Quarantine trends
Here’s a short list of global quarantine trends without context: baking (sourdough) bread, buying plants, Tiger King, Dalgona coffee, TikTok, Animal Crossing, Instagram Live, Zoom, Among Us, Queen’s Gambit.
How bizarre, some of these things felt like it happened a decade ago. Which ones did you participate in? I watched Tiger King, accidentally watched (and quickly disappeared from) several Instagram Live broadcasts, downloaded TikTok (for work) and downloaded Zoom only in November (and only because I was a panellist on an online conference).
I’ve not accomplished much this year, but I did hit a few milestones. Twenty years ago, I thought it was the toughest year I ever faced. It was the year I sat for UPSR, which was then the biggest and most important national standardised exam of my life, and in the same year, also my Grade 5 Piano, the minimum grade to pass to qualify to teach music. Ten years later, I completed my first fieldwork and graduated with a science degree thinking I would be following my father’s footsteps to be a wildlife biologist. This year, I took a break from full-time journalism and still I’ve achieved what I never thought I would: my work has appeared in print (newspaper and magazine), broadcast (radio, TV) and online media (text, podcast and video) in three different languages.
There’s just one more thing: this book I’m still working on.
Google’s “Year in Search 2020”
According to Google, this year, the world searched “why” more than ever.
The year we gave up on privacy
“The pandemic put more people online than ever, and their data followed,” writes Sara Morrison for Vox. But privacy law didn’t.
While some [US] lawmakers did continue to sound the alarm about privacy throughout the year, especially with regard to issues raised by the pandemic, the focus on how to regulate the internet seems to have shifted away from privacy laws and toward curbing the power wielded by Big Tech companies. Generally, the left and the right have differing ideas of how to do this. Democrats are looking at using antitrust laws to break the companies up, while Republicans hope to take away immunity protections that allowed those companies (and the internet as a whole) to prosper.
Misinformation fatigue sets in
If 2020 is the year of conspiracy theories and misinformation, then 2021 is the year of misinformation fatigue, predicts Brandy Zadrozny for Nieman Lab. She writes, in part:
Misinformation isn’t going away, but it seems inevitable that people will stop caring. Much like compassion fatigue, a traumatic burnout experienced by caregivers, I expect people to be exhausted by a year of unbridled misinformation.
There’s a chance that this fatigue (aided by the ability to actually leave our homes, should these vaccines work as advertised) will lead to people giving up on the online social experiment — logging off and re-subscribing to their local newspaper (should it still exist), and finding their communities not just online, but IRL, though family, church, work, hobbies.
But something else seems more likely.
Read on and brace yourself.
Then look into the other predictions for journalism in 2021 including Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman’s who propose that local collaboration can slow misinformation even as Edward Roussel think that tech companies will get more aggressive in local journalism – but at least parachute journalism is going to go away for good, or at least that’s what Kevin D. Grant believes. In its place, perhaps will be the journalist-influencer, according to Mark Stenberg, but journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy, cautions Taylor Lorenz.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Jason Rogers’ 2020 Mannual Report, a collection of creative work on masculinity.
I’m watching Tiffany Ferguson’s video essay on CGI/artificial influencers.
I’m making a Christmas greeting for Sherald only.
Chart of the week
Facebook remains the most popular social media site for men and women regarding news consumption but women are less likely than men to visit news sites directly, according to this report by Meera Selva and Simge Andı for Reuters Institute. Women are also slightly less likely than men to comment on news stories on social media and news sites.