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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years

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Surveillance Capitalism is just capitalism, plus surveillance

You've probably heard Zuboff's excellent coinage "Surveillance Capitalism" and perhaps you've read the paper it was introduced in, or the book that it led to. Today, I've published a response to that book, "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism." https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 I wrote "How to Destroy..." after reading Zuboff's book and realizing that while I shared her alarm about how Big Tech was exercising undue influence over us, I completely disagreed with her thesis about the source of that influence and what should be done about it.

Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a "rogue capitalism," a system that has used machine learning to effectively control our minds and shape our behavior so that we can no longer serve as market actors whose purchase decisions promote good firms and products over bad ones. Because of that, Big Tech has a permanent advantage, one that can't be addressed through traditional means like breakups or consent decrees, nor can it be analyzed through traditional privacy lenses.

But I think that's wrong. It's giving Big Tech far too much credit. I just don't buy the thesis that Big Tech used Big Data to create a mind-control ray to sell us fidget spinners, and that Cambridge Analytica hijacked it to make us all racists. So I wrote "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism," a short book that delivers a different thesis: Big Tech is a monopoly problem. In fact, it's just a part of a wider monopoly problem that afflicts every sector of our global economy. Accidentally and deliberately, monopolies create all kinds of malignant outcomes. If the company that has a monopoly on search starts serving wrong answers, people will believe them - not because of mind control, but because of dominance. But monopolies have an even graver failure-mode: when a large, profitable industry collapses down to 4 or 5 companies, it's easy for those companies to agree on what they think policy should be. And being monopolists, they have lots of spare cash to convert that agreement to actual policy. What's more, once an industry is monopolized, everyone qualified to understand and regulate it probably came from one of the dominant companies. Think of how the "good" Obama FCC chairman was a former Comcast exec and the "bad" Trump FCC chair is a former Verizon lawyer. There's a name for regulatory outcomes driven by collusion among monopolists whose regulators come from their own ranks. We call them: "Conspiracies." When social scientists investigate conspiracists, they find people whose beliefs are the result of real trauma (like losing a loved one to opiods) and real conspiracies (the Sackler family and other Big Pharma barons suborning their regulators). The combination of real trauma and real conspiracies gives ALL conspiracies explanatory power. This is brilliantly documented in Anna Merlan's "Republic of Lies," one of the most important books on the rise of conspiratorial thinking I've read. https://boingboing.net/2019/09/21/from-opioids-to-antivax.html Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem, but not because it accidentally led to a working mind-control ray and then turned it over to Nazis.

It's a problem because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo. And Big Tech DOES exert control over us, but not with mind-control rays. Lock-in (and laws that support it) allows Big Tech to decide how we can use our devices, who can fix them, and when they must be thrown away. Lock-in is an invitation to totalitarianism: the Chinese government observed the fact that Apple alone could decide which apps can run on Iphones, then ordered Apple to remove apps that allowed Chinese people privacy from the state. I'm sure that the Uyghurs in concentration camps and the Falun Gong members having their organs harvested are relieved that Apple abetted their surveillance for reasons other than mere marketing. This is the core of my critique, the reason I wrote this book: we should be suspicious of all corporate control over our lives, and should insist on nothing less than absolute technological self-determination. The idea that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product," suggests the simplistic solution of just charging for everything. But the reality is that in a monopoly, you're the product irrespective of whether you're paying. We deserve to be more than products. I am so grateful to Onezero for the incredible look-and-feel of my new book. It's a free read on their site, with a really fantastic new nav system that will help you pick up where you left off. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the spectacular artwork that Shira Inbar did for the book, and the tireless efforts of my editor, Brian Merchant, who championed it internally and is ultimately responsible for the brilliant package you see before you. I'm also excited to note that this will be shortly coming out as a print book, doubtless just as beautiful as this digital edition. I know it's a longread, but I hope you'll give it a try. Big Tech NEEDS a corrective, and that corrective - antimonopoly enforcement - is part of a global movement that addresses deep, systemic problems in every sector. This is a moment for us to seize, but we have to understand where the problem really lies.

#pluralistic

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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The hilarious headline in the Daily Beast yesterday read like a cross of Clickhole and Izvestia circa 1937: “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media? FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX’S EARS?”

The story, fed to poor Beast media writer Lloyd Grove by certain unnamed embittered personages at the Intercept, is that their former star writer Greenwald appears on, and helps provide content for — gasp! — right-wing media! It’s nearly the exclusive point of the article. Greenwald goes on TV with… those people! The Beast’s furious journalisming includes a “spot check” of the number of Fox items inspired by Greenwald articles (“dozens”!) and multiple passages comparing Greenwald to Donald Trump, the ultimate insult in #Resistance world. This one made me laugh out loud:

In a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.

This, folks, is from the Daily Beast, a publication that has spent much of the last five years huffing horseshit into headlines, from Bountygate to Bernie’s Mittens to classics like SNL: Alec Baldwin's Trump Admits 'I Don't Care About America'. The best example was its “investigation” revealing that three of Tulsi Gabbard’s 75,000 individual donors — the late Princeton professor Stephen Cohen, peace activist Sharon Tennison, and a person called “Goofy Grapes” who may or may not have worked for Russia Today host Lee Camp — were, in their estimation, Putin “apologists.”

…

For years now, this has been the go-to conversation-ender for prestige media pundits and Twitter trolls alike, directed at any progressive critic of the political mainstream: you’re a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately), an “insurrectionist”! The Beast in its Greenwald piece used the most common of the Twitter epithets: “Trump-defender.” Treachery and secret devotion to right-wing politics are also the default explanation for the growing list of progressives making their way onto Fox of late, from Greenwald to Kyle Kulinski to Aaron Mate to Jimmy Dore to Cornel West.

The truth is, Trump conservatives and ACLU-raised liberals like myself, Greenwald, and millions of others do have real common cause, against an epistemic revolution taking hold in America’s political and media elite. The traditional liberal approach to the search for truth, which stresses skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement that Plato himself would have loved, one that believes knowledge is too dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of “experts.” It’s anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum.

…

Follow the logic. Isikoff, who himself denounced the Steele dossier, and said in the exchange he essentially agreed with Meier’s conclusions, went on to wonder aloud how right a thing could be, if it’s being embraced by The Federalist and Tucker Carlson. Never mind the more salient point, which is that Meier was “ignored by other media” because that’s how #Resistance media deals with unpleasant truths: it blacks them out, forcing reporters to spread the news on channels like Fox, which in turn triggers instant accusations of unreliability and collaborationism.

It’s a Catch-22. Isikoff’s implication is a journalist can’t make an impact if the only outlet picking up his or her work is The Federalist, but “reputable” outlets won’t touch news (and sometimes will even call for its suppression) if it questions prevailing notions of Conventional Wisdom.

These tactics have worked traditionally because for people like Meier, or myself, or even Greenwald, who grew up in the blue-leaning media ecosystem, there’s nothing more ominous professionally than being accused of aiding the cause of Trump or the right-wing. It not only implies intellectual unseriousness, but racism, sexism, reactionary meanness, greed, simple wrongness, and a long list of other hideous/evil characteristics that could render a person unemployable in the regular press. The label of “Trump-defender” isn’t easily removed, so most media people will go far out of their way to avoid even accidentally incurring it.

…

The consistent pattern with the Trump-era press, which also happens to be the subject of so many of those Greenwald stories the Beast and the Intercept employees are complaining about, is that information that is true but doesn’t cut the right way politically is now routinely either non-reported or actively misreported.

Whether it’s Hunter Biden’s laptop or the Brian Sicknick affair or infamous fictions like the “find the fraud” story, the public increasingly now isn’t getting the right information from the bulk of the commercial press corps. That doesn’t just hurt Trump and conservatives, it misinforms the whole public. As Thomas Frank just pointed out in The Guardian, the brand of politicized reporting that informed the lab-leak fiasco risks obliterating the public’s faith in a whole range of institutions, a disaster that would not be borne by conservatives alone.

