Messages Galore, but No Time to Think - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“Nobody can think anymore because they’re constantly interrupted,” said Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor and author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “Technology has enabled this expectation that we always be on.”
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To lessen the disruptive nature of e-mail and other messages, teams need to discuss how to alter their work process to allow blocks of time where they can disconnect entirely,
A Million First Dates - Dan Slater - The Atlantic - 0 views
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. In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice, the psychologist Barry Schwartz indicts a society that “sanctifies freedom of choice so profoundly that the benefits of infinite options seem self-evident.” On the contrary, he argues, “a large array of options may diminish the attractiveness of what people actually choose, the reason being that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.”
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Psychologists who study relationships say that three ingredients generally determine the strength of commitment: overall satisfaction with the relationship; the investment one has put into it (time and effort, shared experiences and emotions, etc.); and the quality of perceived alternatives. Two of the three—satisfaction and quality of alternatives—could be directly affected by the larger mating pool that the Internet offers.
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as the range of options grows larger, mate-seekers are liable to become “cognitively overwhelmed,” and deal with the overload by adopting lazy comparison strategies and examining fewer cues. As a result, they are more likely to make careless decisions than they would be if they had fewer options,
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A Million First Dates - Dan Slater - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The positive aspects of online dating are clear: the Internet makes it easier for single people to meet other single people with whom they might be compatible, raising the bar for what they consider a good relationship. But what if online dating makes it too easy to meet someone new? What if it raises the bar for a good relationship too high? What if the prospect of finding an ever-more-compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, in which we keep chasing the elusive rabbit around the dating track?
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the rise of online dating will mean an overall decrease in commitment.
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I often wonder whether matching you up with great people is getting so efficient, and the process so enjoyable, that marriage will become obsolete.”
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Virtually Emotional « The Dish - 0 views
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I don’t see online interaction as easily separable from real-life human interaction any more. We spend more and more time communicating with one another virtually rather than physically. But these communications are still between human beings, with all our foibles and needs and crushes and hatreds and, if we’re lucky, wit and humor. We do not cease being human online; but we do wear a kind of mask, concealing some things, revealing others – whether on a blog or a hook-up app or a list-serv or a Facebook wall. And if you spend more hours a day communicating that way, you haven’t stopped living. You’re actually slowly becoming another person on top of your regular self.
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This is the current reality for a lot of us. We meet many more people virtually than on the street or in our physical daily lives. We also get to know them more. The anonymity of the web can allow people not just to trash talk in a way they wouldn’t in real life but to sext and love-talk with strangers they’ve only seen pictures of. Some of this may actually be more authentic an expression of ourselves than anything we have the courage to say to someone’s face.
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the more time we live virtually, the more we will reproduce aspects of our pre-virtual life online. Including love. And this strange, amazing story was about love, not sex. It was about a panicked, conflicted young gay man knowing he would be rebuffed by his straight crush and setting up a fantasy where he could become a virtual woman to have a relationship with him.
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55555, or, How to Laugh Online in Other Languages - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 0 views
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So, how do you laugh, on the Internet, in other languages?
Coursera Plans to Announce University Partners for Online Classes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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John Doerr, a Kleiner investment partner, said via e-mail that he saw a clear business model: “Yes. Even with free courses. From a community of millions of learners some should ‘opt in’ for valuable, premium services. Those revenues should fund investment in tools, technology and royalties to faculty and universities.”
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Previously he said he had been involved with Stanford’s effort to put academic lectures online for viewing. But he noted that there was evidence that the newer interactive systems provided much more effective learning experiences.
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Coursera and Udacity are not alone in the rush to offer mostly free online educational alternatives. Start-up companies like Minerva and Udemy, and, separately, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have recently announced similar platforms.
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Couples and Dating | Men's Health - 0 views
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in the world of online dating, frivolous similarities really do matter. When researchers at MIT tracked 65,000 online daters for a 2005 study, they observed "significant homophily." Translation: You're typically interested in someone just like you, who likes the same things you do.
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Finding a decent signal amid all this noise takes work. This is one of the market failures of window-shopping for soul mates, writes behavioral economist Dan Ariely, Ph.D., author of The Upside of Irrationality. He cites this finding from University of Chicago research: A typical online dater spends an average of 12 hours a week screening but only 2 hours dating. Not a good return.
