Our capacity to make sense of events crashed in 2020. New research shows how we coped, embraced a DIY ethos to find perspective. — On March 26, 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) halted trading shares of Zoom Technologies. Volume in “ZOOM” transactions skyrocketed as did its valuation, increasing nearly seven-fold — from around $3 a share to more than $20 — in a month. The SEC’s statement said the company had…

This year’s World Economic Forum brought together 3,000 government, business, and civil society decision-makers to address major global issues and priorities for 2023. The mood was decidedly mixed, even confused. And yet, there were signs of optimism and urgency to adapt to a rapidly changing, complex world. …

Creative destruction of cultural production is near. — About a month ago, a new Cosmopolitan “hit the newsstands” with a greeting from the future. The publication featured no celebrity news, dating, or relationship advice. Just a simple message with material subtext. Meet the World’s First Artificially Intelligent Magazine Cover → It took only 20 seconds to make. Cosmopolitan’s…

Signals of migration from fear-inducing media to safer, more informed spaces — So this graphic below recently caught my eye. It’s a breakdown of how we die, tracked during the first twenty years of the 21st century. Heart attacks, cancers, and lung disease top the list by a wide margin. At the bottom of the chart, natural disasters, terrorism, and death from…

A story of a narrative, a reality, and a change in perspective “Never fall in love with the top layer. It’s what you find underneath that’s important.”— Amy Petersen, founder of Rebel Nell, Detroit City as Classroom is one of my favorite McLuhan books. It’s written as a lesson plan to “notice accurately.” Using “figure/ground” technique, the book helps readers see the…

Calling Russia-Ukraine the ”first social media” war distorts this fight for power — A Politico headline reads Social Media Goes to War. The New Yorker says Ukraine Becomes the First TikTok War. Facebook and Twitter make headline news by removing disinformation from their platforms. In the past week, dozens of news outlets contextualized the events in Ukraine and Russia as the “first social…

A new kind of crisis response is required — Fake news, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, deepfakes, conspiracy theories, synthetic content, manipulated media, information disorder, spoofed brands, narrative attacks, liar’s dividend, infodemic — there’s no shortage of seemingly synonymous buzzwords circulating our feeds. …

Beauty algorithms that mash fantasy with reality are a pervasive — and damaging — form of misinformation — In 1999 there was RateMyFace. The site allowed users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted by others. In 2000, the idea took off with Hot or Not, which inspired social media sites like YouTube. Most famously, Mark Zuckerberg launched his spinoff and Facebook precursor, Facemash, for Harvard students in…

Imagine Zooming with a coworker and discussing confidential information, only to discover the person on the other end of the call is actually a bad actor using deepfake tech to impersonate your colleague. A brighter hypothetical — imagine you need to quickly turn around content, so you generate high-quality photos…