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Some of my early hopes for social media, that it represented, like Kevin Kelly reckons, some kind of renaissance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry. There’s a splendid series of articles over at O’Reilly Media concerning the dark side of social media by Joshua-Michéle Ross. The first We love our infograms, don’t we, the digerati, the twittering classes? These information graphics, or data visualisations. I don’t think there’s another field of the social sciences quite so keen on complicated graphs that half-explain themselves and suggest transparency and half are a subtle appeal to the imagination. Because these images are machine-generated, there’s a temptation to believe I’ve recently installed a relatively new WordPress plug-in from the good folk at Backtype. This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in Twitter is about the real-time web; being in the flow. Once you’re following more than 100 people, it becomes an entirely different experience to instant messaging or Facebook. It feels like one of those adverts for the Information Superhighway in the 1990s: people and objects and destinations rush by. Sometimes you’ll stop and check in, You’ve probably already seen this, even though it was published just a week ago. It’s had nearly two million views in the last week, over 6,000 comments on YouTube itself, and been plugged into 826 blog posts. Among its honours, it’s the #2 – Top Favourited (All Time) – Sport. If it weren’t I spent the day today at the Wealth of Networks II conference, the agenda of which was set out as the next-generation of the Internet. It was a good event and the organisers managed to bring together some top-rate speakers in a great venue with rock-solid internet, for once. And it was free – yay |             | |||
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