While Facebook remains the most popular social media site, other platforms — like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter — saw higher rates of growth over the past year. In 2014, 52% of online adults used two or more social media sites, up from 42% in 2013.

Social media have become a prevalent channel to access information, spread ideas, and influence opinions. However, it has been suggested that social and algorithmic filtering may cause exposure to less diverse points of view. Here we quantitatively measure this kind of social bias at the collective level by mining a massive datasets of web clicks. Our analysis shows that collectively, people access information from a significantly narrower spectrum of sources through social media and email, compared to a search baseline. The significance of this finding for individual exposure is revealed by investigating the relationship between the diversity of information sources experienced by users at both the collective and individual levels in two datasets where individual users can be analyzed—Twitter posts and search logs. There is a strong correlation between collective and individual diversity, supporting the notion that when we use social media we find ourselves inside “social bubbles.” Our results could lead to a deeper understanding of how technology biases our exposure to new information.

Early last week I uploaded to my Academia.edu homepage a brief note signaling and explaining my decision to close my account on that site. As a medieval historian, I had been an active and enthusiastic member since 2010, with moderately...

Digital Media + Learning: The Power of Participation

“What’s the difference between ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and the institutional repository?” “I put my papers in ResearchGate, is that enough for the open access policy? These and similar questions have been been common at open access events over the past couple of years. Authors want to better understand the differences between these platforms and when they should use one, the other, or some combination. First, a brief primer on what each service has to offer: ResearchGate and Academia.edu ResearchGate and Academia.edu are social networking platforms whose primary aim is to connect researchers with common interests. Users create profiles on these services, […]

Despite all the hype about how it has connected the world, the web is more insular than you might think.

I’d forgotten just how much fun ETech is. Not only are the talks some of the most creative and innovative you can hear in the tech community, the room full of people is one of the most congenial, smart and funny you’re likely to encounter anywhere. Tim O’Reilly won’t come out and say that it’s… Read More »The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech

As archives start to collect, provide access to, and present social media collections, many ethical issues arise that need to be addressed.

Social media’s struggles sum up a modern malaise: the inability to recognise value beyond market-driven metrics

Earlier this year, I looked at the social media policies of 17 federal agencies and departments with science in their missions. All but one of those agencies had a social media policy in place. So we asked the lone agency—the Food and Drug Administration—to produce the social media policy it claimed

TEI for e.g. tweets.

Forcing our visual language on social media means we can’t express what we really mean

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