firehose

Technological menace and "hookup culture" are both cultural catnip, so something like Vanity Fair’s "Friends Without Benefits" is a choice coup for an author like Nancy Jo Sales, who also wrote Bling Ring.

"Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and new dating apps like Tinder, Grindr, and Blendr have increasingly become key players in social interactions, both online and IRL (in real life)," warns the lede. "Nancy Jo Sales uncovers a world where boys are taught they have the right to expect everything from social submission to outright sex from their female peers. What is this doing to America’s young women?"

The topic of teen promiscuity is old, but social media is… well, slightly less old, which means not only are we treated to evergreen standbys like internet pornography and gyrating starlets, everyone in the story is constantly hearting Instagram photos and reading each others’ Twitter feeds. At one point, a group of teens decides to have an "online orgy." It’s easy to make fun of this scare-quotes treatment of new technology, but the real problem isn’t rampant cyberfear. It’s that the whole thing is a sad, facile story that looks at the right problem in exactly the wrong way.

Looking at the right problem in exactly the wrong way

Sales has talked to a large sampling of American girls, assuming LA and New York are the only places in America. They are having apparently unsatisfying sex, occasionally with the help of Tinder and other casual dating apps that get a lot less interesting outside big cities. They are using social media (Sales notes that 81 percent of American teens are doing so, apparently a more important statistic than how many are actually sexually active in high school.) It sometimes makes them feel lonely and sad. And if you mention those things together enough times, they’ll probably seem connected, even if the link is as tenuous as a girl staying home alone and watching YouTube videos instead of a DVD.

Sales does hit on some important points about social media and the internet in general. Most obviously, the internet is a huge amplifier — if you’re being bullied or harassed, it won’t stop when you leave school. If someone wants to reveal an embarrassing secret, the whole world is watching. We often see each others’ carefully constructed avatars, not their messy real lives. And whether or not it’s changing behavior in general, people will say things from behind a screen that they never would in person; one girl in the story refers to a boy who is timid in real life but asks for nudes via text. But it’s a big step from online interaction to a real-world sexual revolution, much less one that people have been warning about since women could walk outside unsupervised.

In fact, the article is mostly a series of salacious stories and broad warnings that could have been written at any time in the last 20 years — just swap in Britney Spears for Miley Cyrus. It quotes a counselor and a researcher, but cites only three pieces of non-anecdotal data: the percentage of teens using social media, the hours a day they spend on electronic devices, and the percentage of adolescents who've seen internet porn. Notably absent: how much sex teens are actually having, and whether that number is going up.

I’m not saying I can prove Sales wrong. I’m just saying there’s no good reason to believe she’s right, either. Collecting "hookup" statistics is complicated: for one thing, hooking up can mean anything from kissing to sex. One group found that internet-era college students were neither having sex more frequently nor sleeping with more people than their counterparts from the 1980s and 1990s.

In case you’re wondering, I just cited more relevant data in one paragraph than Sales has in five pages.

When we condemn 'hookups,' we take aim at sex and give sexism a pass

If you assume the article is accurate, things get worse. In the world of "Friends Without Benefits," it’s not just social media that’s the problem — it’s any non-physical communication. "They don’t even have to be together," Sales gasps before describing a teenage boy "getting a boner" from a dirty text; we’ve quickly moved past Snapchat and Tinder and are now indicting the written word. But even this wouldn’t be so bad if there were even a hint that sex isn’t inherently degrading to women and empowering to men.

There are real, painful stories in the article: girls who have been bullied, girls who feel pressured to be sexy, girls who chafe at a double standard. But "hookup culture" articles aren’t helping. For all their iterations, they seem to deliver only one message: if women are given more options — including hookup apps — men will only take advantage of us. Any action that could lead to sex is painted as a tragedy.

The story is heavy on blowjobs and stripping, our cultural shorthand for things men enjoy and women endure. There’s a quote about all genders having rote sex so they can "update [on social media] about it," but boys in the piece seems to want and enjoy sex for its own sake just fine — it’s just girls who apparently don’t get anything but Facebook likes and the chance of a relationship. The thing is, we’ve been telling this story for decades now. In 2003, it was "rainbow parties," which were complete nonsense but pushed the same narrative: boys get pleasure, girls give. This was, in one survey at the time, not borne out at all; teen girls and boys reported both getting and giving oral sex in pretty similar numbers.

