Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Friday, March 5th, 2010
I like the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Their surveys are reliable and well-constructed, and they've collected tons of publicly available data over the past 10 years.
Their public relations, though, doesn't approach the quality of their methods. Exhibit A: thorough takedowns of last month's "just-this-side-of-moral-crusading...soft ball pitch to those ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | No Comments »
Friday, February 12th, 2010
No real commentary here, just a fun visualization tool I found on Pete Warden's blog using the 210 million public Facebook profiles he's harvested. Hover or click on each country or city to see the most frequent friend locations, most popular fan pages, and most common names.
In another post, he ...
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Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
The Harvard Business Review recently published the above map in an article attempting to locate MySpace's centers of activity. The colors represent relative rates of use: red states have 20% or more MySpace logins than we'd expect from their populations of Internet users, and orange states have 10-20% more. Dark ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
ReadWriteWeb, via iStrategyLabs:
How fickle are kids these days? Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking ...
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Monday, June 15th, 2009
[An uncredited photo from the Iranian government's assault on Tehran University.]
I've been riveted to the ongoing revolt in Iran. While many mainstream media outlets dropped the ball initially, even those few with brave reporters on the ground have been hampered by a foreign media crackdown. Much of the news is ...
Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
Teens and Texting (New York Times, 5/26/09)
Step 1: Select an act, norm, or condition to become stigmatized. The group or subculture primarily associated with this topic should ideally have little to no political power, and already be associated with other deviant behaviors (e.g., teenagers).
Step 2: Write a title stating the ...
Posted in Deviance, Technology, Youth | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
My thesis, Learning to Like Facebook? Effects of Cultural and Educational Capital on the Use of Social Network Sites in a Population of University Students, is now available for download.
Abstract: This study explores the reasons why university students prefer to join or participate frequently in one social network website (SNS) ...
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Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
David Gibson at the Complexity and Social Networks Blog hypothesizes about Facebook and (anti) social capital:
I predict that we will eventually want to add something that I am tempted to call anti-social capital, which is a snarky (and imprecise) term for the absence of ties of a certain type, namely ...
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Saturday, February 14th, 2009
MySpace: 90,000 Sex Offenders Removed from Site
When I think of the attitudinal outlook driving moral panics, I think of my experience working as a technology assistant at a one-to-one laptop high school at the height of the MySpace/Facebook sexual predator panic from 2004-2006.
The school organized a series of informational sessions ...
Posted in Deviance, Technology, Youth | No Comments »
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
Last night, with eyes sagging and sinuses hanging out of my nose, I nevertheless spent hours customizing a new iPhone.
Tools like that fascinate me, and not just because I can play Katamari on them. It's clear that our society's most beloved toys are progressing toward holding more and more data, ...
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