Word: statuses
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...millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having...
...those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed...
...these developments will be entirely positive. Most of us have learned firsthand how addictive the micro-events of our personal e-mail inbox can be. But with the ambient awareness of status updates from Twitter and Facebook, an entire new empire of distraction has opened up. It used to be that you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night's date. Now you're compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people's lives. And because, on Twitter...
...broader program in South Asian languages, cultures, and histories. India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Tibet—all are ever more important to understanding the world in which we live. And for many years, the Study of Religion has operated as a degree-granting Committee without departmental status, patching together faculty and courses from many departments and from the Divinity School. Meanwhile, the energies of religion have hardly subsided in the face of secularism. In fact, the religious traditions of humankind are flourishing in all their diversity, creating worldwide promise and worldwide pestilence. Basic religious literacy has never...
...these elections are largely an outlet for European voters to express their frustration with the status quo. The eccentrics and extremists may offer implausible E.U. policies, but most European governments prefer voters to vent their anger at the European elections rather than at the national polls. The danger is that this mood will shape the Parliament just when a new generation of politicians is needed to pull Europe out of its apathetic slump...