The problem apparently isn't just social media — it's communication, period

Look, once again, I haven’t proved anything. But neither has Sales. All she’s done is tell us that girls might as well give up on enjoying sex altogether, at least in high school and college. There’s no way forward from this. No outliers, no good examples inside the relationships she champions, virtually no exploration of what decent sex at any age might even look like for women. Just some fatalistic hand-wringing that reinforces the very idea it’s supposedly condemning. If physical relationships are going to be terrible for girls no matter what, why should boys bother trying to make things better?

Which is, really, the crux of the problem. Sales promises to expose "a world where boys are taught they have the right to expect everything from social submission to outright sex from their female peers." But for a 6,000-word essay that’s ostensibly about male expectations and male desires, it’s telling that it only directly names and quotes one boy. Three other nameless male teens are given single throwaway lines. One of them, despite the article’s virtually exclusive focus on heterosexual sex, is talking about gay hookups. And that quote isn’t even a firsthand account.

If we were actually interested in looking at how boys are "taught" to expect sex, we might consider asking a few of them. But instead, we treat them like mute forces of nature, incapable of empathy when given access to sexting. We assume that men exploiting women is inevitable the moment we let girls onto the internet or out of the house. Social media amplifies the kind of sexual double standard the interviewees describe, but Sales never seems to consider questioning the double standard itself. If anything, she plays right into it.

If we're worried about what boys are being taught, we might consider talking to them

If you want a real story about how social media hurts girls, look at cyberbullying victim Rehtaeh Parsons. Parsons, 15, was allegedly gang-raped while blacked out at a party by four boys, who took pictures of the incident and posted them online. The case against the boys was dropped for lack of evidence, though it was later reopened and child pornography charges were filed. Parsons, meanwhile, was mocked as a slut by fellow students both online and offline, her parents said. "Her friends turned against her, people harassed her, boys she didn’t know started texting her and Facebooking her, asking her to have sex with them since she had had sex with their friends." At age 17, she committed suicide.

Parson’s story underlines a blunt truth: technology and social media can be brutal tools in the wrong hands. But online communication isn't a gun — it has many, many uses that are neither dehumanizing nor isolating, and suggesting that the internet is raising a generation of callow sociopaths whitewashes problems that have always existed offline. When we talk about cybersex or even "hookup culture" in general, we end up taking aim at sex while giving sexism a pass.

The internet created a forum for Parsons’ classmates to shame her. It made it almost impossible for her to escape the comments. But should we really argue that smartphones are a bigger problem than rapists? Should we pretend that boys who assume any non-virginal girl is fair game, or girls who relentlessly police their friends’ sexuality, weren’t just as common 10 — or a hundred — years ago?

Why is it so much easier to blame Facebook than look at the misogyny and hatred it reflects?

Breaking Bad may be gone, but the debate over whether Skyler was an annoying character will rage on forever.

Facebook Graph Search now includes posts and status updates in its results, according to a Facebook blog post Monday. Such searches will accept modifiers like time—“All of my posts from 2012” for instance—location, or people who participated.

This new aspect of Graph Search will take advantage of Facebook’s recently announced hashtags. One intended purpose is for users to search posts among different social groups for topic matter, e.g., “posts about Breaking Bad by my friends.” Graph Search will also allow searches based on tagged locations (“Posts from the Empire State Building”) or involvement of other users (“Posts my friend John Smith has commented on”).

The search is still subject to privacy controls, so users won’t be able to see results they couldn’t view otherwise. But this opens up all public posts ever, as well as any posted shared directly to each user, to aggregation, and it’s worth noting that Facebook updates are set to be public by default. Ostensibly, Facebook hopes that this will create a Twitter-like feed of activity that users can view and interact with.

Verizon Wireless did away with unlimited data plans last year, forcing monthly limits onto all customers signing new contracts. Customers with unlimited plans before the switchover could keep them indefinitely, unless they decided to sign a new contract in order to get a cheaper (subsidized) phone.

That was true until a tiny miracle occurred this past weekend. Customers who went to Verizon's website to purchase a new, subsidized phone found that they were able to keep their unlimited plans, Droid Life reported Saturday.

Verizon admitted its mistake and won't force the customers onto limited plans. Some customers apparently had trouble completing their orders for unlimited data plans, but those who did not run into trouble can keep the unlimited data. A statement Verizon sent to Droid Life today reads as follows:

Michael Slovis is Breaking Bad's cinematographer. He's the man responsible for the show's striking visual style: its filmic landscapes, its lingering timelapses, and its trademark perspective shots. And what does Slovis say allowed him to imbue Breaking Bad with its own distinct aesthetics?

