Posts tagged digital age
My Writing My Society
What it says on the tin
“The bystander effect also extends beyond reality and into cyberspace. Specifically, in a study performed by Markey (2000), the experiment focused on the amount of time it took a bystander to provide assistance. The researchers examined the effects of the gender of an individual seeking help by measuring participant response time (dependent variable). The perceived gender was manipulated by the usage of a male or female screen name in an Internet chat room (independent variable). The treatment conditions examined the number of people present in the chat (two to nineteen), and then asked the stimulus question: “Can anyone tell me how to look at someone’s profile?” The findings reflect a correlation between the number of people present in a computer-mediated chat group and the amount of time it took for an individual to receive help. The higher the number of participants, the longer it took for someone to help. This research reveals that bystander interventions in Internet chat groups reflect the same patterns as interaction in non-computer based environments.” source: http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Bystander_Effect (via The Bystander Effect: Old Experiments Still Relative To Today’s Social Influences)
I think it’s absolutely fascinating when we find that the digital world does not, in fact, change basic sociological tendencies. That somehow, despite the incredible factual difference between interacting with someone face-to-face and interacting via a computer, the social interactions remain basically the same. I guess that seems obvious, but, to copy a phrase, “everything’s obvious once you know the answer”.
(via socio-logic)
Technologists tend to believe that we are actually smarter for having these gadgets, and that as they permeate the texture of modern life, we will grow smarter still. That’s a collective, grand, slightly murky, we. Bernardo Huberman, scientific director of the Sand Hill Labs — a new Hewlett-Packard research center — talks about harnessing social knowledge, “studying the whole Internet ecosystem and designing novel mechanisms and institutions so that we can harvest the distributed knowledge: that such a gigantic social mind is producing.”
We don’t have to become neurons in the New World brain to feel that we’re already gaining something. I have noticed that the mobile-gadget wielder develops the odd sensation of being entitled to all sort of facts. You get in the habit of knowing things, or at least of being able to find out. It’s as if there’s a permanent mental hotline to the information specialists at the public library. Can’t quite identify Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996 or that actor up on the screen or a science-fiction story encountered 10 years ago? You get a twitchy feeling that you ought to push a button and pop up the answer.
But Huberman has more in mind than facts and trivia. His research consistently finds informal communities making better decisions than any of their members, knowing more and thinking better than experts. “We now know that society can work better than any individual,” he says. “There is this notion of a collective mind, a social mind, and today the Internet allows us to tap that.” We are distributing intelligence. We are creating social organisms that carry out continuous computation.
(Source: azspot)
Social Media Is Changing How We Die and Mourn
(Source: tristanjutras)
By using social networks we voluntary put on public record ‘who we are’, ‘what we do’ and ‘what we think’, disclosing in this way our identity and the most intimate aspects of our lives—making them available at a click. In this sense, social websites can be understood not as tools for the advance of democracy and human rights—but rather as instruments that allow a cheap, quick, thorough and easier surveillance. This is made even more effective by the voluntary cooperation of its intended targets, who happily (and deliberately) fill in pages with private information and personal data to build their profiles and express their views.
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.
(via dearace)
