'Another key trait of human networks is their ability to magnify inputs, Christakis said. If someone is altruistic and helps out a friend, that will likely trigger a cascade, making that person more likely to help others and making those others more likely to pass it on. This generates a higher benefit to the whole group than the original input itself. The downside of networks, of course, is that they can also magnify violence, germs, panic, and other negative factors. “Networks magnify whatever they are seeded with, good or bad,” Christakis said. Different people occupy different positions in a network, with the more popular in the center, with more and closer connections. Whether it is better to be in the center or out on the fringe depends on the situation, however, as does the desirability of tight-knit friends who all know one another compared with friends who are attached to unconnected others. A central position has greater access to information, but greater vulnerability to germs. A tight-knit group might perform better on a hunt or a raid, while a looser, more extended group might be more effective at gathering far-flung information. -- A later experiment involving a different group of people found that cooperators in groups with noncooperators tend to sever links with noncooperators and form new bonds with other cooperators. This leaves cooperators in like-minded groups and noncooperators with no choice but to team up with people like them. When network membership was fixed, however, cooperators eventually stopped, creating groups dominated by non-cooperators. “Generous people hang out with generous people. Ungenerous people hang out with ungenerous people,” Christakis said.'

'As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication – and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have.' -- "...people can't get enough of each other, if, and only if, they can have each other at a distance in amounts they can control." -- "Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding – and we clean them up with technology." -- "We use conversation with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. And our flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for reflection." -- "...people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they become almost willing to dispense with people altogether." -- "Being alone feels like a problem to be solved, and so people try to solve it by 'connecting'." -- "...if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves – so we 'connect' more and more, but in the process we set ourselves up to be isolated." -- "Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious, in order to feel alive. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self."

'...once social media makes you aware of the ability to document your life as it is happening, it changes what you experience; you begin directing your life as if it were a documentary, choosing what to do in part on the basis of how it can be represented later. Once we have a channel, we live so as to fill it with content, and that content is more self-consciously molded to suit desired audiences and enhance one’s watchability—it’s “curated” with an eye to make oneself more followable, more relevant. The stake is our status as a unique individual; other people may be products of the system but not us; we are self-created. We don’t want to admit that we are being determined to a degree by our media use, so we instead struggle to do the impossible and deliberately communicate authenticity, try to communicate in such a way – communicate something so genuine and real and uncompromising perhaps – that can make ourselves believe that it’s not totally obvious that we are posing for the cameras we’ve pointed at ourselves. Because if we admit to and foreground our “inauthentic” curatorial impulses – doing things just to tweet them – then we surrender the old ideal of our having a self-actualized identity, a unique internal self that we discover inside ourselves and then share with the world. The data self is not just a matter of the data we supply (actively or passively), but also the data and metadata the social-media companies return to us. We increasingly stabilize our self-concept in terms of what social media makes possible, what sorts of rewards it can supply, and what garners those rewards. (Note to self: Remember that the work of identity construction for any given individual is always collective. One’s identity is not the product of the identity-bearer’s labor only, but is also the product of those whose work sustains institutions and expressive codes and everything else that contributes to substantiating and expressing identity.)'

'Lana del Rey, in other words, is a pop musician who has been manufactured as a pop musician. In that, she is no different from Beyoncé or Gaga or Madonna or any other musical act that has ever existed ever. Music is manufacturing. Music is performance. Music is spectacle. It lives and dies on its ability to combine sincerity and falsity in approximately appropriate ratios. And so, inevitably, it has introduced many an artist to the business end of the hype cycle. Lana, however, is different from her counterparts in one particular way: She found her current fame, such as it is, on YouTube. She is not a celebrity so much as she is an Internet celebrity. And, as an Internet celebrity, Lana-née-Lizzie is not just a product; she is a possession. She is, in a very real sense, ours. We, the Internet – we buzzing democracy of views and virality – created her. We have made her both what she is and more than what she is, aura and reproduction in one, a celebrity forged in the fire of 26 million YouTube views. We have, link by link, converted Lana del Rey, the person, into Lana del Rey, the meme. Which would be terrific for all involved – the singer gets her audience, the audience gets its singer – were it not for the fact that Lana del Rey is also, inconveniently, a person.'

'And so the Lana Del Rey-bashing economy moves faster than the actual Lana Del Rey economy...'

'Fear Of Missing Out, the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling you’re missing out—that your peers are doing, in the know about or in possession of more or something better than you. While we’ve always had a fear of missing out, today it’s exploding with the proliferation of real-time, location-based and social media tools. We’re exposed more than ever before to what others around us are doing, and we’re filled with a gnawing uncertainty about whether we’ve made the right choice about what to do or where to be—not just in a given moment but in stages of our lives as well. Our friends aren’t helping, touting their every FOMO-worthy move on the go. This report identifies which cohort is most prone to FOMO and how they respond to it, spotlights how FOMO is manifesting in the zeitgeist, and looks at the wide-ranging potential for brands seeking to tap into FOMO.'

'Fear of separation from the group, and antagonism toward larger-brained independent individuals is deeply ingrained. The reduced brain volume is compensated for somewhat by vindictiveness. Prosocials reward conformists and will punish transgressors at some cost to themselves.'

