Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Can Facebook Promote Safe Sex?

November 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
(ILLUSTRATION: SHANNON TOTH/SHUTTERSTOCK)

What exactly is Facebook good for, anyway? Investigating the college antics of the office intern, perhaps, or vetting your teenage daughter’s new boyfriend; sharing Instagrams of your toddler with the in-laws, or reminding exes how happy you are with your new man who, ahem, just surprised you with a trip to Turks and Caicos. Public policy leaders have somewhat higher hopes, of course. They’d like to use Facebook to encourage organ donation, charity in the wake of disaster, even voter participation. Sheana Bull would like to use it to promote safer sex. Bull is a professor at the ... Read More

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Predicting House Races by Weight of Tweet

October 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
VWYT

With the presidential prediction game dreadfully same-y, surely there’s another constantly changing fix for political junkies. How about forecasting all 435 U.S. congressional races every day, based on brand new data every day? That’s what you get at “Voting With Your Tweet,” an experiment that mines mentions of congressional candidates in the Twitter-sphere to predict who will win each race and what the actual vote share will be. Unlike past efforts at using social media to predict political contests, which made their “predictions” after the voters had settled the matter, this ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The 101
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For Teens Online, Hundreds of ‘Friends’ and No One to Turn To

October 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Amanda Todd

Amanda Todd is an Internet sensation. Last week, her name was a trending Twitter #hashtag. A Facebook page honoring her has 590,000 “Likes.” A YouTube message she recorded to the world— “I’m not doing this for attention,” she wrote in an accompanying note, “I’m doing this to be an inspiration and to show that I can be strong”—has been watched more than four million times. http://youtu.be/vOHXGNx-E7E If only Amanda Todd had lived long enough to witness it. Todd was just 12 when, fooling around with friends and a Web cam one day, she flashed her breasts for a ... Read More

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Facebook at One Billion: Too Big to Fail?

October 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

With Zuckerberg's Blob having now engulfed 10 figures worth of followers, it's well worth reading this fascinating analysis over at Buzzfeed on "What a Billion Facebook Users Means". Writes Matt Buchanan: Facebook has spread itself across the web in a way that it underpins vast swaths of it, processing 2.7 billion Likes a day. Facebook is now officially integrated into nearly a quarter of the top 10,000 sites on the web by one count, and it's linked by nearly half of them....Ripping yourself away from Facebook is hard, and it's getting harder as it becomes more entrenched as a basic part of ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Your Own Personal Voting Advisors

August 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The new(ish) site PollVault.com (tagline "Elections made easy") aims to use social media to help you go vote. They aim to do this by connecting you to people so that, as their press release says, “ you don't have to know the answer, you just need to know who does.” Users can "choose up to ten Advisors whose positions they trust and request to follow them. If an individual accepts the role of an Advisor, a customized dashboard with his or her private ... ballot choices appears, giving approved subscribers the ability to learn more about his or her position on key issues. Voters use the ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Ugly Facebook Photos? Blame Your Friends

July 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Ladies, it may be no coincidence that unflattering photos of you keep showing up on your Facebook friends' pages: a recent survey of 1,500 women finds that one in four admitted to deliberately posting ugly pictures of their supposed pals. As the UK's Telegraph reports, "The majority of women posting the photos said they did so after falling out with their friends, while nearly a third said they were taking revenge on people who had done the same to them." Social media is not a pretty place. ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings
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Social Media – The U.S. Government’s Conflicted Response

February 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Hillary Clinton gave the second major speech of her State Department tenure this week on the importance of Internet freedom throughout the world, a popular theme in the wake of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East that now seem impossible to imagine pre-Twitter. “Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly and association online comprise what I have called the freedom to connect,” Clinton said in comments at George Washington University. “The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same.” Her remarks ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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A Friends and Family Plan for the Flu

November 12, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

A fortune-teller looks into a crystal ball. She sees a network of people, and at the center are the trendsetters. They are contracting the flu. The seer predicts that in two weeks their friends will have the same bug. Unlike the fortune-teller, predicting the onset of an epidemic is something the Centers for Disease Control cannot do at this time. In fact, the CDC is usually about two weeks behind the curve. But social network researchers may have found an effective predictive tool — a well-known, but to this point unused, barometer of social interaction — known as the friendship ... Read More

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Offline Values in an Online World

November 4, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Offline Values in an Online World

Work must be done, but often, the blinking red light of a BlackBerry or iPhone momentarily steals attention away — again and again. Text messages, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and a host of other new media have to be contended with along with the seemingly more arcane and time-consuming demands of sustained activity. These forms of on-the-fly communication, while keeping us connected with one another like never before, can also be a massive distraction from the task at hand. Many people want to know: As we forge ahead into unheard of levels of multi-tasking likely to make us all experience ... Read More

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