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Twitter, Facebook, and social activism

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism
At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied. The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. What makes people capable of this kind of activism?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

What do Twitter users actually think of Trending Topics? Of the many features Twitter employs, the Trending Topics section seems to be one of its more mystifying elements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Twitter users don’t even use Trending Topics, citing several understandable rationales, including being downright oblivious to what Trending Topics actually are and how to use them. Buried within the Twitter help and support pages, I dug up this official definition: “Twitter’s Trending Topics algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the “most breaking” news stories from across the world. Content Strategy: Exploring Content Curation Tools Content curation has been getting a lot of attention recently. We’ve covered what it is, why it’s valuable and offered best practices on how to curate content on your own. Yet, if management systems can be designed to manage content, why not build one to curate content?

The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted (Unless It Is) : All Tech Considered hide captionSocial media platforms may not create revolutions, but they sure can amplify them. Jason Nicholls/via Flickr For those who were sure that Twitter, Facebook and the realtime web could either manufacture or replace personal qualities such as being courageous, determined, selfless, disciplined, steadfast and having a charismatic ability to inspire and lead others in moments of great historical importance, I’ve got some bad news.

Malcolm Gladwell Is #Wrong Essay Maria Popova Malcolm Gladwell's take on social media is like a nun's likely review of the Kama Sutra — self-righteous and misguided by virtue of voluntary self-exclusion from the subject. But while the nun's stance reflects adherence to a moral code, Gladwell's merely discloses a stubborn opinion based on little more than a bystander’s observations. Gladwell, who has built a wildly successful career curating and synthesizing other people's research for the common reader’s consumption, has been surprisingly remiss in examining the social web’s impact on various forms of activism.

myhue-mcgowran.suite101 A few weeks after Facebook filed their $100 billion IPO, Amine Derkaoui came forward to tell the world about the work he had been doing as a moderator of flagged content for the social media company. In an interview with Gawker.com, the 21 year-old Moroccan spoke openly and angrily about his work for oDesk, an online outsourcing company based in California that provides content moderation services for Facebook and Google. The job he applied for required passing a written test and an interview and undertaking several weeks of training, he and about 50 others from around the world (Turkey, Mexico, India, the Philippines) then worked four-hour shifts at $1 an hour censoring the dark and dirty content that gets flagged on Facebook and often needs to be removed.

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Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell, the revolution may well be tweeted For a man who has devoted a significant part of his life to documenting "how little things can make a big difference", Malcolm Gladwell is surprisingly dismissive of the power of social networking to effect change. In the latest issue of the New Yorker, he writes that the role played by Facebook and Twitter in recent protests and revolutions has been greatly exaggerated. Gladwell's argument is that social networks encourage a lazy activism that will only extend as far as "liking" a cause but not actually doing anything about it.

How To Validate A Credit Card With Your Mind How To Validate A Credit Card With Your Mind [source] Accept Credit Cards Using your Smartphone with no monthly fees - Try Kudos Today! RedditTumblrStumbleUponDigg Inside Facebook's Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where 'Camel Toes' are More Offensive Than 'Crushed Heads' A camel toe is not a vulva, nor does it have a more proper name. Er, well, not just a vulva. I think it's clear to everyone that your labia cannot be visible in your profile picture. I had never heard the term "moose knuckle" before.

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