'In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors: “...Work alone...” -- Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” ...decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.” The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.'

'Over time as the forest matures and passes into the late part of its growth phase, the mechanisms of self-regulation become highly diverse and finely tuned. Species and organisms are progressively more specialized and efficient in using the energy and nutrients available in their niche. Indeed, the whole forest becomes extremely efficient-in a sense, it effectively adapts to maximize the production of biomass from the flows of sunlight, water, and nutrients it gets from its environment. In the process, redundancies in the forest's ecological network-like multiple nitrogen fixers-are pruned away. New plants and animals find fewer niches to exploit, so the steady increase in diversity of species and organisms slows and may even decline. This growth phase can't go on indefinitely. Holling implies-very much as Tainter argues in his theory-that the forest's ever-greater connectedness and efficiency eventually produce dim­inishing returns by reducing its capacity to cope with severe outside shocks. Essentially, the ecosystem becomes less resilient. The forest's interdependent trees, worms, beetles, and the like become so well adapted to a specific range of circumstances-and so well organized as an efficient and productive system-that when a shock pushes the forest far outside that range, it can't cope. Also, the forest's high connectedness helps any shock travel faster across the ecosystem. And finally, the forest's high efficiency makes it harder for it to realize its rising potential for novelty.'

'Social media isn’t a set of tools to allow humans to communicate with humans. It is a set of embedding mechanisms to allow technologies to use humans to communicate with each other, in an orgy of self-organizing. Om Malik nailed it when he called Twitter the “messaging bus” of Web 2.0. That’s a raw, lowest-level hardware metaphor, the level with the highest volume of raw bytes. And we’ve plugged ourselves right into the switching circuitry at that level. Think about it, Twitter is a massively parallel stochastic switching circuit built as a global human bus, where more of us are routing bit.ly links than actually reading them. We’ve moved ourselves into the bottom layer of the information work stack. The Matrix had it wrong. You’re not the battery power in a global, human-enslaving AI, you are slightly more valuable. You are part of the switching circuitry. ...SEO aka “writing to the machine” is just the tip of the iceberg.'

'“FOMO” stands for “Fear of Missing Out” ... FOMO is a great motivator of human behavior, and I think a crucial key to understanding social software, and why it works the way it does. Many people have studied the game mechanics that keep people collecting things (points, trophies, check-ins, mayorships, kudos). Others have studied how the neurochemistry that keeps us checking Facebook every five minutes is similar to the neurochemistry fueling addiction. Social media has made us even more aware of the things we are missing out on. You’re home alone, but watching your friends status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. social software both creates and cures FOMO. If you didn’t know that party was going on, you’d be home contentedly reading your latest New Yorker. But since you do, you hungrily watch each new tweet. It’s an age-old problem, exacerbated by technology. To be always filled with craving and desire...'

'...changes to communication technologies create new possibilities for the self-organisation and self-mobilisation of society, by-passing the barriers of censorship and repression imposed by the state. The issue clearly isn't dependent on technology. Internet is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The roots of rebellion lie in exploitation, oppression and humiliation. However, the possibility of rebelling without being quashed immediately depends on the density and speed of mobilisation and that depends on the ability created by the technologies which I have classified as mass self-communication. -- The important thing to remember about wiki-revolutions (self-generating and self-organising ones), is that leadership doesn't count, they are just symbols. However, these symbols don't have any power, nobody obeys them and neither would they try. Perhaps later on, when the revolution has become institutionalised, some of these people may be co-opted to be a symbol for change...'

'The goal of this series (other than to simply entertain) is to raise awareness about the abundance of various tangled messes in the world and to establish the humanitarian fund dedicated to eradicating this blight from the face of the Earth entirely.'

'What matters in the new era is not your physical wealth, but your reputation. As long as you’ve built up a rep for trustworthiness, there’s no reason you can’t benefit from access to a wealth of products and services when you need them. The trend isn’t entirely new — we’ve had toy libraries since the 1930s...'

'#6. Shifting Psychology = Shifting Power: 2011 will bring a psychological shift in individuals and groups. Social media, social networks, and mobile technologies have caused a fundamental change in the core assumptions about how the world works. People are more publicly expressive and vocal. Expectations of having voice don't exist in a vacuum. If you speak, you want to be heard. This will redefine relationships at all levels of society: between business and consumers, governments and people, teachers and students, and social and cultural groups. #11. Creative Problem-Solving: Low technological hurdles, collective information pools, global access and real-time information inspire creative solutions to problems. Empowerment, agency, and technological competence and the belief that individuals can make a difference will fuel a massive flood of Do-It-Yourself solutions to everything from job creation to philanthropy.'

'...people are influential because they are connected to many influential people. But influence doesn’t seem directly linked to how many people you are connected to. It’s a function of being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to. So, it’s not who you know it’s where you know. It’s where you are situated in the network, and not just in the limited sense of how many immediate contacts you have. It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses.'

'This is the future of banking. Like during the 16th Reformation you either evolve or die.' -- Uh-oh. The internet is here.