Cheap HDTVs. Slovis thanked the increased take-up of the technology in an interview with Forbes.

"It just so happened that during the last seven years, widescreen televisions became affordable. And HD became the norm. Now people could see what we were doing and we didn't have to tell stories in the old style of closeup [then another] closeup."

Perhaps more important to Breaking Bad's overall success, Slovis says, was the rise of digital video recorders and Netflix. The cinematographer argues that Breaking Bad's audience grew because people were "able to binge view and catch up." Show creator Vince Gilligan has agreed in the past, saying Netflix provided Breaking Bad with an "amazing nitrous-oxide boost of energy and general public awareness."

"We didn't have to tell stories in the old style"

Slovis also celebrated the show's recording format. Breaking Bad's one of the few modern shows to have been recorded on 35mm film, a hardware choice that means Sony can transfer episodes from 2K to 4K as television technology becomes more affordable: "something," Slovis notes, "you can't do with shows that are shot digitally."

The full interview goes into more detail on how the cinematographer imagined, lit, and shot Walter White's descent into badness, and explains why the show's perspective camera shots are like toppings on a sundae.

By Nathan Grayson on September 30th, 2013 at 12:00 pm.

You probably haven’t heard, but Valve’s officially going forward with its plan to launch its own Steam-centric OS, living room hardware, and a crazy, touch-pad-based controller to back it all up. I know, right? It’s weird that no one has been talking about it incessantly. But while Valve preaches openness and hackability, it’s downplayed an ugly reality of the situation: smaller developers still face a multitude of struggles in the treacherous green jungles of its ecosystem. SteamOS and various Steam Boxes, however, stand to bring brilliantly inventive indie games to an audience that doesn’t even have a clue that they exist, so I got in touch with developers behind Gone Home, Race The Sun, Eldritch, Mark of the Ninja, Incredipede, Project Eternity, and more for their thoughts on SteamOS, who it’s even for, Valve’s rocky relationship with indies, and what it’ll take for Steam to actually be an “open” platform.

Steam? In Living Rooms? Who Is This Even For?

PC gaming in the living room. A chance to overthrow the simplified scion of consoledom in favor of a glorious kingdom of customization and openness. That’s what we’ve always wanted, right? But no dream ever comes true without some kind of catch, and Valve’s plan for domination of all rooms (except maybe the bathroom… for now) isn’t without its complications. So then, the big one: who is SteamOS and its various hardware extensions really for? Many console gamers, after all, tend to prefer convenience over options, and PC gamers already have, well, PCs. Beyond that, who’s left?

“It kind of seems like an odd proposition to me,” said Gone Home project lead Steve Gaynor. “I guess the target market would be ‘somebody who wants to play these cool indie and PC games I keep hearing about, but doesn’t want to deal with building or maintaining a computer.’ Which does sound pretty cool. So, I dunno. I wouldn’t be the target market probably, since I’d just build my machine and play games on it. But I could see this filling a middleground between hardcore PC builders and console gamers with an interest in PC gaming but no interest in the headaches that come with maintaining a PC. And also it does give developers a single target hardware spec to test on, like consoles have, which is a plus.”

Former Mark of the Ninja lead and current Campo Santo founder Nels Anderson, meanwhile, figured that Valve has the time and resources to figure out where exactly its mighty steam engine is headed as it goes along. SteamOS won’t necessarily be an overnight success, but then, neither was Steam. Valve’s MO is adapting and evolving over time, and it’s gotten Gabe Newell and co insanely far. Why suddenly go for an instant, unsustainable smash hit instead?

“The thing is, a lot of PC games really aren’t meant to be played on a controller in a living room,” Anderson noted, speaking of the current landscape of these things. “Are the people who primarily want controller + TV games already having their needs met by the more proven and streamlined consoles? Do the console exclusives still have pull for those folks? No idea. If there’s anything Valve is good at though, it’s playing the long game (insert Half-Life 3 pun here), so it will definitely be interesting to see how this all develops for sure.”

Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart agreed, adding that Valve’s pretty clearly angling its molten-hot news eruptions at dyed-in-the-wool PC gamers right now, but we’re just the beginning. “I’m betting Gabe is looking for this to ultimately be for everyone,” he said. “If I had to guess though, the early adopters will most likely be users and fans of Steam along with gamers who want to play their PC libraries on their TVs.”

