OLDaily

The Impact of Context Collapse and Privacy on Social Network Site Disclosures
Jessica Vitak, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 2021/02/12

This is from 2012 but I want to make sure I have it in my records as a definitive account of context collapse - what the term means, how it's caused, and measures for responding to it. By 'context collapse' we mean "the flattening out of multiple distinct audiences in one’s social network, such that people from different contexts become part of a singular group of message recipients."

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Libby is stuck between libraries and publishers in the e-book war
Anna Kramer, Protocol, 2021/02/12

What I want to know is how we came to be in a world where e-books are a lot more expensive than physical books, so much so that the libraries are increasingly unable to afford them? "Librarians sometimes pay hundreds of dollars to circulate one copy of an e-book for a two-year period, a number that could theoretically add up to thousands for one book over decades." It's because of the way e-books are priced: you don't own them, the way you would a regular book, you lease them, and these agreements increase the cost of the book each time it is read. The problem is that publishers fundamentally disagree with the core purpose of libraries, which is to make books available for people to read without paying for them. And to me, this means they disagree with a core building block of a a free, open and democratic society. And that's a problem.

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What Teachers Pay Teachers Is Learning From Bad Lessons and Upset Teachers
Stephen Noonoo, EdSurge, 2021/02/12

As Slate stated bluntly last summer, "lesson plans platforms for teachers have a racism problem." It's not new, and has been widely discussed. This article picks up from that and looks at measures Teachers Pay Teachers has taken to address the problem. Specifically, "the site now uses AI to identify lessons that include certain keywords, especially ones relating to social studies and historical events, and subjects them to manual review." What's missing from the EdSurge article is any information about whether the response has been effective. It's hard to reconcile the "tiny percentage of the site’s total" that the company found with the 30 percent of the site's bestsellers found to have "posed potential harm to students, particularly to students with marginalized identities." And it's worrying that between the time of its founding in 2006 and some time last summer the site's owners were content with allowing this problem to fester.

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FundOSS
FundOSS, 2021/02/12

This is a variation on donor-based funding for open source software (and therefore, open content). The idea is that donors contribute to a pool of money, and then donations are allocated by the number of people supporting given projects, as opposed to the size of the donations to those projects. This works against the phenomenon of rich donors picking winners, a valuable idea since such donations tend to favour (as I said in a post yesterday) projects "that entrench the idea of winners and losers, view the commodification and often the commercialization of community and media as inevitable, that view all of this as being inherently individual-based, libertarian, and 'free' in a very special and privileged sense of free." Via pia mancini.

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Testimony before the North Dakota Senate Industry, Business and Labor Committee
David Heinemeier Hansson, Signal V. Noise, 2021/02/12

This is testimony from the co-founder of Basecamp on the subject of North Dakota's Senate Bill number 2333 on the subject of app stores. The bill is a short and clear two pages saying that platforms may not (quoted):

• Require a developer to use a digital application distribution platform or digital transaction platform as the exclusive mode of distributing a digital product.
• Require a developer to use an in-application payment system as the exclusive mode of accepting payment from a user to download a software application or purchase a digital or physical product through a software application.
• Retaliate against a developer for choosing to use an alternative application store or in-application payment system

Now I know it's just a proposal, and I know it's just North Dakota, but this model of clarity is both badly needed and could upend the monopoly lock on app distribution currently enjoyed by mobile phone providers.

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Subject matter networks
Harold Jarche, 2021/02/12

To protect yourself from disinformation and fake news you should determine whether the speaker is an authority on the subject. That's what a lot of digital literacy guides say. But it's wrong on two fronts. First, a lot of authorities are wrong, or worse, deceitful. And second, a lot of non-authorities are right. So how do you decide? The answer is to never trust just one source. That's how newspapers do it, or at least, are supposed to do it. As Harold Jarche argues in this post, it's better to rely on a network of voices on a given subject. The question is, how can you know the network is reliable? My response is to refer to the semantic condition for networks: diversity, autonomy, openness, interactivity. A network based on webs, not stars.

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