More miscellaneous details

Tag: communication

The leaked Signal chat, annotated – The New York Times

Excerpts of a Signal chat published Monday by The Atlantic provide a rare and revealing look at the private conversations of top Trump administration officials as they weighed plans for U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. … President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the apparently accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, in the chat, claiming that officials did not share classified information. However, Mr. Goldberg reported that highly sensitive military operational information was posted in the channel. The Atlantic did not publish those details.

communication, Donald Trump, politics

26/03/2025
Who can save us from social media? At this point, perhaps just us – The Harvard Gazette

The boldest and most creative of social media’s would-be reformers, a small group of legal scholars and other academics, joined by a handful of rebel programmers, have a more radical plan. They call it frictional design. They believe the existing technological system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt in a more humanistic form. Pursuing an approach reminiscent of the machine-breaking strategy of the 19th-century British Luddites, if without the violence, they seek, in effect, to sabotage existing social media platforms by reintroducing friction into their operations — throwing virtual sand into the virtual works.

books, communication, Nicholas Carr, social media, society

02/02/2025
The case for kicking the stone – Los Angeles Review of Books

The central problem, however, is that an onslaught of information—of everything, all at once—flattens all sense of proportion. When Zuckerberg said to his staff that “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,” it’s not that his tone-deaf observation was untrue but that, as Carr says, he was making a category error, equating two things that cannot be compared. Yet “social media renders category errors obsolete because it renders categories obsolete. All information belongs to a single category—it’s all ‘content.’” And very often, the content that matters is decided in the currency of commerce: content is “bad” when it harms profits.

book reviews, books, communication, Nicholas Carr, social media, technology

02/02/2025
LED scroller

The LED Scroller is a web tool that displays scrolling text, emojis, or messages. You can change the text color, speed, style, and even add a blinking effect. It simulates an LED sign, which makes it useful for announcements, events, or just for fun.

communication, design, tools, typography

25/01/2025
The Tyranny of Now – The New Atlantis

Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data. When the flow of information reaches the consumer, it’s translated into another flow: a stream of images formed of illuminated pixels, shifting patterns of light. The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new — to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.

communication, culture, social media, society

24/01/2025