Alerts fatigue, or would that be journalism fatigue?

The Guardian picked up an interesting finding (among many interesting ones) from the 2025 edition of the Digital News Report, perhaps the world’s largest press survey, produced annually by the Reuters Institute:

Analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week. Crucially, 43% of those who did not receive alerts said they had actively disabled them. They complained of receiving too many or not finding them useful, according to the research, which covered 28 countries.

There was a time, around 2014, when phone notifications were seen as a phone’s “premium real state,” a battleground for people’s attention, who were already saturated by the volume of digital information.

Unsurprisingly, the notification area also ended up saturated and discarded as yet another digital dumping ground. I suspect many people don’t even care what’s there, accumulating dozens, hundreds of unread, ignored notifications.

The obvious focus of the Reuters Institute research, journalism, reminded me of an excellent short piece by Ricardo Fiegenbaum, a researcher at objETHOS, a research group from Federal University of Santa Catarina. A decidedly non-academic text [pt_BR] (in the best sense), in which he thinks aloud about journalism’s place today:

It’s in this mined, paradoxical, complex and uncertain terrain that I enter when I think about journalism. And every question that presents itself in this scenario — logical, ideological, pragmatic, technological, discursive, etc. — always leads me to the fundamental question: what are we talking about when we talk about journalism?

It’s a good question.

I suspect the fatigue transcends notifications and that much of what’s currently understood as “journalism” escapes one of the profession’s noblest definitions, one that Ricardo mentions: serving societies’ information needs.

From the archives: in 2022, in light of that year’s Digital News Report edition, I was asking myself — echoing Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso — who reads so much news anyway [pt_BR].

You’re going to use Gemini on Android whether you like it or not

1

Google sent an email to Android phone owners warning that Gemini “will soon be able to help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” The change is scheduled for July 7th.

The notice generated confusion even in Android-focused publications. — 9to5Google, Android Police, Android Authority. Even after clarifications, including a statement from Google itself, the whole thing remains… confusing.

From what I understand, if Gemini Apps Activity is disabled, Gemini will continue to be available and have access to the mentioned apps, including WhatsApp and Phone. The difference is that interactions with the AI won’t be recorded in the history and will be stored by Google for up to 72 hours, with the guarantee that they won’t be used to train AIs or reviewed by humans.

(In other words, leaving history enabled subjects interactions to AI training and reviews by other humans.)

Those who *really* don’t want Gemini meddling with calls, messages, WhatsApp, and system settings need to disable integrations with each app within the Gemini app itself. Which seems to be another thing, different from Gemini Apps Activity. I presume it’s this app.

The aforementioned specialized publications, after updating their stories to “clear up the confusion,” concluded that the net result of the change is positive for people’s privacy. I’m not so sure about that. Confusions of this type, which sound intentional and try to hide the “nuclear” toggles (that disable the offered feature), tend to be defeats for privacy. And I won’t even get into the merits of whether Gemini snooping through my messages is good or bad.

Or maybe I still don’t understand it properly.

Related link (I think?): the extensive Gemini Apps privacy center.

Hiding metrics from the web

In 2012, artist Ben Grosser released a browser extension called Facebook Demetricator. Once installed, it hid all metrics from Facebook’s interface: likes, comments, notifications, unread messages, and so on.

“What’s going on here is that these quantifications of social connection play right into our (capitalism-inspired) innate desire for more,” he explained.

In creating his extension, Ben questioned why there were so many numbers “a system (and a corporation) that depends on its user’s continued free labor to produce the information that fills its databases.”

All of this in 2012!

More than a decade later, I feel we haven’t internalized Ben’s ahead-of-his-time discoveries. Even alternatives that position themselves as opposites to the abusive practices of commercial platforms like Facebook — think of Bluesky and Mastodon — insist on interfaces packed with numbers. It almost seems like we’ve lost the ability to imagine other models of digital interaction.

(more…)

Can AI-generated photos be art?

At the exhibition Indomitable Presences, currently showing at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, works by artist Mayara Ferrão are on display. Created using generative artificial intelligence, they emulate old photographs in order to “resignify the past”: indigenous and enslaved women kissing (example), scenes that probably occurred but of which we have no records for obvious reasons.

