The accidental online society

Anil Dash’s blog post last week on The Facebook Reckoning includes this terrific summary of what’s at stake for us in inventing our new, social media-ted society: But what if I weren’t my own boss? What if my family couldn’t accept parts of my...

Bathroom graffiti, meet social media

The back-to-school rhythm of September has stayed with me in the years since I graduated myself, but it has fresh resonance this September as I’m back in an academic environment. Here at Emily Carr the pace has quickened, the cafeteria is jammed and the anxious...

Talking about talking about social media

Daniel Greene has an interesting post about the need for offline conversations that can help us make sense of our lives online. As he puts it: I need a forum for discussion– a structured, moderated, real life, real time conversation about social media. I need to...

The risks of risk management

Risk may not be something you always want to limit online. This post tells you how raising the stakes of your online participation — by posting under your own name, by giving your blog’s URL to your colleagues, by being more candid and authentic in what you say online — can increase the value of your online engagement.

Defining the impact of social media on social capital

What are your online friendships worth to the community you live in? That’s the practical question that is implicitly raised by Jon Hickman’s interesting and slightly perplexing post on Social capital & social media. Hickman writes: …as academics...

Patrolling the boundaries in social networking

Rob Jewitt, a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Sunderland, writes about the university’s recently introduced social networking site for students. Embedded in his description of the site’s features are some interesting reflections on the kinds...

What online music fans learn about online community

Anastasia Goodstein says this about how social networks have changed the relationship among music fans and between fans and artists: While the future of MySpace may be questionable, I have to credit the service with transforming the relationship between artists and...

Using ecosystems to model the abundance of the Internet

John Naughton had a remarkably thoughtful and useful piece in the Observer this weekend, Everything you need to know about the internet. He covers what he deems the nine essential truths you have to understand about life online, and while that may be overreaching, he...