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German companies are currently desperate to find more workers. That could all be about to change, if the results of a new survey are to be believed.

A study by the IT association Bitkom seen by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Friday, projects that 3.4 million jobs in Germany will become redundant in the next five years, as robots and algorithms take over the work of humans.

Given the fact that there are currently around 33 million people in regular employment in Germany, that figure amounts to roughly every tenth job in the country.

The survey by Bitkom among 500 companies with more than 20 employees across a wide range of sectors also shows that every fourth firm sees its existence as threatened by digitalization.

Bitkom director Achim Berg criticized the German government for paying far too little attention to digitalization and its impact on Germany's future.

"During the World Economic Forum in Davos almost every event had something to do with artificial intelligence. In Berlin I've heard far too little about this," he said.

Bitkom drew particular attention to the communications technology sector which had 200,000 employees in the 1990s but only has around 20,000 now.

"In only 15 years we have lost 90 percent of jobs in this sector - due to digitalization," said Berg.

He warned that banks and insurance companies could be next to feel the brunt of the digital revolution, adding that Germany should experiment with an unconditional basic income. "We need to try it and see if it works," Berg said.

But the findings are likely to prove highly controversial.

Researchers at the Mannheim Research Institute claim that digitalization has created more, not less jobs. They claim that computers will take over specific functions rather than complete jobs and also argue that the increased profitability of companies through digitalization will allow them to take on more personnel.

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Digitalization will destroy every tenth German job within five years: survey

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German companies are currently desperate to find more workers. That could all be about to change, if the results of a new survey are to be believed. A study by the IT association Bitkom seen by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Friday, projects that 3.4 million jobs in Germany will become redundant in the next five years, as robots and algorithms take over the work of humans.

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Virtual reality prepares business students for digital leadership - Financial Times
Financial TimesVirtual reality prepares business students for digital leadershipFinancial TimesAt ESMT Berlin business school, executives from some of Germany's biggest companies are locked in a room, then observed as they try to escape. The room is not real but digitally created. The executives are playing a 45-minute virtual reality game used ...
Virtual reality prepares business students for digital leadership - Financial Times

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Virtual reality prepares business students for digital leadership - Financial Times

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Virtual reality prepares business students for digital leadership - Financial Times Financial TimesVirtual reality prepares business students for digital leadershipFinancial TimesAt ESMT Berlin business school, executives from some of Germany's biggest companies are locked in a room, then observed as they try to escape. The room is not real but digitally created.

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Wonderful book about which aspects of real social life can be found in World of Warcraft as virtual alternative to the real world.

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Exploring World of Warcraft as both cultural phenomenon and game, with contributions by writers and researchers who have immersed themselves in the WoW gameworld.

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Problem of privacy in the modern world is pretty specific thing. This scandal can be the reason for reflection on it among community, I think.

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Problem of privacy in the modern world is pretty specific thing. This scandal can be the reason for reflection on it among community, I think.

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Some Facebook users have found that the company stored message and call logs.

The company said it had permission to collection the information.

It looks like it's due to an old version of the Android mobile operating system being unclear about what data was being handed over.

This privacy scandal comes as Facebook is trying to rebuild trust after the Cambridge Analytica story.

Facebook has yet another privacy scandal on its hands, its second in two weeks.

This time, the company is being criticised for storing logs of message and calls of some of its users who signed into Facebook using its Android apps.

Several Facebook users who requested an archive of their personal data following the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal found something concerning in their files: Facebook had stored months' worth of data about who they had been text messaging and calling.

To be clear: Facebook didn't have the text messages or recordings of phone calls. But it stored records of who some people texted, and when, as well as which phone numbers they called, when, and for how long.

Facebook rushed to try to stop the story getting out of control. It published a "fact check" on its blog in which it denied that it had done anything without users' permission.

It looks like the party at fault here isn't Facebook directly, but instead the Android operating system. Ars Technica points out that older versions of Android allowed apps to gain access to call and message logs when users actually just gave permission to read contacts.

It seems that all Facebook knew was that its users had given permission to share call and text logs with it. But users may never have explicitly chosen to do that.

Most people aren't going to research the story enough to learn about deprecated Android versions and app permissions, though. Instead, they're just going to see this as yet another Facebook privacy scandal.

Headlines matter for Facebook right now

Macquarie Research analysts said in a note published after the Cambridge Analytica scandal that "headlines matter" for Facebook.

"In this case, headlines matter very much for the stock," the analysts said in a note published on March 19. "While there will be plenty of journalists and others who can parse exactly what happened regarding this most recent issue involving Cambridge Analytica in terms of number of accounts and whether this was a 'data breach' or not, the details matter very little when looking at this through the narrow lens of an equity analyst. What matters for this stock, at this time, are the headlines."

