A recent study by Soraya Mehdizadeh in Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking reignited the debate about whether social network sites are linked to increased narcissism and self-esteem, even drawing the attention of CNN and Mashable.

Actually there is less of a debate on whether social network sites feed, and are fed by, narcissism.  Social network sites allow people consider control over how they present themselves, including choosing more attractive photos  and focusing on more positive traits in notes and the About Me section.  Status updates provide ample opportunity for people to boast about their achievements.  Narcissism has also been linked to the number of times people visit and update their page and the time spent on social network sites. San Diego State researcher Jean Twenge argues that social networks are one of many symptoms of a growing narcissism epidemic in our culture: “We have phony rich people (with interest-only mortgages and piles of debt), phony beauty (with plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures), phony athletes (with performance-enhancing drugs), phony celebrities (via reality TV and YouTube), phony genius students (with grade inflation), a phony national economy (with $11 trillion of government debt), phony feelings of being special among children (with parenting and education focused on self-esteem), and phony friends (with the social networking explosion).”

One could argue that the whole notion of social network sites is narcissistic as broadcasting to others about what you think and what you are doing presumes that others give a damn.  I should add that I DO give a damn what is going on with my friends and family, particularly ones that I don’t see regularly.  I must admit, though, that a few of family and friends overdue it and give constant updates about their activities.  Even a cursory look at my Facebook updates, though, would confirm that I am a narcissist.  I presume people are interested in knowing that watching Legally Blonde lifts my spirits and that I enjoy empanadas from Pucha.

There is more of a debate on the link between self-esteem and Facebook use with some studies finding support for the Social Enhancement hypothesis (The Rich Get Richer”) that those who  are popular offline enhance that popularity on social network sites and others backing the Social Compensation hypothesis (“The Poor Get Richer”)  that those with low self-esteem attempt to increase their Facebook  popularity to compensate for being unpopular offline. A 2008 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication study by Zywica and Danowski reaches what I think is the most plausible conclusion:  Facebook use is linked to both low and high self-esteem. Those who are more extroverted and with higher self-esteem are popular both offline and online.  On the other hand, those who are more introverted and have lower self-esteem reveal more about themselves online than they do with real-life friends and admit to promote themselves to look more popular on Facebook.

I would like to hear what you think.  Is the whole notion of creating a social network profile narcissistic?  As a whole, are we becoming a more narcissistic society? Does the amount of interesting information one gleans from Facebookoutweigh the mundane posts?  Which of the  sins of  Facebooking (posting mundane details, self-promoter, those who provide too much information about themselves, the bad grammarian, the sympathy-baiter, or the chronic inviter (support my cause, sign my petition, play Mafia Wars with me) is the greatest?  Do you think most Facebookers have low self-esteem or have perhaps an inflated version of their self worth? Ask my wife where I come down on the last question.

Pew Research released a study last week that showed that 18 percent of Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim, up 7 points since March 2009.  The percentage that correctly identifies the president as a Christian has dropped from 48 to 34 percent.

While not surprisingly, his political opponents are most likely to misidentify his religion, less than half of Democrats correctly identify him as a Christian.  Most who said that they believe Obama is a Muslim said they got the information from television.  Perhaps that has something to do with conservative pundits consistently questioning whether he is a Christian  and most Republican lawmakers, while not claiming his is a Muslim, seem to take the line that the president says he is a Christian and they won’t dispute that claim.

Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible, put the recent uproar over President Obama’s religious beliefs in historical perspective, noting that “Americans taking out their discrimination toward minority religions on the president of the United States is as American as apple pie.”  George Washington was accused of being a more loyal Mason than a Christian.  Abraham Lincoln was accused of being baptized a Catholic at a time when anti-Catholic rhetoric ran high.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was labeled as Jewish in the midst of tensions surrounding World War II as well as the economic hardships of the Great Depression.  Feiler believes that the rumor of Obama being a Muslim arouse because his father was a Muslim and he spent formative time as a child in a Muslim country and because he has reached out to the Muslim world and supports the rights of Muslim Americans.  Feiler did see a positive.  In previous cases of religious discrimination, whether it was Methodists in the 18^th century, Catholics in the 19^th Century or Jews in the 20^th century, reviled outsider religions made it into the inner circle of accepted religions, and he believes the same will happen with Muslims.

