Weekly Links & Thoughts #103

Here is this week’s edition of meshedsociety.com weekly, loaded with thoughtful opinion pieces, interesting analyses and significant yet under-reported information bits from the digital and technology world. Published and annotated every Thursday (CET), just in time so you have something good to read over the weekend.

I have been sick over the past days, which caused this week’s edition to be a bit more compact than usual.

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Reading time indicator: 1 = up to 3 minutes, 2 = 3 to 10 minutes, 3 = more than 10 minutes

• Moral panic over fake news hides the real enemy – the digital giants (2)
  
  Evgeny Morozov, a long-term critic of the powerful tech giants, thinks that fake news are just a symptom of the real problem: The influence of digital capitalism.
• Did Media Literacy Backfire? (2)
  
  Meanwhile, Danah Boyd makes an interesting point: The increasing number of people who don’t trust mainstream media, experts nor official institutions, make use of the tool that they have been taught by these very players and the society they represent: to question authority, to doubt the information that one is given.
• What are the Future Business Models of the Consumer Web? (2)
  
  Subscriptions, micropayments and – the most exciting one – attention-based protocols.
• Voice-First Technology Is About To Kill Advertising As We Know It (2)
  
  …and as 2017 looks to become the year of voice-first technology, the digital economy could face tectonic shifts.
• What the Internet of Things Has to Learn from Snapchat (2)
  
  With its camera sunglasses Spectacles, Snapchat has created a few best practices about what a connected device needs in order to be embraced by users.
• Work. Work. Work. Work. Work. Work. (2)
  
  Strange title, but a couple of intriguing points about the changing nature of what we define as “work”. This was something I also brought up in my post “13 facts about work in the age of automation“.
• Bitcoin Will Never Be a Currency—It’s Something Way Weirder (2)
  
  With its sudden, rapid changes in value, Bitcoin is unsuitable as currency. But some other use cases persist.
• On bots, language and making technology disappear (2)
  
  Turns out, giving a bot an (human-like) identity is not always for the best.
• Streaming Now Officially the Number One Way We Listen to Music in America (1)
  
  A real milestone.
• Google’s Travel Business Is Already Twice the Size of Expedia’s (2)
  
  This piece from November last year points towards estimations that Google could have generated about $12.2 billion in revenue from travel advertisers in 2016. No surprise that the company keeps its portfolio of travel-related services growing.
• Filter Out the Noise (2)
  
  More a challenge than ever, and more important than ever in order to live a good life and to be productive.
• The Swedish Kings of Cyberwar (3)
  
  A very informative long read about Sweden’s rather significant role in the Western intelligent services’ surveillance activities.

Recently on meshedsociety.com:

• From someone in a country without Amazon, a few questions about Alexa
  
  Amazon is pushing into the exciting segment of personal assistants and the smart home with full force through Echo and its Alexa platform. But if you live in a country without an Amazon retail presence, it’s easy to feel left out.

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