread of misinformation

  • The spread of new ideas suffers

  •  The support of news outlets weakens   

Social media is becoming less social. There is less emphasis on connections and greater focus on individual consumption of media produced by content creators. This focus toward engagement amplifies extreme content, which (among other things) hinders the sharing of actual news content and accurate information.

 Read more:

The end of the social network – The Economist

People are posting a lot less on public social media – Fortune

First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go – Wired

Why the Internet isn’t Fun Anymore – The New Yorker

11 Newer Social Media Networks of Note

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Artifact - discuss news stories.

BeReal - photo-sharing app.

Bluesky - a decentralized Twitter alternative (Android and invite only for now)

Discord - for playing video games with fellow gamers.

Gobo - switch between networks in the app, developed by the MIT Media Lab (May 2023).

Letterboxd - an app for film enthusiasts to share their opinions.

Mastodon - a Twitter clone sliced into communities.

Minus - users make only 100 posts on their timeline for life.

Nextdoor - for neighbors to talk about crime & potholes.

Nostr - focused on giving people content control and the communities they engage with.

Truth Social - a social network for conservatives started by Trump.

 

Learning to do Nothing

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In a 2014 study, researchers left people in a room alone for six to 15 minutes with nothing to do and found that the participants turned to almost any available activity, including administering painful electric shocks to themselves. Even pain—even, gasp, Twitter—is better than being alone with your thoughts. Despite the difficulties, learning to do nothing is good for us. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Teens & Social Media

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Teenagers are using TikTok (67%), Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%) more than other social media platforms to stay in touch with one another, according to the Pew Research Center. YouTube (95%) is their destination site for consuming media. Meanwhile, Facebook has lost most of its teen audience (from 71% in 2014 to 32%). The survey did not include chat and audio app Discord.

About a third of teens (36%) say they spend too much time on social media. Black teens were more likely to use TikTok while Hispanic teens were more likely than other groups to use WhatsApp. Read the details of the survey here and you’ll find a Washington Post article on the findings here.

How Science Fuels a Culture of Misinformation

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Covid-19 hasn’t been just a viral pandemic, but also a pandemic of disinformation—what the World Health Organization calls an “infodemic.” Many scientists blame social media for the proliferation of Covid-related falsehoods, from the suggestion that Covid could be treated by drinking disinfectants to the insistence that masks don’t help prevent transmission. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and other platforms have indeed propagated dangerous misinformation. However, social media is a symptom of the problem more than the cause. Misinformation and disinformation often start with scientists themselves.

Joelle Renstrom writing in OpenMind

Local TV and Radio News Survey 2022

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Takeaways from The Radio Television Digital News Association’s annual survey of local TV and radio:

Programming

  • A new record of 1,116 TV stations aired local news—up 18 from last year’s all-time high.

Budgets

  • Just 16.3% of TV stations report budget increases while 29.3% report experiencing budget cuts.

  • Among TV news directors who do know their department’s profitability, 75.9% report a profit.

  • The percentage of radio news managers reporting their budgets decreased doubled to 18.2% over the previous year.

Salaries

  • Despite pandemic-related pay cuts, local television news salaries, on average, increased by 3.5%, or 2.1% after accounting for inflation.

  • TV salaries in markets 101-150 faired the best, with salaries for most positions increasing while in the top 25 markets, salaries for most positions fell.

  • Average and median starting TV news salaries both rose during 2021 to the highest staring salaries in the survey’s history.

Staffing

  • Full-time newsroom staffing fell 6.3% in 2021.

  • Digital staffing, on average, was up slightly, along with the roles of photographer, producer, editor and social media producer/editor.

  • Three times as many commercial radio news departments cut staff as added. Public radio stations, on the other hand, were four times more likely than commercial stations to grow.

Solo Journalists

  • The average newsroom has fewer solo journalists than last year while smaller markets overwhelmingly rely on MMJs, and mid-markets increasingly do, but few stations large market stations send reporters out alone.

  • MMJs and producers remain most in demand, representing about three-quarters of new TV news hires.

Innovations

  • More local TV newsrooms report producing virtual town halls, specials and longer-form or digital-exclusive content.

