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The public world has since become less urgent, more remote, and more tainted.

face-to-face civic activity has dropped as groups with local chapters have given way to groups that count as members everyone who sends in a check in response to a direct-mail appeal.

The important question is the share of income that Americans devote to charity; and by that measure, charitable giving has dropped sharply

We are Anonymous.Recently, it has come to our attention that several online retailers have decided to ride the coattails of our sudden popularity by offering aparrel and other swag bearing our image. This is extremely offensive to Anonymous, as the very idea of wearing an article that identifies one as anonymous flies directly into the face of who exactly we are. We are anonymous. We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances and we guard you while you sleep. We put you under the knife to remove your bloated, infected spleen. We deliver your mail. We relay the evening news from the comfort of your television set, and we work dilligently to print it to give you something to read with your coffee and croissants the next morning. We are everyone and we are no one. We do not need to advertise our identity.Because our image is not a copyright, we can not stop anyone from selling items bearing it. However, we can suggest that you do not purchase these items. Wearing anything that tells the world you are anonymous compromises the veil of protection being anonymous provides, as well as cancelling out your anonymity. Wearing a t-shirt is like wearing a crosshair. You become an easy target for the Cult of $cientology and it puts you at serious risk of harm by its operatives. Use good judgement. Do not compromise yourself and your fellow Anonymous. Do not reveal your personal information to an online retailer that could possibly be a front for data mining operations by the cult.Remain Anonymous. Remain vigilant.We are Anonymous.We are LegionWe do not forgive.We do not forget.And we are certainly not some Xenu-forsaken fashion statement!

The company's product: videotaped study aids with up-tempo soundtracks, flashy graphics, and undergraduate-age actors who look like they just danced out of a Gap television advertisement. Students can watch the review tapes on their VCR's. Soon the guides will also be available on DVD and over the Internet.

Other observers wonder whether the company could one day compete with colleges.

In the videos, complex concepts are explained with skits, jokes about dating and drinking, and the occasional song.

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

Wolfe's three laws of the brave new Web 2.0 world are: Mobile is the new desktop, the home page is dead, and social networks like Facebook and MySpace presage the media company of the future.

No one, and I can't stress this enough, gives a shit about your brand. They care about what user experience you deliver to them. This obtains whether you're in the physical world selling a product, or online serving up content.

The new go-to destination of users won't be home pages but instead will be Web apps. That is, users will access content -- news, blogs, video -- and interact with your (their) communities via apps, hopefully apps that you develop and sell ads around.

By the end of 2004, bloggers were using the ability to add video as an enclosure to an RSS feed, allowing viewers to subscribe to videos and have them delivered automatically to their computers. This solved the problem of click and wait, where you had to wait for a video to start playing when you clicked on it from a web page.

podcasting (both video and audio) is a bottom-up movement and squarely the domain of individuals who are being guided by human creativity and expression, rather than corporate agendas and economic exigencies.

With the cost of video cameras in the hundreds, sophisticated computers with video editing software available for just over a grand, and high speed always-on internet connections costing less than the average cable television subscription, the means of both production and distribution are now in the hands of practically anyone with something to say

"It's like Craigslist -- hugely simple and highly useful," says David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. 4chan's utility is its ability to gather millions of people in conversation in a single place and create a "meme-rich" environment, says Mr. Weinberger.

Mr. Poole originally just wanted a place to share his fascination with Japanese comics and television shows. He was a fan of the popular Japanese image Web site 2chan and wanted to create a version for American audiences. With his mother's approval, he used her credit card to purchase server space and started 4chan.org.

"They get rowdy -- it's like a bar without alcohol," says Willard Ling, a moderator and long-time user of the site. "It's like that psychological concept of deinvidualization -- when groups of people become less aware of their own responsibility." Mr. Poole and his team of moderators have handed out 70,000 bans over the last three years, but preventing long-term abuse can be difficult. 4chan's "Wild West" reputation has created a dilemma for Mr. Poole. While it's brought him Internet fame, albeit through his alter ego, and created enviable traffic, he has trouble selling ads to more cautious companies who don't want their ads appearing next to potentially graphic content. He's attempted to quarantine sexual material on a set of adult boards, but that doesn't stop pornography or other adult content from appearing elsewhere.

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.

Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.

Like literacy in general, media literacy is applied in a wide variety of contexts—when watching television or reading newspapers, for example, or when posting commentary to a blog. Indeed, media literacy is implicated everywhere one encounters information and entertainment content.

The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that: • all media messages are constructed • each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction • media messages are produced for particular purposes • all media messages contain embedded values and points of view • people use their individual skills, beliefs, and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages • media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one’s own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.

The technological transformation of leisure. There is reason to believe that deep-seated technological trends are radically "privatizing" or "individualizing" our use of leisure time and thus disrupting many opportunities for social-capital formation. The most obvious and probably the most powerful instrument of this revolution is television.

replacement of community-based enterprises by outposts of distant multinational firms

fewer marriages, more divorces

More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates warned about a different information revolution — the rise of the written word, which he considered a more superficial way of learning than the oral tradition. More recently, the arrival of television sparked concerns that it would make children more violent or passive and interfere with their education.

8. Film and video editors edit soundtracks, film and video for the movies, and cable and broadcast television.Salary growth rate: 5.4 percentSalary: $62,958

15. Anthropologists study the origin, cultural development and behavior of humans, while archaeologists recover artifacts to gather information about humans.Salary growth rate: 4.9 percentSalary: $66,861

"What we tried to be on YouTube was the actual television show," says Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign's New Media director.

That would explain why Obama first used his channel to respond to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy and later to break the news that he would forgo public financing for the general election.

McCain had his "Bomb Iran" moment, which folks were reminded of well into the presidential debates. Obama had the Reverend Wright clips, which forced him to address his relationship with the preacher and eventually renounce the man.