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Santiago Swallow is "a Mexican-born, American motivational speaker, consultant, educator, and author, whose speeches and publications focus on understanding modern culture in the age of social networking, globally interconnected media, user generated content and the Internet," and has "dedicated himself to helping others know more about how media and personality can manipulated in the 21st Century." Though completely fictional, he boasts a Wikipedia biography and a Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers. Making up-or at least "enhancing"-an identity like this is something real people do to increase their reputation, look popular, and sell themselves. There are equally real people who profit from this by selling fake followers created by software at the push of a button. Be afraid.

Twitter - the social network where users write tweets of 140 characters is changing how poets and novelists write. They are being forced to strip down language to its bare minimum.

With the spread of mobile technology, it's become much easier for more people to maintain constant contact with their social networks online. And a lot of people are taking advantage of that opportunity. One indication: A recent Pew Research survey of adults in the U.S.

Fascinating article on language learning using an app called Memrise. The company's goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything. Two takeaways for language learning, and acquiring and retaining any subject matter: 1. Elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you'll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind's eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it'll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote. Create mnemonics for vocabulary. 2. "Spaced repetition". Cognitive scientists have known for more than a century that the best way to secure memories for the long term is to impart them in repeated sessions, distributed across time, with other material interleaved in between. If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in. One study found that students studying foreign language vocabulary can get just as good long-term retention from having learning sessions spaced out every two months as from having twice as many learning sessions spaced every two weeks. To put that another way: you can learn the same material in half the total time if you don't try to cram.

Botched autocorrects are a byproduct of a technological convenience that allows typing on the go, even when the message does not always come out as planned. Yet as autocorrect technology has become more advanced, so have its errors. Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists - or "natural language programmers," as they are known - to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture. And they can do amazing things: correct when you hit the wrong keys (the "fat finger" phenomenon) and analyze whom you are texting, how you have spoken with that person in the past, even what you've talked about. Apple's iOS 8 operating system, released in September, even purports to know how your tone changes by medium - that is, "the casual style" you may use in texting versus "the more formal language" you are likely to use in email, as the company put it in a statement. It adjusts for whom you are communicating with, knowing that your choice of words with a buddy is probably more laid-back than it would be with your boss. Your smartphone may now be able to suggest not just words but entire phrases. And the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, the structure of your sentences and tone.

An article explaining how technology affects teenagers social communication and friendships

Artificial intelligence can make adults nervous, but experts say exploring it as a family is the best way to understand its pros and cons. It's important to understand how a chatbot works, employing a "neural network": a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. The chatbot works by scraping the internet for digital text or images. It gathers information from a variety of places, including websites, social media platforms and databases, but it does not necessarily choose the most reliable sources. In other words, even though chatbots may appear authoritative, rigorous and trustworthy, they are not always reliable and can produce content that is offensive, racist, biased, outdated, incorrect or simply inappropriate.