Few people doubt that social media are changing our world, but what does that really mean? This animated video presents a rapid-fire sampler of facts and figures that drive home the point: It’s happening, and it’s happening fast.
Category: Chapter 8 Networking and Digital Communication
In an age when “friend” is a verb, many of us have hundreds of social-network friends. But Oxford Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research suggests that we’re wired to max out our meaningful relationships at about 150. This NPR story has details. Can technology help us break Dunbar’s limit, and is that a worthwhile goal?
Categories
-Multimedia 15.0 Alan Turing, Military Intelligence, and Intelligent Machines 15.1 Thinking About Thinking Machines 15.2 Natural-Language Communication 15.5 Question-Answering Machines 15.6 The Robot Revolution 4.4 The User Interface: The Human-Machine Connection 4.7 Inventing the Future: Tomorrow's User Interfaces I 5.4 Beyond the Printed Page 8.5 Interpersonal Computing: From Communication to Communities 9.3 Internet Issues: Ethical and Political Dilemmas
Conversations with Robots
Be careful–you may be falling in love with a software robot. This episode of Radiolab—NPR’s clever and entertaining broadcast/podcast—explores many ways people talk to machines, including those alluring bots that populate online dating sites. Eliza, Furbie, Clever Bot, Bina—they’re all talking to us, and we’re listening. Radiolab puts it all in perspective in this fascinating program.
This summer some consumers will be able to pay for some of their purchases by waving their phones instead of swiping their cards. Google Wallet is an Android App that uses near-field communication technology to send transaction information from phone to merchant terminal. This kind of technology could eventually change the way we do most of our face-to-face shopping.
This New York Times article includes a demo video.
Two people sitting next to each other in a coffee house can get wildly different results from the same Google search. Many Facebook users see only posts from friends who agree with them because Facebook is hiding posts from other friends. These two sites, and many others, use filtering software to personalize our Web experience. In this short, thought-provoking talk, Eli Pariser said this software is rapidly creating a world in which “the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.”
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