'To run a really successful tyranny, the leaders must have increasing wealth as well as more reliable data. They need wealth to hire the programmers, the data collectors, and the police. Computer costs keep falling, but they fall much faster in the private sector (microcomputers) than the government sector (mainframes). Yes, governments have access to ever-growing quantities of data. But the public has far greater access to low-cost information that it uses to increase the overall complexity of society. The task of monitoring what is going on becomes ever-more utopian. The government is always falling behind... The greater the complexity of society, the less able the State is to monitor it, assess it, and use the data to control it. The police State is doomed. It cannot possibly keep up with the constant innovation of society. It cannot gain access to enough resources to maintain control. It wastes the resources it commandeers. The free market is winning.'

'I add so much metadata that it begins to obscure the data; the metapleasure cannibalizes from the pleasure... -- The Internet “encourages us to pursue our identities and alliances based around very specific and articulable interests ...we want our identities—our cultural investments—recognized; we want to be understood. So we [choose] to explicate ourselves, “share” our private organizational schemes with ever more urgency on the host of new media forms designed primarily to facilitate this sort of communication—the communication of privately curated little bits organized into a hierarchy, commented upon, glossed in an effort to make their contingent coherence more broadly comprehensible so that we feel less alone, less like we treading water alone in a vast sea of information.'

'...the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era. -- In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks. Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers – like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example – which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability. -- In the Babylonian Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes.'

'“The biggest problem if you’re trying to figure out ‘What is this stuff? What are they trying to do?’ is that I think even they don’t completely have a grip on it,” Scott says. “This thing — the Internet, online culture — allows you to engage with interesting people who you otherwise might not be aware of or interesting people who are, themselves, unaware that they’re interesting.” ...BuzzFeed is organized by its readers’ shorthand response to what they view — sections include LOL and OMG. “The way people interact with media is more about someone’s reaction, an emotional or even intellectual reaction,” Peretti says. “That is a kind of cultural shift. It’s not ‘I love to read the Style section,’ it’s ‘I love all the LOL stuff.’ ” “You see the news break,” Peretti says, and “the next day or 12 hours later, people are hungry for the parody of it or the comic relief.” '

'Why Statism Is Theoretically Impossible. #1. The state would need a huge volume of information, and this information is only found in a dispersed or diffuse form in the minds of people... #2. The information the intervening body would need for its commands to exert a coordinating effect is predominantly tacit and inarticulable in nature, and thus it cannot be transmitted with absolute clarity. #3. The information society uses is not "given;" it changes constantly as a result of human creativity. Hence, there is obviously no possibility of transmitting today information which will only be created tomorrow and which is precisely the information the agent of state intervention needs to achieve its objectives tomorrow. #4. Finally and above all, to the extent state commands are obeyed and exert the desired effect on society, their coercive nature blocks the entrepreneurial creation of the very information the intervening state body most desperately needs to make its own commands...'

'In brief, praxeology consists of the logical implications of the universal formal fact that people act, that they employ means to try to attain chosen ends. Technology deals with the contentual problem of how to achieve ends by adoption of means. Psychology deals with the question of why people adopt various ends and how they go about adopting them. Ethics deals with the question of what ends, or values, people should adopt. And history deals with ends adopted in the past, what means were used to try to achieve them – and what the consequences of these actions were. -- Praxeology, as well as the sound aspects of the other social sciences, rests on methodological individualism, on the fact that only individuals feel, value, think, and act. Economic theory is not based on the absurd assumption that each individual arrives at his values and choices in a vacuum, sealed off from human influence. Obviously, individuals are continually learning from and influencing each other.'

'Another outcome of the social nervous system is that we see the shift away from privacy as an inalienable right to an individual responsibility. In a social nervous system there will be increasing pressure to be connected 24/7 to the hive mind that is Facebook, Twitter and so on. Those who do not connect, share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life.' -- ORLY? Loose lips sink ships.

'...socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting. The lesson? There’s value in obscurity. -- Maybe we should be designing tools that reward obscurity — that encourage us to remain in the shadows. Sure, we’d be connected with fewer people, but we’d be communicating with them, and not just talking at them.'

'The more we intentionally grow networks, the more we discover very clear laws at work. #1. Luck = consciousness x transparency #2. Innovation = learning x diverse connections #3. Influence = credibility x location #4. Network growth = introductions x generosity'

'Reluctant to risk their lives by visiting a bank, many subscribers transferred money to each other by passing on the serial numbers of scratch cards charged with credit, like gift vouchers. Recipients simply add the credit to their account or sell it on to shops that sell the numbers at a slight discount from the original. This impromptu market has turned mobile-phone credit into a quasi-currency, undermining the traditional informal hawala banking system. -- Criminal rings are among the parallel currency’s busiest users. Kidnap gangs ask for ransom to be paid by text messages listing a hundred or more numbers of high-value phone cards. Prostitutes get regular customers to send monthly retainers to their phones, earning them the nickname “scratch-card concubines”, while corrupt government officials ask citizens for $50 in phone credit to perform minor tasks.'

'Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it’s unreliable if not false. It’s my own version of “slow news”. ...the advent of 1,440 minute news cycle (should we call it the 86,400 second news cycle?), which brings with it an insatiable appetite for something new to talk about, should literally give us pause. Again and again, we’ve seen that initial assumptions can be grossly untrustworthy. ...Clay Shirky (also a friend) observed recently — in a Tweet, no less — that “fact-checking is way down, and after-the-fact checking is way WAY up.”'

