Why'd You Push That Button?
The Verge
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Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Why'd You Push That Button? episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Why'd You Push That Button? for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Why'd You Push That Button? episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Why do you hold on to text threads?
Why'd You Push That Button?
12/12/17 • 38 min
This week on Why’d You Push That Button, we’ve been hypnotized by the romance of New York in December and we’re acting accordingly! Twinkle lights, snow banks, and love letters. I recommend listening with a cup of hot chocolate or a bucket of that popcorn that has the little paper dividers between the three flavors. Get cozy; hold hands.
The big question: how do you decide to delete or save text threads from friends, family, or significant others? If you have 3GB of texts from an ex, you’re never actually going to scroll back to the beginning, so why can it feel so hard to let go? If you have absolutely no old texts on your phone, what is wrong with you, just wondering?
This episode was inspired by Maureen O’Connor’s 2013 New York Magazine essay “All My Exes Live in Texts,” which I am obsessed with, and in which she argues that we struggle to let go of old relationships' digital artifacts because they represent “a dozen soap operas playing at the same time on a dozen different screens, and you are the star of them all.” Wow! A little cynical, but at least 100 percent true if you’re being honest with yourself.
To get some alternative angles on this topic, we spoke to freelance writer and former Racked shopping and style editor Nicola Fumo, who has a complicated system for saving and curating the messages she cares about. (This system was inspired by the one, the onlyKim Kardashian West.) Then we called up my college boyfriend Sean, and the two of us had a weird little moment that was ultimately fine. He also explained how deleting texts makes for stilted friendships and missed plans.
Finally, we took all of our questions to Michelle Janning, a professor of sociology at Whitman College who’s dedicated her career to studying the differences between digital and physical communication, with a particular focus on how we decide what to save, how to save it, and when to look back at it. Her book, Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age,will be out sometime in 2018. She had so much wisdom to share and we couldn’t believe she was real.
(sent via text by Kaitlyn Tiffany)
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Does tech encourage ghosting?
Why'd You Push That Button?
03/12/18 • 52 min
Kaitlyn and I went to Texas, ate breakfast tacos, each gained five pounds of happy weight, and more or less became certified brands. We had a good time together. We also successfully pulled off our first live episode of Why’d You Push That Button.
We tried to figure out why people ghost and ended up learning that humans are lazy and need a manager-type hanging over their heads to keep them accountable at all times. Still, I’d like to think this is just a rough patch in our collective dating experience, so hopefully ghosting will clear itself up after we’re all sufficiently hurt enough to want to stop the cycle.
(sent via text by Ashley Carman)
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Who owns a meme?
Why'd You Push That Button?
03/06/18 • 37 min
Our first episode of season 2 is about memes and the law, which sounds both boring and scary and is neither. First, we chatted with Vox Media’s Sara Reinis, who told us an unsettling story about her first viral tweet. In short: Her life was turned a little upside down because she made a meme using a photo of some birds, and did not realize the birds were someone’s family. Fair enough, Sara, but maybe all of our listeners will learn from your mistakes!
Then we talked to Drew Scanlon, best known as the “white guy blinking meme.” He told us all about how his life has changed since his eyelids became the most famous ones on the whole internet. Honestly, it doesn’t sound that bad! But I would probably have less patience with my friends and acquaintances than Drew does. He says it doesn’t even bother him when they introduce him to people as “the blinking guy.”
Finally, we talked to Tim Hwang about all the legal issues buzzing around these stories. He’s a lawyer, as well as the founder of the meme convention ROFLCon, and the director of Harvard and MIT’s Ethics and Governance of AI initiative. You can listen and read the transcript below, or find us anywhere else you find podcasts, including on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, and our RSS feed. And get caught up on season 1 if you’re late to the party.
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Why do you turn on read receipts?
Why'd You Push That Button?
10/24/17 • 23 min
Here it is! The second episode of a new Verge podcast called Why’d You Push That Button. On this show, my colleague, Circuit Breaker’s Ashley Carman, and me, the Culture section’s most self-indulgent blogger, talk about all the tiny decisions your gadgets and apps force you to make every day. All day, every day, we’re pushing buttons and thinking about the intended or unintended consequences. We’re interviewing consumers — including friends, co-workers, loved ones, and some strangers — and then we’re talking to product designers and experts who built the tech or have studied it professionally.
