Gender Equality 0 Internet 1

This from The Verge: Emma Watson nude photo threats were apparently a plot to kill 4chan.

In which, emmayouarenext.com is revealed to be a hoax and a mightily murky one at that. But the thing that gets me is this:

The organizer says that emmayouarenext.com reached 48 million visitors, 7 million Facebook shares and likes, and 3 million Twitter mentions.

As of 10:43 24/09/14, by comparison only 96,199 men (myself proudly included) have signed the #heforshe commitment.

These numbers are *seriously* out of whack.

Video killed the internet star

An interesting piece from The Verge.

What happens to literacy when the internet turns into a giant TV station?

Personally, I skip video in the same way that I used to skip jpegs on the web 20 years ago. It's far too slow a means of conveying information: I can skim read 200 words in about 10 seconds at a depth of understanding that's more than enough to know if I want to read any bits of it in more detail. Then I can lob it into Pocket or whatever. Video? Too clunky; too resistant to efficient archiving; too manipulative...too slow, frankly.

It's like 1995 all over again...

It's all repeats nowadays - online mindfulness

[Reposting this one from last year in lieu of having the time to write anything new at the moment. Normal service will be resumed in a couple of weeks after IBC...]

One of the things I've been increasingly puzzling about recently is the disconnect between our online lives and our real ones; the personas if you like that we present to people in the real world and the ones that we forge for ourselves online.

There's a tradition of this, of course. Back in the early days of the internet, it was possible to have an enormous amount of fun in the Usenet groups you frequented by pretending to be a 16 year old schoolgirl from Helsinki. Certainly fun when troll-baiting. But with the rise of social media and its interconnecting webs of likes and dislikes, follows and retweets, our online personalities are designed to be much more faithful extensions of ourselves. The problem is, we don't treat them that way.

Maybe it's because our online relationships are mediated via the keyboard, and even with the rich complexities of language - and the less subtle interventions of emoticons - we are always a step removed. But it seems that this is particularly the case when it comes to mindfulness. A quick quip, a sarcastic comment...it is all too easy for us to participate in conversations that we perhaps wouldn't chose to in real life. I've lost count of the times I've been within a button press of tweeting something or commenting on something on Facebook and then pulled back and run through the usual quick Buddhist mantra: is it kind? Is it necessary?

Often it's not, and at least online there is a delete button (depending on how Facebook is running its privacy policy that week). But, again in Buddhist parlance, right thinking and right speech should also lead to right typing and our online relationships - ephemeral sometimes though they may be - are poorer when this isn't so.

Allons-y-up

Despite having spent several years now writing about sports broadcasting's most prestigious events, I have never managed to write much about my personal favourite, Le Tour de France.

So, in the spirit of slight randomness, here's a picture of some sheep and a link to an article about Sony’s 4K World Cup Workflow instead which I wrote for the good people at Red Shark.

And with that, it's back to the IBC grindstone...

Slenderman and creepypasta

An interesting piece from The Verge that lifts the lid on the collision of memes and teenagers and the possible creation of a moral panic (let's see if the Daily Mail jumps on this one).

I dunno, we just had to make do with mashing up D&D and The Diceman in my day...

'Slenderman' is the new 'devil made me do it'

70 years on

Can think of few better illustrations of the difference that seven decades have made to Europe than this series of then and now pictures that the Huffington Post created…

More here: D-Day Landing Sites Then And Now: 11 Striking Images That Bring The Past And Present Together

Life - quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Technician, we want you to build a component...

A really interesting article from the Grauniad which details the activities of a firm in London that's using smartphone apps to track every waking moment of their employee's lives. Is it voluntary? No, not exactly (which raises some rather vexing human rights issues) but what's more it's seen as simply an extension of the quantified self movement where everything we do is analysed, measured and shared.

Me, I think I may pass. Have enjoyed checking my times on a couple of cycling apps, but this is all starting to get both too narcissistic and too creepy; another instance where we don't have to rely on governments collecting data on us as we're all too happy to volunteer it ourselves.

Bread and circuses? Seems all you need is an app that says 'well done'.

These companies are tracking the fitness of their employees

As English prog band Twelfth Night chanted on their excellent 'We are Sane' track back in the very early 1980s:

"Technician we want you to build a component
For each of our workers to be with them always
At all time watch closely so we can keep track of
Their actions their interests their morals their time out...
...The maintenance of power can be so fulfilling
Just as long as all the slaves are willing"

Quite.