'#The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control. -- Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return. This loss of control over personal information is on a collision course with the law of unintended consequences... Amidst this barrage of good news for how much power we wield in the transaction of commerce one has to wonder if we are giving away something quite precious in the bargain.' -- Give all your information over to Facebook and they'll rent your identity back to you.

Discuss -- #More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us. -- Elizabeth Kolbert: "People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still." -- The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” -- Birds of a feather...

'My thought process is private ... the “immediate self” is not a true reflection of what we mean or what we want or what we are. The stream of real-time information to which we are continually supposed to contribute may seem a spontaneous eruption of expression, but it is an expression of pure administration. -- The self we develop in that matrix of perpetual publicity will be more malleable than ever before; there will be no reserve for the individual to draw from, no private experience to shore up a sense of self that the social network rejects or doubts. The endless real-time communication foretells a perfect system for imposing dispersed power on an individual at every moment—to have that individual compulsively referring everything that he regards as significant that he does to the public sphere for comment and recognition, a never-ending compulsion to confess, to invent the anticipated sins and perform the social penances.'

'Peep culture involves watching and being watched, snooping and spying, gawking and gossiping; it means exposing our intimacies with an eye toward bonding with others and growing comfortable with the increasingly common slippage between public and private. Peep culture, like pop culture, informs the atmosphere — it is the atmosphere — in which we live. Writes Niedzviecki, “It’s like that famous line about pornography: you know it when you see it. And you do see it. All the time, everyday, everywhere. -- ...people like Twitter because it's connection with low expectations. And that's a phrase that has stuck with me and has become almost an overarching explanation for the whole peep culture phenomenon. ...we want the feeling of connection without the weight of being expected to do something.”

'...twitter is an instant window into the lives’ of people. A chance to track the distractions that are filling up people’s lives’, momentarily taking over their brains. An impact significant enough to process a lil thought/meme about it. Whether it is a human, a product, a political scandal ... or a celeb death, the twitter’s portal into a generalized human psyche is priceless. We must embrace the power of this tool. We must embrace all tools that allow us to reflect/share/digitally mourn. We are growing up, learning how to use social networks to experience life together. We are learning how to mourn, celebrate, and crucify miscellaneous celebrities. We are learning that death memes are the memes that unite us. The internet/internet meme is a coping mechanism/opportunity. While events happen in ‘reality’ our opportunity to reflect upon them in a ’sillie lil online world’ helps us to cope with how deeply rattled we are by the underlying themes of highly bloggable events.''

'By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people. By keeping in close, regular contact with other healthy friends for decades, Eileen and Joseph had quite possibly kept themselves alive and thriving. And by doing precisely the opposite, the lone obese man hadn’t.' -- Monkey see, monkey do.

'When do people herd? They herd when they are uncertain. In contexts of uncertainty, the herding impulse drives social behavior. The herding impulse is based in the amygdala, a part of the brain’s limbic system. It is non-rational, unconscious, endogenously-regulated and impulsive. By “non-rational” we mean that the herding impulse is not based on reason, but is not necessarily “irrational.” ccording to socionomic theory, not all synchronized group action is herding behavior. We only recognize herding when the behavior is non-rational and performed in the context of uncertainty.'

Texting isn't writing: it's talking. -- '...young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. ..life writing, as Lunsford calls it. ...students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.' -- See? There's nothing letter-ly/linear going on here. These are sound-words that are meant to be overheard in an acoustic space conducive to overhearing: the internet. -- 'The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor...' -- Why write for one when you could talk to all?

'The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. -- #1. Speed matters. Speed used to convey urgency; now we somehow think it means efficiency. The Internet has provided us with an almost unlimited amount of information, but the speed at which it works—and we work through it—has deprived us of its benefits. We might work at a higher rate, but this is not work­ing. -- #2. The Physical World matters. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than con­sumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.'

"The tweets turned out to be obfuscated links to sites where further malicious code and instructions could be downloaded. Hackers have long used IRC chat rooms to control botnets, and have continually used clever technologies, such as peer-to-peer strategies, to counter efforts to track, disrupt and sometimes decapitate the bots. -- There’s something ironic about this finding, given that Russian hackers allegedly used a botnet to take Twitter down for two days last week. But we won’t go down that rabbit hole.'

'This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities. -- “They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”'

'The Corrupted Blood incident was a widely reported virtual plague outbreak and video game glitch found in World of Warcraft. The plague began when an area was introduced in a new update. One boss could cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which would deal a certain amount of damage over a period of time and which could be transferred from character to character. It was intended to be exclusive to this area, but players discovered ways to take it out, causing an epidemic across several servers. During the epidemic, some players would help combat the disease by volunteering healing services, while select others would maliciously spread the disease. - One aspect of the epidemic that was not considered by epidemiologists in their models was curiosity, describing how players would rush into infected areas to witness the infection and then rush out. This was paralleled to real-world behavior, specifically with how journalists would rush toward a problem to cover it, and then rush back out.'