Last week, we started things off with Tinder’s Super Like feature. This week, we’re talking about read receipts — the timestamp that’s optional in iMessage and mandatory in Facebook Messenger, that lets anyone who’s trying to correspond with you know exactly when you saw their words and chose not to respond.
Why do you leave them on? Why do you turn them off? Why must you insist on subtly manipulating every person in your life? We heard from our friends who have made these choices, and then we took their responses to Lujayn Alhddad, who studied human-computer interaction while obtaining her master's degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She wrote a paper on this exact topic, and she knows what’s up.
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Why do you delete your tweets?
Why'd You Push That Button?
10/17/18 • 52 min
Why’d You Push That Button is back for season 3, and our first episode is a relatively serious one. Vox’s Kaitlyn Tiffany and I catch up on our summers and then dive into everyone’s favorite social media platform: Twitter. We need to discuss tweets. Are they worth deleting, or should we preserve our limited-character history? Who needs to worry about their tweets? What happens if a potential employer searches your Twitter? What will they find?
Kaitlyn and Ashley reflect on their tweet history, and we take it to other users and experts. First, they talk to Max Read, an editor at New York Magazine , and then they chat with Brianna Wu, a woman who ran for Congress this year and was previously a target of Gamergate. Then they talk to Alison Green of the Ask A Manager website / book / podcast universe. (She is Ask A Manager!) And they wrap the show chatting with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, which attempts to archive the web. It’s true: you could think you deleted a tweet only to discover someone else on the internet has already saved it for you. A truly spooky possibility in the spirit of Halloween.
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How do you send nudes?
Why'd You Push That Button?
12/05/17 • 34 min
This week on Why'd You Push That Button?, we're talking about sending nudes. Sending a naked photo of yourself doesn't need to be complicated, but with hundreds of thousands of messaging apps to choose from, deciding how to send that nude can require some thought. Do you take to Snapchat, iMessage, or Instagram DMs? What about sending them through your dating app?
We talked to two people about how they make sense of this messaging app utopia. An anonymous man named Frank primarily uses gay dating apps like Grindr and Scruff to send his nudes because they feature built-in camera functions, while our other interviewee, Eden Rohatensky, chooses their platform based off the recipient of the message. Someone new might get a nude through Snapchat, whereas their friends might receive them in iMessage. Eden also tells us how they send nudes platonically with friends in an effort to build body positivity, which is fantastic. They wrote a Medium post about this exact thing earlier this year.
We then take all our messaging thoughts to Eric Silverberg, CEO and co-founder of gay dating app Scruff. He explains why he built a camera function into the app and how he thinks the feature will eventually trickle down into straight apps. Scruff tells us that more than a million photos and videos are sent over chat daily.
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Do you take selfies in public?
Why'd You Push That Button?
03/20/18 • 30 min
Do you take selfies? Do you take them in public? Do you watch other people take selfies in public and judge them harshly, as if it is any of your business?
Or, uh, why does anyone have an opinion on the selfie behaviors of others? I don’t take them; Ashley does. Who cares?
This is our question on Why’d You Push That Button this week — with a long detour to defend Kim Kardashian, the tryingest social media pioneer and performance artist of our time — and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. We spoke to Alicia Eler, author of the brand-new book The Selfie Generation, and she broke down the subtle misogyny of maligning young women for making their own records of their lives. We discussed the Super Bowl “selfie kid” and those very annoying sports announcers from 2015.
Then we chatted with Racked executive editor Julia Rubin, who does not allow anyone to take photos of her at any time — never mind taking them of herself. Selfies are embarrassing, she says! As a fashion editor, Julia has had other jobs that required her to maintain a meticulous and glamorous Instagram, and that’s just not the life she wants to live anymore.
