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What it shows is that, as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network. I’m sure many people have had this feeling, but these data make this effect more transparent.

The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.

All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends. Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties. One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated. Maintained Relationships: to measure engagement, we took the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan called the speech "strong, thoughtful and important" and noted that its rhetorical style subverted the soundbite-driven coverage of contemporary news media.[41]

Beyond the content of the speech, some media coverage focused on the manner in which it spread through the Internet. Video of the speech "went viral," reaching over 1.3 million views on YouTube within a day of the speech's delivery.[71] By March 27, the speech had been viewed nearly 3.4 million times.[72] In the days after the speech, links to the video and to transcripts of the speech were the most popular items posted on Facebook.[72] The New York Times observed that the transcript of the speech was e-mailed more frequently than their news story on the speech, and suggested that this might be indicative of a new pattern in how young people receive news, avoiding conventional media filters.[72] Maureen Dowd further referenced the phenomenon on March 30, writing in her column that Obama "can ensorcell when he has to, and he has viral appeal. Who else could alchemize a nuanced 40-minute speech on race into must-see YouTube viewing for 20-year-olds?"[73] By May 30, the speech had been viewed on YouTube over 4.5 million times.[74] The Los Angeles Times cited the prominence of the speech and the music video "Yes We Can" as examples of the Obama campaign's success in spreading its message online, in contrast with the campaign of Republican (then) presumptive nominee John McCain.[74]

y this point, hype was gathering like a storm, and YouTube's conspiracy theorists had elevated Kallie from run-of-the-mill YouTube cheat to industry-backed marketing shill. No one had forgotten Lonelygirl15, YouTube's biggest phenomenon to date, and its biggest phony. "Lonelygirl15, is that your younger sister?" one commenter wrote of GreenTeaGirlie. "What the … are you trying to sell?" demanded another.

"Honestly, I could get anybody's video to the top of YouTube," he boasted.

"We were trying to piggyback off what … the real GreenTeaGirlie site was doing," he said. So he bought the rights to GreenTeaGirlie.com on the very same day Kallie posted her first video. "I wanted to fuel the hype," he explained, "so I linked [GreenTeaGirlie.com] to some random tea company's website." (That would be Dragonwater.) "And I noted the response to that and how negative it was." It was a revelation to Foremski. "What if there was a whole ad agency dedicated to setting up these relationship between companies and popular YouTubers?" he mused at the time. "And Vidstars kind of grew off of that." Foremski said the notoriety Vidstars has gotten from its GreenTeaGirlie high jinks has attracted several parties interested in Vidstars' next move. It's an interesting new business model: hoaxing for dollars.

the next form of social evolution on the Internet.

As the internet has grown in popularity, a disturbing phenomenon has occurred: Everyone thinks they they are SPECIAL.

We have news for you... You aren't special.

Does knowing something about the way technical architecture influences behavior mean that we can put that knowledge to use?

Can inhumane or dehumanizing effects of digital socializing be mitigated or eliminated by better media design?

in Coase's Penguin,[7] and then in The Wealth of Networks,[8] Benkler contributed to important theoretical foundations for a new way of thinking about online activity−"commons based peer production," technically made possible by a billion PCs and Internet connections−as a new form of organizing economic production, together with the market and the firm. If Benkler is right, the new story about how humans get things done includes an important corollary−if tools like the PC and the Internet make it easy enough, people are willing to work together for non-market incentives to create software, encyclopedias and archives of public domain literature.

At the March 15 protest, an anon in his 30s who says he works in homeland security, compares Anonymous to the War on Terror--you can fight terrorists, but you can't fight an idea. Anonymous, he says, is an idea.

"Oh Fuck, The Internet is here."

Anonymous existed before it was called Anonymous.