Unconscious Automatons on Facebook

The Internet is a relatively new phenomenon that has completely morphed the modern world. Living on a college campus, I almost never find myself in a room without access to the Internet and social media. I, along with many others in my generation, spend hours per month mindlessly surfing the Internet and Facebook. With my project, I want to start a conversation on the topic of how the Internet has shaped our society and whether these changes are positive or negative. To do so, I have built an installation of three robots and a monitor. Each robot (see Figure 1) is interactive in the physical world through the use of an Arduino, sensors, motors, LCD screens and LEDs and the digital world through the use of Facebook where they can post photos of their surroundings, status updates or comments. I hope that by watching my robots mindlessly performing the same tasks that we do everyday, viewers will begin to ask the same questions proposed above

Childhoods and play: Facebook, exhibition and competition

L'objectif de ce document vise à explorer les relations entre le jeu et les enfants dans le contexte contemporain. L'article considère le jeu d'enfants comme pratique significative à partir des nouvelles technologies de l'information et de la communication. Comme les enfants associent Facebook aux jeux, Facebook représente le point central de cet article. Nous traitons les jeux auxquels les enfants jouent, les articulations les plus appropriées entre les enfants, la socialisation et Facebook. Nous proposons d'entrer dans l'univers où les enfants, les représentations, les médias et les adultes entrent en relation. Nous analysons Facebook comme la plate-forme contemporaine la plus importante à partir de laquelle la socialisation, l'exposition et la concurrence sont construites par les enfants.The objective of this paper is to explore the relationship between games, play and children in the contemporary context. The article begins with the consideration of children’s play as a meaningful practice focussing on new technologies of information and communication. Along the research, Facebook was identified as the most important place that children associated with games. That is why, the role that Facebook “plays” is one of the most important focusses of this paper: the uses that our informants report of the most used social network, the games they play and the most relevant articulations between children, socialization and Facebook. It is not our objective to analyse games thoroughly (we will analyse “Farmville” briefly), but to enter the universe in which children, representations, media and adults are related and intertwined. And in this path, we will analyse Facebook as the most important contemporary platform from which socialization, exhibition and competition are built by children as the main subjects of our research.Fil: Duek, Sara Carolina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Université Catholique de Louvain; Bélgic

Design and Development of a User Specific Dynamic E-Magazine

Internet and electronic media gaining more popularity due to ease and speed, the count of Internet users has increased tremendously. The world is moving faster each day with several events taking place at once and the Internet is flooded with information in every field. There are categories of information ranging from most relevant to user, to the information totally irrelevant or less relevant to specific users. In such a scenario getting the information which is most relevant to the user is indispensable to save time. The motivation of our solution is based on the idea of optimizing the search for information automatically. This information is delivered to user in the form of an interactive GUI. The optimization of the contents or information served to him is based on his social networking profiles and on his reading habits on the proposed solution. The aim is to get the user's profile information based on his social networking profile considering that almost every Internet user has one. This helps us personalize the contents delivered to the user in order to produce what is most relevant to him, in the form of a personalized e-magazine. Further the proposed solution learns user's reading habits for example the news he saves or clicks the most and makes a decision to provide him with the best contents.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure

Determination of Friendship Intensity between Online Social Network Users Based on Their Interaction

Online social networks (OSN) are one of the most popular forms of modern communication and among the best known is Facebook. Information about the connection between users on the OSN is often very scarce. It's only known if users are connected, while the intensity of the connection is unknown. The aim of the research described was to determine and quantify friendship intensity between OSN users based on analysis of their interaction. We built a mathematical model, which uses: supervised machine learning algorithm Random Forest, experimentally determined importance of communication parameters and coefficients for every interaction parameter based on answers of research conducted through a survey. Taking user opinion into consideration while designing a model for calculation of friendship intensity is a novel approach in opposition to previous researches from literature. Accuracy of the proposed model was verified on the example of determining a better friend in the offered pair

Digital Democracy: Episode IV—A New Hope*: How a Corporation for Public Software Could Transform Digital Engagement for Government and Civil Society

Although successive generations of digital technology have become increasingly powerful in the past 20 years, digital democracy has yet to realize its potential for deliberative transformation. The undemocratic exploitation of massive social media systems continued this trend, but it only worsened an existing problem of modern democracies, which were already struggling to develop deliberative infrastructure independent of digital technologies. There have been many creative conceptions of civic tech, but implementation has lagged behind innovation. This article argues for implementing one such vision of digital democracy through the establishment of a public corporation. Modeled on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States, this entity would foster the creation of new digital technology by providing a stable source of funding to nonprofit technologists, interest groups, civic organizations, government, researchers, private companies, and the public. Funded entities would produce and maintain software infrastructure for public benefit. The concluding sections identify what circumstances might create and sustain such an entity

Social networking and transnational capitalism

Social Networking Sites (SNS) have become a key component of users’ experience of the internet. Whilst much has been made of the social dynamics of online SNS, the influence of the structures and operations of these sites – and the business models behind them – on users is rarely accounted for. This paper argues that behind the social behaviours sup- ported by SNS, there is a growing shift towards viewing online communities as commodities, and SNS as an extension of mainstream capitalist ideologies fostered by existing patterns of commercialization and consumption. Using the works of Gramsci, Gill and Hardt & Negri to provide a critical grounding, this paper explores the popular SNS site ‘Facebook’ and suggests that SNS may feel to the users to be free, social, personal, but in fact SNS are business as usual