SajitonTech

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

‘Overtourism’ Worries Europe. How Much Did Technology Help Get Us There? Technology

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Tumblr Redoubles Efforts To Curb Hate Speech

Tumblr Redoubles Efforts To Curb Hate Speech

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Like most social networks these days, Tumblr is struggling with its role as a moderator of ideas and opinions.

Like Facebook, Twitter and others, the platform wants to promote free speech and creative expression, but not at the expense of people’s physical and emotional safety.

The Oath unit is redoubling its efforts to curb what it considers to be “hate speech,” the promotion of glorification of self-harm, violent material and all harmful content.

The full list can be found on Tumblr’s newly revised Community Guidelines, which officially goes into effect on Sept. 10.

Now easily a decade old, the changes reflect a more mature social-media industry. That means less freedom for users, and more work for networks -- but the larger among see the changes as necessary.

“Our Community Guidelines need to reflect the reality of the internet and social media today and acknowledge that the things people post and share online influence the way others think and behave,” Tumblr stated.

Rather than add to its guidelines, Tumblr has actually removed what it considers to be “gray” area from its guidelines.

For example, its classification of “hate speech” will no longer include the qualifying words: “If you encounter negative speech that doesn’t rise to the level of violence or threats of violence, we encourage you to dismantle negative speech through argument rather than censorship. That said, if you encounter anything especially heinous, tell us about it.”

For Tumblr and its ilk, what constitutes inappropriate content remains an open question. Awkwardly illustrating this point, Twitter continues to waffle on Alex Jones’ InfoWars and similarly incendiary tweeters.

“They, like other platforms where consumers can post their views on any given topic, are struggling to reconcile their sense of themselves as a platform with the reality they are more like media companies,” said Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group.

Humbling itself to the challenges ahead, Tumblr admitted: “We’ll continue to review and revise our Community Guidelines to make sure they remain an accurate reflection of our community and its values.”

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August 29, 2018 at 07:09AM

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Dozens at Facebook Unite to Challenge Its ‘Intolerant’ Liberal Culture Technology

By KATE CONGER and SHEERA FRENKEL from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/2wmVhPR
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Report Finds In-House Agencies More Likely To Service Creative Than Media

Report Finds In-House Agencies More Likely To Service Creative Than Media

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Media planning and buying, programmatic media, data analytics and research have relatively little risk of being taken in-house, according to findings of executives form 325 companies that have brought at least part of their marketing in-house. The findings, which comes from the In-House Agency Forum's and Forrester Research's 2018 State of the Industry Report, finds creative services, digital, video and social are far more likely to be serviced in-house.

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August 28, 2018 at 04:53PM

How Interns Spent Their Summer At These Agencies

How Interns Spent Their Summer At These Agencies

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As agencies say goodbye to their summer interns, several shops are revealing the projects these workers developed during their stints.

R2C Group interns were tasked with explaining the agency's nebulous-sounding "Transactional Brand Building" strategy. Their project captured this concept through three videos that each feature staffer dogs who help narrate the clips including Vinnie, who with his Australian accent struggles to outline the agency's DSEM approach that includes discovering the target audience.

The interns themselves filmed and edited these videos. The agency specifically crafts the projects so that each person can apply what they learned in their department to the project. In fact, the Portland-based shop takes its internship search so seriously that it actually recruits for interns year-round with several jobs offered at the end of the program each year.

Interns at WPP’s Kinetic focused on the research side by having themselves serve as focus group participants. The agency's leadership team developed questions for a Gen Z survey based on what clients would be interested in learning about that generation and how to apply insights to develop an OOH campaign. The interns were then asked to analyze and present the results to the company as their final project.

NYC-based Barker says it treated its interns as equal members of agency team, assigning them creative work that makes it to clients’ desks, and sometimes even consumers' eyes, says the shop.

Scout interns saw one of their suggestions launched during this summer's Shark Week to coincide with Discovery Channel's themed programming. They helped to create a Shark Week “war room” where they submitted tweets during primetime programming on behalf of client SeaPak. Some of their messages included "#shrimpweek has a nice ring to it" and responding to one follower who asked about a favorite shark with "the one really far away from us."

Likewise, School interns (in teams of eight to 10) were handed control of the agency's social media accounts, led the agency's ideation sessions for non-profits and startups, and spearheaded a fundraising campaign for the non-profit Pencils of Promise to help raise money to build schools in developing countries.

Since 2014, School has hired 63 interns total, including two that have risen through the ranks to become current creative directors.

Bernstein-Rein also focused on advocacy by dividing its interns into two teams that worked, respectively on projects for Ronald McDonald House of Kansas City and a community-wide corporate education and engagement initiative around quality early learning programs.

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August 28, 2018 at 04:16PM

Amobee Complete Videology Deal, Ups Demand-Side Options

Amobee Complete Videology Deal, Ups Demand-Side Options

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Amobee, the digital marketing technology company, completed its deal for video advertising firm Videology -- which filed Charter 11 bankruptcy back in May.

Amobee was named the winner of the auction to take control of the assets of Videology in July -- a final net purchase of $101.2 million.