“As soon as I saw his iPhone on the table, I felt resentful,” she says. '“He’s on Twitter, for work he says.” They’d barely got beyond their aperitif when a row started. “I refuse to have a three-way conversation. If you talk to me, I expect eye contact. Meanwhile, you are typing some meaningless observation into the ether.” -- “People feel they’re not being shown enough consideration, that they’re being excluded if their partner is spending a lot of time using phones for socialising, playing games or working. It’s the fact that these devices are so mobile that makes the problem more widespread.” -- “Sometimes it’s an almost tragic scene. The couple are on holiday with their children and dad’s eyes are are glued to a bit of electronic gadgetry. He’s present but he’s absent at the same time. The very technology that is meant to bring people together is increasingly separating us from those we need to attend to most.”'

'Today's Mail: "I won't date him if he doesn't get unlimited texting."'

'In the twittersphere, if you just take the tweetstream and put it on Fox News, people are going to be tweeting and looking at their own tweets and making assumptions on their own tweets in this divine narcissistic loop of ego destruction and id aggrandizement to the point where all information to do with self-preservation beyond the next 5 minutes is discounted as having no meaning; so all science, all religion, all philosophy, all the body of knowledge accumulated is meaningless in the twittersphere which is merely an open nerve that's being poked at by the aberant nature of individuals whose illnesses are being carried on the mainstream networks as "news".'

'Perhaps I’m too old to appreciate how “showing off” has now become “sharing.” If I made an effort to let people know what I was listening to, I would only be able to see what I was doing as trying to score points, trying to beat out whoever was paying attention by one-upping them with something cooler than what they were listening to. Maybe that kind of competition is a contemporary potlatch, but to me it just seems weird. It seems to supplant the pleasures of me in my apartment listening to the music, which should theoretically be enough, with a different and more uncertain pleasure of showing others up—I mean, sharing with them my superlative tastes. But pop culture consumption ultimately has little to do with sensual qualities and more to do with signaling, with participating in a zeitgeist, with nailing down one’s social identity for a particular moment in time. -- Poseurdom is too seductive and useful an opportunity; it lets us deploy cultural capital without risk.'

'The Internet has proven to be a frighteningly efficient tool to create virtual mobs. But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break. ...on FriendFeed all the comments are aggregated on one page, and everyone participating sees it all. It’s much more likely to break out into a mob. ...it might be a good idea to slow the mob down a little until actual facts can be introduced into the conversation.' -- This slowing down is a valid point regarding realtime sentiment racing ahead of facts and wider context. #iranelection is a perfect case study. Isn't all this just a 'tragedy of the commons (attentional bandwidth)' problem?

Masahiro Morioka, 'Consciousness Communication: The Birth of a Dream Navigator', 1993: "In this book, I analyzed computer-mediated-communications from the viewpoint of deep psychology and sociology. I distinguished two concepts, "infomation communication" and "consciousness communication," and insisted that the latter would be greatly activated in the network society. ..."consciousness communication" means "the communication for the purpose of social interaction itself." In consciousness communication, my consciousness flows out through the feeler of my personality, and gets mixed with other consciousness in the consciousness interaction field. -- I introduced the concept of "community of anonymity" where anonymous persons join and interact with each other. I insisted that this kind of community would expand and prevail in cyber-space." -- Expect us.

Kenji Kamiyama: 'When I first named the series, "Stand Alone Complex", I tried to underscore the dilemmas and concerns that people would face if they relied too heavily on the new communications infrastructure known as "the network". When "the network" links individuals together, the speed and the amount of transmitted information is greatly boosted. Also, people can share information as if they had actually experienced it, using virtual reality tools in the same way that cell phones and text messaging is commonly used today. When you are only exchanging text messages, you tend to include all sorts of presumptions and imagined notions. I became aware that this could lead to a sort of parallel information further leading to dangerous situations. -- "information disseminates and parallelizes; and the Stand Alone Complex phenomenon actually exists." and "good cause is seldom parallelized, and does not disseminate."' -- Bad spreads good.

"While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics."

"...rumors can have a longer lifespan on a network of sympathetic blogs, Facebook postings and Twitter feeds. None of this is to excuse the behavior of the government after the election results came out. Or to diminish the bravery and courage of the people who are out in the streets in Tehran getting beaten. But what if it’s based on a lie? A Twitter-fueled, mass delusion of a lie? That the one third of people who voted for Mousavi convinced themselves, via a social media echo chamber that selectively picked rumors and amplified them until they appeared true, that they in fact represented two thirds of the country? And then tried to bring down the government based on that delusion? Maybe it’s not the case this time. But doesn’t this entire episode seem to show how such a thing could happen? And then what?" -- And a whole new reality was set into motion.

"The value of Tweets right now is less the information they contain than the solidarity they promote. Twitterers are bearing witness to what's happening around them, and calling out into the darkness of cyberspace for confirmation. I'm here. You're here, too. We are present. Twitter, for all its faults, and the Internet, for all its insubstantiality, nonetheless serve as the strands of an existential telegraph. By resisting those who would censor history in real time, those flinging messages into the ether are demonstrating their freedom of speech—or, rather, their freedom to speak in spite of all efforts to the contrary. This mere gesture of freedom—the ability to connect to others and confirm one's experience of the world—is what social networking is all about. While this may or may not be enough right now to topple an unjust government, the opposition, in demonstrating that this freedom is now a permanent right, has already claimed victory." -- The network is flowing.

