Category: issues

Tim Schneider: “A sharp fall in public funding for cultural organizations since the 1980s has coincided with a sharp rise in private wealth held by the very few. And rather than being some wacky coincidence, these developments have a direct causal relationship, as many elites have spent billions of dollars on think tanks, lobbying firms, and politicians to enact policies that keepsafe mountains of revenue that once went to public causes, including arts and cultural institutions.” – Artnet

Trolls often see themselves as victims, and so they “have a distorted sense of what punching up vs. punching down looks like. So even though most of us would likely say that trolling behaviors are aberrant, and that we would never engage in them, this kind of inverted worldview allows the troll to see the behavior as justifiable and admirable.” – Slate

The 2008 law has been a problem for Facebook, Google – and Six Flags, which very much wanted to overturn the law when parents sued it for taking their 14-year-old’s fingerprints without their consent. The court: “Whatever expenses a business might incur to meet the law’s requirements … are likely to be insignificant compared to the substantial and irreversible harm that could result if biometric identifiers and information are not properly safeguarded.” – The Verge

Online gaming has a terrible history of bad behavior toward women players, or those who appear to be women. And that’s wild: “e-sports pose no physical barriers to mixed-gender competition. It is a realm in which quick thinking, creative problem-solving and hand-eye coordination, not size or strength, are needed to succeed.” – The New York Times

Simon Dancey: “The picture now is of a middle-class sector reinforcing its own values in an echo chamber that compounds the structural inequalities of the UK. This self-endorsing closed shop is never going to shift persisting inequalities and will continue to exclude a large section of our community, its values and potential. This is morally unacceptable, economically stupid and socially disgraceful.” — Arts Professional

“The agencies, which the Trump administration’s first two budgets tried to eliminate, will use remaining FY18 administrative funds to reopen [on Monday] for up to four weeks, officials said. The agencies hope to ‘minimize any interruption in the awarding of federal funds,’ according to the NEH website.” — The Washington Post

The new document warns that arts organisations must “evaluate the impact of goods or items being delayed at borders and consider ways to minimise reliance on these routes.” Any organization that received EU financial support should “consider its reliance on commercial or philanthropic income through visitor numbers, donations or corporate hire.” — The Art Newspaper

Alan Rusbridger: “My experience is that readers are surprised when journalists can say, “Can you help me? Here’s my article. Is it right? Could it be improved? What’s missing here? What should I write about next?” These are such collaborative and open questions. Rare are the examples where journalists behave like that. But [when they do], readers fall over themselves to get involved, and that leads to trust. I think it leads to better reporting.” – Vox

Increasingly it comes down to one of three things: Money, data or attention. “Money is the cleanest transaction and usually, but not always, comes with a few strings attached. Data is at the other end of the spectrum, a resource that is harvested with our technical permission but rarely granted by us fully willingly, as the choice is often a trade-off between not sharing data and not getting access to content and services. The weaponisation of consumer data by the likes of Cambridge Analytica only intensifies the mistrust. Finally, attention, the currency that we all expend whether behind paywalls or on ad supported destinations. With the Attention Economy now at peak, attention is becoming fought for with ever fiercer intensity.”  – Music Industry Blog