Posts tagged social

It’s not easy to make social change with technology. There’s excitement around bringing “innovation” to social problems, which usually means bringing in ideas from the technology industry. But societies are more than software, and social enterprise doesn’t have the same economics as startups.

via https://medium.com/@jonathanstray/doing-good-with-tech-is-hard-e53c1c153370

These three visions lead to radically different worlds.

If you think the Web is a way to CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS, then your job is to get the people and cats online, put a decent font on the knowledge, and then stand back and watch the magic happen.

If you think your job is to FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE, then the web is just the very beginning. There’s a lot of work left to do. Really you’re going to need sensors in every house, and it will help if everyone looks through special goggles, and if every refrigerator can talk to the Internet and confess its contents. You promise to hook up all this stuff up for us, and in return, we give you the full details of our private lives. And we don’t need to worry about people doing bad things with it, because your policy is for that not to happen.

And if you think that the purpose of the Internet is to BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN INVENTION, then your goal is total and complete revolution. Everything must go. The future needs to get here as fast as possible, because your biological clock is ticking!

The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD.
The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD.
And the third group wants to END THE WORLD.

These visions are not compatible.

http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

Incognito mode for real life. Avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat—anyone you’d rather not run into. Cloak scrapes Instagram and Foursquare to let you know where all your friends, “friends,” and nonfriends are at all times so you never have to run into that special someone. Think of it as the antisocial network.

http://usecloak.com/

A directory of direct links to delete your account from web services.

http://justdelete.me/

“As regards illegal activity—people will break the law regardless of whether we know their names online or not. Laws already exist for those cases; we don’t need more. The general principles should not change simply because there is new, or widely misunderstood, technology.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323468604578245841828280344.html

For the past six months my research group has been looking into an app that explores social dissonance on Facebook. Today we are announcing the public release of EnemyGraph. The project was developed principally by graduate student Bradley Griffith with invaluable help from undergraduate Harrison Massey.

EnemyGraph is an application that allows you to list your “enemies”. Any Facebook friend or user of the app can be an enemy. More importantly, you can also make any page or group on Facebook an “enemy”. This covers almost everything including people, places and things. During our testing testing triangles and q-tips were trending, along with politicians, music groups, and math.

http://bit.ly/H5yEjZ