But this is only a minor point, compared to the more immediate reason the constant accusations of treachery and Trumpism aimed at dissenters should be ignored.

From the embrace of oligarchical censorship to the aggressive hawking of “noble lies” like Russiagate to the constant humbugging of Enlightenment values like due process to the nonstop scolding of peasants unschooled in the latest academic jargon, the political style of the modern Democratic mainstream isn’t just elitist and authoritarian, it’s almost laughably off-putting. In one moment it’s cheering for a Domestic War on Terror and in the next, declaring war on a Jeopardy contestant flashing the “A-OK” sign. It’s Dick Cheney meets Robin DiAngelo, maybe the most loathsome conceivable admixture. Who could be surprised a politically diverse group finds it obnoxious?

During the Trump years conventional wisdom didn’t just take aim at Trumpism. The Beltway smart set used the election of Trump to make profound arguments against traditional tenets of democracy, as well as “populism,” (which increasingly became synonymous with “the unsanctioned exercise of political power by the unqualified”), and various liberal traditions undergirding the American experiment. Endless permutations of the same argument were made over and over. Any country in which a Trump could be elected had a “too much democracy” problem, the “marketplace of ideas” must be a flawed model if it leads to people choosing Trump, the “presumption of innocence” was never meant to apply to the likes of Trump, and so on.

…

By last summer, after the patriotic mania of Russiagate receded, the newest moral panic that the kente-cloth-clad Schumers and Pelosis were suddenly selling, in solidarity with famed progressive change agents like Bank of America, PayPal, Apple, ComCast, and Alphabet, was that any nation capable of electing Trump must always have been a historically unredeemable white supremacist construct, the America of the 1619 Project. The original propaganda line was that “half” of Trump supporters were deplorable racists, then it was all of them, and then, four years in, the whole country and all its traditions were deemed deplorable.

Now, when the statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt came down, there was a new target, separate and apart from Trump. The whole history of American liberalism was indicted as well, denounced as an ineffectual trick of the oppressor, accomplishing nothing but giving legitimacy to racial despotism.

The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because a central part of the liberal’s identity was skepticism and doubt, most of all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone owned, it was at best a fleeting consensus, and in our country everyone, down to the last kook, at least theoretically got a say. We celebrated the fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth of things.

This new elitist politics of the #Resistance era (I won’t ennoble it by calling it liberalism) has an opposite view. Truth, they believe, is properly guarded by “experts” and “authorities” or (as Jon Karl put it) “serious people,” who alone can be trusted to decide such matters as whether or not the Hunter Biden laptop story can be shown to the public. A huge part of the frustration that the general public feels is this sense of being dictated to by an inaccessible priesthood, whether on censorship matters or on the seemingly daily instructions in the ear-smashing new vernacular of the revealed religion, from “Latinx” to “birthing persons.”

In the tone of these discussions is a constant subtext that it’s not necessary to ask the opinions of ordinary people on certain matters. As Plato put it, philosophy is “not for the multitude.” The plebes don’t get a say on speech, their views don’t need to be represented in news coverage, and as for their political choices, they’re still free to vote — provided their favorite politicians are removed from the Internet, their conspiratorial discussions are banned (ours are okay), and they’re preferably all placed under the benevolent mass surveillance of “experts” and “professionals.��

Add the total absence of a sense of humor and the inability of “moral clarity” politics to co-exist with any form of disagreement, and there’s a reason why traditional liberals are suddenly finding it easier to talk with old conservative rivals on Fox than the new authoritarian Snob-Lords at CNN, MSNBC, the Daily Beast or The Intercept. For all their other flaws, Fox types don’t fall to pieces and write group letters about their intolerable suffering and “trauma” if forced to share a room with someone with different political views. They’re also not terrified to speak their minds, which used to be a virtue of the American left (no more).

From the moment Donald Trump was elected, popular media began denouncing a broad cast of characters deemed responsible. Nativists, misogynists and racists were first in line, but from there they started adding new classes of offender: Greens, Bernie Bros, “both-sidesers,” Russia-denialists, Intellectual dark-webbers, class-not-racers, anti-New-Normalers, the “Substackerati,” and countless others, casting every new group out with the moronic admonition that they’re all really servants of the “far right” and “grifters” (all income earned in service of non-#Resistance politics is “grifting”). By now conventional wisdom has denounced everyone but its own little slice of aristocratic purity as the “far right.”

#matt taibbi #substack #glenn greenwald #journalism in action

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nancydhooper · 3 years

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Meet Kimberly and Yashira, Two High School Students Leading the Fight for Broadband Access

Kimberly Vazquez and Yashira “Yoshi” Valenzuela are two Baltimore high school students who live in households that experience frequent power cuts, particularly when too many electronics are plugged in at once. When their classes went virtual last year, it didn’t take long to realize they had a serious problem. Participating in class required connectivity to high-speed, broadband internet, and the low-cost plans their families could afford did not cut it. Together, they lead the student-led advocacy group Students Organizing a Multicultural and Open Society (SOMOS), and have organized student boycotts and letter writing campaigns, testified in front of the Baltimore City Council and State Assembly, and ultimately pressured Comcast to agree to raise the minimum speeds on its low-cost plan.

While it was COVID-19 that spurred Kimberly and Yoshi to act, the digital divide has existed for decades and has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities, who are less likely to have access to broadband internet at home. Not having broadband access means you don’t have access to equitable opportunities, whether in education, work, health care, or just connecting with a rapidly digitizing world. Broadband access is a basic utility, and it should be treated that way.

Kimberly and Yashira are now about to graduate. In this week’s episode of At Liberty, we talk with them about what it’s like to live without high-speed broadband internet as a student and how they continue to fight the digital divide.

What spurred you into action for broadband access?

KIMBERLY: I was seeing a problem [with speeds under Comcast’s low-cost plan] when at the end of the school year of 2019-2020 where I was having issues with going into Google Docs, I kept on being disconnected. And then during the summer my little sister … was going to summer school and I was going into meetings and I was struggling to go into the meetings and it was only us two … And so I already realized that this was going to be a problem for the next school year.

Comcast’s low-cost plan wasn’t providing the upload and download speeds required to meet the Federal Communication Commission’s definition of broadband, which is already outdated.

KIMBERLY: It was difficult hearing Comcast representatives falsely promoting this package when at best it only provided Internet for one or two devices, and [to hear them] them claiming that high speed. But it doesn’t it didn’t seem high speed to me if I couldn’t get online at the same time as my younger sister. [They told me] it was probably because I had 20 devices plugged into one outlet, which in my neighborhood, if I did that, I would have no electricity. So I don’t think that’s the problem. And in fact, it was a lot of blaming it on me and on customers, [more] than really looking at their service and really saying, you know, maybe it isn’t good.

How did you expand the campaign for broadband access across Baltimore?

YOSHI: We decided that there is more that needs to be done in the city. There are millions of students, not only in Baltimore but across the world, who currently do not have access to devices and good quality internet. We planned and attended other online press conferences with so many other nonprofits across the country. And we garnered a lot of grassroots support from the people in Baltimore City and across the country.

KIMBERLY: This issue was getting coverage in BuzzFeed, in the New York Times. And so when we’re putting so much pressure on them, there’s only so much they can do to defend themselves. And so, I can personally say as an Internet Essentials (Comcast) customer, even with the doubling of speeds, I’m still having problems. And I believe it’s because they only increase their upload speeds two megabits per second. That’s what you need to go into video conferencing. Obviously right now with everything online and with video conferencing being such a daily task, there needs to be more upload speeds …. I actually even purchased a portable charger because now I have to be on my phone for classes … I use my own data a lot of the time in order for my sisters to use the internet for their classes.

What would you tell other students struggling with lack of broadband access?

YOSHI: My advice to other students who are currently struggling is to reach out for help, like communicate with your teachers, administrators at school, let them know what your situation is, let them know that you’re struggling and come up with a plan where you can complete the assignments at a reasonable time that also works with your teacher. On top of that, don’t stress yourself out too much.

For students who want to make a difference, how can they get involved?

