At a local comic con, of all places, a cosplayer and recent sociology graduate introduced me to the term “mean world syndrome”. Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Source: Mean world syndrome – Wikipedia She says sociology, as a field, suffers from mean world syndrome as all they do today is study things…
Source: Newspapers run IDENTICAL letters slamming Trump’s Supreme Court pick | Daily Mail Online At least one of the signatories to the letter says she never sent the letter and suggests that her name was lifted off a petition. This was an astro-turf propaganda operation, flooding the world with a message that is made to look like it comes “from the people” (grass roots) when in fact, it was manufactured by an organization or public relations agency working on behalf…
http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/09/technology/fake-black-lives-matter-facebook-page/index.html Most of Facebook is Fakebook. I’ve covered similar fake Twitter accounts before. Social media is big alligator infested swamp with lots of poo.
Social media posts that draw ire of others are an emerging workplace issue. Source: Kaiser Roseville nurse out after Stephon Clark post | The Sacramento Bee
Facebook has a feature that allows you to tag friends in photos. They encourage you to click on the individual in the photo and then “tag” their user name. This helps Facebook build an image library from multiple angles and perspectives. This data is processed by Facebook to create their automatic facial recognition software. Facebook claims it can accurately identify people’s faces in photos – literally among billions of photos in the world and that it can do this in…
True. What many are only just now discovering about social media (or what you might have known if you’d be reading this web site for a while) is the serious problems manifested by social media, particularly Facebook. As Zunger notes in further comments, software development has not suffered the consequences of massive systemic failures like what we are seeing with Facebook. Other fields, like civil and mechanical engineering did, long ago (think bridge and building collapses), which led to professional…
Verge reports the Trump administration will drop a mandate to require all automobiles to contain automated vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems. The reporter writes Under the Obama administration, then-Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said V2V technology would greatly enhance autonomous driving technology to, “provide 360-degree situational awareness on the road,” and improve vehicle safety. [Emphasis added as the quote is about vehicle safety] and then follows that with: The Trump administration’s decision comes at a time when traffic fatalities in recent years have…
Disney has a secret army of mothers who flood the internet with Disney propaganda While this sounds like a big deal and “secret” and what not, it is just “astro turf” public relations. “Grassroots” organizing is when a group of people supposedly come together to promote something (often political or government policy related). The idea is that it is a movement that arose from the people. In reality, nearly all “grassroots” movements today are “astro turf” operations, carefully orchestrated and…
I saw an item on a Facebook group where the general meme was that everyone knows cellular phone usage while driving is the cause of most vehicle crashes. The data, however, paints a remarkably different picture. Cellular phone usage, per the government’s own data, is a minor causative factor in vehicle crashes. There are many causative factors in car crashes: one category of causative factors is “distracted driving”. Cellular phone usage is a subset of “distracted driving”. The U.S.government’s National…
“On the left if you’re consuming fake news you’re 34 times more likely than the general population to be a college graduate,” says Green. If you’re on the right, he says, you’re 18 times more likely than the general population to to be in the top 20 percent of income earners. And the study revealed another disturbing trend: the more you consume fake news, the more likely you are to vote. It’s “fascinating and frightening at the same time,” says…