On this episode of Spark: Online friendship, personal branding, and geoweb privacy.
If single-minded attention is vital to learning, how far should college instructors go to protect their students from distraction? Should laptops be barred at the classroom door?
But now, for the first time, functional measures of the resting brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less smart people.
Publishers are trying to use the increasingly social media landscape to stimulate a new reading culture. “I don’t think they are walking into bookstores in droves, so how do you get to teens and how do you get an author in front of a teen?” said Diane Naughton, vice president for marketing for HarperCollins Children’s Books, which has initiated enterprises including the Amanda Project, a Web site affiliated with a young-adult mystery series, and inkpop, where teenagers can upload their writing and receive commentary from peers and HarperCollins editors.
Edge asked over 100 intellectuals "How has the internet changed the way you think?" Howard Gardner, Clay Shirky, Richard Dawkins, and many others respond.
Despite the prevalence and popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, almost a third of respondents [to survey of 3,020 eight to 14-year-old Europeans conducted by Disney] said that they preferred to meet friends face-to-face, although 44 per cent said the internet made it easier to keep in touch with them.
Lanier sees the Web's "open culture" as a failure. Instead of creating new songs or videos, we just steal from the previous decades of pop culture and create parodies and mashups. Instead of writing brilliant new computer programs, computer jocks toil at improving the free, open-source Linux, which offers no real innovation over the decades-old Unix.
By mutual agreement, the two friends now allow themselves to log on to Facebook on the first Saturday of every month — and only on that day.
The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents — the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves.
Some teenagers, like Monica and Halley, form a support group to enforce their Facebook hiatus. Others deactivate their accounts. Still others ask someone they trust to change their password and keep control of it until they feel ready to have it back.
Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.
The researchers expected the Facebook profiles to match an idealized version of the user’s personality. But to their surprise, the online Facebook profile matched the real-world personality test.
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On this episode of Spark: Online friendship, personal branding, and geoweb privacy.
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