Crowdfunding healthcare perpetuates different kinds of inequities

Anne Helen Petersen, writing for Buzzfeed, on the trend of people using crowdfunding websites to raise money for healthcare:

Both GoFundMe and YouCaring provide step-by-step instructions for what they call a “successful campaign.” “Use a great photo or make a video,” GoFundMe advises. “This is your shot at a first impression and it should create a strong reaction, like ‘Wow!’ or ‘Awe!’ or ‘I need to know more about this’ … Try to use photos of the people involved whenever possible. They get stronger reactions than a graphic or text. Be sure to avoid blurry or low-quality images.” YouCaring suggests users pay particular attention to choosing their fundraiser’s name: “Many people will decide whether to read about your cause based solely on your fundraiser’s name.” Or, as GoFundMe puts it, “Which title sounds better? ‘I Need Money!’ or ‘Julie’s Rally Against Cancer?’…the second one, right?” […]

Of course, packaging need isn’t necessarily new. Every time we ask a family member or friend for money, we’re presenting our need in a way that makes it more likely they’ll respond; some people are better at it than others. But that’s also why most would rather not rely on their family, friends, or an ability to convincingly ask someone for money as a means of survival. It’s subjective and depends, at least in part, on a flair for drama. Marketing a need through crowdsourcing demands similar skills — creating or choosing a compelling image and an eye-grabbing, keyword-searchable title — but a campaign must also transform the underlying need into a persuasive narrative. As YouCaring points out, “Julie’s Rally Against Cancer” is more compelling than “I Need Money” — one situates “Julie” as the hero fighting a good fight; the other de-romanticizes the struggle down to its most essential (and truest) form: My need? Money.

This paradigm sets up a dangerous expectation in which giving is contingent upon being moved, entertained, or otherwise satisfied with the righteousness of a fight. I’ll give, this arrangement suggests, but only if you give something to me — tears, sadness, hope, cuteness — first. As Jeremy Snyder argues in the Hastings Center Report, this paradigm also creates a “strong incentive to sensationalize or embellish their stories in order to receive donations,” in part because the narrative has to be striking enough to compel individuals outside of one’s existing social network to give. You’re not just selling to your family members, in other words — you’re trying to sell to the entire internet.

If there was anyone that thought crowdfunding was in any way a proper solution for rising healthcare costs, this piece will disabuse you of that notion.

Why ‘Beauty and the Beast’ represents a troubling trend for Disney

Alison Willmore, writing for Buzzfeed, about Bill Condon’s new Beauty and the Beast:

Beauty and the Beast [1991] was considered more nuanced and more sophisticated in its interpretation, its not-to-type bookish protagonist, and its aesthetics, a landmark for the company — the first animated feature to have ever gotten nominated for Best Picture.

Sad and a bit alarming that 26 years later, this new Beauty and the Beast is so fundamentally stuck in place beneath its few middling gestures toward inclusivity. Being stuck in place is a conscious choice here, nostalgia having become very good business, but there’s something more than cynical to the way the film regurgitates so much from a past classic. The new Beauty and the Beast may be live action, but it feels less alive than the animated feature it follows. It’s not comfort food, it’s Disney saluting how much it’s done right — so much so that it insists, over a quarter century later, that it barely needs to change. It’s a corporation’s ode to itself, and to setting expectations for progress very low.

While the new films are doing gangbusters at the box office, I find Disney’s live action remakes to be artistically bizarre. More often than not, they are shells of their former, animated selves, often taking the same plot, the same characters and even the same look, then gussying them all up using modern day technology and production design. They rarely add anything new or worthwhile to the original story, and thus feel beholden to their predecessors.

Disney is a multinational conglomerate that is producing many different kinds of films. But it’s a bummer that it has chosen this decade to revel in its former glory with these remakes when it could be telling newer, more interesting stories instead.

Thomas Newman’s ‘Passengers’ soundtrack is beautiful

Sure, Passengers is a pretty morally reprehensible film and basically a feature-length adaptation of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s “The Implication.” But one of the best things to come out of it was Thomas Newman’s beautiful, plaintive score (which was actually nominated for an Oscar last year).

The theme from “Spacewalk,” the track above, plays several times in the movie. It appears when Jim takes his first spacewalk outside the cruise ship he’s on and sees the wonder of the ship in the vastness of space. Later, he brings Aurora to show her as well.

When I play it, it reminds me that even in the most hopeless, dire situations, beauty still exists. It just needs to found and appreciated.

