e176. What Was Social Networking?

Instagram recently made an announcement that they were going to be shifting their social networking focus away from “photos”. This decision prompted a collective “WTF?” from the users who saw it. You see, Instagram claims that their primary business isn’t photos (despite having a whole motif from their logo to their name based around polaroid…

Call for Comments: Photo Sharing isn’t for Photos?!?

From Katya: Instagram recently announced that the photo sharing app is no longer a place to share photos. The actual design implications aren’t clear nor is the actual goal. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says that the app’s goal is “to…entertain” with a focus on “Creators, Video, Shopping and Messaging.” Which reads as a pretty accurate…

Call For Comments: A Think Piece on Thought Experiments

From Mav: A few weeks ago, I started one of those conversations we’ve all been a part of on social media. I made a Facebook post where I postulated that Luke Skywalker was a fucking psychopath who just likes doing murder. Of course, this is a variation on a thought experiment that Star Wars fans…

Call for Comments: Performing the Minimum and Virtual Protesting

From Katya: This episode is more than a bit overdue but it’s especially pervading online culture right now: online activism. The internet has unquestionably opened up historic new options for sharing information, fund raising, and promoting causes and events. But for smart phones and the internet, most of us would not know the names of…

e112. Social Media and Free Speech

If you’re unlucky enough to live on the planet Earth, you probably know that it’s not doing terribly well lately. We’ve had a global pandemic sweeping through every corner of the globe that has largely shut business and commerce to a halt, tanking the economy. And if you live in America, and the people dying…

Call for Comments: Social Media and Free Speech

From Hannah: At the end of March (so basically, an entire decade ago) we released our episode “News By Meme,” which dealt with how social media spreads news and the consequences with this — especially content that is inaccurate. Briefly in that episode, we discussed the policies social media companies like Facebook are adopting to…

Call For Comments: Avatars and the Virtual You

From Mav: In the last few days an interesting meme of sorts has popped up on Facebook: people posting their “Facebook Avatars,” stylized cartoonish self-made images generated with Facebook’s mobile app. They’re cute enough, but rather innocuous and I didn’t think much of it. I did play around with it for 5 min and made…

e60. Poverty Shaming

Have you ever been perusing Facebook or Twitter and run across a meme that maybe seemed a little funny at first, but when you thought about it, you just thought “hey, isn’t that just making fun of people for being poor?” Maybe the meme wasn’t funny at all…. maybe it was just a forward from…

Call for Comments: Mediated Politicking

From Katya: Sick of hearing about electoral politics? Prepare to hear about it some more! (Hopefully not as bad as that family member that we often encounter over the holidays.) Media has always had a huge role in politics. In the U.S., we have the myth that  JFK won the presidency because TV  (which is…