Twitter’s IPO: a financial perspective on our emergent social-media world

For the past several decades, the stock market and the financial world seem to be increasingly abstracted from “the real world." The epic housing bubble and economic downfall of the 2000's are just a few obvious manifestations of this phenomenon. My rough understanding of how any valuation should work is based on my experience of … Continue reading Twitter’s IPO: a financial perspective on our emergent social-media world

Live-tweeting democracy: the fantasy of representation

Twitter and the 2012 Elections: Media Practice and Politics Whereas Facebook is a platform that treats politics as more or less taboo, Twitter's network is made up substantially of news outlets/media organizations, political junkies and citizen journalists. This characteristic of Twitter's population of users is partly a product of the site's informational architecture, which makes … Continue reading Live-tweeting democracy: the fantasy of representation

Hashtag Revolution

The following is the first part of a lengthy consideration of the idea of the Hashtag Revolution as a model for a social/political movement. This section considers mainly the Occupy movement, and the next section considers the relevance of the concept of the hashtag revolution to the presidential elections. The hashtag revolution or hashtag revolt is … Continue reading Hashtag Revolution

KONY 2012: An Anthropological Perspective (TO BE CONTINUED)

“Right now there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago”-opening line of Kony 2012 film. KONY 2012 is a benchmark phenomenon in the history of social media and political activism. A kind of descendent of the Occupy movement and Arab Spring - both grassroots political movements fueled by … Continue reading KONY 2012: An Anthropological Perspective (TO BE CONTINUED)