Proximity

Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election 

Jan 24, 2019 | ,

 

There was a proliferation of fake news during the 2016 election cycle. Grinberg et al. analyzed Twitter data by matching Twitter accounts to specific voters to determine who was exposed to fake news, who spread fake news, and how fake news interacted with factual news. Fake news accounted for nearly 6% of all news consumption, but it was heavily concentrated—only 1% of users were exposed to 80% of fake news, and 0.1% of users were responsible for sharing 80% of fake news. Interestingly, fake news was most concentrated among conservative voters.

Source: Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election | Science

What Made the TV Show ‘You’ a Hit? Netflix 

Jan 22, 2019 |

Could the numbers be believed? Could it be possible that a show that premiered on cable television may as well not have existed until Netflix — which now has 139 million paying subscribers, including 58.5 million in the United States — came around to stream it? Netflix is already a television network and a movie studio. Was it one step closer to effectively becoming television itself?

As Daniel D’Addario, a TV critic for Variety, posited, “‘You’ flailing on Lifetime and being treated by the viewing public as a Netflix original is going to be remembered as a major turning point in what will shortly be a contraction of the TV industry.”

Source: What Made the TV Show ‘You’ a Hit? Netflix – The New York Times

Songs Are Getting Shorter and Streaming Is To Blame 

Jan 20, 2019 |

Songs are getting shorter. The average length of a song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds between 2013 and 2018.

6% percent of Hot 100 songs were 2 minutes 30 seconds or shorter in 2018, up from 1% in 2013, according to an analysis published by Quartz.  From Drake and Kanye West to country superstars Eric Church and jason Aldean, songs are getting shorter.

Source: Songs Are Getting Shorter and Streaming Is To Blame – hypebot

Feasting on Precarity 

Jan 20, 2019 | , ,

Uber considers its drivers to be everything but employees. They are simultaneously customers of Uber’s proprietary software and private contractors providing the company a service (they also provide a service to another group of Uber’s customers, the riders). If this seems confusing, uroboric, or like a contortionist’s exercise in semantics, it is.

Source: Feasting on Precarity – Los Angeles Review of Books

Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism 

Jan 20, 2019 | , ,

Silicon Valley’s Phoenix-like resurrection is a story of ingenuity and initiative. It is also a story of callousness, predation, and deceit. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise — what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

Source: Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism – Los Angeles Review of Books

Netflix Content Spending Expected to Hit $15 Billion in 2019 

Jan 20, 2019 |

Netflix’s binge-spending on content isn’t expected to slow down.

The streamer spent a whopping $12.04 billion in cash on content last year, up 35% from $8.9 billion in 2017, according to its fourth-quarter 2018 earnings report.

For the year ahead, Wall Street analysts see that climbing 25% — to around $15 billion on a gross cash basis. Netflix will continue to burn cash, telling investors Thursday that it expects to record negative $3 billion in free cash flow in 2019 (similar to last year), and that it intends to continue to turn to debt markets to fund the spending rate. The company had $10.4 billion in long-term debt at the end of 2018, versus $6.5 billion year earlier.

Source: Netflix Content Spending Expected to Hit $15 Billion in 2019 – Variety

How Retail Changes When Algorithms Curate Everything We Buy

Jan 13, 2019 | , ,

Giant travel search engines such as TripAdvisor, Expedia, Kayak, and Google Flights have all but replaced travel agents as most consumers’ travel advisors. Soon, independent curating engines like these could trigger the next wave of disruption in retail. The first stage of the digital shopping revolution saved consumers time and money by letting them buy things they already wanted without having to go to a traditional retail store. A major part of the second stage will likely be a dramatic refinement of technologies that tailor recommendations and then scour the internet for the best deal.

Source: How Retail Changes When Algorithms Curate Everything We Buy

The 3 biggest trends at CES 2019

Jan 11, 2019 | , ,

As the world’s biggest consumer tech show wraps up, here’s what Apple, Google, and other giants who made news tell us about tech in 2019.

  • Google and Amazon continued duking it out for title of most virtual assistants listening to the most people on the most devices. It’s been a multi-year battle, once led by Amazon, quickly matched by Google, and now escalating between these two companies like a new cold war.
  • The biggest news is that Apple–fresh off devastating quarterly earnings that showed iPhone growth has tanked–is making a bigger effort to be interoperable with third-party products, and make its services accessible without using Apple devices themselves.
  • When I took a ride in Waymo’s first driverless taxi last year, I noticed something interesting: The app interface doesn’t show your route–it just shows the start point and end point. I joked to one of Waymo’s product developers that it had already designed its interface for flying cars. They laughed, but only a little. Perhaps because that’s exactly the kind of thinking that the mobility industry is doing, now that self-driving technologies are maturing and digital ride hailing has been figured out. The way we move is only going to keep changing.

Source: The 3 biggest trends at CES 2019

Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads

Jan 10, 2019 |

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker […]

Source: Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads | TechCrunch

The Digital Commons: Tragedy or Opportunity? A Reflection on the 50th Anniversary of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons 

Jan 9, 2019 | , , , ,

Garrett Hardin’s Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons” 50 years ago focused on a physical world where common goods are finite and rivalrous. By contrast, this paper explores the digital commons, calling for better understanding of its long-term impact and for government policies supporting benefits while mitigating costs.

