Prolonged use of social media may make you short tempered

Showing all posts about social media

Prolonged use of social media may make you short tempered

13 January 2025

Research from Massachusetts General Hospital, I believe, in the United States, possibly underscores what many of us already suspect: that prolonged use of social media may not be the best:

This kind of study cannot prove that your hours of doomscrolling is directly making you Tik’d off, but in light of known associations of irritability and mental health issues, maybe we should put down our phones just a little more.

While I have a few social media accounts, I’m no power user, as some of you may know. Does that not make me short tempered? Maybe that’s not for me to say…

Meta announces major changes to content moderation polices

9 January 2025

Justine Calma, writing for The Verge:

Meta is essentially shifting responsibility to users to weed out lies on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, raising fears that it’ll be easier to spread misleading information about climate change, clean energy, public health risks, and communities often targeted with violence.

The policy revision seemed surprising initially, but less so as I read more. I wonder why they’ve decided to make these changes, at, of all times, now?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also says he wants to allow more political discussion, although he refers to it as civic content, on the company’s platforms, while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Does this mean political discourse, between people on opposing ends of the political spectrum, will be courteous and respectful?

Will Australian social media users need ID to prove their age? Maybe not

9 December 2024

At some point in 2025, Australians under the age of sixteen will no longer be able to operate social media accounts. I thought up to high school age, about thirteen, seemed sensible, but lawmakers decided otherwise. Anyway, I imagine the new regulations will require, eventually, those of us sixteen or over, to verify, or certify, that we are of the correct age.

With Instagram (IG), I’ve been a member since 2011. So unless I joined up when up when I was four years old, age verification seems pointless for long standing accounts. But not necessarily. There are situations where accounts may have changed hands. A page — or more specifically, a username — once established by a person of adult age, may now belong to someone under the age of sixteen.

I don’t know how often it happens, but social media usernames or accounts, probably change ownership on at least some of semi-regular basis. I’m talking about personal pages here, not accounts run on behalf of a business or organisation. These would most likely change stewardship when the person, maybe a social media manager, previously looking after the page, leaves that role.

I receive a couple of requests per year from people asking if I could “transfer” my personal IG page to them. They probably like the account name. I politely decline the polite requests (I’ve had a couple of not so courteous… demands before). I can only imagine the pressure people with IG handles, such as, well John, must be under to relinquish their usernames, but I digress.

To prove though we are the right age to be using social media in Australia, will we need to scan our driver’s licenses, or passports, into an app? A sometimes, cumbersome, awkward process. Please try retaking the photo of your passport in a better lit setting. Hopefully not. Instead, writes Stilgherrian, at The Weekly Cybers, everything we need may already be on our smartphones:

According to The Mandarin, tests of Australia’s Digital Trust Service (DTS), run by driver registry peak body Austroads, have shown that the credentials already in digital wallets can be used to verify proof-of-age at point-of-sale transactions without needing additional personal data.

Threads to allow users to select following feed as their default

29 November 2024

This to finally spare us the time-wasting, sometimes totally irrelevant, tyranny of the “for you” tab. Chris Welch, writing for The Verge, says Meta has started testing a feature allowing users to select their preferred feed, be it “for you”, “following”, or even one custom made, as the stream they’ll see all the time. It can’t happen soon enough.

If you’re in the test, here’s how to set your default feed: open the Threads app and tap and hold on any feed at the top. From there, choose “edit feeds,” and that’s where you’ll be able to reorder them. Whichever feed you put in the first slot will appear whenever you open Threads.

I’m obviously not part of the test, as I couldn’t set my following feed as the default, but I did take time to setup a custom feed. They seem to be a little like the list feature Twitter has (or had), whereby you can read someone’s account without having to follow them. It’s a great way to set up feeds with a particular focus, without having the same accounts clutter your following feed.

I’m hoping the “test” proves successful, and the ability to select one feed or another as the default, is made available to all Threads members.

