“I think Facebook and Twitter should be prohibited”
“isn’t it time to admit that MOOC providers don’t primarily care about “how learning works?””
“talking about MOOCs in productive ways is getting harder for everyone”
“Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet”
Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com]. more...
“We’ve become better at choreographing ourselves and showing our best sides to the screen”
“75 percent of the world’s heads of state have a presence on Twitter”
“Forget about bowling alone: In Toffler’s future, we’d all be telecommuting together”
“A quarter million comments land in HuffPost’s assorted in-boxes every day”
“On Snapchat, sexual identity isn’t cemented through a series of boxes & menus”
“using drugged milkshakes to knock out the parents of one of the girls so they could log on to the Internet“ more...
“I’ve created a technique for converting digital audio files into 3D printable 33rpm records”
“IBM predicts that computers will soon have a sense of smell”
“Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, speak to us about human decency”
“the needed reforms, executives at Apple and Foxconn hope and believe, are falling into place”
“Behaving as if our digital data is fleeting can cause serious trouble”
“Social Media” didn’t get anything wrong or right. Reporters got things wrong”
“I’m tired of contributing to the commodification of my own existence”
“There was no correlation between how much money users paid and how well they were treated”
“No, technology is not “rewiring” young people’s brains”
“Holiday cards were mostly maudlin crap as if that could make any real difference for stopping wars”
“To the photographer, this was simply a beating, not this particular man suffering”
“This glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure”
“Inbox Zero is a coping mechanism for the anxiety created by a constant flux of e-mail”
“the cybertheorists, however, are a peculiarly corporatist species of the Leninist class”
“I’m tired, technoutopianism. I’m tired of your sexy, shiny surface and your utter lack of substance”
This piece was supposed to be about porn star James Deen.
After reading about Deen here and there and everywhere, I had the idea that perhaps there was something worth writing about. Only the problem was, that the more I watched of his work, the less I had a desire to write about it. Perhaps the point is not Deen himself and how he has been lauded via the wheel of favorable ratings by female audiences online. What needs to be written about is what happens when a woman sits down and engages with sex—specifically, her own, as tied to an exploration of her individual sexuality and liberation therein—via the medium of a computer screen. more...
“tablets aren’t a new medium which will support a whole new class of publications”
“We live for the moment because the moment is what an image captures”
“Social media is a major development in the creation and delivery of propaganda”
“to lose a cell phone would be to induce a state of partial amnesia”
“Hyper-visibility and invisibility are not mutually exclusive”
“the image may be the most-shared item in the eight-year history of Facebook”
“unboxing videos are maybe the exact opposite of ASMR videos”
“I happen to love Instagram because I’m mildly creative and a terrible picture taker“ more...
Since it’s the season for giving, I’d like to satirically write up some conclusions for that op-ed you need to finish. A cool way to crank out that “think-piece” before your deadline is to pick a topic—reading, driving, talking, pet-grooming, bedazzling, whatever—and say social media is making it less real, deep, true, meaningful, authentic, soulful, or whatever else makes you feel like a better type of human than the automaton masses. more...
“my favorite twitters share a sense of wonder expressed as comedy of the bizarre”
“Does Web 3.0 come after Web 2.0?”
“A sociological analysis must not conceive of algorithms as abstract, technical achievements”
“We’re gonna introduce the mapping stuff so you can stalk people”
“all of my digital masks are equally me and that all of my digital ghosts mean me no harm“ more...
One of the aspects of techno-social life that I’ll be looking at closely in my forthcoming book Superconnected: The Internet and Techno-Social Life is the reality of the online experience. To explore this issue in the classroom, I invited Nathan Jurgenson of this blog to tweet “live” with my “Mediated Communication in Society” class, billing him as a special guest speaker tweeter! Here I describe what I did, why I did it, how I did it — and what happened, much of it unexpected, as a result. more...
