This is no parody. We give up our right for privacy for the usage of their software. Both Facebook and Google’s entire business model is based on knowing everything about you and then selling it to advertisers.
Category: Culture
What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
Author Nicholas Carr talks about how the Internet is affecting our brains, from our creativity to our ability to learn, in this animation by Epipheo.
How Our Devices Make Us Less Efficient
Douglas Rushkoff examines how we are using digital devices to manage our lives, and how something designed to give us more time can, in fact, give us less.
Your Cellphone May Be Ruining Your Dating Life
The mere presence of a mobile phone can make the meeting between two strangers more stilted, according to new research published in the May issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. LiveScience reports:
Cellphones don’t disrupt casual conversation much, the study found, but when people were asked to discuss something meaningful, they reported less trust, empathy and lower relationship quality when a cellphone was in the room.
[...]
“When people were having an important conversation, relationship quality was lower, and partner trust was lower and empathy was lower when the mobile phone was there,” he said.
The effect was noticeable even though the participants barely noticed the phone. Surveys given after the experiment suggested the students had no idea the research involved the phone, and most had to be prompted to report they’d even seen it.
Tao Lin’s Photos of Taipei’s ‘Facedown Generation’
Over the next month, in celebration of the forthcoming release of Tao Lin’s latest novel, Taipei, Vice will be featuring a weekly selection of photos taken by the author during his recent trip to Taipei, Taiwan. This week’s photos are named after a term in Taiwan for people who seem unable to stop looking at their phones while in public (I believe the term they are referring is 低頭族）. All photos and captions by Tao Lin.
Americans Choose Smartphones Over Sex
Forty years after Motorola engineer Martin Cooper stood on a New York City street corner and made the first cell phone call, a new poll finds that Americans are twice as willing to go without sex for a week than a smartphone. The survey highlights show (includes unfortunate political comparisons):
- More than twice as many respondents were willing to give up sex instead of their smart phone or caffeine;
- Men as a group are least likely to give up alcohol, but women by far preferred their smart phones and caffeine;
- Men ages 18-34 are least willing to give up sex – five times less likely than women of the same age group, who favored their smart phones;
- The older people get, the less likely they are to give up caffeine compared to the other choices;
- The demographic most committed to their smart phones are ages 35 to 49; and
- Democrats are least likely to part with alcohol, while Republicans prefer their smart phones. People who identify themselves as Independents have equal allegiance to caffeine and their smart phones.
Via.
Your online life, permanent as a tattoo
What if Andy Warhol had it wrong, and instead of being famous for 15 minutes, we’re only anonymous for that long? In this short talk, Juan Enriquez looks at the surprisingly permanent effects of digital sharing on our personal privacy. He shares insight from the ancient Greeks to help us deal with our new “digital tattoos.”
The connected generation
Millenials – the largest generation to come of age in American history have been characterised, and caricatured, as tuned out, selfish and lazy. But in an era of economic hardship and global uncertainty they’re finding financial and social success. So instead are they brave, curious and adept? We take a look at the niche millenials are creating and the technology they’re leveraging.
A Job Interview Is No Time To Be Texting
Newly minted college graduates soon entering the job market could be facing another hurdle besides high unemployment and a sluggish economy. Hiring managers say many perform poorly — sometimes even bizarrely — in job interviews.
Human resource professionals say they’ve seen recent college grads text or take calls in interviews, dress inappropriately, use slang or overly casual language and exhibit other oddball behavior.
The trend reflects a generation of Millennials — ranging in age from 18 to 34 — who grew up texting and using smartphones and social media, says Mara Swan, executive vice president of staffing firm Manpower Group.
A male graduate student seeking a managerial position in Avery Dennison’s research and development unit took a call on his smartphone about 15 minutes into the interview. The call, which lasted about a minute and wasn’t an emergency, ruined his near-certain chance for a job offer.
Chat apps mount challenge to Facebook
Commuting on buses and trains, even crossing the road, people here in Singapore are transfixed by their smartphone screens, and increasingly their fingers are typing at top speed on their chat app of choice. From the BBC:
Armed with a slew of social features and cutesy illustrations called stickers, messaging applications for smartphones which were conceived in South East Asia are changing the way people communicate around the world.
WeChat from China, Line from Japan and KakaoTalk from South Korea, have managed to attract hundreds of millions of users in a very short space of time.
Having conquered their home markets, these companies are setting their sights on global expansion and mounting a challenge to the more established players in the West.
In a sign of the impact of these applications and the importance of messaging to users, US giant Facebook made chat a more central feature of its Facebook Home software which was launched for Android devices earlier this month.
Step into any coffee shop in Singapore and you can see how popular these apps are, and how young people are spending increasing amounts of time using them.
Why using a mobile phone can be contagious
Researchers concluded that a person was twice as likely to talk on a mobile, or check for messages, if a companion did the same.
The University of Michigan study discovered that checking a phone created an “alternative outlet” for a person’s attention.
It also found that females were more likely to use their mobile than men because it was more “integrated into the daily lives of women”.
Scientists suggested the study’s findings, published in the Human Ethology Bulletin journal, could be linked to “social exclusion”, in which a human feels the need not be left feeling “out of the loop”.
“What we found most interesting was just how often people were using their mobile phones,” said Dr Daniel Kruger, the study’s co-author.
I can’t quite fathom how a mobile phone could be any more integrated into a woman’s life than a man.
Toddlers becoming so addicted to iPads they require therapy
“Experts” have warned that parents who allow babies and toddlers to access tablet computers for several hours a day are in danger of causing “dangerous” long term effects (I think neglecting your child for several hours a day in any form might also cause long term effects). The Telegraph writes:
The youngest known patient being treated in the UK is a four-year-old girl from the South East.
Her parents enrolled her for compulsive behaviour therapy after she became increasingly “distressed and inconsolable” when the iPad was taken away from her.
Her use of the device had escalated over the course of a year and she had become addicted to using it up for to four hours a day.
Dr Richard Graham, who launched the UK’s first technology addiction programme three years ago, said he believed there were many more addicts of her age.
Psychiatrists estimate that the number of people who have become digitally dependent has risen by 30 per cent over the past three years.
John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!
John McWhorter posits that there’s much more to texting — linguistically, culturally — than it seems, and it’s all good news.
Texting is not a blight on the English language, says linguist John McWhorter in a February talk, given at TED2013. Rather, texting is a “miraculous thing”: a novel linguistic mode that’s redefining the way we communicate with each other — for the better.
McWhorter points out that texting shouldn’t be categorized as written language –but as speech. This shift makes the apparent problem of grammatical errors seem misplaced and unimportant.
If we think of texting as “fingered speech,” as McWhorter puts it, it also opens our eyes to texting’s distinct linguistic rules, structures and nuances. McWhorter dives into the example of “lol,” which originally stood for “laughing out loud.” But over the past few years, “lol” has “evolved into something that is much subtler,” signifying empathy and accommodation.
As the mediums through which we communicate quickly multiply, our modes of communication are following suit.
The importance of mobile connectivity in our lives is growing each year. While the simplicity of a single device may be desirable, consumers are acquiring an increasing number of devices whose utility is a function of their ability to be connected. Demand for a widening array of devices continues to increase and connectivity becomes core functionality as it adds value to both devices and to content.
The state of the global mobile consumer
Tablet owners consume more media
A survey from Deloitte reports that 36 percent of Americans say they own a tablet. That’s up from 13 percent a year ago. Once consumers buy a tablet the survey states that they tend to use it allot, especially to watch movies.