RELATED CONTENT

social media, social networks, Threads

Doomscrolling social media does not result in brain rot

12 November 2024

So say psychologists at the Sydney based University of New South Wales (UNSW):

Dr Poppy Watson, adjunct lecturer with UNSW’s School of Psychology, says while the idea warrants exploration, there is a lack of evidence showing excessive doomscrolling of social media is responsible for the mental fatigue, lack of focus, and reduced cognitive function often attributed to ‘brain rot’.

Doomscrolling is hardly a harmless undertaking either, but the UNSW researchers attribute so-called brain rot, particularly among teenagers, more to poverty, socioeconomic status, and poor diet. Brain rot does not, for instance, seem to have impacted IQ scores, which continue to rise:

If intense, prolonged digital consumption were stultifying young people’s minds, then we could expect to see a drop in average IQ scores between pre- and post-digital generations. But as Dr Watson points out, average IQ scores have risen from the start of the 20th century and into the 21st, known as the Flynn Effect.

This as the Australian government proposal to ban social media access to people under the age of sixteen, has been attracting criticism.

RELATED CONTENT

psychology, social media, trends

One personal website is enough for me

15 October 2024

I’m not sure disassociated always rates as a personal website, with its informational content style. But it’s owned personally by me, and I personally write the content, so on that basis it’s a personal website. A lot of what I post are my thoughts on the many and various things happening online and in the world, so much of what appears here is my personal perspective.

I think I’ve said it a few times before, writing diary-like posts here seems pointless. I’m not sure what interest the ins and outs of my day-to-day life would be to anyone else. But writing diary-like posts is the precise definition of a personal website for some people. I’ve always seen the web as self-publishing platform: a platform to publish whatever you want. So if that’s informational content, or diary-like posts, that’s all fine.

A website whether you consider it personal or otherwise, is yours to do with as you please. Within reason. In that context, one personal website has always been enough for me. But a post by Kev Quirk, about bloggers who have multiple personal websites and blogs, has struck a chord with a few of the people whose RSS feeds I read. For some of us, it seems, one personal website is not enough.

Well, this is the web, and that’s an individual’s call to make. But to my mind, even two personal websites is one too many. Why, I wonder, do some bloggers feel the need to split their web presence? Maybe it’s a throwback to the idea supposedly propagated by Google that we should only be publishing niche blogs? That is, blogs focussed — mainly — on a single topic. In addition to being useful for readers looking for information on a particular subject, niche blogs enjoyed better SERPs placement, or something. Or so the story went.

Mind you, I’m not even sure Google actually said that. Maybe the notion was simply picked up by the people who blogged about blogging, and ended up being bandied ceaselessly around the blogosphere. A lot of my traffic comes in through Google, so clearly they’ve never been bothered by my non-niche blogging style.

But when it comes to having multiple blogs, it’s possible some bloggers want to separate different types of content, or feel not everything they write is suited to a particular blog. That I get, because I post a bit of what I call off-topic content to social media. Back in the day that was Twitter, which made for a great “side-dish” to a blogger’s main website. I don’t use Twitter/X anymore, but still post the same sort of content to the socials I have today, albeit at a greatly reduced rate.

Not everyone wants to post content on social media though. In that case then, I can see the point of something like Micro.blog. I don’t know a whole lot about the platform, but it seems similar to the likes of Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky: it’s basically for micro-blogging. But even with something like Micro.blog, you still come back to the problem of content ownership, and the concern such platforms, like the social media channels, could close-down just like that.

It’s probably not likely to happen, especially to the established platforms, but it could be a problem if it did. That’s what I like about a single website. Even if my website host closed down overnight, I have the database and other content (e.g. photos) backed-up (in one place, well, more), and ready to potentially transfer elsewhere. Very little, hopefully, would be lost. Trying to recover years’ worth of posts from a closed social media channel might be another matter.

The blogging CMS I use lets me — if I chose — hide selected categories from the main feed/stream (or at least there is a way to make that happen because I did it before), in addition to serving up a separate RSS feed for each post category. If using social media becomes untenable, for whatever reason, in the future, I could always setup a separate off-topic content stream that would only be visible on certain parts of this website.

That seems to me to be the way to go. Everything on your own, single, self-hosted, website. And all in the true spirit of IndieWeb, or whatever you like to call it.

