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Digital Culture Links: March 9th 2010

Links for March 9th 2010:

• Mapping the growth of the internet [BBC News] - Useful flash-powered world map from the BBC visually demonstrating the growth in internet use across the globe from 1998 to 2008. (Quite a lot of growth to be seen!)
• Return of the natives by Slavoj Zizek [New Statesman] - Slavoj Zizek gets stuck into Avatar: "So where is Cameron's film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself - the film substituting for reality."

• Adventures in the Wild, Wild West: Media140 Perth [media140.org] - Official wrap-up post for Perth Media 140 (Feb 2010), including links to pretty much everyone involved and a snappy little video summarising some of the key themes (if you watch closely you can see what 10 seconds of my talking head looks like after presenting a talk in a room which is warmer that 40 degrees Celsius!).
• Study: Ages of social network users [Royal Pingdom] - A really useful breakdown of social networking websites by age, including these stats:
  "* Bebo appeals to a much younger audience than the other sites with 44% of its users being aged 17 or less. For MySpace, this number is also large; 33%.
  * Classmates.com has the largest share of users being aged 65 or more, 8%, and 78% are 35 or older.
  * 64% of Twitter’s users are aged 35 or older.
  * 61% of Facebooks’s users are aged 35 or older. [...]
  * The average social network user is 37 years old.
  * LinkedIn, with its business focus, has a predictably high average user age; 44.
  * The average Twitter user is 39 years old.
  * The average Facebook user is 38 years old.
  * The average MySpace user is 31 years old.
  * Bebo has by far the youngest users, as witnessed earlier, with an average age of 28."
• Twitter Hits 10 Billion Tweets [Mashable] - "It’s official: Twitter has surpassed 10 billion tweets. [...] you can tell by the actual tweet ID numbers that we have crossed the magical threshold. The milestone shows that Twitter’s still growing at a rapid pace: it broke 1 billion tweets in November 2008 and 5 billion tweets just four months ago."