Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Assistant Vice President for Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innnovation and Professor of Communication at Purdue University, Director of the FORCES initiative leads research teams that study the relationship between technological and social systems using big data, simulation, and mapping approaches. He published papers and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, National Interest, and Foreign Policy. He is the author or co-editor of several books. The most recent is Structural differentation in social media. He also co-edited Ethical Reasoning in Big Data,Transparency in social media and Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (Computational Social Sciences) , all three the product of the NSF funded KredibleNet project. Dr. Matei's teaching portfolio includes technology and strategy, online interaction, and digital media analytics classes. A former BBC World Service journalist, his contributions have been published in Esquire and several leading Romanian newspapers. In Romania, he is known for his books Boierii Mintii (The Mind Boyars), Idolii forului (Idols of the forum), and Idei de schimb (Spare ideas).
This series of Business Week articles maps out more than a year of high hopes and incredile public mood swings related to the newly minted Second Life 3D virtual reality environment (Update April 19: The Business Week search engine seems to be…
Image via Wikipedia The idea that cultures and societies stay the same is put again to rest by this little piece of news about the increase of the divorce rate in China. WP: Barriers to divorce fade in China – washingtonpost.com Highlights…
An educator’s perspective Students love Wikipedia. Convenience and deadlines remembered at the last minute conspire with immense success in making undergraduate students avid consumers of web content. Professors fight their pupils’ addiction with stern grading policies bolded, underlined or italicized in the…
Turns out one of Wikipedia’s editors is a major fraud. So major that the New Yorker had to make a correction. Read all about it in the New York Times.
Expert: Wikipedia wont go away, so learn how to use it WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The popularity of Wikipedia makes it important that users learn to use the online collaborative encyclopedia as a starting point for their research rather than as the…
Confirming the suspicion of those who, like myself, believe that social behaviors are similarly codified across social universes, a Stanford study found that online nonverbal communication patterns closely reflect offline communication strategies. Study: Virtual men are standoffish too – Yahoo! News NEW…
Com 435, Emerging Communication Technologies (150 enrolled students), will organize in the last two weeks of April an eight team soccer tournament in Second Life. Students will play use avatars and very funny names and I will preside as Cyclops Argus. The…
An update to the most accessed pages on Wikipedia. Adolf Hitler is now running head to head with Lisa Nowak, the astronaut in dipers, and the eternal adolescent fascination with self-satisfaction… At the top dominates Anna Nicole Smith (aka Vicki Lynn Hogan),…
The communist manifesto found its most appropriate medium: You Tube. A remixed cartoon collage brings out the best (and worst) in Marx’s little pamphlet. Personally I always found Marx’s prophetic vocation sinister and hilarious at the same time. Modernity’s most powerful man…
Second Life takes a toll on the campus administrator community. In an unmistakeable sign of linear project its members believe that the future will be 3D. Second Life, a increasigly unwielidy environment, victim of its own success, cannot be the solution to…
Google’s been strongly opposed to the whole pay-as-you-go revamping of the Internet (the equivalent of introducing toll-lanes ofn the Internet). You know, the whole net neutrality debate. At the same time, Google seems to suggest that its opposition is only pro forma.…
All 13 root servers, which act as the Internet’s ubergatekeeprs and traffic routing cops, have been attacked simultaneously yesterday. The news does not make any major newspaper frontpage today, at least not New York Times’, which regales us with a story about…
The idea of a wireless peer-to-peer backbone to replace the classic ISP has been announced and dennounced in the tech media for some time. Has its time arrived? An intriguingly inexpensive alternative has appeared: a Wi-Fi network that is not top-down but…
From The Economist RESEARCHERS in the field of artificial intelligence have long been intrigued by games, and not just as a way of avoiding work. Games provide an ideal setting to explore important elements of the design of cleverer machines, such as…
Idea of paid entries roils Wikipedia – Tech News & Reviews – MSNBC.com BOSTON – When a blogger revealed this week that Microsoft Corp. wanted to pay him to fix purported inaccuracies in technical articles on Wikipedia, the software company endured online…
What do you do when bandidos steal 4000 of your just produced and very expensive suits? You move your machiladora back to the US… Globalization can be a two-way street. (NPR story)
Because the hippies invented it as a means of “doing their own thing” MIT OpenCourseWare | Anthropology | 21A.350J The Anthropology of Computing, Fall 2004 | Readings Pfaffenberger, Bryan. “The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution…
Young dog trainer Zak George, posts a little starry-eyed manifesto about the role of You Tube in changing our future (and in the process the past gets changed, as well). Since its posting last week the clip has been seen by 350,000…
ikbis | Capture your life, is a new user generated video service geared toward the Arabic world. A world just as modern and fascinating, if you know how to look at it, as our world…
A very interesting “blog of blogs” demonstrating the power of the Internet to decentralize and recreate the flows of information. A blog that centralizes the known source of local information from Iraq and the middle east. Mostly in English. Why the quotation…
The report is one of the most comprehensive to date, including information about ranking over time… Abstract and link There is an immense information and communication technology (ICT) gap, a “digital divideâ€, between developed and developing countries. A person in a high-income…
