Group items tagged

In response to the person who said in class that people who edit Wikipedia "have a lot of time on their hands" -- see this 2008 piece by Very Smart Guy and NYU professor Clay Shirky, who points out that editing Wikipedia is a more productive use of time than watching TV. Which, somehow, a lot of people also seem to have a lot of time to do. *** "I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?" I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system." So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years.""

It can be a little bit of off-topic but this is a very interesting video that my communication professor showed class before. The video basically tells you how much the internet and the social media affect our lives these days. Even though we have already known that the internet is hugely influential, you'll probably be surprised while you watch this video.

Social issues and the past and future of the internet is discussed.

Whether we realize it or not, all social media websites have a certain (usually unwritten) etiquette. This article lists some basic etiquette when using Tumblr.

Oddly enough, today the Washington Post has chosen to reprint a 1988 article about the Internet; that article mentions Robert Tappan Morris, the first person prosecuted under the Computer Fraud Act, whom Brittney Douress told us about today. Nice timing, Brittney! :)

Note too that this article came out well before the World Wide Web was invented circa 1992 / 1993. There weren't any GUI web browsers yet; people just used text-only terminals (no pictures, no video) to access stuff. Mostly news groups -- I'll post a picture of what that looked like if I can find one.

This web site, Rebel Mouse, allows you to post things from all the social media you like to use on one homepage that you can create and edit.

Here's a recent article published in April about where people get their news.

That's useful, Milan, thanks. Note, though that it's not super-clear what "get" means in this context -- I'm sure a lot of people, like me, get their news from several of these sources. I get news from radio, the Web (including newspaper websites and Google News), and social media, and I'm not sure which of those sources is primary.

I figured an appropriate way to end the semester was to have a blog post about my blog post :)

An interesting article from the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times about how the internet has changed the concept and attitudes of R.S.V.P viewed by people. With the modern R.S.V.P, the ability for a host or event producer to painlessly publicize his or her event to many people has replaced the meaning of a social contract.

Someone recently presented on the YouTube founders and mentioned Google's new integration of Google+. This article discusses the backlash by users Google is receiving about the new comment interface on YouTube.