I would like to hear what you think.  Is the misperception about Obama’s beliefs a result ofr Obama’s background and efforts to reach out to Muslims or more as a result of claims by conservative pundits?   Do you think Feiler is right that while Muslims are currently reviled in many quarters of this country, that they will join Catholics and Jews on the list of “accepted religions” in the United States?

for possession of pot.  But political scientists, who have measured America’s political knowledge for more than a half a century agree, that our citizens’ political IQ is about equal to your average eggplant. Studies indicate less than half of the public could answer facts crucial to effective citizenship, such as what are rights guaranteed by the constitution (being able to have 12 item in a 10 items or less line at grocery store is NOT a constitutional right) and where candidates, parties and public officials stood on important issues of the day.

The nation’s low political IQ was reaffirmed recently when Pew Research released results of its recent political knowledge exam which showed on average people answered 5.8 of 11 questions correctly.  Before reading on, take the Pew Research quiz and post your results.  I don’t want to brag (actually I LOVE to brag; wife JoAnna will confirm that my ego is big enough to cast a shadow that would cover downtown Austin), but I did get all 11 correct and only struggled with one.

Why should we be concerned that people seem to have limited political knowledge?  Some apologists have noted that the public may be under informed, but not uninformed.  They do not know the positions of presidential candidates and political parties on some of the major issues of the day, key constitutional guarantees such as right to a jury trial and basic economic facts such as whether we have a budget surplus or deficit.  Others (such as elite theory proponents) argue that it doesn’t make much of a difference how much the public knows or doesn’t know because the government is run by, and on behalf of, elites in government, business, the military and other powerful groups.

However, I agree with democratic theorists that how much we know or don’t know DOES make a difference, as informed citizens are better citizens in many ways.  They are more politically tolerant, believe they can influence the political process, and are more interested in, and likely to participate in, politics.  They hold more opinions on important issues of the day and are less likely to change opinions in the face of misleading or false information, but likely to alter their views in the face of new, relevant information.  They are better able to choose candidates who support their views and interests.

For those who still don’t believe level of political knowledge makes a difference, meet Alvin Greene.  Greene won the Democratic nomination for Senate in South Carolina by 18 points over a more experienced foe despite not campaigning for the position. Analysts, scrambling for reasons why 59 percent of South Carolinians would vote for a candidate they never heard of, have advanced arguments such as his name was top of the ballot and a “name-letter effect” in which Greene was a more common name than Rawls and sounds like singer Al Green (which leaves Democrats wondering: How Can you Mend a Broken Heart?)

As a communication researcher, what makes the flat lining of political knowledge extremely troubling is that it has come at a time when the amount of information available to people has increased tremendously through broadcast news, cable news and the Internet.  How can knowledge scores remain the same despite dramatic increases in available information? First, availability of information doesn’t automatically lead to increased interest in politics; those who are already political junkies benefit the most from the increase in knowledge, widening the knowledge gap.  Second, an increase in number of sources doesn’t necessarily equate with an increase in the quality of information.  Again, for those who care about politics there is a wealth of wonderful information out there.  However, audiences have increasing control over what sources of information to seek out and, as I have noted before, increasingly people are either simply avoiding news and information or seeking out sources that reinforce their viewpoints.  Recently when President Obama came to town, the local television station featured a debate between an Obama supporter and a Tea Party supporter.  The Obama supporter said she thought Obama was doing a good job and the Tea Party supported retorted that she obviously was reading the wrong newspapers.  In this case, “wrong newspapers” mean any sources that do not demonize the president.  People’s confidence in government and their belief that politicians act in their interest have dropped precipitously since the 50s and 60s and trust in the government to do what is right has dropped from about just under 80 percent in the 60s to 22 percent today.  Confidence in government always drops during hard economic times, but as government officials from both parties appear to demonstrate they care more about Wall Street than Main Street can the public be blamed for believing government officials don’t operate in their interests?

I would like to hear what you have to say. How problematic is our low levels of political knowledge? What do you see as the cause and what role do you see the media play?

The abacus, the slide rule, 8-track tapes, Betamax… and agenda setting?  The four technologies listed above died out when newer technologies that could perform their tasks better and more efficiently were developed. As I noted in an earlier blog,  some scholars have similarly argued that new technologies may make agenda setting irrelevant. You no longer do see a unified media agenda. Also, the Internet has made it easier for people to bypass the media altogether in searching for information.  However, the death of agenda setting may be greatly exaggerated.  The theory needs to simply adapt to the new media environment.

