Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 14
Posts 1 - 10

Violent thriller won't have many clicking 'like'

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 22.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, Facebook, social media, threat
Summary | The movie "Friend Request" is about the danger of social media and Facebook anxiety. The movie is unlikely to be popular though. In the movie, Laura is a popular college student and has a lot of Facebook friends. When Laura unfriends Marina, a shy student who posts a lot of gothic animations, Marina kills herself. The movie plot is a good idea, especially in the age of social media, but the movie fails to develop its characters.
Image Description | N/A

Popular People Live Longer

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 1.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, research/study, social media
Summary | Resent research has shown that popularity significantly improves one's longevity due to many genetic, psychological, and evolutionary reasons. This may explain why so many people value their popularity on social media, i.e. how many followers, retweets, or likes they get. That is however not the kind of popularity that significantly improves one's chances at a long life. That requires a stable and large social surrounding with nurturing relationships.
Image Description | Illustration of a tombstone saying "not enough likes" with a thumbs down symbol.
Image Tags | emojis, Facebook

Tech’s sexism doesn’t stay in Silicon Valley. It’s in the products you use.

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 8.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, artificial intelligence, diversity, gender, research/study
Summary | Slicon Valley has been entangled in scandals around sexism and racism recently. Many innovations incorporate artificial intelligence which means that the software learns from data reflecting our social reality but which are biased. This leads to issues like image recognition not recognizing black people as humans but as gorillas because the data the program learned from included predominantly white people. A similar case is a health app that tracked various physical paramenters but not the menstrual cycle thereby disregarding a large proportion of the female population.
Image Description | N/A

Uncle Sam Wants Your Deep Neural Networks

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 22.6.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, artificial intelligence, brain, Facebook, Google
Summary | Image recognition softwares are being developed with artificial intelligence technologies. Programs are fed information that they are supposed to learn from much like a human brain. Google and Facebook have been using such an approach for a while to enable the recognition of faces in images. The field of medicine is also using artificial intelligence softwares to augment doctors' analytic abilities in detecting lung cancer for instance and airport security is using such technology for their body scanners.
Image Description | A woman standing in an airport body scanner with a male officer in the background.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

I swiped right and got a life coach, not a life partner

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Newspaper | Los Angeles Times
Date | 6.4.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, online dating, smartphone, social media
Summary | The author of the article met a life coach/texting buddy on Tinder. They have now been texting each other for two years, and they have never met. Her life coach, a young Syrian man, regularly gives her tips about relaxation, meditation, and breathing. She likes the fact that her "therapist" is digitally accessible 24 hours a day.
Image Description | Illustration of a laptop and two hands touching each other
Image Tags | computer/laptop, hand(s), keyboard

The problem with becoming an inspirational meme

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 9.4.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, meme
Summary | The author of the article was suprised to see that her commute home from work had become a meme. She was photographed while riding her bike wearing heels and looking "determined". The comments were quite positive (e.g. "making it work", "divas bike too", or "goals"). However, the author then started to question those positive comments. Why is determination linked to a willingness to risk one's life? People nowadays seem to glorify work in an unhealthy way. For instance, the fact that a 94-year-old woman has been working at McDonald's for 44 years seems to be something people should be striving for.
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No, Grandma, You Are Not LOL

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 7.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, social media, youth
Summary | Older people used to stay away from technology and used to express themselves using elevated language. With the advent of social media, things have changed. Now, 62% of seniors (65+) use Facebook and seem to be acting like their grandchildren; they are the fastest-growing demographic since 2000. You can easily notice when an old person is using social media; if you see the post 'Check this out LOL', it's probably been shared by a senior. Seniors are late adopters when it comes to new media. The feeling of competitivity, jealousy, or of being left out does not only concern young people. Older people can also feel the same way when using social media.
Image Description | N/A

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

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Newspaper | The Atlantic
Date | 0.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, cyberbullying, gender, smartphone, social media, threat, youth
Summary | A US study has conducted a large survey among teenagers and found out that smartphones are impacting their lives significantly. They sleep less, go out less, date less, are less likely to get (someone) pregnant, feel left out more, have more mental health issues, etc. Especially girls are more likely to feel left out because they spend more time on social media and because girls tend to bully each other by ostracization which is very easily achievable in cyberspace. Also, the teenage suicide rate has surpassed the teenage homicide rate for the first time in history.
Image Description | Two illustrations showing a woman falling with a tablet and a woman lying in bed at night looking at her smartphone. Charts showing the results from the US survey.
Image Tags | chart, female(s), smartphone, tablet

How Artificial Intelligence Is Helping The Visually Impaired

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Newspaper | Huffington Post
Date | 11.4.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, artificial intelligence
Summary | The discourse around artificial intelligence is usually centered around how it will make tons of jobs obsolete. What few people think about however, is the tremendous potential artificial intelligence has to improve the life of visually impaired or blind people. The same technology that is being developed to operate self-driving cars can be used to help visually impaired people read or recognize people on the street by face recognition cameras.
Image Description | Person using AI camera to read and photograph of interviewee.
Image Tags | male(s)

Poor Sleep Hygiene Is Killing You And Your Career

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Newspaper | Huffington Post
Date | 22.4.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, smartphone
Summary | Poor sleep habits are detrimetal to one's health. Part of a good sleep hygiene is to stop being exposed to short-wave blue light - emitted by all kinds of screens - in the evening before going to sleep. So one should really stop using a laptop or a smartphone a few hours before going to sleep because it blocks the production of sleep-inducing hormones. One should also refrain from checking one's email (work-related) late at night because it keeps people from winding down psychologically.
Image Description | Getty image of a woman sleeping in bed.
Image Tags | female(s)

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