This blog is about how the rapidly evolving world of media and technology is affecting us. It’s about stepping back. Looking at the upside, downside, and any other side we don’t usually see. And asking what does it all mean, how does it really matter.
78% of teens now have a cell phone, and almost half (47%) of them own smartphones. That translates into 37% of all teens who have smartphones, up from just 23% in 2011.
23% of teens have a tablet computer, a level comparable to the general adult population.
95% of teens use the internet.
93% of teens have a computer or have access to one at home.
“The nature of teens’ internet use has transformed dramatically — from stationary connections tied to shared desktops in the home to always-on connections that move with them throughout the day,” said Mary Madden, Senior Researcher for the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and co-author of the report. “In many ways, teens represent the leading edge of mobile connectivity, and the patterns of their technology use often signal future changes in the adult population.”
So teens aren't just using technology and the internet a lot: They're paving the way! It makes sense, then, to harness this force and encourage them for the greater social good. I especially like: start conversations, change minds, and drive change.
I have a working concept in mind - Stop Bullying - and in the spirit of this terrific delineation and exhortation from Cisneros, I plan to actively engaging teens. It's a video initiative, and one that tap into where teens are: at school, with friends, on social media, in sports, behind the car. Let's see how I can initiate this.
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
Dustin Stout posted on the question of Google+: The Bridge between Social Media and Blogging today. (a) It's a thought-provoking topic among those of us who have vested interest in the digital world, and (b) he engaged four colleagues to weigh in as well for a collaborative post.
Editor's Note: This is a collaborative post experiment by +Demian Farnworth, +Alexandra Riecke-Gonzales, +Matthew Loomis and +Dustin W. Stout. Our goal was to answer the question "Is Google+ the bridge between blogging and social media? If so, what does that mean?" We each took turns in answering those questions on a private Google+ post. All links are only to other Google+ posts. If this works out well, we may tackle more questions about this social network in the future. Thank you for your time and attention. Enjoy.
Stout's post is just a few hours old right now, and there have been several comments from others already. So please click on the link in the first line above to read them.
Here are mine:
+Dustin W. Stout A superb post and a great discussion, Dustin. Google+ is no more (or less) a bridge between social media and blogging than is Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
But where Google stands way head-and-shoulders over other sites is its enormous ecosystem. It has a staggering reach across sites, and with Android it follows us wherever we go, that is, with our smartphones and tablets. Remember that Google also has its own blogging platform - Blogger. So Google is more than just a bridge: It's virtually the entire landscape in which we live, work and play. Google+ and Blogger are simply pieces of that landscape. From what I understand, the reason there aren't ads on Google+ is because our data (posts, comments, +s etc) is far more valuable to Google than our AdWords or AdSense clicks.
What I also see in Google's ecosystem are highways, overpasses and bridges. Here's a little experiment I've done recently: I launched a handful of blogs on Blogger, and without posting any articles on any social site, they've already had over 1000 visits. So clearly traffic finds its way to my content via some avenue other than Google+. No doubt, Google's algorithms are actively at play here, because I do have AdSense working on my blogs.
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
IGY stands for International Geophysical Year (1957 - 1958), and is a jazzy, lyrical standout piece by Donald Fagen. It's hard to imagine technology weaving so gracefully with music and infusing the piece with hope and joy.
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
This is hyper-cool! You know, the faster we go, the slower time gets (rf. Theory of Special Relativity).
Now, Elon Musk reveals how the Hyperloop Works. Travelling at over 700 mph, passengers would sit in a 1.35-metre-wide tube and be blasted through the 382-mile tunnel linking Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 30 minutes. It’s the most science fiction idea Musk has ever presented, yet the PayPal/Space X/Tesla founder is confident Hyperloop is very doable, and very affordable, too.
Finally, a sleek e-vision by Microsoft, that is more Minority Report than "Minority Report":
Super-awesome! I say, Google, Microsoft and IBM will be (even more) the major tech players of the future.
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
I read an article a couple of years ago that distinguished Google from Apple. Wearing every bit the personality of Steve Jobs, Apple was the quintessential design master and the convergence of technology and liberal arts. On the other hand, Google was every bit the Stanford geeks that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were, more concerned with data and algorithms than aesthetics or humanity.
