Christopher Schroeder

Category: digital

  • Matchmaker, Matchmaker

    Matchmaker, Matchmaker

    A recent Atlantic article offers a different perspective on dating app problems, but these conditions suggest something more significant.

    This article by Olga Khazan shifts the dating app discussion from its products to its approach. Central to such challenges Khazan suggests is the reduction in socializing, especially in “mixed-gender, non-dating” situations.

    Dating apps as Khazan describes allow users to filter for hight for example in ways that might make the process more efficient. Such preferences however can be supplanted by other, and more appealing attributes, such as poise under pressure or kindness to strangers, that often and sometimes only appear in repeated interactions over time.

    These apps might make looking for love more efficient, but that encourages users to expect perfection as Khazan explains and reduces these experiences to chemistry with strangers rather than affection that arises with context. The more important issue I believe is that these digital matchmakers are no match for human experience.

    Human analogues obviously aren’t perfect. Some arrangements whether marriages or something less legal don’t succeed for any substantial time.

    This imperfection however is essential. Human relationships more generally not only consist of but also depend upon imperfect experiences, which can be gateways to bigger benefits and more satisfaction.

    I’m not suggesting that dating challenges, which others have documented and discussed, can be completely explained by digital difficulties. I do think these conditions though cannot be disentangled from the digital devices and platform technologies that have catalyzed, or at least contributed to, these.

    Efficiency more importantly isn’t always an unalloyed good. Not everything is or should or even can be an engineering problem.

    Apps and algorithms in other words cannot completely replace human experience and expertise. Some areas of human existence in still other words must be protected from the intrusion of digital technologies, including AI.

    And that is something worth remembering for all of us whether we dating or not as we consider first principles for incorporating these technologies, including AI, into our lives.

  • So Long Sun-Times

    So Long Sun-Times

    I’ve discontinued my Chicago Sun-Times subscription, and am disappointed about doing so.

    The final factor was its required “Premium Edition” fee, which for those who had this fee waived is in fact a price increase. These editions are generally useless cash-grabs, and sometimes filled with AI hallucinations. Moreover, this fee is still not required by its cross-town competitor.

    I had switched my daily delivery subscription to the Sun-Times after it was acquired by Chicago Public Media. Since then, I’ve observed a reduction in its quality, such as fewer op-eds and less unique content, that only increases its contrast with its hedge-fund-owned rival.

    I’ve also asked for clarification of inconsistent and inaccurate price-increase processes, missed delivery promises, and subscriber-supporter differences, which are often unclear or even ignored. These issues become even more confusing given that the print newspaper is freely available in .pdf on its website.

    These observations and others, such as the increased content overlap between the Sun-Times and WBEZ or increased sponsor spots on the radio after the predictable federal funding loss, have initiated a seeming commercialized convergence, and produced a cross-platform credibility problem. The limited responses to my often ignored queries from a long-time donor have been less than reassuring.

    I realize that these conditions are part of larger concerns, such as a widespread performative progressivism. Regardless, I think these challenge the primary public media purpose, and its promise of facts and reason for its communities.

    I wonder in other words whether Chicago Public Media is the innovative institution that it describes itself as, and that I’ve long imagined it to be.

    I know that it will continue despite decreases in my modest financial support. I just hope that its leaders can restore my confidence in it as a crucial contributor to an informed Chicago and a functional American democracy.

    Such beliefs are perhaps more important now when hope for our future is harder to find.

  • Texts Today

    I’ve had my issues with the Chicago Sun-Times, but I’m objecting this time to recent comments from one of its writers.

    Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg wrote one that was ostensibly about why Chicago Children’s Museum had missing lights on a recent national broadcast. He elsewhere described it as “a columny sort of column” from “a columnist for column readers,” and admitted his uncertainty whether the newspaper would even publish it.

    The reason he suggests is that its features — “something chatty, a little funny, with a voice” — represents a kind of article that is disappearing over time. He offers no evidence but should know, and probably isn’t wrong.

    Such a claim could however have made the same claim about all newspaper articles generally. Newspapers as has been reported are disappearing across the United States, in which case readers would have fewer opportunities to encounter all newspaper articles, and not just “chatty” and “funny” ones that have “a voice.”

    Steinberg is suggesting I realize that forms, or genres, of newspaper articles seem to be changing, but that again isn’t particularly insightful. The medium as media critic Marshall McLuhan explained in 1964 is its message — content and “character” — and perhaps even more so after the appearance of the internet, social media, or AI today.

    The more interesting issue I believe can be found not in Steinberg’s comment but its connotations, particularly the suggestion of nostalgia and loss. Are “columny columns” better than the versions that are placing these?

    Should we lament the loss in other words of the “something chatty, a little funny, with a voice” columns? Are columns or while we’re at it other traditional journalistic genres inherently better than other kinds, including blog posts and social media to which he also turns?

    Steinberg’s opinion I believe cannot be separated from his ideas about his reputation for example or his need for continued employment. The rest of us might have different answers, but these must be considered contexts in which genres emerge, evolve, and are sometimes even eliminated.

    Discursive changes, like those in life, are unavoidable, and conclusions about whether such changes are unproductive or undesirable are debates worth having before offering opinions even throwaway ones.