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The rise of social platforms and content sharing is driving a major shift in the media industry. Increasingly, people are getting ALL their media through the social web: cute animals, breaking news, personal updates, branded content, humor, jokes, music and entertainment are all mixed together in a single interface.

"I ask us - in journalism and in education (and in journalism education) - to aspire to being services. That requires us to start by thinking of the ends." This is so right. Aspire being services, in education as in journalism, as both activities have so much in common. 

"As streams of information become more popular on the Web, we need better ways to consume and manage them."

"'If it's not talking to each other, it's not a market.' Europe, despite being a political union (of sorts), does not yet feel like a real market. Part of the solution would be to know more about each other, and to talk to each other more often. That's what 'Whiteboard' wants to offer: a place to find information about interesting businesses and innovation, and to talk about it." So yet another DJ journalist, as professor Mark Deuze would say. Raf Weverbergh left the Flemish magazine Humo and started his own venture, Whiteboard.  He won't be the one who is on stage all the time creating his very own content, but rather he invites contributors to talk about entrepreneurship in Europe. Which seems like a great idea, as Europe is not just that doom and gloom continent - but it needs media ventures to talk about its entrepreneurs and to facilitate the conversation between entrepreneurs. So I cannot wait to hear a thousand (or more) entrepreneurial voices on Whiteboard reporting about exciting new things in Europe! 

The famous sociologist Manuel Castells in an interview by Paul Mason (BBC):  "With Facebook and with all these social networks what happened is that we live constantly networked. We live in a culture of not virtual reality, but real virtuality because our virtuality, meaning the internet networks, the images are a fundamental part of our reality. We cannot live outside this construction of ourselves in the networks of communication." Ever wondered why people try to redefine themselves by nationalism, regionalism, membership of small subcultures, even though the world is globalizing fast? I think Castells has some anwers on that too:  "The more we are connected to everything and everybody and every activity, the more we need to know who we are. Unless I know who I am, I don't know where I am in the world, because then I am a consumer, I am taken by the market, I am taken by the media. "And therefore people decide that they are going to be different. But to do that, they have to identify themselves as individuals, as collectives, as nations, as genders, all these categories that sociologists have already constructed time ago." Castells explains how people in this crisis engage in co-operative or non-profit work. It's a kind of 'non-capitalism'.  Putting now on my list: his new book Aftermath. 

An academic study co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life.  Wagner James Au on New World Notes says this is probably also true for other virtual environments, not onlt for Second Life. He also points to the bigger question of the shifting boundaries between virtual and real.  Social media help extend immersive experiences to so-called real world networks. Virtual money is convertible in real money, and solidarity actions for real world issues can start out in virtual environments.  Manuel Castells says we live in a cultural of virtual reality - I think the deconstruction of the boundaries between real and virtual is becoming fairly obvious. Virtual is not some exclusive feature of 3D environments, and reality is ever more being augmented and digitally annotated.

Really thought-provoking talk from danah boyd, primarily about how in the competition for attention we want to promote fear, and that social media perpetuates this.

The accelerating rate of change in many fields of technology all manifest themselves in terms of human development, some of which can be accurately tracked within economic data.  Contrary to what the media may peddle and despite periodic setbacks, average human prosperity is rising at a rate faster than any other time in human history.  

"Our group designs new interfaces that integrate digital content in people's lives in more fluid and seamless ways. Our aim is to make it easier and more intuitive to benefit from the wealth of useful digital information and services. " Pattie Maes and her group at MIT, lots of fascinating projects here, often making me think 'why isn't this ubiquitous right now already?' One of the reasons might be 'the economy, stupid' - like the idea of being able to swipe a file from one mobile app to another, seamlessly.  But eventually we'll get there. The future is fluid.