“Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry

Social media has introduced a new dimension to the well-worn fights over private space and personal expression.

Parent-teen battles about privacy have gone on for decades. Parents complain when teens demand privacy by asking their parents to stay out of their bedroom, to refrain from listening in on their phone conversations, and to let them socialize with their friends without being chaperoned

The parents in the stands were paying much more attention to their devices. They were even more universally equipped with smart-phones than their children, and those devices dominated their focus.

They whipped out their phones to take photos of the Homecoming Court, and many were texting fran-tically while trying to find one another in the crowd.

He made references to technology to remind me that technol-ogy wasn’t changing anything important.

The real world affords us many ways of keeping public, private, and secret utterances separate from one another, starting with the fact that groups have until recently largely been limited to meeting in the real world, and things you say in the real world are heard only by the people you are talking to and only while you are talking to them.

How could this happen? How could the newspaper industry miss such an obvious and grave challenge to their business?

Many people in the newspaper business, the same people who worried about the effects of competition like USA Today, missed the significance of the internet. For people with a pro­fessional outlook, it's hard to understand how something that isnt professionally produced could affect them-not only is the internet not a newspaper, it isnt a business, or even an institution.

In an ideal world, we would be able to support only those causes that were clearly and overtly good. However, our world is a messy one and as a result, individuals must struggle with the tensions between supporting a cause even when flawed and not showing support at all. In the case of the HRC logo, many individuals found that support of the HRC could be beneficial given its visibility and reach. For example, a commenter on the Guerilla Feminism thread expressed her initial reluctance thusly: Everyone who has faced difficulties because of their sexuality were literally flooded with a wave of support, by seeing friends, loved ones, acquaintances, celebrities, even giant corporations like Bud Light, showing that they cared. For people who are ostracized ... it told them that there are people out there who actually give a damn.

Group identification is a necessary aspect of the spread of memes

An active Facebook user in March 2013 might have logged on to see his or her timeline overtaken by small red squares, many with an equal sign inside

human choice and the medium through which these ideas are circulated. Dawkins writes not about how “people acquire ideas” but about how “ideas acquire people.”

A similar situation can be seen in the case of the “Crank Dat” song by Soulja Boy, which some have described as one of the most succesful Internet memes of 2007. Soulja Boy, originally an obscure amateur performer in Atlanta, produced a music video for his first song “Crank Dat”, which he uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube. Soulja Boy then encouraged his fans to appropriate, remix, and reperform the song, spreading it through social networks, YouTube, and the blogosphere, in the hopes of gaining greater visibility for himself and his music.

It is invoked in discussions about buzz marketing and building brand recognition while also popping up in discussions about guerilla marketing, exploiting social networks, and mobilizing consumers and distributors. Needless, the concept of viral distribution is useful for understanding the emergence of a spreadable media landscape

We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isIit intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read.

MySpace, the wildly successful social networking site, has tens of millions of users. We know this because the management of MySpace (and of its parent company, News Corp) tells the public how many users they have at every opportunity. But most users don't experience MySpace at the scale of tens of millions. Most users interact with only a few others-the median number of friends on MySpace is two, while the average number of "friends" is fifty-five. (That latter figure is in quotes because the average is skewed up­ward by individuals who list themselves as "friends" of pop­ular bands or of the site's founder, Tom.) Even this average of fifty-five friends, skewed upward as it is, demonstrates the imbalance: the site has had more than a hundred mil­lion accounts created, but most people link to a few dozen others at most.

That evening, two things happened. First, a man named Luis sent Evan mail, saying he was Sasha's brother and a mem­ber of the Military Police. He said that Sasha had bought the phone from a cabbie. (This story, as Evan pointed out on the webpage, directly contradicted Sasha's earlier account of her brother finding the phone.) Luis also told Evan to stop harassing Sasha, hinting violence if Evan didn't lay off

He cre­ated a simplewebpage with Sasha's photos and a brief descrip­tion of the events so far, with the stated rationale of delivering a lesson on "the etiquette of returning people's lost belong­ings," as he put it. He titled the page Stolen Sidekick, added it to his personal website at EvanWasHere.com, and began tell­ing his friends about what had happened.

The only problem is, when you have that much information, you have to find the good stuff, and that can be incredibly difficult when you're dealing with those volumes. And nowhere was this brought home more than during Hurricane Sandy. So what you had in Hurricane Sandy was a superstorm, the likes of which we hadn't seen for a long time, hitting the iPhone capital of the universe -- (Laughter) -- and you got volumes of media like we'd never seen before

And that happened because this one person had a documentary instinct, which was to post a status update, which is what we all do now, so if something happens, we put our status update, or we post a photo, we post a video, and it all goes up into the cloud in a constant stream.

Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter, and this was someone saying "temblor," which means earthquake. So 60 seconds was how long it took for the physical earthquake to travel. Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled all around the world, instantly. Everyone in the world, hypothetically, had the potential to know that an earthquake was happening in Managua.

Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter, and this was someone saying "temblor," which means earthquake. So 60 seconds was how long it took for the physical earthquake to travel. Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled all around the world, instantly. Everyone in the world, hypothetically, had the potential to know that an earthquake was happening in Managua.

The fact that hardware and software is being professionally designed to distract was the first thing that made me willing to require rather than merely suggest that students not use devices in class.

The technologies that we have in our pockets today are powerful engines for participation. My students and I carry computers that are literally millions of times more powerful than what the U.S. Department of Defense had a couple decades ago, networked at speeds millions of times faster than the first online networks. We are seeing a massive adoption of an attitude of active participation simply through the use of these technologies.

Attention is the fundamental building block for how individuals think, how humans create tools and teach each other to use them, how groups socialize, and how people transform civilizations.