The beginning of trouble can be linked to the advent of television. The first hint of a problem that has now grown out of control was identified in 1961 by Newton Minow, the leader of a Federal Communications Commission that was authorized to report to President John F. Kennedy on the effects of television on the personal and social psychology of Americans. Minow’s executive summary described a medium that was filled with “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” Minow concluded that TV was creating “a vast wasteland” in which an alternate reality of entertainment was disconnecting Americans from the actual world in which they lived.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Living in the MetaverseTag Archives: Facebook
Why Cortes Island does not need Facebook
While there are Facebook groups on Cortes Island, they have largely been marginalized by a wiki style community bulletin board. The Tideline is not a place for personal webpages or a typical news website, but for the past 20 years most of island’s population have used it to post notices, community announcements, reports and advertisements.
Someone suggested that this may be a model for the rest of the country to emulate, now that Facebook has barred Canadian news outlets from using its pages.
This prompted me to ask a few people at Lovefest for their opinion.
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Delores Broten: The problem with Facebook
Google and Facebook took in $9.7 billion in advertising revenue during 2020, while the revenues of more traditional news outlets – who produce much of the actual news being posted on Facebook and Instagram – are failing. In response to Bill C-18, which requires them to pay Canadian media outlets a fraction of their advertisement revenues, the dynamic duo will no longer let Canadian news outlets post.
This was brought home to Cortes Currents on Wednesday, August 2, when Facebook served notice that as a news outlet, Cortes Currents Facebook posts will no longer be viewable inside Canada.
As only about 10% of my web traffic actually comes through Facebook, my reactions were mixed, but the strongest was curiosity.
So I reached out to some local media outlets to find out:
- What is their opinion of the situation?
- How does being cut off from Facebook affect their publication?
The first to respond was a well known former Cortes resident, Delores Broten of the Watershed Sentinel.
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The Quadra Project – Social Media
“We invent things, and thereafter they invent us.” This is a fundamental principle in the media theory articulated by Marshall McLuhan, but it is rarely considered because we are usually so enamoured by the ingenuity of our inventions that we fail to consider the ways in which they invent us.
A brilliant essay by Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”, in the May 2022 edition of The Atlantic Monthly magazine deserves careful reading and thought. Its insights do much to explain the factious irrationality that has been generated by social media, an adjunct of the internet that was supposed to facilitate and deepen communication, but instead has created angry disputes with irresolvable differences. What went wrong?
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Fewer young Canadians seeing the steady stream of online harassment
By Morgan Sharp, National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
More than a third of young adult internet users in Canada either witnessed or experienced online harassment last year, a wide-ranging survey on digital habits found, although there has been a significant decline in its visibility.
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