Welcome to 2019 - Expect Less Blogging This Year
We made it to 2019! We're still living in times of rapid change. But now, unlike early 2018, we acknowledge it. Out loud.
What a year 2018 was - this writer decided on February 14th to unfriend my remaining Facebook contacts, extricate myself from that platform, and redirect that energy and time to blogging objectively about Facebook's pros and cons from out here on the open web.
The editors of this site dedicated to a few months of full time blogging after seeing too many repetitions of false memes in the media such as: "paper is going away" or "it would be improper to hold Facebook executives accountable for what its algorithms do" !?!?!?
Other false memes were "people over 26 don't understand how computers work" and "there are more H1B visa workers in College Station, Texas than in Silicon Valley." And a favorite "humans, who created climate change, are too stupid and powerless to reverse it."
Some writers felt we were uniquely positioned to see through the b.s. of that time in history - the intersection of technology, sociology, mass media, journalism, and ... trees!
With a few well-timed blog articles, we helped course-correct some of those false memes. (See: Controlling Personalities 101: Exploiting Gray Areas . See: Ad Tech Primer: Anonymized Ad Tech vs. Platform Peeping Toms. And our most widely shared article from last year: Why Ad Tech Can't Build Brands (Yet).)
With data-reporting colleague R. Davis, we published Tech Ageism Worse in S.F. Than L.A., Census Data and Anecdotes Suggest.
2018 was also a peak in the "information age" in that humans grappled with our digital limitations, just how much information we can hold on a link-rotting internet, or in our heads, or in our phones. Or how much information we could remember to retrieve from the phone's "cloud." It was a time of "Two Hour Nostalgia." Here is a post from last year that reflects how fast things were changing "Speculation Monthly: Cryptocoin Edition."
Finally, 2018, more so even than 2017, was a time when the media (with aggressive nudging from this site) finally had the guts to acknowledge this harsh truth: tradeoffs exist when technology advances (oh, sorry - did you need a trigger warning for that last sentence?)
Until 2018, a journalist risked being called a Luddite and losing her job if she dared to cover a new app's one downside for every 100 upsides.
This site helped dissolve that trend with such posts as Emily Postteque's Bot Etiquette: Online Reputation Management (ORM) Edition from May. We believe our post had influence, and at 2018's end New York Magazine said “Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human." Or more colorfully “Everything Is Fake”: Ex-Reddit CEO Confirms Internet Traffic Metrics Are Bullshit."
Many challenges remain in 2019. A 48-year-old guest on Kara Swisher's podcast repeated the false meme that congress is too old to pass privacy legislation in the digital age. Said guest seemed not to know a) that many in congress are her age or younger and b) the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently asked congress not to pass federal privacy laws that supersede (and weaken) the many state privacy laws developing nationwide.
And in 2019 we hope to get more people on a subway to be less ashamed to read a dead-tree newspaper.
Every time in 2018 we walked the subway we were the only ones reading a paper paper, and even we only read it rarely now. This is a big change from ten years ago - when one of eight riders read a paper.
Every subway passenger I see on their phones is playing candy crush, or scrolling Facebook, and very few are reading e-books. Each month of 2019 we tally how many passengers per subway car at rush hour are reading the newspaper on their phone and how many are reading dead-tree papers. Let's increase it from zero newspaper readers per car to one or more in 2019!
(Some people resolve to sky dive in the new year. But doesn't resolving to destigmatize paper media make you feel really really ALIVE? Us too!)
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The editors of this site dedicated to a few months of full time blogging after seeing too many repetitions of false memes in the media such as: "paper is going away" or "it would be improper to hold Facebook executives accountable for what its algorithms do" !?!?!?
Other false memes were "people over 26 don't understand how computers work" and "there are more H1B visa workers in College Station, Texas than in Silicon Valley." And a favorite "humans, who created climate change, are too stupid and powerless to reverse it."
Some writers felt we were uniquely positioned to see through the b.s. of that time in history - the intersection of technology, sociology, mass media, journalism, and ... trees!
With a few well-timed blog articles, we helped course-correct some of those false memes. (See: Controlling Personalities 101: Exploiting Gray Areas . See: Ad Tech Primer: Anonymized Ad Tech vs. Platform Peeping Toms. And our most widely shared article from last year: Why Ad Tech Can't Build Brands (Yet).)
With data-reporting colleague R. Davis, we published Tech Ageism Worse in S.F. Than L.A., Census Data and Anecdotes Suggest.
2018 was also a peak in the "information age" in that humans grappled with our digital limitations, just how much information we can hold on a link-rotting internet, or in our heads, or in our phones. Or how much information we could remember to retrieve from the phone's "cloud." It was a time of "Two Hour Nostalgia." Here is a post from last year that reflects how fast things were changing "Speculation Monthly: Cryptocoin Edition."
Finally, 2018, more so even than 2017, was a time when the media (with aggressive nudging from this site) finally had the guts to acknowledge this harsh truth: tradeoffs exist when technology advances (oh, sorry - did you need a trigger warning for that last sentence?)
Until 2018, a journalist risked being called a Luddite and losing her job if she dared to cover a new app's one downside for every 100 upsides.
This site helped dissolve that trend with such posts as Emily Postteque's Bot Etiquette: Online Reputation Management (ORM) Edition from May. We believe our post had influence, and at 2018's end New York Magazine said “Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human." Or more colorfully “Everything Is Fake”: Ex-Reddit CEO Confirms Internet Traffic Metrics Are Bullshit."
Many challenges remain in 2019. A 48-year-old guest on Kara Swisher's podcast repeated the false meme that congress is too old to pass privacy legislation in the digital age. Said guest seemed not to know a) that many in congress are her age or younger and b) the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently asked congress not to pass federal privacy laws that supersede (and weaken) the many state privacy laws developing nationwide.
And in 2019 we hope to get more people on a subway to be less ashamed to read a dead-tree newspaper.
Every time in 2018 we walked the subway we were the only ones reading a paper paper, and even we only read it rarely now. This is a big change from ten years ago - when one of eight riders read a paper.
Every subway passenger I see on their phones is playing candy crush, or scrolling Facebook, and very few are reading e-books. Each month of 2019 we tally how many passengers per subway car at rush hour are reading the newspaper on their phone and how many are reading dead-tree papers. Let's increase it from zero newspaper readers per car to one or more in 2019!
(Some people resolve to sky dive in the new year. But doesn't resolving to destigmatize paper media make you feel really really ALIVE? Us too!)
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
