'Facebook succeeded because it built new online habits around frequent offline behaviors. TheFacebook.com, as it was originally known, offered users a digital way to feel connected to others throughout the day and from anywhere they could access the web. The power of this universal human need for social acceptance and connection helps explain how the company grew well beyond college campuses and now touches one in eight people on the planet. Ask a devoted Facebook user why they log-in to the site several times per day and they’ll describe features they love and provide examples of how they use the service. They’ll tell you it’s a great way to share photos or keep up with their friends. But below the surface is the need for emotional gratification. Though we can all shift our emotional states ourselves, it’s not easy. Instead of going through the hard work of consciously changing the way we feel, we use ready-made solutions to do it for us. Facebook, and the companies like it, are the new tools we use to quickly elevate our moods. With Facebook, it’s often loneliness that cues a visit to the site. Twitter is cued when the user fears being out of the loop about what’s happening. Pinterest users feel the urge to capture and collect visual scraps of the web, worried they’ll lose the image lest they pin it. -- The more often an emotion is experienced by the user, the larger the potential market of a product that serves that feeling. -- People don’t realize they use products to satiate feelings so emotional needs must be translated into a concrete story.'

'Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In "Alone Together", MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools...' -- "...Alone Together is about human vulnerability and technological affordances. People are actually willing and wanting to substitute robots – that seem to care – for people... Nurturance is the killer app for sociable robotics. Human beings are programmed to love what we nurture." -- "'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.' When we use other people in this way, you can get used to seeing them as spare parts; as ways to support our too fragile selves."

"The most destructive thing that we've allowed to have an expectation of each other is that we will instantly respond to each other ... and almost without thinking." "If you need to be constantly responding, you can only answer in little bits that really show no thought." -- "The kid comes out of the school, is desperately trying to make eye contact with the parent, and the parent is sitting there glued to the phone..." "This generation has grown up seeing technology as the competition. I don't think they're going to raise their children this way."

"The feelings that you feel are very, very real, on the internet."

'#Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. #Step 2: We bring her into existence. #Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network #Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl.'

"We can't get enough of each other IF we can have each other at a distance in amounts that we can control." -- "Things go from: I have a feeling, I want to make a call; to: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. In other words, the validation of a feeling becomes part of establishing it."

'The technology has power because it addresses psychological vulnerabilities that many of us have. We want connection, but many of us fear the consequences of connection. True intimacy can be very scary. ...this is particularly true of the narcissists: "In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.” This can set into motion a vicious cycle. As Sherry points out: "...if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants – it demands – immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands but creates a self that prefers simulation. Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.'

'Facebook fans overwatered the plant, loving it to death. Since its unveiling two months ago, Isai said Meet Eater had attracted more than 5,000 fans from across the world -- including a five-fold spike in the past two weeks -- literally drowning it with love. "We found that it's been over-loved, it's actually died two times from having too much stimulation, which is an interesting outcome for us," said Isai, a Queensland University student in interactive design. -- He said the research showed meaningful connections could be made online, but also some "needs and responses" could not be met via computers.'

"Here's some pictures of my dog. Can you comment on these?" -- Comment or it didn't happen.

'Loneliness is the most obvious risk of aloneness. The very idea of solitude may evoke deep childhood fears of abandonment and neglect, and cause some people to rush toward connectedness. Computer life is an attempt to solve the problem of alonetime and social needs. In a culture that no longer provides wilderness or stretches of solitary time, the computer is the one machine that seemingly offers it all: stimulation, knowledge, news, alonetime, relationships, and even sex. One might say it has universal appeal. However, if we are not aware of why computer technology is attracting us, we cannot use it to our best advantage. The question is, are we routinely using the computer and television to find alonetime without really realizing our unfulfilled alone need? Or are we becoming incapable of living in the moment except in technological time-outs like the computer? -- Life's creative solutions require alonetime. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems.'

Turkle: "There's a kind of self-surveillance that young poeple don't think about... What is intimacy without privacy? This is really a question for this generation. -- Philosophers tell us that we become human when we’re confronted with another face, with a voice, with the inflection of a voice; these kids don’t want to see a face, they don’t want to hear a voice. They want to text. In a way we’re no longer nourished but consumed by what we’ve created. It’s not all good. I see people in retreat as much as they are in advance now that they have all this information. I see people defining a successful self as a self that can keep up with its email. -- We live in a kind of paradoxical time. We’re giving young people a very paradoxical message: The world is more and more complex; on the other hand, we’re only going to ask you a question that you can answer in two seconds. We leave ourselves less and less time for reflection because our communications media push us to quick responses."

