Fewer people are interested in the truly geeky stuff these days, but the social media platforms that billions of us participate in often degenerate into dead zones of disinformation and misinformation. Masu.Photo/Yu Yu Hui, Getty Images
opinion
Looking back at more than a decade of tech articles and columns, it’s easy to see how everything has changed, aside from the eerily fast passage of time. Technology may now be even more integrated into our lives.
We’re not quite at Neuralink’s brain interface level yet, but we’re certainly working harder to outsource our already declining cognitive abilities to machines using artificial intelligence.
Some things haven’t changed much, like the emotions of the early works. herald About how the internet will never be safe.
It’s evolving so quickly that no one really knows how to fix the problem. Moreover, to put it euphemistically, everyone takes privacy and security seriously, so it benefits both the hacker who exploits the vulnerability and the security guard who protects from the vulnerability.
But the discussion is different from what it used to be, moving from being piecemeal to devices. Nowadays, fewer people care about really geeky things. That’s because technology has become increasingly powerful and accessible. In 2024, you won’t have to think about it as much. And then there’s the cloud.
Here we talk more about what technology can do and what it brings to us and society.
That last one is important, but it tends to gloss over the argument that the point of technology is to automate as much as possible, eliminating humans in the process. Technology has no values, morals, or ethics, and cannot be reasoned with. If you suffer from any of these, being in the tech industry can be lonely and depressing.
As a result, technology can seem like a dark beat to cover. Like when amazing engineering and ingenuity is unleashed to build a social network that is attractive to billions of people willing to give their hearts to unscrupulous platforms for profit.
It’s like an endless episode black mirrorAn excellent, gritty dystopian TV series from Charlie Brooker.
Social networks that seemed novel and innovative, such as Twitter, which began to understand the mass management of users and grew into a real-time news network, ended up being “excited” (with apologies to Cory Doctorow). They are now often dead zones for disinformation and misinformation.
Suggest to X that it’s good to care about others, maybe provide free school lunches to kids who normally go hungry all day, and then an army of trolls with numbers in their account names open their doors with both hands. Start typing abuse. Some are real people, some are machine-generated automatons, but there is little consistent discussion.
It’s a competition for news media outlets that are running out of advertising dollars. Publishers don’t have to plan or pay for producing the content, and only take token responsibility for it retroactively or even caring what it is. Any content is fine, even if it’s something that fills a toddler’s diaper.
Facebook is one example. A few days ago, Facebook announced it would remove the News tab for users in Australia and the United States, following in the UK, France, and Germany last year. Simply put, Facebook has no intention of signing new commercial deals with news organizations. But it also doesn’t stop users from posting news articles on Facebook.
As a journalist, you might want to join the platform even if you can’t beat it. Like TikTok, it has grown explosively since 2016, reaching its 1 billion monthly users mark.
However, this seems difficult from an economic standpoint. One New Zealand TikToker said he received 40 million likes and views on the clip. That’s a very impressive number.
However, this number doesn’t seem all that great when you look at the payout rate. It looks like it’s between $0.02 and $0.04 per 1,000 views. After all, New Zealanders aren’t getting paid for their efforts from TikTok, so it’s neither here nor there.
A little money like a reel
But nothing is forever in technology, and estimates suggest that TikTok earns US$0.31 per active hour of a US user.
This is interesting because it is much lower than the $200 that Instagram earns per user per hour. Meta-Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is understandably concerned that TikTok and other social network wannabes following in the Chinese company’s footsteps will likely cost even less.
Similarly, research from a German university shows that Google, the advertising-spending behemoth, is becoming less searchable because untrustworthy AI-generated content automatically corrupts and crowds out human work. It is suggested that it is starting.
There’s also the small problem of AI summarizing the content in your browser, without the need for a human to visit and interact with the site. It will be difficult for Google to monetize poor search results and the web browsed by AI.
In any case, this is my last column herald But I will soon document how algorithms have turned the social internet into junk. And how the news media survived that meltdown thanks to the hard work and high standards of journalists. In that sense, I remain your most faithful and optimistic servant even in times of adversity.