Current in Social

Is TikTok really an elaborate façade for Chinese spyware?

Is TikTok really an elaborate façade for Chinese spyware?

Cyber-experts are claiming that 2020’s number one app is a shady front for Chinese spyware and mass censorship.  Suggestions that ByteDance’s ‘innocuous’ short-bite video app TikTok has all the makings of a totalitarian plot hatched by the Chinese government are looking more plausible by the day. Suffice to say, people are freaked. Months of bad...

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Gen Z are mocking millennials online

Gen Z are mocking millennials online

If you’re over 25 and you’ve been using the phrase ‘OK boomer’ online, you’re about to have a reality check. The generational wars have truly begun, people. No longer are we simply aiming our tweets at dismissive and judgemental boomers, we’re now attacking each other in what can only be...

BLM protesters weaponising memes against police

BLM protesters weaponising memes against police

The weaponisation of memes is nothing new, but taking on anti-racism has to be its biggest and most significant engagement to date.  Digital natives Gen Z are constantly shifting the parameters of political demonstration and discourse to include online spaces. Now a part of our everyday vernacular, memes are used to make light of serious subjects, to highlight hypocrisies or irony within current affairs, and generally to cause a bit of...

By London, UK
Online dating during lockdown- can love thrive while we’re apart?

Online dating during lockdown- can love thrive while we’re apart?

Lockdown has accelerated the transition of online dating apps to purely online hangout spaces. Should this trend continue beyond quarantine? If modern communication falls broadly into two categories – the online and the offline – then where do we place online dating? Pre-COVID, it occupied some strange liminal place between the two, with the majority of conversations never traversing the digital despite the fact that this was, for most people,...

By London, UK
The apps empowering BLM protesters right now

The apps empowering BLM protesters right now

Police brutality is the enemy, racial equality is the goal, and technology is becoming the vehicle for change.  Many of you won’t be old enough to recall this with much clarity, but I remember the 2011 London Riots like they happened yesterday. A 29-year-old black man named Mark Duggan was shot dead after the Metropolitan Police followed up on ‘intelligence’ that he was seeking to distribute controlled drugs and firearms....

By London, UK