Lessig reviews The Social Network movie - the results are interesting, but at the same time reveal a lot about the reviewer in addition to the topic reviewed.
Shirky isn't concerned with what's on TV. What galls him is how much we watch, regardless of what's on. Television, he writes in "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age," has "absorbed the lion's share of the free time available to citizens of the developed world."
From August 2010: "The Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday that a California marketing company had settled charges that it engaged in deceptive advertising by having its employees write and post positive reviews of clients' games in the Apple iTunes Store, without disclosing that they were being paid to do so.
"Over the summer, the On-line and Electronic Subcommitee of the Strategic Communication Committee considered official Facebook use. Out of that review, Web Administration worked with UF's General Counsel to craft a policy that accommodates the new opportunities available with the need to maintain a professional presentation and message."
"To those who Twitter, the reporter who investigates a story before offering it to the public must also seem tediously ruminant. On Twitter, the notes become the story, devoid of even five minutes of reflection on the writer's way to the computer. I can see that there are times -an airplane landing in the Hudson, a presidential election in Iran-when this type of impromptu journalism becomes a necessity, and an exciting one at that. Luckily, reporters still exist to make sense of information bytes and expand upon them for readers-but for how much longer?"
Social networks typically promise to remove "personally identifying information" before sharing this data, to protect users' privacy. But researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have found that, combined with readily available data from other online sources, this anonymized data can still reveal sensitive information about users.