Submitted by Ruby Sinreich on Jan 11, 2010, 10:59 AM

I am trying to learn more about the games Little Big Planet and Spore: Galactic Adventures... sadly, I don't have any friends on either network!

Submitted by Ruby Sinreich on Oct 16, 2009, 12:06 PM
This week I had the pleasure of leading a webinar for the winners of the Digital Media and Learning Competition. The focus was how to harness the power of social networks and social media to advance your project, your issues, or your constituents.

Submitted by Ruby Sinreich on Aug 07, 2009, 01:03 PM
This week I was honored to be a speaker at the inaugural Ignite Raleigh. This event gave 15 people the chance to pitch an interesting idea to the crowd at Raleigh's Lincoln Theater. The catch: you have 5 minutes and 20 slides in which to do it. In other words: "enlighten us, but make it quick." Some of you (including Cathy and Steve) will notice a very strong resemblance between this format and the Japanese Pecha Kucha.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 23, 2009, 03:47 PM

This transcript from an NPR piece on Social Networks and how they are growing by the millions but still can't pay for themselves.   One person they interviewed on this subject was Fred Stutzman, of the University of North Carolina, and who was the first Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition.   As readers of my Cat in the Stack blog know, I worry a lot about all the way that "information wants to be free"----but is costing someone a lot.   How it eventually pays for itself is the issue, and there are good thoughts in this essay.  Here's the url and an excerpt of Fred's smart comments.

 

Submitted by Ruby Sinreich on Jun 05, 2009, 03:30 PM
Hello, innovators and collaborators! I am am the newest member of the HASTAC staff (as Cathy wrote on Monday). I have spent much of my first week getting to know the people and tools that will help me do my job as the next Director of New Media Strategy. I thought I'd kick off my blog here with a presentation by one of the people who has shaped my own thinking about the Internet and how it can serve the greater good, Chris Messina.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 06, 2009, 04:27 PM
Apophenia (danah boyd) provides a very sane response to the recent pronouncements about throwing 90,000 registered sex offenders off MySpace. Sounds like a big number until you (a) do the math or (b) ask what are they doing---and where are there real problems that we are not attending to? http://tinyurl.com/bqm9mq   

Submitted by jonathan.tarr on Jan 17, 2009, 04:33 PM

Our hosts for this session are Cameron Neylon and Deepak Singh, who have themselves explored the many social networks developed especially for scientists and bring to us the question: Why aren't these more successful?  Some examples are Nature Network, MyExperiment.  Others?  Please add others that you know of, and your thoughts on them.

Submitted by John Jones on Dec 19, 2008, 04:54 PM
Jason B. Jones has posted an interesting response to Mark Bauerlein's comments concerning the role of social media in teen narcissism on his Chronicle.com blog. In his post, Bauerlein cites recent psychological studies that indicate teens are more narcissistic now than they have been in the past. While Jones points out that these studies provide "multiple causes for this" narcissism, Bauerlein suggests that it can be attributed to the tools of social media. Jones counters

More generally, I think that this is a moment for education, not for condemnation. Iâ??ve argued before that I donâ??t think students are as familiar with technology as grown-ups tend to think, and this is probably a good example. It may be the case that students turn to such tools as Twitter for endless self-validation or for mere self-expression--but I donâ??t think thatâ??s the best use of such technologies. Merlin Mann gets at the crucial issue:

And, you know. Just since it bears repeating: If you think you know people from reading Twitter, you probably donâ??t get Twitter. Or people.

One of the things social media let us do is reflect in more sophisticated ways on self-presentation and on the differences, perhaps, between the self we present to the public and the self to whom all the meaningless events of a day happen. In other words, thereâ??s no reason at all why Twitter, like everything else in a liberal education, canâ??t help us learn to get over our small shivering selves.

Of course, Bauerlein's comments are timely: in the U.S., the holidays are the traditional season in which we are reminded that adulthood is an alternating series of tragedies and disappointments which only serve to underline our ultimate insignificance. As Bauerlein notes, "maturity means outgrowing" the belief that "your life is, indeed, something special and different and unique and worth sharing." I, for one, agree, and the sooner are kids can be taught how little their thoughts will ever matter to anyone else, the better. However, while I'm sure we can all support crushing the hopes and dreams of future generations, what I really wanted to comment on is the irony involved in Bauerlein's post. As a rhetorician, I would argue that all he has really demonstrated in this essay is that he is not a member of the target audience of teenaged bloggers, a fact that he then employs to criticize "MySpace page[s] and blog diar[ies]," all the while utilizing one of these very technologies to publicize said critiques. This merely serves to illustrate the paradox introduced by Walter Ong: critiques of high technology must always be made using that same technology. I wonder if Bauerlein ever stopped to consider that, like those poor, narcissistic teenagers, he himself was composing a blog entry. Why did he think those thoughts were of more intrinsic merit than some teenager narrating his or her life to friends? I, of course, have no access to Bauerlein's thoughts, but I imagine the reasons are these: he has a Ph.D. and is a Professor at Emory. He has published two books and numerous articles in respected newspapers. His blog isn't on MySpace, it's on Chronicle.com. In short, the (unstated) reasons underlying his assumption that his "opinion [is] just as valid as anyone else?s"--or, at least, more important than anything a teenager could possibly write on MySpace--is deeply dependent on centuries old publishing processes that have served for generations as gatekeepers of what information should be considered important or significant. Since its inception, the internet has destabilized these processes and brought into question the assumptions of quality which they support. To borrow Jones's phrasing, the technologies that Bauerlein is criticizing help us to reflect in more sophisticated ways on information and on the different ways that information is imbued with authority and meaning by technological and cultural forces. What's more, these technologies have demonstrated that in some cases they are able to produce superior versions of the products of the publishing culture they are replacing (cf. Wikipedia, The New York Times Online, etc.) So, having read Bauerlein's post, I wonder what is better: the tools that allow for Wikipedia, even if they also serve to convince teenagers that they might possibly have something special to say, or the traditional publishing establishment that places the authority of determining what is important to others in the hands of the few?

Submitted by Monika Buscher on Dec 06, 2007, 03:14 AM
The Futuresonic international conference and the Social Technologies Summit invite proposals for talks, presentations, workshops and session themes. Submissions of innovative formats for social interaction are encouraged.

Submitted by Heather on Nov 17, 2007, 09:19 AM
Developing a social networking site is not the same as conventional software development!