Fighting for Which Future? When Google Met Wikileaks
The power struggles in the Internet are waged between conflicting sides, but framing them in terms of good against evil, anarchist versus conformist, freedom fighter against the power hungry is simplistic and ignores the complexity of these debates.
Why Facebook does not Reign Supreme Among Young Adults? Cool Infographics may be Misleading.
If you look carefully at the poll, you will notice that this beautiful infographic may be misleading (like every other visualization). Many young adults have accounts on Facebook and Google +. Why? They opened an account because their friends were there, or because it was a great way to communicate with others. But having an account doesn’t mean that they are really active. In other words, we are confusing ‘subscriptions’ with ‘real activity’. This infographic doesn’t show us what are the usage patterns of young adults; It doesn’t show how many inactive accounts Facebook has; it doesn’t shoe how many people use Google+ just because they want to use hangout, which Google+ has combined together.
Going Viral – A New Book
Our first book ‘Going Viral‘ has just been published by Polity. What is the book about? We live in a world where a tweet can be instantly retweeted and read by millions around the world in minutes, where a video forwarded to friends can destroy a political career in hours or a cause for a […]
The Era of Pretended Transparency
“Transparency and trust are core values at Facebook ” the report says. But now after Snowden-Gate we know that certain governments (say the US) have direct access to data from Facebook and other big companies.
Shouldn’t Facebook disclose information about this as well? How much data and kind of data is extracted on a daily basis by governments (say the US)? Of course Facebook is not the issue. The same request can be made to Google, Yahoo, Apple or Microsoft. Publishing a report and pretending it is transparency, is a good way to mask the relevant information that should be accessible to users.
It is All about Networks: Attribute to the life of Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini
This is an attribute to the life of a courageous scientist-woman, Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who died at the age of 103 at her home in Rome. Her eagerness to study and research defeated any artificial boundaries to learning: Fighting against masculine domination in science; and fighting against the blind racist anti-Semite rules issued by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. They didn’t let her do research in a university because she was Jewish, so she set up a small laboratory in her home. Among other things, she discovered critical chemical tools that the body uses to direct cell growth and build nerve networks.
Power and Networked Social Movements
I presented a paper with Manuel Castells in the 13th annual meeting of AOIR (Association of Internet Researchers) from a study we are conducting regarding networked social movements. In April we presented some of the findings at the USC Annenberg School for the ANN-SONIC Fourth International Seminar. You can watch the video by clicking here, or you can read below for further explanation about the work and the dynamics of power among stakeholders.
Petition to the High Court of Justice against the Biometric Database
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) filed a petition to the High Court of Justice today (February 20), seeking to annul a law that would establish a governmental biometric database and to cancel of the database’s two-year pilot program. The petition was filed by ACRI attorney Avner Pinchuk along with The Movement for Digital […]
Pic of the Day: George Orwell and Modern Information Technology
Now what would George Orwell say about this picture? The irony of surveillance… (BTW, Placa de George Orwell is located in Barcelona. He went to Barcelona in 1936, and hoped to write articles about the Spanish Civil War. )
Call for Papers – Social and Digital Inclusions in Networks
This mini-track calls for papers that study social and digital inclusion in networks at different levels. In the forthcoming conference, we would like to emphasize four areas: (i) connections between off-line divides and on-line divides; (ii) inequalities within and among communities; (iii) information and communication technologies for development; and (iv) inequalities between users with respect to social and digital divides. Possible levels at which to examine such areas include international, national, local, sector, communal, and individual. Both empirical and theoretical papers are invited. Building on the success of this mini-track from the past nine HICSS conferences, we invite submissions to the 2011 mini-track on social networking and communities.
Network Theory
On February 2010 a bunch of network scholars (including me) convened in a workshop in USC (the Annenberg School) to talk about Network Theory. The strength of the workshop was in its ability to bring interdisciplinary perspectives about network theory to one table. The videos, powerpoints and reports of each one of the talks is available on the ANN (Annenberg Networks Network) website.
As a result, the IJoC (International Journal of Communication) dedicated a volume to network theory.