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How Social Media Has Changed Us

How Social Media Has Changed Us
Mike Laurie works at London agency Made by Many where he helps design social digital stuff. You follow him on Twitter @mikelaurie. Over the last 10 years, we've seen social media galvanize thousands over politics, create as many industries as it has destroyed, and offer an abundance of visual and audio entertainment. But has all this incredible change actually changed us, or just the world we live in? Below are some areas in which social media has had lasting, and arguably permanent effects on the ways in which we live. Child Literacy It stands to reason that children who read and write more are better at reading and writing. Ambient Intimacy Lisa Reichelt, a user experience consultant in London coined the very pleasant term "ambient intimacy." Consider the many communications technologies through history — the telephone, Morse code, semaphore, carrier pigeons, smoke signals — they are all fairly inconvenient and labor intensive. Knowledge Was Power The Reinvention of Politics Marketing Flux

10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010 This time last year, I wrote about the 10 ways social media will change 2009, and while all predictions have materialized or are on their way, it has only become clear in recent months how significant of a change we've seen this year. 2009 will go down as the year in which the shroud of uncertainty was lifted off of social media and mainstream adoption began at the speed of light. Barack Obama's campaign proved that social media can mobilize millions into action, and Iran's election protests demonstrated its importance to the freedom of speech. This guest post was written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com - a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com. Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. So what will social Web bring next? Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies Mobile Will Take Center Stage

Government 2.0: The Rise of the Goverati - ReadWriteWeb Everyone knows how well Barack Obama's presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social technology played during inauguration week, from handheld flip HD footage appearing on network TV to people reporting on Twitter about what they liked and disliked. After President Obama took office, spirited debates proliferated in the blogosphere about whether or not whitehouse.gov is Web 2.0-enabled and what the role of President Obama's CTO might be. But one striking trend has largely flown under the national radar: the rise of the goverati. What is the goverati? The goverati includes not only government employees, but also people from think tanks, trade publications, and non-profits. About a week ago, President Obama issued a memo on this very topic. There are many barriers to this kind of change, so many they would be overwhelming to list. Case in point: webmasters. Former CIO of the Department of Defense, Dr. Dr.

How long does change take? « The Thinking Stick Napster was started in June 1999 and for many marked the beginning of an era of free digital music. For the next 10 years the music industry would try to stop people from downloading free, and what they claimed to be, illegal music. In January 2009 the largest online music store in the world, Apple’s iTunes, announced it will offer all 10 million songs DRM free, allowing people to download and share their music without any Digital Rights Management. It took the music industry 10 years to change to a new model, to understand a new landscape, and to learn to take advantage of it. The newspaper industry has been in sharp decline for the past couple of years. YouTube was created in 2005 and really gained ground in 2006 and 2007. The conversations about the changes that have been happening and continue to happen in education around these new models of learning, and digital landscape have only been going on since about 2002 (my own opinion). Just a thought!

Overcoming Resistance to Technological Change Tom Haymes, Director of Technology and Instructional Computing at Houston Community College Northwest, outlines a Three-E Strategy for Overcoming Resistance to Technological Change in the latest issue of Educause Quarterly. According to Haymes, the successful adoption of any new technology is rooted in its ability to fulfill three criteria for the user including making its potential evident, being sufficiently easy to use, and essential to the user’s life. “The dirty little secret of technology in education is that a lot of it doesn’t get used effectively—or at all.

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