Social media websites pervade a good slice of society these days, yet their novelty means that effect on society is relatively poorly understood. Today, I’ve chosen two articles that use to very different cases to explore two different social media websites in two different ways.

My first chosen article is “Why do we hate Facebook?”, written by Luke Allnutt for RFE/RL’s Tangled Web. With a headline like that, you’ll be relieved to hear that Allnutt does explore the premise of the questions as well as the question itself.

The hook Allnutt uses to discuss our relationship with Facebook is the story that circulated a few years ago about Facebook making private messages public. It was demonstrably untrue, and yet still spread quickly and widely. Many reasons are explored in Allnutt’s detailed yet readable article, but the following passage about the complexity of our relationship with Facebook stood out for resonating with so many discussions I’ve had with others about Facebook over the last few years:

Characters revert to type on social media, but their attributes are turbo-charged. The annual family update (“Chloe has had an impressive first term at Brown and seems to enjoy the social life as much as the academic!”) has become the hourly update. The whiny friend we once met now and again outside the grocery store is now a daily occurrence. Of course, we can hide these people on our feeds, but this is information we love to hate. That is the dichotomy of Facebook.

My second chosen article is rather shorter. “The fate of Sally Bercow suggests it’s all too easy to side with the baying mob” (the argument really is in the headline here) was written by Graeme Archer, and published in The Telegraph. He says

I think that the case exemplifies a problem for humans that is ancient and universal, but which, thanks to technology, is more dangerous than ever. The tendency to rush to judgment, and the desire to be part of the crowd.

After all, Mrs Bercow was hardly alone in casting aspersions on Lord McAlpine: the Twittersphere had decided it knew who was the subject of the BBC’s sensational report. Why not join in? The temptation is hard to resist (it’s one reason I gave up on Twitter for a while; I’m not immune to the phenomenon).

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that, actually, I am pretty resistant to the phenomenon, and often finding “Twitterstorms” like the one in the Sally Bercow case more than a little tiresome: If anything makes me stop reading Twitter, it’s a Twitterstorm. But, regardless, I think Archer has a point, and I think he makes it pretty well in this article.

So, taking those two articles together: we distrust Facebook, and Twitter makes it easy for us to do bad things. Yet, by bringing these two articles together, my intention wasn’t really to criticise social media, but rather to point out that our relationship with these sites is complex and multilayered. That’s perhaps brought out more by the Allnutt article than the Archer one, but I hope you find the cominbation of the two as interesting as I did.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

The link between the two articles in this 2D is health and economics. It’s a reasonably weak link, granted… but it’s a link nonetheless!

The first article I’d like to recommend is this long and thoughtful interview with Bill Gates by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, which carries the arresting title “death is something we really understand extremely well”. He talks through some of the financial decisions his Foundation makes, and the economics of disease eradication. I found it quite fascinating.

The second article is really rather different. For Priceonomics, Alex Mayyasi gives a history and economics lesson to explain why articles in scientific journals are, more often than not, behind a paywall. He argues, too, that the system needs to move on and develop in the 21st century. As someone who spends a disproportionate amount of time whining about medical journals and their paywalls, I found this detailed blog post very interesting and informative.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them! The picture at the top of this post was uploaded to Flickr by Howard Lake, and has been modified and used under Creative Commons licence.

You might remember some of the extraordinary pictures from late last year, when the Endeavour space shuttle was driven across Los Angeles to its final resting place in a museum. It was a quite remarkable operation, and this Global Mail article by Gerard Wright describes it at a very human level. It also includes some more of those memorable photographs that really help to put the physical scale of the shuttle in perspective.

But what if you like the space shuttle so much that you want to steal it? Jason Torchinsky has you covered with his article for Jalopnik. Torchinsky delivers an article on a faintly ridiculous topic in such a way that it combines eye-popping factual detail and intrigue with a strong dose of humour. It’s well worth a read.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them! The picture at the top of this post was uploaded to Flickr by InSapphoWeTrust, and has been used here under Creative Commons licence.

