Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery.

Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, The Right To Privacy, 1890

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

Eric Schmidt

This thinking is totally wrong, an authoritarian, absolutist remark. People have the right to entertain all sorts of unpalatable and unpopular ideas, and it is generally the well-off and powerful who don’t want to recognize that. This is the West Coast libertarianism that comes pouring out of Mark Zuckerberg, too, advocating a single, absolutely consistent identity online at all times.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

James Baldwin (via ladyvenoms)

Source: ladyvenoms

We must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody.

Alan Harrington (via inthenoosphere)

Growth Hacker

This is going to be like ‘personal branding’ — a term we’ll hear all the time but cringe every time.

(via Google Glass: An Etiquette Guide - WSJ.com)

(via Google Glass: An Etiquette Guide - WSJ.com)

The Wall Street Journal

What is soft power? It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.

Joseph Nye, Jr

I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet - Paul Miller via The Verge ⇢

I was wrong.

So Paul Miller ends the year he took off from the Web. He learned that it’s not a maze of hardware and wires: it’s a social world where we connect to each other. He was lonely. He might still be lonely afterward, but not because of artificially cutting himself off from us.

Technology is not outside of culture. It’s indivisible from culture. Deciding to live without the web today is like getting a lobotomy.

If people had to give up sex, alcohol, smartphone, or coffee for a week, what would they pick? Men 18-34 are least likely to say sex, women of the same age group prefer their smartphones.

If people had to give up sex, alcohol, smartphone, or coffee for a week, what would they pick? Men 18-34 are least likely to say sex, women of the same age group prefer their smartphones.

kskobac:

I love the simplistic, beautiful onboarding experiences that betaworks creates for its apps.  The screenshots above are from the first time you open the new Dots game betaworks released.  The intro experience for Tapestry was really enjoyable too.

Source: kskobac

About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

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GigaOM Research analyst and curator.

Also writing beaconstreets.com.

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Socialogy

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

  • Hot Now

  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

  • Oldie

  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.