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These are the right questions. It is disappointing that our top journalists sometimes prefer to fit a story into an existing narrative but narratives capture th

These are the right questions. It is disappointing that our top journalists sometimes prefer to fit a story into an existing narrative but narratives capture the public's attention so the incentives get a little weird. Anyway I do sometimes think that it might be good to have an actual screen recording of everything I do online, just so that I could look back and see what a permission dialog looked like for instance. Maybe I will build a Chrome extension for myself.

ergothus 8y ago
Perhaps not "recording",but I can see a real case for an extension that: 1) automatically grabbed a screen text (so it snags the text hidden inside a scrollable container, for example) capture (with notification) when you had a page with a button or link with the text "Agree" or "Understand" or "Accept" in it. Capture would be "tagged" with referrer url, current url, and timestamp. Possibly a screenshot of the rendered page as well. 2) Allowed you to manually trigger such a capture. I'd think that would involve reasonable space, and even if I wasn't trying to gather legal evidence, it'd be interesting to see the results after, say, only a month.
stcredzero 8y ago
It is disappointing that our top journalists sometimes prefer to fit a story into an existing narrative but narratives capture the public's attention so the incentives get a little weird. 1) It's not "sometimes." It happens many, many times a day. It's basically become the way they do things. 2) "narratives capture the public's attention so the incentives get a little weird" -- So the news is no longer about finding and transmitting the truth. It's about selling narratives? And the more the legacy news industry progresses on its inevitable collapse, the worse it's going to get? Nice.
- stanleydrew 8y ago
  1) We can debate the frequency of this all we want (though I don't think it's useful). In my opinion the top (note this is an important qualifier) journalists are not lazy on purpose and in general are trying to deliver accurate information. You may disagree and that's fine. Also technology reporting is particularly difficult when you yourself are not a technologist, but that's a separate issue. 2) I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. I didn't say that news isn't about finding the truth. But when describing complex systems and situations there is always going to be judgement applied in the distillation process. So for instance, you could say "Facebook provided private message data to some application partners" or you could say "Facebook's users inadvertently agreed to share private message data with application partners." Both are true.

ergothus 8y ago

Perhaps not "recording",but I can see a real case for an extension that: 1) automatically grabbed a screen text (so it snags the text hidden inside a scrollable container, for example) capture (with notification) when you had a page with a button or link with the text "Agree" or "Understand" or "Accept" in it. Capture would be "tagged" with referrer url, current url, and timestamp. Possibly a screenshot of the rendered page as well. 2) Allowed you to manually trigger such a capture. I'd think that would involve reasonable space, and even if I wasn't trying to gather legal evidence, it'd be interesting to see the results after, say, only a month.

stcredzero 8y ago

It is disappointing that our top journalists sometimes prefer to fit a story into an existing narrative but narratives capture the public's attention so the incentives get a little weird. 1) It's not "sometimes." It happens many, many times a day. It's basically become the way they do things. 2) "narratives capture the public's attention so the incentives get a little weird" -- So the news is no longer about finding and transmitting the truth. It's about selling narratives? And the more the legacy news industry progresses on its inevitable collapse, the worse it's going to get? Nice.

stanleydrew 8y ago
1) We can debate the frequency of this all we want (though I don't think it's useful). In my opinion the top (note this is an important qualifier) journalists are not lazy on purpose and in general are trying to deliver accurate information. You may disagree and that's fine. Also technology reporting is particularly difficult when you yourself are not a technologist, but that's a separate issue. 2) I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. I didn't say that news isn't about finding the truth. But when describing complex systems and situations there is always going to be judgement applied in the distillation process. So for instance, you could say "Facebook provided private message data to some application partners" or you could say "Facebook's users inadvertently agreed to share private message data with application partners." Both are true.