Santa goes to Best Buy

Early adopters are the hardest folks to shop for. As an early adopter married to yet another early adopter, we struggle to find good gifts, since we own every gadget we need, and many we don’t. That’s why you’ve got to surprise us with something so...

Making sense of the Wikileaks backlash

The past week has seen a series of denial-of-service attacks on services like Paypal and Amazon, which have been characterized as a hacker retaliation for how these services have treated Wikileaks. Since I wrote my dissertation on hacktivism — politically...

The 5 questions to ask about online distraction

Whether you’re worried about the Internet’s impact on your attention span, or tired of hearing about how life online is driving us to distraction, these 5 questions will help you think more deeply about online distraction.

Social media insights from recent research

The more time college students spend online, the worst they do in their first semester….but they end up with better social lives. Facebook activism doesn’t detract from offline activism: people who are politically active on Facebook are actually more...

Star Trek for kids

Many parents focus on preparing their children for a digital future by working on their basic math skills, helping them use a computer, or even teaching them the basics of programming. These parents are fools! If there is one thing I have learned from working with...

How your Facebook presence can inspire your friends and family

Over at The Hookup Column, Anna Lind Thomas concludes her list of Dos & Don’ts for Facebook status lines with the following: DO inspire, uplift, support and spread love. Anna’s suggestion is a refreshing departure from the all-too-common focus on...

The suffering of technology users

I love this paragraph because I think it distills and represents the pain and suffering so many people now feel around the role of technology in their lives: I like technology just as much as the next person, but sometimes I find myself feeling overwhelmed with it...

“Since I started blogging…”

I overhear more and more conversations about how people cope with their lives online. We talk about our day-to-day strategies for coping with e-mail overload. We gossip about our friends’ Facebook profiles and worry about whether we should be joining the latest...

Can documentation save the world?

Yesterday I wrapped up my 2010 Home Media Overhaul and Documentation Festival with a blog post on why to watch TV. But I left another unanswered question on the table: why document your TV setup? Documentation is somewhere between a neurosis and a calling for me. As...