We used to speak with one another, but now through the convenience of electronics, we can enable a service to do that for us. Or, in the alternative, we may opt out. The point where “sharing” drifts away from pure communication, and toward Aldous Huxley’s searingly prescient vision of thousands of couples simultaneously fornicating in glass houses under spotlights, is what blogger Robert Scoble calls “the Freaky Line.” The ability for Facebook to strategically relocate this line, as it is appearing to do once again with “frictionless sharing,” is described by Scoble as “Zuckerberg’s brilliance.
Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.
Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think
UC Davis’ pepper-spray videos have gone viral around the web, proving citizen journalism can allow us to form our own views of raw footage collected in the thick of it.
Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media giant has been able to create a running log of the web pages that each of its 800 million or so members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook web page for any reason.
PostPost, a powerful, noise-reducing search tool for Twitter, has pushed out some updates that make it even more useful.
The past decade has seen a student-loan binge, so that today Americans owe well over six hundred billion dollars in college debt. That’s a burden that’s hard to carry at a time when more than two million college graduates are unemployed and millions more are underemployed.
We ask our students to be good observers, consider the world carefully and to analyze the implications of what they see. As educators, it’s time we do the same….
When I began teaching a course called “Writing for the Web,” three years ago, I pictured myself scrambling to keep up with my plugged-in, tech-savvy students. I was sure I was in over my head. So I was stunned to discover that most of the 20-year-olds I meet know very little about the Internet, and even less about how to communicate effectively online.
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