KIMBERLY: I was very shy. But I feel like what got me to being unapologetically myself was having a platform, having other people that I could relate to. SOMOS was a platform for me to connect to other students who were facing [similar issues]… a lot of our members are immigrants or children of immigrants or Latinx. Having the voice of groups that are minorities is great to put at the forefront because those are usually who get the worst of the worst if I’m being fair, as well as Black voices. So for me, I’ve seen that a lot of students hesitate in putting out their story, and so I just want to say that your voice does matter.

What would you say to President Biden and the FCC?

KIMBERLY: I really would like to see municipal broadband internet throughout the nation and first going into communities that are disproportionately cut off from internet. Funding is a good way to go, but as Yoshi said, talking to the community who knows what is going on and what they’re facing — they know what’s the best solution that will effectively help them.

You are both about to graduate. What’s next?

YOSHI: I’ll be going to University of Baltimore, I’m on a full ride [scholarship] thankfully. I will be studying public policy.

KIMBERLY: I’m actually going to go to Goucher College and I am potentially majoring in political science. Funny story: I wanted to be a forensic scientist, which I could still do and do advocacy work. But this just has amazed me and sparked something in me, such that I steered into political science. But I’ll still be in Baltimore.

YOSHI: Yeah, we’re going to talk every day, we’re still going to keep working and hopefully we’ll still keep working with SOMOS and this campaign and continue doing all this work, hopefully not forever, but for as long as we need to.

Nationwide, there have been significant gains in the fight to extend broadband access, indicating that the government is finally starting to treat it like the basic utility it is in today’s world. Congress created the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB), which will provide families with a $50 subsidy to afford broadband access during the pandemic, and the Emergency Connectivity Fund, which will help students connect. President Biden’s American Jobs Plan also prioritizes broadband access. Unfortunately, given the scope of this problem, the government needs to do more. The FCC must extend broadband access by improving the Lifeline program and ensuring the equitable and efficient rollout of the EBB in order to reach unserved and underserved communities, including those on Tribal lands. For their part, Congress and President Biden must bolster the EBB, pass the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, and work toward a permanent solution for broadband affordability. As Kimberly and Yoshi’s activism show us, for true equality, there must be broadband access for all.

https://soundcloud.com/aclu/meet-the-students-who-are-taking-on-comcast/s-z67wXRCuvwY

What you can do:

Broadband Access for All Now

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from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/meet-kimberly-and-yashira-two-high-school-students-leading-the-fight-for-broadband-access via http://www.rssmix.com/

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dipulb3 · 3 years

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Analysis: Why you won't find Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on British TV

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/analysis-why-you-wont-find-sean-hannity-and-tucker-carlson-on-british-tv/

Analysis: Why you won't find Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on British TV

“The mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol … could not have existed in a country that hadn’t been radicalized by the likes of [Fox News hosts] Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and swayed by biased news coverage,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan.

But are the airwaves of any democracy free of this kind of harmful propaganda and downright fiction? The United Kingdom, for one, comes pretty close.

Though the UK media scene is defined in part by a freewheeling and often partisan tabloid press with its own share of conspiracy theories, its TV news channels largely frame their coverage down the middle, with broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV maintaining high levels of public trust. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is no longer on air in the country after failing to generate a significant viewer base.

A big factor in this is media regulator Ofcom, which enforces rules on impartiality and accuracy for all news broadcasters. Those who breach the rules can be censured or fined — putting pressure on TV channels to play stories fairly straight.

Russian state-funded news channel RT, for example, was slapped with a £200,000 ($272,000) penalty for repeatedly breaking impartiality rules in its 2018 coverage of the poisonings of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, as well as the conflict in Syria. It has not been fined since.

“What the impartiality rules do is ensure you cannot have the kind of shock jock culture — [a] far right, or indeed far left, one-sided interpretation of events,” said Steven Barnett, a professor of media and communication at the University of Westminster.

The UK system isn’t perfect. A review of BBC coverage ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum found that its main news program was more negative on the European Union than Russian President Vladimir Putin. And two new media ventures expected to launch shortly could again push the limits of what’s allowed. But according to experts, the framework has protected against the kind of disinformation peddled by Fox News in the United States.

No Fox News

Ofcom, which was established in 2003, has two important standards that the news broadcasters it licenses must abide by — “due impartiality” and “due accuracy.”

This does not mean that equal time needs to be given on television and radio to both sides of an issue. But broadcasters do have a responsibility at least to acknowledge opposing viewpoints, and to quickly correct “significant mistakes.”

When Fox News was on the air in the United Kingdom, its top stars were found to have violated the regulator’s rules.

Ofcom said that a Hannity program about President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting travel from seven majority-Muslim countries didn’t do enough to surface the viewpoints of those who opposed the order. Ofcom also said that a separate Carlson broadcast following the 2017 Manchester terror attack — which included claims that UK authorities had done nothing to stop terrorism or to protect “thousands of underage girls” from rape and abuse — did not adequately reflect alternate perspectives.

Fox News was pulled off air in the United Kingdom later in 2017 when Murdoch, the billionaire chairman of News Corp and Fox News’ parent company, was seeking government approval to purchase the shares he didn’t own of European pay TV network Sky. (He ended up selling his Sky holdings to Comcast.)

21st Century Fox, the network’s parent company at the time, said it made the decision because Fox News had attracted “only a few thousand viewers across the day” in the United Kingdom, and it didn’t make commercial sense to continue broadcasting. But the move also came amid scrutiny from Ofcom, which had previously slammed Fox’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against former network boss Roger Ailes and former star host Bill O’Reilly, calling their alleged conduct “deeply disturbing.”

Such warnings hint at the trouble Fox News could have faced had it stuck it out during the Trump era.

Hefty penalties awarded to other channels, such as RT, have effectively communicated the consequences of slipping up to media executives, said Trevor Barnes, a TV and radio compliance consultant and former Ofcom official.

“They’re aware that if they misbehave, they’ll be hit with a fine,” he said.

The United States, meanwhile, doesn’t have these kinds of rules — and hasn’t since the Reagan era, when the Federal Communications Commission stopped enforcing the so-called Fairness Doctrine for TV and radio stations. Historians believe the demise of this rule, which required broadcasters to present a variety of views on issues of public importance, paved the way for the explosion of conservative talk radio in the late 1980s and 1990s, which later served as a model for Fox. Those talk radio shows continue to be popular today.

As a cable network, Fox News wouldn’t have been bound by the doctrine, which only applied to broadcast channels. But Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University and Appradab contributor, said its removal changed the rules of the game.

“It served as a kind of check,” Zelizer said. “It was always on the mind of everyone who was in the news business.”

Now, even members of the Murdoch family are reckoning with the role Fox News has played. James Murdoch, who made a dramatic break from his family last year when he resigned from the board of News Corp, said in a statement on Friday that “spreading disinformation” has “real world consequences.” While he did not mention Fox News by name, it was clear his focus was on the network controlled by his father and brother.

“Many media property owners have as much responsibility for this as the elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies. We hope the awful scenes we have all been seeing will finally convince those enablers to repudiate the toxic politics they have promoted once and forever,” James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, said in a joint statement to the Financial Times.

New networks may test the system

The United Kingdom has largely watched the Capitol riot and its aftermath in horror.

“The events … have been the ultimate demonstration of what can happen when those fundamental pillars of democracy break down: accurate information [and] fair information,” Barnett said.

But two outlets expected to debut shortly in the United Kingdom could test the bounds of the regulatory system, including Ofcom’s appetite for enforcement.

Murdoch’s UK operation, which still controls three big British newspapers — The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times — is working on a new video venture, having recently received a license under the name News UK TV. Details haven’t been announced.

Meanwhile, upstart competitor GB News, which recently secured £60 million ($81 million) from investors, is hiring journalists as it prepares to launch a 24-hour news channel.

“Many British people are crying out for a news service that is more diverse and more representative of their values and concerns,” former BBC host Andrew Neil, who will serve as the chairman of GB News, said in a statement last week. Neil was previously the editor of Murdoch’s Sunday Times and executive chairman of Sky TV.

