Posts tagged Life
A Life Lived Online: How We Talk About Death on Social Media
Mar 14th
Death is a part of life, both on and offline. Facebook and MySpace become gathering spaces for the living to mourn their fallen friends. What kind of language do people use to express their grief?
A new study out of the University of California at Irvine’s School of Information and Computer Sciences takes a closer look at the language of bereavement and distress in social media. “Death in social media creates an entirely different kind of experience than we’ve ever really had before,” says Jed Brubaker, a PhD Candidate at the University of California at Irvine. “Traditionally when someone dies, people come together at a certain place, certain time and grieve together – like a cemetery, wake.” What types of language people use to mourn their loved one on social media, in front of other users?
Sponsor
Rather than take an obvious, trendy turn toward Facebook, the study looks at MySpace users, many of whom died young. Using a coding system, the researchers identifies emotionallt distressed content and an analysis of that language, which lays a foundation for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including automatic detection of bereavement-related distress. The researchers discovered that linguistic style can also indicate messages demonstrating distress in the space of post-mortem social media content.
After a user dies, friends visit the page and express their sadness, shock and grief. Later many return and continue updating and conversing with the user, often times sharing events and feelings as if the person were still alive. It’s kind of like talking with a ghost.
By examining user-generated content, the researchers were able to observe the grieving process in a naturalistic, public setting. What’s more is that this study focuses on “extreme expressions of grief and mourning in SNS following the death of a friend or loved one.” This means more than just a few Twitter-esque RIPs, trending topics and the dead popping up in one’s Facebook friend list. The researchers sought to expand the current knowledge base around the use of language in online grieving, rather than focus on the fact that people do express their grief on social media.
A previous study took a similar linguistic approach, looking at how those in mourning reacted to the deceased on memorialized Facebook profiles. Of the post-mortem Wall posts, they discovered higher rates of negative emotion than previously, when the user was alive. Visiting a deceased user’s profile is seen as both a space for people to mourn and a space of pain. Some return to the profile again and again, continuing to post. Some decide to defriend the dead all together.
What Do You Say To the Dead?
“The stages of grieving the death of a loved one generally consist of shock, denial, anger, mourning and finally, recovery,” explains Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni, co-author of the study “Why Do People Use Facebook?”
In this sense, mourning refers to “the overall process through which an individual comes to acknowledge and accommodate the loss, while acute grief reactions are defined as psychological, behavioral, social, and physical reactions to the perception of that loss,” writes Brubaker & colleagues. As such, comments on the deceased’s MySpace page serve as reminders and manifestations of grief.
“During the earlier stages of grieving, the online presence of the deceased can serve as a powerful visual reminder, enabling friends and relatives to relive the tragedy in a far more vivid fashion than if they had relied on memory alone,” explains Nadkarni.
In our fractured world of social media, mourning can happen simultaneously on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and MySpace. There is no singular space for mourning the death of a loved one. The objective of this mourning process is, however, always the same: “To incorporate the reality of the death into their relationship with, and understanding of, the deceased,” according to Therese A. Rando’s 1993 study, Treatment of Complicated Mourning.
For the data in this study, Brubaker and fellow researchers collected comments from profiles of 1369 deceased MySpace users in April 2010 using the site MyDeathSpace. All people used in the study had been dead for at least three years and lived in the United States.
To identify the language used, researchers developed a codebook of language – and also acknowledged that much of the language used in post-mortem comments is “performative and uses formulaic language.” As such, the researchers discovered two distinct types of language: common funerary sentiments (e.g. “I miss you already…”) and expressions of emotional distress, which did not include memories of the deceased. To further clarify, here are some rules and examples of comments that qualify as emotional distress:
After determining which types of comments qualified as emotional distress, the researchers decided to find and articulate the linguistic style of emotional distress. To analyze sentiment and linguistic style, the researchers used “Language Inquiry Word Count” (LIWC), which provides dictionaries for parts of speech and punctuation, and psychological and social processes. They examined pronounces, conjunctions, negations adverbs and tense use.
“Heightened use of first person pronouns and decreased use of second and third person pronouns have previously been found to relate to depression,” according to previous studies by Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer. Use of first person singular pronouns also elevates during emotionally tense times. In a more gendered look at language, a 1988 study found that high use of adverbs and negations indicates a more socially aware, “female” style language. In analyzing expression of sentiment, the researchers looked at the categories of positive emotion (“happy,” “love,” “nice”), sadness (contains words such as “cry,” “sad,” “grief), anger (“hate” and “kill”) and social processes (include “talk,” and social relationships, including “family” and “friend”).