Thoreau's formulation of a fully developed life: Live deliberately; live in your own life; live with no sense of resignation. '... on all of those dimensions, I feel that we're taking away from ourselves the things that Thoreau thought were so essential to discovering an identity. We're not deliberate; we're bombarded. We have no stillness; we have resignation -- There is a wonderful Freudian formulation, which is that loneliness is failed solitude. In many ways, we are forgetting the intellectual and emotional value of solitude. You're not lonely in solitude. You're only lonely if you forget how to use solitude to replenish yourself and to learn. And you don't want a generation that experiences solitude as loneliness. And that is something to be concerned about, because if kids feel that they need to be connected in order to be themselves, that's quite unhealthy. They'll always feel lonely, because the connections that they're forming are not going to give them what they seek.'

'“I stopped living for moments and started living for people.” — Miley Cyrus, 2009 -- I was reading that popular tween sensation Miley Cyrus deactivated her twitter account. It will go down in history as the ‘most tragic’ internet suicide of all time, since she had over 2 million followers. I have read ‘doomsday articles’ that say this is ‘the end of twitter’, since tweeple now have role models who were ’strong enough’ to quit twitter. Instead of mimicking role models who are ‘twitter addicts’, tweens will now be more independent and mimmick role models who are ‘twitter quitters. A lifestream of text filled with 140 character statements just doesn’t give U enough room to BE U. It seems like maybe she turned to ’social media’ to try to replicate human relationships+interactions+socialspheres, but it was just this weird experience of ‘people looking at her.’ -- Just want my life 2 belong 2 me, but also want my life to make other people feel jealous/bored with their own existences.'

'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.”

Emotional intelligence campaign for teens (ab)use of communication technologies. Great 'callout cards': "YOU MUST BE PROUD TO HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN IM ME ALL DAY" - "CONGRATS ON TOTALLY VIOLATING MY TRUST" -- 'Talk it out' section is full of interesting countermeasures. These poor kids are running constant damage limitation exercises. That's not cool.

'Your cell phone, IM, and social networks are all a digital extension of who you are. When someone you're with pressures you or disrespects you in those places, that's not cool. Thatsnotcool.com is attempting to raise awareness about digital dating abuse and stop it before it gets worse. Addressing new and complicated problems between people who are dating or hooking up, like constant and controlling texting, pressuring for nude pictures and breaking into someones e-mail or social networking page.' -- http://www.thatsnotcool.com

'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.'

'We assume we know the people whose petty complaints and daily routines we’ve heard so much about because, traditionally, the only way to hear such things was to get to know them well. But it’s impossible to really know someone through sanitized soundbites. In 140 chars, there’s little room for the nuances of personality such conversation typically reveals. ...all see the carefully-prepared facade people want to present, and come away thinking that we know them better than we really do. With people we know in “real life,” this isn’t such a big deal. We already know their personality; Twitter simply helps maintain our relationship by keeping us up-to-date. And while, in doing so, it lets us maintain vastly more relationships ...on Twitter, at the same time you sign up to hear from Oprah, you can also follow—and cement your relationship with—more real friends. And it’s a good thing too, because with all these fake friends running around, we’re going to need all the real ones we can get.'

'It's all about shared intimacy that is of no value to a third-party ear who doesn't know the person babbling. It's a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn't look down at it from outter space. Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don't know and it's bound to look a wee bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different than you. It's about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It's about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what's happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it's embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What's so wrong about that?'

#Flow #Faces: Indeed, what you see are the faces of people you know with the notes they wrote next to them. This taps into deep mental structures that we all have to looks for faces and associate the information we receive with people we decide to trust, through what we feel about them. This is also why automated tweets not by them are so obtrusive, as they break the trust. Using friends' faces in ads is even more pernicious, as ads are by definition recommendations from people we don't trust. #Phatic #Following #Publics #Mutual media: Mutual media: The alternative model is one that is less familiar, yet is all around us - the spontaneous order that emerges from people communicating in parallel. ...we are each others media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. #Small world networks'

On media ecology and Postman's amusing ourselves to death. Quoting Henry Canbry, 1926: "What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life ... and the prime cause is not vanity ... but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in mass civilization." -- That 'context collapse' makes people to want to discover an authentic self to perform authentically towards 'authentic causes' that reinforce the authenticity of the endlessly authenticating self? Dude needs to read some HRO.

