Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s been a wild year for tech giants: between Mark Zuckerberg’s faltering Metaverse, Elon Musk’s ruinous takeover of Twitter, and significant crashes on cryptocurrency exchanges, a lot of precarious digital systems are hitting key tipping points. The latest news out of the crypto world is no different: FTX, an industry giant once valued at $32 […]
social media
Posted inSatire
Elon Musk invades Russia in the winter
Reading Time: 2 minutes Moscow, Russia – Elon Musk first bought Twitter, a social media platform that was bleeding money, at a premium. His next move was predictable: He invaded Russia in the winter. As he looks out at the burnt-out shell of Russia’s capital city he wonders Who can I blame for this? Because I know it isn’t […]
Posted inSocial Media
What next? Twitter’s complicated role in the literary world
Reading Time: 11 minutes Not long after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, another exodus of site users began—and with it, discussion about the people who aren’t ready, or able, to leave. Transitioning to a new platform isn’t easy for everyone: for many disabled people, for instance, leaving Twitter means learning all the ins and outs of yet another system […]
Posted inSocial Media
The bird is freed, or is it? Why I’m not leaving Twitter…yet
Reading Time: 2 minutes When I first heard that Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, I was skeptical. It seemed like a stunt intended to get attention. He said he wanted to end the censorship of ideas. Conservative Twitter was all a flutter over the prospect, and many liberal-leaning users left for other platforms. I suspected it was […]
Posted inSocial Media
Musk, Twitter, and the future of online platforms
Reading Time: 4 minutes On Wednesday, October 26, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s offices in San Francisco with a kitchen sink, for a video captioned “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” On Thursday, he made his purchase of the company official with a tweet addressed, “Dear Twitter Advertisers”. In this first message as “Chief Twit”, Musk promised a fruitful […]
Posted inSocial Media
Kanye’s Parler, Musk’s Twitter, WeChat’s fake news: Our digital crisis deepens
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s been a “pick your poison” week for problems with our information networks: from the world’s richest person using Twitter for complex foreign policy, to a prominent US musician laying claim to a far-right social media platform, to the alarm continuing to sound on US midterm misinformation circulating on poorly regulated China-based chat apps. While […]
Posted inSocial Media
Trump was never king of Twitter. This guy was (and is)
Reading Time: 3 minutes Among the more depressing news tidbits I recently ran into informed me that Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has 1.1 million Twitter followers. 1.1 million! It’s true. I checked. By comparison, I have, uh, 170 followers (.00001545% of Greene’s), which may or may not be a function of never using it. And virtually everything […]
Posted inSocial Media
Twitter’s Elon Musk debacle raises serious questions about digital citizenship
Reading Time: 9 minutes On October 3, Elon Musk tweeted a proposal for “Ukraine-Russia Peace”, with a Yes/No poll that yielded 2.7 million responses (59 percent “No”). Because Musk is the richest person in the world, with a current net worth of around $230 billion USD from Tesla, SpaceX, and recent AI ventures, his views on Russia’s invasion of […]
Posted inTechnology
The internet is lethal. That class I took in 1995 didn’t mention it.
Reading Time: 6 minutes I remember way back in 1995 I took a nontraditional local college class on “the Internet,” then a curious new tech phenomenon emerging from the womb in barely post-fetal form. I had no idea then that this seemingly miraculous invention would become as exponentially huge—and potentially dangerous to the health of Americans and our republic—as […]
Posted inPolitics
Are GOP’s social media villains being coached?
Reading Time: 4 minutes The seemingly instantaneous, coordinated blow-back by Donald Trump supporters on social media whenever they believe the former president has been attacked begs the question: Are they being coached? The matches that ignite these online conflagrations are strident public alarms set off by either Trump’s own protestations or by elected sycophants in MAGA world rushing to […]