Last Year's April Fool

Twelve months is a long time in online history. Last year I distributed the following April Fool to academic acquaintances, linking it to the one that appeared in The Guardian - a year on it all seems to have come true!

ACADEMICS MASS HYSTERIA SHOCK

Dear All

How sad that social scientists across the country have reacted in such a panic stricken way today to the news of the end of The Guardian (see below). Whilst it is true that for decades they have relied upon it as their sole source of ideas, surely they have registered some of the changes in knowledge acquisition over the last two decades.

The realisation that the majority of journal articles are never read.

The fact that students don't take books out of libraries, but just photocopy the introduction and conclusion.

That software could write a fake article on post-modernism and that it would be published.

That the reason the entry for your subject in Wikipedia is being edited every other day is that not just your rivals, but your research students and even your research subjects contest your authority.

The fact that the more enterprising of your colleagues have gone over the heads of the academic audience to the public at large on video at TED, Web2Expo, Meaning of Life TV, Blogging Heads, Edge.org...

Now with the advent of twittering there is no need to find research participants or record them. They've done it for you - you can see the world as it is today. With the development last year of a search engine to go with it, you can do global research on any issue tomorrow!

Flexibility in the face of change I am told is the key to mental wellbeing.

Best wishes

Nick

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

Newspaper to be available only on messaging service

Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters

Rio Palof
The Guardian 1.4.09

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as "epochal" by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter's brief text messages, known as "tweets", which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity "twitterers", such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter's profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York's Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.

"[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this - his well-known observation 'Comment is free but facts are sacred' is only 36 characters long," a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet.

For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by", eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.

At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays. "In the new media environment, readers want short and punchy coverage, while the interactive possibilities of Twitter promise to transform th," the online media guru Jeff Jarvis said in a tweet yesterday, before reaching his 140-character limit, which includes spaces. According to subsequent reports, he is thinking about going to the theatre tonight, but it is raining :(.

A unique collaboration between The Guardian and Twitter will also see the launch of Gutter, an experimental service designed to filter noteworthy liberal opinion from the cacophony of Twitter updates. Gutter members will be able to use the service to comment on liberal blogs around the web via a new tool, specially developed with the blogging platform WordPress, entitled GutterPress.

Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry, whose reliably jolly tone, whether trapped in a lift or eating a scrumptious tart, has won him thousands of fans. A further 11% is made up of his 363,000 followers replying "@stephenfry LOL!", "@stephenfry EXACTLY the same thing happened to me", and "@stephenfry Meanwhile, I am making myself an omelette! Delicious!"

According to unconfirmed rumours, Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, will next month announce plans for a new system of telepathy-based social networking that is expected to render Twitter obsolete within weeks.

It's the company you keep! (updated 2014)

(Christakis and Fowler 2008)

I've been directing people to the short article below since it first appeared on the Edge.org site almost two years ago. On the surface it's just a small investigation of a few hundred of the early student users of facebook - but give it some thought and a second read and the implications are enormous. Much of my writing on this blog insists that the real world, along with the virtual one, is like the article describes. Mental distress is made and unmade everyday through our interaction with others. When it persists for long periods we become progressively more isolated. Mapping social networks suggest how such a process works.

Social Networks and Happiness

(Nick Christakis homepage, and on video How social networks predict epidemics plus The hidden  influence of social networks)

Online meditation and Wisdom2.0

Think of the Web as an add-on to your brain. When you combine it’s increasing connectivity with the memetic selection of searching you have a partial reflection of how the mind works. What was once a very weak analogy between the brain and computers, is becoming stronger.

Whether your influence over the domain in which selection takes place is greater than you have in your social environment is unclear - it appears that way, but it could be an illusion. However the dangers of too greater specialisation, leading to extreme dependence on a particular environment are very real. The more precisely you search and the more limited your connections, the more you exclude and put blinkers on yourself. Another form of emotional and cognitive isolation.

Equally the stressors in the virtual world often mirror those in the physical one. The idea of applying meditation techniques to the way we use computers and the internet has been taken up by Soren Gordhamer in his book Wisdom2.0

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-2-0-Creative-Constantly-Connected/dp/0061651516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264459010&sr=1-1 Later this year there will be a Wisdom2.0 conference http://www.wisdom2conference.com/

Soren writes columns for The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soren-gordhamer and Mashable.com http://mashable.com/author/soren-gordhamer/

At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QBcEFUNCOk&feature=PlayList&p=3B93FF3D190E0C51&index=6 there is a short video.

If you can't beat'm, join'm

Fed-up with others posting my words on the web (often without my permission) I bow to the inevitable!