Ali Johnson

I saw this today on Mashable and loved it. Wonder if we truly realize what impact Facebook has had on communication and on the way we do community.

This is an interview in Seed Magazine all about Networks. THE PHYSICIST AND THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST DISCUSS CONTAGION AND THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN, DEBATE THE NATURAL SELECTION OF ROBUSTNESS AND ASK WHETHER SOCIETY IS TURNING INWARD. ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI: It is becoming a truism that we’re living in the era of networks. Just about anywhere we turn, we encounter one. We have the World Wide Web and the internet; we have social networks, genetic networks, and biochemical networks. These things — web pages, genes, chemicals in our cells — are nothing new. What is new is that everybody’s waking up to the fact that there is a network behind all of these systems, and we need to think about networks as a common feature of all complex ...

The hyperconnection we are seeing creates for us a massive amount of choice, which, in turn, has an impact on our relationships. How many of us have been frustrated in a conversation with someone who’s picked up their phone to check a text or an email that has just arrived? Hyperconnection is the experience of having too much control, literally too many choices, in our interpersonal connections. If a computer is overloaded and running too many applications or programmes it will grind to a halt. Human hyperconnectivity has a similar effect as we become lost in a sea of connections. Many times our relationships fail due to our inability to ...

A college student, when I asked her how she was, responded by saying “check my Facebook status”. We live in a ‘hyperconnected’ world, a world in which many different means of communication are used; more specifically social networking sites. You are never more than one click or tap away from millions of people all over the globe. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Emails or some other form of connectedness, we are bombarded with connections. We are famous in our own world. We want people to ‘like’ our statuses, retweet our tweets and reply to our emails, in a way that has never been seen before. With the rise in smart phones our level of connectedness is only going to increase. We ...

I have been re-watching the video again and am really struck by the raging debate that still continues about Virtual Community. We are a society that is moving into a new generation that will have lived throughout with the Social Networking Era. They will have been defined by it. There friendship will revolve around it. What challenge's does this leave us with? Some Good Links that talk more about this... Out of UR Flowerdust JR Woodward

Five minutes goes by and I get out my Iphone, open up my Facebook app and check if I have any new wall posts, hoping that someone has sent me a message or ‘liked’ my status. What did I do before Facebook? How did I stay in contact with my friends before I had them all at the click of a mouse or the tap of the keyboard? Have you ever missed an event or not turned up to something because it wasn’t on Facebook. I even rely on Facebook to tell me when my families’ birthdays are. Social networking sites like Facebook have changed the way we live our lives. ...