It’s a different era. The digital world is molding children in a way that is completely different from their parents. Some may say that it’s always the case as technology, culture, and societal norms change, but this is different. It’s faster. This isn’t just a matter of, “I don’t understand the music you kids listen to these days.” It’s a major shift in the way that kids interact with the rest of the world.
After the recent tragedy in Newtown, CT, some commentators and - notably - the National Rifle Association (NRA) remarked that video games played a role in a "culture of violence" and detachment that can ease the path to violent behavior. This, in turn, has given new life to the debate about the role of media violence – particularly, violent video games – on real-world aggression. It's a serious topic, so ReadWrite thought it was important to to recap the latest on the discussion and see where scholarly studies and popular opinion fall.
Quantifying aspects of human behaviour and social phenomena has never been simple. But in today’s world, one thing is inescapable. We are creating a new market and ecosystem of personal preferences and patterns of influence. We are creating an exponential amount of data – 3.2bn likes and comments per day, over 400m tweets per day, and rapidly being joined by Pins and Cinema.grams. We are connected in some way to more people than ever in history – an average of 229 friends of Facebook, the ability to be magnified to hundreds of thousands or millions on Twitter.
And out that seismic, epochal change, social influence, a delicate concept, rises in importance. Why? Influence is that delicate concept which describes or predicts the behaviour embedded in these trillions of connections.
There is a growing problem in society. Once upon a time in the distant past (about 2 or 3 years ago) it was considered rude to do things such as text during class, while driving, or even during sex. Unfortunately, our addiction to the little devices in our pockets has made many of us begin to ignore the old cellular taboos that kept us polite, focused, and safer.
To many, it has gotten completely out of hand. To others, it’s just a fact of life, a natural transition to a world where nothing is too sacred to exclude the use of cell phones. There’s a reason why 1 in 5 people have dropped their cell phone in the toilet. An estimate 247.5 million cell phones have been used in the bathroom. Here’s a graphic that goes over the mobile details.
