Procrastinator (some) Times Sunday 3rd of November Edition

EDITORIAL

It's already November... again. I know it's not only me who thinks (or feels) time is accelerating, and I also know it's not only me the one that cannot stop talking about it every time the month begins. I am working on this. I promise I won't mention December starting when December starts.

This edition of The Procrastinator is a compact but dense one. It includes articles about dictators in the Instagram era, sexist stereotypes in the era of hackers, the future of television in the era of Internet-based innovation, relationships in the era of Facebook and funerals in the era of Tumblr. We also have the second article of Andreína's Photoautomat, featuring the work of Irving Penn.

Hope you like this week's edition, happy reading!


NEWS

Photo via SyrianPresidency Instagram account

Did you know that Bashar al-Assad has an Instagram account? I didn't. I discover that thanks to this great article by Emily Greenhouse in The New Yorker called Dictators in the Age of Instagram. Social media, says Greenhouse, poses a problem for restrictive regimes, judging by the measures and laws imposed by countries like China, Belarus, Iran, China, and others. But that is not the only issue. "What does a social-media company do when a user known to be attacking civilians is blasting out feel-good content?" Greenhouse posed that question to Instagram about Assad’s user stream. If you want to know the answer, read full article in The New Yorker.

"We've hacked so many other spaces in our lives -- how we date, have babies -- and yet this space, gender objectification, remains stagnant." That's part of the lecture that actor and writer Natascha McElhone gave at Wired 2013. According to Wire's article, McElhone's feelings are shared by many of the women that make up 66 percent of our world's population, sexism is the norm, yes, but the good news is that lately we've been changing a lot of rules. Read full article in Wired and let's hack some gender stereotypes!