Why anonymous apps like Secret and Yik Yak failed

Miranda Katz, writing for Backchannel, on why apps like Secret, Yik Yak, and Whisper failed to gain traction or live up to their promise:

From the bulletin boards of the early internet to the subreddits of today, anonymity has always had a place online. But as Secret, Yik Yak, and Whisper all discovered, anonymous social networks are something of an oxymoron. An anonymous app that relies on social connections to be relevant all too easily breeds foul behavior, and quickly becomes antisocial. An anonymous app that lacks real-world social or geographical ties, meanwhile, struggles to be addictive. What does work, more or less, is an anonymous or pseudonymous group that forms around an interest, where a person’s identity matters less than their willingness to engage on a shared passion.

In Byttow’s view, a fatal flaw of anonymous social media is that using the apps doesn’t pay dividends. Users can’t build relationships or burnish their own reputations while operating without names. From time to time, people may have a piece of information they’d like to share with the world without revealing their identity, but that’s not enough to sustain a network. What makes an app sticky is positive reinforcement: more followers, more friends, more retweets. “For the most part people want to communicate with an audience,” says North. “People want credit for what they’ve said and done. Anonymity flies in the face of people’s need to have acknowledgment.”

This passage nails it: app retention is largely built around “stickiness” — what gets people to come back and keep engaging with the app. In an anonymous social network, the incentives are largely missing.

Father on BBC interrupted by his children: an analysis

Ben Thompson (of the solid tech analysis blog Stratechery) has written a detailed breakdown of the most viral moment of the week: a father getting interrupted by his child while on live national television:

Here’s the deal with these TV spots: you don’t get paid a dime. Why, then, does the BBC, or CNN, or MSNBC, or all of the other channels have an endless array of experts on call willing to call-in from their home offices not just get guests, but also convince them to put on a suit-and-tie and arrange books just so? BECAUSE YOU’RE ON TV!

Here’s the deal: the male ego is both remarkably fragile and remarkably easy to satiate. Tell said ego he will be featured as an expert in front of a national or global audience and he will do whatever it takes — including 12 years of academia and wearing a suit at home—to ensure it is so.

The flipside of said ego-soothing, though, is a potential level of embarassment that is hard to fathom. In this case Kelly is fulfilling his self-selected destiny: he is appearing as an expert across the world on the BBC. But it’s not going well! His daughter has appeared, and while he certainly loves her, he must, MUST, keep up appearances. Thus the hand, and not the overt affection.

(via Rira)

Breaking Bad – The Movie

Someone has edited all 62 episodes of Breaking Bad into a 127-minute long film. According to the creator:

What if Breaking Bad was a movie ?

After two years of sleepless nights of endless editing, we bring you the answer to that very question. A study project that became an all-consuming passion.

It’s not a fan-film, hitting the highlights of show in a home-made homage, but rather a re-imagining of the underlying concept itself, lending itself to full feature-length treatment.

An alternative Breaking Bad, to be viewed with fresh eyes.

This is a pretty interesting, well-executed experiment. Of course, it’s not Breaking Bad at all — countless scenes are lost, the pacing is dramatically different, and the timeline of the film (unlike the show) is largely linear. Nonetheless, a fascinating concept and a clear labor of love.

[Thanks to Shayne B from the Slackfilmcast for bringing this to my attention]

How fake news brings people together in pursuit of profit

Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko, writing for Buzzfeed, on how a liberal troll and some Macedonian spammers both ended up profiting from spreading fake news:

There is perhaps no better expression of the current economics of internet content than an American liberal troll and spammers from the Balkans and Caucasus making money from completely fake online news aimed at American conservatives. The troll says he’s exposing ignorance, while the spammers are stealing any content that drives traffic and ad impressions. Regardless of motivation, the clicks and dollars are the same — and they reinforce the reality that misinformation about American politics is now an international business opportunity.

BuzzFeed News analyzed 11 hoaxes published by The Resistance that received the highest engagement on Facebook in the past two weeks and found they were copied and reposted by 48 different websites. Of those sites, 16 were confirmed using domain registration records as being run from Macedonia, 4 originated in Georgia, 2 are from Kosovo, and 1 is Bulgarian. The remaining 20 sites whose provenance is unconfirmed use similar WordPress themes to those run from Macedonia, and often post their content in the same pro-Trump Facebook groups used by Macedonians to spread their content. BuzzFeed News emailed 19 owners of the sites but did not receive any response.