'The Yorkshire Ranter recasts terrorism as an "auto-immune war" -- a war intended to inflict maximum damage by getting the host's defense mechanisms to overfire, damaging the host well beyond than the actual terrorist attacks: "Specifically, auto-immune war is a strategy, but its tactical implementation is the creation of false positive responses. Security obsession gums up the economy with inefficiencies. Terrorism terrorises the public; security theatre keeps them that way. As Kilcullen points out, every day, millions of travellers are systematically reminded of terrorism by government security precautions. Profiling measures subject entire communities to indignity and waste endless hours of police time. Vast sums of money are spent on counterproductive equipment programs and unlikely techno-fixes. National identity cards and monster databases are the specific symptoms of this pathology in the UK, just as idiotic militarism is in the US."' -- The cancer that is killing /e

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Ambient is for the lightness, the atmospheric, non-directional and distributed nature of the communication. These are communications that are one to many; they're not quite broadcast and yet not exactly conversational; they flood over a somewhat defined space. Within that space is intimacy: the closeness, familiarity and warmth that this kind of communication can create and the ever-present network of friends available wherever you can access the internet, or even just send a text message." -- Four reasons why people bother with social networking: #1. anticipated reciprocity #2. reputation #3. sense of efficacy #4. identification with a group

"...the human brain evolved to very quickly recognize and empathize with physical pain and fear in others, but is much slower to recognize and empathize with emotional pain, or to acknowledge and celebrate virtue or skill. What this means is that, in a media environment where our social encounters happen very quickly, we may not be giving our brains a chance to generate appropriate compassion or admiration. This is especially problematic with regards to compassion, as we may find ourselves building insufficient bonds of empathy, critical to communities undergoing stress (and we're seeing a lot of stressed-out communities right now!). ...rapid-fire messaging overwhelms the brain's capacity to see consequences. ...there's a point where an insufficient amount of attention given to a potentially moving encounter means that little or no empathy--compassion or admiration--will result. And while paying attention to another person is important, offering empathy is much more critical."

Like the meaning of life being 'life', I think he's nailed the "what does twitter mean?" thing, here: '#1. Ideals beat strategies: What infuriates people most about Twitter is that it seems to have no plan, scheme, or angle. "Hey, Twitter" say the pundits: "don't you know the business of business is to profit, by any means necessary?" The business of business is to create value — and that's why Twitter's not playing the tired, old game of value extraction. It is trying, instead, to create a more authentic kind of value — and to do that, you need ideals. Twitter pursues its ideals — democracy, peace, equity — with the quiet intensity of a true revolutionary.' -- '#2. Open beats closed. #3. Connection beats transaction. #4. Simplicity beats complexity. #5. Neighborhoods beat networks. #6. Circuits beat channels. #7. Laziness beats business. #8. Public beats private. #9. Messy beats clean. #10. Good beats evil.'

'The consequence of self-reproduction in life, as well as in the technium, is an inherent drive toward ubiquity. Technology, too, wants to be ubiquitous. ...the technium favors the type of ubiquity found in open-ended technologies, that is, those technologies that effectively increase the arrival of other effective open-ended technologies. This expansion unleashes cascades of other technologies that spread pervasively. Total ubiquity is the end point all technologies tend toward but never reach. -- '...something strange happens with ubiquity. More is different. When a technology saturates, or even supersaturates, a culture, it unleashes patterns not seen in lone examples of it. A few isolated manifestations of a technology can reveal its first order effects. But it is not until technology fills a vast, thick interacting pervasion do the second and third order consequences erupt. Most of the unintended consequences that so scare us in technology usually arrive in ubiquity.'

'Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes -- concepts that are literally alive.' -- "Words are memes that can be pronounced."

"What if the reason no one's figured out why Twitter matters is that it's bigger, in fact, than anyone's imagining? ...by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation. It's not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven't always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It's just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life. And that may be all the point that Twitter needs."

'A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information—that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are are a part of this flow. Overload isnt a problem anymore since we have no choice but to acknowledge that we cant wade through all this information. This isnt an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of—its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we cant attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it. ...today history is disappearing given a deluge of flow, a lack of tools to navigate and provide context about the past. The cacophony of the crowd erases the past and affirms the present. It started with search and now its accelerated with the now web. I dont know where it leads but I almost want a remember button—like the like or favorite. Something that registers something as a memory—as an salient fact that I for one can draw out of the stream at a later time'

"My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors. I define the One Machine as the emerging superorganism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism." -- Escalating set of definitions of the superorganism: "# I: A manufactured superorganism # II: An autonomous superorganism # III: An autonomous smart superorganism # IV: An autonomous conscious superorganism -- My hunch is that the One Machine has advanced through levels I and II in the past decades and is presently entering level III."

'And maybe it doesn't matter so much if the most-deserving entrant wins, whether it's Britney Spears ruling pop, or a gossip item leading a list of most-read news articles. "If we view the role of cultural products as giving us something to talk about, then the most important thing might be that everyone sees the same thing and not what that thing is," Prof. Salganik says.' -- Monkey see, monkey do. -- 'Users are shaping news by voting up popular-culture coverage and gossip on many sites. "Celebrities, sex and anything Jon Stewart-related" rise quickly to the top of the list at the news-aggregator Newser, according to Chief Executive Patrick Spain. "This is at odds with what people tell us about what they want in their news -- serious, important stories."' -- Monkey is, monkey isn't.