The question, then, is how Valve will catch the increasingly fickle eyes of all humans, and that’s where things get tricky. SteamOS’ big selling point is PC-style openness and options in the living room, but that on its own simply won’t be enough. Convenience always wins, and that mantra rules over living rooms with an iron fist. If Valve wants everyone on board, it’ll have to (somewhat paradoxically) offer both options and a smooth, streamlined experience that doesn’t paralyze users with indecision. Given that John Q Publicsmithingworthamshire views PC gaming as more trouble than its worth, SteamOS has its work cut out for it.

“If they can make it very very easy to buy, plug in, and use then I think it could take off,” said Incredipede creator Colin Northway. “I’ve always thought people avoided PC games because of the ‘hassle’. I make games and I have no idea how to benchmark a new gaming machine right now. It looks like Valve is looking to remove all the friction.”

Obsidian’s Chris Avellone concurred, adding that convenience is becoming even more key as mobile devices devour more and more of people’s gaming time. “Seeing the increased level of functionality a lot of mainstream TVs have nowadays (internet, USB ports, their own Netflix buttons on the controller, etc.), it feels like the migration into using the TV as a one-stop PC machine as well seems, well, inevitable,” he explained. “Already seeing a lot of that consolidation on mobile phone tech, bringing the PC to the living room via Steam seems like a smart move.”

Steam Vs Indies (And Why Steam Isn’t Actually ‘Open’)

Valve dreams of an entirely open gaming future, but well, the future sure seems far away sometimes, doesn’t it? While SteamOS and Steam-powered hardware might – to varying degrees – let anybody wriggle around in their innards, Steam itself is quite a different story. Valve’s spent years trying to figure out how best to curate its virtual shelves, but it’s yet to find a solution that makes everyone happy. Most recently, Steam Greenlight’s been giving many smaller developers no end of trouble. And with the prospect of expanding into living rooms and – with that – a whole new audience on the horizon, something needs to change lest both gamers, developers, and even Valve miss out big time.

Former BioShock 2 developer and current Eldritch lead David Pittman made no bones about his hope that Valve swings in the opposite direction. If you’re going to try and be “open,” you may as well go all the way.

“The execution of Steam Greenlight has been a contentious subject, and I am not entirely convinced that curation ultimately benefits anyone,” he said. “Certainly, the present form of Greenlight seems to preclude the availability of niche titles, and that’s something that I hope improves over time as Valve continues to review the process.”

“I believe it is critically essential to the openness of the platform that SteamOS can be used to play games (and any other software) which are not available on Steam, just as a Windows- or Linux-based PC can do. It is unclear to me yet if that will be the case.”

Incredipede creator Colin Northway, who nearly found his game beaten and penniless at the bottom of Greenlight’s barrel, echoed that sentiment. The system came through for him eventually, but the circumstances were far from ideal. For his part, he doesn’t think it has to be that way anymore.

“I would love to see Steam become an open platform,” he exclaimed. “Steam is great for both players and game developers. I just want it to be more egalitarian. I dislike gate keepers, I don’t want Valve to be the one who decides what players see, I want it to be blogs and gaming sites and people’s friends and curators. I would like to see them step back from the curation side of things entirely. It would make a few people less money but more people more.”

Others, however, didn’t see the issue as so cut-and-dry. Race The Sun co-creator Aaron San Filippo, whose game has financially crashed and burned due to sluggish Greenlight progress, was surprisingly even-handed about the situation.

“Man, this one’s tough,” he began. “In a sense, we love Steam for its curation. As developers, we love hearing stories about how quality games can launch there and do really well, supporting developers where few other platforms can do this. On the other hand – what would really benefit us right now, is to be able to reach customers who love the convenience of Steam, and to be able to build on top of Steam’s social layers. It seems like Valve is moving in the direction of letting more and more games onto their system, and so for me the big question is: How do they handle curation? Maybe they’ll be able to use metrics in a way that other big platforms haven’t, and give games a chance to get front-page exposure based on how much players are engaging with them? It’ll be really interesting to see where they go.”

