iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Josh Braun

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Pithier point 1: I am not worried about students cheating; rather, I am worried about what students are getting cheated out of.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

2028: Inspired by the TI-85 era, higher ed announces it will certify offline-only typing tools for classwork and exams. 2029: Tech firms compete to design tools and sign contracts that will corner the market. 2030: The future of education technology arrives:

Image of a Radio Shack TRS-80 word processing device from 1977.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

A predictive timeline of AI in higher education: 2026: Professors move writing assignments to handwritten in-class exercises to avoid dealing with AI plagiarism. 2027: Professors complain they can no longer grade in-class exercises because the art of handwriting is in such decline. 1/2

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Now presenting my poster for #aejmc26. Feel free to stop by or say hello later if it catches your interest!

Center and Periphery — Media Distribution and the Tension Between Local and Centralized Production (Conference poster by Josh Braun)

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

It explains why they’re questing after ridiculous scale, but also why it may be a pipe dream and/or a strategy that forecloses more sustainable options.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I found @karenhao.bsky.social’s “Empire of AI” extremely helpful on this front.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Good morning, #commsky! Headed to #aejmc26. Hoping to see many of you there.

Sunrise out the gallery windows of Bradley International Airport in New England. A line of planes appears in the foreground.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Ed Wynn passed 60 years ago today. His epitaph is a vibe.

Gold placard mounted on Ed Wynn's grave. It displays the dates of his birth (Nov 9 1886) and death (June 19 1966) and is formatted to look like a letter bearing his signature and it reads:

> DEAR GOD:
> THANKS…
> (signed) Ed Wynn

Above and below are the nameplates for other deceased members of his family.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

IKR? The mail merge database has failed, but the auto-sender keeps on keeping on.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Journal spammers really putting their back into it. (Volume II) #academicSky

Screenshot from a spam email reading:

>Dear Dr. Joshua Braun,
>Greetings from Journal
>
> I hope this message finds you well.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

So, the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal…was an ad.

The same issue of the Wall Street Journal with the top page turned to reveal the newspaper's ordinary front page beneath.

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Reposted by Josh Braun

Ethan Plaut @ethanplaut.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

so preoccupied with whether or not they could

Bags of Cheerios branded granola in honey nut and chocolate flavours

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Reposted by Josh Braun

Alex Goldman @agoldman.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Hi, my name is Alex Goldman and I host the @hyperfixedpod.bsky.social I used to host the Reply All podcast, and I have found that so many people who liked Reply All have no idea Hyperfixed exists. It's super frustrating because I have no idea how to reach those people.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

I’m just really glad I could help you connect with folks who have a greater sense of agency over all this than I do. I love hearing that we can fix this—find the perpetrators, regulate the space effectively. I may not personally feel that way, but God I wanna believe.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

I was always excited to see what @agoldman.bsky.social's next big project would be, but never dreamed I'd find out about his new podcast by being interviewed for it. Really impressed with Hyperfixed, glad to have spoken with them, and thankful for their attention to this really pernicious problem.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

This old painting by Bob Eggleton came to mind involuntarily.

Painting by Bob Eggleton of astronauts on the moon watching as a nuclear war unfolds on earth.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Watching all four #Artemis II astronauts don their spacesuits simultaneously reminds me of the changing room scene from “The Cameraman.” 😂 youtu.be/4Tv8rG-3oq8

youtu.be

Buster Keaton The cameraman 1928 Trying To Change in Dressing Room

YouTube video by Classics

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Fellow space nerd. 🖖 Did you catch the part the next day where they were talking for an extended time with Houston, sans context, about getting straws for the urine bags and a supply of syringes? I was relieved when it turned out they were just repurposing stuff to stow a back up supply of water.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

I’d be morbidly fascinated to see a few scenes from old Buster Keaton films upscaled and brought to a higher frame rate. But mostly to appreciate his acrobatics. I wouldn’t consider it restoration and I wouldn’t want such things considered canonical in any way.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Wait, isn’t this from “Bringing Out the Dead?”

