Over at Slate, David Auerbach has an excellent analysis of how the interface of a social networking tool–in this case, Twitter–can severely degrade the discourse it is supposed to to be facilitating: Twitter’s founders initially formulated it as a broadcast tool to publish announcements to your friends and to the world, and to that extentContinue reading “Twitter’s Design And The Deadly Sin Of Task Modification”
Tag Archives: EIES
Online Conversational Spaces: The Vocal and the Previously Silenced
Comments on Internet discussion forums have been the subject of much analysis ever since electronic conversational spaces first made their appearance back in the 1970s. Pioneering scholars of ‘computerized conferencing systems’ like Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz–who conducted most of their empirical studies on the Electronic Information Exchange System–noted that several features of theseContinue reading “Online Conversational Spaces: The Vocal and the Previously Silenced”
Social Networks and Loneliness
As a graduate student in the late 1980s, I discovered, in quick succession, email, computerized conferencing, and Usenet newsgroups. My usage of the last two especially–and later, the Internet Relay Chat–would often prompt me to say, facetiously, that I would have finished my graduate studies quicker had I stayed off the ‘Net more. That lameContinue reading “Social Networks and Loneliness”
Samir Chopra 