The Internet has certainly challenged some of the basic assumptions of agenda setting.  The theory presumed that the media, formerly largely limited to major newspapers and the networks, shared a similar agenda because their journalists shared similar values.  But the emergence of cable news, alternative news and information sites, blogs and social networks has thrown that assumption into question. A basic assumption of the theory is that those who do not experience an event first hand or through talking with others would need to rely on the media to tell them what issues are important.  But what if people could bypass the media and seek out information on their own or have only certain types of information sent to them? Aren’t people now setting their own agenda?

The Project for Excellence in Journalism recently studied how the legacy press agenda compares to blogs, Twitter and YouTube   The results show mixed support, at best, for agenda setting.  While more than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy sources such as newspapers and broadcast networks (with 80% coming from the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post), blogs and traditional media agreed on the lead story in just 13 of the 49 weeks studied. PEJ did find, however, that mainstream media influenced the blog agenda more than vice versa. Twitter users were even less influenced by the legacy media.  Half of the sources used in tweets came from the traditional media and 40 percent relied on web-only news sources such as Mashable and CNET.  Not surprisingly, Twitter and legacy media had divergent agendas, with the two sources agreeing on the lead in just four of the 29 weeks studied.

When PEJ compared topics stressed in the mainstream press and blogs and Twitter, politics was the most important topic for both blogs and traditional media.  However, blog and traditional media agendas split after that.  Blogs focused on foreign events, science and technology, while legacy media centered on health and medicine, the economy and foreign news. On Twitter, however, users linked to technology stories far more than anything else (43 percent). Technology accounted for 1% of the newshole in the mainstream press.

The fact that agenda setting remains a commonly used theory and continues to evolve during the age of the Internet demonstrates that news of the theory’s demise was greatly exaggerated.  However, to continue to remain relevant, I believe the theory needs to better adapt to the new media landscape.  Before the Internet, it made sense to talk about the media agenda.  Most people got news through newspapers and television and there was considerable evidence that these sources shared similar values. But as the Internet has equaled newspapers as a source of information and people are getting information from a host of sources  other than the traditional media such as news and political websites, blogs, Twitter and other social network sites, the media now represents a whole host of information sources. Similarly, with the emergence of partisan and/or single issue websites and blogs and information increasingly produced by citizens rather than traditional journalists, you can  no longer speak of a single media agenda, but a host of agendas.  Furthermore, in the Web 2.0 media environment, users have more information to choose from as well as more control over what sources they will search out.  More importantly, the public is no longer a mere consumer of news.  Increasingly citizens have a greater role in producing news, from commenting on news stories or blog entries, to submitting photos and information to iReports and other similar services, to creating their own blogs.  Recently, individuals have assumed a third role of being conduits of news: posting story links to their Facebook page, Twitter page, or simply passing on stories and links through e-mail and receiving news and information from friends in return.

Certainly some researchers are already adapting to the new media environment.  Recent years have seen a growth in intermedia agenda setting.  For instance Sweetser, Golan and Wanta examined the intermedia agenda setting relationship between blogs, television news and political advertising and Messner and Distaso studied the blog and traditional media source cycle.  However, more work needs to center on the new media themselves, for instance examining how left-leaning and right-leaning blogs influence their readers’ agendas and the agendas of government officials or how the messages of conservative talk show hosts influence what both the public and Republican legislators view as important.

As the public has moved from mere consumers of information to producers and conduits, more efforts need to center on the role of the public in the agenda-setting process. This isn’t a new idea in agenda setting.  As Max McCombs noted, during the “second stage” of agenda setting research in the the 70s and 80s, researchers went beyond how the media influenced the public agenda to explore what factors led the public to seek out some messages more than others, with the focus on need for orientation. Active audience theories such as uses and gratifications and selective exposure as well as variables such as issue importance and partisanship may better help explain the role of the public in actively searching out content to achieve certain goals .

Also with the public playing a larger role in the production and distribution of news and information and public officials increasingly being able to sidestep the traditional media in advancing their own agenda, more attention needs to be paid to agenda building, which examines how the media, public official and public agenda influence and, in turn, are influenced by, each other.

