DataDownload: Happy Fourth — Creatively

7 min readJul 4, 2020

DataDownload: Happy Fourth — Creatively A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

Hi. It’s Steve writing to you this week. It’s summer time. And that means we’re probably missing some things we love from summers past. But not forever, so we’re doing different things. But Doomscrolling — as Wired reports, is a bad idea. Charlie Warzel writes in the NY Times about Facebook, and the possibility of reform. It’s worth a read. Over at CJR — Jon Alsop makes the argument that there’s too much news. I’m sure you get that info-overload feeling a few times a month (or week, or hour). And our friend Steven Levy takes a swing at WFH, again — we think — yup.

And then — we premier Episode #1 of MACHINES+MEDIA in conjunction with Bloomberg. Chris Collins, Charlie Beckett, Noelle Silver, and Vivian Schiller. Pretty tasty brain food, if we do say so ourselves.

So look back — America’s 244 years are pretty remarkable. And our next chapter is going to be full of challenges, innovation, and change. Ok, maybe that’s a tad optimistic, but that’s how we roll.

Insert hopeful fireworks sound here: (Kaboom. Kaboom. Kaboom.)

Happy 4th.

Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health

The pandemic has surfaced a number of neologisms as people shut themselves inside, their only connection to the world video boxes and social feeds. Zoomers, zoombombing, covidiot, quarantini — these describe generations, behaviors, even cocktails. Now we can safely add doomscrolling/doomsurfing: “falling into deep, morbid rabbit holes filled with coronavirus content, agitating [yourself] to the point of physical discomfort, erasing any hope of a good night’s sleep.”

We keep looking for clarity in a world that becomes increasingly more chaotic — and the worst place to look for solace is a feed that algorithmically pushes stress, anxiety, and stimulation (especially with our propensity to look at bad news). “Doomscrolling will never actually stop the doom itself. Feeling informed can be a salve, but being overwhelmed by tragedy serves no purpose,” notes Wired senior editor Angela Watercutter.

7 min read

“We Know We Have More Work to Do” (or shortened — somewhat contrarily — to W.K.W.H.M.W.T.D.) “is the definitive utterance of the social media era,” notes NY Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel. He quotes Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia: “You see lots of people putting forth a hopeful idea of a new, humane social media platform…. if we’re being honest, what they’re really proposing at that point is not really social media anymore.”

The issue is tied to leadership and its viewpoints, writes Warzel, but that’s so deep-seated that we need a different approach than just targeting the edges or leaning on content moderation: “We need to change our demands.” The #StopHateForProfit campaign is one example, and Warzel presents other ideas floated, ranging from simple (“Design distribution around a different principle than virality”) to wonkish (“Cross-company/platform data and research collaborations between trust and safety teams”) to blunt (shut it all down, start over).

7 min read

“Now, for the first time, it feels to me that to be astride everything of importance is to be pulled apart.”

What’s more effective than reporting on news overload/oversaturation than succinctly summarizing the brain-melting volume of chaos that’s being dropped on us every day? CJR does just that (so if you wanted to catch up after a few days away from doomscrolling, now’s the chance), before dissecting this barrage of breaking information we’re facing… and then again diving into some great summaries of what’s been happening.

10 min read Read More Remote-First Companies Are Another Covid-19 Calamity Steven Levy ruminates on the new normal of WFH: “Offices may never be much of a thing again — even when the Covid-19 crisis passes. Are joint workspaces over?” Levy notes that like always, Big Tech has the final say: Facebook and Google employees don’t need to show up in-office until at least 2021, while Zuckerberg says he expects half his workforce will be WFH by 2030. Twitter even said that employees can remain remote permanently if they’d like (later extending the offer to Square employees).

Funny how the way to acquire top talent has shifted from lavish offices to the option to never plant yourself in one. But Satya Nadella isn’t quick to celebrate the WFH movement: “One of the things I feel is, hey, maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?”

9 min read Read More A Plan to Redesign the Internet Could Make Apps That No One Controls

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

The quote is an excerpt from Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow’s 1996 cyberspace deceleration of independence. A mere 25 years later and the Internet belongs to Big Tech, giants of silicon and software. And the weariness isn’t just felt by early Internet pioneers, but by politicians, the media, internal employees, and the general public as they push back against misguided leadership, bias, misinformation, and information harvesting.

The MIT Tech Review piece tracks nonprofit Dfinity Foundation as they pursue their mission to make the Internet an equal ground again with the Internet Computer — “a decentralized technology spread across a network of independent data centers that allows software to run anywhere on the internet, rather than in server farms that are increasingly controlled by large firms.”

8 min read

Read More What We’re Watching Machines+Media — Episode 1

The hype around AI in newsrooms and production studios has been a hot topic for many years, with the long-discussed technology promising to change the way media is produced, distributed, consumed, and monetized.

Are these applications actually helping or hindering journalists as they cope with an unprecedented scale of information, all while their normal practices are disrupted by working remotely? Learn more on Machines+Media Episode 1: AI & Emerging Trends in Media Technology.

63 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Land of the Giants

In a series of podcasts, Recode’s Peter Kafka and Rani Molla examine Netflix’s road to 200M subscribers, and how the streaming company disrupted entertainment and completely changed the way we watch TV. “Hear from Netflix’s founders and top executives as well as its competitors, critics and more — covering everything from its unusual internal culture to its battle with Blockbuster.” Here are the episodes out so far:

Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: ETL Speaker Series — Bonny Simi, JetBlue Technology Ventures
Date: July 8, 4:30PM
Bonny Simi is the president of JetBlue Technology Ventures, and will be speaking as part of Stanford eCorner’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. Watch Here.

Virtual Event: 7th Annual NYU-Yale Summer Accelerator Pitchoff
Date: July 9, 4PM-6PM
For the seventh year in a row, inspiring young innovators who are building promising ventures will come together (virtually) for a friendly pitchoff competition before a panel of judges at the NYU-Yale Pitchoff. Register Here. A Deeper Look What Comes After Zoom?

Benedict Evans looks at Zoom — and the future of video — through the lens of two other breakthrough services: Dropbox and Skype. Both examples weren’t the first in their respective markets, but they solved a lot of “small pieces of friction” that made it easier to save files and make VoIP calls. And Zoom did that too. But then we look at what happened with Skype (besides the customer support taking a nosedive, among other issues) — voice got commoditized, and what ended up mattering was how you wrapped it in a product.

“I think this is where we’ll go with video — there will continue to be hard engineering, but video itself will be a commodity and the question will be how you wrap it. There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other.”