Tag: facebook

Digital Media · Human-ities · Social/Politics · Videos

THE END OF FACEBOOK. I know you know…Just reiterating.

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Sure, at this point we just continue with Facebook because it is interesting to see the collapse of a city, we were brought into, from within.

“It is very unnerving to be proven wrong, particularly when you are really right and the person who is really wrong is proving you wrong and proving himself, wrongly, right.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“It is not truth that matters, but victory.”
― Adolf Hitler

Art/Aesthetics · Book-Text-Read-Zines · Digital Media · Technology · Theory

Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art

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The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials.

Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.

Text and Image via Bloomsbury

Human-ities · Philosophy · Technology · Theory

What Is the Social in Social Media?

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New York city police supply a generator so that victims of hurricane Sandy can charge their cell phones.

Headlines, 2012: “Next time you’re hiring, forget personality tests, just check out the applicant’s Facebook profile instead.” – “Stephanie Watanabe spent nearly four hours Thursday night unfriending about 700 of her Facebook friends—and she isn’t done yet” – “Facebook apology or jail time: Ohio man gets to choose” – “Study: Facebook users getting less friendly” – “Women tend to have stronger feelings regarding who has access to their personal information” (Mary Madden) – “All dressed up and no place to go” (Wall Street Journal) – “I’m making more of an effort to be social these days, because I don’t want to be alone, and I want to meet people” (Cindy Sherman) – “30 percent posted updates that met the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for a symptom of depression, reporting feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness, insomnia or sleeping too much, and difficulty concentrating” – Control your patients: “Do you hire someone in the clinic to look at Facebook all day?” Dr. Moreno asked. “That’s not practical and borders on creepy.” – “Hunt for Berlin police officer pictured giving Nazi salute on Facebook” – “15-year-old takes to Facebook to curse and complain about her parents. The disgusted father later blasts her laptop with a gun.”

The use of the word “social” in the context of information technology goes back to the very beginnings of cybernetics. It later pops up in the 1980s context of “groupware.” The recent materialist school of Friedrich Kittler and others dismissed the use of the word “social” as irrelevant fluff—what computers do is calculate, they do not interfere in human relations. Holistic hippies, on the other hand, have ignored this cynical machine knowledge and have advanced a positive, humanistic view that emphasizes computers as tools for personal liberation. This individualistic emphasis on interface design, usability, and so on was initially matched with an interest in the community aspect of computer networking. Before the “dot-com” venture capitalist takeover of the field in the second half of the 1990s, progressive computing was primarily seen as a tool for collaboration among people.

Text and Image via e-flux. Written by Geert Lovink. Continue HERE

Rand Corporation think tank employees brainstorming, 1958. CA, Santa Monica, US. Photo: Leonard Mccombe.

Design · Paint/Illust./Mix-Media

Facebook Psychology

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Human-ities · Science

Is Mythology Like Facebook?

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How can you tell if an ancient story is completely fictional or based on reality? One method, says a team of physicists, is to map out the social network of the characters and test whether it looks like a real social network. When they used that method for three ancient myths, they found that the characters have surprisingly realistic relationships.

Ancient stories are called myths for a reason. No one believes that Beowulf, the hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic, slew a talking monster named Grendel. Or that the Greek gods described in The Iliad actually appeared on Earth to intervene in the Trojan War. But historians and archaeologists agree that much of those ancient narratives was based on real people and events. The supernatural features of the narrative were then layered onto reality.

Excerpt of an article written by John Bohannon, Science NOW. Continue HERE

Bio · Digital Media · Technology · Vital-Edible-Health

Facebook, Twitter Activate Brain’s Reward Regions

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Many people constantly update about their lives on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter mainly because of the “kicks” that self-disclosure offers, according to a new Harvard study.

The study found that sharing personal information is as good as eating food or even having sex. The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), regions that are associated with reward, were active when people talked about themselves.

Continue article at Medical Daily

Human-ities · Technology

Mummified Bodies and Glowing Computer Screens. Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?

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Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.

The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.

Excerpt of an article written by Stephen Marche, The Atlantic. Continue HERE
Above Image: Phillip Toledano.
Title of this post by Katie Fahey.

Bio · Human-ities · Science · Technology

Enemy me on Facebook: In a friend-obsessed world, research is uncovering real benefits to having a nemesis

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No one wants an enemy. Few things could be more stressful and potentially damaging: We dread the nemesis vying for the same job, a rival business trying to steal customers, or the opposing sports team that always sweeps.

A half-century ago, however, a British ornithologist put forth a surprising new idea about enemies in the natural world: Maybe they aren’t always such a bad thing. In a 1954 book chapter, James Fisher suggested that territorial birds might actually gain some advantages from living near threatening rivals. He called it the “dear enemy” phenomenon: Birds that compete with their neighbors would also be bound to them in helpful ways.