On 9/11 I bought the newspapers, today I will just clip this on this blog. Reports: Saddam Hussein executed – Conflict in Iraq – MSNBC.com BAGHDAD, Iraq – Three years after he was hauled from a hole in the ground by pursuing…
According to the International Labor organization US multinationals account for a majority of exports and just under 40% of imports. At the same time, their share of both exports and imports decreased during the 80s and mid 90s (the article claims that…
Manuel Castells is famous for his triptic “Network Society” in which he summarized the broad hopes for a new (and improved) global society powered by information technology. (While, at the same time, pointing to the weak spots of this techno-driven version of…
The International Monetary Fund papers below discuss the history of globalization, pointing to the fact that what we are witnessing today is just a recovering trend. The conclusion is that around 1900 we WERE globalized already. It took two hot world wars…
A very good definition of globalization-rather extensive-from Yale center for globalization. I especially liked the author’s insistence that the human species has a global vocation by its very natural history. Genetic evidence shows that all modern humans (and all humans, past and…
Working ethically in a global environment should not only mean abstaining from bribing local politicians or being a scofflaw. It should also translate into not coniving with the local tyrants in opressing their people (and your employees). Human Rights Watch details the…
My 435 students came up with a number of ways of improving the Purdue website. The ideas run the gamut, from cloning YouTube to, well, to “Less is more”. Enjoy
U.S. warns of possible Qaeda financial cyber attack – Yahoo! News
Nancy White, Rheingold’s succesor at the helm of Well’s Virtual Community conference keeps a blog. Worth taking a look at…Full Circle Online Interaction Blog
A very good reference work on the social aspects of Information Technology. The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies Danny Quah, Roger Silverstone, Robin Mansell and Chrisanthi Avgerou ISBN13: 9780199266234 ISBN10: 0199266239 Hardback, 752 pages Apr 2007, Not Yet Published due…
I found your blog while tagging my blog with SC06. I noticed that you were interested in finding the slides to Kurzweil’s keynote at SC06. I too was looking for them and found a couple of his slides on wikipedia and I…
Sounds familiar? Currants » MySpace For Baby BoomersI was reading this article about Myspace for babyboomers. It is a website very similar to MySpace but it is for people over the age of 50. Part of the reason they are doing this…
Suppose you are in search for ideas for starting an online group. Here are the steps a typical design process should go through: Community Design Process (This is a wiki page. It can even be edited if you know what you are…
Larry Sanger defines a new paradigm for Web 2.0. Why Make Room for Experts in Web 2.0 There’s a bit of conventional wisdom about Web 2.0 that is wrong. According to this conventional wisdom, Web 2.0 involves bringing the power of publishing…
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/technology/02compute.html
Wegner’s Communities of Practice concept is rooted in seven design principles. All good online communities, which are variants of communities of practice, should keep them in mind: 1. Design for evolution Design elements should be catalysts for a community’s natural evolution. As…
The members of the COM 632 graduate seminar “On-line Interaction” at Purdue University propose the following list of practical principles for designing successful on-line communities. The list is compiled on the basis of these materials: 1. Preece, fill in the rest please…
Ms. Dewey’s Dr. Jekyll is a pop music artist and a regular on the L show. Janina Gavankar
The jury is out. And it’s ugly…. ZDNet.com is downright nasty. The rest of humanity chimes in.
Silicon Valley Sleuth: Google steps up anti-Google campaign
Very, very interesting posting about the Wikipedian power processes… [WikiEN-l] Quitting Wikipedia and wanted you to know why.
This is the only word that I could muster…
It might be that someone’s password was compromised. We are getting a lot of spam comments on this blog, despite the fact that only registered users can comment and new registrations are not allowed. Existing registers, can you please change your passwords?…
Wikipedia posts this most amazing list of topics in order of their popularity. Notice the succession of topics (Wiki/Amish/Foley or Clitoris/September 11/Pokemon). There is a whole bunch of statistics here.
I love elgg (and peopleagreggator). It’s exactly what we need. Now, it’s time to design the darn place. I really think that we need to focus on a name that is as clear to the world outside as it is for the…
David Weinberger has a blog…
Fleamarket, craigslist like environment-Robert Overlapping space, bring abstraction into the game-Zeynep and TJ Wiki-like site with tagging and mapping in a direct way-Scott Calendars and events–How do I locate what is available–Gabriel Process related information, class rating, travel board, electronic smalltown etc.–Brenda…
We were talking in class today abou the future of embodied computing and its philosophical foundations. Bill Joy, taking the path of those who believe that life is software by other means, concludes that the future could be really bleak: Why the…
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s confounder, is at it again. He decided to “fork” Wikipedia, that is to create another flavor, which includes more editorial control, of the famous online encyclopedia. I am part of the project, called Citizendium, and I hope to be…
From Don Norman, the author of the famous POET (Psychology of everyday things) a word of wisdom about Human factors: I’m often asked for reading suggestions, especially for references to the literature on Human Factors and Ergonomics. In the past few months,…
Here is an Amazon.com list for those interested in social shaping of technology!
A few 9/11 and media related thoughts. Somewhat related to the idea of communitas, I ‘ll let you find out in what way… The Exponent – Purdue’s Student Newspaper 2001 attacks still affect media coverage By Sarah Michalos Publication Date: 09/11/06 Campus…