David Perlmutter and I are co-editing a special issue of Mass Communication & Society looking at the role of social media in the 2008 campaign. One of the articles, by Matthew Ragas and Spiro Kiousis, Intermedia agenda-setting and political activism: MoveOn.org and the 2008 presidential election, provides a nice glimpse at what could be the future agenda setting.  Their study tested for intermedia agenda setting  among partisan news media coverage, political activist groups, citizen activists and official campaign advertising.  Specifically, the setting of the study was MoveOn.org “Obama in 30 seconds” ad contest in which the progressive political activist organization encouraged citizens to create ads to support then-candidate Barack Obama.  The contest provided a means to evaluate first- and second-level intermedia agenda setting relationships between  the explicitly progressive news outlet The Nation, official Obama and MoveOn.org campaign ads and the “Obama in 30 seconds” ads created by politically active citizens.  I will save the results for the Fall 2010 Mass Communication & Society Facebook Election issue.

I would like to hear what you think.  Has the Internet rendered agenda setting obsolete or does it remain a vibrant theory in the 21^st century?  To what degree, if any, should agenda setting be adapted to the Web. 2.0 world? And who still has an abacus, slide rule or an 8-track player?

The answer to that “better or worse” question seems to often be: “Well, that depends.” I want to share a recently-published study that I believe is useful because it provides a very specific and important example of how precarious the tightrope can be between a technology helping and harming depending on how the technology is employed.

I had the opportunity to be involved in the study, a full report of which is in a recent issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, but only in a limited role. Its leaders were Sriram Kalyanaraman and David L. Penn at the University of North Carolina, and Abigail Judge of UNC was also a co-author.

An image from the simulator.

The study examined the effectiveness of a virtual reality simulator provided by Janssen Pharmaceutica in inducing empathy toward persons with schizophrenia. Participants in the study were assigned to one of four conditions: 1) completing a written “empathy” task where they imagined what it would be like to suffer from schizophrenia and wrote about it, 2) using the virtual reality simulator to “experience” the viewpoint of a person with schizophrenia at a supermarket, 3) completing both the written task and the VR simulator, or 4) doing neither the written task nor the simulator. Participants in all of these conditions then answered questions assessing their perceptions toward people with schizophrenia, including feelings of empathy (such as how ““Disgusted,” “Scared,” and “Compassionate” they felt toward people with schizophrenia), feelings of social distance (such as “How would you feel having someone with schizophrenia as a neighbor?”), and attitudes toward persons with schizophrenia, among other measures.

Results for empathy and attitudes were simple: Scores were lowest in the control condition, slightly higher in the written empathy condition, still higher in the simulator condition, and clearly highest in the condition where participants completed both the written empathy and simulator tasks. Hooray for technology, right? Things got more complex with the data for social distance, which produced similar scores in all conditions except for the simulator-only condition, which produced significantly greater feelings of social distance (which isn’t good).

In other words, the VR simulator induced more empathy and better attitudes toward persons with schizophrenia, especially when accompanied by the written task … but the VR simulation without the written task made people more uncomfortable about inteacting closely with people who suffer from schizophrenia. The simulator was not only more effective, then, in reducing stigma when accompanied by the empathy task; the simulator was actually counterproductive in some ways without the empathy task.

Although we can’t say whether a similar pattern would be observed in other contexts, it may well provide a useful caution for anyone interested in the potential of high-tech simulations: Technologies like VR simulations can be powerful tools in the right context, but by themselves may do as much harm as good (or more).

An underlying message I receive is that while Facebook isn’t  necessarily bad,  perhaps I could be use the time more productively, such as having an honest-to-goodness conversation with my wife.  Conversation?  Can you download an app for that?

I did feel a bit vindicated, though, when I read the results of the latest Pew Internet/Elon University’s project “Imaging the Internet” where they ask experts to project themselves 10 years into the future and imagine what effect the Internet will have on society.  As an aside, I am a day-to-day kind of guy and have a hard time imagining how life will change 10 days from now, much less 10 years. The most recent study examined the future of social relations.  The study was based on 895 “technology stakeholders”, 371 of them experts from government, business and academia that made early predictions about the future of the Internet (people like Howard Rheingold, Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor) and 524 schmoes like me who are recommended by a expert or get the Pew Internet e-mail updates.

