StumbleUpon is now bigger than del.icio.us, counting 1.3 million users. Is it just another social booknetworking site, or a way for me to finally "surf" the intertubes? Just ten more Stumbles before bed, and this time I'm serious.
posted by Area Control on Jan 17, 2007 - 37 comments

Big Brother 101 -- Could your social networks brand you an enemy of the state? (Popular Science Mag) And one staffer finds out it might--due to a connection to the Buffalo Six. Think 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with tapping and surveillance and worse at the other end.
posted by amberglow on Sep 22, 2006 - 15 comments

The Internet and our social and psychological well-being : This older study correlates Internet use with declining social relationships and isolation. A more recent study (PDF) shows that the Internet has changed and positively affects social relationships.
posted by lpctstr; on Aug 31, 2006 - 6 comments

Visualising Networks is fun. So are Monkey Networks (ppt). Dolphin Networks (pdf). Ant networks can aide network design. Does the Brain Work Like the Internet? Can the Internet Think? The Social Superorganism and its Global Brain? Webog Inequality. A City Is Not a Tree. The I Ching, a network of 384 pathways. The Whole, the Parts, and the Holes. Heterarchy, the secret of Japan, Inc.? Sense/non-sense;hierarchy/heterarchy... Heterachy and Heirarchy: Two Complimenatary categorises of description (pdf). Summary: "Our most significant problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking at which we produced them." (attributed to Einstein)
posted by MetaMonkey on Jan 26, 2006 - 5 comments

A rebuttal to the "cult of Turn Off Your Computer," or as might be more familiar here: "It's Only a Website."
Curious about others' views on this. I've been on-line for so long(shut up, not consecutively), avatars/personas/whateveryoucallem just seem like silly extra work to me, outside appropriate contexts like on-line RPGs and the like.
posted by Su on Aug 11, 2002 - 16 comments

Maybe there's hope for our social lives after all. A new study (complete report here) seems to directly contradict February's study which claimed that the Internet makes people antisocial hermits. This new study is particularly focused on the habits of women who use the web but offers many interesting numbers that apply across gender lines, i.e. "Nearly three-quarters of Internet users (72%) say they visited family or friends "yesterday," while 61% of nonusers report they had visited someone".
posted by Sapphireblue on May 10, 2000 - 2 comments