'...heart rates increased when they witnessed someone behaving badly, but this increase was tempered when they were able to pass on the information to alert others. "Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip," Willer said. So strong is the urge to warn others about unsavory characters that participants in the UC Berkeley study sacrificed money to send a "gossip note" to warn those about to play against cheaters in economic trust games. Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said. -- "People paid money to gossip even when they couldn't affect the selfish person's outcome," Feinberg said.'

'Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. ...when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. But when she’s logged in, they can do all of that. And she can delete anything that she doesn’t like. ...she wants to be a part of Facebook when it makes sense and not risk the possibility that people will be snooping when she’s not around. ...you’re not searchable when you’re not around. You really are invisible except when you’re there. And when you’re there, your friends know it, which is great. What Mikalah does gives her the ability to let Facebook be useful to her when she’s present but not live on when she’s not. -- Shamika doesn’t deactivate her Facebook profile but she does delete every wall message, status update, and Like shortly after it’s posted. When she’s done reading a friend’s comment on her page, she’ll delete it. ...“too much drama.”' -- Ghosts in the shell

'The role of reputation systems is to facilitate trust by making reputation more visible. Reputation systems may also be coupled with an incentive system to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. For instance, users with high reputation may be granted special privileges, whereas users with low or unestablished reputation may have limited privileges. -- Rheingold inclines that [online reputation systems] arose as a result of the need for Internet users to gain trust in the individuals they transact with online. The innate trait he makes note of in humans is that functions of society such as gossip 'keeps us up to date on who to trust, who other people trust, who is important, and who decides who is important'. Internet sites such as eBay and Amazon he argues seek to service this consumer trait and are 'built around the contributions of millions of customers, enhanced by reputation systems that police the quality of the content and transactions exchanged through the site'.'

'...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.” '

'Carles invites his readers to make explicit the implicit surveillance they are already conducting, led onward by an administered proclivity for passive curiosity and vicarious fascination with famous persons ... and become actual informants, supplying him with information as if he were a Stasi bureau chief in charge of cultural subversives: Recommended TIP submissions: #mild misunderstandings that need more exposure to turn into over-exposed controversies... And so on. Carles's point of course, is to demonstrate how the media machine no longer needs diabolical masters to operate it ... Instead we create the material bases for our own ideological predetermination through our own eagerness to participate in the mystified consciousness and culture industries. By reporting on one another, we feel as though we have become more famous ourselves, more certain that every move of our own is being watched and evaluated...'

'Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.' -- InternetToughGuy: “Kill him." -- 'The human-flesh search engine can also serve as a safety valve in a society with ever mounting pressures on the government. “You can’t stop the anger, can’t make everyone shut up, can’t stop the Internet, so you try and channel it as best you can. You try and manage it, kind of like a waterworks hydroelectric project,” MacKinnon explained. “It’s a great way to divert the qi, the anger, to places where it’s the least damaging to the central government’s legitimacy.”'

'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.”'

'...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.''

'A new phenomenon is sweeping China after the quake: digital witch hunts of those who dare to be outspoken or criticise. -- According to Ms Eberlein, the term “human flesh search engine”, a literal translation of the Chinese, was first coined in 2001 when an entertainment website asked users to track down film and music trivia. With 210 million Chinese wired up to the internet, it was a powerful concept. It quickly caught on and came to be used as a tool to punish the perpetrators of extra-marital affairs, domestic violence and morality crimes. “Righteousness is one of the five virtues in the Confucian tradition,” Ms Eberlein said. “With the convenience of the internet, and in the case of non-responsive law, the righteous people took matters into their own hands.”' -- McLuhan explains the cause of such violence as a lack of identity in a life lived at the speed of light: http://adamcrowe.posterous.com/kill

'What if games could make kids exceedingly likable and fashionable? A wave of new games for tween girls seeks to do just that, serving up innocuous gameplay designed to let players become perfect little princesses. Aimed at that lucrative, Hannah Montana-fueled intersection of childhood and adolescence, these games might give 8- to 12-year-olds their first experiences with fashion, make-up, popularity … even boys. The weird thing is that you can view these “wholesome” games as being just as bad for girls as Grand Theft Auto’s random bloodshed and rampant criminality is for young, impressionable boys. And while GTA’s influence on boys has been dissected to death, what about the Nintendo DS’ upcoming avalanche of games for tween girls? What kinds of values do preteens learn from these titles? Valuable life lessons, or bad habits?' -- 'Man points' vs 'Bitch points'

'EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That's the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees. Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees. Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.'

"...it’s difficult for a media consumer to care enough about any one thing to stick with it—and for a network trying to build allegiance to a brand, convincing anyone that what you’re showing matters becomes almost impossible. The only thing network television can uniquely offer us non-digitally-optimized saps and dipshits is the promise of immediacy. Leno’s content—like that of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the breakout stars of the past few years—is news-driven, hypertimely, and ultimately disposable, insofar as it loses almost all its value within 24 hours. ...viewers will (I think, and hope) happily continue to pay for quality. Those who don’t will get what they don’t pay for." -- The book was better.

'... it's imperative that brands and their agencies do two things: #1. They become remarkably adept at understanding the cultural conversation in real-time #2. They change their process so they can respond to appropriately to the conversation. This means shrinking the planning process from weeks down to hours.' -- Hark, the future of the agency is 4chan.

"His theory is that if an employee shares a titbit of information, this makes the confidante feel important, that they are someone to be trusted."

Online Store, Magazine/Magalogue, Fashionista Blog = 'Fashion Ecology' < 'Retail Ecology'

"Success is not solid. That’s part of the weird fascination with Gawker—it’s about the anxiety and class rage of New York’s creative underclass. It supplies a Manhattan version of social justice."

Good for staying updated on transmedia / arg / chaotic fiction stuffs. Has rumor rss feeds for your favourite stories.

"I made streetviewr because I wanted a place to collect unusual, interesting and just plain weird locations in Google ® Street Views."

"Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction. It focuses on the depiction of sexual or romantic relationships between two or more characters, who are not necessarily engaged in relationships in the canon universe."

"A bunch of griefers in Second Life staged a members-only metaverse assault on "virtual real estate tycoon" Anshe Chung yesterday, during a staged SL event with CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman. A torrent of pixelated male genitals rained upon the victim, wh

R/u/s/s/e/l/l D/a/v/i/e/s' Twin Brother's Blog

Did this really happen or was it mine and Raj's article (http://sense.psfk.com/2006/10/theres_gold_in_.html) that started the rumour?

Tube gossip. (I don't hear much on the Central Line)