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How the Internet Gets Inside Us

How the Internet Gets Inside Us
When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication we’re living with are unprecedented.

FreedomBox Foundation How Social Media Is Having a Positive Impact On Our Culture [OPINION] This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication. Josh Rose is the EVP, digital creative director of ad agency Deutsch LA, who -- when time permits -- moonlights as a photographer. Follow him at @joshrose. Two events today, although worlds apart, seem inextricably tied together. First, on my way to go sit down and read the newspaper at my coffee shop, I got a message from my 10-year-old son, just saying good morning and letting me know he was going to a birthday party today. The amount of calming satisfaction it gives me to be able to communicate with him through technology is undeniably palpable and human. I guess one man’s TMI is another man’s treasure. Moments later, I sat down and opened the paper. The Paradox of Online Closeness I recently asked the question to my Facebook friends: “Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare … is all this making you feel closer to people or farther away?” It is confusing. Filling in the Space With Connections

Tech Digest Or at least it's making us lazy, opting for shorter words instead of long ones. 73% of us believe that Twitter and text messaging is changing the use of the English language, according to a survey presented in a book by JP Davidson called "Planet Word". Too bad for "balderdash", as you really don't hear that often enough as it is, but language is evolving, and brevity is becoming a virtue. "Language is always evolving and great descriptive words are being lost", said Davidson, but added that others emerge to take their place. Davidson's book is being published as a tie-in with Stephen Fry's new series, also called Planet Word. Here are JP Davidson's top 15 rarely-used words: 1 - Bally 2 - Laggard 3 - Felicitations 4 - Rambunctious 5 - Verily 6 - Salutations 7 - Betwixt 8 - Lauded 9 - Arcane 10 - Raconteur 11 - Cad 12 - Betrothed 13 - Cripes 14 - Malaise 15 - Quash [via Daily Mirror]

If the FCC had regulated the Internet: A counterfactual history of cyberspace. - By Jack Shafer The Federal Communications Commission recently issued new rules regulating the Internet—even though it doesn't appear to have such powers. A federal court gangster-slapped the commission last year, accusing it of regulatory overreach for attempting to dictate Internet policy to service providers. These new regulations got me to thinking of where we would be today if the FCC had regulated the Internet from the get-go. … In January 1993, idle regulators at the FCC belatedly discover the burgeoning world of online services. The FCC ignores the standalone Internet because nobody but academics, scientists, and some government bodies go there. "Regulating the Internet would make as much sense as regulating inter-office mail at Michigan State University," says the FCC chairman. The online companies protest and vow to sue the FCC, but the heavily Democratic Congress moots the suits by passing new legislation giving the commission oversight of the online world.

The Computer as a Communication Device This landmark 1968 essay foresaw many future computer applications and advances in communication technology, such as distributed information resources and online interactive communities that are commonplace today as Internet chat rooms and peer-to-peer applications. Originally published in Science and Technology, April 1968. Published on KurzweilAI.net November 9, 2001. In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion. We shall talk more about the mechanics of the meeting later; it is sufficient to note here that we were all in the same room. Our emphasis on people is deliberate. But to communicate is more than to send and to receive. To the people who telephone an airline flight operations information service, the tape recorder that answers seems more than a passive depository. Such a medium is at hand–the programmed digital computer.

Nearly Half of Americans Use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter [STUDY] Facebook use can lower grades by 20 percent, study says - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - Back to School Does the "F" in Facebook stand for an "F" in school? A new study says that college students who are on Facebook while studying or doing homework wind up getting 20 percent lower grades than students who don't have the social networking site in visual range, or even running in the background on their computers or mobile phones. The study, reported in the Daily Mail of Britain, was done by Netherlands psychologist Paul A. Kirschnera of the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies at the Open University of the Netherlands, and Aryn C. Karpinskib of Ohio State University. It will be published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. Kirschnera told the Daily Mail that his team studied 219 U.S. university students between ages 19 and 54, and found that Facebook users had a typical grade point average of 3.06, while "non-users" had an average GPA of 3.82. Among the comments to the story was this one, from "I'moverhere" in Britain: "Believe me, if it isn't Facebook, it's something else.