Finally, we spoke to Dr. Sarah Diefenbach, a professor of market and consumer psychology at the University of Munich. Earlier this year, she co-published a paper called “The Selfie Paradox: Nobody Seems to Like Them Yet Everyone Has Reasons to Take Them.” There’s a lot of gold in there, but we were fascinated by her finding that people who take selfies are likely to justify it to themselves as a “situational” decision — e.g. “I’m at the opening of Jake Gyllenhaal’s first Broadway musical, I need a photo of me having this incredible experience, even though I don’t normally take selfies,” or “I’m having a special, unique drunk night with a dear friend and I look good and I need to document it just this once.” When they see other people take selfies, they assume the reason behind it is that the person is a selfie-taker, by nature. This is called the fundamental attribution error, and I vaguely recall learning about it in one of the many “communication” classes I slept or read Jezebel through in college.
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Why do you share streaming service passwords?
Why'd You Push That Button?
11/07/17 • 22 min
This week on Why’d You Push That Button, we’re talking about a series of buttons. Specifically, the buttons on your keyboard that you have to use to type out the password to your Netflix, Hulu, or HBOGo account and send them to another person.
Do you do that? Do you ever regret it? Do you have to boot ex-boyfriends who keep watching half of the new episode of Game of Thrones before you can get to it, spoiling the latest dragon spectacle? Has your password gotten away from you, whispered down the telephone line until it was in the hands of complete strangers? Are you a password giver or taker, and what does that say about you? Does... anyone actually pay for Netflix?
First we talked to Ashley’s friend from college, MarketWatch personal finance reporter Kari Paul, who shared her password with a romantic partner and learned a hard lesson about trusting boys with any sort of secret. Then we heard from our friend and collaborator, The Verge’s audio engineer Andrew Marino, who has a pretty unique system set up so that he can share passwords in a relationship and avoid most of the unfortunate consequences. Finally we took our questions to an expert: Amber Steel, the product marketing manager for the password management app LastPass. She tried and failed to convince me that I need to download LastPass, but she also gave us some valuable insight into how streaming service passwords have become a fraught and fascinating issue for her company.
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Why do you like celebrity photos on Instagram?
Why'd You Push That Button?
10/31/17 • 27 min
We aren't stopping here at Why'd You Push That Button? HQ, aka The Verge's offices. We've still got more episodes, and this week, we're asking: why do you like celebrity photos on Instagram?
This question might sound familiar if you're a Verge reader. I asked it months ago in this iconic post: "Why did my boyfriend like Emily Ratajkowski's butt on Instagram?" We now have the definitive, audio version of the article. We're going to get through it together as a family.
For this episode, Kaitlyn and I talk to my boyfriend Chris to get a final answer about his butt-liking behavior. We also chat with a certified Instagram influencer named Lisa Ramos, our dear friend and Verge collaborator Lizzie Plaugic, and Verge editorial director Helen Havlak. (I've taken to calling her the algorithm whisperer, though, so maybe she should consider that as an alternate title.) By the end of this episode, you should understand why you double tapped that photo of Kim Kardashian and why you keep seeing content tangentially related to Kim. You should have a clearer understanding of what a like means, in a philosophical sense, and how to feel about your boyfriend liking a model's butt. We grappled with these questions so you don't have to.
(sent via text by Ashley Carman)
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Holiday Spectacular 2017
Why'd You Push That Button?
12/23/17 • 31 min
We've done it, fam. We've finished season one of the podcast. Because it's also the season of giving, and because we love you all, today's episode is dedicated to you. In today's Holiday Spectacular — I told you it was coming — Kaitlyn and I listen to the audio clips you've sent us over the past few months. We also sit by the fireplace here in our podcast studio to look back at the season. We've learned so much, mainly how tech companies manipulate our minds :)
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FAQ
How many episodes does Why'd You Push That Button? have?
Why'd You Push That Button? currently has 49 episodes available.
What topics does Why'd You Push That Button? cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Podcasts and Technology.
What is the most popular episode on Why'd You Push That Button??
The episode title 'Why do you share your location?' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Why'd You Push That Button??
The average episode length on Why'd You Push That Button? is 36 minutes.
How often are episodes of Why'd You Push That Button? released?
Episodes of Why'd You Push That Button? are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of Why'd You Push That Button??
The first episode of Why'd You Push That Button? was released on Oct 11, 2017.
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