Christopher Schroeder

Category: digital

  • 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.

  • Revolutionary Thinking

    I had been encouraged after a conference session to read Heather Ford’s (2022) Writing the Revolution, and can understand after having done so why this book was recommended.

    Ford in it offers her decade-long digital ethnography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia entry from its emergence and through its evolution and uses it to challenge conventional ideas about facts in the digital world. To do so, she outlines a framework for facts that includes allies, or those who author or edit Wikipedia content, and companions, or sources that validate and verify these assertions.

    Ford uses these results to challenge conventional Wikipedia principles, such as neutral point of view, verifiability of facts, and prohibitions against primary research. Instead, she argues that facts are contested and change, and as such illustrate the reality that knowledge is not objective but rather situated, especially in a digital world.

    This account systematically examines her observations and consistently supports her claims. Moreover, it establishes context through interviews with central participants, including those who led early efforts to establish this page, and in so doing shaped the narrative around this event, such as whether, and when, to call it a revolution.

    I wanted more synthesis, implications, and even application, especially beyond the Wikipedia world, but I admit that at least the latter wasn’t the ostensible purpose of this book, which is a successful account of academic research. As such, it illustrates a way of bridging the academic and the public, and offers a way of thinking about more relevant research.

    And I found it to be useful in ways I didn’t expect. For me, its engaging style consistently demonstrated a grad school tenet — knowledge as situated — that seemed intuitively true, and yet to have wide-ranging implications, especially for institutionalized practices, which I could never confront.

    I think Ford’s account clearly illustrates an interim step in an effort to transform a grad school stipulation into a useful foundational principle.

  • Quite Careless Indeed

    Sarah Wynn-Williams’s (2025) book Careless People is offered as a memoir of her six years at Meta (Facebook), but it focuses as much on the people whose decisions created this company, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was reportedly hired to appease the Trump administration.

    Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat, wanted to work for Facebook she explains because she believed in its potential and its power. She also recognized that this company needed a global perspective to maximize this potential for positive impact, and was eventually offered a position, which she developed in a way that allowed her to become central to its global policies.

    This focus as much as anything explains the emergency injunction won by Meta to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting her book although that according to some only increased its sales. If so, this response obviously backfired, but that likely means more money for Wynn-Williams but does not increase the likelihood of the public benefits she once identified.

    Wynn-Williams generally knows how to tell engaging stories. Some moments are uneven, but many are engaging. I consistently wondered what happened next, and what some of these powerful yet peculiar people would say or do.

    She also if this account is accurate has admirable attributes, such as confidence, motivation, and resilience. These seem even more so in contrast with her shortcomings that she details, such as the time she stopped in the middle of labor with her feet in the stirrups to draft a requested talking points memo, and insisted despite her husband’s and doctor’s requests upon sending it before returning to the task at hand.

    This and other moments might make some question Wynn-Williams’s judgment. Perhaps most alarming was her willingness to stay in her position despite the political, social, and individual harm, such as blatant sexual harassment, that she witnessed and even experienced. These decisions some could suggest might have condoned such conditions no matter how often she cited the need of her family for health care or any increased capacity to change the company as a company insider.

    Wynn-Williams’s relationship with Meta ends when she is fired. She insists that she had wanted to leave and had been searching for another job, but some might wonder whether she would have ever left on her own volition. Such critics could cite her decision to relocate reportedly at Zuckerberg’s request, which as she admits affects not just her but also her family, or her concerns about the economic consequences if she did.

    Wynn-Williams also offers what could be considered a cautionary tale for those who might still be techno-optimists. She isn’t wrong to imagine the potential power in social media and other digital technologies. At the same time, she depicts the risks of being naive about surveillance capitalism, and especially its ability to disable this potential and exploit users.

    That perhaps is a bigger problem. Despite her engaging stories, she hasn’t provided a narrative. Many moments are engaging although according to some contain little new information, but these together are never quite connected into a sequence of events that ultimately offers useful insight about not just this author but also if readers are lucky the times or world in which we live.

    This flaw can be found even in its title, which refers to Tom and Daisy and their relationship in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1925) canonical The Great Gatsby. In it, Tom and Daisy are indeed careless, and even entitled, but Mark, Sheryl, and Joel in contrast seem more than careless, and rather self-absorbed, exploitative, and even ruthless in this book.

    A question I have after reading it is whether Wynn-Williams could be considered part of this problem.