The effects of social media on youth today
By Wei Seng
Are we overwhelmed by social media?
It's been a while since there has been any coverage or review of articles published in the newspapers recently, and I apologise for that. It really takes someone who has left school and joined the working world (albeit briefly) to understand what life at work is really all about and how suddenly time magically disappears when you want to work on your pet projects. Kevin, in all his hustle and bustle as a budding undergraduate at LSE, has taken plenty of time out to maintain this place and keep it alive and I shall try my best to contribute whenever I can.
I just returned from a 3-week holiday in Toronto which was refreshing and eye-opening yet isolationist - I had no access to my usual The Straits Times or The Economist in hard copy, so I had to rely on surfing news websites online, which I did not quite like as I am the traditional kind of reader that prefers to be able to hold on to what I was reading.
A source of news which was unexpected and unprecedented for me was Facebook, which thankfully I had access to while in Canada. Being overseas while a general election was ongoing, I relied heavily on my friend's postings of newsworthy articles on Facebook to keep me updated on news that slipped under my radar while I skimmed through the headlines of The Straits Times Online.
With this experience in mind, it was interesting to read in yesterday's Review in The Straits Times an article by Susan Moeller about youth today are "hooked on social media and one-sentence news stories".
Based on a recent study conducted on youths aged 18 to 25, it seems like social platforms and networks are now the place to go to for news - and the only place youths go to for news. A "paradox" his arisen - when the Internet first emerged people were worried about being flooded and overwhelmed with too much information, but instead people read only what they were interested in and what reinforced their beliefs, leading to their acquisition of lesser information than ever. This paradox has apparently only deepened with the popularity of social networks - instead of being active in their search for news and knowledge, people on Facebook and Twitter can now just sit there and wait for news to be delivered onto their Facebook Wall or Tweet page.
People today are still being overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of news and information online, which has led to this natural mechanism to shut off all the news and take in only short headlines of most news that comes in, content that this is "sufficiently informative" for them and reading further only where a piece of news is of deep personal interest. Social platforms and networks reinforce this further. Twitter in particular, with its 140 character limit on each tweet, means that whatever that needs to be communicated must be summarised.
Going back to the study, those in the study had to "give up all media for 24 hours" - in other words, be offline and disconnected from the world for 24 hours. Some of the observations made from the study (read the article for more details) include how students missed their Facebook and Tweeter but not traditional news outlets, and how these social networks have become so part of their lives that students feel empty and "lost" without access to it.
However, there is also a positive spin to these observations. It is noted that youth today actually care more about news and what is happening around them, and that they, through their huge number of friends on Facebook or following many Tweeters, would be exposed to a wider variety of news. This indicates that they are not necessarily apathetic to what happens around them, just that convenience has caused youth to lose initiative in finding news of interest to them.
So can anything actually be done? Any comments from our readers, whom I presume are also quite connected individuals and would understand this phenomenon well?
RSA Animate
By Kevin
RSA has discovered a way of making talks really interesting by giving a life to the content of the talks. My personal favourite is this one on the crisis of capitalism:
There are other wonderful animations on many different topical issues found here.
Joy of Stats
By Kevin
Rosling's Charts
I was catching up on finishing my previous issues of The Economist before 2010 ends and I stumbled upon an article about Hans Rosling and his Gapminder Foundation. This Swede is really passionate about statistics and its presentation to the world. And I went on to discover that he came up with the Trendanalyzer software which Google took over and is now the Google Motion Chart.
Hans Rosling doesn't look like an exciting man on first impression; to rave about statistics and its presentation seem like a really odd thing for this professor of public health who is a physician by training. Yet he impresses people with the passion and enthusiasm he displays when he talks about development. It is the development statistics that are of particular interest to him; it is the way these numbers change or stay constant, correlate or indicates no relationship (though more often than not, they indicate false ones). You can watch his talks on TED.com and you'd discover that statistics is very much his starting point to drive home messages. And his grand message is really that if you can measure something, and you know about it, you can try and do something about it.
He presented a documentary on BBC, appropriately titled 'The Joy of Stats' where he talked about the uses of statistics and the powerful visualization tools in the real world and how it influences the lives of ordinary people.