The Pew Internet/Elon study found that 85 percent of experts, looking back from the year 2020  and considering their personal friends, marriage and other relationships, see that the Internet was a mostly positive force on their social world.  These Internet utopians noted that e-mail, social networks, blogs and other social tools reduce the time and effort to communicate with people, making it easier to create, cultivate and continue social relationships. Social network tools allow people to build larger social networks and  learn more about those in those networks.

As David Moskowitz, principal consultant at Productivity Solutions, Inc., and lead editor of OS/2 Warp Unleashed, noted, “The internet is communications gold mine. We can already find people with whom we’ve lost contact, communicate with people independent of time zones, hold simple video conversations, instant-message people. It already allows us to communicate in new ways. The trend I see only improves with time!”

Both critics and supports of social networks sites noted negatives: Time spent online reduces time spent with important face-to-face relationships; the internet fosters primarily shallow relationships and exposes private information; the internet allows people to  limit  their exposure to new ideas; and the internet is being used to breed intolerance.

Eric James, president of the James Preservation Trust, indicated, “The enemies of social connectivity are silence, disengagement, distance, and abandonment. In the past, how many individuals and families have suffered from these degenerative influences? Now we have the internet.”

Respondents also imagine news technologies to be able to communicate more effectively such as holographic displays with the bandwidth to carry them as well as highly trusted and secure systems such a quantum/biometrics security (which, I think, is using encryption and finger prints and retinal scans to identify people). I am always dubious about future predictions.  I clearly remember that by now we were all supposed to travel by personal jetpacks.  UT grad student Brian reminded me that one of the coolest-named bands to come along in some time is “We Were Promised Jetpacks.”  You can listen to them here.

I am interested in hearing what you think.  Do you really think people can project themselves 10 years in the future and explain what happened communication-wise during those intervening years? What do you think about the prediction that on whole, the positives of social connections through the Internet will outweigh the negatives? Am I only one peeved that we DON’T have personal jetpacks?

This blog post was written by Monica Ancu, assistant professor at University of South Florida.

The rise of YouTube in political campaigns has an interesting undertone: user-generated videos with enough shock and awe value to make them viral and compete, at least in viewership, with candidate ads.

The last two presidential elections, 2004 and 2008, are marked by such clips. Who doesn’t remember The Jib Jab video “This is My Land”  where Bush quarreled Kerry over everything from nukes to ketchup? Or the “Obama Girl”, who proclaimed her crush on the (then) candidate to about 18 million of YouTube viewers?

You might laugh at, cry, love or hate these clips. What I’d like to know, as a researcher, is whether the opinion of another Internet user could possibly affect your political sentiments. So, as a researcher, I took one of the first viral ads of the early 2008 primaries and ran a little experiment.

The ad: Political consultant Phil de Vellis modified the famous Apple “1984” ad ( by replacing the image of Big Brother with the image, voice and message of Hillary Clinton. Within three days, the ad became the #3 most watched YouTube video of the day. Within three weeks, its viewership reached 1.5 million.   At the time, Clinton’s most popular official campaign video had barely over 12,000 views

The experiment: Participants in three conditions viewed the ad and were informed the producer was 1) anonymous source, 2) the Obama campaign (attacking Clinton) and 3) an independent, private citizen.

The result: Participants in all conditions changed their thermometer rankings of both Obama and Clinton to show increased liking of the candidate under attack (Clinton) and decreased liking of the candidate supported by the ad (Obama). This change in candidate rankings happened in all three experimental conditions showing that, on YouTube, all videos might be equal.  These results also support other studies that have noted that negative ad attacks on the character of a candidate may produce a boomerang effect in which the ad reduces the support of the attacker, not the attacked.

The ‘so what?’:  Good news for you, the average voter. It seems that your homemade political video can make a real impression on the rest of us. Could it be that the last half decade of social media immersion has made us more trustworthy of what our peers have to say? Is this a sign that future political candidates will compete for voters’ attention not only with their opponents but also with their own supporters? In an online world where we trust the knowledge of strangers (Wikipedia), live virtual lives (Second Life), and accept profile updates as news (Twitter and Facebook), being receptive to peer-produced political messages doesn’t seem that far-fetched. Be careful, though.  Attack advertising might not be the best way to help your preferred candidate, and indeed may boomerang back and hurt the candidate’s image.

