5 votes

Danah Boyd - The messy fourth estate

1 comment

  1. super_james
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    I think this is pretty topical for Tildes in general. Especially so given the vitriolic arguments & meta stuff lately. danah boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and the...

    I think this is pretty topical for Tildes in general. Especially so given the vitriolic arguments & meta stuff lately.

    danah boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder/president of Data & Society.

    An excerpt of what the article is trying to do:

    Many Americans — especially conservative Americans — do not trust contemporary news organizations. This “crisis” is well-trod territory, but the focus on fact-checking, media literacy, and business models tends to obscure three features of the contemporary information landscape that I think are poorly understood:

    • Differences in worldview are being weaponized to polarize society.
    • We cannot trust organizations, institutions, or professions when they’re abstracted away from us.
    • Economic structures built on value extraction cannot enable healthy information ecosystems.

    Let me begin by apologizing for the heady article, but the issues that we’re grappling with are too heady for a hot take. Please read this to challenge me, debate me, offer data to show that I’m wrong. I think we’ve got an ugly fight in front of us, and I think we need to get more sophisticated about our thinking, especially in a world where foreign policy is being boiled down to 140 characters.

    1 vote