"I'm not exactly sure who made being a "personal brand" a thing on the Internet, but I'd really like to sit down with them and ask them why they thought that it was a good idea. You see, an entire ecosystem of people looking to make money have cropped up around this notion of helping people become a "brand." Honestly, it's bull, and I'd like to see it stop. Why is it bull? Because unless you're Kim Kardashian and have a line of clothes or stinky fragrances, you are not a brand. You are a person."
"The Internet affords children endless opportunities to get into serious trouble, downloading what they shouldn't download, looking at what they shouldn't be looking at, and getting ideas about what they shouldn't be getting ideas about.
But the good news is that if your kids are like mine, they may be doing some or all of those things... but there's another use for the Internet that's attracting their time and attention.
It's called teaching."
"Facebook "likes" are being added to webpages even if a user has not clicked a like button, or even visited the page in question, the company has admitted.
A US security researcher found that simply sending a web address to a friend using Facebook's private messaging function would add two likes to that page.
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"There are a lot of gadgets out there, right? Shiny new products with fun, useful, or amazing capabilities are being churned out at quite the clip. They're available for use in workplaces, schools, and at home, and the scope of what we can do with all these neat devices is only expanding. So, we know that students are connected - Very Connected. They have computers, smartphones, tablets, and a variety of devices in between. But just how connected are they? And what does this mean for teachers?"
"I love being a scholar, but one thing that really depresses me about research is that so much of what scholars produce is rendered inaccessible to so many people who might find it valuable, inspiring, or thought-provoking. This is at the root of what drives my commitment to open-access. When Zizi Papacharissi asked Nancy Baym and I if we'd be willing to guest edit the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM), we agreed under one condition: the issue had to be open-access (OA). Much to our surprise and delight, Taylor and Francis agreed to "test" that strange and peculiar OA phenomenon by allowing us to make this issue OA.
Nancy and I decided to organize the special issue around "socially mediated publicness," both because we find that topic to be of great interest and because we felt like there was something fun about talking about publicness in truly public form. We weren't sure what the response to our call would be, but were overwhelmed with phenomenal submissions and had to reject many interesting articles.
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"An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that's not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.
Rather than characterizing them as hapless drones wasting time, Rheingold's book contends that this massive population of gamers is part of a growing group of "supercollaborators," as described by Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, who's interviewed in the book."
"Who created the Internet and why should we care? These questions, so often raised during the Bush-Gore election in 2000, have found their way back into the political debate this season - starting with one of the most cited texts of the preconvention campaign, Obama's so-called "you didn't build that" speech. "The Internet didn't get invented on its own," Obama argued, in the lines that followed his supposed gaffe. "Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet." In other words: business uses the Internet, but government made it happen."