Do you think that the fact that individuals can produce their own ads that can be just as powerful as candidate ones benefits our democracy or does the negative tone hurt our democracy?

But to me the king of false phrases is “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” As an aside, the first part of this chant “sticks and stones may break my bones” is hardly reassuring. I religiously watched Lost this season where stones did much more than break bones, and being hit by sticks (tree limbs actually) caused one character to forget how to speak English. Is this a common ailment from being hit by sticks? Who believes that words can never hurt? Certainly there is growing awareness of the effects of bullying and cyberbullying. Children who are bullied are more likely to have lower self-esteem; higher rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts; and these emotional scars can continue into adulthood.

Words can never hurt? The Southern Poverty Law Center reported a 54 percent rise in hate groups during the last decade. The hate bubbled over during the “debate” over health care. Conservative pundits claimed Obama was a socialist, a Muslim and a racist who often mimicked the tactics of Hitler and was turning the country over to a one-world government . As I noted in an earlier blog, as the health care bill came up for a vote, there were reports that several members of the Congressional Black Caucus had racial epithets hurled at them by angry protesters, and openly gay congressman Rep Barney Frank was heckled with anti-gay chants.

Pew Research recently did a survey looking at the public’s reactions to words. While the overall results were not surprising, some of the partisan breakdowns and age breakdowns were. Not surprisingly, we as a country love family values (89 percent) and civil rights (87 percent) and are not so fond of militia (21 percent) and socialism (29 percent). But if you don’t think the hijinks on Wall Street make a difference, only 52 percent have a favorable opinion of capitalism. Even 29 percent of Republicans had a negative view on capitalism. Isn’t that like 29 percent of kids not liking candy and ice cream?

Some of the partisan differences were interesting. A plurality of Democrats (44 percent) have a favorable impression of socialism (The conservative commentators are right! The most socialist president ever has infected the views of the rank and file!!). A third of Republicans had negative views of the word “progressive,” (you certainly don’t want to be associated with progress), likely because it is the sneaky term that liberals use to advance their views. Fifteen percent of Democrats had a negative slant on family values. How can you oppose family values? (Actually, this shows the power to define a term along specific ideological lines).

Perhaps the most interesting result is that the youngest respondents 18-29 are equally likely to have a favorable view of socialism and capitalism which suggests that all that exposure to left-leaning college professors is having its intended effects (Comrades! Look at our success!!).

I was disappointed that the survey didn’t include the terms “conservative” and “liberal.” I just witnessed the last days of a governor campaign where the two candidates argued who was the true conservative. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I can’t remember the last election in which Democrats used the L-word to describe their values and argued which candidate was more liberal.

I am curious to hear what you think. Which of those words do you have a positive and negative attitude toward? To what degree do you think that either conservatives or liberals have co-opted certain words from the list? And what is it with you Millennials for having equally positive views of capitalism and socialism?

So it may seem paradoxical that, according to a recently released report from Pew Internet, the Millennial generation, the supposedly narcissistic generation that is said to be as demure as the top bead earner at Mardi Gras, is more vigilant about managing their online reputations through controlling who has access to information on their social network sites than other age groups. Specifically the study found the following about the Millennial generation:

• They are much more likely than any other generation to take steps to limit the amount of information available about the  online
• They are more likely to have changed their privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others.
• Almost half say they have deleted unwanted comments and 41% said they have untagged themselves from photos posted by others.
• Nearly three in 10  young Internet users say they never trust social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Linked-in and nearly 80 percent said they trust social network sites some of the time or never. Surprisingly, about a quarter of those 30-49 said they trust social network sites most of the time or all of the time.  Really, have these people read what  Facebook President Mark Zuckerberg has to say about online privacy?  He seems as concerned about privacy as those horndogs in American Pie and the first Porky’s movie.
• The young are also more than twice as likely to regret something they posted online than other age groups.

Pew Internet doesn’t explain the seeming contradiction of why the group most likely to post regrettable information online is also the group that seems most vigilant about protecting its online image.  However, I believe it come down to the fact that the Millennials were raised on the Internet and are therefore the most tech. This savviness comes into dealing with their online image.  As Mendelson and Papacharissi noted in their study of college students and Facebook, they see the role of Facebook photos as documenting the college experience (and by college experience, students meant partying and other social gatherings with friends, not documenting time spent on things actually related to college such as studying).  However, the young are more likely to have searched for what information is available about them online, are more aware that companies have policies about what employees can post about themselves and are more aware that companies check Facebook to find out about employees and potential employees.  So during college students may not be terribly concerned about posts and photos that document “bad behavior,” but when they hit the job market they are aware that it is best they delete details about a one-night stand or untagged themselves from friends’ photos showing them taking a bong hit.