The Search Stories have been around just a handful of years, but they speak to Google's sense of humor and pulse on emotion and sentiment. To me, they strike a deft balance between telling a story simply for its human value and promoting a vanguard product that Search is.
Consider the following: I grew up in the Philippines, and toothpaste was Colgate. Transparent tape was Scotch Tape. Our car was Pontiac. This carried on to the US, where hand tissue was Kleenex. To copy something was to Xerox it. Now, of course, we don't say search for it, rather we say Google it.
So Google may not win any design awards anytime soon. But if a successful brand means something that is a part of our tongue and our lexicon, then the boys from Stanford are already in the echelons of storied decades-old companies.
Enjoy these stories. Millions of people already have.
An American finds love in Paris.
Andy's going to college. The toys are nervous. In the meantime, they discover Google.
The history of storytelling gets a new chapter. Use Google searches to tell your story.
The world prepares for the big games that lie ahead. Are you ready for it?
A brother and sister grow up together.
A mother from Vietnam moves to America to provide the best for her son.
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
Here you go, +Scott Kleinberg and +Ron Villejo ... this time it's a matter of news organizations and reporters becoming the story this time via blogging.
This one I don't care much about: "I've gone bra-less during a live broadcast and no one was the wiser."
This one I do: "My best sources are the ones who secretly have a crush on me."
And this one: "I'm frightened of old people and I refuse to do stories involving them or the places they reside."
Those things have nothing to do with expression, they have to do with admitting things that are unethical for the sake of being able to because of freedom of speech.
You know what? I'm happy to get up close and personal with you, here and on my website. I am happy to share that I am trying to lose 20 pounds because it makes me feel healthier when I walk. And I'm happy to tell you that I really don't care for vanilla yogurt, but I'm a big fan of Harvest Peach.
There's nothing wrong with those things. But when you post something that basically is the equivalent of a little child standing in front of her employer with her fingers in her ears yelling "na-na-na-na-na," what do you expect?
This person gets no freedom of speech points, but she does get 20,000 stupidity points. And now her 15 minutes of fame will include something that will make her public enemy No. 1 when it comes to being hired.
That's my take. What's yours? Great post, +Adam Music.
I weighed in, On the one hand, this lady may just be immature and guileless (i.e., childish, as you noted +Scott Kleinberg). On the other hand, she may be quite a troubled lady who has a few things to sort out for herself. For instance, "I don’t fight for things because they serve me, I fight for them because they are right" flies in the face of stealing mail, feigning attention, and manipulating her body.
Then, again, on the third hand, this kind of confessional probably makes for great tell-it-like-it-is, Jerry-Springer blogging! Just not for ethical, professional reporting.
While government officials, legal authorities, and major tech CEOs duke out issues on privacy inside a high stakes ring, there is a veritable human quandary about these very issues. It's one thing for companies to track our stuff online with illegally-inserted cookies. It's another thing altogether for any one of us to put that stuff out there among millions and millions of eyes!
So we ourselves haven't just blurred that line between public and private, but also taunted it in some cases while blowing right past it.
To wit, Jason Levy offered up thoughtful notes on the post as well:
In general, this is a very difficult line to draw, as being a public personality, whether you like it or not, your personal confessions affect the public perception of your employer - the assumed assumption in the eyes of the public is that your employer has chosen to employ you despite their prior knowledge of your confessions. Whether the public do assume that, or whether the public's assumption is in the mind of the employer is open to debate. I think the truth is that there are probably a number of people who can't handle the concept that a person can have a public and a private life that are separate, and who expect anyone in the public eye to be perfect when there is no such thing as a perfect person (perfect by whose definition, anyway?).
The line gets blurred by blogs, which can make public certain aspects of a person's life that would traditionally remain private. No doubt over time more and more people will develop and understand the advanced concept that people can have more than one side to them. As a #therapist, one of my tasks is to help clients accept that it is ok to have multiple facets to their personality. It's ok to have parts which are analytical and logical, and other parts which are emotional and intuitive. The assumption that we should be 100% consistent all of the time is incorrect, as the brain has two pathways: one, the neural net, which comes up with an immediate intuitive answer; the other, deductive reasoning which works through each step and often comes up with a different answer. Some people need to trust their "gut" more, while some people need to learn to consider the consequences before acting! +Adam Music
Below is Allen's tweet. Tell the whole story, that she did apparently. Which was telling in and of itself, because she evidently missed the professional import of the story. Or maybe she just didn't care for it.