All IndieWeb participants need to be vocal, not just developers

5 October 2024

Evan Sheehan, writing at The Darth Mall:

I think Jeremy Keith is right, that all that really matters is having your own website. However big or small, however you make it, whatever you choose to put on it. I just don’t think that this is what the IndieWeb is actually focused on. The IndieWeb feels like it’s something by developers, for developers, because it focuses so much on implementing certain features.

My take here, is that it’s the people developing and implementing the microformats, the webmentions, what have you (sorry, a lot of this stuff is over my head), who seem to be the most vocal in the conversation. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but you’d be forgiven for sometimes thinking IndieWeb was the exclusive domain of developers. But I’m not having a go at developers here, because, you know, if there were no developers, there’d be no web/internet.

Instead, the discussion needs more input from others in the IndieWeb community. The creatives, the writers, the artists, the photographers. The other people doing their thing on the non-corporate web. There are already such people doing that, but more need to weigh in. The topic brings to mind something American author Edgar Allen-Poe once wrote:

Shadows of Shadows passing… It is now 1831… and as always, I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations to which end, music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallour, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless.

It’s all very deep. But the point is that different ideas complement each other. IndieWeb, the web, needs the technical infrastructure, but then alongside that, there needs to be something else. An idea, a thought, content. Something to engage with.

It’s my roundabout way of saying IndieWeb isn’t just for the technical people, it’s for anyone who wants to be involved. And in this case, the more the merrier. Let’s hear it then, from the other IndieWeb participants.

Independent websites: vital for the survival of the hyperlink

3 October 2024

This Halifax Examiner article, by Philip Moscovitch, which features a number of quotes by Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles Times journalist, recorded on a recent episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, has been doing the rounds. The upshot being hyperlinks, links from one webpage to another, are in danger of becoming obsolete. Extinct. Quite unsurprisingly, social media, and some search engines, are among the culprits intent on “degrading” hyperlinks:

There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It’s something that’s kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That’s why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well…

Threads, Meta’s micro-blogging platform, allows hyperlinks to be included in posts at the moment. Whether though they “degrade” them, in X/Twitter style, down the line, remains to be seen. Instagram has never been hyperlink friendly, but remember it started out as a platform for sharing photos, not links.

Not long after I started making websites in the late 1990’s, I read an article about Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web in 1991. The piece is long gone now, but as I recall it, Berners-Lee said when he devised HTML, the markup language used to build websites, he made it intentionally simple to use (though maybe hard to master…). This so information could be shared easily:

However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer working at the CERN research center on the Swiss-French border named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of linked information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Here we are, all these years later, where some people would like to do away with one of the web’s building blocks, which made everything we have today possible in the first place. Go figure. Well, link-haters are gonna hate, and do their best rid their web of hyperlinks, I guess. What this does though is underline the importance of an independent web, and websites that are interlinked by hyperlinks. Continue freely and abundantly sharing those links everyone.

When is the social web not the social web? When it is THE social web

27 September 2024

A few days ago, a group called the Social Web Foundation was launched. A coming together of “leaders of the open social networking movement“, the foundation aims to make “connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.” Rather than me reinventing the wheel, here’s the Wikipedia definition of ActivityPub:

ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server (shortened to C2S) API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.

In short, ActivityPub allows individual, separate, decentralised social networking platforms, to “talk” to each other. Therefore someone on, say, Threads can (in theory) interact with another person on Mastodon. Threads and Mastodon are two different entities. The ActivityPub protocol means the Threads member does not need a Mastodon account, and vice versa. The Threads member will be able to interact with the Mastodon member, almost as if they were on the same platform.

Here’s the Social Web Foundation’s wording of what I just said:

The “social web”, also called the “Fediverse”, is a network of independent social platforms connected with the open standard protocol ActivityPub. Users on any platform can follow their friends, family, influencers, or brands on any other participating network.

The foundation, in the same sentence, is also proposing that the fediverse, the current conglomeration of independent social platforms, be referred to as the social web. Perhaps by now you’re saying to yourself: “remind me again; who are these Social Web Foundation people?”

