Practically everyone uses social media, and most workers use them at work. In fact, as a Microsoft study revealed this week, 84 percent of information workers use non-work social networks, and 60 percent of them use them from work at least once a day. At the same time, the survey found that more than 30 …
Continue reading Get Over IT! Social @Work is Smart (and Inevitable)
In February, I had the great fortune to visit the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of their "What's Next Health" series. I gave a talk raising a series of critical questions for those working on health issues. The folks at RWJF have posted my talk, along with an infographic of some of the challenges …
Continue reading Challenges for Health in a Networked Society
Yesterday, Pew Internet and American Life Project (in collaboration with Berkman) unveiled a brilliant report about "Teens, Social Media, and Privacy." As a researcher who's been in the trenches on these topics for a long time now, none of their finding surprised me but it still gives me absolute delight when our data is so …
Continue reading thoughts on Pew’s latest report: notable findings on race and privacy
You hear sirens blaring in your neighborhood and, naturally, you are curious about the cause of commotion. Your first reaction might be to turn on the local TV news or go online and check the local newspaper. Unfortunately, unless the issue is of significant importance, your initial search of these media will be probably be …
Two years ago, when I started working on issues related to human trafficking and technology, I was frustrated by how few people recognized the potential of technology to help address the commercial sexual exploitation of children. With the help of a few colleagues at Microsoft Research, I crafted a framework document to think through the …
Continue reading Addressing Human Trafficking: Guidelines for Technological Interventions
Image credit: Harvard Business Review. SMC Principal Researcher Kate Crawford reached the number-one slot on the "Most Read" list of the Harvard Business Review this week with her sharp and insightful blog post on the weaknesses of big data. Debunking the commonly held belief that "numbers speak for themselves" in large data sets, Kate brings …
Have you downloaded your Twitter archive? Would you like to? Do you want to talk about it? Nancy Baym and Jean Burgess are seeking to interview people about how their Twitter use has changed over time. We are seeking Twitter users in the Boston area who have or can get their Twitter archive (For instructions …
Sitting with a group of graduating high school seniors last summer, the conversation turned to college roommates. Although headed off to different schools, they had a similar experience of learning their roommate assignment and immediately turning to Facebook to investigate that person. Some had already begun developing deep, mediated friendships while others had already asked …
Continue reading Is Facebook Destroying the American College Experience?
(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
At the ASTD TechKnowledge conference, I was asked to reflect on networked learning and how tomorrow's workers will challenge today's organizations. I did some reflecting on this topic and decided to draw on two strands of my research over the last decade - startup culture and youth culture - to talk about how those outside of traditional …