Next page: Linguistic styles of emotional distress, the death of queer artist Mark Aguhar
The Internet: It’s like Real Life, Only With Buttons
Mar 8th
Every time I read about social media these days, I end up hearing about how social sharing metrics are becoming a bigger factor in everything from organic rankings to driving additional clicks from visitors already on your site. And it makes total sense. If Google sees that a blog post has a ton of…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Books Continue to Evolve – Check Out E.O. Wilson’s ‘Life on Earth’ iBook
Feb 23rd
Last month Apple announced iBooks 2, the next generation of its e-book app for iPhone and iPad. iBooks 2 was notable for the launch of a new breed of interactive digital textbooks, designed for the iPad. The books feature videos, photos, diagrams, rotating 3D objects, “Study Cards” for notes and highlights, and more. Among the first iBook 2 offerings is a free preview of new book by famed biologist E.O. Wilson, called Life on Earth. It’s an intriguing glimpse into the future of textbooks.
Sponsor
Life on Earth is a digital biology textbook for high school students. It’s currently “under development” (it isn’t being written, it’s being developed) by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. The free download offers a preview of the book and a sample chapter about ecology. New chapters will be “released” (not published) over the next 2 years to the Apple iBookstore.
After a brief introductory video by Wilson, the colorful textbook opens. It’s best viewed in landscape mode, where the photos and animations are larger and more vivid. Viewing it in portrait mode creates a more streamlined version, which is less colorful but can be read quicker.
The animations are probably the most impressive thing about Wilson’s iBook. Using a variety of swipe and tap gestures, students can explore how things like cells and DNA work.
The videos are typically short, 1-2 minutes long. So while they interrupt the flow of reading a textbook, they don’t distract for too long.
The “Study Cards” feature allows students to make notes and highlights. Students are also prompted to do pop quizzes. However, as Ars Technica pointed out in its review, there is limited sharing with third party apps like Dropbox and Evernote.
Publishers can create this new type of iPad textbook through a separate iOS app called iBooks Author. The big benefit of e-textbook projects like this is that the book can be constantly updated and new versions are released through the App Store. Life on Earth is a 2-year development process, but after that it will be an ongoing iterative process to update the book as new scientific discoveries come to light.
There are some downsides to projects such as Wilson’s iBook. They’re costly to both produce and consume. For producers, the animation and video effects don’t come cheap. For consumers – in this case students – iPads are expensive and many schools can’t afford them.
Regardless, this is an impressive iBook preview by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. Encouraging kids to interact with their textbooks and follow scientific process through animations and video is a great way to engage young minds.
Textbooks have evolved, it’s as simple as that.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Valentine’s Day Gift Guide for the Developer in Your Life
Feb 8th
Christmas is long gone and the Superbowl is over, which can only mean one thing – Valentine’s day is almost here. If you are anything like the CloudSpokes team, you struggle to find a great gift for the love (or “like”) in your life by February 14. It’s not a secret that we’re in love with developers, but we know as well as anyone that the developers in our life have their own unique likes.
Given that there is only one week left until Valentine’s Day, we wanted to make shopping for the special developer in your life a little easier. Here is a list of gift ideas for the developer love (or “like”) in your life, crowdsourced from our community team.
Sponsor
Nomad Brush: This handy brush makes digital painting on the iPad and other tablets possible.
Star Wars: Episode 1 movie tickets: Who wouldn’t want to watch a classic – The Phantom Menace – in 3D!
Magic Wand programmable TV remote: This gadget is as entertaining as it is useful and learns from your existing remote control.
Steve Jobs book: If you have an urge to give a “real” book, this is the one.
Chrome cufflinks: These Chrome logo cufflinks are for the guys in your life, but don’t shy away from grabbing an Android T-shirt.
JayBird Bluetooth Earbuds: Bluetooth Stereo Headphones make working and commuting even more enjoyable.
Hard Candy Stylus and Pen: If your valentine isn’t a painter, opt for the pen that makes writing on an iPad (and paper) possible.
Jawbone JAMBOX: This buletooth speaker boasting hi-fi audio definitely says “love.”
Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate Silent Keyboard: Give the gift of incognito typing. It’s silent and doesn’t have numbers or letters visible (so you can still work while on the phone with your loved one).
Dave Messinger, chief architect and evangelist for CloudSpokes at Appirio.
Robot photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
[STUDY] A Friend of a Friend in Real Life But Not on Facebook
Feb 3rd
Picture this: You’re at a party, and your good friend introduces you to one of their friends. You two hit it off, and boom – a new friend! You’ve just become friends with a friend of a friend. In real life, this is a common occurrence. On Facebook, a friend of a friend isn’t necessarily an actual friend.