The company says the addition of Videology now combines TV, social and digital in a single platform. That neatly separates Amobee from other demand-side platforms on the market.

Amobee also announced that Scott Ferber, founder, chairman, CEO Videology, has been named Chief Innovation Officer.

Domenic Venuto is now the COO, Amobee. Venuto had been general manager of IBM Watson’s Consumer Division and Watson Advertising. Erica Golden is now chief people officer of Amobee. Previously she head of global talent development at Apple.

Amobee is owned by Singtel, the large Singapore communications technology that reaches more than 700 million mobile subscribers.

Amobee original bid for Videology was $117.3 million. Adjusting for an asset purchase agreement, gave the deal a net price of $101.2 million.

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August 28, 2018 at 02:30PM

Why We No Longer Want To Know What's True

Why We No Longer Want To Know What's True

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“Truth isn’t truth” -- Rudy Giuliani, Aug. 19, 2018

Even without Giuliani’s bizarre statement, we’re developing a weird relationship with the truth. It’s becoming even more inconvenient. It’s certainly becoming more worrisome.

I was chatting with a psychiatrist the other day who counsels seniors. I asked him if he was noticing more general anxiety in that generation -- a feeling of helplessness with how the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. I asked him that because I am less optimistic about the future than I ever have been in my life. I wanted to know if that was unusual. He said it wasn’t. I had plenty of company.

You can pick the truth that is most unsettling. Personally, I lose sleep over climate change, the rise of populist politics and the resurgence of xenophobia. I have to limit the amount of news I consume in any day, because it sends me into a depressive state. I feel helpless. And as much as I’m limiting my intake because of my own mental health, I can’t help thinking that this is a dangerous path I’m heading down.

I researched and found that PTSD (President Trump Stress Disorder) and TAD (Trump Anxiety Disorder) were identified by the American Psychological Association. After a 10-year decline, anxiety levels in the U.S spiked dramatically after November 2016. Clinical psychologist Dr. Jennifer Panning, who coined TAD, says “the symptoms include feeling a loss of control and helplessness, and fretting about what’s happening in the country and spending excessive time on social media.”

But it’s not just the current political climate that’s causing anxiety. It’s also the climate itself. Enter “ecoanxiety.” Again, the APA in a recent paper nails a remarkably accurate diagnosis of how I’m feeling: “Gradual, long-term changes in climate can also surface a number of different emotions, including fear, anger, feelings of powerlessness, or exhaustion.”

“You can’t handle the truth” -- Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (from the movie “A Few Good Men”)

So, when the truth scares the hell out of you, what do you do? We can find a few clues in the quotes above. One is this idea of a loss of control. The other is spending excessive time on social media. My belief is that the latter exacerbates the former.

In a sense, Giuliani is right. Truth isn’t truth, at least, not on the receiving end. We all interpret truth within the context of our own perceived reality.

This in no way condones the manipulation of truth upstream from when it reaches us. We need to trust that our information sources provide the closest thing possible to a verifiable and objective view of truth.

But we have to accept the fact that for each of us, truth will ultimately be filtered through our own beliefs and understanding of what is real. Part of our own perceived reality is how in control we feel of the current situation. And this is where we begin to see the creeping levels of anxiety.

In 1954, psychologist Julian Rotter introduced the idea of a "locus of control": the degree of control we believe we have over our own lives.

For some of us, our locus is tipped to the internal side. We believe we are firmly at the wheel of our own lives. Others have an external locus, believing that life is left to forces beyond our control. But like most concepts in psychology, the locus of control is not a matter of black and white. It is a spectrum of varying shades of gray. And anxiety can arise when our view of reality seems to be beyond our own locus of control.

The word locus itself comes from the Latin for place or location. Typically, our control is exercised over those things that are physically close to us.

Up until 150 years ago, that worked well. We had little awareness of things beyond our own little world, so we didn’t need to worry about them.

But electronic media changed that. Suddenly, we were aware of wars, pestilence, poverty, famines and natural disasters from around the world. This made us part of Marshall McLuhan’s “Global Village.” The circle of our locus of awareness suddenly had to accommodate the entire world, but our locus of control just couldn’t keep pace.

Even with this expansion of awareness, one could still say that truth remained relatively true. There was an editorial check and balance process that checked the veracity of the information we were presented. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but we could place some confidence in the truth of what we read, saw and heard.

And then came social media, which creates a nasty feedback loop when it comes to the truth.

Once again, Panning typified these new anxieties as “fretting about what’s happening in the country and spending excessive time on social media.”

The algorithmic targeting of social media platforms means that you’re getting a filtered version of the truth. Facebook knows exactly what you’re most anxious about and feeds you a steady diet of content tailored specifically to those anxieties.

We have the comfort of seeing posts from members of our network that seem to fear the same things we do and share the same beliefs. But the more time we spend seeking this comfort, the more we’re exposed to the anxiety-inducing triggers, and the further and further we can drift from the truth.

All this creates a downward spiral that leads to these new types of environmental anxiety we are seeing. To deal with those anxieties, we’re developing new strategies for handling the truth -- or, at least, our version of the truth. That’s where I’ll pick up next week.

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August 28, 2018 at 01:30PM