Source: The Digital Commons: Tragedy or Opportunity? A Reflection on the 50th Anniversary of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons – HBS Working Knowledge – Harvard Business School

Facebook culture described as ‘cult-like’, review process blamed

Jan 8, 2019 |

  • More than a dozen former Facebook employees detailed how the company’s leadership and its performance review system has created a culture where any dissent is discouraged.
  • Employees say Facebook’s stack ranking performance review system drives employees to push out products and features that drive user engagement without fully considering potential long-term negative impacts on user experience or privacy.
  • Reliance on peer reviews creates an underlying pressure for Facebook employees to forge friendships with colleagues for the sake of career advancement.

Source: Facebook culture described as ‘cult-like’, review process blamed

Clear Channel’s digital billboards help keep homeless people warm

Jan 8, 2019 | ,

In Stockholm, the advertising company Clear Channel owns more than 1,000 digital kiosks serving an endless loop of ads to citizens. It’s the sort of high-tech urban installation we wish might do more than just sell us things. And beginning in November of last year, Clear Channel partnered with the city to give these signs new purpose: to offer homeless people directions to the nearest shelter on particularly cold nights.

Source: Clear Channel’s digital billboards help keep homeless people warm

CES 2019 is a grand distraction from what matters

Jan 8, 2019 | , ,

2018 was an unprecedented bad year for technology that has eroded consumer trust. But you won’t see any mention of that this week. Because it’s the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It’s the time of year when gadget manufacturers everywhere line up to dazzle us with their latest takes on thin and shiny. It’s one long “This Is Fine!” cartoon, playing out in the stale cigarette-scented air of the Hilton Las Vegas–with canapés!

Privacy and security are the two things we need out of CES that we most certainly won’t get (despite Apple’s giant ad). Instead? I’ve gotten pitches for $15,000 massage chairs, delivery robots, and, as always, more TVs than I can count. It’s like the industry is telling us, kick back, binge on a show, and stuff your face until this nightmare has come to an end.

Source: CES 2019 is a grand distraction from what matters

 Is This the End of the Age of Apple? 

Jan 3, 2019 | ,

The last big innovation explosion — the proliferation of the smartphone — is clearly ending. There is no question that Apple was the center of that, with its app-centric, photo-forward and feature-laden phone that gave everyone the first platform for what was to create so many products and so much wealth. It was the debut of the iPhone in 2007 that spurred what some in tech call a “Cambrian explosion,” a reference to the era when the first complex animals appeared. There would be no Uber and Lyft without the iPhone (and later the Android version), no Tinder, no Spotify.

Source: Opinion | Is This the End of the Age of Apple? – The New York Times

Apple: time to get back to your roots and fix some stuff

Jan 2, 2019 |


2018 was a rocky year for Apple. Despite becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company this summer, it has seen disappointing sales for the latest iPhone–its main cash cow–and, worse, analysts, industry players, journalists, and users believe that the Cupertino company has stopped innovating in favor of milking its user base with marginally updated products at higher price points. It’s a dangerous game that can go south really fast.

Source: Apple: time to get back to your roots and fix some stuff

The Post-Advertising Future of the Media 

Dec 31, 2018 | ,

One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising.

Twelve months later, it’s end times all over again. There have been layoffs across Vox Media, Vice, and BuzzFeed (and dubious talk of an emergency merger). Mic, once valued at $100 million, fired most of its staff and sold for $5 million. Verizon took a nearly $5 billion write-down on its digital media unit, which includes AOL and Yahoo. Reuters announced plans to lay off more than 3,000 people in the next two years. The disease seems widespread, affecting venture-capital darlings and legacy brands, flattening local news while punishing international wires. Almost no one is safe, and almost everyone is for sale.

Source: The Post-Advertising Future of the Media – The Atlantic

Why online retail has to drop its addiction tactics

Dec 30, 2018 | , ,

Clearly we’ve reached a saturation point with tech overload. Many of us have found ourselves falling into reward-center feedback loops, craving the dopamine hits that likes and comments give to the brain or the instant gratification of one-click shopping. We’re not exploring and learning anymore — we’re zombie scrolling, buying things we don’t want, and spending precious hours staring at pictures we don’t care about.

Source: Why online retail has to drop its addiction tactics

Smart speakers hit critical mass in 2018

Dec 30, 2018 | ,

We already know Alexa had a good Christmas — the app shot to the top of the App Store over the holidays, and the Alexa service even briefly crashed from all the new users. But Alexa, along with other smart speaker devices like Google Home, didn’t just have a good holiday — they had a great year, too. The smart speaker market reached critical mass in 2018, with around 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning a voice-activated speaker, up from 21.5 percent in 2017.

Source: Smart speakers hit critical mass in 2018 | TechCrunch

2018 Proved Game Streaming Can Still Get Bigger—and Messier

Dec 28, 2018 | ,

From a critical remove, then, streaming is a strangely liminal space, one not yet secure in its place in the media landscape. It’s a land of opportunity and nonsense, a media format beyond its Wild West stage yet not quite formed into something that can be subjected to mainstream media analysis. Streaming is a place for big-time, multi-million-dollar celebrities. It’s also a place where marginalized people form communities around games and people they love, where niche gaming communities like speedrunning can grow healthily.

Source: 2018 Proved Game Streaming Can Still Get Bigger—and Messier | WIRED