Friday, October 14, 2022

The High Cost of Living Your Life Online

 Germany: What poverty looks like in a rich country DW


Are you reading this story on your Apple MacBook, in your home office, with the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the air? Or on your phone, in a port-a-loo, on a worksite? 

The latest census data just dropped, and it paints a picture of two Australias.

A ‘Laptop Line’ divides Australia’s cities. The inner city works from home, but the suburbs can’t, as the next map shows. In Sydney, the highest rate of working from home happens in the harbourside suburb of Lavender Bay. That’s an area where an apartment can cost well over $3 million. The lowest rate is in Ashcroft, where you can find a three-bedroom house for under $1 million. The irony is that many of those people chose to live in the inner city for proximity to CBD offices they now don’t need to visit.

Huge irony in ritzy suburbs with highest work from home rates


The High Cost of Living Your Life Online - Wired: “To be online is to be constantly exposed. While it may seem normal, it’s a level of exposure we’ve never dealt with before as human beings. We’re posting on Twitter, and people we’ve never met are responding with their thoughts and criticisms.

 People are looking at your latest Instagram selfie. They’re literally swiping on your face. Messages are piling up. It can sometimes feel like the whole world has its eyes on you. Being observed by so many people appears to have significant psychological effects. There are, of course, good things about this ability to connect with others. It was crucial during the height of the pandemic when we couldn’t be close to our loved ones, for example. However, experts say there are also numerous downsides, and these may be more complex and persistent than we realize. Studies have found that high levels of social media use are connected with an increased risk of symptoms of anxietyand depression. There appears to be substantial evidence connecting people’s mental health and their online habits. Furthermore, many psychologists believe people may be dealing with psychological effects that are pervasive but not always obvious.

 “What we’re finding is people are spending way more time on screens than previously reported or than they believe they are,” says Larry Rosen, professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. “It’s become somewhat of an epidemic.” Rosen has been studying the psychological effects of technology since 1984, and he says he’s watched things “spiral out of control.” He says people are receiving dozens of notifications every day and that they often feel they can’t escape their online lives. “Even when you’re not on the screens, the screens are in your head,” Rosen says…”


A 30-year-old Queensland man charged with hundreds of identity fraud offences allegedly also threatened to murder some of his victims when they tried to get their online accounts back.

Man allegedly threatened to murder victims after stealing their identities


A new history of YouTube argues that the video-streaming service created the template for the online attention economy

The New Yorker – “…According to the company, the site has more than two billion monthly “logged-in” users. In a given twenty-four-hour period, more than a billion hours of video are streamed, and every minute around five hundred hours of video are uploaded. The torrent of content added to the site has helped establish new forms of entertainment (unboxing videos) and revolutionized existing ones (the mukbang). YouTube is a social network, but it is more than that; it is a library, a music-streaming platform, and a babysitting service. The site hosts the world’s largest collection of instructional videos. 

If you want to fix a tractor or snake a drain or perfectly dice an onion, you can learn how to do these things on YouTube. Of course, these are not the only things you can learn. Anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, live-streamed acts of mass violence—all of these have surfaced on YouTube, too. “No company has done more to create the online attention economy we’re all living in today,” Mark Bergen writes at the start of “Like, Comment, Subscribe,” his detailed history of YouTube, from 2005, the year it was founded, to the present. Among the titans of social media, YouTube is sometimes overlooked. 

It has not attracted as much adulation, censure, theorizing, or scrutiny as its rivals Facebook and Twitter. Its founders are not public figures on the order of Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. Aaron Sorkin hasn’t scripted a movie about YouTube. But Bergen argues that YouTube “set the stage for modern social media, making decisions throughout its history that shaped how attention, money, ideology, and everything else worked online.” It’s one thing to attract attention on the Internet; it’s another thing to turn attention into money, and this is where YouTube has excelled. 

The site, Bergen writes, was “paying people to make videos when Facebook was still a site for dorm-room flirting, when Twitter was a techie fad, and a decade before TikTok existed.” Posting on Facebook or Twitter might net you social capital, an audience, or even a branded-content deal, but the benefits of uploading videos to YouTube are more tangible: its users can get a cut of the company’s revenue…”


THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED:

● Pro poker player is accused of using ‘hidden vibrating device’ to help her win $130,000 hand: Gives money back to her opponent – but claims she was forced to hand it over ‘in a dark hallway.’


● Chess world rocked by rumors of anal beads and artificial intelligence.