Critics fear the News UK TV venture and GB News could move to take on the BBC and fill a perceived gap in right-wing broadcasting, sparking concerns about whether UK regulators are up to the task of maintaining due impartiality, or whether Britain could soon have its own Fox News-type problem.

Both outlets may play things fairly safe at first, and Barnes noted that the rules will give them some latitude.

“There’s no requirement under due impartiality for a channel not to have a bias,” he said. “All it requires is you reflect, to a pretty small degree, what the opposing viewpoint is.”

But Barnett is worried that over time, there could be a slow erosion of norms — combined with an anti-Ofcom push from Murdoch’s powerful papers, who may level criticisms of a “nanny state regulator telling us what we can and can’t say.” News Corp declined to comment.

“I will make a prediction that within a year we will see a concerted attack within the Murdoch press on Ofcom,” he said. And if support for the regulator fades, all bets will be off.

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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It’s Time for the Eternal September to End

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

For nearly 30 years, the internet’s culture has been defined by a corporation’s move that seemed to, without any care about what was left behind, ensure that a sense of order would never again drive the growth of this series of tubes.

This phenomenon is, in many ways, the central tension on which the modern internet is built. And it’s a tension that most people aren’t aware of, even though it is an undercurrent secretly framing our online interactions.

I am, of course, discussing the Eternal September, a 1993 move by AOL to allow its users into the free-for-all that is Usenet. In the decades since, the conflict that move created, although long forgotten today, lingers in the way that technical users and not-so-technical users interact.

And, in too many ways, it is the basis for digital conflicts that have nothing to do with back then and everything to do with right now.

It’s time to retire the Eternal September. Twenty-seven years is long enough.

“September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended.”

— Dave Fischer, a Usenet user, discussing the start of the Eternal September in 1993, the point at which the chaos created by mainstream interest in the internet began to overwhelm the early discussion forums that originally attracted technical users to computer labs on college campuses and pokey modem connections at homes.

At its root, perhaps we can blame AOL for all of this. Image: sarahe/Flickr

How the Eternal September set the stage for decades of online conflict

For decades, internet culture has struggled with the n00bs. For generations, as new people entered the digital gates, there was an inevitable sneer that awaited them as they hit the onramp.

If you’re not in the know, what do you know?

The internet is, of course, not alone in owning this dynamic. It plays out in all sorts of areas that traditionally have nothing to do with technology: High school, internships, sports teams, organized crime syndicates. The little guy knows nothing and has to work their way up. Most don’t. You get the idea.

But on the internet, we all technically should be on equal ground. After all, knowledge is at our fingertips at all times.

Yet tribalism has long defined the internet. We are built around subcultures upon subcultures, and these subcultures have only hardened over time, creating shells of insularity that have proven impenetrable.

And perhaps its most notable form came about in the mid-1990s, when the “Eternal September,” a concept involving the n00bs taking over Usenet, took hold. For those who don’t date back to this era, here’s the general gist: Each school year, thousands of new students would flock to Usenet groups for the first time, hoping to find community or learn from the folks already there. The problem was that they were green and didn’t really know much of anything, so they faced rejection until they got the gist.

In September of 1993, AOL added Usenet access, turning a controlled situation of steady ongoing community growth into something of a flood of never-ending n00bs. Suddenly, the social norms that the Usenet community was built around were broken at the seams, never to be repaired.

This was a major communal shift, and one that put early online users on the defensive. To put it simply, people were dismissive of their fellow users based on nothing other than the domain attached to their email address. It was an easy signifier; if you had an AOL.com email address, you were a dork, or beyond saving.

An essay on the commercialization of the internet, written in 1995 by MIT student Christopher R. Vincent, put the situation like this:

As accessing the Internet continues to grow easier for the novice user, it is inevitable that many of these social guidelines will fall to the wayside. This is not to say that new users should be denied access to Internet resources. It has been the first reflex in many newsgroups to flame any user who posted from an online service provider. Some of the larger providers, such as America Online have not received a very warm welcome to the network (note the formation of the alt.aol-sucks newsgroup). This reaction does not necessarily stem from elitism, but from a genuine fear that as more and more users appear, Usenet will fall apart. Indeed, this is a valid concern. The current system is not designed for the commercial-oriented direction the Internet is now taking.

Over time, the close association between AOL and lamers subsided, in part because our online access points evolved toward providers decided by local area, rather than consumer-oriented services.

So many flame wars fought over digital turf. Image: Anthony Cantin/Unsplash

But this dynamic of conflict and savvy emerged in other ways. When web-based communication alternatives emerged to replace Usenet, new types of turf wars appeared: Apple vs. Microsoft; open source vs. proprietary; Something Awful vs. Fark; Digg vs. Reddit; liberal bloggers vs. conservative bloggers; early adopters vs. technical laggards; iPhone vs. Android. You get the idea.

In many ways, these ideological battles of the digital age only found gasoline with the advent of social mediums, which helped to better connect people, but failed to account for the side effects that came with all that.

But the internet, early on, played into this tribalism in ways that allowed it to evolve into something dangerous.

“The newbies could not be forced to accept what we now understand as a central tenet of cyberlibertarianism: that cyberspace, too, was a place, separate from the world, and thus free. For it all to work, all the visionaries needed was for everyone to recognize a small set of self-evident truths.”

— Bradley Fidler, a researcher with the UCLA Computer Science Department, discussing in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing the rise of what he calls the Eternal October—the understanding that “it is no longer possible to pretend (no matter one’s privilege) that cyberspace can circumvent the politics of civilization.” At the time he wrote this, it was October 2016, ahead of a U.S. election that helped bring some scary forces into the world. I can only imagine how Fidler must feel in October of 2020.

The calendar never stops. Image: Eric Rothermel/Unsplash

Why, in many ways, the Eternal September is still going strong

Look, I’m not going to tell you that we have a constant influx of newbies hitting the internet at all times. That certainly is not what I mean when I describe the Eternal September as an ongoing thing.

But I do think that the spirit that led to the Eternal September becoming a landmark in the first place is still very much there. It has simply taken new forms.

There’s a modern term for what this is called, in fact: Gatekeeping. The idea that, because of your identity or lack of experience, you shouldn’t have access to an online community.

Now, to be clear, there are lots of kinds of gatekeeping in terms of the internet—for example, the technical barriers created by large companies to shape the broader network, whether internet service providers like Comcast or Verizon, or major tech firms like Google or Facebook. Those figures deservedly need their callouts.

But in this case, I’d like to focus on a particular cultural kind of gatekeeping, the kind that leaves people out for reasons of elitism, fear, or simple “othering.”

Earlier this month, a great example of this type of gatekeeping emerged on Twitter when a user claimed that they assumed anyone who used a mouse to program was a junior programmer. That user (rightly) got criticized over it—though I’ll pass on linking the viral tweet, because who needs to add to that kind of drama? But examples that don’t get called out in quite that way abound online, and they represent the way that users tend to focus on their own tribes.

Back in 2017, before our world became even more divided, CBC News columnist Ramona Pringle wrote a piece about how digital tribalism has proven a nasty side effect of highly amplified online echo chambers:

In and of themselves, tribes aren’t inherently bad. We all long to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and tribes fulfill that need. But where we get into trouble is when we introduce borders, which separate my land from your land, and by extension, my tribe from your tribe. When borders are violated, we fight. This, in broad strokes is the root of all war.

The Eternal September, in many ways, was the opening salvo in decades of division on the internet. And in the years since, it has only gotten worse.

In many ways, we understand the people around us even less than we did a few years ago. We aim for the jugular instead of the handshake. And by the time the word “compromise” is thrown around, it’s already too late. It’s a sign of weakness.

It is perhaps sad to think about, considering the early internet was built around utopian dreams. But it’s where we are. I’ll let you draw the through line between ’90s programmer/IT elitism and some of the internet’s modern day problems, because ultimately all those programmers helped lay the foundation for today’s tech infrastructure.

