By flicking through and clicking on a few of Swarmâs screens, menus, and icons, a user can signal different things to different people in a phoneâs address book. Ms. Satchell admits that her systemâs capabilities have earned it the name âthe liephone,â but she says she prefers to see it as giving users control over their own identity â or identities.
Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor in Northwestern Universityâs sociology department, has discovered that students arenât nearly as Web-savvy as they, or their elders, assume.
After poring over the Dutch and French versions of Wikipedia, the Dartmouth team concluded that anonymous âgood Samaritansâ are actually among the siteâs most valuable editors.
Northwestern University psychologist comes under fire for research on transgender women and is hounded online by critics.
Two researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln have completed a study on âdeception in cyberspace,â and theyâve hit on something pretty interesting: In text-based chat rooms, people who are lying generally get anxious. But in virtual worlds that let people create avatars, that edginess seems to fade away. âThis suggests that âwearing a maskâ in cyberspace may reduce anxiety in deceiving others,â the researchers conclude.
When word spread last year that Congressional staff members were feverishly editing their bossesâ Wikipedia entries, Virgil Griffith asked himself: How many company spokesmen & campus officials were doing the same thing? Griffith created Wikipedia Scanner, a searchable database that links anonymous Wikipedia edits with the businesses and organizations from which those markups came.
This small example typifies the difference between the print world of scholarly and educational publishing and the often-anarchic world of the Internet. The difference is in the authenticity and fixity of the former (that its creator is reputable and it is what it says it is), the expertise that has given it credibility, and the scholarly apparatus that makes the recorded knowledge accessible on the one hand and the lack of authenticity, expertise, and complex finding aids in the latter. The difference is not, emphatically not, in the communication technology involved. Print does not necessarily bestow authenticity, and an increasing number of digital resources do not, by themselves, reflect an increase in expertise. The task before us is to extend into the digital world the virtues of authenticity, expertise, and scholarly apparatus that have evolved over the 500 years of print, virtues often absent in the manuscript age that preceded print.
The Internet - and Wikipedia - change the rules for distribution and production. It means that those with knowledge do not have to retreat to the ivory towers to share what they know. It means that individuals who know something can easily share it, even when they are not formally declared as experts. It means that those with editing skills can help the information become accessible, even if they only edit occasionally.
Makes an argument against complete faith in collective intelligence by arguing that meta filters (e.g. Wiki) that aggregate many sources of info (many that are anonymous) obscure sources & decontextualize info, which undermines quality & credibility. He acknowledges that collective intelligence can be useful in some instances, but you need both collective & individual intelligence in a society.
Graduate posts on Youtube, upsets university and students. "The five-minute clip, identified as a film about Winston-Salem State football, showed a fistfight between two ex-athletes, up-close shots of scantily clad women dancing, a depiction of players mixing grain alcohol, a picture of an athlete defacing another university's property, and enough foul language to make a rapper blush."