The Rio CCBB’s Instagram profile has been getting into arguments with some followers who are outraged by the promotion of art created with the help of AI. Even on profound topics that still lack answers from those who make a living finding these answers (philosophers, in general), @ccbbrj is taking a stance:

(more…)

Markdown in Windows 11 Notepad

My instinctive reaction to the news that Windows 11 Notepad has gotten text formatting support was to reject it outright. What a blasphemy! After reading the article, however, it seemed quite interesting: the formatting is Markdown, you can toggle between formatted and plain text with a click, and most importantly, you can completely disable formatting in the app’s settings.

(This is yet another reason why it’s always good to read beyond the headline. Microsoft’s blog post announcing this feature, for example, doesn’t mention Markdown, which made me expect the worst.)

TextEdit, macOS’s notepad equivalent, offers rich formatting (*.rtf format). It’s horrible. I think I only use it when I open the app for the first time after reinstalling the system or when setting up a new computer. My first move is always to switch the default to plain text in the settings.

That said, I would love for macOS TextEdit to have native Markdown support, even if it were just syntax highlighting — that is, without rendering the formatting.

Back to Windows Notepad, I learned that the version Microsoft has been updating with cool features (Markdown) and questionable ones (Copilot/AI) over the past three years is actually a whole new app. And that the old app — the one that was abandoned by Microsoft for over two decades — remains accessible at C:\windows\system32\notepad.exe. And if the new one is uninstalled, the old one automatically becomes the default. It’s good to have a backup when major changes hit previously reliable software.

(At least that’s what this commenter on Ars Technica says. I don’t have a Windows PC to verify this information.)

The who cares era

One of the latest generative AI-motivated blunders, the recommendation of non-existent books in a “special supplement” of US newspapers Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, generated yet another wave of criticism of the technology.

Dan Sinker defined the moment as “the who cares era”:

The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.

It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

Dan focuses on AI, but I have to say that the problem runs deeper and predates it. Supplements of this kind already existed before, and while slip-ups of this nature were rare, the fact that this one took two days to be noticed implies that on the reader’s side, nobody cares — yes, and they don’t care for a long time, well before the popularization of generative AI.

I find myself wondering how much stuff has already been printed not to be read, or at most, to be read and ignored. Or, in the digital realm, how much content isn’t published to be read and spark action or make people think, but rather to fill space, capture attention to redirect it toward ads or similar things.

Rob Horning raised this argument more thoroughly and elegantly, as he often does:

The fact that LLMs can generate endless amounts of explicitly “fake” copy with the traces of human intention and presence deeply diluted through countless layers of processing and concatenation could hopefully demystify not only that particular subject position that seeks safe harbor in “real texts” — i.e. an alibi in a “real supplement” for the dubious pleasures such supplements have always supplied — but also the fantasy of accessing perfect authenticity through media.

Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion, I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.

AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.

It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.

Talking about the internet in Salvador, Bahia

I’m in Salvador (BA) participating in the 15th Internet Forum in Brazil, FIB15. I came to present a new interview podcast (in pt_BR), Nós da Internet, and to fix a personal flaw: never having participated in a FIB before.

Here, I had the privilege of interviewing people who built and continue to build the Brazilian internet. And in a big fashion: in a beautiful aquarium-studio set up in the middle of the convention center. The one in the picture above.

(more…)

Just a QR Code is a simple, straightforward QR code generator without ads or invasive trackers.

Just a QR Code was born from Gabe Schuyler’s dissatisfaction with online generators of this type. “Isn’t it possible to just make a one-page website that uses Javascript to generate QR codes? Something I could save to disk and run locally”, he pondered.

And from that, Just a QR Code was born. Gabe himself was committed to cover the operating costs. In exchange, he asks:

If you find it valuable, you can pay it back by creating your own useful thing for the world and releasing it for free. Let’s take back the friendly web, one vexingly-monetized utility at a time!

It’s this spirit that drives PC do Manual, a host of FOSS apps from Manual do Usuário. Which, by the way, has two QR code generation tools, a general one and another for joining Wi-Fi networks.

Random Posts