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The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns

There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

The following is a rather long and scholarly type post arguing for the use of Networks in addition to groups commonly employed in formal campus and distance education.

There are far too many sessions on journalism and policy, and far too little on doing science . . .

“killer app” that integrates social media into the mainstream of science.

Tools for doing science are much harder to envision and build.  But these sorts of tools are much more likely to see uptake and use by the community, simply because scientists are more interested in doing science than they are in talking about science.

This printable version is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license

Configuring the Networked Self was published by Yale University Press in 2012.

Last week my vague feelings of unease about social networking were fanned by a fascinating study by the Mental Health Foundation, which blamed high levels of loneliness among young people on their use of virtual, rather than real, communication. Dubbed the “Eleanor Rigby generation”, those aged 18-34 (84% of whom use the internet regularly) are the most likely to be lonely, according to the report. And 31% admitted that they spent too much time online rather than face to face.

The psychologist Dr Aric Sigman says that social networking sites undermine social skills and the ability to read body language.

Dunbar's number it basically says that the most amount of people that you can maintain stable social relationships with is 150

Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

Morten Hansen's fantastic book on Collaboration in which he states that the real value of collaboration and of networks doesn't come from strong relationships and networks but from weak one's. 

Internal (intra or inter-government) collaboration. Institutional presence on external social networks Open government data Employees on external social networks 

Increased government efficiency Increased government accountability Increased citizen engagement and participation Increased innovation

Potential loss of privacy Invalid data