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Reposted by Josh Braun

Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

I mean I'm glad that I'm helping educate young people on TikTok and all that but also my 72 year old father just told me that he told all of his friends that he meets weekly at Waffle House in south Georgia to watch my Facebook videos about how large language models work.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Sorry, lame attempt at a nerdy joke. Maybe you got it and it was just too bad to laugh. But if not: They’re both highly regarded independent documentary filmmakers…who would not actually be making this show.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Is that the season directed by Ross McElwee or the one by Chris Hegedus? 😂

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Cc @oddletters.bsky.social ‘“CEO said a thing!” journalism’ sounds like something of your coinage. lol

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

At this point, I have neither the skills nor the time to learn them. But the idea is free for the taking. 😀

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

When I was younger, I always thought it'd be a blast to make an animated interview with the stick figure guy in the style of "Inside the Actor's Studio," using the most hilarious and confusing of these signs as B-roll.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Which is, you know, bad news for the significant number of people now treating chatbots as therapists or leaning on them for emotional support. 9/9

psychologytoday.com

10 Things to Know Before Using AI Chatbots for Therapy

Here are 10 important things to know before you use an AI chatbot as your therapist.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

And, now that advertising is in the mix, the incentive is going to be to reduce our mental landscape to a whether we're in a buying mood or not (insert your own "retail therapy" pun here), so as to identify—or create—optimal moments to insert ads. 8/9

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Rather, their version of parsing feelings is mostly going to revolve around reducing our complex emotional state to whether we're engaged enough to keep paying a subscription or visiting the client's website. 7/9

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Blunt approximations are also less costly, so in some senses more attractive to businesses. McStay says, similarly, the designers of AI that's tuned to our emotions are unlikely to be ultimately worried about our true emotional state in the way a psychologist might be when they try to help us. 6/9

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

To throw in another relevant example, algorithms that show us ads don't have to capture our true intent in viewing webpages or clicking links to be valuable to brands—they just have to be right enough, often enough to improve on untargeted campaigns. Blunt approximations are commercially viable. 5/9

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

The catch is, much as Google Search is not a library, but ultimately a commercial product that serves us results based in no small part on either Google's interests or those of the companies paying for SEO, in the long run AI algorithms are likely also going to be attuned to business interests. 4/9

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

A classic Google Search lets you type "cameras" without any modifiers and intuits, through context and machine learning, whether you likely meant "how cameras work," "where to buy a camera," "camera reviews," etc. But with AI tools resolving ambiguity will also involve reading our tone. 3/9

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

I'm paraphrasing here, but the essence of McStay's argument is that AI interfaces are going to be increasingly designed to interpret our emotions and states of mind in order to give us the information for which we're looking. 2/9

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

Ever since Google and OpenAI announced the introduction of ads to their AI products, I can't stop thinking about an argument from @andrew-mcstay.bsky.social's 2018 book, "Emotional AI." 1/9

us.sagepub.com

Emotional AI

The Rise of Empathic Media

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

I know the feeling with other classes. Will send how along the syllabus when I’ve finished it. And in the meantime, I’ll think whether there’s anything that stands out that’s worth a standalone recommendation.

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

I mean, I'm not mystified. I get the structural reasons *why* the topic was ignored until there was a crisis to cover—hence my teaching the class. Still, there's a real Big Yellow Taxi vibe to all this. 2/2

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Updating my media criticism class for a new academic year and it's astonishing to me the night-and-day contrast between the number of accessible explainers on the finances and workings of US public media available before and after the US defunded it all. 1/2

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Reposted by Josh Braun

Adam Gurri @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com · 23/01/2026

There is a long list of things the administration has taken down or replaced. Some are like this, in public places. Others are displays within agency office buildings. I would really like someone to write something for us that tallies up as many of these examples as is possible to get info on

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Josh Braun @joshbraun.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

I know the feeling! Also, courses tied in varying degrees to the news cycle that require constant overhauling.

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