A new study from Pew Internet discovered this and an array of other interesting facts about peoples’ Facebook friendships. The researchers found that most peoples’ friend lists were not very interconnected. In a friend list with a density of 1, everyone knows everyone. On Facebook the density is quite low at .12 with a maximum density of .42, which means that your chances of knowing a friend of a friend on Facebook fall between 12% and 42%. In its its S-1 filing on Wednesday, Facebook toted 100 billion friendships. What it probably meant to say was 100 billion connections, many of which are dormant.
Sponsor
To understand the friend ties idea, here’s an example. Say you have 10 friends; this means that the number of possible friendship ties among everyone in network is 45. The average Facebook user has 245 friends, which means there are 29,890 possible friendship ties in the network. With an average density of .12 and a total number of 245 friends, that means there are only 12% of 29,890 friendship linkages between “friends.” A 1992 study from Pew found that offline social ties had a density of .36, or three times the density size of Facebook’s.
“We suspect that Facebook networks are of lower density because of their ability to allow ties that might otherwise have gone dormant to remain persistent over time,” the study says. Those ties that should have gone dormant are the people who you’ve Facebook friended from grade school, middle school, high school and other pubescent times in life. These are the people whose friend requests you naïvely and curiously accepted. This is where the Facebook “drama” potentially begins. “Facebook is a giant emotional locker,” writes Andy Kessler on the Wall Street Journal.
“We expect that new Facebook users typically start with a core group of close, interconnected friends,” the study says.”But over time their friend list becomes larger and less intertwined, particularly as they discover (and are discovered by) more distant friends from different parts and different times in their lives.”
The study also reports a curious finding: People are more likely to be friends with people who have more friends than they do. They are less likely to become friends with people who have less friends than them. Hence, the popular kid syndrome: Everyone wants to be friends with the popular kid, and few willingly try to buddy up with the loner who sits alone at lunch.
Tagging friends in Facebook photos is the only activity that the study says is associated with having more close ties. These people tend to be friends who the user interacts with both online and offline. This does not account for those awkward photo taggings that happen on the fly, without a user’s permission. Lifehacker’s Jason Chen argues that no, you shouldn’t tag someone in a photo without their permission. For if someone is truly your friend on- and offline, they’ll show some rexpect by first asking if you’d like to be tagged in the photo they’re about to upload. When it comes to more innocuous taggings, such as a status update or photo, permission isn’t completely necessary, but it’s still quite welcome.
The study reinforces findings from past research, which suggest that heavy Facebook users are more trusting than others.
Images via Nikki Lynette’s Facebook page and Shutterstock.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Ethiopia Sentences U.S. Blogger to Life in Prison
Jan 27th
The Federal High Court in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa sentenced expatriate journalist and blogger Elias Kifle to life in prison yesterday. Kifle is the editor of the Washington D.C.-based blog, Ethiopian Review. He was sentenced in absentia.
It was originally reported that he could receive the death penalty, which is the maximum penalty for his alleged crime of “political terrorism” in the northeast African country.
Sponsor
He and several other defendants were found guilty on January 19th, according to the Ethiopian news website Walta Info, but were not sentenced until Thursday, January 26.
“The charges included conspiring to commit acts of terror, rendering support to terrorism, participating in a terrorist organization (Ginbot 7) and money laundering. Elias is also found guilty of masterminding and providing financial support to the other defendants who remained under police custody since June 2011.”
The other defendants, who were sentenced to 14 years in prison and given fines of 33,000 birrs ($1,500.00), were Reeyot Alemu, a columnist for the weekly newspaper Feteh, and Woubshet Taye, who was deputy editor of Awramba Times, which has since closed up shop.
Kifle’s higher profile, resulting from his U.S. residency, may have saved him from the death penalty. That may not be the case for another blogger, Eskinder Nega, who was arrested in September, also on “terrorism” charges.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, this is Kifle’s second life sentence, following a 2007 decision, also rendered in absentia. The first conviction was on charges of treason and was part of a 2006 crackdown on the press. He was targeted for his publication’s coverage of the Ethiopian government’s violent clampdown on protests that arose after the 2005 elections in the country.
Photo via CPJ | tip via Scott Baldauf
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Real Voters’ Disinterest In Anti-Piracy Legislation May Give SOPA New Life
Jan 24th
Interest in news about last week’s protest against anti-piracy legislation was highest among people under the age of 30, according to the latest weekly News Interest Index survey. The survey was conducted Jan. 19-22 among 1,002 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
While the Stop Online Piracy Act that was pending before the House and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act, are on indefinite hold after last week’s protests, the Pew poll shows little interest in the protests outside of those under 30. The Pew poll may have politicians rethinking their decision to take political cover in the immediate aftermath of the protest, which included a day-long shutdown of Wikipedia, as people under 30 traditionally have low voter turnout rates.
Sponsor
An aide to a House member that supports SOPA said it was too soon to tell how lawmakers would work to move anti-piracy legislation. The aide, who asked that he and his boss not be identified, had not seen the Pew report, which was released Tuesday.
