(This post was originally posted on Medium.) For the second time in a week, my phone buzzed with a New York Times alert, notifying me that another celebrity had died by suicide. My heart sank. I tuned into the Crisis Text Line Slack channel to see how many people were waiting for a counselor’s help. Volunteer crisis counselors were pouring […]
The below original text was the basis for Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd’s March 2018 SXSW Edu keynote,“What Hath We Wrought?” — Ed. Growing up, I took certain truths to be self evident. Democracy is good. War is bad. And of course, all men are created equal. My mother was a teacher who encouraged me to […]
(This was originally posted on NewCo Shift.) A friend of mine worked for an online dating company whose audience was predominantly hetero 30-somethings. At some point, they realized that a large number of the “female” accounts were actually bait for porn sites and 1–900 numbers. I don’t remember if users complained or if they found it themselves, but they concluded that […]
Flickr: Jan Hoffman (This was originally posted on NewCo Shift) Ever since key Apple investors challenged the company to address kids’ phone addiction, I’ve gotten a stream of calls asking me to comment on the topic. Mostly, I want to scream. I wrote extensively about the unhelpful narrative of “addiction” in my book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives […]
Yesterday, Steve Bannon clearly articulated what many people have felt and known for quite some time when he told journalists, “You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party… The media’s the opposition party.” This builds on earlier remarks by Trump, who said, “I have a running war with the media.” Journalists have covered this with […]
Anxious about the widespread consumption and spread of propaganda and fake news during this year’s election cycle, many progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy programs. Others are clamoring for solutions that focus on expert fact-checking and labeling. Both of these approaches are likely to fail — not because they are bad ideas, but […]
Most people who don’t code don’t appreciate how hard it is to do right.Plenty of developers are perfectly functional, but to watch a master weave code into silken beauty is utterly inspiring. Unfortunately, most of the code that underpins the tools that we use on a daily basis isn’t so pretty. There isa lot of […]
At what age should children be allowed to access the internet without parental oversight? This is a hairy question that raises all sorts of issues about rights, freedoms, morality, skills, and cognitive capability. Cultural values also come into play full force on this one. Consider, for example, that in the 1800s, the age of sexual […]
In 1968, Walter Cronkite did the unthinkable. After visiting Vietnam to assess the state of the war in light of the Tet Offensive, he produced documentary coverage of the situation. And then, to the shock of many, he concluded with his opinion. In an era in which reporters never stated their own assessment, this act […]
Earlier this week, Mendeley was bought by Elsevier. I posted the announcement on Twitter to state that I would be quitting Mendeley. This tweet sparked a conversation between me and the head of academic outreach at Mendeley (William Gunn) that could only go so far in 140 character chunks. I was trying to highlight that, […]