Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
How can we conceptualize the relationship between technological and social change at the local level? More specifically, what conceptual tools have we got at our disposal to study the emergence of new Internet-related forms of local sociality? This article is a summary…
WordPress, the popular blogging platform, has grown especially through its extraordinary and active support community. The WordPress theme developer community is absolutely amazing, churning day after day more and more themes, each more innovative than the other. Here is a list of…
My department head put me on the spot today. At the monthly faculty meeting this afternoon I took notes with my Pulse gizmo. At the end of the meeting, Howard pointed to me gleefuly: “Ask Sorin what he is up to with…
Video: Future Vision Montage
Email is for people with thick skins, who in fact do not need email at all... Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy If in doubt, buy the book...
The Daily Telegraph put the world on fire with the announcement that a square grid-like pattern of structures was found in the middle of the Atlantic. Google reacted promptly, claiming that the pattern is a digital artifact, being the product of the…
Slideshare presentation of Visible Past. Visible Past is a web-based knowledge creation and storage environment that is aware of a user's spatial location and which delivers information on the fly, to that location, based on the user needs connected to that location.…
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Have you ever wanted to capture a webpage in it’s entirety? More than just the link, but what you actually see on the page? Well you can! Services like Google notebook, Evernote, ubernote, Diigo, and Zoho (to name a few) can…
An emerging consortium of partners dedicated to generic, not specific projects Bamboo, the Mellon Foundation supported project, has reached its third milestone at the Tucson, AZ workshop, when it announced that it will create a development consortium for digital humanities tools and…
A sophisticated browser, which straddles the desktop/server divide has been launched by Google. It aims to create a better platform for its webapplications, which need to be faster and more secure to compete with the local desktop, currently dominated by Microsoft. The…
Steven Levy outlines the greater benefits of launching the Iphone 2.0. But though the low price will dominate iPhone chatter between now and July 11, there is actually a much bigger iPhone story to tell. Today marked the official transformation of Jobs’s…
A $40 dollar Wii controller turned into a movement tracker that in the “wild” costs $$$$$$ shows that the building blocks of technological progress are simple functions and devices that can be combined into utilities. It also suggests that technological creativity at…
Submitted by Colleen E. Brown on November 26 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) Introduction The need for group membership, social support, and information gathering are part…
Submitted on November 26, 2007, to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) Abstract: The widespread expansion of communication technology over the past century has resulted in a marked…
Submitted by Pamela Morris on November 26, 2007 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink). “An (online) host is like a host at a party. You don’t automatically…
Submitted by Robert N. Yale on October 15, 2007 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink). Abstract This essay posits that virtual communities are successful to the degree…
Submitted by Colleen E. Brown on October 15, 2006 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) The growth of computer mediated communication (CMC) has sparked much debate across…
Front Porches and Public Spaces: Planned Communities Online Susan Huelsing Sarapin Comm. 632: Online Interaction Professor: Dr. Sorin Matei November 19, 2006 Introduction Where else today but in the cost-effective frontier of cyberspace can the average person construct a community?1 With widespread…
Content is king! You have to provide them with content that they want in order to get people to come to your site. However, you should be particularly careful in how you integrate it with the community features of your site. Content…
By Susan Huelsing Sarapin Submitted on October 22, 2006 to the On-Line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2006, Purdue University Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) Introduction Today, people all over the world are connected, or “tethered†(Turkle,…
In the media hubbub that seems to surround Wikipedia nowadays (have you see the Atlantic Monthly piece, yet?), the Onion chimes in…. Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of…
New media and emerging technologies continue to change not only our communication (Gunn, 2006; Jones, 2006), but also our relationships, our work, and our communities (Contractor, 2006; Walther, 2006). At the same time, our societies and organizations – i.e. the bodies within…
Submitted by: Scott Sanders to the Online Interaction Seminar, COM 632Y, Spring 2006, Dr. Sorin A. Matei, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907. Summary: Social categorization, which is at the heart of SIDE theory, may often prove to be an incredibly powerful…
The social shaping of knowledge through collaborative authoring tools I grew up in a household with a set of encyclopedias prominently displayed in the family room and frequently used as a resource– for our education, to consult during family discussions about issues,…
For many, the democratic and liberatory promise of the internet lies in the potential to allow collaboration, interaction, and exchange of information, ideas, and resources at a scale not otherwise possible (or at least, not highly probable) in a simple offline world.…
Drawing on the earlier notion of electronic propinquity as postulated by Korzenny (1978), the role of several factors like communication skills, bandwidth, information complexity, mutual directionality, to name a few, all play a part in determining the amount of propinquity achieved in…
I tried for a couple of weeks Yahoo’s new email interface. It promised to do a lot of things simple web interfaces could not. Dragging and dropping files and messages, complete listing of messages, faster searches, etc. Most of the functionalities resembled…