I’m still idealistic that some of that utopian spirit is out there, if you know where to look. But I wonder if, in the big fight for protecting netiquette, the early internet set a bad example for all the people that came after, who jumped in not looking for help, but looking for a fight. The initial separation between the normal and the technical that the Eternal September fostered underlined the tribalism that other internet users follow without even thinking about it. It discourages people from taking part in communities—especially those underrepresented in STEM fields—and sows the kinds of division that attract users to misinformation.

And I wonder if the same types of users who criticized the n00bs way back when are the same folks who can help get us back—by setting an open-arms example that other communities can follow.

At a time when Godwin’s law is less an observation and more a genuine worry, perhaps there are bigger fish to fry than whether or not someone asked a technical question the right way … and those technical users might need to shift their plan of attack accordingly.

“We need to make sure that Rust is prepared to welcome people who are just learning about Rust today. We don’t want anyone to feel like they’re late to the party.”

— Tim McNamara, a software developer and writer who focuses on the Rust programming language, making a case for leaning into the Eternal September, as far as the Rust community goes. It’s a refreshing take from someone in a technical community, and an approach that others should follow.

So, you might be wondering: Why write about this topic, and why now?

Honestly, what got me thinking about it was one specific reaction to a recent piece I wrote about the mainstream demise of FTP. I aimed really broad with that piece, because honestly, that’s usually who I write for—someone who knows something about technology, but who doesn’t know everything and is curious about learning more.

Functionally, the point of my piece was that plain vanilla FTP is on its way out, a vestige of the past for the vast majority of people, thanks to its forthcoming removal from major web browsers. But there are people in narrow spaces who likely will never stop using it—or, who choose not to stop.

While I can get technical, I generally write for regular people who know a thing or two about technology but who, perhaps, aren’t engineers.

And well, this user was a technical user in a highly technical role. And they decided to mock it for not covering specific technical cases where it might persist, rather than spending five seconds considering that they may not be the target audience for this piece. Cockroaches are everywhere—you don’t have to tell me.

I’ve seen this with other things we’ve written as well. Last year, I ran a piece about OS/2’s continued use on the NYC subway system, and I spotted a reader who got upset because we focused on the obvious novelty of a vintage operating system being used in a high-profile way, rather than focusing on the low-level technical aspects that may appeal to that specific user but may go over everyone else’s heads.

I get it. You might get upset if you dive into this with the expectation that we’re going to talk about code or infrastructure on here, and that’s not what you get.

But the reason that technology content is often written more broadly is because, well, writers often want to open up the gates and encourage people to take a deeper look into tech. As much fun as it is to do a deep technical dive into the nuances of how a system is designed, there is a deep threat of losing people if you go too deep without explaining why they should care.

Tying back to our discussion of the Eternal September in this piece, I would also like to make a broader point: We have to figure out a way to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical users online. To pretend that there isn’t room to offer a helping hand, or that we can just focus on our own tiny bubble, just isn’t working anymore.

In September of 1993, well-established users who felt their territory was being encroached on by people who didn’t earn their place in the digital culture reacted by being inhospitable to those users.

It’s nearly three decades later, and in the years since, tech has very much won. Our world has been redefined by it, in ways large and small. And while technical corners can and should exist, we should no longer pretend that technical users have a monopoly on these stories.

And, honestly, given the way that technology has negatively affected the lives of so many, we need to do a better job explaining it to the average person, so they have a chance to grab a hold of the ways that algorithms define what we see online, or how automation might reshape our lives and careers, in ways good and bad.

The Eternal September is over. We’re well into October now. We need to open up the gates.

It’s Time for the Eternal September to End syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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flauntpage · 5 years

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“…what the Hell is Going on” – A Take After Islanders 6, Flyers 1

Four games.

That’s all the Flyers have at this moment to get their team, locker room, and hockey-playing style fixed.

Things are pretty stressful in the Flyers organization right now. They were before the game Saturday and it’s no different now that they got their doors blown off on home ice by the New York Islanders by a score of 6-1.

This is the same New York Islanders team whose leading goal scorer coming into the game against the Flyers was Val Filppula.

Yeah, that’s how bad it’s gotten for the Flyers.

Ron Hextall doesn’t usually have very many visitors to his general manager’s box.

On Monday night it was former GM Bob Clarke, who made a visit. He watched the game with Hextall, and then had a serious chat with him afterwards, before saying goodbye and telling Hextall he’d see him in a couple weeks.

Then today, before the games against the Isles, Hextall was visited by Dave Scott, CEO of Comcast Spectacor, the parent company of the Flyers.

He’s been pretty quiet for a long time, giving Hextall a lot of latitude in running the hockey organization.

But by dropping into the GM’s box, and being certain to be seen by the media, it could be a hint that the slack he’s been cutting is suddenly going to shorten up.

Maybe it’s the slow drip of dwindling patrons that bothers Scott. Although most Flyers tickets are sold, there are an inordinate number of empty seats on game days. That means either people have tickets and are opting not to use them, or they were purchased by brokers and the inventory can’t be moved.

Either way, it’s an indication that the public is starting to become a bit apathetic about the hockey team.

And why not? They are 4-7-0. They have have yet to win consecutive games this season. A lot of the same problems that have plagued them in the previous three seasons of the Hextall/Dave Hakstol tenure continue to rear their ugly heads.

But perhaps most damning is the fact that they are not good in their own building. They have been outscored 26-15 in six games so far at Wells Fargo Center and are 2-4-0 at home. And they tried to give away one of their two wins, but were able to pull out a shootout win over Florida after coughing up a three-goal lead.

Not even Gritty can provide enough equity for the organization to quell the mix of apathy and anger that exists within the Flyers fan base.

The “Fire Hakstol” chants at the Wells Fargo Center are now as frequent as the E-A-G-L-E-S ones emanating from the mezzanine level.

Fans, who used to bring signs to the game to put on the glass for warmups telling the players how much they love them have resorted to this:

Spotted

pic.twitter.com/YIXyv7v0EX

— NBC Sports Philadelphia (@NBCSPhilly) October 27, 2018

Scott had to take notice. Had to.

Something has to be done. Has to.

Because if this goes on much further without course correcting, this season will be over before Midterm Election results come in.

“I don’t think anybody is happy,” said Ivan Provorov, who actually looked like his old self against the Islanders, which is one of only a couple small positives to take from this game. “We have to play better and we have to figure out soon what the hell is going on.”

What the hell is going on is a team is playing hockey without much confidence in themselves individually, in each other and in the structure of their system.

Every player is basically admitting it at this point.

“I’m not sure what to say, but we can’t give up, said Scott Laughton. “On the bench you gotta stay positive, keep encouraging guys and it’s only these guys in here that’s gonna get us out of it. No one’s gonna feel sorry for us and we’re under 500 whatever, but it’s the group in here that’s gonna get us out of us, everyone’s gotta take a deep breath, look in the mirror and see what you got to do better and go to work and that’s what we’re going to have to do here to get out of this.”

The captain was pretty candid too. Here’s my exchange with him after the game:

Me: I know it’s frustrating that the same things kind of hurt you guys game after game after game, how do you stop the snowball from rolling downhill?

G: Start doing the little things right, start playing as a team, instead of one guy doing everything or trying to make an extra play. We need 5 guys to be on the same page here.

Me: What do you think is the reason why you guys don’t start out on the same page? You say that so obviously that’s happening, but why?

G: I think when you want too much sometimes, you press a little harder, get away from what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re just pressing. I really feel like we’re pressing right now we’re just tired of losing so we’re trying to do everything we can to make something happen, but sometimes it’s not always the right thing.

Me: Does going away on this trip, kind of come at the right time considering that? You think back last year you guys went through a tough time and then you went on that trip out west you were able to right the ship because you were able to get away from home. Do you think that that’s…..?

G: I think when you go on the road for a long time with your teammates you get a little closer and that’s what we need right now. We need to get closer as a team, we need to go out there and play for each other and this road trip is going to be very important for our season.

I rambled forever on that last question, as those of you who actually watched the post game show could probably see because NBCSports Philly had a camera in our faces during that exchange, but Giroux said a lot. Lots unpack it:

1. “… start playing as a team, instead of one guy doing everything or trying to make an extra play. We need five guys to be on the same page here.”

