Using social media for social change

By SUSAN MERNIT Net-enabled social tools have enabled new models for grassroots activism and community building, and they have changed how we function in society — how we communicate globally and locally, how we form ties and how we organize and connect. What’s tricky about deploying social media today is not access to the technology, […]

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Digital Nation: What it means to be human

Near the end of PBS’s Digital Nation, we’re taken to a military facility in the desert an hour outside of Las Vegas where a soldier sits in a cushy chair and pilots an unmanned drone over Afghanistan. The drone’s cameras send images from a war zone to a screen at the soldier’s work station. As […]

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Homage to a machine and a visionary

Before we’re swept away (oops, but that seems to have happened already) by the unveiling of Apple’s tablet we ought to pay homage to technologies before the iPad and visionaries before Steve Jobs. The original messiah machine: the Mac Plus. Introduced in 1986, this little beauty brought a revolution in publication design. It came standard […]

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Oops, there goes local

A few months after three, young software architects launched an obscure social networking and microblogging service, students at a rural Virginia university sent short messages to their friends from their PCs and cell phones as they hid from a gunman who opened fire in classrooms and a dorm. “Everything you thought you knew about media […]

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