Even if someone doesn't closely follow technology news, they'll have been aware of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and now Facebook has another set of negative headlines such as " Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones." It's not a good look.

The timing of this Android story is particularly painful for Facebook. It comes as the company is trying to restore public trust following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even wrote a message to users and paid for it to be published in full-page newspaper ads in the US and UK.

Facebook's skeletons are tumbling out of the closet

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
The timing of the two stories gives the impression that Facebook is currently dealing with a privacy scandal. It is - but the issues aren't new. Instead, they're historic problems that the company didn't properly deal with at the time.

Facebook knew about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2015, when a Guardian journalist revealed that the research firm had harvested data on millions of Facebook users. Facebook had already changed its app settings to stop people handing over their friends' data, but it didn't ban Cambridge Analytica and continued to allow the company to operate on its platform.

And the new Android issue was due to a version of the Android operating system that allowed Facebook to gain message and call logs between 2015 and 2017. Again, it's an old issue for Facebook that isn't ongoing, but a lack of transparency and decisive action at the time has come back to hurt the firm.

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Facebook's new privacy scandal has come at the worst possible time for the company

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Some Facebook users have found that the company stored message and call logs. The company said it had permission to collection the information. It looks like it's due to an old version of the Android mobile operating system being unclear about what data was being handed over.

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A book that demonstrates wonderful results in ethnographical analysis of videogames. 

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A book that demonstrates wonderful results in ethnographical analysis of videogames. 

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My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft

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About the Book World of Warcraft is currently the most popular online world game on the planet, with more than 12 million subscribers-officially making it an online community of gamers that has more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and [...]

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It is interesting, how need for possibility for everyone to access any type of information in digital world faces problems this information usage. 

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It is interesting, how need for possibility for everyone to access any type of information in digital world faces problems this information usage. 

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Young people who commit violence offences should be banned from using social media such as YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram, according to the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime.

Speaking before the launch of the government's new serious violence strategy, the MP Sarah Jones urged the extension of criminal behaviour orders (CBOs) to give courts the power to ban individuals from using social media.

Senior officers are concerned that online content on YouTube and other sites is helping fuel the current knife crime and gun epidemic - last month was the bloodiest in London for nearly a decade. Yet tech companies are refusing to remove some content despite requests from the police.

On Sunday the Home Office will move to tighten up other online loopholes by announcing tough restrictions on knives bought through the internet. The new offensive weapons bill, which will be published within weeks, aims to prevent knives that are bought online being sent to residential addresses, as well as making it illegal to possess certain offensive weapons, such as "zombie" knives and knuckledusters.

The home secretary, Amber Rudd, will tomorrow unveil the serious violence strategy to combat a rising toll that includes more than 50 people murdered in London so far this year. It will place renewed emphasis on early intervention and prevention, along with increased support for community groups working with young people, a package of measures that confirm the Home Office's acceptance that the killings cannot be halted through increased convictions and tougher sentencing.

"It's about stopping people before they become involved in gangs, before they pick up a knife, and if they have become involved in such activity, stopping them before they get any further," said a Home Office source.

The strategy also contains measures to tackle so-called "county lines" drug trading, where urban gangs force children as young as 12 to traffic drugs in suburban or rural areas using dedicated mobile phones, along with fresh demands for social media companies to take action against video sites that glorify violence.

Jones hopes that the Home Office will back the broader use of CBOs, which replaced Asbos in 2014, and revealed that Rudd had described their potential effectiveness in tackling youth violence as "compelling".

"We know the causes of knife crime and violence are multiple, but one factor impacting the scale of the problem is social media, because it is fuelling a cycle of violence," Jones said.

Meanwhile, a number of senior parliamentary figures are calling on Rudd to incorporate an "ambitious target" to halve deaths from serious youth violence over the next decade as part of her strategy. A letter, signed by 11 chairs and commissioners from cross-party campaign groups, and David Blunkett, the former home secretary, urges the government to "put children and young people at [the] heart" of the strategy and treat the epidemic of violence as a "public health" issue.

It states: "Knife crime is an epidemic, spreading through our communities and we know that violence breeds violence.

"A truly new and multi-agency approach will recognise this as a public health crisis, tackling the problem at source while immunising future generations against violence."

More immediate actions were evident on Saturday with an extra 300 Metropolitan Police officers deployed in the areas of London worst affected by a spate of violent crime.