'This is a video of the first beta version of TwittARound - an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone. It shows live tweets around your location on the horizon. Because of video see-through effect you see where the tweet comes from and how far it is away.'

'I’m starting to think that Internet romances, including Mark Sanford’s, are not romances between people at all. They’re affairs with the Internet. Watch people who are newly in love, especially any kind of love that requires that the participants keep stealthy and apart, and they’re all over their iPhones and Palm Pres. It’s P.D.A. with P.D.A.’s. Romance seems to have become an online multiplayer fantasy-adventure game, no less thrilling than World of Warcraft, and open to all ages. Apparently you’re never too old to relish using special screen names to send cryptic messages on secret decoder devices.' -- 'The connection to communications technology — the connection to connection — has become part of what makes us human. In the idiom of those who are swooningly in love, it makes us “feel alive.” When we’re denied the connection to connection, it’s no wonder we lust for it.' -- Love, temes xXx

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.

"Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles." -- "...the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — will persevere regardless of Twitter's fortunes..." -- "Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter — some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. You don't need patents or Ph.D.s to build on this kind of platform."

"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

"I published my life on the fucking internet. And it doesn’t make people wanna be with me. It makes people not trust me. And I don’t know what the fuck to do about it." -- “It was like Justin was maintaining a celebrity gossip blog about himself. Who needs that kind of cruelty in their lives?” -- 'In 1994, Justin Hall invented oversharing ...no one knew that the self-revelation he found so addictive would one day become a temptation for millions. -- the transition we’re living through today.. The struggle to draw a line between the self and the world isn’t some novelty imposed on us by technology; it’s part of human development—an effort we all face from the moment our infant selves begin to notice there’s a world out there, beyond our bodies. The Web has just made the process of drawing this line more nettlesome. In the end we’re each going to find the compromise between sharing and discretion that’s right for ourselves. If we’re lucky, it will take less than the decade it took Hall.'

' ...sometimes I wonder how anyone ever gets to know anyone who is basically off the grid. It feels so forced and unnatural. You have to ask someone about their day and what was on their mind--manually! Ever think about introducing yourself on the subway? Ask them to unplug from their iPod to talk to a stranger in mid-sardine can transport with no ability to Ignore or Block? Yeah, right. How would they know who I was if they couldn't Google me? BTW, exactly what day was it that it became creepier *not* to have a web presence? -- "How did you meet?" Nowadays, it goes something like this, "Well, I found her after searching a keyword that I'm interested on Twitter..."

'Constant connection makes us chronically impatient. We come to expect everything to happen at the touch of a button – and get angry when it doesn't. As the actress Carrie Fisher once quipped, these days "even instant gratification takes too long." The other day, my neighbour, a multitasking marketing executive, lost her BlackBerry; or thought she did. It turned out that her five year old daughter had hidden it. "I thought it would get you to listen to me when I talk," explained the little girl. Overdosing on mobile communication can also mess up the relationship we have with ourselves. Human beings need moments of silence and solitude: to rest and recharge, to think deeply and creatively, to look inside and confront the big questions, 'Who am I? How do I fit into the world? What is the meaning of life?'. That isn't likely to happen when your mind is constantly wondering if you have new email or if it's time for a fresh tweet.' -- Interesting comment on fear of uncertainty (untether)

Sherry Turkle: '“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be. Texting hits directly at both those jobs.” Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind. “If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”'

"I have this sense that experiences need to be shared in a much more mediated way to register to myself as having happened. ...since online sharing has become a way of translating my own experiences to myself, without that process readily available to me, I felt dulled at times, alienated from myself to a degree. All of this is to say that I think that the internet has suddenly brought us a much denser experience of interpersonal relationships and sociality that forces us to reshape the way we think of ourselves, as being potentially social at basically all times. We are perpetually present everywhere, with a ubiquity wireless connectivity supplies. The result of this thick intimacy, this perpetual sociality, is that we may have much more difficulty achieving harmony with the natural world, where presence is momentary and fragile, and sociality is limited to the distance our voices can travel." -- Data or it didn't happen.

'The Facebook status is the result of a significant shift in thinking within Generation I. The concept of being social has adapted, now requiring that a person be eternally connected and no longer differentiate between personal and public information. Young people have accepted that sharing private information about themselves is simply a part of having friends. The advice your mother provided long ago finally makes sense: Sharing is caring.'

