Overview: Politics

the “crowd”—the concept, more so than the reality—was born in fin-de-siècle Paris... the fascination and fear of crowds obscures their reality and reach... But here’s the rub: “le crowd” is, in part, a mythical creature... less a feature of the modern political landscape than a creature of Le Bon’s private nightscape the “mob” that took the Bast…

THE PARALLELS BETWEEN the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming.... both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.

There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes... We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump.

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

Facebook makes billions of editorial decisions every day. And often they are bad editorial decisions — steering people to sensational, one-sided, or just plain inaccurate stories. The fact that these decisions are being made by algorithms rather than human editors doesn’t make Facebook any less responsible for the harmful effect on its users and t…

will stream Trump’s rallies directly each night and feature pre-and post-event commentary... a way for the campaign to circumvent the mainstream media ... says as much about Trump’s future in media as it does about Facebook’s.

I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

voters feel let down by the BBC’s coverage being hampered by impartiality rules... we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigners, are seeking by a process of nods and winks to let you know: ‘Hey, this is where you belong. Your people are here.’”

Decline of text in favour of videos means more Trumps and Berlusconis around the world... the internet which was the last word-centred public space after the decline of print journalism, is capitulating to the television format... public opinion in the age of television is more a set of “emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the …

To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head is high... the mastery of such intelligent, kind-hearted, and considered disagreement emerges as a supreme art of living And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so …

two products, Springboard and Time Inc. Connect to help editors source content from contributors, some for traditional editorial content and some for native or branded content... a way for editors to create more content around specific topics or events rather than just getting content on the cheap... gathering ... people with some degree of social…

This paper will explore and critique the logic and motivations behind the position that these content providers/aggregators are technology companies rather than media companies, as well as the communications policy implications associated with accepting or rejecting this position... The final section discusses why it is important that these online…

The CIA wants to make sure that the privacy rights of this fictional character aren’t violated.

the reality-based community... people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality... That’s not the way the world really works anymore... We’re an empire... we create our own reality. ... Trump is building on the foundation laid by Karl Rove and other great American fabulists, but he’s doing something funda…

when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

at The Information, the subscription-based tech news publisher, comments and community aren’t just intact — they’re a selling point... The Information puts its members front and center. Subscribers get their own bio pages... its subscription call to action entreats visitors not to get access to great information or level up their tech and media k…

All hail the Trump-o-Meter, a short post on Medium

Quick response to Baekdael’s Are you under estimating prototyping?, over on Medium: "Your excellent post reminds me of a participation project a few years ago for a government organisation. Ostensibly, it was going to ‘open up’ EU decisionmaking to the public ..."

in 2016, the criticism from Hannity and a vocal faction of the conservative news media reached a fever pitch... full-blown, searing criticism. Even figures like Ryan and Cruz, considered by most to have iron-clad conservative credentials, were no longer safe... an incidental twist, considering how Republicans helped foster the growth of the conser…

a lot of media sources you don’t recognize ... a new and distinctive sort of operation ... political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook... engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the news feed... Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle... together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in med…

a research paper ... found depressing proof that the web is fuelling segregation.... matched the attitudes of those who did and did not have broadband with data on partisan hostility... Greater use of the web ensured that an admirer of Jon Stewart would think that conservatives were not just mistaken but stupid, or a viewer of Fox News would wor…

In response to "The Tyranny of Agile"... Don’t get me wrong — in theory it sounds great to release half-checked, bug-ridden websites for your users to check in the name of agile... But websites delivering actual governmental services really badly IRL can ruin people’s lives...

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

While our experience with political Facebook posts suggests, anecdotally, that the thrust of the story is correct, we cannot confirm the authenticity of the study... Our efforts to reach Rantic before publication were unsuccessful, and Wired has since retracted its story.

Trump’s ability to avoid the political immolation that usually follows overt displays of racism, sexism, pathological dishonesty, or gross incompetence from a presidential candidate has led to a common refrain among political types: “Nothing matters.”... I’ve always found this reply to be a bit silly and overstated... a few political truths that …

A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

47% of Clinton supporters and 31% of Trump supporters say they have zero close friends who support the opposing candidate... The most segregated groups (those with the highest responses of “no friends supporting the opponent”) were young and black people.. Fewer than half the country has even had a conversation with someone from the opposing side’…

Cognitive ease is the concept of which when you hear something repeatedly, your brain starts to form connections around it, thus making it easier for you to process later. And since we prefer things to be simple and easy, things that are easy to think about generally makes us feel happier... for newspapers it’s part of the problem that we all face…

You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already... The real game is hardening your own support in ways dramatic enough to be picked up by the mass media ... the easiest way of doing that is to pick a rollicking fight... Lacking an established political mac…