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NeoOne110 (5 hours ago) Show Hide 0 Marked as spam Reply | Spam so she has a.d.d. or bipolar which made her create the boxxy person.now whos next on youtube to reveal there true identity.

ludwigious (2 hours ago) Show Hide 0 Marked as spam Reply | Spam R.I.P, oh glorious martyr.She died for our sins.

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to "know thyself," or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter's Web site — "What are you doing?" — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they're trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

Laura Fitton, the social-media consultant, argues that her constant status updating has made her "a happier person, a calmer person" because the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively. "It drags you out of your own head," she added. In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.

"It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,"

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.

This roused more than a few suspicious YouTubers, and it was quickly discovered that the first 10,000 views were accrued through embedded copies of the video on bogus MySpace pages. Someone was gaming the system with an auto-refresh program to boost GreenTeaGirlie into the most viewed section, where she has since gained an additional 300,000-plus views.

Another part of the change is the increasing realization that we can show what was hidden before. Instead of an interpretation of what someone meant, a writer can include a link that says effectively: "Here is the background material I used. Here is me interviewing the subject on a podcast or a video and here is precisely what he/she said. Here is the raw material out of which I constructed my dialectic, and you can decide whether I got the argument right or wrong based not on the power of my rhetoric but on the facts at hand."

Within 24 hours of posting, the Pelosi Rickroll video had been viewed nearly 60,000 times and garnered some 200 comments. Viewers were stunned ("Not gonna lie, that's totally surreal"), impressed ("My faith in House Democrats has just increased tenfold"), not impressed ("It is bad enough that she is in power, and now one of her interns has to Rick Roll me.") and outraged ("CURSE YOU PELOSI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!")