Peoples & Things Podcast – Nirit Weiss-Blatt on The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication

Moments before my response to Haidt was out - Don’t Be So Certain Social media is Undermining Democracy - Lee Vinsel and I covered a lot of ground:

Filter bubbles, echo chambers, rabbit holes, polarization, the shift to Techlash, Donald Trump, tech companies’ crisis responses and whether they were effective (spoiler alert: NO), Google/YouTube vs. Facebook, confirmation bias in media consumption, tech regulation, and the Web3/Crypto hype.

 

Give it a listen:

Peoples & Things: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Castbox | Listen Notes | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | YouTube

 

AI algorithms creating rabbit holes 

as interpreted by OpenAI’s DALL-E (left), MidJourney (middle), and Stable Diffusion DreamStudio (right)

 

Let’s End “The END of __” Headlines

 

My new article demonstrates numerous times headlines claimed "The End of Facebook/ Google/ Twitter/ etc" and were miserably wrong.

We still have those stupid headlines due to both panic and wishful thinking (wanting Facebook to die, for example). 

But wishful thinking doesn't make the END of something a fact.

On the other side of the equation, we have tech leaders with a totally different narrative:
1. There's a lot to Build. We are the Builders.
2. Progress. We're moving forward because, by definition, progress is for good.

This combination can explain why those things (that were declared "Dead") are pretty much alive and kicking.
 

Check out the full piece:
Bombastic eulogies: Let's put an end to cynical "The End of" headlines