Mark of the Ninja/Campo Santo’s Nels Anderson chimed in with a similar point of view, adding: “It’s a hard problem to solve, and I don’t think a 100 percent open platform is the right approach. As the iTunes App store pretty clearly attests, complete openness does some severe violence to the signal vs. noise of content on platform. The pseudo popularity contest of Greenlight tends to self-select certain types of games too, though. I don’t know what the right answer is (easier access for developers that have already shipped on Steam or other platforms? Some kind of sponsorship from existing Steam devs?) but I think some kind of curation is important to Steam’s long-term health as a platform.”

This, too, is an area where SteamOS could get a major leg up on its new competition. Sony and Microsoft are finally (in the latter’s case, kind of) embracing indies, but PC’s already got them handily beat. Even Steam’s still very flawed approach has eclipsed consoletopia’s twin titans, but Valve can’t afford to rest on its laurels.

“Valve’s generally been pretty hands-off, as they are in most things,” explained Anderson. “You don’t see them promoting anyone else’s games at events or anything like that. In regard to exposure, which is one of a smaller developers biggest challenges, it’s really nice seeing Sony pointing some of their big ol’ media spotlight at smaller developers. But in terms of easiest, lowest overhead platform to develop for, Steam obviously can’t be beat.”

The Banner Saga technical director John Watson had similar praise for Sony, who’s taken quite a bit of initiative in giving indies the spotlight. “Sony has been extremely accommodating over the last few years, and is very active at outreach,” he said. “Steam is hard to approach and hard to get into, but once you are in, the developer’s life is pretty good.”

Northway also concurred, but he still thinks Valve has the best chance of sparking a real revolution. At least, if it plays its cards right.

“Of everyone embracing indies right now my favorite is Valve because for some reason, they actually care about what’s right and what’s fair,” he said. “It’s bizarre and I love it! I think Sony is laudable for what games they are publishing and it’s obviously working out for the game creators as well as Sony, but Valve is the only one that might actually change how we find, buy, and play games.”

Check back soon for developers’ thoughts on Linux’s many ups and downs, streaming, and of course SteamOS’ much-talked-about controller. 

Composer Takashi Tateishi, known for creating the Mega Man series' iconic stage clear jingle and main character's theme in Mega Man 2, will join production on Keiji Inafune's Mighty No. 9, according to the latest update to the Kickstarter campaign.

Tateishi (pictured above on the right) will join Inti Creates' Ippo Yamada (pictured left) — who has written music for games including Mega Man 9 and 10 as well as Resident Evil — and Mega Man 1 composer Manami Matsumae, who already created the Mighty No. 9 Main Theme.

According to the update, Tateishi, currently CEO of his own studio Most Company, has been reworking his schedule in order to find time to work on Mighty No. 9. And as a reminder, all backers who pledge $40 and above will receive a digital version of the game's full soundtrack.

"Tateishi-san's tunes are the type you can't get out of your head, the kind you find yourself humming in the shower, or covering in your band — it's no accident they've become some of the best-known songs in all of gaming!" reads the post.

"We hope you agree this is a really big deal, both to us personally as fans, and for the project overall."

The Kickstarter campaign for Mighty No. 9 ends tomorrow night at 8:19 p.m. ET. The campaign was launched during PAX Prime earlier this month and met its funding goal in less than 48 hours. The game is currently slated to release on Windows PC, Linux, Mac, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii U, with PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS ports as stretch goals. Read our interview with Inafune and learn how launching Mighty No. 9 made him realize how wide-spread Mega Man's influence has been.

Facebook is about to make Graph Search a lot more powerful. Though the service has been able to query fixtures of your social graph — including likes, personal details, and photos — until now it hasn't been able to index what you or your friends wrote in comments or status update. But Facebook is now starting to roll out an update that will allow users to search for anything that's been written about, so long as it's currently shared with them. The feature will begin appearing for some users later today, though in true Facebook fashion, it'll be a slow rollout from there.

Search for any comment that's been shared with you

The new searches should work just like existing Graph Searches, allowing users to narrow down their results by adding in people, places, timeframes, and other details that have to match up. While before you could search for friends living in your home state who like Breaking Bad, now you'll be able to find out which of those friends are also writing about Breaking Bad, or even the friends who also tagged their post with "#heisenberg."

Facebook finished rolling out the initial version of Graph Search to all US users over the summer, after initially announcing the feature back in January. The company promised back then that more complex search features — like today's comments and status updates — were on their way, but didn't give a more specific timeline than "the coming months." Other search options like what music your friends have been listening to should still be on the way, though Facebook hasn't mentioned them again just yet.