Social Media

  • Facebook is the most popular social media platform for local TV and radio news, with 94% of radio newsrooms and 100% of TV newsrooms reporting they used it.

  • Instagram is used by nearly every TV station and a third of radio newsrooms.

  • Twitter use among local news has been declining for several years, with most TV newsrooms using the platform, but less frequently.

Podcasts

  • The typical station, measured by median, has no podcasts and the average per station is less than one half.

  • The typical radio news department reporting zero podcasts.

Danger

  • 1 in 5 television news directors reported attacks on employees.

  • More than half of attacks occurred during coverage of civil unrest, protests, marches/rallies or riots

The Full Report

19 Articles about Getting the Most out of LinkedIn

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The algorithmic feedback loop

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Users keep encountering similar content because the algorithms keep recommending it to us. As this feedback loop continues, no new information is added; the algorithm is designed to recommend content that affirms what it construes as your taste.

Reduced to component parts, culture can now be recombined and optimized to drive user engagement. This threatens to starve culture of the resources to generate new ideas, new possibilities. 

If you want to freeze culture, the first step is to reduce it to data. And if you want to maintain the frozen status quo, algorithms trained on people’s past behaviors and tastes would be the best tools.

The goal of a recommendation algorithm isn’t to surprise or shock but to affirm. The process looks a lot like prediction, but it’s merely repetition. The result is more of the same: a present that looks like the past and a future that isn’t one. 

Grafton Tanner, writing in Real Life Magazine

New Adobe tool for Content Creators

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Adobe express logo

Adobe has released a single template-focused app called Creative Cloud Express (replacing Adobe Spark) that combines some of the best features from the Creative Cloud Suite for mobile and web. Quickly create everything from social media posts to promotional posters and videos with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface. Drag all sorts of elements into your composition from text, icons, shapes, free photos and fonts, music and other design elements. Assets from Photoshop and Illustrator can be utilized as well. Convert videos to GIFs and documents to PDFs. Great for non-professionals with little video editing experience. However, if you’re a pro, this is not a full-featured video editor.  

Creative Cloud Express includes premium features from: 

  • Adobe Premiere Rush — Shoot, edit, and share videos on mobile and desktop. 
  • Adobe Photoshop Express — Edit and retouch images, create collages, and combine photos. 
  • Adobe Spark Video — Quickly create stunning video slideshows. 
  • Adobe Spark Page — Turn words and images into beautiful web pages.

More on the features here.

Teaching resources from Adobe for Educators here.

While Express is already included in many Creative Cloud subscriptions, there is a free version available or get more templates, photos and fonts with a paid subscription for $9.99 a month (or $99.99 a year) here. Better yet, there is a three-month free trial here. More info on the plans here.

More Tech Tools

Are we immune to manipulation?

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We like to think of ourselves as independently minded and immune to manipulation, and yet imagine others — particularly those of a different political persuasion — as being fantastically gullible. The reality is probably something in between. 

We do know that the posts we see on Facebook have the power to alter our emotions. A controversial experiment run by Facebook employees in 2013 manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users without their knowledge (or consent) in an attempt to control their emotions and influence their moods. The experimenters suppressed any friends’ posts that contained positive words, and then did the same with those containing negative words, and watched to see how the unsuspecting subjects would react in each case. Users who saw less negative content in their feeds went on to post more positive stuff themselves. Meanwhile, those who had positive posts hidden from their timeline went on to use more negative words themselves. Conclusive: we may think we’re immune to emotional manipulation, but we’re probably not.  

Hannah Fry, Hello World

The Social Media Distraction

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I think the reason that we seek distraction (from social media) is that working on stuff that we care about is often scary. It brings us into contact with all the ways in which we’re limited—our talents might not be up to what we’re trying to do, and we can’t control how things will unfold. If you’re writing a difficult article, you don’t get to know in advance that it’s going to come out well, which can make you feel constrained and imprisoned by reality. Meanwhile, the internet feels limitless, like you’re an all-powerful consciousness surfing the unlimited waves of the web and social media. It’s very relieving.

Oliver Burkeman quoted in The Atlantic

The dirt that splatters

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Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. 

Jonathan Franzen writing in the New York Times