NETWORKING FUN FOR THE INTROVERTED: Flocking, Obama and an anarchist at the G-20

Networking Fun for the Introverted
with Wendy Kovitz

This month, I'm serving up a few eye-catching stories from around the web. Is social networking bad for you? Does social networking need censorship? What are the legal and ethical complexities of social media?

'Flocking' behavior lands on social networking sites
by Sharon Jason
USA Today

For the most part, being part of a social network is good for you, research suggests. For example, a study in this month's Scientific American Mind finds that social support and social networking offer benefits, from additional resilience to greater life satisfaction to reducing the risk of health problems.

"The mythology we have is that people used to spend whole days hanging around community — like the bar at Cheers," (Barry) Wellman says. "They didn't. They stayed home. If we switch from television to social networking sites, it's a switch toward sociability — not away from it." (Barry Wellman is) a sociologist at the University of Toronto in Canada who started analyzing social networks in the 1960s and has expanded his studies to online.

For the complete article please click here.

For another great article, please see CNN's Obesity, politics, STDs flow in social networks.

People have profound influences on each other's behavior within three degrees of separation, the authors find. That means that your friends, your friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends may all affect your eating habits, voting preferences, happiness, and more.

(Fourth degree, not so much historically speaking. But who knows what kind of trouble that will get us into/out of.)


It's Not Facebook, It's the People Who Use Facebook
by Jose Antonio Vargas
Huffington Post (blog)

It's easy to be anonymous online, as anyone who's ever been a victim of online slander knows. It's also easy to threaten the life of the sitting American president. And the controversial Facebook poll asking users if President Obama should be killed underlines two emerging ethos of the connected, free-wheeling, open-like-an-open-wound Web.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-antonio-vargas/its-not-facebook-its-the_b_302275.html

What's acceptable to say in the company of your friends or relatives can go public. And spreads. Then hits a collective nerve.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jose-antonio-vargas/its-not-facebook-its-the_b_302275.html

For the complete article please click here.


Twitter Crackdown: NYC Activist Arrested for Using Social Networking Site ...
Bay Area Indymedia

Tuesday, October 6, 2009 :Elliot Madison was arrested last month during the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh when police raided his hotel room. Police say Madison and a co-defendant used computers and a radio scanner to track police movements and then passed on that information to protesters using cell phones and the social networking site Twitter. Madison is being charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility, and possession of instruments of crime. Exactly one week later, Madison's New York home was raided by FBI agents, who conducted a sixteen-hour search.

For the complete article (including Elliot Madison speaking with his attorney Martin Stolar) please click here.
For more information, please check out the following sources: HuffPo, WOK3, Guardian, FastCompany, CNN, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.


Social media not only changes the way an individual voice is heard but alters the perception of how the individual fits in with the world as a whole. Good or bad, we're all connected.

For more information, please visit Wendy's TNNW Bio.

- Wendy Kovitz
http://www.BookOfAra.blogspot.com - blog of fictional fantasy memoirs


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NETWORKING FUN FOR THE INTROVERTED: Flocking, Obama and an anarchist at the G-20