'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."'

"The essence of Twitter is all about how it redefines our relationship with time. We experience time as a series of moments measured out by events. Our personal timeline is a series of events that happen moment by moment and are dominated by the events that happen in our brains – thoughts, contemplations, urges and emotions bubbling up from our sub-concious stream, some of them converted by the conscious into intentions and sometimes into actions. It is communication and self-expression at the speed of thought. And, it is no coincidence that the length of a tweet fits nicely into the size of a text message, for what better way to seize the moment than to do so using a mobile – the only device that is with us moment by moment. It is a seizing the moment machine. The medium is the moment. The tools invented to seize the moment have began to define the moment." -- Use cases 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.”'

On Facebook: "It’s a bit like being trapped at an elementary school talent show. People seem to be trying to hard, or are entirely unaware that they should be trying, or—like me—they have just frozen up there on the stage. -- Facebook seems to exist precisely to obviate awkward discourse. But awkwardness is inescapably necessary. It’s an almost physiological signal that something emotionally significant is taking place. If Facebook eradicates such feelings by giving us such granular privacy controls that we prevent the possibility of embarrassment, then our lives become poorer, emotionally. The people we connect with through the site seem less than real people; they seem like shadows of the real people we thought we knew—the reality of these “friends” remains offline and even more inaccessible. In the place of intimacy, we have the more convenient alternative of user friendliness, the triumph of a new, corporate-mediated politesse.'

'... college was my big chance to [...] reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self? Perhaps my nieces will find a new way to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation. Perhaps they will evolve through judicious deleting and updating of profile information, through the constant awareness of their public face. It could be that [...] Facebook marks a return to the time when people remained embedded in their communities for life, with connections that ran deep, peers who reined them in if they strayed too far from the norm... Kids [...] will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon [Facebook] and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves.'

'Josh’s experiments in 2000, during which he and his cohorts became obsessed with their view counts, parallels today’s blogging, social media and YouTube “arms race.” In his experiment, the technology robbed the subjects–and their audience–of every last ounce of empathy. Digital communications is a wonderful thing–at least at the start. Everyone participating in digital communities is eventually introduced to Godwin’s Law: At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis. But that’s only part of the breakdown. Eventually, you see the effect of what I’ll call Harris’ Law: At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person. Harris’ Law took effect last year when Abraham Biggs killed himself in front of a live webcam audience on life-streaming service JustinTV. The audience’s role? They encouraged him to do it.'

"Optional paralysis, indifference and solipsism loom, as the coping strategies for the onslaught of realtime and realspace. When our social reality is ironed out into a stream of broadcasts on a feed, mediated by devices that guarantee each of us an isolation in an environment that gratifies our fantasies of total control, the illusion that friends can be monitored entirely on our own terms grows; the requirement of reciprocity begins to seem provisional, old-fashioned, a signal of a breakdown of the better technologies for person management. ...it seems to me a continuation of the space of consumerism—of impulsiveness, instrumentality, convenience for its own sake, and ersatz individualism. And obviously it is not just going to go away. We are all complicit in it, eventually. At some point it suits our purposes and we go along, as though we control the terms by which we interact with it. We don’t notice the creeping ways in which it begins to dictate terms to us."

"Solitude has been transformed into loneliness by the prevalence of tools that make it possible for us always to be connected. The tools assume an always-on status, so we do too, whether or not we need to. Because you can text your whereabouts at all times to your friends, you should do so. Because people can be contact you always, when they aren’t, it can begin to feel like a slight. Something about knowing people out there on line could be paying attention to what we are doing can bring out the borderline personality in all of us. The immediacy of the new medium for friendship sets friendship up on a customer service model, on which we are encouraged to expect immediate satisfaction on our own terms, since we are paying with that newly scarce currency, our attention. This commercial reciprocity threatens to preclude the possibility of the gratuitous reciprocity of friendship. The customer is always right, but the customer is always alone."

'while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only actively communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.” “People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says.

'There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.” Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.”'

"Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: "We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed." But just as not all information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality should be celebrated. We communicate with quick instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Although the culture that grows up around the cellphone is a "talk culture", it is not necessarily a culture that contributes to self-reflection. Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."

