Skip to main content

Home/ Critical Thinking/ Group items tagged twitter

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
David McGavock

Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) : Howard Rheingold : City... - 2 views

www.sfgate.com/...detail

twitter literacy rheingold socialmedia

shared by David McGavock on 02 Jan 11 - Cached
  • It's about knowing how and knowing who and knowing who knows who knows what.
  • use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.
  • successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively.
  • The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.
  • My reasons: Openness - anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else
  • Immediacy - it is a rolling present. You won't get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.
  • I don't have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
  • Reciprocity - people give and ask freely for information they need
  • A channel to multiple publics - I'm a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds - and each of the people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks.
  • Asymmetry - very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.
  • A way to meet new people - it happens every day. Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I follow people I don't know otherwise but who share enthusiasm
  • A window on what is happening in multiple worlds
  • Community-forming - Twitter is not a community, but it's an ecology in which communities can emerge.
  • A platform for mass collaboration:
  • Searchability - the ability to follow searches for phrases like "swine flu" or "Howard Rheingold" in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.
  • successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and feeding.
  • If it isn't fun, it won't be useful. If you don't put out, you don't get back. But you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you
  • Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy
  • My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter
  • David McGavock on 02 Jan 11
     
    "Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. "
  • David McGavock on 02 Jan 11
     
    Using twitter effectively is a critical thinking skill. Howard describes this in detail.
David McGavock

In a cutthroat world, some Web giants thrive by cooperating - page 3 - 3 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2011021902888_3.html

cooperation corporate google twitter facebook washingtonpost

shared by David McGavock on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter work in semiautonomous teams, usually made up of experts from each department: design, programming, marketing, etc.
  • How are conflicts resolved?
  • Zuckerberg engages in the conversation and offers his perspective.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Twitter's growing really quickly, and something that allowed us to do so much with so few people early on was this culture of trust, where you knew people around you were smart and had the best of intentions," Mark Trammell,
  • "TeamTeam," a forum for employees to gather around common interests.
  • Trammell spends roughly 10 percent of his time helping his colleagues build personal relationships around "things that people are passionate about."
David McGavock

How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's - Howard Rheingold -... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...256898

thinking information_literacy crap detection Net Smart critical_thinking resources skills Howard Rheingold

shared by David McGavock on 10 May 12 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 10 May 12
     
    Editor's note: The following essay has been adapted from Howard Rheingold's new book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which offers Rheingold's insights on how to find quality information on the web, and then how to piece that information together "intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully." The book was published in April by MIT Press.
David McGavock

The demise of quality content on the web - 4 views

www.elezea.com/...the-demise-of-quality-content

thinking evaluate information_literacy critical_thinking ads lowest common denominator

shared by David McGavock on 30 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • I remember exactly when I decided to stop reading Mashable.
  • You can’t see a single word from the actual article without scrolling. It reminded me of a comment that Merlin Mann recently made in his typically funny and obnoxious style:
  • we seem to be in this bizarre race to the intellectual bottom to write the most generic article in the world so that everyone with an Internet connection will click through. And the only purpose seems to be to keep the advertising monster fed, fat, and happy.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • I’m worried that all the noise makes it increasingly difficult for quality content[1] to be seen. Worse, I’m worried that it’s discouraging the creation of quality content because what’s successful (i.e. what gets the most clicks) is mostly lowest-common-denominator blog post titles that either start with a number or end with a question mark.
  • The problem is not that people don’t have enough time, it’s that people don’t have enough attention.
  • The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.
  • David McGavock on 30 Dec 11
     
    "I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you're smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing (and to do it without selling your soul in the process). "
David McGavock

A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority « Clay Shirky - 1 views

www.shirky.com/...-idea-of-algorithmic-authority

shirky trust authority community evaluate critical_thinking crap detection

shared by David McGavock on 10 Feb 11 - Cached
  • people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia
  • algorithmic authority
  • do I have certification from an institution that will vouch for my knowledge of Eastern Europe?
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The social characteristic of deciding who to trust is a key feature of authority
  • information that can’t be evaluated independently
  • information that is correct by definition
  • authorities making untestable propositions
  • Why would you feel less silly getting the same wrong information from Britannica than from me? Because Britannica is an authoritative source.
  • Like everything social, this is not a problem with a solution, just a dilemma with various equilibrium states, each of which in turn has characteristic disadvantages.)
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 10 Feb 11
       
      "Not a problem with a solution" - there's something very freeing about that idea. So often we try and fix nature and our social "states" but they are too dynamic for a fix.
  • it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published.
  • Algorithmic authority
  • just an information tool.
  • people come to trust it.
  • produces good results
  • people become aware not just of their own trust but of the trust of others:
  • his is the transition to algorithmic authority.
  • spectrum of authority
  • Good enough to settle a bar bet
  • Evidence to include in a dissertation defense
  • he criticism that Wikipedia, say, is not an “authoritative source” is an attempt to end the debate by hiding the fact that authority is a social agreement,
  • David McGavock on 10 Feb 11
     
    "Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying "Trust this because you trust me." This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics. "
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page