Category: Social Media

  • Interpersonalization

    Does the marketing dream of AI-generated ads for every person make sense? Digital advertising uses all the data it has about you (which is a lot) to draw conclusions about the things you want and then place ads about those things in front of you. My friend (and media deep thinker) Jim Meskauskas describes the worst-case scenario…

  • Not-Safe-For-Work AI Deepfake Review

    I look at fake Pixar previews, allegedly “banned” dirty song recordings, and a disturbingly-convincing Star Trek blooper. How long can reality last?  Trigger Warning (yes, I said it): Humor is subjective and always at least a bit mean. Malice, as Lady Sneerwell says in Sheridan’s School for Scandal, is “the barb that makes wit stick.”* Also, anytime…

  • The Distraction Button

    What Sydney Sweeney and Jeffrey Epstein have in common, plus why it’s time to revive the word “Ridiculous.” For the Dispatch readers who aren’t compulsive media watchers, a summary: a scandal of the week involves the actress Sydney Sweeney in a new ad campaign for American Eagle jeans. The campaign’s tag line is “Sydney Sweeney has great…

  • Experience Stacks and the End of Quests

    My search for a 22-year-old comic book series led to a realization about where satisfaction comes from… or doesn’t. A quick word about Experience Stacks before we move on to our top story. Experience Stacks are the different contexts that a customer, user, or audience brings to a product or story. People improvisationally shift from context to…

  • Our Best Friends

    Mark Zuckerberg thinks our BFFs will soon be AIs. He’s wrong. They’re still dogs, and that’s never more clear than when our dogs die. I have two distinct (but oddly connected) topics this post. AI Gone Weird The number of stories continues to increase about people surrendering all common sense when it comes to AI.…

  • Scammer Spotting: Little Tips and Big Worries

    Online scams are a $500B annual “industry.” Here are a few ways to protect yourself from being the next victim. There’s a thin line between paranoia and sensible precaution. When it comes to online scams, it’s hard to see the line because it’s squiggly, jagged, dotted, and looks like the EKG of somebody on a…

  • B.L.U.E. revisited…

    In today’s issue of my newsletter, The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch, I revisited a piece I wrote on this blog back in 2019: Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable… Ever). Here’s the context from The Dispatch: Last week, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a peculiar op-ed in The New York Times about the value of boredom that’s a…

  • Move Fast and Kill Kids

    Trigger Warning: If the title wasn’t enough of a hint, this piece gets into dark territory. In the December 5 episode of the podcast On with Kara Swisher, Swisher interviewed Megan Garcia and Meetali Jain. Garcia is the mother of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy who killed himself in part because of an unhealthy, one-sided quasi-relationship with a chatbot…

  • Tempest on a Toy Box

    Mattel printed the wrong URL on the back of the boxes of toys for the new “Wicked” movie, which was not good, but just how bad was it? Lady Sneerwell in Sheridan’s School for Scandal observes, “There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature: the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes…

  • Why Musk Supports Trump

    It has little to do with politics. I’m a fan of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work. Her brilliant 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, explored how a Tea Party community in Lake Charles, Louisiana, came to hold their political views, which became important in the weeks after the 2016…