That means there is a lock of cohesiveness on this team. Everyone is out there playing as individuals in a team game. That’ll never work in hockey. I doubt that’s they system, so that mentality is not on the coaches, but the players themselves. They need to keep their eyes on the big picture and not try to play the part of superhero. Sometimes the simple play is the easiest play. I’ll show you a couple examples:

The Philadelphia Flyers in their own zone are a high school JV team. It's just disgusting to watch. Shit play by Sanheim. Shit awareness by Gudas. Puck ends up in the back of the net just a few seconds later. pic.twitter.com/vKvJsNsQ7n

— Jordie

(@BarstoolJordie) October 27, 2018

The first video does show Christian Folin doing nothing. That’s not as egregious as what he did later (hang tight, that’s coming). But the second video shows a real awful play by Travis Sanheim. He has an easy out up the wall and chooses to inexplicably reverse the puck to Radko Gudas, who isn’t expecting it. The Islanders then get control of the puck and…

And once again, the Flyers find themselves down 1-0. pic.twitter.com/5HF0F0nMWi

— Sons of Penn (@SonsofPenn) October 27, 2018

That would make 10 times in 11 games they got behind 1-0. That’s unconscionable. But, it’s Sanheim’s mistake – and it’s something that still haunts him, no matter what his analytics say.

I know, I’m too hard on the kid, right?

Let’s see what a former NHL defenseman has to say about it:

1-0 Isles. Poor clear by @NHLFlyers d. The play to make was forward not a reverse to partner! Turnovers KILL in any sport

— Chris Therien (@ctherien6) October 27, 2018

And that’s a team employee folks.

Then of course, there’s this:

Get Christian Folin off the ice. Fire Hakstol. Enough is enough. https://t.co/pSjLHaMwBL

— Marc Procopio (@Brocopio26) October 27, 2018

That’s Folin darting across the ice, abandoning his position to make a lame check, allowing the Islanders to come out on a 2-on-1 and ultimately score the goal.

When Provorov says “what the hell is going on,” I’m betting he’s talking about this play.

Or this:

5-1. So how is everyone's Saturday? pic.twitter.com/DSxpKiroMY

— Sons of Penn (@SonsofPenn) October 27, 2018

There are times to slide and times not to slide. This was definitely not the right choice – and not just because it resulted in a goal. Sanheim isn’t alone on defense. He’s not sliding to take away the pass on an odd man rush. He’s… sliding for no reason.

Andrew MacDonald has done this at times too (At times he’s criticized, even if it was the right play). You can’t take yourself out of a play and leave the opponent with the puck a clear path toward the shooter.

These kinds of mistakes are examples of what Giroux is saying about not everyone being on the same page.

2. “I really feel like we’re pressing right now we’re just tired of losing so we’re trying to do everything we can to make something happen, but sometimes it’s not always the right thing.”

The three videos above could qualify for here too, but I want to use this to talk about the special teams, because that’s really where they’re pressing.

The Flyers power play has fallen to 24th in the NHL and is clicking at just 15%. That’s been buoyed by a recent stretch in which they have gone 1-for-20.

And that one was scored by Travis Konecny on the second power play unit.

To find the last one scored by the top unit, you have to go back to Claude Giroux scoring in Ottawa. That means the Flyers’ top power play unit, long the lifeblood of their offense, has now gone seven straight games without a goal.

That’s pressing.

They seem a little stale too… trying the same plays over and over again. They need a new look. Something else. Change it up.

As for the penalty kill, well…

6-1. pic.twitter.com/CRmR3OgdC2

— Sons of Penn (@SonsofPenn) October 27, 2018

Jori Lehtera is on the ice somewhere supposedly killing this penalty too. But my goodness are they all out of position. Provorov got caught on the wall. Laughton and Lehtera (wherever he is) are way too high, and Gudas goes down to block a potential shot way too soon.

The PK is now at 67.5%, 30th in the NHL.

It’s embarrassing. It really is.

3. “This road trip is going to be very important for our season.”

Yes G, yes it is.

Because if it’s not fixed, something is going to happen.

There are some grumblings within the organization that these four games are all the Flyers have left in the patience tank.

If these issues aren’t corrected, Dave Hakstol’s job could be on the line. (His odds of being the first coach fired in the NHL this season according to Bovada are 15/2 and falling – that’s the sixth-most likely at this point).

And don’t think the coach doesn’t notice this. He’s been more forthcoming with issues on the team of late.

He even targeted Mikhail Vorobyev, who got back into the lineup Saturday and didn’t show he belonged:

“Well, we’re down in a game and looking for guys who are gonna go out and try help us get back into it and I wasn’t confident that he was going to be able to do that. That’s nothing against, he’s a young guy, he’s been out of the lineup, it can be hard to come in and be really sharp and make some of the plays that we need to have made. You can always bring energy, you can always bring intensity, and you can always bring effort and that’s what’s expected.”

I expect Vorobyev to be returned to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms post haste. Even with Corban Knight having an upper body injury that’s going to keep him out a while, I expect Hextall to call on not one, but two forward reinforcements from the minors. (Nick Aube-Kubel anyone? Maybe Taylor Leier?)

If these issues aren’t corrected, a major trade could happen – and you want to know who’s the prime choice there? Jake Voracek. It would send a message, the Flyers would get some return and also be able to remove a big salary from their Cap. Not that they are in danger with the cap, but more flexibility is never a bad thing.

And could Hextall himself be in trouble? Yes, yes he could.

After all, the visitors to your GM’s box weren’t coming in to bring you flowers.

The post “…what the Hell is Going on” – A Take After Islanders 6, Flyers 1 appeared first on Crossing Broad.

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adolphkwinter · 6 years

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8 Surprising Marketing Predictions for 2018

Marketing can be a bit like gambling.

You test out one advertising channel and measure your results.

Every so often, a new marketing channel or program becomes available. Eager marketers jump at the new opportunity and gamble some of their ad budget into it.

Some of those gambles crush it because they struck gold with the new channel connecting with the right audience.

Each year brings a few of these big new opportunities. This post will outline some of our predictions for those new opportunities and trends that will emerge into 2018.

What predictions came true and which ones started with a bang, but ultimately fizzled out? Let’s take a closer look:

1. Blended Marketing Will Continue to Dominate in 2018

Just as the incredible rise of ad blockers on the web has filtered out much of the advertising noise, so too are consumer bombarded by omni-channel offers that don’t really meet their needs, or happen at inopportune times.

As a result, consumers are being much more selective about the apps they install, the sites they visit and the emails they receive. If you’re not doing enough to stay at the top of their minds in ways that aren’t intrusive, you’re giving yourself a one-way ticket to UnsubscribeLand.

This is why many businesses look at omni-channel as more risk than reward. Do you really want to be everywhere the customer is all the time? Does the customer want you to be? Are you more of an elegant butterfly in their minds, or a pesky fly? If you don’t take the time to refine and chart your marketing course appropriately, they’ll make that decision for you.

Social media and mobile media continued to blur the lines with integrated shopping, recommendations, videos and reviews – creating an even greater push to get noticed among the amalgamated chunk of product pitches, retargeting ads and “I’m-an-authority-look-at-me” videos. As more and more advertisers step up to the plate, they look at what others are doing and then copy their efforts – rather than test on their own to see what their unique audience would respond to.

And, in an effort to get in on this big, blended push, Google shifted its search results to include video, recent news, location information and other details to help match the user with their search request even faster and more thoroughly than before.

So if everything’s coming together in a more finely-tuned customer experience, what didn’t really take off as well as we expected it to?

2. Chatbots Will Grow into More Businesses and Sectors

Chatbots emerged a few years ago on platforms like Facebook in the form of Messenger bots. Companies like 1-800 Flowers immediately hopped on board and made it easy for customers to order from a bot:

In the years since their inception, they’ve grown from a few e-commerce stores using them to a more wide adoption.

And they’re not going away anytime soon. They’re on our 2018 marketing predictions list because we believe that these bots will increase their penetration in our daily lives.