From the linked PDF 'Neither Hierarchy nor Network: An Argument for Heterarchy by Karen Stephenson': "There is no archeological precedent for heterarchy that we know of, largely because the world and our institutions have never been this interconnected. Heterarchy is a good idea, but very difficult to implement compared to more familiar forms of hierarchies and networks. Heterarchies can be seedbeds of contagion—of ineptness, of disease and of fraud as we have witnessed in the unintended consequences of ENRON, AIDS [etc]. Or, heterarchies can link together people and institutions to solve a complex task and/or achieve a grand design. Heterarchy could portend a premier form of 21st-century governance. Or it could be a harbinger of unimaginable perversity. -- Connection by technology without trust is merely traffic. Trusted connection without technology is an opportunity lost. To survive

'The actress playing the operator would ... ask them a simple personal question—like, “Tell me something that you’re especially good at.” Once the operator got her answer, she would inform the player that she would be calling another phone within one hour, and whoever answered that phone needed to know what that player had told her as the answer. She didn’t tell the player which phone she was going to call; the player needed to make sure that all of the other players in the field who would potentially receive the call knew that information. The designers shortened the time between the calls throughout the day, planning to reach a point where the players could no longer relay the necessary information quickly enough. But, to the designers’ surprise, they never reached the limit of the players’ capabilities. By the end of the day, the players were able to broadcast the pertinent message from one individual to a world-wide network of teammates in the real-world in less than 15 seconds.'

"Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so."

'Now that everyone relentlessly Googles baby names, parents have no excuse if they saddle their kids with the most popular names. What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.” And that’s what’s fascinating about watching the nation-level trends in baby naming. The national nomenclature is transformed living room by living room as one frazzled couple after another makes a seemingly personal decision for underlying phonetic reasons they haven’t considered. “People may think they named a child after great, great grandma Olivia, but they have a lot of great, great grandmas, and they picked Olivia because it fits the popular sounds,” Wattenberg says. And that’s how a country’s culture changes: People cherry-picking from the past as they look for a name to call the future.' -- How about choosing one that's good?

'Adaptive natural selection excels at supremely optimizing a form to a constantly shifting niche. That process is always very specific, very local, and very contingent on tiny historical details and chance. But adaptive optimization presents an ancient conundrum to a species: if they perfect themselves for where they are at present, they can get stuck if the environment shifts quickly which over the span of geological time is certain to happen "frequently." Ideally, a species should seek a balance between optimization of the present and flexibility for the future. Yet, by definition natural selection works only in the present and cannot anticipate the future. The forces behind convergence and emergence, however, keep species near optimal evolvibility, rather than optimal adaptation, and occasionally skip across optimization (good enough is better). Converging on emergent forms, remixing durable ancient subroutines, resisting over-optimization, can keep species primed for the future.'

'Robert Bornstein talks about "dual dependency": the desire to have portable technologies nearby all the time and the desire to have other people always reachable at a moment's notice. Several people told me that they felt naked without their cell phones on them at all times and that they sleep with their computers or cell phones in their beds with them! Many more keep the devices not too far away at night and feel uncomfortable and agitated when physically separated from them or when they must be turned off.' -- 'Kate Fox says that portable technologies help us restore the kind of continuous communication with our 'tribes' that was common in pre-industrial days. It is alienating to be physically separated from our friends and family, she argues. Cell phones reduce that alienation by restoring a kind of pre-modern sense of community in which people were in frequent, almost constant, contact. They return us, she says, to "the more natural and humane patterns of pre-industrial society."'

'"BBS: The Documentary" by Jason Scott, a mini-series of 8 episodes about the history of the BBS'

"Welcome to the 21st century. What's different about a hyperconnected world? In a word: feedback. The more connected we are, the more feedback matters — because when we're all connected what I do is more likely to feed back onto you. Viral effects are a path to radical strategic innovation. Wanna get radical? Stop thinking about products, services, and processes. Ask instead how you can get viral, not just in terms of marketing, but in terms of production, distribution, pricing, logistics, or even service."

"A simple message, less than 140 characters, is sent out to followers around the world and within hours, perhaps minutes, more than 100 million people have been mobilized to act. The message might instruct those who read it to look at a certain website, protest at a designated time and place, or perform any number of other acts, promoting an agenda or cause whose intentions may be either benign or downright evil. But whatever the message, whatever its agenda or intentions, the message has been sent and the world is shaken by its power. A tweetbomb. That is what this message is called. Although we haven’t seen one yet, you better believe it is coming, and it is coming soon." -- Monkey see monkey do

"Viewer Voices: The Onion News Network's Brandon Armstrong responds to viewers' emails, texts, and chats--no matter how inane."

