Social Media And Politics, May 20, 2009

Editor's Notes

• #5: Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogs (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).
• #9: Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.The advent of Facebook came about as a spin-off of a Harvard University version of Hot or Not called Facemash.[10] Mark Zuckerberg, while attending Harvard as a sophomore, concocted Facemash on October 28, 2003. Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl and trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind.[11] According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash \"used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person.\" To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the house's private dormitory ID images. \"Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people ... ),\" Zuckerberg wrote in his personal blog. \"But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually ... \"[12] The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy and faced expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped.[13]The following semester, Zuckerberg founded \"The Facebook\", originally located at thefacebook.com, on February 4, 2004.[14] “
• #18: -Sociology story of beach: Our experiments were based on a 1972 study conducted by Thomas Moriarty who found that, when a member of a research team left his beach blanket unattended while another member stole a radio, 1 out of 5 people intervened if the victim had made no previous exchanges with his neighbors. However, when the owner of the radio directly asked his neighbors to keep an eye on his belongings while he stepped away, people intervened 95 percent of the time.