Friday Reading S04E05
Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam covering journalism, media and technology.
This photo emerged and lots and lots of men on the internet spluttered with rage about how it summed up the narcissistic fecklessness of millennials and everything wrong with society.
But
- They are boring old bastards. Seriously. People used to pay for someone to paint them while they stood around the house in front of all their stuff for hours posing. People used to ask strangers “Can you take a picture of me in front of this famous location” and then send the film off and pay for someone to develop it. Any generation that had access to taking selfies would have taken selfies.
- It turns out Clinton had just said: “Anyone who wants a selfie turn around right now.”
So actually the real meaning of the photo was that lots of men have bad opinions in public about women without checking their facts first
Emily Bell on how Facebook is being taken somewhere it never wanted to go:
“Facebook is finding itself under almost constant pressure to be more transparent, despite the fact that by the standards of some legacy media it is the model of openness. One of the fundamental problems is that the platform has been almost too successful at persuading the world to publish on its portal”
Talking of that pressure for transparency, ProPublica have made a Google Chrome extension that lets you know what Facebook knows about you…
“India is important to Google as a bellwether for the future of the internet itself, and what happens there is likely to spread elsewhere.”
“Sundar Pichai explains why Google is focusing hard on India” — Sam Byford
The Guardian has launched on the Amazon Echo smart-speaker device in the UK.
“The number of journalists at digital native publishers has more than tripled in the past decade. This growth, however, pales in comparison to the number of journalists laid off in the newspaper industry. And in recent years, the number of journalists at digital-only publishers seems to have actually plateaued.”
Oh.
There’s now a code of practice for fact-checkers. I think this is a great development, especially as it seems the Trump campaign and their media cheerleaders seem to be using “well fact-checking is actually opinion” as a line of attack/defence.
This transcription tool could be a game changer for newsrooms.
“YouTuber books are a difficult genre to define. Lee rejects the definition altogether. ‘It’s important for people to understand that YouTube is just a platform, like TV is, and everyone makes completely different types of content on it.’
Indeed, the books come in disparate forms. Yet although one interviewee after another tells me that the grouping is a bugbear for authors and publishers alike, there is no doubt that it works as a marketing technique.”
Barbara Speed on the strange story of how YouTubers saved publishing where she does exceedingly well not to keep tutting “Young people today, eh?” all the way through. There’s whole swathes of fandom out there that mainstream media and publishing is blissfully unaware of.
I’m not entirely convinced by all of this, by I was struck by this paragraph:
“People [in the 18th century] learned to read in a variety of ways, some from small one-room schools, but many from their mothers, from tutors, traveling ministers, apprentice’s masters, relatives, neighbors, friends. They could read because, in a literate population, it is really not that difficult to transmit literacy from one person to the next. When people really want a skill, it goes viral. You couldn’t stop it if you tried. In other words, they could read for all the same reasons that we can now use computers. We don’t know how to use computers because we learned it in school, but because we wanted to learn it and we were free to learn it in whatever way worked best for us. It is the saddest of ironies that many people now see the fluidity and effectiveness of this process as a characteristic of computers, rather than what it is, which is a characteristic of human beings.”
“What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning” — Valerie Strauss.
And when I say I’m not entirely convinced by this, the computer example looks great written down, but I’m all of 44 years old, and I got taught about computers at two different schools s0 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve written a short piece for the rather lovely My Toy Story about a memory of how my beloved 70s space Lego caused me to experience early onset imposter syndrome at school.
Extremely good piece by Abi Wilkinson on media bias and supporting Jeremy Corbyn.
“I know none of this is as exciting as talking about building alternative media, and circumventing conventional power structures, but I think it’s true. To achieve a Labour government you need to see the mainstream media as a tool, and do everything you can to maximise positive coverage, rather than writing it off as the enemy.”
She also makes a particularly good point that outright hostility to all journalists alienates the ones who are covering Momentum and Corbyn’s leadership of the party as diligently and as impartially as they can.
A blog by someone who is trialling a new badge from TfL, asking people to give up their seat for those who suffer from a disability or medical condition which makes it difficult to travel, but which may not be as obvious as a big baby bump.
Staircases in medieval castles were designed clockwise as a defensive measure. What?
Vice have managed to track a couple of the very few kids to ever win on cult classic TV game show Knightmare, and have interviewed them about it. Amazing.
We’ve got this wonderful, wonderful old art deco cinema in Walthamstow. My mum saw the Beatles there. I saw the first Star Wars and Star Trek films there. It has reopened as a bar, but what do you do with a problem like the old Granada Cinema to keep it viable?
Oh man look at how brilliant the screenshots are of Championship Manager 93–94 in this quiz.
“You know the Alien movies? I had the box set of that. I had my laptop and my drug paraphernalia was all set up around me. And I’d watch the first Alien film, then the second, then the third, fourth, fifth. And when it got to the end of the fifth one, I’d put the first one back on again. So that was it. Over and over again. It was, like, my life has gone out of control, but I can control this, this tiny little bubble of behaviour: that was my safety, sitting in front of this computer screen with what I’m watching, and I know all the dialogue and I know what’s going to happen. I could control how I felt. ‘Oh, I’m bit tired, let me have some crack. Oh, I’m a bit depressed, let’s have some heroin. I need to go to sleep, I’ll take a downer.’ I just wanted to die, but I couldn’t do that, I think because I was brought up a Catholic, with that idea that if you kill yourself you go to purgatory. I kept thinking, ‘Well, it’ll be just my fucking luck, I’ll kill myself and wake up in exactly the situation I’m trying to get away from and it’ll be for eternity.’ At least I know this is going to end at some point.”
Mind-boggling profile of Marilyn.
Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from journalist and designer Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology. Martin is Social & New Formats Editor for the Guardian in London.
