Posts with keyword: society

5 entries

Gin and Television: Using Our Social Surplus

Tue Apr 29 09:44:00 2008

Clay Shirky has posted a transcript of his Web 2.0 talk "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus." In it Shirky argues that television was the safety valve that society used to sponge up all the excess cognitive capacity that we developed after World War II. In effect, the mindless activity of watching television kept people from going crazy with all the spare cycles that they had. Shirky says that with the Internet and Web, we're starting to re-use that capacity for social good, finding ways to create value from what was previously wasted. So how big is that surplus? So
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Is There Anything Good About Men?

Tue Aug 21 17:26:00 2007

This provocatively entitled paper by Roy Baumeister, Eppes Eminent Professor of Psychology & Head of Social Psychology Area at Florida State University, is very interesting. A refreshing look at alternative interpretations of data on gender in human relations and how it can be explained. If you don't want to read the full paper, here's a summary from the NY Times.
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Paul Graham on Stuff

Tue Aug 7 08:41:00 2007

Paul Graham has an excellent essay on stuff. Have we reached the point where most things are so cheap, we no longer need them? A historical change has taken place, and I've now realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not. In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they're indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We've now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become
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Violent Video Games Change Brains

Wed Nov 29 21:28:00 2006

A study looked at the direct effects of videogames on teen brains and documents functional differences between the brains of teens who play violent games and those who play non-violent games. This Newsweek article interviews the researcher behind the study, Dr. Vincent P. Mathews, professor of radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
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China, the Internet's Broken Link

Fri May 26 02:52:00 2006

Danny Weitzner, W3C, at WWW2006(click to enlarge) Danny Weitzner from the W3C started out today's plenary session with a discussion of the Internet and Society called "China: A Broken Link on the Web. Is it the case that if everyone's a publisher, then too is every government a filter and interceptor? He starts off noting the story of Yahoo! "helping jail a Chinese writer" and made some interesting points: Yahoo! has no basis for ignoring Chinese law while obeying the laws of other countries. That leaves the choice of simply not doing business in China. There's an argument that being
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