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  • Facebook has conquered “the west” almost entirely, as well we South-East Asia and Oceania/Australia.
  • Since it’s blocked in China, Facebook has pretty much zero market penetration in the world’s largest online market.
  • Facebook is still weak in Japan, which is also one of the world’s largest online markets.
  • Facebook is significantly less popular in much of Eastern Europe and Russia than in the rest of Europe.

Via Royal Pingdom.

Infographic from New York Magazine’s amazing article on online porn. A must read.

Here, Marshall McLuhan argues to Norman Mailer that we see our present as a rear view image always placed in the context of the past. Only the artist can see the present as it really is.

Via Next Nature:

Our historical snippet of the moment is a Canadian television fragment from 1968 featuring a debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on the implications of media technology and whether nature still existed.

The two heroes of the ’60s are absolute opposites. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is assertive, animated, hot, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted and smiling wanly, leaning backward, cool. Mcluhan argues “The planet is no longer nature,” he declares, to Mailer’s uncomprehending stare; “it’s now the content of an art work.” Mailer: “Well, I think you are anticipating a century, perhaps”.

I am a big fan of Marshall McLuhan and think he is due for a well-timed comeback in this the year of his centennial. I posted this great Playboy interview a while back and am now fixated with a new website called McLuhan Speaks. This site archives short video clips of our media prophet in action.

Click the images below to watch some of my favorite short clips from the site.

Here, and ever ahead of his time, McLuhan describes how we will become obsessed with surveilling each other, something that social media often exemplifies.

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…the further augmentation of the body with technology.

…and the list is sure to grow in the future. See the full-sized version of this great infographic after the jump.

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Last week, I posted a review of the film Tron: Legacy (2010) on this blog. This week I have a review of Ondi Timoner‘s wonderful 2009 documentary We Live in Public. This review is found in the latest issue of one of my favorite journals, Surveillance and Society.

The issue is here. Free .pdf download of the review here.

I explore theoretical connections between the movie and the rise of social network sites such as Facebook. I look at privacy, publicity, surveillance and our increasingly augmented reality. Many of the points are elaborations of topics posted by myself and others on this blog. It is particularly exciting to see these theoretical ideas travel so smoothly across mediums such as film, radio, the blogosphere and academic journals.

Founder Jimmy Wales celebrating Wikipedia’s 10th birthday. The site gets 400,000,000 per month.

Fed-Ex has created an interactive global data experience on their website to offer “customers intriguing and insightful information to help them stay ahead of their customers’ needs in a continually changing world” (quote is from here). Putting aside the business speak, some of the data and especially its presentation is indeed intriguing. For instance, here is the globe with countries sized, as usual, by geographic size.

Next, we can have the size of the countries displayed based on all sorts of things. Below they are sized by access to the mobile web:

See the global data map here. more...