The vagaries of Facebook invites

From this week’s NYT magazine:

I would learn, when I asked some people who didn’t show up the next day, that “definitely attending” on Facebook means “maybe” and “maybe attending” means “likely not.” So I probably shouldn’t have taken it personally. But the combination of alcohol and solitude turned my thoughts to self-pity. Was I really that big of a loser? Or was it that no one wants to get together in real life anymore? It wasn’t Facebook’s fault; all those digital pals were better than nothing. For chipping away at past friendships and blocking honest new efforts, you really have to blame the entire modern world. People want to hang out with you, I assured myself. They just don’t have the time.

Read more here.

The state of the blogosphere

Technorati, the blog indexing site, has just released day two of a five day report about the nature of the blogosphere.  Unfortunately, it’s clear that blogging is still overwhelmingly dominated by well-educated and wealthy males, which means that we have a ways to go before the blogosphere represents the world as a whole.  Still, there are some interesting findings here, and it’s worth checking out the full report for more.

How our lives are turning into haiku

Is Twitter leading to the downfall of higher thought?  From a NYT article:

But for all the new technologies that increase our productivity, there are others that demand more of our time. That is one of the dialectics of our era. With its maps and Internet access, the iPhone saves us time; with its downloadable games, we also carry a game machine in our pocket. The proportion of time-wasters to time-savers may only grow. In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.

The author also references an article that appeared in The Atlantic recently, which posits that Google, not Twitter, is making us dumber.

Interesting NYT article about Web TV shows

From the article:

…as my colleague Virginia Heffernan pointed out in The New York Times Magazine on Aug. 24, serialized Web shows are popping up faster than ever, partly as a result of the recent writers’ strike. (She has posted a handy list of current series at her blog, themedium.blogs.nytimes.com.) And the television industry, hedging its bets, is heavily involved in the format, even if the most notable results so far — remember “quarterlife”? — won’t remind anyone of “Seinfeld” or “Lou Grant.”

Many “original” series on network Web sites are simply marketing tools for television shows. And a look at a few current, more truly original Web series with television connections demonstrates that if you’re not packaging “Big Brother” outtakes, it helps to have an independent revenue stream. Nielsen isn’t covering these things yet.

Read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/arts/television/02seri.html

Welcome to CMUN 240

This blog will serve as a repository for course changes, announcements, and anything else relevant to our study of communication and technology this semester.