Entries Tagged 'Insights' ↓

Too much watching of television means being a couch potato, but now there’s a new syndrome "tweet potato" or "face bookato". Dr Aric Sigman says that high usage of social media can lead to an upset in our body chemistry through decreased face-to-face contact. The doctor believes that instead of these services supplementing our communication, they are replacing normal human contact, and it’s bad for our health.He theorises that this contact is essential for stimulating certain biological effects in our bodies, such as our immune system and hormones, which can cause imbalances or deficiencies in our bodies, giving rise to more serious problems. Read the full article here

Dr Sigman’s has seriously dealt with this subject in the past and his new book The Spoilt Generation, has just been published. His previous book was Remotely Controlled: How Television is Damaging Our Lives, and his health and psychology book Getting Physical won The Times Educational Supplement’s Information Book Award.

We checked his site, he doesn’t tweet or poke at Facebook, he is not even ready to be LikedIn.

[Via textually.org ]

Picture Credit: Aric Sigman

Via O’Reilly’s video channel on youtube: The rise of Government 2.0 signals the emergence of IT innovation and the Web as a platform for fostering efficiencies within government and citizen participation. How can we harness these innovations to decrease waste and increase productivity? Gov 2.0 Expo, the IT event for 21st century government, brings stakeholders together to explore transformative technologies and discover new solutions. List of speakers slides and videos can be found on the site and here’s the video.

SmartMob informs about MIT’s Center of Future Civic Media video “The use of civic media in difficult places”.

In a live demonstration of globe-straddling communication technologies like Skype, this forum connects to citizen journalists and activists around the world, some of whom frequently test the limits of governmental authority. Moderator Ethan Zuckerman wonders if these new digital forms are fundamentally liberating, providing users access to public spaces they might otherwise be denied. He pursues this line of inquiry in a series of internet conversations with correspondents covering some of the world’s most ravaged or oppressed regions.

From IQ2 debate on Fora TV :

The pursuit of happiness is one of the unalienable rights enshrined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. But is our relentless striving to feel good no matter what actually making us miserable? Would we be better to accept that life comes with good times and bad, and make peace with that?

This IQ2 debate, held in Sydney in March 2010, pits those who believe that happiness is a worthwhile goal that can be found in pleasures material and social, against those who hold that people should abandon unrealistic goals and seek quiet comfort within.

Here’s the introduction video

You can find more videos here

A latest BCS report suggests that access to IT can make you happier. It primarily covers three areas:

• Effect of IT on Life Satisfaction, Individual Level
• Effect of ICT on Sense of Freedom and Control, Individual Level
• Effect of IT on Life Satisfaction with various variable/IT interaction terms

From the press release:

A new global study from BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, shows that access to information technology has a ‘statistically significant, positive impact on life satisfaction’.

‘Put simply, people with IT access are more satisfied with life even when taking account of income,’ said the study’s author, social scientist Michael Willmott.

‘Our analysis suggests that IT has an enabling and empowering role in people’s lives by increasing their sense of freedom and control, which has a positive impact on well-being or happiness,’ he continued.

Women and those on lower incomes or with fewer educational qualifications benefit most from access to and use of IT and appear to benefit more than those on higher incomes or with more qualifications. 

The study also suggests that women in developing nations benefit even more than those in the developed world.

You can download the full report here (PDFs)

[ Via Textually.org ]

Kate Ray (@kateray) a student at NYU studying journalism/psycholoy has come up with this great video on Web 3.0 assembling the thoughts of great thinkers like Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, Chris Dixon, David Weinberger, Nova Spivack, Jason Shellen, Lee Feigenbaum, John Hebeler, Alon Halevy, David Karger and Abraham Bernstein

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Nokia’s Ideas Projects finds out What It Means to be a Student Leader in the Age of Social Media:

College students are, by nature and context, ideally suited to the role of spoilers in society. So when IdeasProject invited a group of students from the University of California, Berkeley, to interview the big "influencers" among their peers, we expected to have our assumptions challenged in ways beyond those posed by our slightly older Experts. As beta-testers and early-adopters of social media from a tender age, they not only take for granted many of the “break-throughs” we rhapsodize about, but offer an impressive range of big ideas for how these technologies can be used to address the numerous challenges we face as a planet.

Most run their own organizations and are used to doing the hiring rather than waiting to be hired. They weigh the usefulness of traditional communications tools like letter-writing and resumes against the kinds of social media (text, email, microblogging) they’ve grown up with, and envision a time when tools for sharing video, location and real-time information will be deployed more fluidly across platforms and devices. When they encounter an application, a platform, or some aspect of the world they’re not satisfied with, they think of a way to make it better and then, as the ad says, just do it.

Check out some great videos of the students talking passionately about their projects. Here’s one such video

Nikhil Arora. In his final semester at school, Nikhil found through a class research project that there was one kind of retail business that was creating a huge amount of waste in urban areas: Coffee houses. Nikhil resolved to change that – and a business was born. His company, BTTR Ventures, collects tons of coffee grounds and uses them as fertilizer to grow mushrooms, which he then sells at farmers’ markets around the country. He uses social media including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to connect to communities in urban areas and plans to deploy geo-location “to track salespeople in farmers’ markets…with give-aways and contests.”

Nikhil says that “…being able to translate the virtual world into the real world and start making them interact a lot more easily” will lead to a “next wave” of fun tools that can be used simultaneously by individuals as well as companies.

Well everyone of us involved in media has been asking this questions and let’s see what Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon have discovered:

Twitter, a microblogging service less than three years old, commands more than 41 million users as of July 2009 and is growing fast. Twitter users tweet about any topic within the 140-character limit and follow others to receive their tweets. The goal of this paper is to study the topological characteristics of Twitter and its power as a new medium of information sharing.

We have crawled the entire Twitter site and obtained 41.7 million user profiles, 1.47 billion social relations, 4,262 trending topics, and 106 million tweets. In its follower-following topology analysis we have found a non-power-law follower distribution, a short effective diameter, and low reciprocity, which all mark a deviation from known characteristics of human social networks~\cite{Newman03}. In order to identify influentials on Twitter, we have ranked users by the number of followers and by PageRank and found two rankings to be similar. Ranking by retweets differs from the previous two rankings, indicating a gap in influence inferred from the number of followers and that from the popularity of one’s tweets. We have analyzed the tweets of top trending topics and reported on their temporal behavior and user participation. We have classified the trending topics based on the active period and the tweets and show that the majority (over 85%) of topics are headline news or persistent news in nature. A closer look at retweets reveals that any retweeted tweet is to reach an average of 1,000 users no matter what the number of followers is of the original tweet. Once retweeted, a tweet gets retweeted almost instantly on next hops, signifying fast diffusion of information after the 1st retweet.

To the best of our knowledge this work is the first quantitative study on the entire Twittersphere and information diffusion on it.

Download the PDF (4.8MB) and here’s quick summary from slideshare.

SmartMob reports : A study from the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, concludes that most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world.

Researchers asked 200 students at the College Park campus to give up all media for 24 hours. After their 24 hours of abstinence, the students were then asked to blog on private class websites about their experiences: to report their successes and admit to any failures. The 200 students wrote more than 110,000 words: in aggregate, about the same number of words as a 400-page novel.

“Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one student. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”

The study is available online at http://www.withoutmedia.wordpress.com