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All my wife's likes and dislikes—the ones I've had to learn over time—are right there on the screen for some other guy to capitalize on. To make her short list, all he has to do is declare, "Me too!"
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Deconstructing the Creepiness of the 'Girls Around Me' App-and What Facebook Could Do A... - 0 views
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Cult of Mac had a fascinating, stomach-churning story about an application called Girls Around Me that scraped public Foursquare and Facebook checkins onto a map that showed people in your vicinity. Its branding was crass -- "In the mood for love, or just after a one-night stand? Girls Around Me puts you in control!" -- but, as the developers of the app argued, they had technically done nothing wrong aside from being piggish and crude.
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They took publicly available data and put it on a map. The sexysexy frame they put around it made it *seem* creepier, but in terms of the data they accessed and presented, everything was within the rules of the game. They had done nothing that couldn't be done by another app developer.
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This is basically how app ecosystems working with data from Foursquare and Facebook and Twitter are supposed to work. Some people out there get an idea for something that the main services had never thought of and they build it out of whatever data is available.
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Coursekit Raises $5 Million to Reinvent the Classroom - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Coursekit is a new tool that lets teachers and educators create mini social networks around individual courses and lectures.
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The goal of the service, said Joseph Cohen, its co-founder and chief executive, is to take some of the most successful elements of social networking — especially the fluid exchange of ideas that comes natural to online interactions — to revitalize the education experience. Students are already accustomed to interacting online and supplementing their daily lives with the Web and social media. Why should that stop when it comes to learning? “Our education experience is truly offline,” he said. “We want to build what Facebook has done for your personal life, but for your school.”
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Using Coursekit’s software, teachers can upload homework assignments, answer questions, grade work and facilitate discussions with their students. In addition, students can use the software to chat with one another, collaborate on projects and share relevant materials with their classmates
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Does Technology Affect Happiness? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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How is technology affecting their happiness and emotional development?
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The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls ages 8 to 12, is that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.
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Among the crucial questions that the researchers were not able to answer is whether the heavy use of media was the cause for the relative unhappiness or whether girls who are less happy to begin with are drawn to heavy use of media, in effect retreating to a virtual world.
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Anti-vaccine activists, 9/11 deniers, and Google's social search. - Slate Magazine - 1 views
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democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories
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Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.
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Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.
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How The Internet Enables Lies - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 1 views
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the ease of self-publishing and search afforded by the Internet along with a growing skeptical stance towards scientific expertise—has given the anti-vaccination movement a significant boost
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She regularly shares her "knowledge" about vaccination with her nearly half-million Twitter followers. This is the kind of online influence that Nobel Prize-winning scientists can only dream of; Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous working scientist, has only 300,000 Twitter followers.
Christine Rosen: The Machine And The Ghost | The New Republic - 0 views
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Ultimately, the goal of creators of Ambient Intelligence and persuasive technologies and the Internet of Things is not merely to offer context-aware, adaptive, personalized responses in real time, but to divine future needs. As one contributor to The New Everyday noted, eventually these technologies will “anticipate your desires without conscious mediation.”
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The challenge for ethicists such as Verbeek is whether a society composed of “smart” cities like Songdo might also bring an increase in moral laziness and a decline in individual freedom. Freedom is a hollow promise in the absence of agency and choice.
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these technologies also undermine a crucial (albeit often maligned) human quality: self-deception. Self-deception is inefficient. It causes problems. It makes things messy—which is why our technologists would like us to replace it with the seemingly greater honesty of data that, once processed, promise to know us better than we know ourselves. But being human is a messy business; and exercising judgment and self-control, and learning the complicated social norms that signal acceptable behavior, are the very things that make us human.
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Online Medical Advice Can Be a Prescription for Fear - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the medical Web, which is dominated by an enormous and powerful site whose name — oh, what the hay, it’s WebMD — has become a panicky byword among laysurfers for “hypochondria time suck.” In more whistle-blowing quarters, WebMD is synonymous with Big Pharma Shilling.
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A February 2010 investigation into WebMD’s relationship with drug maker Eli Lilly by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa confirmed the suspicions of longtime WebMD users. With the site’s (admitted) connections to pharmaceutical and other companies, WebMD has become permeated with pseudomedicine and subtle misinformation.
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WebMD is a corporation that started as an ad-supported health-alarmism site with revenues of $504 million in 2010
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