Sunday's Home Office announcement of new legislation also includes measures to make prosecutions easier by changing the legal definition for threatening someone with an offensive weapon and banning the possession of a knife on a further education premises, following data that shows knife-carrying in schools has soared by 42% over the last two years.
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Violent youths 'should face social media ban'

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Young people who commit violence offences should be banned from using social media such as YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram, according to the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on knife crime. Speaking before the launch of the government's new serious violence strategy, the MP Sarah Jones urged the extension of criminal behaviour orders (CBOs) to give courts the power to ban individuals from using social media.

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Community in digital culture can be connected with different explanations. And the main problem in defining it can be understood as finding balance between criticizing and praising new opportunities that appeared in digital age.

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Mark Zuckerberg delivers the opening keynote at the Facebook f8 conference on April 30, 2014 in San Francisco. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

When Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook, he constantly uses the word "community" to describe the internet platform. In his 2017 manifesto, Zuckerberg famously argued "Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community." Indeed, "Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community." In his testimony before Congress this week, he again used the term several times. "My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together," he told the Senate.

The notion of this community of more than 2 billion users worldwide, and over 200 million in the United States, seems core to Zuckerberg's conception of the platform, and perhaps his own identity. But is Facebook a community? And if it is, on what terms?

Surprisingly, Zuckerberg is rarely confronted with this question- and the Senators did not put it to him on Tuesday. "As far as I can tell, not once in his apology tour was Zuckerberg asked what on earth he means when he refers to Facebook's 2 billion-plus users as 'a community' or 'the Facebook community,'" academic Zeynep Tufekci.

To get to the bottom of it, I asked several notable Facebook observers to respond to this question. Here's what they said:
SANDY PARAKILAS is an advisor to the Center for Humane Technology and a former Facebook employee:

Facebook has a community of users, but unfortunately the company has not always treated those users with the respect a community deserves. For example, a lack of transparency about Russian interference in the 2016 election and a failure to adequately handle the Cambridge Analytica issue when it was first discovered both show a lack of respect by Facebook for its users.

"The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good." wrote Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth in an internal post from 2016 that recently . "That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools."

JOSE MARICHAL is professor of political science at California Lutheran University and author of Facebook Democracy from Routledge Press:
ROGER MCNAMEE is managing director founding partner at KAREN KORNBLUH Executive Vice President of External Affairs at Nielsen MAYA WILEY Professor of Urban Policy JOAN DONOVAN is the Media Manipulation and Platform Accountability Research Lead at JONATHAN ZITTRAIN, Professor of international law and of computer science at Harvard, a co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the author of MELISSA RYAN is a visiting fellow at Media Matters for America , chronicle the rise of the alt-right via her newsletter, Ctrl Alt-Right Delete , and in 2017 launched the Factual Democracy Project , an organization pioneering a multi-disciplinary response to the extreme right coalition and the weaponization of the Internet: The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It Data & Society Research Institute and Management at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School, and she is co-founder of the Digital Equity Lab and Senior Fellow for Digital Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations: Elevation Partners and an early investor in Facebook:

No. And no. Further, it is problematic and dangerous to think that it can be. What FB gives us is the feel of community, what one might call a "synthetic community." A synthetic community isn't necessarily bad (it's better than no community), but it is not a substitute for the real thing. A Facebook community, by itself, is stripped of the relational elements that make community real. A Facebook like cannot substitute for the personal effort required to take dinner over to a sick friend. That requires the physical act of cooking a meal, driving over to the house, engaging in what might be banal chit chat, etc. Facebook's synthetic community has elements of connection through disclosure typical of real intimate relationships, but it lacks the unmanageable contingency of being "in relation" to those in your "real" community.

Lived community requires physical space. For community to have any significance, it must have spatial and temporal boundaries. It can be a diaspora separated by distance, but it must be identifiable and partly practiced in place and, more importantly there must be a zone where "the community" is absent: where one can go to "get away" from their community. With the ubiquity of mobile communication, that space of "no community" has been eliminated. Take the instance of someone on vacation who feels compelled to create selfies to post online. Theorist like Nathan Jurgenson who question the utility of a "digital divide" are right to point out that perhaps we are never "offline." What that means for community is never having the true space away from the community to reflect upon its health and bring useful ideas back into it too. A permanent state of synthetic ambient community where you are never "not in community" but never fully "in community" leaves one fraught with doubt, about the true fealty of one's friends or about the fundamental legitimacy of one's adversaries.

Facebook cannot replace lived community. Relationships are intersubjective, personal, subject to contestation, serendipitous and uncomfortable at times. Individual relationships are built on mutual trust and shared experience-they require gestures: physical sacrifices, emotional engagements, extended attention. The greatest damage that Facebook has done to democracy is to give the impression that the rewards of community can be gained without the hard work of being "in relation" to one another. It is the "factory farming" of community building and it has produced similar effects.

