betajames

The Stanford scientists pointed out that, because the study only looked at chain letters that reached a large number of people, it was impossible to see any letters that might have had a subcritical ratio of receivers to senders—these letters would have died out too quickly to achieve the wide-reaching spread that the earlier researchers wanted to study. It's entirely possible, the Stanford researchers noted, that the Internet may not be able to sustain a chain letter that follows the usual supercritical path where each person passes it on to more than one person.

The importance of social media is perhaps best illustrated by the government's response to it. Many sites have been filtered or blocked in Iran, including YouTube and Facebook. The speed of the internet was also deliberately slowed down. And Prominent bloggers, like the former vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, were among those first arrested. More recently the so-called Iranian cyber army has attacked reformist websites, and the organisers have had their computer files deleted.

The story of Oxfordgirl gives a clue about the real role that Twitter played. There is no doubt that she helped spread news about the Iranian protests -- often very quickly. Twitter played an important role in getting word about the events in Iran out to the wider world. Together with YouTube, it helped focus the world's attention on the Iranian people's fight for democracy and human rights. New media over the last year created and sustained unprecedented international moral solidarity with the Iranian struggle -- a struggle that was being bravely waged many years before Twitter was ever conceived.

But an honest accounting of Twitter's role in Iran would also note its pernicious complicity in allowing rumors to spread.

"What we're doing now as EduPunks is we're kind of taking the same concept, the same ethos of the punk era and we're applying it to education," says Steve Wheeler, a self-proclaimed EduPunk educator at the University of Plymouth. "We're doing it ourselves. We're using our own tools. We're bypassing the educational systems that have been put in place by the corporate companies and institutions. That's EduPunk."

many social networking sites -– such as the 25 million-strong Viadeo Global Social Networking and Campus Networking — are multilingual. Facebook is available in more than 70 languages.

"Facebook has a number of international offices, and if they're interested in being truly global, they'll need to understand the cultural nuances that they'll face in other countries," says Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motor Co. and overseer of The Social Media Marketing Blog.

It's absolutely essential, he adds, "that Facebook — or any other company doing business globally — does not simply try to take an American approach to its efforts. It absolutely needs to be culturally sensitive and consistent with the norms of the local markets."

When teachers write about their jobs, personal narrative can collide with expectations of student privacy.

It's "an area that we're just beginning to get our arms around," said Stuart Knade, chief counsel of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. "The limits of what should be our business and what is not still are not clear, and probably won't be for years."

Perhaps that's why the Pennsylvania State Education Association says on its website that teachers should not blog about their "job duties, colleagues, supervisors, or students."

The authors, at least, certainly aren’t advocating drunken speeches. But personally, public speaking at scientific conferences seems as good a reason as any to hydrate with some fast-acting liquid courage. It’s a lot better than drinking while you’re actually conducting the studies that you’re presenting on, anyway. And it’s certainly better than drinking one too many glasses of wine at dinner later that night before driving home. Now of course acting like Anna Nicole Smith at the 2004 Video Music Awards probably isn’t the wisest thing you could do in front of your professional colleagues and I wouldn’t recommend it for job talks. But for me, a carefully calibrated shot or two of vodka or, if there’s a bottle at hand, a glass-and-a-half of Chianti, dispensed precisely 45 minutes prior to going on stage, not only dampens my stress response before giving a nerve-racking talk—that’s all well and fine, of course—but more importantly it dampens the intolerable glare from that burning sea of eyes before me. Alcohol is without rival in its ability to dilute the presence of other minds.  

Crowd Science, as it might be called, is taking hold in several other disciplines, such as biology, and is rising rapidly in oceanography and a range of environmental sciences. "Crowdsourcing is a natural solution to many of the problems that scientists are dealing with that involve massive amounts of data," says Haym Hirsh, director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Findings have just grown too voluminous and complex for traditional methods, which consisted of storing numbers in spreadsheets to be read by one person, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute. So vast data-storage warehouses, accessible to many researchers, are going up in several scholarly fields to try to keep track of the wealth of information.

an idea that we have largely taken for granted is in fact the product of a very specific ideology. Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixed, hyperlinked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out. Mainframe behemoths like IBM wave the bloody shirt of Linux, the nonprofit open-source competitor of Microsoft Windows, any time they need to prove their bona fides to the tech community. Ironically, only the “old” entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era’s freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up.

Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, “Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self,” to be released next year.

Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.