Facebook for Beginners Update: This post was updated October 2013 to reflect current statistics and tools. Against all odds, you likely know someone who still hasn't succumbed to the lure of Facebook. Maybe you’re a beginner yourself. Or perhaps you just haven’t had the gosh darn time to explore every last corner of the world’s most expansive social network. Below, we offer a refresher course for those eager to learn more about the basics of Facebook. Even if you’re a pro, it’s fun to look at the platform through a beginner’s eyes. 1. Before you begin searching for friends, it’s important to complete your Timeline (aka your personal profile), which includes everything from uploading a profile picture and cover photo to outlining your employment history to determining your relationship status (OK, that’s optional). Check out these additional resources for building the best Timeline: 2. Once you’ve filled out a healthy portion of your Timeline, start searching for and adding “friends.” 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
5 Reasons Listicles Are Here to Stay, and Why That's OK | Underwire Image: IS/Getty Lists are everywhere. They’re the bread and butter of sites like Cracked and BuzzFeed, and regular content or sporadic filler at dozens more. (Yes, even WIRED.) From the multimedia gallery to the humble top 10, list-format articles — listicles — are rapidly becoming the lingua franca of new-media journalism. They’ve met with no end of resistance from the old guard, cantankerous readers and old-school journalists convinced that listicles (and their admittedly unfortunate portmanteau) are rotting our brains, destroying our attention spans, and generally contributing to the decay of all that is right and good. Are lists overused? 1. Welcome to the information age! With near-infinite information at hand, and reporting moving at more and more breakneck speeds to keep pace with social media, it’s easily to end up either trapped by choice paralysis or whittling away hours on end trying to keep up. 2. 3. Lists are the survey courses to long-form’s advanced study. 4. 5.
This Video Will Have You Completely Rethink How You Conduct Yourself Online And In Person (Video) World• Robert Gordon • We, as human beings, think that through social networks, we’ve somehow become more social creatures. The problem with this theory is, the more we “connect” online, the less actual human interactions we have, making us actually fairly unsocial. A new video breaks down exactly how the social aspects of human beings have evolved and transformed, showing how we’ve regressed from a social standpoint. Shimi Cohen shows exactly what’s wrong with our social structure now, and how we manipulate how we want to be presented to peers, family members, and potential mates on social media, rather than having vulnerable and genuine conversations in real time. Check out this video below, and take a moment to truly assess how you conduct yourself, both online and in person. Top Photo by Brittny Moore
generational audience habits News organizations have been confronting the problem of a shrinking audience for more than a decade, but trends strongly suggest that these difficulties may only worsen over time. Today’s younger and middle-aged audience seems unlikely to ever match the avid news interest of the generations they will replace, even as they enthusiastically transition to the Internet as their principal source of news. Pew Research longitudinal surveys find that Gen Xers (33-47 years old) and Millennials (18-31 years old), who spent less time than older people following the news at the outset of their adulthood, have so far shown little indication that that they will become heavier news consumers as they age. Notably, a 2012 Pew Research national poll found members of the Silent generation (67-84 years old) spending 84 minutes watching, reading or listening to the news the day before the survey interview. Younger generations just don’t enjoy following news Older Americans’ habits show little change
generational Media Consumption It is considered intuitive that younger people use more diverse devices than older people in order to consume media – but does that mean older adults don’t use any technology to get their news or enjoy television shows and movies? As our world and news cycle becomes faster-paced, in what ways are older generations making attempts to keep up with new media platforms? And how much further ahead of the curve are younger generations, really? To answer these questions, Scarborough reveals the ways American adults are consuming media across platforms and across generations. Millennials* are at the front of the technology curve in terms of device usage, but what is critical to note is that, despite using less “traditional” platforms to consume media, they are still accessing similar types of information as other generations. For Baby Boomers*, radio and newspaper are the desired methods for media consumption, though the devices they use for these activities are perhaps surprising.
Logical Form First published Tue Oct 19, 1999; substantive revision Mon Jun 22, 2009 Some inferences are impeccable. Examples like (1–3) illustrate reasoning that cannot lead from true premises to false conclusions. In such cases, a thinker takes no epistemic risk by endorsing the conditional claim that if the premises are true, so is the conclusion. Inference (4) is not secure. Appeals to logical form arose in the context of attempts to say more about this intuitive distinction between impeccable inferences, which invite metaphors of security and immediacy, and inferences that involve a risk of slipping from truth to falsity. Many philosophers have been especially interested in the possibility that language disguises thought, in part because this suggests a diagnosis for why human thinkers are tempted to adopt certain problematic claims about the world we think/talk about. 1. If the first then the second, but not the second; so not the first. Schematic formulations require variables. 2. 3.
Open-Minded Man Grimly Realizes How Much Life He's Wasted Listening To Bullsh... CLEVELAND—During an unexpected moment of clarity Tuesday, open-minded man Blake Richman was suddenly struck by the grim realization that he's squandered a significant portion of his life listening to everyone's bullshit, the 38-year-old told reporters. A visibly stunned and solemn Richman, who until this point regarded his willingness to hear out the opinions of others as a worthwhile quality, estimated that he's wasted nearly three and a half years of his existence being open to people's half-formed thoughts, asinine suggestions, and pointless, dumbfuck stories. "Jesus Christ," said Richman, taking in the overwhelming volume of useless crap he's actively listened to over the years. "Seriously," Richman added, "what have I gained from treating everyone's opinion with respect? At various points throughout the day, Richman could be heard muttering to himself that he couldn't believe he was almost 40 years old. "Twenty minutes here, 10 minutes there.
How to Be an Individual in Age of the Echo Chamber by Steven Mazie By BRUCE PEABODY, guest blogger Last week, we considered how M.T. Today’s post proposes that we train our gazes to the 19th century, and the political and social philosophy of John Stuart Mill, in order to search for ways out of Anderson’s dystopian landscape. Even ostensibly free citizens, Mill charges, rely too much on convention, shared ideas, and generic experiences fostered by a “unity of opinion.” Mill especially feared non-discriminating mass publics. Mill’s antidote to all of this is a partly familiar model of robust individualism. A person “whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture” can be said to have “character.” In Feed, the outsider Violet embodies this convention-upsetting figure. You're not like the others. Of what use are Mill’s ideas for 21st-century browsers, bloggers, and tweeters? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. None of this is easy, of course. Related content in Praxis:
Personal Knowledge Management is Bullshit Personal Knowledge Management (“PKM”) is a trendy new term for techniques and applications designed to manage information. Everyone is overloaded with information thanks to the digital revolution, so—the PKM people tell us—we need new software and systems to survive and thrive. So far, so good. I agree with this intuition. The problem is that market demand for solutions is tremendous, while the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable. The Bull in the China Shop First, a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic. Next, these naturally organized people realize they’re sitting on a valuable commodity, which they can sell to less industrious and orderly people. To be clear, I think this can work, at the margin, for some people, so I’m not coming after the basic idea of organized people helping less organized people for a fee. Get Your Knowledge Graph Away From Me Another great example is the concept of the Knowledge Graph.