Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Photo: Screenshots via YouTube Social media stardom is a brutal Darwinistic competition, a craven and utterly shameless battle for space on our screens and in our brains carried out by a phalanx of influencers, thinkfluencers, beauty vloggers, charlatans, health quacks, spiritual phonies, and unhinged vegans. Recently, Lil Tay entered into this fray. Tay is—as far…
close story-meta Photo Patrick and SpongeBob in “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Credit Nickelodeon When a yellow sponge in rectangular pants came to children’s TV in 1999, who could have guessed that it would lead to “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical,” which was nominated this week for 12 Tony Awards? With the musical on a slate that includes…
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – If a new European law restricting what companies can do with people’s online data went into effect tomorrow, almost 1.9 billion Facebook Inc users around the world would be protected by it. The online social network is making changes that ensure the number will be much smaller. Facebook members outside…
Photo: Carl Court (Getty) Sure, you can share your friends’ posts on your Facebook page, or retweet a hot take to your followers on Twitter, but Instagram has been relatively conservative when it comes to letting users publicly redistribute posts on the social network. According to a report from TechCrunch, however, Instagram is testing a…
After The New York Times announced on Tuesday that Quinn Norton would be its lead opinion writer on technology, her Twitter history doomed the hiring. On Tuesday afternoon, The New York Times announced that it had hired Quinn Norton, a journalist and an essayist known for her work at Wired magazine, as the editorial board’s…
close story-meta Photo Jim Steyer, left, and Tristan Harris in Common Sense’s headquarters. Common Sense is helping fund the The Truth About Tech campaign. Credit Peter Prato for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — A group of Silicon Valley technologists who were early employees at Facebook and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of…
close story-meta Credit Cari Vander Yacht MTV’s “TRL” recently welcomed Poppy, a rising star with hologram-perfect skin, an avant-garde Japanese schoolgirl wardrobe and a voice like Betty Boop’s on benzos. For much of the show, she perched silently on the couch and methodically stacked candies on a glass table. A longhaired handler called Titanic Sinclair…
The real Jessica Rychly is a Minnesota teenager with a broad smile and wavy hair. She likes reading and the rapper Post Malone. When she goes on Facebook or Twitter, she sometimes muses about being bored or trades jokes with friends. Occasionally, like many teenagers, she posts a duck-face selfie. But on Twitter, there is…
Facebook Inc. FB 0.83% plans to start ranking news sources in its feed based on user evaluations of credibility, a major step in its effort to fight false and sensationalist information that will also push the company further into a role it has long sought to avoid—content referee. The social-media giant will begin testing the effort next week by…
close story-meta Photo The newsroom of Página Siete, a Bolivian newspaper. Traffic to the publication’s website plunged by 20 percent after Facebook began testing a new version of its News Feed in Bolivia. Credit Gonzalo Pardo for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — One morning in October, the editors of Página Siete, Bolivia’s third-largest…