Links for May 31st 2010 through June 3rd 2010:
- Anatomy of an Unpublished Chapter [Just TV] – Jason Mittell’s insightful post about academic publishing in general, and the challenges of balancing copyright, readership and academic reputation. I admire Jason’s decision to give up publishing a chapter in a collected edition due to the inflexible copyright demands of the publisher (including a requirement for him to remove a pre-print version on his blog); that said, at this stage of my academic career, I’m definitely not established enough to be this brave!
- Did Twitter censor the #flotilla hashtag following the Israel attack? [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – The #flotilla hashtag disappeared from Twitter’s trending topics briefly – cries of censorship erupted – but it soon returned and it appears that the disappearance was due to automated spam filtering (the hashtag had been active earlier in the week relating to another story).
- Terminating employees for their conduct on social media sites – Malcolm Burrows (B.Bus.,MBA.,LL.B.,GDLP.,MQLS Associate) offers some useful advice and tips about social media and the law in Australia, especially as to whether it’s legal to fire someone for social media comments made outside of work time (short answer: mostly no, but with some important exceptions).
- When Facebook Says – You Have Too Many Friends [NYTimes.com] – 5000 Facebook friends: that’s your limit.
“anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150. Facebook begs to differ. […] Facebook famously co-opted the word “friend” and created a new verb. Friending “sustains an illusion of closeness in a complex world of continuous partial attention,” said Roger Fransecky, a clinical psychologist and executive coach in New York (2,894 friends). “We get captured by Facebook’s algorithms. […] Facebook discourages adding strangers as friends, adding that only a tiny fraction of its 400 million users have reached the 5,000 threshold, at which point Facebook wags its digital finger and says: That’s enough.” - Facebook, you’ve been sent a message . . . Angry users quit over privacy fears [The Australian] – “Tens of thousands of other disaffected former Facebook fans are also due to commit mass account suicide today, which has been declared “Quit Facebook Day” in a grassroots campaign started by two tech guys, Joseph Dee and Matthew Milan. Motivating them in part are the increasing privacy concerns surrounding the world’s most popular networking site. As of yesterday afternoon, about 24,000 Facebook users had committed to leaving, according to the tally on QuitFacebookDay.com. That’s about 0.006 per cent of the site’s approximately 400 million active users. However, surveys show growing dissatisfaction with the site, with users complaining settings make it too hard to restrict who can view their personal information and too easy for them to inadvertently share details with third-party websites, which mainly use the information to better target them for advertising.”