From Clive Thompson’s “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” (The New York Times Magazine: 5 September 2008):
In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
Social scientists have a name for this [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
photo credit: Oude School
From John Cloud’s “Why Girls Have BFFs and Boys Hang Out in Packs” (TIME: 17 July 2009):
For the better part of the past half-century, feminists, their opponents and armies of academics have debated the differences between men and women. Only in the past few years have scientists been able to [...]
Posted on July 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From “List of confidence tricks” (Wikipedia: 3 July 2009):
Get-rich-quick schemes
Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied. For example, fake franchises, real estate “sure things”, get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, Nigerian money scams, charms and talismans are all used to separate the mark from his [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, science, security | No Comments »
photo credit: 708718
From Annie Karni’s “Gabbing Taxi Drivers Talking on ‘Party Lines’” (The New York Sun: 11 January 2007):
It’s not just wives at home or relatives overseas that keep taxi drivers tied up on their cellular phones during work shifts. Many cabbies say that when they are chatting on duty, it’s often with their [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, politics, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Certain properties are core to social media in a combination that alters how people engage with one another. I want to discuss five properties of social media and three dynamics. These are the [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
For American teenagers, social network sites became a social hangout space, not unlike the malls in which I grew up or the dance halls of yesteryears. This was a place to gather with [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Many who build technology think that a technology’s feature set is the key to its adoption and popularity. With social media, this is often not the case. There are triggers that drive early [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009):
The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the solution [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From The Economist’s “Primates on Facebook” (26 February 2009):
Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” (danah boyd: 24 June 2007):
When MySpace launched in 2003, it was primarily used by 20/30-somethings (just like Friendster before it). The bands began populating the site by early 2004 and throughout 2004, the average age slowly declined. It wasn’t until late 2004 that teens [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, politics, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman (Edge: 14 April 2004):
So far, his surmise is that “respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites” (First Monday: December 2006)
John’s reference to “gateway Friends” concerns a specific technological affordance unique to Friendster. Because the company felt it would make the site more intimate, Friendster limits users from surfing to Profiles beyond four degrees (Friends [...]
Posted on December 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Facebook’s ‘Privacy Trainwreck’: Exposure, Invasion, and Drama” (8 September 2006):
Why does everyone assume that Friends equals friends? Here are some of the main reasons why people friend other people on social network sites:
1. Because they are actual friends
2. To be nice to people that you barely [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, social software | No Comments »
Back in November 2002, a bunch of us went camping in a cabin in the woods. Around midnight, we were sitting around the fire, talking. The subject of crime came up, specifically the statute of limitations.
Scott: I think the statute of limitations doesn’t apply only in cases of murder and rape.
Denise: That’s right.
Scott: What about [...]
Posted on November 23rd, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: overheard | Comments Off
Joe Freeman & I were at a party at Jans & Sarah’s. He announced to me that his company had just decided on a new name: Iron Jelly.
"Why that name?" I asked.
Joe explained, "Well, I was looking through a list of words, and I went down the list until I saw two next to [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: overheard, true stories | Comments Off
