The Social Dilemma: A Movie Review.

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Morgan Mussell

The Social Dilemma, released on Netflix on September 9, is a comprehensive evaluation of the dark side of social media, by some of the senior engineers who designed the underpinnings of these systems:

What is your history with social media?

I started this blog in the summer of 2010, after attending a seminar presented by the California Writer’s Club. I learned about “clickbait” from the blogger who led the session, who made his living managing eight blogs, and drew 50,000 – 80,000 hits a month. He used Twitter and Facebook to extend the reach of his blogs.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to hustle a profit from blogging, but I did take to social media to further publicize each post. For five years, I used it for little else.That changed in 2015, during the presidential election season and has only accelerated during our nation’s and the world’s accelerating disasters.

When I worked in the tech industry, we constantly had to think in terms of “cost vs. benefit.” By the start of this year, the benefit I received from social media was maybe ten percent – about the percentage of non-political and non-end-is-near posts my newsfeed provides. Continue reading →

Beware the Trolls

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Morgan Mussell

NOT THAT KIND OF TROLL
John Bauer, 1912 illustration, public domain

Social media algorithms effectively isolate readers of one type of political news from opposing views; if you follow Fox News, you won’t see MSNBC pop up and vice versa. At the same time, you can usually judge the importance of the “breaking news” of the day by the number of profane, violent, vitriolic comments that follow. I have received, if not death threats, at least death wishes, for comments on Facebook I can’t even remember, and I know I’m not alone in this. Does such overheated rhetoric reflect the national mood? I’ve come to think that in many cases, it does not, though some interests would have us believe it does.

On July 11, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, David Rothkopf, said, “Russia’s primary goal was not to get Trump elected. It was to weaken the United States” (emphasis added).

That’s worth pondering at length. It crystalized my sense that a significant part of the national tension over our “house divided” is a creation of social media, and much of it may derive from the focused efforts of foreign trolls.

On the evening of July 11, the PBS Newshour aired a report by Nick Schifrin, with the help of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Inside Russia’sPropaganda Machine. Schifrin reports that for the past two years, the Russian military has run online recruiting adds, offering soldiers a chance to “put down their guns and fight a cyber-war.”

Schifrin interviewed a former Russian troll, Marat Mindiyarov, outside of a large complex in St. Petersburg which Mindiyarov identified as the headquarters of this effort. He said he had “maybe 20, 30” online identities, but implied that some have hundreds.

At the end of May Newsweek reported that 900,000 blank twitter accounts had popped up as Trump followers that month. They were easy to spot – no photo, no byline, no tweet history. And no way for a casual viewer to determine their place of origin. I initially assumed they were created by Trump’s team. Now I have serious doubts.

Important stories on left leaning Facebook sites draw verbal conflict that is sometimes abusive enough to report. This morning I scrolled down the Fox News Facebook site, and noted similar trolling.

Again, I refer to Rothkopf’s piece, cited above. It’s very much worth considering that our external enemies no longer care if Trump stays or goes – as long as we as a nation stay angry and divided against each other, they have won…

Media musings

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Morgan Mussell

I find most alliterative titles, like “Media musings,” to be about 40% cute and 60% annoying, but in this case, it’s a good match for the headline that inspired this post: “Ellen’s Oscar ‘selfie’ a landmark media moment.”

“A what moment?” I mused. “A landmark media what?”

Because the media is falling over itself to celebrate Ellen’s tweet, and because nature abhors a vacuum, it has fallen to me to be the curmudgeonly voice of this “event.” One of the first things a curmudgeon does is reach for the dictionary. A “landmark event” is “an event, discovery, etc. considered as a high point or turning point in the history or development of something.”

At first I thought it must be the high point of product placement. The picture in question was taken with a Samsung phone, Samsung was a big Oscar sponsor, and the Academy Awards are the biggest post-Super Bowl marketing event. But that’s not really new news. Reading on, I realized the article referred to a landmark social media event. Since tweeting about TV isn’t new, an expert, in this case an Oscar co-producer, had to explain it to the likes of me:

“What it’s all about right now is creating a conversation, and social media allows for the conversation as it’s happening.”

Oh thanks, now I understand.

The dogs don’t like me being a curmudgeon, so while I was writing this post, Kit grabbed my (non-Samsung) phone and snapped a selfie, hoping to create a new conversation.

Kit snaps a selfie

“It’s all about what’s happening now,” she says, explaining why she wants to establish a social media presence.

So the price I pay for being a curmudgeon is having to ask all you loyal readers to give my dog a tweet (she accepts treats as well). After all, she is cuter than Ellen’s crew, and she hasn’t been real annoying since puppy days when she chewed up my wife’s phone. That really happened, but it’s a story for another day, and right now I need to let you log onto your twitter accounts. Don’t forget – it’s all about right now.

Hunting UFO’s and Your Chance to Tweet Outer Space

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Morgan Mussell

Tonight at 9:00pm, the National Geographic Channel will present “Chasing UFO’s,” with a team of three investigators checking out reported sightings in Texas, Fresno, and other hotspots of alien activity.

The National Geographic Team – move over Men in Black!

In a recent survey, National Geographic discovered that 80 million Americans – a third of the population – believe in UFO’s. Seventy-nine percent of us think the government has kept UFO information hidden, and more than half believe there are real Men in Black who threaten people who report sightings.

Aliens grok Geena Davis in “Earth Girls are Easy,” 1988

But wait – there’s more going on tomorrow than just watching other people have all the fun. There’s something to take our minds off wondering how to land a job as a UFO Chaser. It’s the Wow Reply Project.

In August, 1977, Jerry Ehman, a researcher at the Ohio State Big Ear radio observatory, spotted a coherent alpha-numeric sequence on a computer printout of signals from deep space. He grabbed a red pen, circled it, and wrote “Wow!” in the margin.

Tomorrow night, National Geographic gives us the chance to Tweet back to whatever alien intelligence may have tried to contact us. You can schedule your reply at this link: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/chasing-ufos/the-wow-reply/.

And in case you’re a bit stuck in figuring what to say, the Geographic has solicited suggestions from several experts, including Stephen Colbert, to help us. Check out Colbert’s recorded message, which begins, “Greetings intelligent alien life forms. I am Stephen Colbert, and I come to you with an important message from all the peoples of the earth. We are not delicious.”

From “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” 1951

It isn’t easy to make up a tweet for space beings. What can you possibly say? “Greetings, aliens. I had cheerios for breakfast, how bout you?” See, this is going to take some work, and there isn’t much time, so we better get busy!

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Or, Sponsored Stories are Bad News for Facebook Users

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this: