READ magazine and The Ophelia Project are staging Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing on Facebook, of all places. Here is a kind of Facebook activity that isn’t entirely incurious. I mean, these people could be posting updates on the breakfast bagel they just bought, or something like that. But instead, they worked together to create a social media adaptation of a Shakespeare play. Click through for more on this bizarre but actually very topical and relevant project.
Here’s a fairly shocking article from Boston.com on how attached teens are to their mobile devices. “A Pew Research Center study from 2010 reported that more than four out of five teens with cellphones sleep with the phone on or near the bed, sometimes falling asleep with it in their hands in the middle of a conversation.”
On the heels of yesterday’s interesting hypothesis that Facebook and other social networking sites are geared toward behavior that is intellectually incurious, comes Obama’s Facebook town hall. This is a fascinating example of the intersection between corporate and political spheres.
A recent study claims that if you are intellectually curious and have a generally high need for cognitive complexity, searching out knowledge or solving more than middling problems, you are less likely to be adding friends on social networks. Is Facebook, as Nicholas Carr suggests, for dullards?