In some ways, watching a dying industry attempt a caterpillar-like metamorphosis is as fascinating as following a nascent one. It’s genuinely intriguing to see the choices different players make about which parts of their former selves they retain, which they reject, and what new elements they add to their products. For this 2D post, I’ve picked out two articles which look at very different responses to those challenges.

The first is an article from the Columbia Journalism Review by Peter Canby about the fact-checking process at the New Yorker, and the way in which that process has morphed under economic pressure. I’ve never before seen such a clear admission from anyone – other than, perhaps, The Guardian – that mistakes happen.

Ultimately we make mistakes. I wish we didn’t, but they are inevitable and constant.

Admitting a problem is, as they say, the first step to addressing it. This article suggests to me the the New Yorker has invested a great deal of effort in working out how to minimise errors without maximising costs, and continues to do so.

At the other end of the spectrum, as Martin Robbins describes in the New Statesman, the Daily Mail has taken a rather different approach, seemingly involving a rather strong dose of hypocrisy.

The coverage of Kick Ass star Chloe Moretz at the age of 14 contains some classic examples: looking “all grown up” she was “every inch the classy young lady” at a film premiere, for example. All this comes from a newspaper campaigning vigorously against ‘sexualisation’ and its impact on children.

I personally find the Daily Mail‘s approach distasteful, but it’s hard to deny that it has been successful. Mail Online is now the world’s most popular news website (perhaps “news” should be in inverted commas), with almost double the number of unique browsers of the BBC News website. Vox populi, vox dei – or at least vox populi, vox argentum. If this is what most people want to read, perhaps we should be a little more respectful towards their art in our tone, even if we make the argument no less forcefully that the protection of the individuals concerned should be paramount. Or perhaps we should focus on the underlying problems of society, rather than the newspaper-based symptoms. I don’t know.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them! The photo at the top of this post was posted to Flickr by Jon S and has been used under Creative Commons Licence.

Even as someone who has recently switched from iPhone to Android, there are few things in life that are as tiresome as listening to or reading the constant bickering between Apple and Android “fanboys”. It might seem, therefore, that this is an odd choice for a 2D post – but, in fact, there are some well-written and well-argued posts from reasonable people on both sides.

First, here’s a Businessweek article by Mathew Ingram explaining why he is considering making the same leap as me, and ditching the iPhone for an Android device. He concludes by saying

Apple has great design, but it restricts your choice in all kinds of ways. I have been seeing those restrictive bars more and more, despite all the beautiful flowers.

On the other hand, Colin Walker of BetaNews has done the opposite, and leapt from Android to iPhone. He too makes some excellent points, though of course reaches the opposite conclusion:

My disillusionment with Android has been growing and the move has been a long time coming; it will not be one I regret in a hurry.

It’s great to have a couple of well-written, non-obsessive, rationale contributions to a long-running and often heated debate.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them! The photo at the top of this post was posted to Flickr by Mike Lau and has been modified and used under Creative Commons Licence.

Ukip’s increasing popularity has generated acres of news coverage in the past few months. I thought I’d use this 2D post to pick two of the more thoughtful articles about Ukip’s leader.

Writing in Prospect, the magazine for which he’s associate editor, Edward Docx describes Farage’s “relentless charm” in an article with several arresting revelations. Perhaps the most intriguing, if not the most insightful, is that “close up, he smells of tobacco, offset with a liberal application of aftershave”. I found it not a little strange how much that added to Docx’s characterisation of the man. Perhaps the scent of all party leaders should become a regular feature of all political reporting.

Docx mentions Farage’s deft handling of a lack of policy detail, but in The Telegraph, Allister Heath goes a little further in taking Farage to task on the lack of coherent policy: he claims that “there are huge black holes at the heart of Ukip’s proposals”.

While these are two rather different articles in terms of tone, form and content, they do identify much the same traits in Farage, at least from the grand political point of view. Despite this, they come to utterly different conclusions: Heath argues that Ukip essentially doesn’t “stand up to detailed scrutiny”, while Docx argues that Farage can “make politics feel personally relevant again” and “show our parliament a way to recover its dignity”.

