Obama use of social network

As the political season continues, the Obama campaign has domi­nated new media, capitalizing on a trend. Americans are more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, and more Americans are comfortable with them. Although the 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, "people didn't quite have the facility," says ­Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who has given the Obama campaign Internet policy advice. "The world has now caught up with the technology." The Obama campaign, he added, recognized this early: "The key networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying community­-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning. The Obama team used the internet very effectively. The conservatives could learn from this. If I were going to suggest one strategy to the Freepers (and other interested parties) for the remaining campaign season, I would suggest having a daily message that I would encourage conservatives to discuss with others around the water cooler or over the backyard fence. That's one way we can combat the missing, distorted, and biased information put out by the MSM. We could tackle just one important point each day.

Comparing Ted, Ny Books and Wired

In the 9 minute video TED talk Eli shares his experiences with internet filters which shape the information we are presented with on a daily basis. It does not matter if we are looking at Google or Facebook, the information we get to see - whether it is search results or news - is tailored to what software algorithms think we might want to see based on data collected on our behavior as a user  thus we are always seeing a distorted picture of reality on the web.
Since these computer rules are lacking any form of ethics their choice on what information we are presented with can harm the freedom that the internet was supposed to provide us with and that is central to our society. If any information that makes us feel uncomfortable or that contains a different point of view is edited out, the world we get to see online becomes increasingly distorted and our worldview will neither be challenged nor broadened due to this filtering of information.
In Clive Thompsons article there is a particularly when it comes to current events and news, there is this importance placed on hearing "both sides." I understand that a story is observed from different perspectives, but the fact is that some perspectives are less wrong than others. So, getting more ideas from a group that is consistently getting their information from the less correct analysis is going to get you less accurate information.

Goods and bads of social networking

Frontline takes us viewers inside the private worlds that kids are creating online, by raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming the experience of adolescence. At school, teachers are trying to figure out how to reach a generation that no longer reads books or newspapers. The fear of online predators has led teachers and parents to mainly focus on keeping kids safe online. But many young people think that these fears are outrageous. Online media has also intensified the significance of adolescence as teens create and play with identities on sites like MySpace and Facebook and encounter intense peer pressure in a virtual world. Parents are confused about how to respond to the increasingly private worlds inhabited by their children, lacking an understanding of both the creative potential and the genuine risks of this new cultural environment.

Frontline interviews kids, parents and educators about the experiences of youth, how they affect home life, identity, and education, and how kids online lives often spin out of their control. Adolescence is playing out, often in the physical world as well as the "always on" digital world of social networking web sites like Myspace and Facebook. Kids are extending their social world into an area without the adult order and supervision of their home, community and school environments. This often presents complex versions of classic issues (like bullying, a.k.a. "cyberbullying") that kids, parents, and schools are having a hard time understanding and adapting to.

Growing up provides access to the behavior and perspective of today's students that can help us find new connections to their ways of seeing the world, regardless of how those efforts are integrated into your way teaching.

The world has clearly changed for teenagers. Technology rules, and childhood or so the insightful documentary GROWING UP ONLINE posits will never be the same again. Over the course of Rachel Dretzin's film, parents, tweens, teens, scholars, teachers, and security experts make sense of the Internet’s impact on growing up. Is it really rife with bogeymen waiting to pounce and pitfalls that could determine no, ruin kids' future? Or is online life more about what you make of it?