Internet Friends

By: Drew Coffman Jon Mitchell
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  • Summary

  • Drew Coffman and Jon Mitchell met on the internet in 2012. It was a whole different internet back then. This is a podcast about what’s changed, where it’s going, and what it’s doing to our always-online society.
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Episodes
  • 38: Whac-A-Mole

    38: Whac-A-Mole
    Mar 4 2020
    Seems like as good a time as any — okay, maybe good is a strong word — to revisit the topic of Twitter. Between the worldwide plague of grotesque elections and the worldwide plague of COVID-19, the Twitter vibes right now are the worst since at least the 2016 U.S. election, if not ever. Jon and Drew discuss why Twitter offers such a harmful attraction in times like this. Jon figures it’s time for his first big following purge in a long time, and he and Drew consider what it takes to shape your social media experience to be as close to what you want, given the way the platforms militate against it. What perplexes us is, it should be in social media companies’ interests to make their algorithms compassionate to their users, not merely stimulating. This status quo is so shortsighted. What precious few of the entities supporting the internet we live on seem to wonder is, what are people going to remember about them in 10 years? Will they remember their results from the March quarter 2020? Or will they remember whether they succeeded or failed to help people weather crises we lived out on their platforms? Bonus: A preview of Drew’s exciting experiments with ephemeral posts! Want to be internet friends? Write to Drew and Jon (https://internetfriends.show/contact) or find us on Twitter at @_NetFriends (https://twitter.com/_NetFriends).
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    55 mins
  • 37: Dracula Keyboard

    37: Dracula Keyboard
    Jan 29 2020
    Drew has a surprise for Jon! It’s an AlphaSmart Neo 2, a dedicated word processor. Jon, for his part, is thinking about buying a bass. They’re both seeking a lost feeling of having dedicated tools for the job they want to do. Increasingly, iPads and iPhones feel like general-purpose devices that can do lots of things, but they aren’t made for any particular thing, and in a lot of ways, they’re getting worse at each thing they can do as their capabilities get broader and more spread thin. Maybe creative work is better handled by specialized tools, and the digital part is better handled by… a desktop computer on an actual desk! What a concept! Want to be internet friends? Write to Drew and Jon (https://internetfriends.show/contact) or find us on Twitter at @_NetFriends (https://twitter.com/_NetFriends).
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • 36: Push and Pull

    36: Push and Pull
    Dec 11 2019
    For a while, our tools were no better at handling information overload than our brains were, but that’s starting to change. Jon and Drew discuss the never-ending practice of checking things — apps, inboxes, notifications — for new information. Everybody knows that feeling of going around and around checking the same few places to see if there’s anything new. For years, the only alternative was to have notifications blowing up your phone at all times, which was obviously worse. Now, though, operating systems are starting to add new layers of notifications and widgets to make checking quicker, easier to handle, and less urgent. Want to be internet friends? Write to Drew and Jon (https://internetfriends.show/contact) or find us on Twitter at @_NetFriends (https://twitter.com/_NetFriends).
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    57 mins
Art Politics & Government
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