Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 2d

maybe epistemic gatekeepers constantly decry the end of truth not because that is happening but because their position as such is in jeopardy

1 3

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 2d

most big news stories come with social videos taken from many angles that add up to something we accept happened

so another good question is: why in the face of the enduring truth-telling function of cameras do pundits constantly declare such function over?

1 3

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 2d

read this same take every month for years even though there's a constant stream of newsy widely-believed video happening all around us

the better question is: what accounts for the enduring truth-telling function of cameras in an age where believable fakes are easy to generate?

2 9

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 3d

hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-u...

1 5 20

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 5d

"nostalgia isn't what it used to be"

4

Reposted by 👁️

Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 5d

that users could prefer a generated simulation to actual old clips for nostalgia purposes clarifies how nostalgia is about consuming "decontextualization" in itself — nostalgia negates history under the auspices of longing for it

Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 13d

YouTube has a legit library of recordings from quotidian settings (which are interesting, mostly as historical markers) but instead of promoting that social media pushes soulless facsimiles solely meant to associate a feeling with a moment sans the immediate, substantive context

grimm ☀️ @mugrimm.bsky.social · 13d

This is doing numbers on social media right now and it's so depressing how people truly yearn for this shit and want to preserve that feeling indefinitely like a mausoleum of false memories.

2 24 79

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 5d

will read - love the abstract, thanks!

3

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 5d

think "synthetic media" is a redundancy

1 2

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 5d

good q! for me, its not drawing the distinction bw AI vs not AI super hard but instead the structures, incentives, politics etc in producing and consuming any media. eg, centering nostalgia as it occurs across many mediated forms over the last few decades, where AI is just one chapter in that story

3

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 5d

bc of AI's statistical cultural regurgitation, its rightful critiques are doomed to mimic old media theory, just with "but even more now" attached to the end

1 1 11

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 5d

telling that so many (good and correct) critiques of AI sound exactly like the main critiques of the media culture AI was born into

Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 5d

So-called #genAI means the abolition of the future through the proliferation of endless streams of stochastically rendered generic pasts. Having turned large parts of the cultural archive into training data, it now traps us in a foreverized pastness, a 24/7 nostalgia for a past that never existed

QuoProQuid @quoproquid.bsky.social · 6d

have just come across a YouTube account that has been using Sora to upload reels of fake, AI-generated “90s sitcoms” every few hours

4 5 19

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 16d

telling that Meta didn't attempt to make compelling little AI clips for their ad. the commercial instead is just "this AI product will have AI," nothing more.

bc they dont need to convince *why* anyone needs AI products, they just need to demonstrate they are burning money in that field

Navneet Alang @navneetalang.com · 17d

I think I'm a lot more agnostic re "AI" than many of you, but this Vibes thing by Meta... a feed of AI-generated videos you can scroll through? Why? What or who for? Struggling to imagine something more dystopian.

Reposted by 👁️

Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 19d

LLMs mean that no one has to write anything they don't care about, but they also mean that "writing anything" will get equated with "not caring" for most people. (If you really cared, you would video yourself talking about it on your phone.)

2 5 16

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 25d

they should invent some kind of audio-only zoom call

1 1

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 27d

1 2 11

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 29d

"the end of social media" ...nah, its just in a new form thats harder for journalists and academics to keep track of

3

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 29d

"discord" can mean a few friends to something massive and nearly public. the social media dynamics of celebrity, virality, metrics, etc dominate many of the bigger ones

1

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 29d

"the end of social media" takes often need to make a too-clean distinction between public broadcast platforms and private group sharing. a lot of social-media-like energy exists in the gradients in-between

2 1 13

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · Sep 11

"phone cameras ended photography's relationship to truth"
but it is those videos yesterday that are accepted fact. it's the oval office video thats questioned more. telling for where photography and truth is at today

4

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · Sep 11

still think about this enduring truth-telling function of cameras with most every big news event

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · Dec 16

ive read so so much about how deepfake images will destroy reality and so little about what accounts for the enduring truth-telling function of cameras when fakery is so cheap and easy

why is the former frame more productive than the latter?

2 1 3