Posts Tagged "society"

This is really interesting… Someone has analysed Facebook data to discover which parts of the USA are most connected to each other. Based on what little I know of the USA, these clusters do seem to represent the different cultural divides within the country. It’s amazing what you can find from social network data.

Make sure you check out the application too, which lets you see which countries are most connected, what their favourite celebrities/topics are, and their most common names.

Update: This article on ReadWriteWeb is well worth a read too, and explores the subject in more depth.

This video explains in simple terms how we need to think more critically and carefully assess the information the world throws at us, not resort to thinking in black and white terms. I think this is going to be more and more important as traditional media authorities and new social media sources blur together to give us our daily information. Critical thinking will be a vital skill for our children’s generation (especially if we want the the wisdom of crowds to be realised).

The BBC has just done something revolutionary… they’ve released all the source footage for an as yet unscreened documentary about the way technology is changing our lives, and are inviting the public to compete and edit/mashup the footage into something unique. Above is an inspiring example of what’s possible, by Barry Pilling. Here’s another by Cassetteboy.

The idea of allowing your work to be edited and improved by others was first encouraged by the Creative Commons. If you don’t already, make sure any photos you share on Flickr are released under Creative Commons, so others can do great things with them (without profiting or taking credit).

Another film in this vein that’s well worth a look is RIP: A Remix Manifesto, the story of Girl Talk’s rise to fame as a musician who plays no instrument but uses samples of others’ music. It too is freely editable and mash-up-able. There’s also a growing craze for “fake trailers”, the most famous being Shining. It’s so much easier these days now that people have a publishing house, editing studio and photo lab on their desktops.

Exciting times!

Following on from my last post, here’s a music video from that Sliders episode I mentioned (Annoyingly Posterous doesn’t let me add the video to a prior post).

I give you.. The Library Rap!