Over time, the notion of the dear enemy developed and spread. Naturalists observing birds found that multiple species reserved their fiercest aggression not for next-door rivals, but for strangers. Birds that were enemies in the most obvious sense, neighbors competing directly for territory, seemed to fight less, maintaining a kind of détente with their known rivals. Biologists began to study the effect in other animals, from crabs to beavers. Today, there are dozens of studies that examine what happens when animals keep their enemies close.

Excerpt of and article written by Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe. Continue HERE

Digital Media · Human-ities · Performativity · Science · Technology · Theory · Vital-Edible-Health

Canadian group studies impact of social networks on mental health

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In an age when Internet devices are always on, meeting face-to-face is becoming increasingly rare as people choose to meet screen-to-screen. Goldfield wants to know what this new dynamic is doing to normal social interaction? How do these devices and social media services, such as Facebook, affect the way we socialize and communicate with each other?

But, more than that, what impact do these social networks have on their user’s mental health?

Murray and Goldfield have teamed up and have scraped together funding to conduct a study this summer examining the impact Facebook has on people’s mental health and their everyday lives and interactions.

They aren’t alone.

John Lyons, director of CHEO’s mental-health research group, has applied to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for a grant to conduct his own study into the topic. However, Lyon’s study will be laser focused. With so much anecdotal evidence about the effects of cyberbullying and online taunts, he wants to know what role social media plays in a person’s decision to end their life, and if there is a way to leverage social technologies to reach out to people considering suicide.

“It’s becoming the medium by which young people communicate with each other. It’s a pretty significant social change,” said Lyons. “There are some very valuable things about social media and networking, and there are also some dangers. Historically, the (societal) changes have been in musical taste and style of dress. Now it has to do with technology and the use of technology to deal with social relations. It’s so fast moving and there is so much going on that it’s rather complicated to figure out the good and the bad aspects of it.”

Excerpt of an article by Vito Pilieci at The Gazette. Read HERE

Digital Media · Social/Politics

The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive ‘value abundance’?

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Chiang Mai, Thailand – Does Facebook exploit its users? And where is the $100bn in the company’s estimated value coming from?

This is not a new debate. It resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles, ever since Tiziana Terranova coined the term “Free Labour” to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid labour – firstly referring to the viewers of classic broadcast media, and now to the new generation of social media participants on sites such as Facebook. The argument can be summarized very succinctly by the catch phrase: “If it’s free, then you are the product being sold.”

This term was recently relaunched in an article by University of Essex academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, entitled “They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free”. In this mini-essay, they make a very strong claim that “we can certainly position the users of Facebook as labourers. If labour is understood as ‘value producing activity’, then updating your status, liking a website, or ‘friending’ someone, creates Facebook’s basic commodity.”

This line of argument is misleading, however, because it conflates two types of value creation that were already recognized as distinct by 18th century political economists. The distinction is between use value and exchange value. For thousands of years, under conditions of non-capitalist production, the majority of the working population directly produced “use value” – either for themselves as subsistence farmers, or as tributes to the managerial class of the day. It is only under capitalism that a majority of the working population produces “exchange value” by selling their labour to firms. The difference between what we are paid and what the market pays for the products we are making is the “surplus value”.

Excerpt of an article written by Michel Bauwens. Read it at Aljazeera

Digital Media · Social/Politics · Technology

Spring Awakening: How an Egyptian Revolution Began on Facebook

Sebastian Alvarez1 Comment



In the embryonic, ever evolving era of social media — when milestones come by the day, if not by the second — June 8, 2010, has secured a rightful place in history. That was the day Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in Dubai and found a startling image: a photo­graph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.

At once angered and animated, the Egyptian-­born Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”

“Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me,” Ghonim writes in “Revolution 2.0,” his fast-paced and engrossing new memoir of political awakening. “All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland.”

Image: Wael Ghonim, photo by Sam Christmas. Written by JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS, NYT. Continue reading HERE

Architectonic · Digital Media · Sculpt/Install · Videos

The Deleted City

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The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web hosting provider that was modeled after a city and where you could get a free “piece of land” to build your digital home in a certain neighborhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neighborhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighborhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few.

Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of “homesteaders” as the digital tenants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bit torrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

The installation is an interactive visualization of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighborhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain.

Text via The Deleted City

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Eco/Adaptable · Performativity · Social/Politics · Technology

Stone Age Social Networks.

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Continuing from the Dawn of Social Networks: Ancestors May Have Formed Ties With Both Kin and Non-Kin Based On Shared Attributes. HERE

If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That’s right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is, without the cars, the written language, and of course, the smartphone). In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other.