Both arguments are well worth reading.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them! The photo at the top of this post was posted to Flickr by the Euro Realist Newsletter and has been modified and used under Creative Commons Licence.

Much has been written in the past couple of weeks about the possibility (and, indeed, the unlikelihood) of Queen Elizabeth II following the example of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in abdicating. On the day of the Queen’s speech at the State Opening of Parliament, I thought it was worth highlighting two articles I enjoyed reading on this topic.

My first choice is an article that, to me, felt very British. This piece by Allison Pearson in The Telegraph suggests that that, contrary to many of the arguments about the perceived cruelty of placing strain on an elderly lady,

for our queen, the cruelty would be not to be allowed to keep her promise, the promise that will only be kept when she takes her last breath.

This struck me as a slightly unusual argument, but nonetheless it’s one opinion.

My second choice is this piece by Joris Luyendijk (who is Dutch) in The Guardian. From his international perspective, he sees the Queen’s ongoing service as a

drawn-out public castration to which Queen Elizabeth is subjecting her son Charles. You can’t help being born an heir apparent, but those who love you can help make it easier for you. Queen Elizabeth is not doing that, or so it looks to a Dutch eye.

The two articles are not quite so diametrically opposed as those quotes might suggest, but they do present to interesting different opinions on the issue, and are both worth reading.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

Even I have to admit that body odour is a strange topic to choose to feature in a series like this, and yet these two stories were just too interesting to miss.

First, I’ve chosen a Smithsonian article by Sarah Everts about the advertising of early deodourants and antiperspirants to a somewhat sceptical American public.

Second, I’ve picked a story by Gendy Alimurung in LA Weekly. It’s a fascinating story with some depth and complexity about a homeless man who, even once he is housed, chooses not to bathe.

The totally different angles that these stories take on the very intimate issue of body odour is very interesting, and I hope you enjoy reading both of them.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

For this 2D post, I’ve chosen to present two different points of view about pragmatism.

In Prospect, Alex Worsnip sets out his position that “‘pragmatism’ means sacrificing moral aspirations for something else” – and that the “something else” might not be all that desirable. In politics, he argues, pragmatism is nothing more than a technique for presenting an argument which defies dissent. At least with ideology, there is something to argue against.

In The Global Mail, Eric Ellis takes the argument about pragmatism away from the purely philosophical and into the physical present, looking at the Dutch approach to climate change. When much of your country lies below sea level, there’s little point debating the ideology of climate change – the only pragmatic course is to act. This has lead to the extraordinary position of virtual unanimity between politicians of all colours and the population at large over spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tackling the problem. Perhaps if people could be convinced to be a little more pragmatic over other politic issues the world over, then we’d be able to achieve far more.

I really like both of these articles, and the combination of the two has made me think a bit differently about pragmatism. Previously, I’d thought of it as a benign way to reach an end result. Now, I see far more clearly both the power and the danger of defaulting to pragmatism.

I hope you enjoy giving them a read!

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

This week, I’ve chosen to feature two articles on passwords.

I’ve read a lot about passwords recently, but these two articles stand out as approaching the problem from different angles. In this Wired article, Matthew Honan – whose live was turned upside down after hackers essentially destroyed his online life last summer – argues that passwords are broken, and that we need to look for another security solution.

On the other hand, in this Lifehacker post, the brilliant Alan Henry describes how we can use tools that are already available to virtually every computer user to build a hack-proof password system – or, at least, something close.

I think the combined effect of these two articles is brilliant. The first convinced me beyond all reasonable doubt that something needed to be done, whilst the second told me how to do something right now to improve my own security. And it worked: a couple of weeks ago, I spent half a day changing a whole load of passwords across a whole bunch of online services, so that I no longer use the same password on different sites – one of those dumb things that everyone knows they shouldn’t do, but almost everyone does. Perhaps the combination will have the same effect on you, too!

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!