In the Trump Tweet Tracker, we are tracking, unpacking, and updating Trump’s tweets, according to our best understanding of their significance.
Here’s the latest on Trump’s “Are We Living in Nazi Germany?” tweets.
(Spencer Platt / Getty / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic)
Ian Bogost offers praise and scrutiny for President Obama’s social media savvy in Obama Was Too Good at Social Media.
Claire Wilmot delivers a heart-breaking critique on how social media can aid in expressing public mourning, but can be damaging for allowing the personal grief of closer loved ones. Read Wilmot’s personal essay The Space Between Mourning and Grief:
The way people mourn online has been the subject of much cultural comment recently, particularly in the wake of mass tragedies and high-profile celebrity deaths, such as those of David Bowie and Prince. Some argue that the likes of Facebook and Twitter have opened up public space for displays of grief that had been restricted to private spheres of secular culture. But rather than reconstructing an outlet for public grief, social media often reproduces the worst cultural failings surrounding death, namely platitudes that help those on the periphery of a tragedy rationalize what has happened, but obscure the uncomfortable, messy reality of loss.
Social media has increased the speed and ease of communication to an unprecedented degree, and yet sites like Facebook and Twitter are poorly suited to grief’s strangeness. By design, social media demands tidy conclusions, and dilutes tragedy so that it’s comprehensible even to those only distantly aware of what has happened. The majority of Facebook posts mourning Lauren’s death were full of “silver linings” comments that were so far removed from the horror of the reality that I found them isolating and offensive. Implicit in claims that Lauren was no longer suffering, or that “everything happens for a reason” are redemptive clauses—ones that have a silencing effect on those who find no value in their pain.
It makes sense that those who knew Lauren sought some kind of meaning in her death in an attempt to re-order a universe disrupted. My sister was a smart, kind, athletic business student and a social entrepreneur—and she had an incredibly rare form of brain cancer that ended up killing her. It’s naively assumed that good, healthy people deserve good, healthy lives. When they’re robbed of what cosmic justice is owed to them, the laws that many believe govern human lives become suddenly suspect, or are revealed as illusory.
Read the entire story here.
Reid Mitenbuler writes on the inextricable relationship between how we communicate and the medium we use to do so in “How Paper Shaped Civilization”:
There’s a deeper question here. Beyond tweeting, how would Plato have responded to modern changes in the way humans communicate? During his own time, people increasingly recorded their thoughts and experiences in writing, and he worried that written language reduced our reliance on memory. The tool made us less human, even mechanical, he argued, because once something was jotted down, it no longer came from within a person. It was less authentic, and therefore less true.
Then again, Plato expressed this concern in Phaedrus, his dialogue that most famously grapples with the issue, by writing it down.
Plato’s complicated relationship with writing—or really, with the seismic shifts of technological change—forms the heart of an impressive new book, Paper: Paging Through History. Mark Kurlansky, the author, has written two previous books, Saltand Cod, that use the condensed histories of their respective subjects to explore the wider global histories of empire and capitalism. Here again he picks up a seemingly mundane commodity to examine a wider phenomenon: historical attitudes toward disruptive technologies. His question: how do humans absorb and disseminate information? His answer helps reveal the evolution, both politically and economically, of how the world has come to be organized.
Read the entire story here.
Finally, a Movie Portrays Social Media as Something Other Than Evil
Jon Favreau’s indie comedy Chef is pitched at foodies—but it has a lot of smart, refreshingly positive things to say about Twitter, too.Read more. [Image: OpenRoad]
In the 1997 movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the two title characters, worried that they haven’t done anything noteworthy to share at said reunion, decide instead to lie and claim they invented Post-it notes.
Their story quickly unravels, of course, but had the movie been made a decade later, even the very concept of the ruse would have been impossible. Everyone would have known about Romy’s daily slog at the Jaguar dealership through Facebook.
Or would they?
The ebb and flow of Facebook friendships has become fruitful territory for social scientists in recent years. At least 63 percent of people report having unfriended someone on Facebook, but what prompts these digital rejections can tell us a lot about both the nature of real-life friendship and about how we manage our online personalities.
Read more. [Image: Sean McGrath/Flickr]
We’ve been trying to figure out the moment Twitter turned, retracing tweets to see whether there was something specific that soured the platform.
Something is wrong on Twitter. And people are noticing.
Or, at least, the kind of people we hang around with on Twitter are noticing. And it’s maybe not a very important demographic, this very weird and specific kind of user: audience-obsessed, curious, newsy. Twitter’s earnings last quarter, after all, were an improvement on the period before, and it added 14 million new users for a total of 255 million. The thing is: Its users are less active than they once were. Twitter says these changes reflect a more streamlined experience, but we have a different theory: Twitter is entering its twilight.
Read more. [Image: Matthias Töpfer/flickr]
The Value of a Positive Tweet: $22.26*
* Depending on the product you’re buying and the person doing the tweeting.Read more. [Image: Reuters]
At 2:38 p.m. on September 9, 2013, Jeremy Fowler posted a picture of his family wearing bicycle helmets while standing in front of the split-rail fence of a horse corral in nowhere New Hampshire. The reflection of their washed out skin bespoke the 2.0 megapixels of Jeremy’s flip phone camera. It was a strange image to arrive on my Facebook newsfeed, a pixilated tribute to Jeremy’s father who died 48 hours earlier. It was Jeremy’s last photograph with all of family members present, a gesture of quixotic solemnity in a medium where the earnest so often do not belong.
He accompanied the picture with this status: “Yesterday my dad unexpectedly went to be with the Lord, we’re glad that he’s in a far better place than we are but we will miss him so much, plz pray for our family during this difficult time!” To date, the post has received 62 likes and 33 comments from some of his 459 friends. Most have said things like, “God be with y’all!!! We have and will continue to pray.”
Death, typically such a huge taboo, was now a subject fit for Facebook, with all its abbreviated spellings and exclamation marks.
Read more. [Image: 55laney69/Flickr]
Share It Forward: How One Facebook Status Spread Across the World
According to the Pay-It-Forward-Day authorities, today is Pay-It-Forward Day. The “holiday” celebrates of little acts of kindness between friends and strangers: If one person does something kind for another, the recipient of that kindness will be kind to someone else, and kindness will move across the world.
Think of it as an unfolding social network, of sorts, of kindness.
Naturally, a social network has turned its attention to the concept. Facebook’s always-intriguing data science team has looked at a popular, pay-it-forward-related status update from the beginning of this year. The status passed across more than 800,000 profiles and was translated into nine languages before the team stopped tracking it at the end of January.
Read more. [Image: marekuliasz / Shutterstock]
In my latest animation, the Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes coming to America for college and being floored by how little...
“Rather than sticking with turgid socialist clichés, in 1958 East German...
Listen to MIke D yell at an ill-informed radio producer because sometimes it’s really fun to be wrong: http://bit.ly/UralXA
–Sean, Sideshow
From Cats Dressed as People, 100 Years Ago, one of 15 photos. The Aviator. (Harry Whittier Frees/Library of Congress)
Memento Mori by Henrik Hondius (1626)
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey - Part 1
Some claim that evolution is just a theory, as if it were merely an opinion.