Think about it – if you call a customer service line, you’re frequently first talking to what is essentially a robot. They’ll ask you a question, you answer it, and the programming in the background will try to solve the problem for you. (I’ve had this experience myself when chatting with the Comcast support line).

If the bot on the phone cannot help you, the last resort is to transfer you to a real support person. Now we just have that through our messenger apps, but it’s going to go father than support.

Bots can help you conduct research, qualify leads, personalize the user experience, sell more products, and much more. Expect to see more of them on platforms outside of Facebook Messenger Ads.

If you’re interested in using a chatbot, you can use Facebook Messenger Ads or a platform from Drift called Driftbot.

3. From Lifestyle Apps to Augmented Reality

I had originally predicted that 2016 would see the rise and greater adoption of lifestyle apps – meaning apps that people installed as a reflection of who they were. These could be a combination fitness-weather-diet tracker app rather than having apps for all three of these items. But the looming spectre of data overages constantly nipping at their heels means developers have tended to go easy on what’s available via app versus the much more open and accommodating web.

What stirred everyone’s imagination was augmented reality. The undisputed summer hit of 2016 was Pokemon Go, but it, too, failed to gain much traction after the initial buzz wore off. Still, it was a masterpiece of gamification and as mobile becomes more powerful, we can look forward to seeing what augmented reality can do – particularly when you’re able to bring together the aforementioned apps into an all-in-one experience that isn’t just helpful, but subtly addictive too.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has made a big bet into augmented reality, and now Apple is supporting iOS developers with their Augmented Reality Kit.

And Tim Cook isn’t alone. Mark Zuckerberg has really started all this with his Oculus acquisition. Zuckerberg’s bet into AR has only intensified recently with the poaching of an executive from Google.

Expect to see more from these companies in the year about how AR will impact it’s users and advertising partners.

4. Talk To Me – Dash Buttons and the Internet of Things

Voice-guided search, wearable devices and innovations like the Amazon Alexa and Google Home are starting to bridge the gap between the internet you access on your computer, and the internet you access everywhere.

Awkward attempts to blend e-commerce with that always-on, on-demand functionality has come out in the form of Amazon Dash buttons – WiFi connected devices that let you instantly order your favorite household products, but they’re more of a novelty than a really useful and innovative design. Watch them become as memorable and curious as the CueCat.

What will be changing for marketers is an increasing investment in understanding analytics and getting a truly cross-channel view of the consumer. Rather than throwing out a bunch of things that the company “thinks” the customer might want, they’re finally gathering enough intelligence (and enough of an understanding to know what to do with it), that they can track a consumer from a search on their home computer to a product description page on their mobile phone, to an order form on their company laptop.

This is known as advanced attribution, and it’s going to change the way we market to customers in ways we probably can’t even imagine. But think of the potential of engaging that consumer at the right time and place, on the right device, when they’re at the right stage of the buying cycle, and you can see precisely how much of a game-changer this technology is.

5. A Bigger Focus on Tools and Services that Fill in the Gaps

Things like predictive analytics and personalization tools are great – but they’re mostly in a vacuum. That means you can’t really leverage them to see the big picture, as well as the granular details you need in order to make decisions with confidence.

Expect innovations in 2018 to help bridge the gaps with many of these services, allowing for greater integrations with existing systems and a better, visual picture of what all that information really means.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that they’re doubling down on Alexa. More companies are putting their voice (so to speak) on Alexa.

Other types of services that are not even part of the analytics industry are popping up to fill in the empty spaces left by other innovators. Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Echo/Google Home and many other services like these are becoming ubiquitous in our lifestyle because of the service they provide — a service we never even knew we needed until we saw its potential.

Tools like these are poised to change the way we market on the web, and you can expect even more integrations with popular software and SaaS products to broaden their reach and capabilities.

6. The Power and Passion of Social Media – Who Decides What You Get to See?

Although this doesn’t just apply to marketing, the U.S. election was watched, dissected, ranted and raved over across social media platforms. So much so, that “fake news” and allegations started littering people’s news feeds.

But this then begs the question – should you encapsulate yourself in a bubble – seeing only what you want to see, or should companies give you a little bit of everything and let you choose accordingly? Who decides? Social media has a very powerful and passionate audience on its side – and a significant amount of data that it’s going to have to make some definitive and perhaps unexpected decisions on. After all, not offering a balance can affect user engagement, and losing user engagement is the one thing that no social network wants to imagine – it’s their lifeblood. How they plan to approach this particular conundrum remains to be seen, but you can bet that eventually they’ll be forced to decide – and not everyone may agree with the results.

7. Influencer Marketing Will Grow Even Further

In a world filled with ad blockers and DVR, it can be difficult for marketers to get their message through.

The workaround many marketers are finding effective is going around traditional channels like TV ads and banner ads and moving towards selling their products through a conduit known as an influencer.

These influencers typically have a large enough following on social media that they’re able to sell a post, tweet, or image to all their followers. These aren’t blocked by ad-blockers, and they’re “blended” into people’s social feeds so all their followers see them.

Some big corporations use influencers in their TV ads, others use them on the websites. Local businesses reach consumers through local influencers – people on radio or TV.

2018 will only see this grow. It will spread to other industries and reach more people than ever. Teens on their Snapchat will see the celebrities they’re following promoting the latest product or movie.

Instagram will have influencers holding their products that marketers are paying big money for. More and more tweets will have the #ad placed next to it.

.@oreo and I share a birthday … and a love of giving away 1 Million free OREO Chocolate Candy Bars! #OreoBirthdayGiveaway #ad. No purchase necessary. https://t.co/V7YyRqpl06 pic.twitter.com/E5TfWhVaYD

— SHAQ (@SHAQ) March 6, 2018

8. More Advertising Programs on Instagram Will Become Available

The war between social media apps Snapchat and Instagram will continue into 2018. Expect Facebook to continue efforts to further monetize Instagram.

In the last Facebook earnings release of 2017, Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook had 2 million advertisers on Instagram, compared to 6 million on Instagram. I expect Facebook will try to increase this number through new advertising programs and platforms available to marketers.

At the time of this writing, they have 4 different advertising products available. If you’re a daily Instagram user, you’ve probably seen all of them – photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, and video ads.

Expect to see some more innovative ad products created in the future.

What Do You Think is in Store for 2018?

Do you think we’ll see some surprising changes on how we market to consumers in 2018? What do you think will happen? Share your own predictions with us in the comments below!

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

from Online Marketing Tips https://blog.kissmetrics.com/surprising-marketing-predictions/

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localbizlift · 6 years

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8 Surprising Marketing Predictions for 2018

Marketing can be a bit like gambling.

You test out one advertising channel and measure your results.

Every so often, a new marketing channel or program becomes available. Eager marketers jump at the new opportunity and gamble some of their ad budget into it.

Some of those gambles crush it because they struck gold with the new channel connecting with the right audience.

Each year brings a few of these big new opportunities. This post will outline some of our predictions for those new opportunities and trends that will emerge into 2018.

What predictions came true and which ones started with a bang, but ultimately fizzled out? Let’s take a closer look:

1. Blended Marketing Will Continue to Dominate in 2018

So if everything’s coming together in a more finely-tuned customer experience, what didn’t really take off as well as we expected it to?

2. Chatbots Will Grow into More Businesses and Sectors

Chatbots emerged a few years ago on platforms like Facebook in the form of Messenger bots. Companies like 1-800 Flowers immediately hopped on board and made it easy for customers to order from a bot:

In the years since their inception, they’ve grown from a few e-commerce stores using them to a more wide adoption.

And they’re not going away anytime soon. They’re on our 2018 marketing predictions list because we believe that these bots will increase their penetration in our daily lives.

If the bot on the phone cannot help you, the last resort is to transfer you to a real support person. Now we just have that through our messenger apps, but it’s going to go father than support.

Bots can help you conduct research, qualify leads, personalize the user experience, sell more products, and much more. Expect to see more of them on platforms outside of Facebook Messenger Ads.

