Suniye-ing, etc.

True story

With social media, we can easily keep up with the lives and interests of far more than a hundred and fifty people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones. We may widen our network to two, three, or four hundred people that we see as friends, not just acquaintances, but keeping up an actual friendship requires resources. “The amount of social capital you have is pretty fixed,” Dunbar said. “It involves time investment. If you garner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly so the average capital per person is lower.” If we’re busy putting in the effort, however minimal, to “like” and comment and interact with an ever-widening network, we have less time and capacity left for our closer groups.

India’s Muslim population represents a huge array of sects, practices, and political participation and is exceedingly unlikely to become receptive to al Qaeda’s call for global jihad. But if Modi does not keep the BJP’s chauvinism in check, it may create an impetus for disaffected Muslims to join existing jihadist groups that are already working with al Qaeda.

For David Cohn, much of a modern news app’s success is about tone – especially when appealing to millenials. “I think we’re in the middle of it so it’s hard to define that tone,” he says. “But think about this: television news, cable TV news – CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc – is not that old, but it has a certain tone to it now. CNN was the first to create a 24-hour news channel, and for better or for worse defined the way that we understand that tone. I think that tone does not work for young people. I think that tone would definitely not work in a mobile setting. There’s something different in a mobile setting and there is a different tone for younger people now, and it’s kind of hard to know what that is now or define it now. The same way that maybe right as CNN launched it was hard to define the way that tone would grow and evolve and define the medium of 24-hour cable news channels.”

Wars are traditionally fought over territory. But the definition of territory has evolved to incorporate five domains: land, air, sea, space, and, most recently, cyberspace. These dimensions of “CLASS war” define the threats facing the world today. The specific triggers, objectives, and battle lines of such conflicts are likely to be determined, to varying degrees, by five factors: creed, clan, culture, climate, and currency. Indeed, these factors are already fueling conflicts around the world.

Is it "too trivial" for complex geopolitical stories to use the same techniques used to list examples of horses that look like Miley Cyrus? This is a perverse reaction to an interesting phenomenon: the remaking of an effective tabloid press. Media that aims to be accessible, that seeks to engage and inform people outside elites, has a valuable mission. Engagement with Ukrainian politics might begin and end with a "disaster porn" slideshow nine times out of 10, but what of the tenth individual who goes on to read more? For younger audiences or those disengaged from the mainstream media, one thing is sure: that the exploration of an alien topic will very rarely start with a 5,000-word article in Foreign Policy.

A few updates...