social-media

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Tempted to type meaningless twaddle all the time on Twitter...with alliteration, no less!

Social media is not just a spoke on the wheel of marketing. It's becoming the way entire bicycles are built.

Treat your entire audience with the same level of care.

The only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely.

Pay it forward with free compliments. They are returned in due time. NetworkEtiquette.net

It's good netiquette to avoid information that offends or challenge errors when confronted. NetworkEtiquette.net

More voices means less trust in any given voice.

The democratization of media means that anyone with a phone can become a celebrity. Our short-sighted focus on self-esteem in children means that everyone gets a trophy, universities and education are __rands_ instead of places of learning, standardized testsare used to assess wisdom, and grade inflation is rampant. The tribe has been replaced with followers and likes. Our economy, our bodies, our health, our children, and frankly our psyches are in big trouble.

Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating "compulsive media" to get you to click things more.

Content_ ranges anywhere from the logo on a can of soup, dogs dancing on youtube, to the coding of an app:it__ confusing!

The internet in general and social networking sites in particular are making people more reclusive than social.

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.

We no longer live in a mass-media world with a few centralized choke points with just a few editors in charge, operated by commercial entities and governments. There is a new, radically different mode of information and attention flow: the chaotic world of the digitally networked public sphere (or spheres) where ordinary citizens or activists can generate ideas, document and spread news of events, and respond to mass media. This new sphere, too, has choke points and centralization, but different ones than the past. The networked public sphere has emerged so forcefully and so rapidly that it is easy to forget how new it is. Facebook was started in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. The first iPhone, ushering in the era of the smart, networked phone, was introduced in 2007. The wide extent of digital connectivity might blind us to the power of this transformation. It should not. These dynamics are significant social mechanisms, especially for social movements, since they change the operation of a key resource: attention_ Attention is oxygen for movements. Without it, they cannot catch fire.

The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial.

These days. Most of us have the attention span of a meth-addicted squirrel.

And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analysing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

Weekends welcome warriors for social fun that starts on Friday. Share, Like, comment, and friend. Netiquette