One of the things that makes the online world so interesting and dangerous is that it’s a place where anything can be posted. That’s good for some reasons and bad for others, and whether your experience in the online world is positive or negative can depend on the degree to which you can effectively and reliably call “bullshit”.

MediaSmarts is a non-profit established to understand and train the critical thinking necessary for people to “engage with media as active and informed digital citizens”.

The organization recently released two reports that came out of engagements with Canadian youth about being online, and they show that young people have a pretty clear idea about what’s going on and what could be done to address problems.

Digital Media Literacy and Digital Citizenzship is the fourth part of a larger project investigating “Young Canadians in a Wireless World”.

It surveyed more than a thousand grade school children from across Canada and found that they are “relatively savvy” about how they get information online, and they are being taught how to make sure the information they’re getting is reliable.

But 83 percent of the respondents think that online platforms should “supervise what people post and comment, and that platforms should remove bad content.”

A different report from MediaSmarts came out of focus groups with young people aged 16 to 29 in which they said they were constantly encountering “misleading or false information online”.

Reporting Platforms: Young Canadians Evaluate Efforts to Counter Disinformation showed that these young people are using techniques to verify information – or outright ignoring things they know to be false – but they also believe that online platforms should be responsible for moderating content.

They just don’t think those platforms are going to do anything about it.

This week on The Shift, Shane Hewitt and I talked about Bungie’s announcement of a new game, Marathon, the Last Case of Benedict Fox side scroller, the release of iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, and Towel Day.

Bungie’s new game is Marathon and looks at the Last Case of Benedict Fox and Humanity.

Bungie’s got a new Marathon coming

One of Bungie’s earliest games was Marathon, published in 1994 for the Apple Macintosh computer. The first-person shooter spawned two sequels. But it was Halo, announced in 1999 and released in 2001, that cemented the developer as one of the most significant studios of the modern game development era.

Today, as part of a Playstation Showcase, Bungie announced a new Marathon.

Currently in development and planned for release to PS5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S, the new game is set in the same universe as those early games, but it looks to contain everything that the studio has learned in thirty years.

Players will become “Runners”, cybernetic characters who are exploring Tau Ceti IV.

No release date was announced.

The Last Case of Benedict Fox a haunting, noir-inspired adventure

The Last Case of Benedict Fox is a delightful game for Windows and Xbox Series X/S. It’s also part of the Xbox Game Pass library.

This side-scroller has maze-like maps (think Castlevania and Metroid) and a dark mystery to reveal. You play as the titular Mr Fox, who has a demon possessing him as he explores otherworldly dimensions of the mind.

Rated teen.

Humanity’s twisting, 3-D puzzles are most fun in VR

Humanity is a puzzle game in the vein of Lemmings, in which your objective is to guide a stream of characters through a space to a destination. You need to set the path and determine how best to confront obstacles.

In Humanity, you play as a small dog guiding an endless stream of people to a beam of light that pulls them into the sky.

The overt spiritual symbolism aside, the game is a light and fun pastime. And while you can play it with a standard game controller, it’s more fun playing in VR because then you are entirely within the architectural spaces that make up the game.

Once you’ve mastered the puzzle solving, you can venture into puzzle creating, as Humanity includes a level editor that puts the tools of creation at your fingertips.

Humanity is available now for PS4 (including PS VR), PS5 (including PS VR2) and Windows.

Remembering Douglas Adams, intergalactic hitchhiker and technologist, and Apple’s audio and video creation tools released for iPad.

Happy Towel Day, to all who observe

Thursday is Towel Day and we mark this day by carrying around or wearing a towel.

We do this in honour of Douglas Adams, a proponent of the towel as an essential tool for any traveler.

Adams was the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of novels, which spawned from his BBC radio play. He was also an early adopter and promotor of Apple Macintosh computers and was reportedly the second person in the British Isles to own a Apple Macintosh computer (after Stephen Fry).

The author and journalist was a technologist through and through and was involved in early game development, creating an interactive version of Hitchhiker’s in 1984. He also had a hand in breaking the games Labyrinth, Bureaucracy, and Starship Titanic.

Adams died in 2001 at age 49, but his wit and humour live on.

Apple’s released pro studio tools for audio and video creators using iPads

As Apple continues to iterate on the iPad, releasing more powerful versions with greater memory and storage capacity, the hardware is capable of pretty much anything.

With the release of iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, Apple is making it possible for video and audio creatives to use iPads in every dimension of the creative process.

The apps have been designed for the touch interface that is possible with the iPad

Final Cut Pro is one of the most popular video editing programs available. With the iPad version, which requires an iPad with an M1 chip, you can edit video with the help of a virtual jog wheel, and you can use an Apple Pencil to draw on the footage, too.

The software also turns an iPad into a monitor during shooting, and you can edit on the fly, taking advantage of multiple camera set ups and integrating graphics and effects features on the fly.

Logic Pro is audio editing software that can be used to record and mix things like music and podcasts. The iPad version of Logic Pro runs on iPads with at least the A12 Bionic chip. It can be used to record audio – the iPad Pro is equipped with studio-quality mics – and you can create audio thanks to a deep library of instruments and effects and the multi-touch capability of the iPad.

Logic Pro also has a full mixing board built in, so you can create final versions of projects and export them anywhere you need them to be.

The iPad editions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are available now for $7 monthly or $70 for a year.

This week on The Shift, Shane Hewitt and I talked about the masterpiece that is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, accessibility in gaming by helping players avoid phobias, and two new Alexa devices from Amazon, the Echo Pop and the Echo Auto.