Technology

Noam Cohen, who has been covering internet issues for The New York Times for the past few years, assesses the role Twitter has played in the old and new media coverage of the election and protests in Iran.  Worth a read this morning.

Any country can have problems with its elections.  Only in a few do the incumbents kill the citizens over them.

On Tuesday, I participated in a panel at Dartmouth on "Facebook: Its Impact on Us and on Society," sponsored by the Institute for Security, Technology, and Society.  Below is an edited version of the remarks I made:

My tag line on the panel announcement was, "A professor, using Facebook? What for?"  That may be a bit misleading - I am certainly "on" Facebook and Facebook knows that I am a professor, but it is not clear that there is any meaningful way in which I am "using" it as a professor as opposed to any other 39-year old guy with a desk job.

Facebook may be the latest great thing, but we should understand it just as much for what it has in common with its predecessors as how it is innovative.  I think of Facebook as a tool for communication.  How good a tool it is depends on how well it allows us to broadcast, to connect, and to target.  I'd like to structure my remarks around my perceptions of how well or how uniquely Facebook performs in each of these aspects and then note how well it serves me as a professor.

Please forgive the lack of posts over the past few days, but virtually all the technology I rely on to do most anything seems to have decided to stop working at the same time.

First, according to my cable provider, the incoming signal on my cable television is either too strong or too weak and somewhere around Saturday afternoon (that's right, just as some of the best football games of the year were starting) I had no acceptable reception.  The best the company could do was get a technician to my home this coming Thursday.