'Bad late 80s early 90s CBC video about the growning phenomina of "Internet"' -- Never gonna happen

Maggie Jackson: "We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrenalin jolt when orienting to new stimuli. Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimize our capacity to pursue goals. This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. When you're scattered and diffuse, you're less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it's hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking. ...stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering." -- *gulps*

"Twitter, which emulates some of the salient features of Newspeak, is of course perfect for advertising—if you have to stop to think about what’s being said, the persuasion has probably failed. But the most insidious aspect of it is how it encourages us to speak in slogans and catchphrases, to eschew logical exposition of our thoughts for a quick, allusive declaration. Twitter is supposed to facilitate our relationships by providing “ambient awareness” of the lives of others, but it seems more a way of persuading us to provide a constant stream of information about ourselves to those sureveilling us. In a sense, it ceases to be communication in any conventional sense; instead it reduces communication to the bleeps of a homing beacon. Twitter is a way to become one’s own voluntary RFID tag." -- Information vs Communication. Message vs Massage.

'Two years ago, a YouTube member named MadV—who silently performs magic tricks while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask—put up a short, cryptic video. He held his hand up to the camera, showing what he'd written on his palm: "One World." Then he urged viewers to respond. The video was just 41 seconds long, but it caught people's imagination. Within a few days, hundreds of YouTube users had posted videos—shot on webcams, usually in their bedrooms—displaying their own scrawled messages: "Don't quit!" "Tread gently." "Think." "Carpe diem." "Open your eyes." And my favorite, "They could be gone tomorrow!" Soon, MadV had inspired 2,000 replies, making it the most-responded-to video in YouTube's history. MadV stitched them all together into a long, voiceless montage, and it's quite powerful. All these people from across the globe convey something incredibly evocative while remaining completely mute. So here's my question: What exactly is this? What do you call MadV's project?' -- ???

"Though he never names it, what Levy is really talking about here is shame. And the shame comes from something deeper than just self-exposure, though that's certainly part of it. There's an arrogance to sharing the details of one's life in public with strangers - it's the arrogance of power, the assumption that such details somehow deserve to be broadly aired. And as for the people, those strangers, on the receiving end of the disclosures, they suffer, through their desire to hear the details, to hungrily listen in, a kind of debasement. At the risk of going too far, I'd argue that there's a certain sadomasochistic quality to the exchange (it's a variation on the exchange that takes place between celebrity and fan). And I'm pretty sure that Levy's remorse comes from his realization, conscious or not, that he is, in a very subtle but nonetheless real way, displaying an undeserved and unappetizing arrogance while also contributing to the debasement of others." -- ;^)

'Paro (a robotic seal-like creative) is able to make eye contact through sensing the direction of a human voice, is sensitive to touch, and has "states of mind" that are affected by how it is treated. In this session with Paro, the woman, depressed because of her son's abandonment, comes to believe that the robot is depressed as well. She turns to Paro, strokes him and says: "Yes, you're sad, aren't you. It's tough out there. Yes, it's hard." and then she pets the robot once again, attempting to provide it with comfort. And in so doing, she tries to comfort herself. The woman's sense of being understood is based on the ability of computation objects like Paro to convince their users that they are in a relationship. They are potent objects-to-think-with for asking the questions, posed by all machines that tether us to new socialities: "What is an authentic relationship with a machine?" "What are machines doing to our relationships with people?" And ultimately, "What is a relationship?"'

“For kids [the mobile phone] has become an identity-shaping and psyche-changing object.” MS. TURKLE, the M.I.T. professor, says cellphones offer another way for the Facebook generation to share every life experience the second it unfolds. “There is a slippage from ‘I have a feeling I want to make a call’ to ‘I need to make a call,’ ” she said. “You don’t get to have a feeling before sharing that feeling anymore.”'

'There is a behavioral connection between the unconsciously “for show” lives of those living in glass condos and the consciously “for show” lives of those spending more and more of their time online, where domestic activities are recorded in achingly specific detail. The result is a cultural confusion about private and public.' --- Sherry Turkle: “There is real confusion about intimacy and solitude. Are we alone in these buildings, facing the anonymity of the city, or are we connected to the city? What do we show and what do we hide? That mirrors what happens when we’re on the computer, on our networks in Facebook. We are no longer able to distinguish when we are together and nurtured and when we are alone and isolated. I can be in intimate contact with 300 people on e-mail, but when I look up from my computer I feel bereft. I haven’t heard a voice, touched a hand, for hours or days. I think people are no longer certain where the self resides.”