Modern human social networks share several features, whether they operate within a group of schoolchildren in San Francisco or a community of millworkers in Bulgaria. The number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected are all very regular across groups of people living very different lives in far-flung places.

So, the researchers asked, are these traits universal to all groups of humans, or are they merely byproducts of our modern world? They also wanted to understand the social network traits that allowed cooperation to develop in ancient communities.

Written by By Kate Shaw, Ars Technica. Continue on Wired HERE

Human-ities · Performativity · Social/Politics · Technology

Dawn of Social Networks: Ancestors May Have Formed Ties With Both Kin and Non-Kin Based On Shared Attributes

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Ancient humans may not have had the luxury of updating their Facebook status, but social networks were nevertheless an essential component of their lives, a new study suggests.

The study’s findings describe elements of social network structures that may have been present early in human history, suggesting how our ancestors may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin based on shared attributes, including the tendency to cooperate. According to the paper, social networks likely contributed to the evolution of cooperation.

“The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today,” said Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology and medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and senior author on the study. “From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we’ve made networks of basically the same kind.”

“We found that what modern people are doing with online social networks is what we’ve always done — not just before Facebook, but before agriculture,” said study co-author James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego, who, with Christakis, has authored a number of seminal studies of human social networks.

Via Science Daily. Continue HERE
Image above: The Hadza of Tanzania live as hunter-gatherers. (Credit: Courtesy of Coren Apicella/Harvard Medical School)

Human-ities · Social/Politics · Technology

The Folly of Internet Freedom and the Mistake of Talking About the Internet as a Human Right

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In the past two years, protesters against authoritarian regimes have begun to heavily use social-networking and media services, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones, to organize, plan events, propagandize, and spread information outside the channels censored by their national governments. Those governments, grappling with this new threat to their holds on power, have responded by trying to unplug cyberspace.

Some examples: In April 2009, angry young Moldovans stormed government and Communist Party offices protesting what they suspected was a rigged election; authorities discontinued Internet service in the capital. In Iran, the regime cracked down on protesters objecting to fraudulent election outcomes in June 2009 by denying domestic access to servers and links, and by slowing down Internet service generally — although protesters and their supporters found ways around those restrictions. In Tunisia, when protests against President Zine el Abidine ben Ali escalated in December 2010, his government sought to deny Twitter services in the country and hacked the Facebook accounts of some Tunisian users in order to acquire their passwords. In Egypt, amid mass protests in Cairo and several other cities in January 2011, Hosni Mubarak’s government attempted to disconnect the Internet. But there, too, protesters found limited workarounds until the doomed regime eventually restored some services.

Authoritarians may have reason to fear cyberspace. It is widely believed that the proliferation of Internet access and other communications technologies empowers individuals and promotes democracy and the spread of liberty, usually at the expense of centralized authority. As Walter Wriston optimistically put it in his 1992 book The Twilight of Sovereignty: “As information technology brings the news of how others live and work, the pressures on any repressive government for freedom and human rights will soon grow intolerable because the world spotlight will be turned on abuses and citizens will demand their freedoms.”

Written by Eric R. Sterner, The New Atlantis. Continue HERE

Social/Politics · Technology

Young Indians in social network ‘fatigue’

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Indian IT professionals are pictured at an industry event in Bangalore in 2010. India’s urban youth are suffering social-media “fatigue,” prompting a number to delete their Facebook and other accounts, according to a new study.

“Youngsters have started finding social media boring, confusing, frustrating and time-consuming,” the survey commissioned by by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) found.

India’s youth have “started experiencing social-media fatigue” and are tending to log less frequently onto social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Orkut, and others than when they signed up, the study reported.

The research that polled 2,000 young people aged 12-25 in 10 cities found many were instead using mobile applications such as Blackberry Messenger, WhatsApp, Nimbuzz, or Google Talk that allow them to chat with their friends.

“Tech overload is apparent among youth and their fixation with social media seems to be eroding,” said D.S. Rawat, ASSOCHAM secretary general, commenting on the survey emailed to AFP on Tuesday.

Some 55 percent of respondents said they had “consciously reduced” their time spent on social media websites and it was no longer a “craze” for them.

More than half of the 55 percent who had cut down on their activity on social media sites said they had actually deactivated or deleted their accounts and profiles from these websites.

Of nearly 200 young people interviewed in New Delhi, 60 percent said they found it “boring and sick to see constant senseless status updates.”

Most of the social media website users said they had opened many accounts initially but now preferred now to stick to a single site.

A majority of the Indian respondents also said “compulsive” social networking had led to insomnia, depression and poor personal relationships, the survey said.

(c) 2012 AFP. Via Physorg