6 crucial police guidelines for stopping social media vigilantes
Yesterday, Vancouver was treated to the first court appearances by alleged participants in the 2011 Stanley Cup Riots. It was a snapshot of one of the most profound and valuable institutions in our society: a system of justice to which we have collectively delegated...6 questions about the impact of social media on think tanks
Can think tanks make a difference? That is the question framing a one-day conference at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), where I was part of a social media panel chaired by CBC’s Peter Mansbridge. My fellow panelists were Chad Gaffield...An online cure for an unsustainable model of leadership
Jack Layton’s death has me thinking back over many years of NDP activism, going back to the very first campaign I ever worked on: Dan Heap’s 1984 election campaign, when one of the most tireless presences in the committee room was that of Dan’s young...Crowdsourced repression: Could it happen here?
The debate that is unfolding online about crowdsourced surveillance — what Christopher Parson referred to as Vancouver’s Human Flesh Search Engine — rests on two implicit assumptions. It’s time to get clear about what they are, so that people...Lady Gaga and the transcendent narcissism of social media
Lady Gaga’s on- and offline relationship to her fans is a case study in the power and perils of social media narcissism.
The Core Tenets of the Social Web, 25 years in the making
This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review. We like to think of the social web as green fields in which we are just now sowing best practices and first principles. After all, if there are no hard-and-fast rules, then anything goes. We get to come up...Honoring the debt Canada’s connectivity owes to Chinese workers
When you choose a historical metaphor, you make claims on conscience as well as imagination. Canada chose to complete its national network of connectivity in November 1985, on the 100th anniversary of completing a national railway built on the hard work of ill-treated Chinese workers. The Canadian – and global — Internet is in danger of repeating that sad history.
Dittos remind us of the pleasures of obsolescence
1972: ELIZA, IANA and the search for (in)finite attention online
The 1972 Internet gave us ELIZA, a computer therapist, and IANA, which allocates IP addresses. Together they structure our contemporary dilemma: how do we get scarce, human attention in a world of infinite online distraction?
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