“But I think, like anything else, if there’s not strong constituent opposition, it makes it easier for us to move forward on issues like this,” he said.
The poll, it should be noted, covers news interest for the four days following Wednesday’s protest, meaning interest may have been conceivably higher amongst all age groups on Jan. 18, the day news coverage was most exhaustive. The poll also asks respondents to rank the story they were most interested in, so lower ratings in older age groups does not necessarily mean people over 30 have no interest in anti-piracy legislation.
The 23% interest rate in Web protest stories for people between the ages of 18 and 29 was higher than interest in any other age group covered by the story, as well as interest by people between 18 and 29 in the presidential election (21%) and the Italian cruise ship accident (16%).
Across all age groups, only 7% of respondents listed the Web protest as the story they were most interested in for the four-day period. Overall, 26% of respondents said they were most interested in news about the cruise ship accident, followed by news about the elections (23%) and the economy (10%).
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Samsung Breathes Life Into Tizen By Merging With Bada
Jan 18th
The long evolution of Tizen continues and is about to get its biggest boost yet. Samsung is going to merge its Bada platform with the Tizen project, bringing the Linux-based operating system to more smartphones and developers across the world.
Tizen is the Linux smartphone operating system that was once called MeeGo that, in turn, was once the confluence of Maemo and Moblin from Nokia and Intel. Nothing tangible has ever really come out of the Tizen/MeeGo project except for a few demo phones and the Nokia N9 and N950. With Samsung throwing its manufacturing weight behind the Tizen development project, that may be about to change.
Sponsor
A Twisted Road For Tizen
The growth path of Tizen has been nothing if not amusing. First, Nokia and Intel got together to merge Linux platforms. MeeGo was born. Nokia then found itself with a serious problem of a “burning platform” and had to jump to Windows Phone and cut its ties with the MeeGo project. Intel was left to shop MeeGo around looking to gain some traction. It eventually found a home with the Linux Foundation, which subsumed the project under a consortium with a wide array of so-called supporters, Samsung included.
Samsung’s participation comes through the LiMo group. When we wrote about the purported “Death of MeeGo” last September and the rise of the LiMo group, we pointed out that Samsung would have a great opportunity to build a framework around Bada development with the backing of the Linux developer ecosystem. Near five months later, that is exactly what is happening.
According to a report from Forbes, the integration of Bada and Tizen will give developers the same tools to develop for each platform. That would make perfect sense. Call it “streamlining Linux mobile operating systems.” Basically, the entire project, from the very beginning, has been to absorb other Linux platforms. Overall, one would think that would give Tizen more functionality and a broader developer base, but that is not what has happened. Every time Tizen has absorbed and changed its name, the development timeline has been set back. Now that Samsung is bring Bada to the project, will this change?
Great For Tizen While Samsung Hedges Its Bets
The great thing for Tizen about the Bada integration is that Bada actually exists on smartphones across the world. Bada was built by Samsung to be a low-end smartphone operating system intended to go head-to-head with Nokia’s Symbian and S-series devices. Tizen and MeeGo were never really designed for low end devices. Bada integration could give Tizen a wider swath of the smartphone vertical with more apps and developers across smartphones of different hardware specifications.
The irony has the potential to be delicious. Nokia ditched MeeGo and is eventually putting Symbian to bed. MeeGo then turns to Intel and the Linux Foundation that turns to Samsung and Bada. All of a sudden the low-end smartphone market is flooded with Bada/Tizen smartphones from Samsung competing directly against Nokia.
By taking a broader role in Tizen, Samsung is giving itself more options. The company does not shy away from producing smartphone of varying sizes, costs and platforms making everything from flagship Android devices to Windows Phones and bottom of the market devices running both Android and Bada. Tizen and Bada give Samsung its own recourse against the potential Google/Motorola partnership and the rise of other dominant players in the Android ecosystem.
According to Forbes, there will be “at least one or two” Tizen devices from Samsung this year. Look for announcements to be made during the summer with release schedules for the end of the year.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Big Question (Answered): Will You Update Your Facebook Timeline with Past Life Events?
Jan 5th
We’re written about the Facebook Timeline extensively here at ReadWriteWeb, but we’ve never come out and asked you whether or not you will spend time editing yours. Facebook has attempted to catalog your life automatically, but if we want our Timeline to reflect all of our important life events, that means editing it. We wondered if you were prepared to do so.
Will You Update Your Facebook Timeline with Past Life Events?
We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
Sponsor
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
The Power Of Online Video Can Prove That There Is Life After Death – ReelSEO Online Video News
Jan 2nd
|
The Power Of Online Video Can Prove That There Is Life After Death
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… We had the privilege of speaking with Bruce Clay … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
