Economics, technology, and how we think.
We published a piece at HBR this past week on Facebook and well-being, by two researchers writing about their recent study: Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being. These results were particularly strong for mental health; most …
Continue reading “Evidence that too much social media is making us unhappy”
The New York Times has finally released the details of their paywall, and they confirm that the model is not sustainable. I have a short post up at The Atlantic Tech saying as much. Here’s the basic point: Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and …
Hearing others’ visions for the future of the Net can be inspiring. But a lot of the time it’s not. One thing I’m struck by with the explosion of social media, in particular, is the shallow nature of the industry’s ambition. For every person writing about how Twitter can enable political change, five others are …
I’ve blogged about this before, but I wanted to share a great post from Ed Glaeser at NYT’s Economix on how social networking – in this case Facebook – supplements in-person interaction, rather than replacing it: it isn’t clear if Facebook will increase or decrease the demand for face-to-face interactions.When theory is ambiguous, we need …
After my last post, I had a few conversations with friends about a categorized or sortable Facebook feed. The point of my post was as much about how Facebook could have better managed the transition from profiles to feeds as it was about categorizing updates, but the latter was, for whatever reason, what I ended …
Continue reading “Apple’s music social network, Ping, and a followup on Facebook feeds”
Umair Haque has a post at Harvard Business Review advancing the following hypothesis which he dubs “relationship inflation”: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships. A year ago I was blogging …
Continue reading “Social media, email and relationship inflation”
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