Of course it makes sense to gum up Instagram with your awesome thing. It’s not like people have had their fill of your Tweets, YouTube Videos, Facebook status updates, rich media eye-rape, projection-mapped city takeovers, bluetooth phone-jackathons, interactive outdoor-o-matics with busloads of people jumping up and down in front of a Kinect, and that mobile-thingy-you-stuck-in-at-the-end-for-good-measure. Oh and of course a bloody #hashtag.
We have abandoned the idea, still popular in the 1990s, that – to put it in a somewhat sketchy way –Internet users spend their nights chatting with strangers over the Web, and thus they are automatically neglect their friends and loved ones. This was known as the displacement hypothesis. Since the beginning of the 2000s we know that the actual social consequence of the Web isn’t social isolation, but rather a dramatic reconfiguration of the balance between strong and weak ties, between bonding and bridging.
Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked with care.
— Bowker, G. C. (2005) Memory Practices in the Sciences. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The issue clearly isn’t dependent on technology. Internet is a necessary but not sufficient condition. (…)
However, that alliance [between new and old media] plays a decisive role for social change. Without Al Jazeera there would have been no revolution in Tunisia.