'It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.'

"It's an epidemic. It can strike anyone. It begins harmlessly enough... maybe with a cell phone, an online social network profile, or an IM. But before long, the electronic screens invade every corner of your life. There's a name for this tragic and extremely annoying condition: Screen Addiction. But there is hope. Send an intervention to someone you care about! Help them take the first step towards recovery." -- Sent one to my computer. Clear your RAM little fella. Your user can cope without you. *sob sniff*

"This is a little bit genius. One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates. That way, it appears that you're paying attention to them when you're really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity."

"Ten years ago we made a conscious effort to connect. Today, if you’re an urban dweller in a city like London, New York or like me, living here in Tokyo you probably make a conscious effort to disconnect."

Sherry Turkle: "When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place."

"Don’t have a prospect? Check Facebook. Afraid to call? Text. With so many avenues for communication, one might expect an onslaught of romantic soliloquies, but that isn’t the case. Casual is sexy. Caring is creepy."

Comment: Kendall Brookfeld: "Mobile phones are channel-clickers for people, and interrupt direct conversation. Conversation itself seems to be affected. I have fewer long talks with friends, on the phone or otherwise, and I miss this a lot."

Adam Greenfield: "Everyware must be deniable." -- Linky, laggy, leaky.

"adocu is a way to let your buddies and the world know what you're doing at that exact moment. Unlike other sites, your posts must be one word long. That way it stays short and simple. We like to call it nano-blogging :)"

"Exposure in terms of disclosing information of course, but also exposure in the way that a trader might think of it - a vulnerability, a risk associated with taking a position that could, potentially, result in loss or harm."

"... if you're in a Twitter-rich city, drilling down to 1- to 5-mile radius around you will let you know all sorts of things going on in your area as they're happening."

Comment: Gregory: "twitter, friendfeed... i think of them as technology that enables esp and intuition, (yes to your 'complements' observation) which is a more subtle activity than plotting, planning, manipulating, managing, confronting, etc."

"By exhibiting their lives, people claim “copyright” to their own lives" - 'profiles, activities, whereabouts, status, preferences – represent a level of communication that neither has to be told, nor has to be asked for. It is just “out there”'

"Prologue. Imagine it like a group Twitter." (Free theme for WordPress.com blogs -- make your own private twitter!)

Sherry Turkle: "When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place."

"... when virtual worlds behaviors go mainstream and spill over to other demographic audiences. My sixty-something-year-old mother already uses Webkinz to connect a few nights each week with her eight-year-old neice and six-year-old nephew in Virginia."

'One young Korean also described how texting felt like a ping-pong game and how email was more "like doing homework".' It's about the interface. Email is not a narrative environment. It isn't situated in any living social activity. It's tethered/literal.

Why is it never "the iPhone". Why MUST it be addressed as a person? THE iPhone. It's a thing!

"The bottom line is most people want to be in their friends’ attention stream. Whether that is offline or on Facebook or off Facebook, people want their real friends to know what is going on in their lives." True.

"Facebook is a game. A very social one... the goals are to win friends and influence people."

*Dopplr* One web company advertises another. *Dopplr*

'Shelley Powers, a computer programmer who writes a blog, Burningbird, about social networking... calls the entire [twitter suicide] experience “artificial intimacy” and wonders if people were “concerned about it, or were they titillated.'

"... you can only pick fleas on one primate at the time. Language allows you to "pick fleas" on more than one person at a time. Allows us to keep track of lots of poeple and who knows what and who and how they fit together and how you fit in with them."

"it's not about being poked and prodded, it's about exposing more surface area for others to connect with - Jonnie Moore"

"Everywhere we look online we see public and private blurred... The end result is a generation confused about the roles of the public and private realms; a generation that risks sinking into self-absorption and narcissism."

"I’ve found it an odd phenomenon to feel relationships strengthening by simply reading status updates... Across not only friends, but also acquaintances and relative strangers. And there’s value in that, for both sender and the receiver."

"... social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy... decrease[s] the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post information to multiple people."

'Twitter could then perhaps just as easily be called Flutter because it is in some respects a response to a chaotic, folk view of history; an attempt to somehow weave this web of human chaos that we all feel inextricably part of.'

"#6) a sense of warmth. Fires, physically create the sensation. Cells, emotionally create the sensation through human communication. #7) Stories. Stories are constantly swapped over cells. Throughout history, humans have told stories over campfires."