>I find it astonishing that what is basically a short message broadcast service can generate billions of dollars of revenue.
Basically a short message service? That's naive. Twitter is a marketing platform with 300m people signed up to receive marketing materials, people who also readily provide the platform with the details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on, where they are in the world, what age they are, what gender they are and more. Of course it's extremely valuable.
The idea that social networks are useful for surveillance and the joke that the users are just useful idiots, massively predates the onion sketch as well though.
Twitter, like Facebook, has beacons on just about every website out there, thanks to website owners who are all too happy to make it easy for visitors to click "like" or "tweet" in the hopes of attracting attention. You don't even have to post a single Tweet for Twitter to know about what you're into.
Only because most others work and a person's value, or perceived value, is largely tied to them working, their work, etc.
The perceived value comes from essentially not relying on others to work to support you while you don't.
If machines were doing the work and trying to make additional money was optional I don't think the vast majority of people would be opting in. Indeed, it could even be seen as a negative trait if you're one of the few chasing money.
Some would call this hipster pretentiousness. I wouldn't though. I think overall we're seeing a growing trend, or growing condition I believe would be more apt, where people are searching for substance at a time where the digital/modern life has removed or cheapened it.
Yep. I remember a nice TED talk about this lady who would go out of her way to send physical letters to people now that communications is so simple, effortless and instantaneous.
This is a recurring thing– whenever things get faster, there is an artfulness that frees up in being deliberately slow. Pretentious maybe, if you pretend that it's somehow "better". But it can also be really heartfelt.
> I think overall we're seeing a growing trend, or growing condition I believe would be more apt, where people are searching for substance at a time where the digital/modern life has removed or cheapened it.
That wasn't an appeal to tradition, I don't know where you got that.
And besides, it is more than that. We are human beings, our brains are designed to interact with physical objects, and when you move all of the physical objects like CDs, photos, DVDs, etc into an existence of pure information, what you end up missing is that satisfaction of holding a physical object in your hand and experiencing it with all your senses, like we did with jewels or tools centuries ago.
Why has digital life removed substance? Today I can talk with my friends, who are scattered all around the globe, all day, every day, in real time. I get lessons from experts on things that interest me, for free, whenever I want them, without having to lift a finger. I can call my friends at a moment's notice and we get together and do a whole host of things that would be pretty much impossible twenty years ago.
How did digital life cheapen substance? Because I can no longer get on stage and touch the actors in movies? When it comes to photographs, specifically, the difference between the phone screen and a piece of paper is a hell of a lot less than the actual thing in the photograph and the photograph itself. If anything, your argument is against photography as a whole.
Because you can't view digital content without a computer. At a fundamental level, your interaction with it must be mediated with the aid of a third party. Nobody thinks digital lacks utility but it is inherently ephemeral.
If I give you an old photograph to look at, then all you need to look at it are your eyes and whatever light happens to be about. If I hand you an SD card, you need to go and find some sort of computer to stick it into, as well as a source of power for said computer, although I think that latter consideration might cease to matter in a couple of decades.
I have no idea about the how, but it's not hard to understand that bits are fragile and totally dependent on a huge network of many technologies.
I spent last week in Europe looking at ancient buildings and incredible art. Some of this stuff is literally millennia old - but people are still queuing around the block to see it.
If you build something out of atoms, that sucker stays there - not quite forever, but some combinations of atoms can easily outlast many human lifetimes.
Compare that with bits, where file formats, storage media, operating systems, and basic hardware all keep changing and content preservation is hit and miss. (I have video files from the late 1990s that are unplayable now.)
Code is even more fragile, especially if it's heavily OS- or framework-specific.
So people like physical stuff. It can survive without power or a reader device. That makes it more reassuring than a transient digital content blip that's gone before your kids have had a chance to experience it.
Interestingly the title "Digital Refuseniks" actually appears as the title for the article if you check out the "Features and Analysis" list on the right hand side of the article's page.
This is astonishingly stupid. It's also time to retire the word "troll", it has become so bastardized that its use shouldn't be taken at all seriously anymore.
It is a poorly understood term people use to shoot down unpopular opinion. This is so common. Here is one from last day where a user is accused of being a troll for criticizing the new StarWars trailer.
Another example is my experience from /r/php. If you go there and criticize the language, you will be called a troll and will be eventually labeled as such. People are emotional, and they will use terms like this when their beliefs are threatened. It is an easy response. In a while, everything you say will be, by default, down voted and even lead to a ban solely out of this impression.
Things appear to have become so weird that letting your kids out to play has now gained its own label - "Free range parenting".
Which is really sad. I grew up outdoors, climbing trees, riding my bike wherever I wanted, going to the local park or woods with other kids, etc. I would really hate to see kids being denied the same opportunities due to unwarranted fear being driven into their parents or their communities.
It's not something I've encountered in Europe, where I spent most of my life, kids seem to be living pretty much the same as ever there, but reading about this stuff happening in the US is very sad.
I grew up only having to be home by dark, too, but putting a label on what used to be normal but is being lost is actually a GOOD thing! It's not sad. It lets you track the concept's popularity, and makes for catchy slogans like "Free range parenting is not a crime".
Without a catchy label, even those who believe in it (like me) have a hard time finding words to speak up whenever a helicopter parent is around.
Because it was so natural in my own childhood, it seems self-evident that children don't need constant 24/7 supervision (and it may actually be harmful) and so I find myself grasping when I encounter someone who believes the opposite (and there are plenty). A nice sound bite like "free range parenting" just might be the tool needed to combat this trend.
I've visited the US many times. You've little to fear as a visitor. There are a great many reasons to visit the USA.
With that being said, I haven't been back since the Snowden news broke and everything else that has followed. I'm not American, I can't vote there, I can't effect influence there, so my only way to protest the national and international actions of the USA is to not bring my tourist dollars there anymore.
Which is a shame because I've spent a lot of money on personal trips there, have enjoyed my times there, have met some really great people there, etc. but as it's my only form of protest that I can engage in, it's what I feel I have to do.
Absolutely. Our individual lives aren't even a blip on the radar of life as a whole on our planet, let alone our universe. We get a very short amount of time to live, even shorter to live well (health, mobility, etc.). The idea of going to do something you dislike every day for 30-40 years of that very short time is just about the anti-thesis of what we should be doing with our time here.
Basically a short message service? That's naive. Twitter is a marketing platform with 300m people signed up to receive marketing materials, people who also readily provide the platform with the details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on, where they are in the world, what age they are, what gender they are and more. Of course it's extremely valuable.