Search Results for: Internet

‘Troll Slayer’ Mary Beard on Internet Abuse Against Women and Its Historical Context

In February, Mary Beard, a classics professor at the University of Cambridge, gave a lecture at the British Museum titled “Oh Do Shut Up Dear!” With amiable indignation, she explored the many ways that men have silenced outspoken women since the days of the ancients. Her speech, which was filmed by the BBC, was learned but accessible—a tone that she has regularly displayed on British television, as the host of popular documentaries about Pompeii and Rome. She began her talk with the Odyssey, and what she referred to as the first recorded instance of a man telling a woman that “her voice is not to be heard in public”: Telemachus informing his mother, Penelope, that “speech will be the business of men” and sending her upstairs to her weaving. Beard progressed to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Tereus rapes Philomela and then cuts out her tongue so that she cannot denounce him. Beard alighted on Queen Elizabeth and Sojourner Truth before arriving at Jacqui Oatley, a BBC soccer commentator repeatedly mocked by men who were convinced that a woman couldn’t possibly understand the sport. A columnist for The Spectator, Beard noted, currently runs an annual competition to name the “most stupid woman” to appear on the current-affairs show “Question Time.”

Finally, Beard arrived at the contemporary chorus of Twitter trolls and online commenters. “The more I’ve looked at the details of the threats and the insults that women are on the receiving end of, the more some of them seem to fit into the old patterns of prejudice and assumption that I have been talking about,” she said. “It doesn’t much matter what line of argument you take as a woman. If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it—it’s the fact that you are saying it.”

In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Beard, who has helped confront the online and Twitter abuse that women face. (Beard’s full lecture is here.)

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Photo: YouTube

The Pre-Internet Small Town

Mary Karr
Mary Karr. Photo: AP Images

Mother—crazy as she was—had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.

-Mary Karr, in The Paris Review (2009), on growing up in Southeast Texas.

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This Internet Millionaire Has a New Deal for You

Longreads Pick

A profile of Matt Rutledge, the founder of deals site Woot, which sold to Amazon in 2010. Rutledge is starting a new deals site called “Meh.”

Author: Tim Rogers
Source: D Magazine
Published: Jul 1, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,628 words)

What Happens When the Internet Takes Over Your Home: Virus Edition

I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again.

Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal.

I don’t sleep well anyway, and already had my Dropcam Total Home Immersion account hacked, so I’m basically embarrassment-proof. And anyway, who doesn’t have nudes online? Now, Wat3ryWorm, that was nasty. That was the one with the 0-day that set off everyone’s sprinkler systems on Christmas morning back in ’22. It did billions of dollars in damage.

Mat Honan, in Wired, with a fictional account of living in the internet-connected home of the future.

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More Wired in the Longreads Archive

Photo: jonathan_moreau, Flickr

The Problem with Journalism and the Internet, in One Quote

Jonah Peretti: I think there’s an interesting tension between what’s good for the user and what’s good for the industry. That was really created by Google. Say The New Yorker writes a really long 12,000 word piece on Scientology. That takes lots of reporting and lots of investment. That’s important work that our industry should embrace and should find ways of supporting economically.

The average person who hears about that story doesn’t want to read the whole story. They’re at work, most likely. They do a Google search because they’ve heard about this Scientology scoop or long form piece. Their first result is the HuffPost link, not a New Yorker link. They look at it. It summarizes what the article is about. It says, “Here’s what was in it, here’s what was notable about it.” Has a few tweets from people. This is how people are reacting to it, and if you want to read it, here’s a link and you can go read the article.

The problem with that example is that from the perspective of the user, it’s a better experience to land on the summary, to see a little bit of the reactions, and have the option of reading it, because that’s as much as most people want. From the perspective of the industry, it would make much more sense for people to go to The New Yorker article so that they get the traffic, as modest as that ad revenue would be, they get the traffic and they get the people onto their site. There is some conflict between Google saying, “Well we want to serve the consumer,” and sending people to the article that the consumer likes the best. Or is Google supposed to send people to the article that costs the most to produce and supports the industry the most? Does that make sense? There is a little bit of a conflict, or a little bit of a tension.

BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, in a long interview with Felix Salmon, on the past, present and future of media.

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Photo: techcrunch, flickr

When the Internet Takes Away Our Paul Newman

Building up to 2005, [Tom] Cruise had tackled some of the most challenging dramas of any actor of his generation: Eyes Wide ShutMagnoliaVanilla Sky. Even his popcorn flicks — Minority Report,CollateralWar of the Worlds — were intriguingly dark. He’d never played it safe or shot a cash-grab. He trusted that if he chose movies he believed in, the audience would follow. And he was right.

Post-2005, we’ve lost out on the audacious films that only Hollywood’s most powerful and consistent star could have convinced studios to greenlight. Cruise was in his mid-40s prime — the same years when Newman made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting — and here he was lying low, like the kid who’d run away to London. Imagine the daring roles that he hasn’t dared to pursue. Cruise’s talent and clout were responsible for an unparalleled string of critical and commercial hits. We gave that up for a gif.

-In which LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson argues that YouTube and gossip blogs played a big part in convincing America that Tom Cruise was crazy.

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How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star

Longreads Pick

A look back at 2005, the year YouTube, Perez Hilton and Oprah’s couch changed how we looked at celebrity:

Hilton had already nicknamed Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie “Brangelina” (“It was just such a long time ago that people don’t remember,” he sighs). When Cruise coupled with Katie Holmes, Hilton was thrilled to have another massive romance to flog. TomKat went public on April 27, and PerezHilton.com embraced their relationship with exuberant cynicism. Wrote Hilton, “We can’t get enough of the TomKat show because eventually the paint will start to chip and we will hopefully see all the ugliness as openly as we’ve been shoved the lovey-dovey bullshit.”

Source: LA Weekly
Published: May 20, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,090 words)

The Botmaker Who Sees Through the Internet

Longreads Pick

A profile of Darius Kazemi, who is turning Twitter bots into an art form: He’s created dozens of automated programs whose purposes can run the gamut from cultural commentary to complete nonsense:

Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jan 28, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,258 words)

Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet

Longreads Pick

Women who are harassed online through social media sites like Twitter and in the comment sections of media sites have found it difficult to seek help from law enforcement agencies:

So women who are harassed online are expected to either get over ourselves or feel flattered in response to the threats made against us. We have the choice to keep quiet or respond “gleefully.”

But no matter how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has severe implications for women’s status on the Internet. Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services, and missed wages. I’ve spent countless hours over the past four years logging the online activity of one particularly committed cyberstalker, just in case. And as the Internet becomes increasingly central to the human experience, the ability of women to live and work freely online will be shaped, and too often limited, by the technology companies that host these threats, the constellation of local and federal law enforcement officers who investigate them, and the popular commentators who dismiss them—all arenas that remain dominated by men, many of whom have little personal understanding of what women face online every day.

Published: Jan 6, 2014
Length: 28 minutes (7,188 words)

Reading List: Brave New Internet


Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

1. “The Vice Guide to the World.” (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 8 April 2013)

“My big thing was I want you to do stupid in a smart way and smart in a stupid way.” Vice pioneers methods of marketing, advertising and reporting while trying to mesh investigative journalism with its party image.

2. “‘There is no news industry’: An interview with media theorist Clay Shirky.” (Martin Eiermann, The European, August 2013)

Shirky talks about the nebulous definition of the journalist, the perilous combination of print and online news services, and the relationship between story and audience. Warning: somewhat jargon-y.

3. “The Secular C.S. Lewis: Neil Postman’s Unlikely Influence on Evangelicals.” (Arthur W. Hunt III. Second Nature Journal, May 2013)

Media theory classes have found an unlikely home in the hearts of Christian college students and other evangelical, primarily Reformed Christians. (I should know—the epigraph of this piece is from my Media Ecology professor, to whom I credit my deep unease toward Google Glass.)

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