The Wave
By Kevin
Receding Tide
Apparently Google decided to cease development of Wave (but maintain the site at least for the remainder of the year) because users have not exactly found good uses of the product and thus adoption and usage is not exactly ideal. After the initial fanfare and hype about Google Wave, I didn't quite use it. I personally think that the recorded typing might be useful under certain circumstances but not always and so users should be allowed to easily disable it. The arrangement of the discussions should also be in reverse chronological order so that you don't have to try to scroll down a really long discussion.
I discover these main ills because I did use it for a collaborative project I did recently. The system is useful for us in general but there were times when it was down. Seeing your friends type in real time might be fun but without a powerful computer, it lags and you might be tempted to reply when your friend have not finished what he wants to say. The good thing is that almost everything is recorded and we can always check back when necessary.
Yet the 'failure' of Google Wave represents the success of Google; by working on many different projects, Google manages to explore multiple ideas at the same time. While different amount of resources and efforts are dedicated to different projects, they are willing to terminate even a high-profile, hyped project show that their model is successful. The ability to create such a 'market-based' testing is immensely useful to the firm. Much must have been learnt from failed experiences and we really should celebrate all that.
Chart Play
By Kevin
I learnt about Google Charts API quite a while back but didn't quite found time to explore it. I had wanted to use it to create charts to showcase certain data trends on ERPZ so that I don't have to generate Microsoft Office graphics to be uploaded. For my experiment, I decided to use the same data set for the distance fares to generate a chart using the Google Charts API. I took the following that I used in the previous entry:
Adult Bus Fares MC curve (By MS Office)
Using the wizard provided by Google and then tweaking the codes a bit here and there, I managed to create the following:
Adult Bus Fares MC curve (By Google)
It actually looks great and I guess in future, when I need to present any data on ERPZ, I'll be using this API.
Internet Addict & Such
By Kevin
Right from the thin air...
When I told my little cousin who is 9 year old that I didn't have the Internet to play with when I was at her age, she gave such a shocked face. She simply couldn't imagine how we could entertain ourselves with just a couple of Lego pieces or toy tea sets. Yet here we are, all grown up without the Internet until perhaps a little later. And even then, we didn't have facebook. Having an email was like a pretty cool thing but simply non-essential.
Today, not having an email address seem like a miracle. But The Economist argues it's difficult to generalize the 'net generation' or to think of these kids as being much different from the previous generations.
Yet, there's something more miraculous than not having an email today. It is the fact that we are constantly being bombarded and surrounded with energy that goes unused - what we term 'ambience radiation'. Imagine if we could harness this little-but-constant stream of energy to power our low-power devices. It is now possible, and we could run our clocks, sensors, possibly our transponder devices as well. It'll be great energy savings and perhaps we could get our ordinary calculators to run on them as well.
Finally, while the straw hut didn't work against the Big Bad Wolf, it has proven steady during earthquakes. The tech quarterly from The Economist this time didn't disappoint.
Economist Special Reports
By Kevin
Water. Anyone?
The Economist have special reports frequently in their weekly issues and often they go in depth into topics that we'll get in touch with at some point of our lives. Most importantly, for academic, students and teachers, these reports are opportunity to get a clear picture of topics you've always wanted to read up more on and be updated on that field.
Very often you'd also find them cross-disciplinary, covering economics, geography, science and definitely General Paper. Take the recent report on Water for example. It raise natural water issues studied deeply in geography but also propose policy (economics) and technological (science) solutions. It is also great that nowadays these reports are available for download free because they are sponsored by some big company. This are materials that anyone can access, even those who are not subscribers of The Economist magazine.
The Economist is not always about economics and you just got to get in touch with the content they offer to understand how good it is. I'm glad they've came up with an economic solution to offer their content to a wider audience.
Pay Gates
By Kevin
Blocked...
I've been working on a couple of writing assignments that requires intensive research and I discovered to my horror that more journals are erecting pay gates for their articles. I subscribe to The Economist and so I don't have to worry about theirs but Wall Street Journal gives me quite some trouble.
