Tag: Twitter

The Shepherd who Twittered – [Article]

Herdy Shepherd who is a shepherd, & a late Twitter adopter, writes about his experiences with the technology. An engaging read:

If you spend your life working with sheep in the fells (what you’d call mountains) you perhaps don’t really need to be ‘connected’ and you probably don’t have time for, or need to have, fancy techno gadgets in your pocket. Our world is one of mountains, meadows, dry-stone-walls, sheep, sheepdogs and managing the landscape much as our ancestors have done over many centuries (it’s being nominated for World Heritage status because of its unique landscape culture).

How Twitter hijacked my mind [Article] @KathrynSchulz

Money quote for me from Kathyrn Schulz’s article about Twitter:

Collectively, the people I follow on Twitter — book nerds, science nerds, journalists, the uncategorizably interesting — come pretty close to my dream community. They also function as by far the best news source I’ve ever used

Lest you think it’s all good – it’s not –

I sometimes think that Twitter is such a parasite, and that I am one of its hosts, so effectively has it hacked my brain. Ask me what I love most in my life, and how I want to spend what limited allotment of it I have, and I will tell you that I want to be around friends and family, or reading, or writing, or in the outdoors, body and mind at play in the world. Ask me what I did today, where all the hours went, and — well, check out that chart.

Machine readable news & the stock market [Article]

Robert N Charette writing for the IEEE spectrum is surprised that it took so long for a media hacking to take down Wall Street. If you had not heard yet, on the 23rd of April, an AP tweet said that there were two explosions in the White House & that Barack Obama was injured. In the three minutes that it took get the message repudiated, Wall Street had lost 143 points.  The reason?

Partial blame for the rapid sell-off of stocks is being given to computer-driven trading algorithms that depend on machine readable news.