Joseph Kahne: Is the Virtual World Good For the "Real" One? In a cartoon depicting the evolution of Good Samaritanism in the digital age, a man walks by a homeless person lying on the street and does nothing. In the next frame, he is at his computer -- "What's this?!! Sally needs a bag of fertilizer for her Farmville farm? I better get right on it! " Many are struck by the amount of time some people spend in online communities -- and concerns have been raised that our attention to virtual communities may be distracting us from the tangible needs of those around us. Frankly, when it comes to youth civic and political engagement, there is reason for concern.
Is time spent online part of the problem? For the past several years, my colleagues and I have been examining these issues. What we found calls conventional wisdom into question. Online communities are not the problem -- in fact, they may be part of the solution. Digital Media Literacy education can help. Of course, not all online activities produce benefits. Twitter. Twitter. Social Media Strategies. How online dating will make slaves of us all : SciencePunk. This is aimed as a companion piece to my article published in the Times Eureka magazine on the mathematics of matchmaking. There isn’t room in a serious newspaper for flights of sci-fi fantasy, but the technology I saw while researching that article left my head reeling with the possibilities that lay ahead.
To recap: most matchmaking engines online work on a system of collaborative filtering. By studying how you behave, they create a personality profile and compare this to other users on the site. When they find someone who acts in a similar way to you, they use this person’s activity to make predictions on what you might do. So if you and another person both send flirty emails to the same man, the system might push the men she’s contacted in the past to the top of your search results. The seed having taken root in my brain, I spent the next few sleepless nights pondering what the consequences of such a system might be.
A typical day might be like this. I am not a number! World Builder (high quality) Social Media Strategies. Home | NEWMEDIA_ studies. BrianSolisTV's Channel.