I posted the brief which has links to the original Google study and Nicholas Carr's underwhelmed response because the summary is nice and easy to digest plus if you wish to delve further you can. Basically Google challenged students in a library versus those using Google to answer 'random' questions- Nicholas Carr responds- " How did the University of Michigan researchers come up with the questions that they had their subjects find answers to? They "obtained a random sample of 2515 queries from a major search engine." Ha! Maybe the question we should be asking, not of Google but of ourselves, is what types of questions the Net is encouraging us to ask. Should human thought be gauged by its output or by its quality? That question might actually propel one into the musty depths of a library, where "time saved" is not always the primary concern".

Interesting talk- makes a good counter-argument to those who only see social media and the internet as disconnecting us or increasing depression. Like my best friend I can see clearly how the internet and having a 'voice' can be helpful :)

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. "

Interesting article from The Economist about applying distributive creativity and group piecework to journalism. "Under the rubric "My Boss Is a Robot" they are testing whether it is possible to draw on the sort of distributed creativity that the internet has made possible-and faddish-to perform the equivalent of journalistic piecework. To start with, the group has chosen to bash out the kind of article with which Babbage is all too familiar: a write-up of a newly released scientific research paper. Rather than assign the task as a whole to a single person, their system will try to tease apart and outsource different elements of analysis and production."

Interesting considering the role social networking played

I found this through Kevin Kelly's website. "Quantified Self 2011 is a conference for users and tool makers interested in self-tracking systems. It will be a "working meeting" for the QS community (14 groups worldwide), where we will gather, inspire, and learn from each other as we share and collaborate on self-tracking projects. We will also explore the potential effects of self-tracking on ourselves and society."

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.

I discovered this center from reading this blogger ( http://www.michaeltyworth.com/blog/social-informatics/ ) Sounds pretty neat though I can't pretend to understand most of this I did like the approach - "We have all this incredible amount of information, but we don't have knowledge. What we're trying to do is focus on the problem of transforming energy-sensor and other information-into knowledge."

Discussion of our over-use of generalizations when talking about social media's effects.

I have used Marcus P. Zillman as a resource in previous papers for school so I was intrigued when I saw this HUGE list of social informatics and networking websites that he had compiled. He also writes for LLRX a highly regarded Law Librarian e-zine here: http://www.llrx.com/authors/398

Blogs, associations, technical websites and basically Steve Sawyer's list of most helpful websites on this topic. What I find most useful is that having been sort of a pioneer in SI having his recommendations makes me feel that these sites are more useful than ones I might find on my own or at least a good place to start.

For some reason the link doesn't take me to the page so I copied and pasted it. Nice find! I highly recommend anyone looking at this to click on the Graphical Representation here: http://www.social-informatics.org/uploadi/editor/1158776249plakat%20ENG1.pdf which is on the page. I think it made me realize just how much more interested I am in the first category (social interaction).