Last night, I went to parent-teacher night at my daughter's school. Here is a list of things I wrote down that differ from when I went to middle school. Since I'm a social media researcher, many of them have to do with technology and social media. I thought someone else might find them of interest. …
Author: Christian
Data Dealer is Disastrous
(or, Unfortunately, Algorithms Sound Boring.) Finally, a video game where you get to act like a database! This morning, the print version of the New York Times profiled the Kickstarter-funded game "Data Dealer." The game is a browser-based single-player farming-style clicker with a premise that the player "turns data into cash" by playing the role of …
Writing the Casual Games Syllabus
(or, "I don't know how to skim a game.") Here's my question: What is the ideal list of 16 games that, if you played them, would give you a picture of all that is possible in gaming? Oh, yeah, and they have to be fast, quick-to-learn, and mostly free (hence the "casual" in the title). …
Scholar of Internet Freedom Denied Tenure for Human Rights Advocacy
(Or: Yale will be next.) Noted freedom of expression scholar Cherian George has been denied tenure by the Singaporean government against the wishes of his faculty. His error was explaining basic tenets of political philosophy in an editorial. I’m writing about it because this is an American problem. Like Prof. George, I am also a …
Continue reading Scholar of Internet Freedom Denied Tenure for Human Rights Advocacy
Bandwidth Hogs Don’t Exist
(or, A Decade into "Always-On" Internet.) [This is a cross-post from my blog multicast. --CS] We're in a paradoxical situation. broadband Internet networks keep getting better, but service provider limits on them keep getting worse. As of this fall AT&T U-Verse has joined my cable Internet provider, Comcast, in imposing bandwidth caps of 250 GB …
Are Rural People Meaner?
(or: Is Online Gossip a Question of Locale or Scale?) [This is a cross-post from my blog multicast. -CS] I'm quoted in this morning's New York Times Story, In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious. This came about because I've done some recent research on social media and rural communities (citations below), including a long-term ethnographic study …
Why Isn’t the Internet a Required Course?
[Note: this is cross-posted from my blog multicast. --CS] I study the Internet. That's what I do. We're coming up on the Internet's 42nd birthday. We just passed the Web's 20th birthday. Why is it so hard to teach freshmen about them? That is, why are so many of our courses about the Internet and …
The Oversharer (and Other Social Media Experiments)
What new norms are we evolving via the use of social media? Way back in 1967 sociologist Harold Garfinkel proposed that the social world was filled with hidden rules for behavior that were so taken for granted it could be very difficult to notice them even if you tried to. To make this point he …
Continue reading The Oversharer (and Other Social Media Experiments)
Social Media Collective 