as reported on BBC.
it may be that the search engines are reflecting society’s own prejudices
emphasis added
a great-grandson discovers documents about his great grandfather. Creates a Facebook profile for him. Fascinating way to memorialise the past in the present.
HT @davidfg
"What mainly goes up… is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively"
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The Social Brain Hypothesis (Dunbar, 1998) tested on Facebook, using generic behavioural closeness metrics (number of friends who people a) post on their wall, status updates or photos; or b) message/chat with), by the social network’s in-house sociologist Cameron Marlow.
from The Economist (26 Feb 2009): Social networks: Primates on Facebook
from the readers’ editor at The Guardian
"People often wander around cemeteries and look at gravestones and wonder who that person was. By using the QR codes they can find out all they need to know"
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Interactive gravestones: how the dead live on, online
timely. just finished editing the chapter on death yesterday.
as powerful as the Fortune 500? As the Bilderberg Group? A 2006 article on the We Know World of Warcraft guild, by Daniel Terdiman
Quinn Norton’s exquisite deconstruction of the Anonymous hacker collective, describing in as much poetic detail as Julian Dibbell did in 1993 in the Village Voice about the text-based community LambdaMOO, the stages this de-organised organisation went through to become a fully-fledged and untied community capable of “focused, disruptive action.”
Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 629-636.
An overview on PsychWiki.
the original article’s abstract:
The effects of two different types of social influence upon individual judgment were investigated: normative and informational. Prior studies of ‘group’ influence were shown to involve only incidentally the type of influence most specifically associated with groups, normative influence. The role of normative influence in buttressing as well as undermining individual experience was also investigated.
And some background by Morton Deutsch, 25 years later.
"A little later a beastlord joined the group… Networking through blood & beyond"
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in Jakobsson, > & Taylor, T.L. (2003). The Sopranos Meets Everquest: Social Networking in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. MelbourneDAC2003, Melbourne, Australia.
abstract:
This article explores the ways social interaction plays an integral role in the game EverQuest. Through our research we argue that social networks form a powerful component of the gameplay and the gaming experience, one that must be seriously considered to understand the nature of massively multiplayer online games. We discuss the discrepancy between how the game is portrayed and how it is actually played. By examining the role of social networks and interactions we seek to explore how the friendships between the players could be considered the ultimate exploit of the game.
(Source: mjson.se)
