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For a tech writer, being very offline is sort of like being a marathon coach who doesnt run. So in 2025, I tried to reverse years of studied avoidance towards the most ubiquitous technological phenomenon on earth I got back on social media. The change was short-lived. My first exodus from the feeds took some work disabling notifications, removing apps from my homescreen and then deleting accounts entirely. This time, the phone put itself down. The whole thing has simply lost its luster.I started with Instagram. Every experience went like this: Id see a single post from one of the rare family members or IRL friends who are active on the platform. Next, I was fed a sponsored post, followed by suggestions to follow randos. After that, a series of influencer videos that, admittedly, appeal to my taste (funny/absurdist women and dissertations on urban planning). That was followed up with more sponsored posts, mostly from brands Id looked up for work. Then itd circle back to the influencers. My eyes glazed over and I tossed the phone aside. Years back, the platform gave off a jolt of quasi-social connection that Id spend hours sucking up. I fed on pointless thoughts from an ex-coworker, vacation reels from a college roommate, a half-baked loaf of bread that an old friend dropped on the floor but took a picture of anyway. Now its a bare sliver of that stuff, shoehorned between towers of sponsored content and posts from people who make or promote their living on Instagram. The real people have left. The connection is gone. The FOMO is no more. I experienced some variation of the same disappointment on every platform I rejoined. When I got back on TikTok a few months after the ban, it felt like a frenzied shopping mall. Every video seems to be about four seconds long and most are promotional and/or shoppable. YouTube Shorts is drowning in AI-generated videos, and I dont hit up social media to watch fake footage of desperate wild animal babies clambering onto the boats of helpful humans. My life has no need for simulated toddlers admonishing their pets. Occasionally, Id hit on something compelling: a clip from late night TV, a stupidly decadent dessert recipe, people from other countries explaining cultural subtleties. But for me, these social media platforms are no longer velcro for the eyes. I remember losing focus, spending long hours on YouTube Shorts and IG. Id look up bleary-eyed and shame-faced after hours scrolling TikToks For You Page. Now, after a few minutes, a bored ickiness sets in. I feel like Im trapped in a carnival of bots hawking shampoo at me and I just want to go home. Its not a mystery how or why things feel different; The answer is always money. These billion- and trillion-dollar companies have shareholders who prize year-over-year performance over anything else. So we get more sponsored posts on Instagram. TikTok purposefully, enthusiastically overloads itself with shoppable content (which isnt going to change no matter who owns it). YouTube is obsessed with engagement so it ends up rewarding people who flood the platform with AI slop. These platforms arent about human connections and the spread of creativity the stuff that used to draw me in theyre thinly varnished ecommerce sites sprinkled with brute-forced AI oddities. Id be sadder about the whole thing if I thought it could be any different. These companies are among the most valuable in the world. The fact that I cant connect with my fellow common people using their services is not surprising. The change isnt even driving everyone away. Instagram reported more users than ever this year, to the tune of 35 percent of the panet. Billions of users still scroll TikTok and watch YouTube Shorts. So maybe its just a me thing. And I have options. Over-monetization may have made me not want to engage with a few social media behemoths, but things arent so dire everywhere. Bluesky reminds me of Twitter before X. I take comfort in seeing posts that prove most people are as dismayed as I am over a government and wider economic system that are nakedly uninterested in serving the public. The hot takes arent quite as funny as they were on Twitter years back maybe its just all been said before or perhaps things have gotten too dire for levity. I still dont end up spending a lot of time on the platform, however. Its not as weird as it was before the defection and I get tired of the stream of news headlines contextualized with tut-tutting and handwringing Im perfectly capable of doing that myself. Itd be easy to say that social media just isnt my thing, but thats not true because I cant quit Reddit the shining exception to my social media ennui. It feels filled with actual people. Ads exist, but in a subdued, manageable way. And every contributor, commenter and moderator Ive come across on the app is militantly vigilant against the onslaught of artificially generated content. I also like the organizational structure. I know my Home tab will only expose me to my chosen subs and I derive great joy from happy cows, greeble-chasing cats, enigmatic night