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Tag: social media

Columns

No News Is Good News
September 06, 2018
The relationship between Facebook and news publishers is a bizarre charade, peopled by unreliable characters, dotted with contradictions, suffused with dependency and resentment. Over ten long years, Facebook kneecapped the newspaper industry by devouring its main revenue ...

Fresh Hell
February 23, 2018
Let's play everyone's favorite game: Multimillionaire Quizzes Billionaire On Basic Grocery Prices!

Dilbert’s Revenge
April 14, 2017
The gospel of Scott Adams is one of mediocrity untroubled by humility, which means that now is the perfect time for him to make a comeback; the dangling toes of the zeitgeist are once again within his grasp. We’ve heard more about him lately than we have since CD-ROMs. Adams ...

Open Mike
March 23, 2017
It is with a heavy heart that I must report that Huckabee is at it again. That is, the ex-governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, has tweeted a new joke. Over the last year, Huckabee has gained a reputation as one Twitter’s high-profile joke writers. “High profile,” I should ...

The Attention Deficit
February 03, 2017
Once upon a time a lot of hope was invested in adblockers. Many saw them as a way to halt the blight of online advertising. The thinking was that if everyone got adblockers, it would not only make the ads disappear, but it might make the internet a more enjoyable place, too. We ...

Token-Hunters: Your Friendship Is Not a Gift
September 21, 2016
“Say it to my face” may sound righteous and brave, but the smug boors who shout that slogan the loudest are often the ones least prepared to listen. If you try to tell this person how her tokenism makes you feel, it could mean a lot of work for you. Do you really have time ...

Q & A with Geert Lovink
August 09, 2016
Presently holed up at the Amsterdam School of Applied Sciences, 7,000 miles from Silicon Valley, tech critic Geert Lovink has held it down in different forms of European bohemia since the eighties, asking, over a series of five books: How can we use technology to actually make ...

Sexting, Lies, and Videotape
June 09, 2016
Midway through the painfully exhaustive documentary Weiner, the title subject’s wife, Hillary Clinton’s adviser Huma Abedin, is puttering around her Manhattan kitchen, fumbling through an array of flatware in an effort to give a semblance of normalcy to her day. One of the ...

Power to the Pixels
February 18, 2016
It sure was a short “end of history.” Back in 1992, with the Berlin Wall leveled and Russia abruptly abdicating its self-appointed role as bureaucratic overseer of the historical dialectic, Francis Fukuyama and his neoconservative confreres surveyed the reconfigured world ...