Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Earlier this month I spent a week at the National Data Archive for Child Abuse and Neglect investigating the correlation between guardian behaviors (rules, filters, surveillance, etc.) and youth online safety.
I’ve recently become interested in how technology use among youths is regulated within the family. Parents tend to learn about ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010
My paper, "Teens, Tribunes, and Tribulations: Representations of Youth and Technology in Mass Media," is now available for download.
Written last fall for a public sociology class, it examines how essentialist and determinist constructions of youth and technology (of the sort espoused by Bauerlein in my most recent post) act as ...
Posted in Deviance, Technology, Youth | No Comments »
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
Mark Bauerlein is an English professor, moral panic practitioner, technological determinist, and G. Stanley Hall kool aid drinker, as evidenced by his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
These credentials are evidently sufficient for an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | No Comments »
Monday, April 26th, 2010
Facebook is playing a dangerous game with sociological theory.
It was a busy week for Facebook. First they integrated into thirty major websites—such as CNN, Pandora, and Yelp. Now it seems they’re making still more profile content public.
This was evidently what Mark Zuckerberg meant when he declared back in January that ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
From the I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-The-Onion department:
It appears the most eminent tribunal in the land--which is currently hearing a case on privacy and pagers and will no doubt hear many more regarding the political consequences of new technologies--hasn't used anything more advanced than a rotary.
The first sign was about midway through the argument, ...
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
My conference paper written in collaboration with James Witte about adult social network site user characteristics, preferences, and motives is now available for download. Link and abstract below.
Lynn, Randy and James C. Witte. 2010. “Learning to Like Facebook? Social Categories, Social Network Site Selection, and Social Network Site ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
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 ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
CNN takes a look at the MySpace/Facebook class divide:
A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.
More specifically, almost ...
Posted in Technology, Youth | No Comments »
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 »
