The fallacy of echo chambers: is everyone really mad at everyone?

The fallacy of echo chambers: is everyone really mad at everyone?

By Ira Nathenson on August 29, 2010

Bob Greene makes a timely post at CNN comparing today’s social climate to that of 1955. He discusses a July 4, 1955 cover story from Life Magazine that paints the era as a time of utopian happiness. Greene asks whether we were really that happy then, and conversely, whether we are as angry now as [...]

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Social networking word-of-the-day: “thinvisibility”

By Ira Nathenson on August 10, 2010

A new word for Facebookers and social networkers who cavalierly post embarrassing information about themselves to the web: thinvisibility:  Here’s a starting definition: Thinvisibility: n. Being neither completely visible nor completely invisible. Being a tiny, shiny needle in a haystack of information overload. Being invisible to everyone except data aggregators and digital preservationists such as Google, [...]

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Animals, information, and language

By Ira Nathenson on August 9, 2010

This summer has been a wonderful three months of reading and writing. Currently, I’m reading Alex Wright’s Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, a book about information and information overload, a topic of long interest to me. Wright’s book includes interesting discussions of just how basic information management techniques are to humans and others, including how [...]

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