By the Numbers: How the Digital Revolution Changed Our World

[Stuart]

Although creating a new thread just for this seemed kinda stupid, there's really no good place to put it otherwise.

When it comes to American media habits, not even Bob Dylan could have predicted the digital revolution of the past 10 years. The growth of blogs, e-mails, and music downloads has exceeded all expectations--though some old-media favorites have fared surprisingly well.

Check it out!

[jee]

hmmm so have got you?
Have many many interesting articles that can go here...

[jee]

addictive nature of technology

[Stuart]

Funny or Die: How the Web Is Changing Comedy

[jee]

dysgraphia

[Stuart]

Are Hyperlocal News Sites Replacing Newspapers?

[jee]

Phone companies know where their customers' cellphones are, often within a radius of less than 100 feet. That tracking technology has rescued lost drivers, helped authorities find kidnap victims and let parents keep tabs on their kids.

But the technology isn't always used the way the phone company intends.

One morning last summer, Glenn Helwig threw his then-wife to the floor of their bedroom in Corpus Christi, Texas, she alleged in police reports. She packed her 1995 Hyundai and drove to a friend's home, she recalled recently. She didn't expect him to find her.

The day after she arrived, she says, her husband "all of a sudden showed up." According to police reports, he barged in and knocked her to the floor, then took off with her car.

The police say in a report that Mr. Helwig found his wife using a service offered by his cellular carrier, which enabled him to follow her movements through the global-positioning-system chip contained in her cellphone.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 44234.html

[Tribble]

That is really not good for abused women. They will have to ditch their cellphones or contact the companies and tell them not to track them.

[jee]

Do you think the companies will listen? Particularly if the account is in the husbands name....

[jee]

Hmmm, to get back to the tracking - not just cells, but one's online activities - "HTML cookies," "Flash cookies" and "beacons."

[jee]

Behind that analysis are years of computer-science research into artificial intelligence and the understanding of human language — now being mobilized in the service of tracking consumers on the Internet. After Lotame collects a Web user’s words, it sends the text to a U.K. company called OpenAmplify. OpenAmplify’s software reads the content and determines what the writer was saying — what topics are being discussed, how the author feels about those topics, and what the person is going to do about them.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/30/ ... ave-typed/

[Stuart]

Do you have a job? While at work, how often are you surfing social media sites such as Facebook, or Twitter? Chances are the answers to those questions are yes, and very. If so, you could be costing your company quite a bit of cash, reports show.

UK research group.MyJobGroup.co.uk, (through polling) discovered that 2 million of Britain's 34 million workforce spent more than one hour on social media sites throughout their workday. And that 55 percent admit to accessing those same sites. That time lost (1/8 of the workday) could potentially be costing British industries upwards of 14 billion pounds ($22.16 billion).

While more than half of employees admit to entering the sites as part of their daily dealings, many discount the impact that's having, as polling also has indicated only 14% admitted reduced productivity in consequence. Astoundingly, 10% of those polled even claimed a boost in productivity.

When limiting social media access at work is suggested, definite resistance is the result. Two thirds would not approve of limiting access to social media sites at work. But Managing Director of Myjobgroup.co.uk, Lee Fayer offers, “Whilst we're certainly not kill-joys, people spending over an hour per day in work time on the likes of Facebook and Twitter are seriously hampering companies' efforts to boost productivity, which is more important than ever given the fragile state of our economy. Companies would do well to monitor use of social networking sites during work hours and ensure that their employees are not abusing their freedom of access to these sites."

While Fayer makes a point, Newsfeed wonders, how would you feel if Facebook access were denied at your office?

[Stuart]

Girl Publicly Outs Boss for Playing “FarmVille” at Work

[Stuart]

Reading in a Whole New Way

[jee]

Losing our "RAM"?

“The expectation of e-mail seems to be taking up our working memory,” [Johns Hopkins professor Steven] Yantis says.

[Stuart]

Who's in the blogosphere?

[Tribble]

Wow - so mainly self employed, educated men between 34 and 60 blog. Interesting.

[Stuart]

America's favorite boy genius, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, has announced a new form of messaging. E-mail, the last Internet link to traditional, epistolary, interpersonal communication, is, he said, outmoded. Young people, by which he meant younger than his own 26 years, desired something more nimble for their iPads, mobile phones and other devices. What he proposed was a "social inbox" where users could readily access messages from friends and then sort them — sort of a cross between instant messaging and Twitter.

We are so accustomed by now to declarations of new technological revolutions that another one hardly gets noticed, especially when it comes to finding new ways of minimizing how we communicate with each other. And it is entirely possible that this proposed geological change will be no more geological than all those other alleged game-changers. But whether his messaging system really transforms how people communicate or not, Zuckerberg issued what amounts to a manifesto that in its own terse way conveys what is already altering our lives — not only how we interact but also how we think and feel. It may even challenge the very idea of serious ideas. Call it Zuckerberg's Revolution.

