Mike Wayne

Everytime I read a thread critiquing the commercial LLMs that are being imbedded into *everything*, several people will jump in to say “Ahem, ChatGPT helps me write emails.” as if that’s not a totally embarrassing thing to admit.

QS World University Rankings for Communication & Media Studies 2025 Discover the world's top universities for Communication & Media Studies 2025. Explore the QS World University Rankings by Subject in various disciplines.

Hooray, U Amsterdam ranked as #1 in the world, again, in media and communication. Celebration time 🍾..., right?

No 🟥

Dutch universities are faced with de-internationalisation and de-funding. The frustration is palpable!

#DoeHetNiet @woinactie.bsky.social 🟥

www.topuniversities.com/university-s...

Lots to ponder in this reflection from @christophersmith.bsky.social. Strong agree from me on this point about the need for Phd focussed on creative industries. IME (5 yrs site director for an AHRC DTP and 8 yrs as a DGS of a small creative-industries Unit in a bigger Faculty of Arts)...

Geert Wilders: “The biggest threat to the survival of our civilization is the current pandemic of the woke mind virus.” No wonder the unprecedented budget cuts in Dutch academia, supported by other Dutch political parties that apparently do not recognize the ideological attack on academic freedom.

Adam Curtis Title Card: We Too Are Trapped In A System. Text over a background of a large office building

THREAD

This Is The Story Of The The Pernicious Rise of AI-Generated Papers and their Online Impact

An Incomplete History Told In The Voice of Documentarian Adam Curtis
1/31

NECS 2025 Conference will be in Lisbon, 18-21 June. And the call for papers is out, at necs.org! Deadline for submitting papers, panels and workshops, as usual, on 31 January. Join us, and spread the word… necs.org/conference

If your intelligence is artificial, you *should* have imposter syndrome.

weird interaction with a student this week. they kept coming up with weird "facts" ("greek is actually a combination of four other languages") that left me baffled. i said let's look this stuff up together, and they said ok, i'll open a search bar, and they opened... ch*tgpt

and i was like "this is not a search bar" and they were like "yes it is, you can search for anything in here" the thing that made me feel crazy is like. every kid that's using this as a browser is getting new BESPOKE false "facts." this isn't "a widespread misconception about X that stems from how it's taught in schools." each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine with the "widespread misconception about X" you can start at a baseline. like, ok, in tenth grade we all talk about X thing from history, and that leaves us with some misguided concepts about X, but we can correct that as students get broader understandings of the world but with this, each child is getting UNIQUE wrong facts they are SURE are correct... because they did what we told them to do! they "looked it up"! they got it from somewhere! it's not a kid making up a belief on hearsay and assumption... it's something they think they LEARNED

this kid was extremely combative with me, and i understood why. i was sitting in front of him and telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things... were wrong. and that i, one person, was right. he basically *couldn't* believe me. 8 135 3.8K 97K ... stillorangecrushed @stilloranged. 7h he decided that i was simply a teacher who'd made a mistake. he could check it, after all! he could look it up! he could find the REAL facts. i obviously hadn't done that, i was just an adult who'd decided i was smarter than him. hence the defensiveness. like i said: i understood 5 760 3.2K 82K stillorangecrushed @stilloranged. 7h ... it was so fucking rough. i did my best, but i am one person trying to work against a campaign of misinformation so vast that it fucking terrifies me. this kid is being set up for a life lived entirely inside the hall of mirrors

Well this is grim

Does the professor own any means of production?

Yes, a pencil and a computer.

That is his means of production.

Americans vastly overestimate the size of different minority groups! For example, Americans estimated 21% of the country is transgender, but the true proportion is just 1%.

How ‘Shogun’ Helped FX Find Its Footing as a Streaming Empire The Japanese-language 'Shogun' may have seemed like a risky bet for FX, but the Emmy-winning series has brought Disney into the global streaming age.

very interesting piece re FX's place within Disney

Het kan niet druk genoeg zijn in Auschwitz - reportage - Jonet.nl Het kan niet druk genoeg zijn in Auschwitz - reportage - Lees dit artikel op Jonet.nl

'Zou het zin hebben om leerlingen massaal naar Auschwitz te sturen? Je kunt ook over de concentratiekampen lezen, maar de ervaring is vele malen sterker.'
jonet.nl/het-kan-niet...

🎶 So this is Christmas, and what have you done? Yippee kiyay, motherfucker. Now I have a machine gun. 🎶

Call for Papers: Critical Studies in Television conference 2025 (link in post)

The CFP is out for next year's Critical Studies in Television conference - returning to Manchester to mark the 20th anniversary of the journal's founding. Full details and the link to the submission portal (deadline 17th Jan) can be found here: sites.edgehill.ac.uk/tvresearchgr...

I'm thinking about making the move with a special poodle account but I haven't pulled the trigger yet . . .

People (especially pundits) assume universities have way more influence over politics and culture than they do and grant way too little credit for the essential, basic knowledge we produce (climate science, cancer research, AI, ethics, etc.)

Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after the US election Social media platform has become a ‘refuge’ from the far-right activism on X, experts say, after Elon Musk teamed up with Donald Trump

On Xodus to 🦋 by @snurb.bsky.social :

“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Made a starter pack of media industry scholars: go.bsky.app/61pDASR

Please let me know if you want to be added (or removed)!

about time :)

I ran like a cheetah with thoughts of an assassin

Illmatic at 30

Your regular reminder that Joe Biden is an #ExcellentPresident. We can disagree with him over Gaza, the border, or 230 and that's the point--unlike the authoritarians The Times loves to poll, we do disagree, we do not worship, we debate. The Times can't understand that.

Every “impressive” display of AI that I’ve seen when it comes to writing is basically “things you would get paid practically nothing to write badly while making a jerk-off motion behind your boss’s back.” Shitty marketing copy. Busywork summaries. Stuff that’s false that a fool might believe. (1/2)

yes but what if the girl was supposed to be the epitome of an aryan/nordic supremacist trad wife but instead turned out to be a moderate dem who gets vaccinations is massively wealthy without a husband and thinks racism is bad? WHAT THEN?

Andre Braugher's performance as Frank Pembleton on Homicide LOTS was the first television actor I could identify as truly great ... his work did so much to shape my appreciation of TV drama and the trajectory of my scholarship

Andre Braugher Played Two of TV’s Greatest Cops. But His Family Came First Star of ‘Homicide’ and ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine,’ who passed away at the age of 61, could do it all, and would then race home to his loved ones.

Andre Braugher was a giant, as capable of being the most intense dramatic actor TV had ever seen as he was of being among its most sublimely silly comic performers. I wrote about Frank Pembleton, Raymond Holt, and everything in beween:

Elon Musk is now taking applications for data to study X -- but only EU risk researchers need apply.... Lawmakers take note: Elon Musk-owned X appears to have quietly complied with a hard legal requirement in the European Union that requires larger platforms Elon Musk-owned X appears to have quietly com...

Surprising move by X ... the company has launched, with no notifications, a procedure to apply for data access on systemic risks to EU based scholars.

Quiet compliance? Please share your experiences!

commsky csssky polisky polcomm dsa
@academic-chatter.bsky.social

techcrunch.com/2023/11/29/x...