Feb 2010

An ode to keeping things small and obscure: Clive Thompson argues why “socializing doesn’t scale”, as communities beyond a certain size are more anonymous and lead to less interaction.

the world’s bravest and most important ideas are often forged away from the spotlight — in small, obscure groups of people who are passionately interested in a subject and like arguing about it. They’re willing to experiment with risky or dumb concepts because they’re among intimates. (It was, after all, small groups of marginal weirdos that brought us the computer, democracy, and the novel.)

Like myself, danah boyd just “wanted to scream” when Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed privacy to be dead.

Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about […]

Here’s an interesting blog post bringing together questions of technology non-use (or more accurately: its apparent impossibility in certain circumstances) and privacy:

My friends did not ask my permission before giving Facebook all this […]

In an extensive historical analysis, Adam Thierer provides a comparison between internet optimists (“Theuthian Technophiles”) and internet pessimists (“Thamusian Technophobes”). Evaluating, but not judging, he […]