'... please don't confuse what I have to say for that tired Luddite screed about how technology is ruining us. It isn't. Except it just might. Because of technology, we never have to be alone anymore. And that's the problem. It is dulling our very capacity to ever be alone, or alone in our thoughts. "We've gone from an American ethic that championed the lone guy on a horseback to an ethic of managing multiple data streams," says Dalton Conley. "It's very hard for people to unplug and be alone -- and be with the one data stream of their mind." What's fueling this? Conley says it's anxiety borne out of a deep-seated fear that we're being left out of something, somewhere, and that we may lose out on advancement in our work, social, or family lives if we truly check out. "The anxiety of being alone drives this behavior to constantly respond and Twitter and text, but the very act of doing it creates the anxiety."' -- On Aloneness vs Loneliness (Video inside)

'“Poor folk love their cellphones!” [Bruce Sterling] said. “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.' -- “I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote an­other. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”'

'Could the connectivity of the 21st century actually harbor a hidden social danger? could it actually be a paradise lost? Could it be that the send/receive button email addiction has evolved into a monster that encompass our entire social sphere? by constantly pressing the “pay me some attention” button we are digging an emotional hole for ourselves, diluting our social “Ribena” more than we need too? Just as a watched pot never boils, does a watched social network creates anxiety, attention deficit and emotional longing. I guess loneliness is relative to the opportunity you have to prove how popular or unpopular you are. thus like the concept of ignorance being learned. Can it be that we also learn to be lonely?'

'What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that the originator of the copied action is not even a real person, but merely a rumored figure that performed the copied action. Even without instruction or leadership a certain type of person will spring into action to imitate the rumored action and move toward the same goal even if only subconsciously. The result is an epidemic of copied behavior–with no originator. ...mass hysteria-with purpose. ... an emergent phenomenon catalyzed by parallelization of the human psyche through the cyberbrain networks. ...by exploiting the mechanism of information transmission in society, one could achieve a very efficient and subtle thought control. Indeed, since people tend to modify slightly the information (and forget where it came from) in the processes of consumption (or appropriation), it becomes difficult to sort genuine ideas from modified, implanted ones.' -- And a whole new reality was set into motion.

"The members of a hashmob gather, virtually, around a particular hashtag by labeling each of their tweets with said hashtag and then following the resulting hashtag tweet stream. Hashmobbers don't have to subject themselves to the weather, and they don't actually have to be in proximity to any other physical being. A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob." -- #amazonfail

"Swarms need real-time communication. Living systems don't have the luxury of waiting overnight to process an incoming signal. If they had to sleep on it, they could die in their sleep. With few exceptions, nature reacts in real time. With few exceptions, business must increasingly react in real time. High transaction costs once prohibited the instantaneous completion of thousands of tiny transactions; they were piled up instead and processed in cost-effective batches. But no longer. Why should a phone company get paid only once a month when you use the phone every day? Instead it will eventually bill for every call as the call happens, in real time. Of course, not all information should flow everywhere; only the meaningful should be transmitted. But in the network economy only signals in real time (or close to it) are truly meaningful. Examine the speed of knowledge in your system. How can it be brought closer to real time?" -- The Great Compression

'PEOPLE, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms — or at least a modicum of their privacy. But Facebook at almost 200 million members is a force that reinvents and tears at such boundaries. Teachers are yoked together with students, parents with their children, employers with their employees. Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as “homophily” — the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity. Facebook is trying to teach members to use privacy settings to manage their network so they can speak discreetly only to certain friends, like co-workers or family members, as opposed to other “friends” like bosses or professional colleagues. But most Facebook users haven’t taken advantage of the privacy settings; the company estimates that only 20 percent of its members use them.'

Quotes Baudrillard's The Vital Illusion: "#Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social. #Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true. #Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present. #Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real. #Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex … Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event." -- Carr: "What we see today is not discontinuity but continuity. Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them."

Adam Greenfield: 'It will be "live feeds from massively distributed embedded sensor networks, extraordinarily complex real-time data visualizations, fully social augmented-reality overlays...” We all will be "minutely and intimately aware of every Indian woman maimed by a spurned suitor in an acid attack, every Iranian kid stoned to death for having the temerity to be born gay, every destroyed textbook in the trashed cafeteria of an abandoned Detroit high school." Unfortunately for us, quoting the Buddha, "awareness is suffering."' -- Jamais Cascio calls the unlimited-bandwidth future the "participatory panopticon," and describes a world where many will broadcast every move of their lives. Everything will be its own broadcast station, its own TV channel: Each subway train, each building, every lamp will be linked in, updating status reports and even live video to the net. The world will be defined by a cacophony of narrow-cast information, all of it begging for attention and analysis.'

On Twitterification: 'We are expected to be, or become, “omnivorous consumers of momentary trivia.” Not only that, but we are expected to produce that trivia ceaselessly and eagerly. This calls to mind Foucault’s ideas about power exercising itself not as repression—that is, as forbidding us to speak or to act in certain ways—but as permission, as a kind of broad encouragement to speak (albeit through discourses that constitute our identities along certain prescribed lines). Our participation lets power work through us, which we can experience as being exciting—as being part of the action; we are all under surveillance, but we understand that emotionally as “Hey, we’re all celebrities!” Foucault calls it “control by stimulation.” This is why people seem to feel compelled to use Twitter. We want to participate, want to be counted, want to count. -- We are spying on each other and confessing ourselves to everybody else, and mistaking it all for entertainment consumption...'