The name Kitty Collector recalls both the NSA’s ‘collect it all’ philosophy and ‘gotta catch ‘em all’, the classic pitch for Pokemon. This is not just a currency trading game; it’s an intelligence gathering sim for a post-Pokemon world. The successful player of Neko Atsume is not a dedicated cat fancier, but a dispassionate data analyst. You gain advantage through making frequent and unannounced visits to the yard. Even when you’re not there to snap photos, new visitors are mysteriously logged into your Catbook – flagged as subjects for closer scrutiny.

The bullets had scarcely stopped flying in Paris before the pressure was on. There were the profile pictures filtered with le Tricolore or changed to show the user on holiday in Paris; the memes with cartoons by Charlie Hebdo illustrator Joann Sfar or words by Martin Luther King Jr; the condemnations of religious fundamentalism and pleas for tolerance on behalf of the peaceful majority of the world’s Muslims. The counter narrative went hand-in-hand: what about Beirut, we were asked with varying degrees of sanctimoniousness, where Islamic State militants had killed 41 people the day before the Paris attacks?

There are a lot of things I don’t get about Twitter and/or Facebook: hashtags (seriously, who uses them?), profile photos, how righteous a tweet can make us feel even as it fills us with self-doubt. There’s no tone and little room for nuance or context in these spaces, no grace for momentary lapses or mistakes, and outrages frequently ensue.

Jason Dowling has been sacked. Not for behaving badly at work, but for behaving badly in his own spare time. Jason posted some offensive comments on Facebook, was dobbed in to his boss by a stranger who happened to stumble upon his page and then given his marching orders. What’s the world coming to? It’s […]