What is it that makes some people vulnerable to anti-vax messages? I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exercises can’t be trusted. That’s a genuinely scary idea, because if the truth is open to the highest bidder, then we are facing a future of […]
Media Manipulation, Strategic Amplification, and Responsible Journalism
This is a crib of a talk (30 min read) that Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd gave at the Online News Association conference in Austin, Texas on September 13, 2018. Well worth the read for anyone interested in a great analysis of our current media situation. Media manipulators have developed a strategy with three parts that […]
Would Twitter Ruin Bee Democracy?
Simple-majority democracy is used by many animals. But they don’t have social media. Did the ancient Athenians invent democracy? Or did bugs have it way earlier than the Greeks? Cornell entomologist Tom Seeley knows which option he’s voting for. Honeybees regularly split from their mother colony. Seeley wondered, with tens of thousands of bees in […]
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. the […]
Kayfabe
A brilliant answer to the Edge.Org 2011 annual question – What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? The sophisticated “scientific concept” with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling. In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ is […]