Immediately after the 2016 election, many Americans discovered just how much fake news they were sharing via social media. And for about ten minutes, the term fake news had a specific and literal meaning; it referred to fabricated stories made to look like news, and which serve either as clickbait to generate ad revenue or as mischief to fan the ...
This is a theme I’ve certainly written about before; it is in fact, the theme that started this blog — the idea that the expansion of stuff through communications technology can lead to a reduction in the very benefits meant to be yielded by the expansion in the first place. CNN’s insistence upon providing round-the-clock speculation about the missing Malaysian airliner ...
When the 1991 Gulf War put CNN on the map, that was the beginning of the end. Ted Turner’s experiment in 24 hour news had found a spectacle — a popular and relatively safe war — that defined the model for how a network can fill a round-the-clock broadcast, even without news to report, and certainly without depth or context. ...
One thesis I have continually proposed since the death of SOPA is that thinking citizens are going to have to stop giving Internet companies a blank check on policy positions, or we’re going to regret it. So far, it looks a lot like there isn’t a piece of legislation, a trade agreement, a civil action, or any other policy initiative ...