The incentives of the advertising business model cause Facebook to promote psychological addiction and appeals to lizard brain emotions like fear and anger, both of which make users vulnerable to manipulation and make Facebook a suboptimal platform for community.

When Facebook talks about community standards, the focus never seems to be on the needs of users. Instead, the focus is on pleasing whichever governmental agencies might otherwise impede the company's growth. One consequence is that Facebook has become an attractive platform for authoritarians looking to suppress opposition.

We build communities beyond our family, neighborhood, or place of worship through norms, codes, laws, standards, institutions, shared experience - that build empathy and trust. It is the tragedy of America that mainstream white America still red-lines African Americans out of full membership in the American community.

This and other strains in the American social fabric were present before social media, but it has added to the strain - by, for instance, treating the news organizations that follow established professional codes the same as purveyors of conspiracy theories or allowing special interests to hide their sponsorship of ads and to use individual data to micro-target voters. Now the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the 2016 elections have undermined trust in Facebook itself.

If Facebook wants to build more and better communities it needs to work with others to build the necessary trust systems - and to repair the damage done to existing trust.

I live in a neighborhood that is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse in the country. It's economically mixed too. Haitian, Salvadoran, Pakistani, Jewish and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. That's only a smattering if the incomplete, but impressive collection of peoples from around the globe. Is it a "community?" Simply because it exists?

There is some meaningful interaction in my neighborhood across that diversity, but only some. Language, religion, class and even world views can create invisible walls that make meaningful relationships and interaction very difficult.

In 2008, I was moving from Montreal to San Diego. At my going away party, friends asked that I join Facebook for fear that the 3000 mile distance would mean we'd lose all touch all together. So, I signed up for Facebook under an alter-ego, thinking I'd use it to kept in touch with those I already know. My first FB friend is now my wife and my current BFF was also my first FB comment way back then.

In 2011, my blackberry and I bloomed as power-users across multiple platforms. Being very active in the Occupy Movement, I was an administrator on a number of Facebook pages, while also operating a set of Twitter accounts, Tumblr blogs, LiveStreams, and IRC chats. Since then, I've kept a personal relationship with these communication technologies and nurtured a political one by making social media content for movements. Collectively, movements practiced both social networking and social media simultaneously. Yet, these are different modes of participation entirely. While social media requires social networks, social networks do not need social media.

By participating in and researching social movements, I am more familiar than most with the pros and cons of using social networking to create communities. I watched as changes to Facebook decimated movements' communication by making it more difficult to see groups, events, and pages in the newsfeed, served advertising over friends' posts, and did not heed recommendations about user privacy. Pages and groups I relied on for comfort and calls to action during crises have devolved into dens of conspiracy or clickbait. The paranoia that pervaded movements in the wake of the Snowden leaks has given way to a suspicion of every platform that preferences profit over privacy, ignores harassment in favor of abstract commitments to speech, and does not take responsibility for the power it commands.

While the move from social networking to social media was a quiet one for Facebook, it did much to change how communities communicate. Becoming social media was not simply a change in style of interacting, but also in scale and kinds of possible connections. Now, I can be just as connected to news outlets, entertainers, and celebrities as I am to my wife and best friend. In that shift, much about what we imagined social networking could do to strengthen community ties was lost to market forces, pay to play metrics, and a sea of disinformation.

And still, I am not hopeful that the return to personal connections, or what we used to call social networks, will support the global villages we once envisioned. Our data doubles have been mapped, traced, mirrored, and sold; marketing community as a cheap commodity. However, I do believe that free communication is a fundamental human right and these tools are powerful agents of social change. It is our collective responsibility to remake them. DefendOurMovements.org is a response to the present condition.

What should be understood for full context for Mark Zuckerberg's use of the word is that he has in the past genuinely sought to think of Facebook users as a polity, and therefore a kind of community. He built a model where Facebook users would vote on major platform governance changes - and abandoned it perhaps because a quorum (requiring millions of users!) could not be achieved, and no doubt because others were telling him that he might regret devolving power that way. I wouldn't put it past Mark to try this again. So he might resolve the dissonance between the word "community" and the reality of Facebook by changing the reality rather than abandoning the word.

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Is Facebook a Community? Digital Experts Weigh In

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Mark Zuckerberg delivers the opening keynote at the Facebook f8 conference on April 30, 2014 in San Francisco. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) When Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook, he constantly uses the word "community" to describe the internet platform.