SOCIAL MEDIA – Page 5

TikTok And Instagram Are Making Obsessively Organized Kitchens A New Status Symbol

18Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS, SOCIAL MEDIA

TikTok And Instagram Are Making Obsessively Organized Kitchens A New Status Symbol

‘Pantry porn’ on TikTok and Instagram makes obsessively organized kitchens a new status symbol. Neatly aligned glass spice jars tagged with printed white labels. Wicker baskets filled with packages of pasta, crackers and snacks. Rows of flavored seltzer water stacked in double-decker plastic bins. In today’s consumer culture, “a place for everything and everything in its place” isn’t just a mantra; it’s big business. Nowhere is this more evident than the kitchen pantry. Most people can relate to finding half-empty cereal boxes squirreled away in the cupboard or letting produce sit just a bit too long in a refrigerator drawer. But for a subset of social media denizens, such sacrileges would never grace their feeds. As someone who studies digital consumer culture, I’ve noticed an uptick ...

Paying For Meta’s And Twitter’s Verified Identity Subscriptions? A Social Media Researcher Explains How The Choice You Face Affects Everyone Else

11Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS, SOCIAL MEDIA

Paying For Meta’s And Twitter’s Verified Identity Subscriptions? A Social Media Researcher Explains How The Choice You Face Affects Everyone Else

Should you pay for Meta’s and Twitter’s verified identity subscriptions? A social media researcher explains how the choice you face affects everyone else. Social media services have generally been free of charge for users, but now, with ad revenues slowing down, social media companies are looking for new revenue streams beyond targeted ads. Now, Twitter is charging for its blue check verification, and Meta and Twitter both charge for identity protection. Users benefit from “free” services such as social media platforms. According to one study, in the U.S., Facebook users say they would have to be paid in the range of $40 to $50 to leave the social networking service for one month. If you value Facebook highly enough that you’d need to get paid to take a break, why not pay for these new se...

How A New Breed Of Influencer Is Transforming The Business Networking Giant LinkedIn At 20

20Jan

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS, SOCIAL MEDIA

How A New Breed Of Influencer Is Transforming The Business Networking Giant LinkedIn At 20

When someone says social media, you probably don’t immediately think of LinkedIn. But there’s no denying that the business networking site has gone the distance: it is now 20 years since it was founded in Silicon Valley. It was the brainchild of Reid Hoffman, a US entrepreneur who worked on an early social media platform for Apple before launching one of his own in 1997. SocialNet was a dating and professional connections site, but folded two years later after failing to find a big enough userbase in those early days of the web. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Marco Verch, CC BY-SA Hoffman went on to become a senior manager at PayPal, and made a substantial amount of money when it was bought by eBay in 2002. This helped him to co-found LinkedIn on December 28 2002 with a team of former Soc...

Think Of Pipelines, Not Utilities – What Social Media Regulation Could Look Like

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

Think Of Pipelines, Not Utilities – What Social Media Regulation Could Look Like

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and his controversial statements and decisions as its owner, have fueled a new wave of calls for regulating social media companies. Elected officials and policy scholars have argued for years that companies like Twitter and Facebook – now Meta – have immense power over public discussions and can use that power to elevate some views and suppress others. Critics also accuse the companies of failing to protect users’ personal data and downplaying harmful impacts of using social media. As an economist who studies the regulation of utilities such as electricity, gas and water, I wonder what that regulation would look like. There are many regulatory models in use around the world, but few seem to fit the realities of social media. However, observing how these mo...

With The Demise Of Twitter The World Would Lose: Valuable Eyewitness Accounts And Raw Data On Human Behavior, As Well As A Habitat For Trolls

26May

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL MEDIA

With The Demise Of Twitter The World Would Lose: Valuable Eyewitness Accounts And Raw Data On Human Behavior, As Well As A Habitat For Trolls

What do a cybersecurity researcher building a system to generate alerts for detecting security threats and vulnerabilities, a wildfire watcher who tracks the spread of forest fires, and public health professionals trying to predict enrollment in health insurance exchanges have in common? They all rely on analyzing data from Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging service, meaning it’s designed for sharing posts of short segments of text and embedded audio and video clips. The ease with which people can share information among millions of others worldwide on Twitter has made it very popular for real-time conversations. Whether it is people tweeting about their favorite sports teams, or organizations and public figures using Twitter to reach a mass audience, Twitter has been part of the collec...