Open University of Catalonia "The popular uprisings in the Arab world perhaps constitute the most important internet-led and facilitated change" The spontaneous social movements in Tunisia and Egypt have caught political analysts on the hop. As a sociologist and communication expert, were you surprised by the ability of the network society in these two countries to mobilise itself? No, not really. Could we consider these popular uprisings as a new turning point in the history and evolution of the internet or should we analyse them as a logical, albeit extremely important, consequence of the implementation of the Net in the world? These popular insurrections in the Arab world constitute a turning point in the social and political history of humanity. Young Egyptians have played a key role in the popular uprisings, thanks to the use of new technology. This figure is already out-of-date. It doesn't. For some years now, Islamic fundamentalist movements have used new technology to promote their causes.

If you build it, they won’t come (unless…) (Editor’s note: Jason Cohen is an angel investor and the founder of Smart Bear Software. This story originally appeared on his blog.) Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he’ll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun. Then he’ll describe his cutting-edge platform — cloud-based, scalable, distributed version control, continuous integration, one-click-deploy. Maybe you’ll even get a wobbly demo.”Great,” I always exclaim, sharing the thrill of modern software development, “so how will people find out about this brilliant website?” Four uncomfortable seconds later, a smile breaks across the founder’s face. Except the “strategy” is a tirade of drivel I’ve heard so many times I can lip-sync as the words spew out the founder’s mouth: “We’re going to A/B-test AdWords campaigns until we discover our hook.” The obvious problem is that every new startup on Earth says exactly these things. “We’ll have a website so people can read about us.”

Why Not Call It A Facebook Revolution? Tunisians filled the streets with the help of Twitter. Egypt's protests were coordinated on Facebook pages like that of Internet activist Wael Ghonim. Libyan dissenters spread the word about their "day of rage" last week the same way. "People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented," the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell opined on February 2. True enough — and utterly irrelevant. Yes, of course, technology alone doesn't make revolutions; the will of the people is the most vital ingredient.

Kids' Cognition Is Changing—Education Will Have to Change With It - Technology This morning, Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report about the cognitive future of the millennial generation. Based on surveys with more than 1,000 thought leaders -- among them danah boyd, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, and Alexandra Samuel -- the survey asked thinkers to consider how the Internet and its environment are changing, for better or worse, kids' cognitive capabilities. The survey found, overall, what many others already have: that neuroplasticity is, indeed, a thing; that multitasking is, indeed, the new norm; that hyperconnectivity may be leading to a lack of patience and concentration; and that an "always on" ethos may be encouraging a culture of expectation and instant gratification. It also offers its experts' predictions about what the most-desired life skills (for young people, but ostensibly for everyone else, too) will be in the year 2020. All these skills can be taught. Image: Lia Koltyrina/Shutterstock.

Internet Growth | Web Traffic | Brazil Please support our site by enabling javascript to view ads. RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The harried mother had little wish to visit an internet cafe with two squirmy boys in tow, but she said there was no choice. New to this potholed neighborhood on the city’s northern edge, Fabina da Silva, 31, needed to enroll her sons in school. Registering online was the only way. “If it wasn’t a necessity, I wouldn’t be here,” da Silva said on a recent afternoon as her 6-year-old, Lucas, thumped his toy Sponge Bob on the mouse pad beside her. Brazil has long been a bellwether nation for emerging-market internet trends and it’s riding a wave that will soon sweep the globe. And whether those newcomers are getting online for fun or because they must, they’re doing so en masse. But internet trend-watchers say there’s more at stake than the emergence of a worldwide class of digital consumers. “Potentially explosive” is how Marcos Aguiar describes the growth.

Electronic negotiation An electronic communication network (ECN) is a financial term for a type of computer system that facilitates trading of financial products outside of stock exchanges. An ECN is generally an electronic system that widely disseminates orders entered by market makers to third parties and permits the orders to be executed against in whole or in part.The primary products that are traded on ECNs are stocks and currencies. ECNs are generally passive computer-driven networks that internally match limit orders and charge a very small per share transaction fee (often a fraction of a cent per share).[1] The first ECN, Instinet, was created in 1969. ECNs increase competition among trading firms by lowering transaction costs, giving clients full access to their order books, and offering order matching outside of traditional exchange hours.[citation needed] ECNs are sometimes also referred to as alternative trading systems or Alternative Trading Networks. Function[edit] Negotiation types[edit]

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