I'm therefore actively using articles from The New York Times, Business Week and Fortune Magazine as my main sources. The Straits Times website pay gate frustrates me in particular because I want to keep myself updated on local news through their site but they're not helpful with it and worst, when I ever need an article from them, it is usually copied from New York Times or other international publications and yet they're hidden behind the pay gate.
For those working on more news research sort of stuff, note the publications without pay gates!
Dot.con
By Kevin
Popped!
I've recently finished John Cassidy's Dot.con I got from library many days back. John Cassidy is a staff writer at The New Yorker and I always liked his writings about Economics. I'll probably find a chance to lay my hands on his latest book, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities soon.
Meanwhile, Dot.con have been an interesting read. It's an old book, no doubt. I believe reading about the Internet Bubble now seem rather weird given that it has happened a while back and don't appear to have any immediate relation with what I've been working on. Still, I think that events like this have lessons to offer that are often missed out and I was looking to read something a little further back given that I've been updating myself with The Economist all the time. John Cassidy didn't fail me, starting his story from the time when the technology was developing for the rise of modern Internet, describing the roles that the US military and government played in its conception, research funding and even implementation. He combines the events leading up to year 2000 with interesting comparisons of speculative manias of the past and talks about retrospective telltale signs of irrationality.
He introduced me to Charles Mackay and his writing, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I subsequently realised I had the sections of Charles Mackay's book in my 4-inch tome, The Real Price of Everything by Michael Lewis. Those pieces have just been added into my reading queue.
Cory Johnson reveals that John Cassidy was a rare skeptical voice with regards to the Internet Boom, but failed to live up to the promise of the title of the book:
Indeed, he is unable to dismiss the most fundamental notion (a mantra among the true believers) that the Internet changes everything. Despite the stock market meltdown, almost any reading of the evolving business practice wrought by the Internet suggests that more dramatic changes are yet to come.
In a sense, the Internet is not quite exactly an illusion so to speak. But I don't think that was what John Cassidy was driving at. His idea is that business fundamentals have been abandoned during the period and it shouldn't have been. The numbers he cites about businesses losing money even as stock prices climb is startling. He might have been against the arguments of the New Economy though, and he could have supported his argument with the fact that falling prices (with economic expansion) isn't entirely an internal affair of US but a result of the external forces as well.
I've enjoyed the little stories told by Dot.con surrounding the whole boom and crash of the Internet, especially those about individuals trapped in those industries contributing and taking part of the boom. Besides that, Dot.con serves as a good look at human behaviours during a speculative mania.
Imperfect Information (Processing)
By Kevin
100101010100111100?
The Economist ran a special report on Managing Data, which is really about how to Data have become really abundant in our world today and how it might help us at all.
It is interesting how I have got a friend who once commented that all forms of market failure is a result of imperfect information. He says that people are consuming too much or too little of a product because they don't have perfect information about the impact of the products, and so basically all the inability to analyse cost and benefit is a result of imperfect information. Likewise, to this friend of mine, technological advancement is basically slowly discovering information, truths that we previously know nothing of. Of course, that's a little extreme and basically demanding perfect knowledge as well. For him, perfect knowledge would naturally be attained from having sufficient information.
The digital age ushered in lots of information; so much that we don't have enough time to process them. In fact, even cataloguing them might be troublesome enough and the process generates meta-data, which in fact is information about information. They would prove useful though they actually add to the information heap. Say for example I give you a quote:
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past:
If I don't provide the source, it's not particularly helpful unless you're able to identify it from just the content. It's from Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. But then that's just a little bit of metadata; there's more: it comes from Act II Scene I. And even more: it's from Line 14-16. The ability to manipulate all these data themselves would create more information too. And they all might just prove to be way too much.
Economics have definitely become more complex thanks to the flood of information. Technology has allowed suppliers to maintain tighter inventory and reduce idle capacity but reality seem to drift further away from classical economics even as the economic agent are becoming more equipped with the information necessary to create a more perfect market. It appears, the next big assumption of Economics about the real world that needs toppling is in fact the idea of independence.