@DeRushaJ Indeed. If I'm going to take a stand on transparency, I gotta tell the whole story.
— Shea Allen (@SheaMallen27) July 29, 2013
Then again, as I suggested in my note to Music's post, Allen must've grasped at some level the social value of her personal revelations.
My blog just hit 1 million page views. Granted...I'm damn interesting but, 10k plus folks from Taiwan?! I don't get it.
— Shea Allen (@SheaMallen27) August 11, 2013
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
I'm just catching on to this bit about Kenji, the wide-eyed configuration above. Story was, Toshiba researchers programmed the pale-green fellow to fall in love. Which he (it) did. But he (it) went too far:
The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji.
This article from Reality Pod even came with a sexier yet more harrowing image:
Yet the robo tall tale continues to quietly circulate around the web four years later, masquerading as blogged truth. This April Fool’s Day, when all of our feeds are brimming with gags, fictions, and jokey might-as-well-be-truths, it’s worth taking a look at how a minor, haphazard hoax has grown a rather long tail.
Not a surprise.
The veracity of stories that a publication puts out is a big deal. The worse that can happen, I imagine, is for them to label something as news when in fact it's a hoax. That's an egg-in-the-face embarrassment. So Brian Merchant, writer of the foregoing article in Motherboard, is right for digging into the story and casting veiled aspersion on the likes of Reality Pod.
But I have two takes on this.
One, we laud truth and reality, as we should. Yet, we seem to relish myth and fiction just as much, if not more. Case in point: Our love for films and plays, novels and mythology, plus makeup and photo shop. More specifically, our fascination with sentient robots is evident in films, such as Bicentennial Man, A.I. and I, Robot.
Why is it that data scientists, for instance, diminish gut-based decisions and instead advance Big Data and analytics? Why is it that many of us, managers, for instance, are encouraged to think logically or objectively, as if emotion were a pox on humanity?
Yet, in related sectors of science, we hear time and time again this aim of making robots that are human-like. Which presumably accounts for all that make us non-robotic: that is, subjectivity, imagination, and again emotion. In A.I., that's the working dream of the scientist that William Hurt plays: to create an android boy that can bond emotionally with human parents.
Two, enter: IBM.
How do we get computers to behave and think and interact the way humans do?
So asks Dr. Katherine Frase, VP Industries Research, IBM. This is not exactly a new idea, as I've argued here. Still, IBM is planted firmly in reality and technology and I am fascinated by their work. But this, and Frase's question in particular, are the quintessential paradox of humans.
The meta-question for IBM is, Why ask that question, that is, why aim to do that?
What's more, the double paradox here is that Frase and her colleagues must account for, and build in, paradox in their cutting-edge technology, if in fact they aim to get computers to behave and think and interact the way humans do. Such a built-in paradox may not be possible, or even desirable, and it may not be reconcilable in any case.
The Kenji story is simply an element of this larger human reality, aspiration, and paradox.
We are fascinated by fiction, as much as we may ridicule it. We cast aside qualities about ourselves that we don't like, yet create machines that possess these very qualities. We want robots that fall in love with us, when we seem to have such difficulty loving one another.
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
I see more clearly now, how Glass gives people greater versatility to do a lot of things. I was looking at Glass from the perspective of an abled person that I am. But for someone with physical limitations, like Alex Blaszczuk, who doesn't have use of her hands, Glass can be liberating indeed.
Being surrounded by greatness. Me and Andre [Agassi]!
Bethanie Mattek-Sands is clearly an outgoing personality. Imagine the possibilities: not just for her, as Glass helps her prepare for Wimbledon; but also for us, who want to get a firsthand, up-close look at what a professional athlete does on and off the court.
Can you say, "Conservation of angular momentum"?
Hey, I want to bike in the Large Hadron Collider - with Glass in tow - too!
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
