You can make the case that slacktivism is important because it makes people feel affiliated to a movement and be part of it, and talk about it.
If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?
When you sign up for Facebook, the service first searches for any mentions of your name and suggests you befriend anyone who has mentioned you in their posts. It then asks to access your e-mail account so you can connect with anyone with whom you regularly correspond.
A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.
Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity.
The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out.
There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.
I study the ways new media shapes people's perceptions of the world.
When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories.
For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market.
Reddit, which calls itself 'The Front Page of the Internet,' is more influential in shaping Internet culture than its comparatively small reach would lead you to believe.
Reddit names are unconnected to real-world identities and it's commonplace for users to create 'throwaway' accounts to reveal sensitive information.
If I use Facebook to stay in touch with my high school friends who are church-going Republicans, I may be getting more ideological diversity than in hanging out with secular progressives on the World Politics sub-reddit.
A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine.
Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it's based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky - to think of serendipitous as smart.
I can imagine Iceland becoming a good place to run a controversial Web site. But... Iceland may find itself forced to defend controversial speech.
