Media /// Forward

But the stories that go furthest on social platforms don’t merely treat users’ identities as a context, they’re more explicitly about identity. And one of the less-appreciated ways to render news in identity terms, after straightforward advocacy, is through explainers. The new explainers are well adapted to feeds: they assert authority without invoking expertise; they mimic the language of their audience; they offer closure and satisfaction in an endless stream. They’re also easy to deploy in a social context. Social explainers often purport to do work for you—to settle arguments, to articulate your position for you, to establish your rightness or to definitively assert your opponent’s wrongness. As a platform-perfect profile tells you why you’re actually totally right to love its subject, a platform-perfect explainer tells you why you’re right to feel the way you do. The onus to provide an opposing viewpoint transfers from ostensibly balanced publications to you and your platform peers.

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Access Denied - The Awl

Originally posted by danger-games

(Source: The Awl)

Love the ability to send location tips about news that hasn’t yet been reported.

breakingblog:

Let’s say you hear a big explosion, and you check Breaking News on your Watch.  You scroll through the five stories, but there’s no news about it.  That’s when you’ll see a big button that says, “See news near you?  Tap to alert us.”

(Source: breakingblog, via breakingblog)

The core issue across all of this, I think, is how much is still totally unsettled. We spent 20 years in which the mainstream internet experience was a web browser, mouse and keyboard, and over a decade in with Google was the way you navigated. Smartphones ended all that but we haven’t settled on a new model, and the idea we’ll all revert back to the comfortable, simple model of the web seems increasingly remote. Even within messaging, the  model is still in flux. I wrote above about the search for new psychologies, but there are deeper architectural questions than anonymity or filters, which you can see in SnapChat’s disappearing messages or Meerkat and Periscope’s use of live. What will the next blow-up model be -  synchronous or not? One to one or one to many? Feed based or thread-based? Algorithmic filter or endless stream? Rich client or rich message? Runtime or deep links? That may be the real problem for Facebook - the next messaging thing may not be messaging at all.

— Messaging and mobile platforms — Benedict Evans

(Source: ben-evans.com)