Digital life

Digital life

YouTube cofounder Steve Chen is one of the latest tech trailblazers to warn against social media's impact on kids. Chen warned in a talk short-form video "equates to shorter attention spans" and said he wouldn't want his own kids to exclusively consume this type of content. Companies that distribute short-form video (which includes the company he cofounded, YouTube) should add safeguards for younger users, he added.

Indian OTT platform Hotstar is named as the most popular streaming platform in India and accounted for 32% of the total market by the number of subscribers in 2017, followed by Amazon Prime Video with 12%. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime Video had attracted more subscriptions in 2017 than Netflix, primarily because of its more affordable pricing offer, according to IHS Markit.

Your dollar can stretch three to four times farther in Asia than in the U.S. In India, you can live comfortably on about $270 a month, excluding rent. In Thailand, about $600 a month gets you beach access, excellent street food, and world-class health care. And in Vietnam, $350 covers your monthly expenses in a country where a full meal costs less than a Starbucks latte.

In a recent study focussing on exclamation mark usage in message communication, it was found that it is often thought as being gendered. Receivers of messages containing multiple exclamation marks tend to assume that the writer is female. Interestingly, such an assumption is likely to be correct, as it has previously been found that more women tend to use exclamation marks than men.

Reading through the support page, the way it works is that once every 12 months, Google will allow you to "change" the email address associated with your Google account. In actuality, the process is more like adding a new alias email to your account since your old email address will not be deleted and will remain functional. You still get one email inbox and outbox, but presumably, you will be able to do some filtering based on which email a message was sent to, as well as choose which email to use for outgoing messages. Essentially, Google is giving users a way to associate up to three new email addresses with an existing account and all of its existing data and services.

Wake. If you're lucky, that is morning's first task. Wake. Not rolling over onto your side, not recalling the thoughts that have stayed the night, like a tryst who cannot sense they're meant to leave before light breaks through on the pane. Leave that to phones - light breaking through, remembering everything. Wake - what a herculean task! To wake first, and not check your phone. Everything after that? A form of grace, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Maybe it's my own nostalgia for another time (I did grow up on early 2000s movies where every main character in New York City worked at a magazine). But it can't be disputed that the cold, mechanical glare of a blue screen can never compare to the natural romanticism of paper in the format of love letters, novels and diaries. It feels nice to hold something! To leaf through a real page! We forget that restaurants are in the business of tactile pleasure: It's why we collect matchboxes and postcards and, if we're lucky, a custom pen pocketed on the way out.

Some eager obituarists base their confident predictions on declining user numbers. At least in the United States, however, self-reports of media usage don't appear to bear this out. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that while the share of adult Americans using the most popular apps, YouTube and Facebook, has "remained relatively stable in recent years," four others-TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Reddit-have grown in overall use.

Google has updated the Google Business Profiles verification issues support form.

Most of that revenue comes from advertising, but an increasing amount of money flows in from YouTube's $14-per-month subscription plan, YouTube Premium. YouTube Premium's primary perk is the lack of ads. You also get YouTube Music Premium, Picture-in-Picture mode, playback with the screen off, and more. And yet, the concept of paying for YouTube may seem baffling to many, not only due to Premium's considerable cost and questionable value, but also because anyone can still, technically, enjoy YouTube without paying a dime.

Your phone already has built-in features that can help you stop getting distracted.To temporarily silence all those attention-seeking notifications, use the Focus setting on your iPhone or Android device. This mode is designed to stop interruptions when you want to concentrate. You can customize it by blocking specific apps or muting only when you're doing certain things, like sleeping or reading.

Despite the ways in which its forced some uncomfortable adjustment, it's ultimately allowed for a more work-life balance, with the scale slightly tipping more towards life for many. In fact, the "microshifting" trend that's recently surfaced on social media, which references the idea of breaking up your work day into shorter blocks of time so that real-life responsibilities can be squeezed in, proves that with the right kind of strategy, there's always time to do it all.

We're curled up on the couch at the end of another long day, finally getting a little refuge from the relentless busyness of modern life. Then, the smartphone lights up, announcing itself yet again, calling us back to the churn. Our phone has already buzzed, dinged, and flashed red dots 150 times today, the North American average (Stern, 2013). Each interruption has carved away a sliver of our time; each glow has pulled us into a digital world.

As the cost of living continues to rise, more people are turning to tools like ChatGPT to work smarter, streamline everyday tasks, and generate extra income without adding another job to their schedule. While many turn to ChatGPT for work-related tasks or entertainment, a growing number are also finding practical ways to use AI to boost their income. By tapping into its capabilities, even beginners can explore simple and creative ways to start earning money online.

For more than a decade, social media didn't just serve Black communities, immigrant communities, and young people - these communities built social media into the global force it became. They were the early adopters, the culture-makers, the organizers, the storytellers. Hyperlocal newsrooms were born on Facebook groups. WhatsApp became a lifeline for immigrant families. Instagram fed cultural reporting. Twitter shaped political journalism in real time.

When you're trying to snazz up your emails with a signature at the bottom, it's all too easy to overthink it. Gmail's signature tool offers extensive formatting options. (Want to sign off in Comic Sans? Go for it.) And typical signature-builder sites can get even more complex, with seemingly endless fonts, buttons, and shiny doodads to choose from. The truth is, you don't need all that to sign your emails in a presentable way.

My friend recently told me a story over drinks that I haven't been able to get out of my head. Her two friends, let's call them Alice and Bob, were something of a lynchpin couple in her friend group. They'd been dating for a few years and moved in together almost immediately. Everyone knew them as an item that did pretty much everything together. Alice and Bob were more like AliceandBob, really.

Every year during late November and early December, our Instagram stories are plagued with Spotify Wrapped posts of people you haven't heard from since middle school or individuals who randomly log back in online to declare to the world that they are the top 0.01% of an artist no one has ever heard of. Spotify Wrapped used to be a social holiday, an annual ritual of showing off who has the more niche top five or who amongst your friend group is the true Swiftie.

Google just rolled out a new Share option inside Google Maps... and yes, Reddit now has its own button and X is no longer there.

Your guide to getting the most out of the festive season without draining your bank account