The tech savvy Millennials not only are more aware of the need to protect their privacy but also are more likely to have the technical know-how to properly manage their online image.  I like to PRETEND I am tech savvy.  I blog, I Twitter, and I belong to about seven social network sites from Facebook to Gowalla.  But compared to my 22-year-son I have the tech savviness of the Amish.  Technologically speaking, I am about as cool as  Tom Jones singing “She’s a Lady.”  It is not easy to completely control your privacy on social network sites. To exert full control over privacy on Facebook the user had to navigate through 50 settings and 170 options. Quadruple bypass surgery isn’t that complex.  Fortunately, I found a video that allows you to change the most important privacy settings in about two minutes

I have posted this blog to more of the Millennial generation than usual and I am curious whether they indeed think the claims that they are indeed the narcissistic, Look at Me Generation that scholars claim are accurate or overblown?.  I offered my opinions on why Millennials, the group that is most likely to regret what they post online is also the one that is more likely to manage their online reputation.  How concerned SHOULD we be about our privacy on social network sites like Facebook.  I am interested in what you think.

“Information wants to be free,” proclaimed Stewart Brand, to an audience of internet enthusiasts at the first ever Hacker’s Conference in 1984, and his later work The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. He then added: “Information also wants to be expensive . . . That tension will not go away.” How do the words of an internet pioneer and activist relate to the economic situation in Greece and its spiraling effects? Let me explain.

Information is an abstraction. Unlike other commodities that are bought and sold in economic markets, information does not possess a tangible material basis. So do a lot of services, but what makes information unique as a commodity is its abstract nature. Information cannot be sold, produced or distributed in distinct units.  Unlike other goods, it cannot be completely used up or consumed. Even when sold, it still remains with the producer. Most importantly, it is valued differently by each potential customer. For all these reasons, information remains an elusive commodity, or, as Brand would say, “free”. Economists, and in particular, Game Theorists, understand this well, but analysts with background in Business Administration frequently underestimate the ‘lightness’ of information as a commodity.

Trade markets seek to unitize information and make profit of it. Regulatory frameworks attempt to define possession of information as intellectual property. Company value is appraised based on information about future growth expectations. Markets react to information and frequently crumble as a result of misinformation or over-reliance on information as a commodity. The famous dot-com bubble of the nineties was constructed on the basis of information and speculation, and burst when actual value no longer sustained the anticipated one. Information as a commodity played a great part in the US subprime mortgage crisis and unveiled a shadow banking system. Credit rating agencies assess investment risk on the basis of information, and recent investigations into the credit rating practices of Goldman Sachs have exposed the ease with which a liquid commodity like information may be manipulated. Finally, some analysts have argued that the prolonged negotiation between the IMF, the EU and the Greek government further biased information markets, ballooning the loaned amount to 110 billion euro after multiple succeeding downgrades of the Greek bond rate.

And yet, for networked, globalized economies, information is a key variable to prosperity and growth. But failure to realize that information is ultimately an abstraction, and not a commodity, frequently leads to unjustified optimism, followed by eventual disillusionment, succeeded by distrust towards markets that operate on information. The networked structure of the global economy exacerbates this effect.

The economy of Greece is not global. Similarly, its industry is not networked. But its currency, the Euro, is, and thus the domino effect that many economic analysts fear will follow the declining Greek economy.  In the absence of a central government and a regulatory framework, European Union countries rely on independent assessments of information provided by investment companies like Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Goldman Sachs and increasingly, those are challenged by top ranking EU officials.

Mismanagement of information is not the biggest problem Greece is facing. Nor are inflated risk assessments of Greek bonds the root of the problem. A bloated and dated civil sector, tax evasion, and decades of non-programmatic government spending are. But for the European Union, management of information will become an issue, in the upcoming assessment of other economies in the Euro zone web of debt, including those of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland.

In assessing these economies, it will become essential to treat information not as a market commodity, but rather as the whimsical market variable that it is.