101 Culture

This is a blog about the emergence of a digital culture. What might it look like? What can we see already?

And all my other details are kept at benmason.org.


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Social media hasn't changed our capacity for social interaction

The TEDBlog caught up with physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis. Amongst much else, he has this to say about social interaction online and how it relates to face-to-face interaction:

"What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions. So you can make interactions between different pairs of people more efficient, and there’s no doubt modern technologies have done that, but what really limits our abilities to interact with each other and to influence each other is a more fundamental requirement. Social media and the Internet haven’t changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes.

In fact, James and I have looked at the phenomenon of Facebook friends -- and here the word “friends” is weird, we should probably say “acquaintance.” We use the word “friends” but it doesn’t mean they’re really your friends. If a random Facebook acquaintance of yours expresses interest in a movie or a book or music, it doesn’t modify your own taste in those things. But, when a real friend of yours does, among your Facebook acquaintances, you are influenced and you do change. So, these fleeting, minor online interactions may not be as influential as we think. But, online interactions can indeed facilitate an influence process among people who are actually truly connected or who have meaningful relationships with each other.

Also, the person who accumulates 10,000 followers on Twitter is unlikely to be affected by everything else that everyone else is saying -- you can’t possibly be monitoring the tweets of the other 10,000. And, if the person is sending out tweets to 10,000 or 20,000 people, in a way, all they’ve done is to become a targeted broadcaster. Now, that targeting is valuable. It’s much better to send messages to people who have expressed an interest in your message, rather than broadcasting into the air, but we should be thinking about this type of interaction more as a kind of change in the way of broadcasting rather than a change in the way of social interaction."


And here's his TED Talk (which I haven't watched yet):

http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks.html

Diesel integrating Facebook into the high street shop

This is very smart. It's a mirror. But it takes a pic of you trying on clothes and uploads it to Facebook.
 
Given this sort of application, I wonder if the BBC should partner with Oyster and launch a social network.

 

There is no 'them'. Just an awful lot of 'us'

Such a brilliant quote from the late Douglas Adams about the internet. Written in 1999 but ever relevant.

Blogged by Jason Kottke but so good and I just had to repost it here:

How to stop worrying and learn to love the internet

So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can't easily answer back -- like newspapers, television or granite. Hence 'carved in stone.' What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust -- of course you can't, it's just people talking -- but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV -- a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us'.

found via @benshaw

Social media: "Stop talking about it"

"Stop presenting about it."

"Go out an use it"

A lady after my own heart: Molly Flatt talks to Cow Bell.