If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?
The Internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be.
Reddit names are unconnected to real-world identities and it’s commonplace for users to create ‘throwaway’ accounts to reveal sensitive information.
People want to be thought of as something other than a source of money. They want to be thought of as creative, thinking people.
The Internet is corporations all the way down.
Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance.
There’s no locality on the web – every market is a global market.
You can make the case that slacktivism is important because it makes people feel affiliated to a movement and be part of it, and talk about it.
Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity.
Cute. I’m on the waitlist to beta a new product, and have been offered the chance to move up in the list if I tweet about it. Not doing so.
Re-tweeting is a pretty common practice on Twitter, but on an average day, we see maybe one out of 20 posts is a re-tweet.
The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.
A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine.
Creativity is an import-export business.
While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that’s unprecedented.
On Twitter, if you want to quote someone else, you say, ‘RT, re-tweet, that person’s name, and then what they said before.’ And it’s a way of essentially saying, ‘I’m not saying this, but my friend said this and I thought this was interesting.’
Teenagers try to hide what’s really going on in their communication online.
The term ‘cyberutopian’ tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naively overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies.
A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.
If I use Facebook to stay in touch with my high school friends who are church-going Republicans, I may be getting more ideological diversity than in hanging out with secular progressives on the World Politics sub-reddit.
Increasingly, I’m inspired by entrepreneurs who run nonprofit organizations that fund themselves, or for-profit organizations that achieve social missions while turning a profit.