If you’re interested in using a chatbot, you can use Facebook Messenger Ads or a platform from Drift called Driftbot.

3. From Lifestyle Apps to Augmented Reality

Apple CEO Tim Cook has made a big bet into augmented reality, and now Apple is supporting iOS developers with their Augmented Reality Kit.

Expect to see more from these companies in the year about how AR will impact it’s users and advertising partners.

4. Talk To Me – Dash Buttons and the Internet of Things

5. A Bigger Focus on Tools and Services that Fill in the Gaps

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that they’re doubling down on Alexa. More companies are putting their voice (so to speak) on Alexa.

Tools like these are poised to change the way we market on the web, and you can expect even more integrations with popular software and SaaS products to broaden their reach and capabilities.

6. The Power and Passion of Social Media – Who Decides What You Get to See?

7. Influencer Marketing Will Grow Even Further

In a world filled with ad blockers and DVR, it can be difficult for marketers to get their message through.

The workaround many marketers are finding effective is going around traditional channels like TV ads and banner ads and moving towards selling their products through a conduit known as an influencer.

Some big corporations use influencers in their TV ads, others use them on the websites. Local businesses reach consumers through local influencers – people on radio or TV.

Instagram will have influencers holding their products that marketers are paying big money for. More and more tweets will have the #ad placed next to it.

— SHAQ (@SHAQ) March 6, 2018

8. More Advertising Programs on Instagram Will Become Available

The war between social media apps Snapchat and Instagram will continue into 2018. Expect Facebook to continue efforts to further monetize Instagram.

Expect to see some more innovative ad products created in the future.

What Do You Think is in Store for 2018?

Do you think we’ll see some surprising changes on how we market to consumers in 2018? What do you think will happen? Share your own predictions with us in the comments below!

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

#marketing

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savetopnow · 6 years

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2018-03-13 09 TECH now

TECH

Ars Techica

Apple is acquiring the Netflix of magazines

Verizon agrees to fix failing broadband networks to settle investigation

Mark Hamill on Skywalker disagreements, fear of starring in a new Star Wars film

Building Windows: 4 million commits, 10 million work items

The Thrustmaster T-GT is a great—if expensive—wheel for the PS4

Buzzfeed Tech

Netflix Is Testing Rewarding Your Kids With Stickers For Watching TV

Out of Prison, Social News Pioneer Matthew Keys Laments "Reactive" Social Media

Musical.ly Is Struggling To Deal With Self-Harm Content

Twitter Just Suspended A Ton Of Accounts Known For Stealing Tweets

Here’s What’s Up With "Smart Guns" — And Why You Can’t Buy One In The US

CNet

Trump blocks $117 billion Broadcom-Qualcomm merger - CNET

Bose AR aims for augmented audio instead of visuals video - CNET

'Black Panther' inspires Wakanda Forever salute from athletes - CNET

How to protect your Apple ID from hackers video - CNET

Honda's hot-rod Mean Mower now packs CBR1000RR Fireblade power - Roadshow

Clean Technica

Tesla Model 3 Production Was Paused Between February 20-24 In Order To Tweak Automation

C40 Reveals Cities’ Emissions Are Up To 60% Higher, Resulting In Bigger Reduction Opportunities

European Investment Bank Provided €1.05 Billion In Solar Financing In 2017

The Lab Surpasses Mobilization Of $1 Billion In Sustainable Investment

The 2018 Community Power State Scorecard

Hacker News

Drive and Expand Bitnami's relationships with the leading cloud providers

Qualcomm/Broadcom Merger Blocked by Trump

PyTorch – Internal Architecture Tour

Study: Renters in high-rent cities are as NIMBY as homeowners

Trump Issues Order to Block Broadcom’s Takeover of Qualcomm

Mashable

Elon Musk drops epic Falcon Heavy launch trailers made by 'Westworld' co-creator

Zoos are rating animals online and it's too good

'The New York Times' profiled the most selfish person in America

Twitter reportedly suspended users that steal memes and force viral tweets

Why did ABC shelve this 'Black-ish' episode?

Motherboard

Tim Berners-Lee: Monopolies and Lack of Public Infrastructure Are Ruining the Web

Watch This Toyota Robot Get Nothing But Net

'Sex Trafficking' Bill Will Take Away Online Spaces Sex Workers Need to Survive

Apple Must Explain Why It Doesn't Want You to Fix Your Own iPhone, California Lawmaker Says

Okay, Let’s Talk About John Oliver’s Bitcoin Episode

New York Times Technology

Broadcom’s Other Regulatory Hurdle: How It Treats Customers

Ex-Leader of Baltimore County Schools, a Tech Booster, Pleads Guilty to Perjury

Broadcom’s Bid for Qualcomm May Be Headed for Rejection, U.S. Panel Warns

Trump Blocks Broadcom’s Bid for Qualcomm

Dropbox I.P.O. Could Value Company at More Than $7 Billion

Recode

Full transcript: ‘Sneaky Pete’ showrunner Graham Yost on Recode Media

Stitch Fix made a big addition to its business that won’t show up in its Q2 financial results

Nancy Dubuc made a big bet on Vice, and now she’s going to try fixing it, as CEO

Lyft says it passed $1 billion in revenue last year — and is growing faster than Uber

Apple is approaching a trillion dollar valuation

Reddit Technology

11 Mayors Applauded for Refusing to Do Business With Companies That Don't Support Net Neutrality: "Town by town, city by city, local leaders are taking back everyone's right to connect and communicate."

Around the world, online platforms seem to be designed to keep us trapped in furious feedback loops that distract us from the difficult work that will ultimately lead to social change

Your Echo Chamber is Destroying Democracy

Trump Wants To Cut Clean Energy Research Funding In Half

Comcast 'blocks' an email service: Yet another reminder why net neutrality matters

Reuters Technology

President Trump halts Broadcom takeover of Qualcomm

Has Spotify answered its royalty problem?

Uber re-enters Barcelona with professional driver service

Dropbox IPO price range puts valuation nearly a third below peak

U.N. investigators cite Facebook role in Myanmar crisis

Slashdot

Trump Issues Order To Block Broadcom's Takeover of Qualcomm

Apple Seems OK With Currency Miners In the Mac App Store

Tesla Raises Prices At Its Supercharger Stations

Comcast 'Blocks' an Encrypted Email Service: Yet Another Reminder Why Net Neutrality Matters

University of Arizona Tracks Student ID Card Swipes To Detect Who Might Drop Out

TechCrunch

Trump administration’s block in Qualcomm vs. Broadcom merger should shake tech to its core

XPrize announces a $10M contest for remotely-controlled robotic avatars

MoviePass CEO backpedals on location tracking and talks strategy to break even by 2019

Trump blocks Broadcom’s takeover of Qualcomm

The Wave is a ring that controls sound as if by magic

The Next Web

Dear Sony and Microsoft, please copy the Nintendo Switch ASAP

Robot takeover stalls in worst slump for AI funds on record

HQ Trivia gives largest prize yet: $25,000, no sharing allowed

This serial entrepreneur wants to disrupt peer-to-peer lending, using blockchain

Why stress isn’t such a bad thing for young, inexperienced entrepreneurs

The Verge

Jake Paul has decided that it is ‘time to end school shootings’

Trump issues order blocking Broadcom takeover of Qualcomm, citing national security

Apple is letting companies make 3.5mm to Lightning cables now

Microsoft reveals Sony is blocking Fortnite PS4 vs. Xbox One cross-play

iFixit has some close-up photos of the Galaxy S9’s aperture blades

WSJ Tech

Trump Blocks Chip Deal by Broadcom on Security Concerns

Apple to Acquire Magazine-Subscription Service Texture

Robots Are Learning to Handle With Care

Who Can You Trust When It Comes to a Résumé? Maybe Blockchain

The Smartest Ways to Use Email at Work

Wired

Don’t Do Drugs and Watch ‘Annihilation’

‘Dr. Strangelove’ Is Basically a Documentary

Total Clips

Aliens Would Probably Like It If You Gave them Flowers

All About HomePod

#tech

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