You wouldn’t be the only one. When I first heard about the foundation, it reminded me of a group (I think) of people calling themselves fediverse.info. About a month ago, they proposed the use of a typographic symbol, an asterism, as a symbol of none other than the fediverse. I had no problems with the suggestion, but I wondered what sort of mandate they had to make such a proposal.

As I wrote then, there was very little information on the fediverse.info website as to who they were, and why they thought they were in a position to make the suggestion in the first place. The fediverse.info group may be made up of some of the most respected people in the fediverse, but you’d never know that from their webpage.

The foundation, on the other hand, is a little more transparent. At least in terms of membership. Their team page identifies Evan Prodromou, Mallory Knodel, and Tom Coates, as core members. What’s not so clear, is why they think they’re in a position to suggest the fediverse be renamed the social web. Unless you accept this rather dubious, and astonishing claim, about Prodromou:

Evan [Prodromou] made the first-ever post on the social web in May 2008.

Prodromou’s background is impressive. Not only did he co-write the ActivityPub protocol, he once worked for Microsoft, and in 2003 founded Wikitravel, a now defunct a web-based collaborative travel guide. He’s doubtless scored a few firsts during his career, but the first-ever social web post claim is problematic. Twitter, for instance, was founded two years earlier in 2006. If Twitter then is not a social web platform, what is?

Actually, there are a number of answers to that question, says fLaMEd, webmaster (a title often used in the nineties, by people who operated and published websites, in the absence of the yet to be devised term blogger) and writer, at fLaMEd fury:

Have you heard of blogs, guestbooks, forums, instant messaging, email?

Email has been around since the early 1970’s. Almost forty years before 2008. And if having a social exchange via email isn’t an instance of the social web, what is? Of course, email isn’t social in the same way that, say, a public, there for all to see, Twitter/X feed is.

Enter then some of the earliest websites, of which fLaMEd fury, online since 1996, is among. And this website, disassociated, online since 1997. I’ve written about my own experiences of this social web.

During the late 1990’s, I made the acquaintance of numerous webmasters, designers, and writers. Some were overseas, but many were in Australia. We communicated in a number of ways. Through the online journals of our personal websites, where we referenced each other, in true IndieWeb style. Or by writing in each other’s guestbooks.

Before long, about eight of us had established an email group, and in 1999, our “social web” interactions culminated in the establishment of the (now off-line) Australian Infront, a group of web creatives working to elevate the perception of Australian web design. Through the Infront’s discussion forums, and face-to-face social gatherings, we brought potentially thousands of local, and international, designers together. Try telling anyone involved that wasn’t social web, because something called ActivityPub didn’t then exist.

There’s nothing new about the social web, it’s been there almost as long as the internet has. But I suspect the Social Web Foundation is going to stay the course, and press ahead with its efforts to rename the fediverse the social web.

But Prodromou has one other claim to fame. In 2007, he founded a company called Control Yourself, which developed Identi.ca, a Twitter/X like microblogging platform. I was an Identi.ca member for a short time in 2008. Was Identi.ca, I wonder, the “social web” platform that Prodromou made this purported “first-ever” post from?

If so, then I think clarification is in order. Instead of saying “Evan made the first-ever post on the social web in May 2008”, perhaps it is more accurate to say he “made the first-ever post on the Identi.ca platform in 2008.”

Sweden wants to curb screen time for children under two

19 September 2024

Amelia Nierenberg, writing for The New York Times:

The intention of Sweden’s policy — and others like it — is to cut down on distractions, promote healthy development and help preserve the innocence of childhood. But some experts wonder if the guidance — however well-intentioned — may be too unrealistic and too judgmental to stick.

These are guidelines, not dictates, or bans, and Swedish health authorities are aiming for zero hours screen time for children under two years of age. I’m not sure what value, say, a one-year old child derives from any screen time at all, but the perspective of a parent of a child close to two years of age, may be different. Being able to temporarily distract a child with a game or cartoon show, may be a boon for any time-poor parent.

« older posts

newer posts »