Explainer: What Does ‘Gaslighting’ Mean?

4Apr

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SOCIAL MEDIA, VIDEO REELS

Explainer: What Does ‘Gaslighting’ Mean?

Shortlisted for the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2018 word of the year, “gaslighting” has well and truly found its way into contemporary thought and vernacular. The term has recently been employed to explain the behavior of contestants on The Bachelor Australia, Monica Lewinksy’s experiences with the media post-Bill Clinton, and the words of US President Donald Trump. But what, exactly, does it mean? Where did it come from? And why is it experiencing a resurgence today? Gaslighting takes its name from the 1944 film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer (itself based on the 1938 play Gas Light). In the film, Paula (Bergman) is deliberately and gradually manipulated by her husband, Gregory (Boyer), into believing she is insane. Paula’s late aunt’s priceless jewels are hidden ...

What Can You Do About Instagram And Facebook Stalking You On Websites Accessed Through Their Apps

12Sep

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IN OTHER NEWS, SOCIAL MEDIA

What Can You Do About Instagram And Facebook Stalking You On Websites Accessed Through Their Apps

Social media platforms have had some bad press in recent times, largely prompted by the vast extent of their data collection. Now Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has upped the ante. Not content with following every move you make on its apps, Meta has reportedly devised a way to also know everything you do in external websites accessed through its apps. Why is it going to such lengths? And is there a way to avoid this surveillance? ‘Injecting’ code to follow you Meta has a custom in-app browser that operates on Facebook, Instagram and any website you might click through to from both these apps. Now ex-Google engineer and privacy researcher Felix Krause has discovered this proprietary browser has additional program code inserted into it. Krause developed a tool that f...

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL MEDIA

The History Of Emoticons

An emoticon is most often used to express the mood of the writer through the use of letters and punctuation to form a facial expression. They serve to improve the communication of simple text by informing the receiver of the intended tone and temper of the writer. An example would be a sarcastic statement that would be lost in plain text but is saved by the use of a smiley face. The word, emoticon, is formed by blending the English words icon and emotion. After years of usage, many internet forums and messenger services as well as many games played online have replaced the typed text with a paired image. For instance, if you typed a colon for eyes and parenthesis for a mouth, this text would be replaced with the familiar yellow smiley face that is commonly known. These corresponding image...

4Jul

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL MEDIA

Your Next Password Might Be Emojis

Would you rather unlock your smartphone with a plain four-digit PIN or with a smiley-face emoji? Would it be easier and more pleasant to remember “

,” for example, or “2476”? An alternate choice for unlocking a smartphone. Lydia Kraus et al., 'On the Use of Emojis in Mobile Authentication,' 2017., CC BY-ND Smartphone users commonly use emojis to express moods, emotions and nuances in emails and text messages – and even communicate entire messages only with emojis. In 2015, a British company tried using emoji passcodes in place of PINs at bank ATMs. But there had been no formal study of how easy they were to use, or how secure they were in comparison to other methods, like PINs. To learn more, in the lab and in the real world, a team of researchers from ...

The Enduring Appeal Of Tumblr Reveals The Potency Of The Web’s Cultural Memory

28Jun

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IN OTHER NEWS, SOCIAL MEDIA

The Enduring Appeal Of Tumblr Reveals The Potency Of The Web’s Cultural Memory

When tech billionaire Elon Musk made a deal to acquire Twitter in April 2022, many Twitter users threatened to shut down their accounts and migrate elsewhere online. Tumblr – a microblogging platform launched in 2007 long known as a laboratory for social justice causes and burgeoning fan cultures – became one contender. However, many Twitter users proposing a migration to Tumblr seemed to be those who had abandoned the site only a few years prior. In 2018, Tumblr content deemed sexually explicit – or NSFW – was banned. The controversial policy led to a mass exodus from the site, the so-called Tumblr apocalypse. Both as a communication researcher and early era user of Tumblr, I’ve contemplated the site’s unique place in internet culture. And in the years following the NSFW ban, I’ve see...