Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Software Review
Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
7/2/2008
|
|
IT as a Humanizing Technology
Information technology is always surprising us in ways like this. It's the serendipitous discovery of new ways to interact that makes technology ever fascinating: All predictions about the human use of technology have been wrong; most popular uses were serendipitous discoveries. A commonly accepted perception of technology is that it somehow de-humanizes us; instead it is infinitely humanizing.
It is in our own discovery of ourselves and how complex we are that technology has gifted us. We found out that our natural speech was not as easily programmed as we thought 40 years ago. We found out that our cognition is not so easily replicated in artificial intelligence. And, we have found that human personality and character expressed communicatively can be infinitely nuanced.
Finding Old Friends
My having changed fields a few years ago meant I lost track of dozens of colleagues who I used to see regularly at conferences. But in my Facebook pages, slowly these old friends began to re-appear. With these re-discovered colleagues, I haven't had to explain all the intervening years but just let them know I'm still around, doing ok, and happy to hear from them again. They can look at my friends, see my social and academic context now, and therefore become part of an extended social milieu not possible a few years ago.
For we, ahem, Facebook habitués, we don't put up formal studio shots, but informal pictures taken by relatives. My current photo features my granddaughter while I'm a shadowy smiling presence behind. I am embedded. Just the context says so much about me that I don't need to spend much time writing messages.
An Existential Challenge in a Simple Question
One of the options that Facebook offers is to say what you are doing right now and update that frequently -- in about 20 words.
Recommended Reading
- Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck
Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.
- U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells
The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.
- George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum
George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.
- George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum
George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.
- Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.
- ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard
ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.
