#15: down the ?? ???

G'day

Virtual meetings have now become so routine the team has started to play pranks when we meet each day. Our favourites: when someone is late for the meeting, everyone stays silent, moves their lips, and types in the chat that we can't hear you until the latecomer goes out and dials back in again. Three times. Hilarious. Then there's "everyone turns off the camera and changes their name to 'reconnecting...'". Classic. O how we laugh.

Hoping this lockdown lifts soon.

Hey, if you like this newsletter, please do share it with your networks because with every share, the number of new subscribers lifts exponentially. Like a virus sort of.

ABOVE THE FOLD

• down the ?? ??? 

BELOW THE FOLD

• ????virtuality
• ?????? chart of the week - zoom versus the airlines
• And finally... the social media relationship cycle

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BELOW THE FOLD

?? ??? filter bubbles and rabbit holes

You know that feeling when you press send or post in a fit of pique, and realize, maybe 10 seconds later, how dumb that was? Kevin Roose does:

"I wondered: Did a few dozen protesters doing something reckless and irresponsible thousands of miles away from me really deserve my outrage? Or had I allowed myself to be whipped into a frenzy by people I’d never met, on a platform engineered to capture my attention and convert it into advertising dollars?"

Haven't we all.

We are all engineered by the platforms.

We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us

-- source disputed

In The Rabbit Hole [must-listen 3-part audio series on Spotify here] Roose explores this phenomenon through the YouTube watch history of Caleb Cain, a high school dropout who is radicalized to the right by the YouTube recommendation algorithm, and then swung back again to tell his story and share his watch history with the New York Times and become a liberal YouTuber.

It is a fascinating insight into one man's journey, but that's the problem. It is just one man's journey. Academics who have looked into this phenomenon reckon it is not just a supply problem - YouTube serving up endless streams of radical content - but also a demand problem - that is what these people want to watch.

Have you ever fallen down a an internet rabbit hole and found yourself somewhere you didn't want to be? Tell us about it in the comments.

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BELOW THE FOLD

?? virtuality

Regular readers will recognize my obsession with virtual reality, the technology that is always five years away. The obsession started way back in #5 when the Rocker came back from college with an Oculus headset as part of a test programme which cost him about 4 hours a day for 6 weeks he spent VR gaming through the first semester, and for which he earned a ￡50 Amazon voucher. That was even before we all got locked up in our living rooms by the corona.

Since then the demand case for VR has accelerated, with business applications such as virtual meetings and collaboration the subject of much curiosity since we can no longer do it in person. Facebook announced that its non-advertising revenues are up 80% in the first quarter primarily driven by Oculus. But the headsets themselves have been mostly out of stock through lockdown. Missed opportunity.

Meanwhile Magic Leap, which once raised $2.6 billion on the back of a whale in a gym (see below), has now pivoted to focus exclusively on business applications. In the process it has restructured and laid off half its people.

VR remains, it seems, five years away.

What would be your dream VR application? Let's make it.

CHART OF THE WEEK

Credit: Lennart Dobravsky, Director of Research & Intelligence at Lufthansa Innovation Hub

This is what "software is eating the world" means.

And finally...

And thanks to Remo Guiffré for suggesting that Facebook add another:

No, not a "divorce" reaction, but a dollar sign that would "help us support performers, artists and other creatives by adding a $ 'reaction' to the mix so that I could make a micropayment and spend a dollar here and there in appreciation of what I was being nourished and entertained by ... in these times, and beyond."

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Thanks for reading everyone. If you have come this far, do me a favour and click ??. It means more people will see and subscribe to this, which means I'll keep putting the effort in for you and you'll get a better product. It's, like, karma.

Mike