Students wishing to study English Romanticism ought to have more than Wikipedia-level knowledge about German Idealist philosophy and Romantic poetry; students interested in the 18th-century English novel should be familiar with the Spanish picaresque tradition; and so on and so forth. Comp lit alone cannot break down the walls of literary protectionism.
Clark's latest work shows much promise. He's built four engines that visualize that giant pile of data known as Twitter. All four basically search words used in tweets, then look for relationships to other words or to other Tweeters. They function in almost real time.
For many chefs in the current economic climate, cooking no longer seems enough. To make their names, they need to develop online personas as well as culinary ones. And with instant access to the Web, chefs — who have traditionally been walled up behind the dining room — are bursting out and talking back, often more profanely than can be conveyed here.
At the beginning of each semester of my class, I tell my students that they’re going to leave with a skillset that helps them negotiate human interaction with social technology. I’ve sat up at night, pondering the value of such a skillset. More than anything, the Buzz fiasco has driven home the point that we need interdisciplinary information professionals that can work with teams in negotiating the social implications of their tools. These are the students I’m working with, and I wonder how Buzz would have rolled differently if their voices were brought to the table.
Twitter is a special case. As beautiful and real as I think it is, the code doesn’t reflect the depth of the social experience. They keep losing/erasing/not finding what you’re building. You’re always a stranger with a few days worth of tweets to Twitter, even if you’ve used it for years as an important pathway for defining and refining what you’re becoming and the stories you tell yourself and how that makes you what you are.
In 50% of the countries included in this study, online photo sharing dominated the list of social media applications. It is also among the oldest of social services within the included mix.
44% of the countries in this survey embrace online profiles in social networks suggesting that their personal brand, whether for engaging in personal or professional interactions, is becoming increasingly important.
81% shared photos and online profiles as the top 1 and 2 activities with the exception of Japan, China, and South Korea where blogging displaced social profiles as a top application.
94% of countries reported that micro-blogging (think Twitter) were among the least pervasive with the exception of Japan, where it ranked fourth – just below social network profiles and above video.
Imagine self-tracking games that reward people for recording their health with badges of recognition; passive monitoring devices that remove the need to actively track yourself; social pressure in the form of online group challenges; prizes awarded to algorithms that turn messy data into beautiful insight.
new business measures for assessing the effectiveness of social media marketing:
- Attention: how many people are clicking on your site, blogs or tweets?
- Engagement: how much interaction there is between the community and you?
- Authority: your influence in the community and on the Web?
- Virality: how your information spreads by digital word of mouth?
- Health: the strength of the community and your online presence?
What if instead of leafing through pages or scrolling through an online manual, you could simply see your way through a task? Just slide on a headset and work your way through a bit of customized, augmented-reality education.
Core elements such as story, theme, and philosophical message determine the mood of the target scene. On a more subliminal, but no less important level, lighting and composition are main contributors that define this mood visually. Characters can look totally different under different a lighting scheme, lens, or scene composition.
Important shots need to be designed with those elements in mind, especially in cut scenes or establishing/reaction shots. Ultimately we are aiming for that perfect shot, and character development ideally starts with the scene test bed with the lighting and camera prepared.
There’s also the problem of bit rot. As floppies, CDs, and cartridges age, holes show up in their data. But getting the games onto stable media is only half the battle. You still need to find devices that can access them. Even big firms are nervous about sharing codes and production details of complex games, which can involve scores of patents. Moreover, games for different consoles were sometimes written in different programming languages; how do you make them universally accessible?
Cutting and pasting shouldn’t be considered writing. And though “mixing” has a nice ring to it—what about blending? Or melding?—it doesn’t hide the dirty reality that someone is getting robbed.
Plagiarism really only makes sense in a scholarly or journalistic context. It’s a mistake in the handling of sources, and can be malicious or nonmalicious, and can completely damage a work or be relatively incidental to it
The plagiarist attempts, as Clark puts it, "to soften the charge against them by misdirecting your attention and by muddying the core issues." These evasions allow the plagiarist to displace the key question of whether his copy was adequately sourced with the more delectable conversation about the plagiarist's mental state, his sloppy work practices, the unintended effects of modern technology, and the "meaning" of originality.
Now and again the busted plagiarist will claim "complete responsibility" for his act—but what that really means is that he wants everybody to leave him alone.