Monday Reading: get elders off TV and journalists off Twitter

Time to ban elders from TV

danah boyd, first cited on this blog 16 years ago, is back and on fire:

Many elders got into the habit of watching TV years ago. It may have started out with the nightly news or prime time TV, an opportunity to escape after an exhausting day of work. And it expanded from there. For many, the pandemic made it much worse. And as they watched more TV, it got harder to do other things. Other things were exhausting physically. Or mentally.

It's a really neat desconstruction of some of the more extreme worries about teenagers and screens, when filtered through a different age bracket and their media obsessions.

Protect Elders! Ban Television!!

(Some thoughts on the efforts to regulate children’s use of social media)

Mediumdanah boyd

ASL?

This is a lovely piece, that gives you a real sense of how generations of teenagers have grown up experimenting with their sense of self and identity through the medium of online chat of varying kinds.

I was in my mid-20s when I first encountered spaces like this, and I was still in the process of navigating the process of becoming the person I am. The ability to have consistent, pseudonynous relationships with like-minded folk was a huge part of that journey.

I don't think we'll ever stop young people doing this — we just need to get better at helping them navigate it safely.

Age, Sex, Location - Longreads

Chatrooms taught me everything I needed to know about what real people were like before I had to grow up and become one of them.

LongreadsKira Homsher

The sexist social media onslaught

One year I will make the journalism festival in Perugia. This is not that year. However, Jacob from Journalism News has doen a great job of captruing a panel on a really serious issue.

Women journalists receive abuse “within seconds” from posting online

ICFJ unveiled a new tool at The International Journalism Festival in Perugia that will explore the link between online and offline abuse of women journalists

Journalism.co.ukJacob Granger

The man behind the Mastodon

I'm still optimisitc about the long-term potential of Mastodon. This is a great insight into the man behind it, and how very different it is as a platform — and how small the company that's somewhat behind it is.

The Verge

Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon — the open-source decentralized competitor to Twitter. It’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in our post-Elon Musk era. The idea of Mastodon is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls. You join a server, and that server can show you…

The VergeNilay Patel / @reckless

Journalists are addicted to Twitter

I intend to write something about this myself, because I think this is, in a way, a rather flattering picture of why journalists are so hooked on the platform. There are deeper, and possibly darker, reasons, and that's why they're so reluctant to let go of what is — clearly — a failing platform.

Think of this as preparatory reading… 😇

Why journalists can’t quit Twitter

The media should be building alternatives. Instead, some are doubling down

PlatformerCasey Newton