What the researchers found was that the typical diversion caused by an e-mail was nine minutes and 30 seconds in length. Now that was just the time spent on the e-mail itself. After that, it still took the participants of the study another 16 minutes to resume their primary task. That’s a lot of lost…
“And I looked up and saw a sign, and my words were in the sign, and the sign was in a meme, and the people of the Book of Face were deceived.” Go read a book, for God’s sake.
I’m just quoting the f-bomb in the link, but I do agree with the sentiment behind it. Last week, Amazon informed us that for ten dollars per month, Kindle users can have unlimited access to over six hundred thousand books in its library. But it shouldn’t cost a thing to borrow a book, Amazon, you…
When he talks about his business being threatened by YouTube parody video-makers, he’s talking about the fact that the public’s yen for parodies is being met by amateurs. Earlier this week, a young woman turned an infamous recording of a Comcast customer service call into a belty ballad. Between the release of that recording and…
“The great paradox about these digital communities is that they’re easily kept around forever, and they are even more easily deleted utterly,” said Jason Scott, an Internet advocate and archivist who launched a digital preservation team that year…. I recently tried to revisit my own first homepage, a wonder of center-aligned blinking text, purple tiled…
Restaurant studies surveillance footage to reveal how customers on smartphones take up waiters’ time. Customers fiddle with their phones before ordering, they ask their waiters to snap group photos, they take pictures of the food and themselves with the food when it arrives, they send it back because it’s cold. 14 out of 45 customers…
Up to now, I refrained from posting anything on the FB “contagion” issue, but this article seems to have the right approach. Facebook has made no secret of the fact that its news feed is a manipulated version of reality. It selects the posts and links to display prominently that it has found through testing…
At age 84, William Shatner (most famous for portraying Star Trek’s Captain Kirk) is quite knowledgable about social media. I have no dog in the Twitter Verified Accounts fight, but I’m still interested to hear from a celebrity of his generation (my father’s generation) who is this informed about Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, etc. Acting…
SMS Generator.
But now that he was at college in America, someone had mentioned Tiananmen, a friend. And he went online, to YouTube and Google, and pulled up videos and photographs from 25 years earlier, images not easily accessible behind China’s Great Firewall, as its Internet-censoring regime is called. He kept looking at one, he said, “the…
My student journalists tell me they learn a lot from assignments that involve livetweeting events. It’s encouraging when students ramp up the social media work on their own, outside of classroom assignments, as part of their work for The Setonian Online. This article offers a helpful reminder that even the pros have to experiment in…
Most handwringing about the state of journalism is done by journalists. They are worried about losing their jobs, so it’s not surprising that they tend to be fretful. But turn the issue upside down for a second, and think about the state of journalism from journalism’s audience. The real purpose of journalism, after all, is…
A review of three books — The App Generation, Status Update, and It’s Complicated — that explore and critique the function of social media in our lives. I used to ask the internet everything. I started young. In the late 1980s, my family got its first modem. My father was a computer scientist, and he…
The professionals don’t always spend 45 days designing a single tweet, but this one got just two favorites. Shortly after, Lindsay met with a copywriter and graphic designer to brainstorm tweet ideas for the next month. It was then that the copywriter suggested a tweet centered around the idea that Camembert, a French cheese popular…
Last week, Facebook asked me what sportsing teams I cared about (and helpfully supplied me with a list of the teams I’d be statistically most likely to favor if I had any interest in sportsing). Now Facebook is asking me what TV shows I’ve watched. Well, yes, I’ve watched episodes of each of these shows, but I…
When a Facebook executive whines about all these shallow viral links clogging our feeds, Slate’s Jordan Wiessmann clicks him a new one. If only we, the American people, could summon a champion. Someone who could, with the change of a single algorithm, turn the entire media ecosystem on its head. But who? –Jordan Weissmann, Slate.
Blogging in education is about quality and authentic writing in digital spaces with a global audience, while observing digital citizenship responsibilities and rights, as on documents, reflects, organizes and makes one’s learning and thinking visible and searchable! Blogging is not analog writing in digital spaces. Blogging is not an activity, but a process. The process…
“From a photographer’s perspective it makes our photography process more similar to the days of film, where you went out you did your assignment, dropped off your roll of film, and went off to do another assignment. Now you download your cards, color correct and caption it. It takes away from the creative process of…
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed: “Google Classroom is not an LMS. It does not have a grade center, a discussion tool, an assessment engine, or a way to integrate with a Student Information System. (I think). Nobody is going to replace an existing campus LMS with Google Classroom. And yet — “
The links under your friend’s post got your attention. What the hyperbolic, go-for-the-gut click-baity blurb did to your lizard brain will make steaming blood gush out of your empty eye sockets. Ok, probably not, but still… [A] Facebook official made clear that the company does not apply the same fact-checking standard when offering readers related…