Christopher Schroeder

Tag: social media

  • Another One

    Another One

    I expected more fundraising chatter when I turned on WBEZ this morning and was surprised by the regularly scheduled programming.

    I heard four promos and ads before any news yesterday morning. I heard several more spots and a traffic report along with some headlines before the latest financial appeals resumed.

    WBEZ reportedly wants to raise one million dollars by the end of the month. Its previous fundraiser, which ended about three weeks ago, seems to have left it substantially short of this goal, so it initiated a follow-up this week, and is reportedly still some $300,000 short of its finish line.

    The previous one, which lasted for over a week, offered monthly donors a generic stream that allowed them in exchange for any local coverage to avoid these appeals, which is better I guess than enduring this incessant and irrelevant chatter. This second fundraiser for whatever reason did not include such a stream for those who already donate every month.

    As a result I heard hosts offer some strange appeals. One explained that the donations from last year didn’t fill the financial holes in the budget for this year. Another suggested that a monthly donation was like the difference between a lump-sum payment and a monthly deposited check.

    WBEZ didn’t learn any lessons in other words and cannot balance a budget. It continues to blame its financial challenges on the federal funding cuts from more than a year ago as if these cuts hadn’t been championed by conservatives for years, and if responsible executives hadn’t had enough time to formulate backup plans.

    WBEZ didn’t learn any lessons in other words and cannot balance a budget. It continues to blame its financial challenges on the federal funding cuts from more than a year ago as if these cuts hadn’t been championed by conservatives for years, and if responsible executives hadn’t had enough time to formulate backup plans.

    None of these concerns and others has been assuaged by the latest Chicago Public Media initiative, which is a public social network called < chicago.com >. This network according to CPM will be a collaboratively-constructed public space for community conversations and local information as well as other content.

    Unclear at least at the moment is whether this network will identify curated content and if the rest will be assessed for accuracy, which are two crucial public media functions. How will users know whether the information in this network is as reliable as what they hear on the radio? How will they know whether these guides are as reliable as the ones that appear in the newspaper?

    This issue has already arisen in response to an AI-generated SUN-TIMES summer reading guide last year. It will only become more urgent in this new initiative unless users expect something other than curated and credible content in this space, which in my opinion would challenge a fundamental public media function.

    No one whom I read seems to know the future of journalism in this increasingly digitized world. Regardless, the stakes given the way AI has been seeping throughout societies might never have been higher.

    Countries still need public media to democratically survive. Communities still need sustainable public media to thrive.

    Here’s hoping that Chicago Public Media knows what it is doing, and is responsibly using what we donate.

  • Things That Should Be Said

    Things That Should Be Said

    I was more excited about getting to read Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel The Things We Never Say than I am about having read it.

    I tend to like Strout’s novels more than I expect, so I thought that this one, and especially its fifty-seven-year-old high school history teacher protagonist named Artie, would be even better. Artie, like so many of us, is beset by a loneliness that as its epigraph attests comes from his alienation in the midst of others.

    Artie and his wife of many years Evie are struggling with the emotional aftermath of their son Rob’s car crash that killed his girlfriend. Artie discovers that his initial response, which is suicide, isn’t as appealing after he falls into the water while stepping into his sailboat, and that he actually has a desire to live, which he spends the rest of the novel trying to do.

    Other critics praise have praised this novel for many reasons, including this memorable protagonist and its cast of characters and its spare yet sharp style.

    I also admired it for its political and personal timeliness. Loneliness if social media are any indication besets the best of us, and the Trump administration antics can alienate all of us, and in that offer us some common ground.

    I additionally appreciated the intersection of character and plot, and especially Artie’s connection with his son Rob, whose circumstances push them closer and later pull them apart. One contributing cause is Evie’s secret that is exposed yet never confronted, which sadly seems so familiar.

    I could recognize the potential in other choices, such as a shifting POV that promises an unprovided intimacy. That and others reinforce the loneliness theme, and combine for a rhetorically withheld catharsis that cleverly compelled me to keep reading and unfortunately was ultimately unsatisfying.

    This condition can be seen in Artie, whose experiences that he both can and cannot change illustrate the excruciating effect of loneliness around others. His motivation however is never quite clear.

    Is Artie driven by his relative poor childhood or his current political outrage or even a righteous indignation over political and personal circumstances combined with an unavoidable awareness of his relative privilege? The answer can never be found in the accumulation of too many tragedies, one after another until the end.

    I respect Strout’s effort, and her commitment to and confidence in this project. I just believe that the book would have been better served with at least another draft.

    The loss is all that this book could but doesn’t say, which is even more lamentable in light of its final paragraphs and our current circumstances.

  • 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.