Group items tagged

Fascinating defensive of new social media in journalism and a critique of those who miss the good old days. Reminded me of the book "The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible". from the article "At an individual level, I think the "distracted Americans" scare will pass. Either people who manage to unplug, focus, and fully direct their attention will have an advantage over those constantly checking Facebook and their smart phone, in which case they'll earn more money, get into better colleges, start more successful companies, and win more Nobel Prizes. Or they won't, in which case distraction will be a trait of modern life but not necessarily a defect. At the level of national politics, America is badly distracted, but that problem long predates Facebook and requires more than a media solution. "

Worst news: The New York Times rolled out a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 a month in a bet that readers would pay for news they have grown accustomed to getting free.

How depressing.

update: I found in the comments section a comment from a NYTimes spokesperson who said that it will be free for students. I haven't been able to find that in the subscription section.

Sherry Turkle has a new book out...

interesting: in the new book, turkle, "takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies - including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots - have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings."

Many of the ideas that we are discussing are not so new and even predate the Internet. Marshall McLuhan made a name for himself dealing with these issues in the 1950's and 60's. Although some of his ideas have perhaps not proved true his basic concepts were on the money. From a CBC broadcast May 18, 1960.

This is fantastic! Worth watching. I want to read up more on McLuhan's work. Which of McLuhan's works do you recommend?

My favorite is "The Mechanical Bride" - a great critique of new (at the time) electronic media, consumerism, marketing and how they could affect the way we perceive ourselves. "The Media is the Massage" is a fun and relatively quick read and covers many of McLuhan's key concepts.

"Sites that produce original content or information that Google considers valuable are supposed to rank higher under the new system."

"the dating site had been used over the past couple of weeks as a clandestine location to exchange information and words of encouragement regarding the citizen uprisings in Libya."

Author finds that young people do care about privacy, but are more concerned with social privacy, rather than institutional privacy. "Contrary to much of the rhetoric in the debate around online privacy, the use of Facebook is not necessarily a choice free of coercion, nor are the reasons for sharing information on the site simply about self-obsession or exhibitionism." Rather it is a dominate expression of online identity and a way to communicate with peers. This is following one of the important points of Wesch - that there is no opting out of new media once the community starts to participate.

Adam Gopnik wrote on overview on many of the issues we are discussing this week in last Monday's New Yorker. I haven't read the article as closely as I would like yet, but I noticed many familiar names.

Linden Lab was founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale to create a revolutionary new form of shared experience, where individuals jointly inhabit a 3D landscape and build the world around them. Today this experience, known as the Second Life® world, has a rapidly growing population of Residents from around the globe, who are creating and inhabiting a virtual world of their own design.

This site documents the public response to internet phenomena (e.g., smiling dogs, phrases, viral videos).

This is fascinating to me. Some years ago I have read Richard Dawkin's The selfish gene (http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introduction/dp/0199291152/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296232952&sr=1-3) and the Idea of Memes, using us, humans, to reproduce and evolve was quite amazing. I would also recommend Susan Blackmore's The meme machine (http://www.amazon.com/Meme-Machine-Popular-Science/dp/019286212X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296232884&sr=8-1), it was interesting for me. Yes, it falls under the "popular science" category, and her pseudo)scientific style could be a bit irritating; but overall there were some interesting ideas. P.S. I did not get the hyper-linking to work for me. I would appreciate some clues :-)

scientismic - a new term?

I find this interesting because it begins the notion of transforming an online content source to a book, and moreover it is built around a social application with the potential for multiple authors. Essentially, Anthologize allows the authors of the blog to take specific posts and generate them into a book. By the way, the developers of this are from the Center for History and New Media, see the next post!

Sherry Turkle's new book is cited.

I have to say with the winter we've had in this country, it is quite wise to plan for emergency closings which keep the kids motivated and learning.

without a question. the key issue, I think, is one of coordination and management.

This is a NY Times article on how co-operative programs (like bike-sharing) are getting a boost from the spirit of collaboration on the web. The piece tries to trend spot "collaborative consumption", a "new" business model. We will have to see what happens.

Transliteracy is defined by Sue Thomas, a professor of new media at De Monfort University, as "the capacity to read, write, and interact across a range of platforms, tools, and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio, and film, to digital social networks."

A already shared some information about this project, but I think that this web site is worth including here too.

This is an article about a British court ruling about privacy, identity and journalism and their lack of privacy on the internet. Strangly this week a US Court ruled on a similar case but said FB statements cannot be used to fire an employee. Interesting the differences in the UK and US rulings.

Zimmer discusses how language will become more technologically mediated.

I think this is an exciting new direction for the column!

I love the note about library closings being equivalent to child abuse!