Looking for a longer form visit into the world of people, science and technology? Here are some of my favourite bigger bytes of multimedia this month.
Listen
- Ezra Klein interviews danah boyd, author of “It’s complicated – the social lives of networked teams”
“The Internet is used for the good, bad, and ugly. It magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. And I always come back to that. I still believe that that’s true. It’s this moment where we can see these tools be used to create such openings, to create such opportunities, to imagine different futures. But they can also be used to reify all sorts of existing prejudices and inequities.”
- Ezra Klein interviews Cal Newport on taking your life back from technology and doing “deep work”
“I’m a long advocate of what I call “fixed schedule productivity,” where I fix my work schedule first. That’s the stake in the ground I start with. Everything else about my career decisions, how I work, what I take on, what I do in the day, all works backward from I want to be done at 5:30. I think my life is the opposite of hyper-scheduled.”
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Read
- What happens to the world of work if we operate in a “quitting economy“? How do we relate to our colleagues, our managers? What attributes become important to succeed in our jobs?
“Your job might be a space to learn skills that you can use in the future. Or, it might be a job with a company that has a good-enough reputation that other companies are keen to hire away its employees. On the other hand, it isn’t as good a job if everything you learn there is too specific to that company, if you aren’t learning easily transferrable skills. And it isn’t a good job if you have to work such long hours that you never have time to look for the next job. In short, a job becomes a good job if it will lead to another job, likely with another company or organisation. You start choosing a job for how good it will be for you to quit it.”
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- On the importance of learning to be alone (resonant as I’ve been finishing Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation this week)
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- I’ve been really appreciating exploring some of the daily essays in Real Life this past month – an editorially independent online magazine funded by Snapchat. It’s “… about living with technology. The emphasis is more on living. We publish one essay, advice column, reported feature, or uncategorizable piece of writing a day, four or five days a week.”
- To forgive – what does and could forgiveness and attonement look like online?
“Digital communities can amplify grievance…Participating in communal anger becomes an expression of solidarity, a symbolic act with which users not directly experiencing the worst effects of a given injustice can affirm their allegiance to those who do. All of us are seen as having the authority and even the obligation to condemn injustice, and in digital cities built on notions of sharing, connecting, and collaborating, the necessity to repeat and expand on news of wrongdoing becomes a civic duty. The scale of pain expressed online can be overwhelming.”
- Picture yourself happy – the use of selfies in advertising “merge fantasies of consumption with fantasies of being consumed”
“These people aren’t posing for a photographer, the selfie ad says; they are posing for themselves, and for their family and friends who might later see the selfie on social media. Ads “may refer to the past,” says Berger, but “always they speak of the future.” The selfie ad speaks of two futures: the future where you and your family are in the mountains, and the further future, where you prove you were there. We went to the mountains, and a good time was had by all. “
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Social in silico 