feelings and freaky abandoned spaces. I use my local subreddit r/Albuquerque daily to answer questions and keep tabs on the world (directly) around me. Sadly, Reddit is an outlier, a misfit exception to the rule, and now that its gone public, it may follow a similar monetization push. Bluesky is tiny, new and not yet profitable, so who knows where its financial journey will lead it (though the world without Caesars shirt gives us some hope). Theres something lamentable about the loss of the connections we gleaned from platforms that were once compelling, engrossing and rife with the creativity of our fellow humans. Ultimately, any public-facing company that prioritizes profits over everything else has no incentive to look out for its users. So I dont expect any of the larger social platforms to pull back on their monetization marches. For now, Ive decided Im comfortable with my admittedly narrow interaction with the world of social media. As a Gen-Xer, online-first wasnt how my relationship to the world started out. And Im pretty confident I know enough about other tech-related stuff to be useful to my editors and readers without a black belt in social. (Ed. note: She is.) Besides, Karissas got us covered. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/in-2025-quitting-social-media-felt-easier-than-ever-140000374.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
You may know Bosch as a home appliance brand (via its partnership with Siemens), but the German multinational is generally more focused on providing underlying technology and engineering solutions to auto, home and manufacturing partners across the globe. It's fitting, then, that much of what it's showing off at CES 2026 is more intended to be licensed to other companies versus Bosch-branded products you'll be seeing on store shelves. Case in point is Bosch's automotive plans at CES. The company will present "AI in the car," or more specifically, in the cockpit of the car. "Bosch's AI-powered cockpit makes driving more comfortable, intuitive, and safer for all occupants," Bosch board member Markus Heyn said in a press release. We'll get into all the details below, as well as how to tune in to the press conference on Monday. How to watch Bosch's CES 2026 presentation You can livestream the event on Monday, January 5 at 12PM ET via the Bosch press page. (If the stream is embeddable, we'll also include it here.) What to expect Bosch will be setting up shop in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center (booth 16203), where the company will be focusing on its three big themes mobility, smart home integrations and manufacturing all of which will include hardware, software and AI solutions. Like many other CES 2026 exhibitors, look for Bosch to emphasize its partnerships with the big dogs of the AI space at the show. For instance, that AI-powered car cockpit mentioned above will feature integrations with both Microsoft and NVIDIA. For instance, Bosch is touting the ability to use voice commands to join a Teams call, while the car's system will automatically activate adaptive cruise control. And it's noting that NVIDIA's software suites will help manage "real-time sensor processing and vision-language models." Here's a glimpse of what the booth will look like: This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/how-to-watch-the-bosch-ces-2026-press-conference-live-130020898.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
The start of a new year always feels like a reset button. Everyones talking about moving more, eating better, sleeping longer or finally taming their digital chaos. But resolutions rarely survive on willpower alone. The right tools or piece of tech can make those goals easier to keep by turning motivation into a habit. Whether youre trying to close your rings, track your progress or just build better routines, these smart picks make self-improvement feel a little more achievable, and a lot more enjoyable. Gear that can help you stick to your New Year's resolutions This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-best-gear-to-help-you-stick-to-your-new-years-resolutions-130000389.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
It's no secret that AI-generated content took over our social media feeds in 2025. Now, Instagram's top exec Adam Mosseri has made it clear that he expects AI content to overtake non-AI imagery and the significant implications that shift has for its creators and photographers.Mosseri shared the thoughts in a lengthy post about the broader trends he expects to shape Instagram in 2026. And he offered a notably candid assessment on how AI is upending the platform. "Everything that made creators matterthe ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldnt be fakedis now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools," he wrote. "The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything."But Mosseri doesn't seem particularly concerned by this shift. He says that there is "a lot of amazing AI content" and that the platform may need to rethink its approach to labeling such imagery by "fingerprinting