This feature was launched Tuesday.

icancstructures:

Does this strike you as helpful or unhelpful?

…[I]f a friend spots a suicidal thought on someone’s page, he [sic] can report it to Facebook by clicking a link next to the comment. Facebook then…

The world just got smaller.

icancstructures:

Facebook Inc. and researchers from the University of Milan recently released a study showing that Facebook users are linked by only 4.7 degrees of separation. This is a significant…

yahoosocial:

Last week, Facebook introduced new Insights for Pages. Take a moment to look at them if you haven’t already. I particularly like the Virality metric because it can helpful in determining what goes viral on your page. “Viral” is a very abstract term but Facebook has done a…

“Digital Dualism” is the (somewhat quaint) notion that cyberspace and meatspace (to use cyberpunk’s language) are separate spheres. Research supports a notion of augmented reality in which atoms and bits coexist, and the latter augments and enhances the latter. In other words, Toyota is taking a cheap shot, unsupported by research, that contrasts the Toyota-driving parents’ “real” friends with their child’s “unreal” internet existence. Research consistently supports that friendships in the digital realm enhance those IRL (in real life). I think it also nicely heightens the differences between social science and journalistic approaches to the issues.

icancstructures:

This Toyota commercial is narrated by a young woman who gets her parents on Facebook because they supposedly are not social enough. While she scoffs at how relatively few…

Hello, all my friends and family IRL!

When social media first gained attention, I heard many people scoff that these online connections couldn’t possibly be real friends. Some even used “Facebook friend” as a synonym for shallowness, fearing people might trade face-to-face interaction for a virtual life online.

But many years, re-tweets, meet-ups, event invitations and birthday wishes later, the majority of the people I know now consider at least some of their online friends to be extended family. Which made me wonder — does social media actually encourage people to connect IRL, or “in real life”?

A Pew Internet and American Life Project report recently found that Facebook users have more close relationships and receive more support than others. They’re also more likely to revive dormant relationships and use social networking to keep up with close social ties.

read more

Whoops, and I have just simply and easily “reblogged” this on Tumblr. Double-plus ungood.

icancstructures:

Via The Machine Starts.

Today in Critters

Today’s the official start of greenhead fly season at Crane Beach in Ipswich, MA, one of my favorite summertime haunts. Unlike mosquitos, which extract a blood meal, these biting flies want to tear off a piece of your skin for nourishment, so they hurt! This morning’s Facebook buzz also brings news of other critters.

Greenhead Flies Advisories
Greenheads are biting horseflies. Greenhead fly season at Crane Beach generally begins by July 11 and the flies are completely gone by the end of the first week in August. Fly intensity varies daily and they are frequently not present on the beachfront between July 11th and August 7th. Lifeguards, Beach Rangers, and other staff have long used an  Avon product called “Skin So Soft” to keep the greenheads from biting. The “Skin So Soft” lotion is sold at the Crane Beach Snack Bar. 

(via Crane Beach on the Crane Estate | North Shore Beach, Ipswich, MA | The Trustees of Reservations)

One friend, a biologist, warns of tick-borne bebeiosis, which leaves not a telltale bullseye like lyme disease, but flu-like symptoms in its wake. Another may have contracted folliculitis from mud in a weekend Warrior Dash in Amesbury this weekend (or has compounded preexisting poison ivy from same).

Finally, last night I had a bird in my shorts. Though I felt somewhat violated, fortunately, I was not in them at the time. As I was fixing dinner, I spied a small red reddish bird, probably a baby cardinal, darting in and out of the pockets, and hanging upside down inside the leg of a pair of my cargo shorts that were hanging outside on the clothesline.

Be careful, friends, it’s summer, and it’s a jungle out there.

There is a telling quote from Nathan Jurgenson at Cyborgology, over at the Society Pages. What is this brave new world of augmented reality?

When Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google, I critiqued his statement that having multiple identities online shows “a lack of integrity.” Schmidt stepped down in April of this year and less than two months later Google announces Google+ (which is an umbrella term for a whole host of services centered on better replicating physical world social norms in a digital social media environment).

The service is brand new and invite-only so we can only speculate at this point what it will actually provide. However, the announcement of Google+ on the company’s official blog provides some interesting statements about privacy. The post is an implicit retraction of Schmidt’s insensitive statements and perhaps a lesson-learned from Google’s Buzz debacle that angered and even endangered many of its users. Further, much of the post is also a direct attack on the Facebook platform and its inability to reflect offline social norms that long-since predate the Web (e.g., the platform’s often incorrect usage of the term “friend”).

icancstructures:

Today, Google announced a new service called “Google+” that explicitly attempts to replicate offline social norms onto an online platform. Besides the conceptual consistency between this…

Don’t get any ideas. This means you. You know who I mean. As one of @GreatDismal’s characters would say in the novel Spook Country (2007), “cyberspace is everting.”

icancstructures:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is a video floating around the internet of a woman getting 152 of her closest Facebook friends tattooed on her arm, creating a full sleeve…

Responsible journalists will help us look beyond the hype infused with the modern US “culture of fear.”

icancstructures:

Today’s headlines pertain directly to issues we covered in my Modern Social Thought class at Endicott College this past semester.

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Police dispersed crowds at Carson Beach in Boston after fights broke out.… (photos by Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff)

You may see more police at beaches around Boston this summer. That’s because of an incident at Carson Beach in South Boston Monday, when about 1,000 young people gathered there. Some of them, according to state police, got into fights and acted unruly. Initial media reports painted the incident as gang warfare organized over Facebook and Twitter, but the real story may be less sexy.

The lead story on the “Drudge Report” Tuesday carried the headline “Teen Gangs Unleashed on Boston Beach.” The link takes you to the story in the Boston Globe that suggested rival gangs had used Facebook to plan unruly gatherings on the beach.

My students read the revised edtion (2009) of Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear. Amongst what they find there are an analysis of the supposed dangers of the internet. It’s just like the media to sensationalize “gang violence,” which turns out not to have been gang-related, to Facebook and Twitter, which turns out just to be the multiplier effect of people “telling two friends” (like the old Fabergé commercial), or in fact, telling five hundred, to go to the beach. Fortunately, as Glassner points out, responsible journalists like those at WBUR also debunk such myths and the hype about youth cyber-crime that frequents the halls of criminal justice studies and police departments alike. To some, social media is a great unknown, and therefore it should be scary, because it sells more clicks on webads. We have come to expect that of Drudge, but the BoGlobe?