It qualifies as a revolution because how we communicate largely defines what we communicate. You know: "The medium is the message." When Johannes Gutenberg invented the first movable-type printing press, it was rightly considered one of the signal moments in human history. By allowing books to be mass produced, Gutenberg's press had the immediate effect of disseminating ideas far and wide, but it also had the more powerful and less immediate effect of changing the very construction of thought — through typography.

The social theorist Marshall McLuhan, in his book "The Gutenberg Galaxy," posited that the printing press resulted in what he called "typographic man" — humans with a new consciousness shaped by the non-visual, non-auditory culture of print. He felt that print's uniformity, its immutability, its rigidity, its logic led to a number of social transformations, among which were the rise of rationalism and of the scientific method. In facilitating reason, print also facilitated complex ideas. It was no accident that it coincided with the Renaissance. Print made us think better or, at least, with greater discipline. In effect, the printing press created the modern mind.
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Writing scarcely 20 years after McLuhan, in 1985, Neil Postman, in his path-breaking book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," saw the handwriting — or rather the images — on the wall. He lamented the demise of print under the onslaught of the visual, thanks largely to television. Like McLuhan, Postman felt that print culture helped create thought that was rational, ordered and engaging, and he blamed TV for making us mindless. Print not only welcomed ideas, it was essential to them. Television not only repelled ideas, it was inimical to them.

One wonders what Postman — who died the same year Facebook's precursor went online — would have thought of Zuckerberg's Revolution. Facebook is still typographically dependent. Its messages are basically printed notes. But contradicting Postman, these bits of print are no more hospitable to real ideas than the television culture Postman reviled. Indeed, in making his "social inbox" announcement, Zuckerberg introduced seven principles that he said were the basis of communication 2.0. Messages have to be seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short.

As Zuckerberg no doubt recognizes, these principles are all of a piece. The seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short communication is not one that is likely to convey, let alone work out, ideas, great or not. Facebook, Twitter, Habbo, MyLife and just about every other social networking site pare everything down to noun and verb and not much more. The sites, and the information on them, billboard our personal blathering, the effluvium of our lives, and they wind up not expanding the world but shrinking it to our own dimensions. You could call this a metaphor for modern life, increasingly narcissistic and trivial, except that the sites and the posts are modern life for hundreds of millions of people.

Which is where the revolutionary aspect comes in. Gutenberg's Revolution transformed the world by broadening it, by proliferating ideas. Zuckerberg's Revolution also may change consciousness, only this time by razing what Gutenberg had helped erect. The more we text and Twitter and "friend," abiding by the haiku-like demands of social networking, the less likely we are to have the habit of mind or the means of expressing ourselves in interesting and complex ways.

That makes Zuckerberg the anti-Gutenberg. He has facilitated a typography in which complexity is all but impossible and meaninglessness reigns supreme. To the extent that ideas matter, we are no longer amusing ourselves to death. We are texting ourselves to death.

Ideas, of course, will survive, but more and more they will live at the margins of culture; more and more they will be a private reserve rather than a general fund. Meanwhile, everything at the cultural center militates against the sort of serious engagement that McLuhan described and that Postman celebrated.

McLuhan understood that print would eventually give way to electronic media, and that these new media would create his famous "global village," though it is nevertheless ironic that typography, which he thought engendered isolation, would in digital form lead to tens of millions of people calling themselves "friends."

Postman was more apocalyptic. He believed that a reading society was also a thinking society. No real reading, no real thought. Still, he couldn't have foreseen that a reading society in which print that was overwhelmingly seamless, informal, personal, short et al would be a society in which that kind of reading would force thought out — a society in which tens of millions of people feel compelled to tell tens of millions of other people that they are eating a sandwich or going to a movie or watching a TV show. So Zuckerberg's Revolution has a corollary that one might call Zuckerberg's Law: Empty communications drive out significant ones.

Gutenberg's Revolution left us with a world that was intellectually rich. Zuckerberg's portends one that is all thumbs and no brains.

LA Times source

[Stuart]

Anatomy of a Fake Quotation: An interesting insight into how a middle school English teacher's words were ascribed to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ms. Dovey, a 24-year old Penn State graduate who now teaches English to middle schoolers in Kobe, Japan, posted a very timely and moving thought on her Facebook status, and then followed it up with the Martin Luther King Jr. quote.

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." MLK Jr.

At some point, someone cut and pasted the quote, and--for reasons that I, appropriately chastened, will not speculate on--stripped out the quotation marks. Eventually, the mangled quotation somehow came to the attention of Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame. He tweeted it to his 1.6 million Facebook followers, and the rest was internet history. Twenty-four hours later, the quote brought back over 9,000 hits on Google.

More

[Stuart]

Victims of Data Overload

After weeks of survey research, it turns out--the bounty and abundance of web data is out of control. As Google's Eric Schmidt has been quoted, from the beginning of time to 2003, we created 5 Exabytes of data. We're now creating that every two days--and it's accelerating.

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[thEnaileDonE]

Victims of Data Overload... awesome (and very scary) article...