alternative publics

"The more promising way to think about social media is as long-term tools that can strengthen civil society and the public sphere. In contrast to the instrumental view of Internet freedom, this can be called the environmental view. According to this conception, positive changes in the life of a country, including pro-democratic regime change, follow, rather than precede, the development of a strong public sphere. This is not to say that popular movements will not successfully use these tools to discipline or even oust their governments, but rather that U.S. attempts to direct such uses are likely to do more harm than good. Considered in this light, Internet freedom is a long game, to be conceived of and supported not as a separate agenda but merely as an important input to the more fundamental political freedoms."

—

Clay Shirky “The Political Power of Social Media” in the Jan/Feb 2011 Foreign Affairs

(Source: https)

Scott MacDonald accurately captures summer evenings on Argyle St in Halifax, Nova Scotia - how i miss the impromptu conversations along the wooden boardwalks.
scottkmacdonald:

New Illustration work for the latest issue of Local Connections Halifax Magazine.

Scott MacDonald accurately captures summer evenings on Argyle St in Halifax, Nova Scotia - how i miss the impromptu conversations along the wooden boardwalks.

scottkmacdonald:

New Illustration work for the latest issue of Local Connections Halifax Magazine.

call-stack:

jtotheizzoe:

iomikron:

Studying the reblogging

These graphs represent the network created by tumblr bloggers who reblogged a previous post of mine. The first graph corresponds to the network formed after 2 days, and the second one is the same network after 3 days. In both networks, there are some clusters, where a blogger reblogs my post and after that successive rebloggings are occuring from his/her followers. I created a little program in Mathematica, which can read the notes of the post and identify who reblogged from whom.

I have attributed a name to some of these clusters by the name of the blog located in the root of the cluster. For example, my cluster is the number 1. The biggest cluster though, for the first graph, is that of jtotheizzoe. For the second graph, the huge cluster is that of n-a-s-a, which has its origin from the jtotheizzoe’s cluster (number 2)… The seperated couples at the bottom are users that have reblogged my post by the ‘likes’ list’ of the other user, and then I couldn’t know where they came from…

I really enjoy that, and I’m curious how the structure of the network will look like eventually…

This a very cool analysis of Tumblr post spread. It’s very interesting to see how content spreads over days from the original poster, and how its life span and amplification change. It’s sharing, visualized.

I’m happy to be a node on this, as well.

I have wanted to write something to do this for a while now.