Inequality breeds stress and anxiety. No wonder so many Britons are suffering
By: The Guardian June 10, 2018 The gap between image and reality yawns ever wider. Our rich society is full of people presenting happy smiling faces both in person and online, but when the Mental Health Foundation commissioned a large survey last year, it found that 74% of adults were so stressed they felt overwhelmed or […]
Impact of Technology on Society
By: TouchCore April 16, 2016 When we speak of the impact of technology on society, we always talk about the positive effects of technology and about how technology has made life easy. We talk about the Internet as an information resource and a communication platform and conveniently ignore the fact that an overexposure to it […]
How poverty changes your mind-set
By: Chicago Booth February 19, 2018 The proportion of the global population living on less than $1.90 per person per day has fallen—from 18 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2013, according to the World Bank. In the United States, however, the poverty rate has been more stubborn—41 million people lived below the country’s […]
From self-harm to terrorism, online recommendations cast a deadly shadow
By: The Guardian March 3, 2019 My eye was caught by a headline in Wired magazine: “When algorithms think you want to die”. Below it was an article by two academic researchers, Ysabel Gerrard and Tarleton Gillespie, about the “recommendation engines” that are a central feature of social media and e-commerce sites. Everyone who uses the web is […]
Facebook is ‘destroying how society works,’ says a former executive
By: Sacramento Bee December 11, 2017 For years, he was a top executive at Facebook. Now, though, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth is sounding the alarm about how the social media company and others are “destroying how society works.” Chamath Palihapitiya, who held the user growth role until 2011, said he feels “tremendous […]
Facebook cracks down on personality quizzes to protect your personal info
By: USA Today April 28, 2019 You know those Facebook personality quizzes that tell you which fruit you are or which cast member of “Friends” is your spirit animal? The social networking giant is cracking down on them. On Thursday, Facebook updated its platform policies for developers and said apps with like personality quizzes “may not be permitted on the […]
China’s cosmological Communism: a challenge to liberal democracies
By: Merics July 18, 2018 China’s presence and influence is not confined to its own borders or East Asia anymore, but has reached a global scale. In the new MERICS China Monitor Perspectives, “China’s cosmological Communism: A challenge to liberal democracies,” journalist and former MERICS Research Fellow Didi Kirsten Tatlow shows how imperial philosophy meets Marxist orthodoxy in Beijing’s […]
YouTube’s recommendations drive 70% of what we watch
By: Quartz January 13, 2018 YouTube is a master of getting you to watch videos you didn’t know existed minutes earlier. On an average day, people around the world watch one billion hours of video on YouTube. Most of those—70%—are recommended by YouTube’s algorithms, chief product officer Neal Mohan revealed at CES, as reported by CNET. The recommendations […]
Casey Gerald – The Gospel of Doubt TED Talk
By: TED February, 2016 What do you do when your firmly held beliefs turn out not to be true? When Casey Gerald’s religion failed him, he searched for something new to believe in — in business, in government, in philanthropy — but found only false saviors. In this moving talk, Gerald urges us all to […]