Monday Mashup: Digital media news and conversation starters to get you through the week

Each Monday we bring you digital media news and conversation starters to get you through the week. If you appreciate a good pre-meeting icebreaker, this is for you.

To keep you thinking

Digital media may be changing how you think

Tablet and laptop users beware. Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, according to a new study published in the proceedings of ACM CHI ’16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, to be held May 7-12, 2016. The findings serve as another wake-up call to how digital media may be affecting our likelihood of using abstract thought.

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Social media exec tolls death knell of overpaid influencers in viral rant

“They’ve been making a shit-tonne of money; they essentially capitalise on the concept of making people feel bad about their real, normal lives, and try to get them to strive for the unattainable. But maybe not for much longer.”

Would you agree?

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After reading thousands of romance books, Google’s AI is writing eerie post-modern poetry

Google had a problem. Their AI engine spoke with grammatical precision and factual accuracy, but its diction remained terse and limp. They wanted it to be more conversational, so they made it read 2,865 romance novels. Now Google has a poet.

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