Tag: Front Page (page 3 of 3)

What we do know is that Facebook, like many social media platforms, is an experiment engine: a machine for making A/B tests and algorithmic adjustments, fueled by our every keystroke. This has been used as a justification for this study, and all studies like it: Why object to this when you are always being messed with? If there is no ‘natural’ News Feed, or search result or trending topic, what difference does it make if you experience A or B?

The difference, for [Edward] Shils and others, comes down to power, deception and autonomy. Academics and medical researchers have spent decades addressing these issues through ethical codes of conduct and review boards, which were created to respond to damaging and inhumane experiments, from the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to Milgram’s electric shocks. These review boards act as checks on the validity and possible harms of a study, with varying degrees of effectiveness, and they seek to establish traditions of ethical research. But what about when platforms are conducting experiments outside of an academic context, in the course of everyday business? How do you develop ethical practices for perpetual experiment engines?

There is no easy answer to this, but we could do worse than begin by asking the questions that Shils struggled with: What kinds of power are at work? What are the dynamics of trust, consent and deception? Who or what is at risk? While academic research is framed in the context of having a wider social responsibility, we can consider the ways the technology sector also has a social responsibility. To date, Silicon Valley has not done well in thinking about its own power and privilege, or what it owes to others. But this is an essential step if platforms are to understand their obligation to the communities of people who provide them with content, value and meaning.

– The Test We Can—and Should—Run on Facebook – Kate Crawford – The Atlantic

“I first glimpsed the image on a postcard I bought at a Memphis bookstore. In that rendition, the black woman in the background was left unnamed. Because I knew a bit about the history of Café Nicholson and the role that Edna Lewis, the African-American cookery writer and chef, played there, and because my eyesight isn’t so great, I wondered, perversely, whether the black woman ferrying what appears to be a pot of tea to the table was Lewis.” — John T. Edge

I memorised Tennyson, and read Homer in prose and Dante in verse; I shed half my childhood tears at The Mill on the Floss. I slept with Sherlock Holmes beside my pillow, and lay behind the sofa reading Roget. It was as though publication a century before made a book suitable – never was I told I ought not to read this or that until I was older. To my teacher’s horror my father gave me Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was still at primary school, and I was simply left to wander from Thornfield to Agincourt to the tent of sulking Achilles, making my own way.

One beloved novel was Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii – I had no idea no one reads him now, or that he’s accused of being the worst novelist to ever have disgraced the page. I simply was content to dwell in his Victorian ideal of a mythic past, safe at a double distance from the confusion of the world outside my door….

Above all – committed to memory, read aloud at mealtimes and prettily framed on the dining-room wall – was the King James Bible. It was as constant as the air, and felt just as necessary, and I think I know its cadences as well as my own voice.

The effect on my writing has been profound, and inescapable: I soaked it all up, and now I’m wringing it out. My obsession with rhythm and beauty comes, I’m sure, from memorising the King James Bible’s peerless prose, and having grown up in the shade of sin and the light of redemption I suppose it’s no surprise that my debut novel After Me Comes the Flood has been called uncanny, sinister, strange (though I never intended to write that way – it’s just how my eyes were put in).

– Reading lessons of a religious upbringing without modern books | Books | theguardian.com

xkcd

Whether the study was ethically questionable is itself debatable, and there are no black-and-white answers. Those defending the study have pointed out, quite rightly, that Facebook and many other online companies routinely perform such studies for their own benefit or as part of social experiments. They don’t need our consent to do such research and nobody seemed to care before, so why such an uproar now when the findings are published in a scientific journal? Facebook may well have done the exact same experiment anyway, and by collaborating with scientists, aren’t they doing it in a way that is publicly transparent and beneficial? Critics warn that too strong a backlash might dissuade such companies from joining forces with science in the future.

These are important points but they overlook the fact that, for better or worse, publicly funded science is held to a higher ethical standard than comparable research in the private sector. Once academic scientists get involved the bar is raised, never lowered. In fact, if this case has highlighted anything, it is how marketing research can be so unregulated. The Facebook study paints a dystopian future in which academic researchers escape ethical restrictions by teaming up with private companies to test increasingly dangerous or harmful interventions.

– Facebook Fiasco: Was Cornell University’s study of ‘emotional contagion’ a breach of ethics? | Science | theguardian.com. Via James Schirmer on Twitter, Some interesting questions here in light of my recent post on this subject.

Isn’t it striking that the most-typical and most-maligned genres of Instagram imagery happen to correspond to the primary genres of Western secular art? All that #foodporn is still-life; all those #selfies, self-portraits. All those vacation vistas are #landscape; art-historically speaking, #beachday pics evoke the hoariest cliché of middle-class leisure iconography. (As for the #nudes, I guess they are going on over on Snapchat.)

Why this (largely unintentional) echo? Because there is a sneaky continuity between the motivations behind such casual images and the power dynamics that not-so-secretly governed classic art…

Technology has so democratized image-making that it has put the artistic power once mainly associated with aristocrats—to stylize your image and project yourself to an audience as desirable—into everyone’s hands. (Although the parallel to art as “celebration of private property” is probably most vivid in the case of those who most closely resemble modern-day aristocrats. See: “Rich Kids of Instagram”). But images retain their function as game pieces in the competition for social status. “Doesn’t this look delicious?” “Aren’t I fabulous?” “Look where I am!” “Look what I have!

– Instagram and Art Theory (via Bill Couch)

robertogreco:

Love Stitching, Hillary Fayle (one of many photos, via notrare)

robertogreco:

ALLEY 1, Miha Štrukelj (via “Alleyway Appeal: Miha Štrukelj’s Explorations of West L.A.”)

Send us your spirit, Lord, with the gifts of humility and understanding. Teach us that your Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, but even beyond our vision. Give us the comfort of knowing that nothing we can do will be complete, no statement of ours will say all that can be said, no prayer of ours fully express our faith, no confession of ours fully bring us to perfection. Make us content to plant seeds that will one day grow, to water seeds which others have planted, to accept that their promise may be for the future, to lay foundations for others to build on better. Give us the comfort of knowing that we are merely workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs, and, with your grace, prophets for a future not our own.

Adapted from the ‘Romero Prayer’ of Bishop Untenor of Saginaw, in Eamon Duffy’s The Heart in Pilgrimage: A Prayerbook for Catholic Christians – Unapologetic: A Petertide prayer for all those ordained yesterday 

“Last Sunday, for the first time in 1600 years, no mass was celebrated in Mosul. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized Iraq’s second largest city on June 10, causing most Christians in the region to flee in terror, in new kinship with the torment of Christ crucified on the cross. The remnant of Mosul’s ancient Christian community, long inhabitants of the place where many believe Jonah to be buried, now faces annihilation behind ISIS lines. Those who risk worship must do so in silence, praying under new Sharia regulations that have stilled every church bell in the city.”

– Church Bells Fall Silent in Mosul as Iraq’s Christians Flee – The Daily Beast