real media, not just chasing fake."From Mosseri (emphasis his):Social media platforms are going to come under increasing pressure to identify and label AI-generated content as such. All the major platforms will do good work identifying AI content, but they will get worse at it over time as AI gets better at imitating reality. There is already a growing number of people who believe, as I do, that it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media. Camera manufacturers could cryptographically sign images at capture, creating a chain of custody.On some level, it's easy to understand how this seems like a more practical approach for Meta. As we've previously reported, technologies that are meant to identify AI content, like watermarks, have proved unreliable at best. They are easy to remove and even easier to ignore altogether. Meta's own labels are far from clear and the company, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on AI this year alone, has admitted it can't reliably detect AI-generated or manipulated content on its platform.That Mosseri is so readily admitting defeat on this issue, though, is telling. AI slop has won. And when it comes to helping Instagram's 3 billion users understand what is real, that should largely be someone else's problem, not Meta's. Camera makers presumably phone makers and actual camera manufacturers should come up with their own system that sure sounds a lot like watermarking to "to verify authenticity at capture." Mosseri offers few details about how this would work or be implemented at the scale required to make it feasible.Mosseri also doesn't really address the fact that this is likely to alienate the many photographers and other Instagram creators who have already grown frustrated with the app. The exec regularly fields complaints from the group who want to know why Instagram's algorithm doesn't consistently surface their posts to their on followers.But Mosseri suggests those complaints stem from an outdated vision of what Instagram even is. The feed of "polished" square images, he says, "is dead." Camera companies, in his estimation, are "are betting on the wrong aesthetic" by trying to "make everyone look like a professional photographer from the past." Instead, he says that more "raw" and "unflattering" images will be how creators can prove they are real, and not AI. In a world where Instagram has more AI content than not, creators should prioritize images and videos that intentionally make them look bad. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-chief-ai-is-so-ubiquitous-it-will-be-more-practical-to-fingerprint-real-media-than-fake-media-202620080.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
NurPhoto via Getty Images Samsung is arguably the 800-pound gorilla of CES, with a full spectrum of products that range from phones and computers to refrigerators to AI assistants and rolling robots. But for CES 2026, the company is shaking up the schedule a bit: Instead of its longtime midday Monday press conference position, the Korean giant will front-run the entire show with a Sunday night presentation. Samsung has already given a few hints as to what's on the agenda, but what we're really hoping to see is an update on the Ballie robot a star of previous CES presentations that ostensibly missed its previously promised 2025 release date. How to watch Samsung's "The First Look" presentation at CES 2026 The event will stream live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas on Sunday, January 4 at 10PM ET. There are several ways to tune in: you can watch via the Samsung Newsroom, Samsung Electronics official YouTube channel or via Samsung TV Plus. (We'll embed the stream here once it appears on the channel.) What to expect from Samsung at CES 2026 Keynote speaker TM Roh, the CEO of Samsung's Device eXperience (DX) Division, will discuss the company's plans for the new year and beyond, which will (of course) include "new AI-driven customer experiences," the company said in a press release. In addition, we'll hear from the President and Head of the Visual Display Business, SW Yong and Executive Vice President and Head of Digital Appliances Business, Cheolgi Kim. Those two will "share their respective business directions for the upcoming year." But if you're looking for more specifics, Samsung is following its "Advent calendar" approach to early CES announcements, with new press releases dropping nearly each day. So far, we know that like competitors LG and Hisense the company will be offering details on a line of micro RGB TVs (replete with confirmed screen sizes of 55 to 115 inches). Also confirmed: a full line of appliances infused with what Samsung calls Bespoke AI. It's likely Samsung will map out its CES plans in greater detail as the January 4 event approaches, so we'll update this story accordingly when it does.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/how-to-watch-samsungs-first-look-ces-2026-presentation-190027604.html?src=rss
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Marketing and Advertising
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