Couples who can’t talk any more are learning how to reconnect with each other — with help from internet counselling |
Dave’s escape was Facebook. Work had dried up, debts ballooned, he couldn’t support his family. Then he found a release online. He knew it was fantasy but, as things do, one thing led to another. He met a woman for a drink, slept with her, lied to his partner, left his family.
By the time he started to write down his feelings on a relationships website he was back home, riddled with regret and trying to make sense of the emotional fallout he had precipitated. “I love my partner more than I have ever loved anybody before, she is the one I want to spend the rest of my life with,” he wrote. “I still regularly feel that I’m not wanted or needed and rarely get the affection I crave from my partner and only my partner.” Read more at www.timesonline.co.uk |
The BBC put together a great interactive graphic that traces the percentage of a nation’s populace that uses the internet every year, from 1998 to 2008–kind of a shorthand for development over the last decade. The chart darkens each country as its internet-using percentage rises, so you can see the entire world get dramatically darker as the decade goes on. The description from 1998: In 1998, just a few countries–Iceland, Sweden, and New Zealand–had extensive internet usage. In Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country of 68 million, had just 200 internet users.
In 1998, most of the world had less than 6% internet usage, including just about all of South America, Asia, Africa, and even most of Western Europe (besides Switzerland, The Netherlands, and Scandinavia). By 2008, North America, almost all of South America, Europe, Australia, and East Asia were all completely dark. Read more at www.fastcompany.com |
In times of Internet censorship and governmental interference with citizen Web use, the need for private browsing has never been more apparent or more crucial to political processes.
Perhaps in response to its woes in China, Google has reaffirmed its support of online anonymity for political purposes in a recent blog post on Tor, a project it’s been supporting extensively lately. Tor allows for safe, anonymous Internet use - it’s a project that protects privacy and circumvents censorship in countries around the world. And as companies gather user data - data that can at any time and for any reason be surrendered to law enforcement or government agencies - safeguarding online anonymity becomes an ever more vital concern. |
The iPod has become so popular that a lot of people have forgotten about a rich and free resource for music—radio. No, not just the radio you accidentally hear when searching for your car’s Defroster switch, but Web-based as well as terrestrial radio. In this Macworld Video I look at ways to listen to and capture radio that streams across the Internet. |
Download Macworld Video #142
- Format: MPEG-4/H.264
- Resolution: 480 x 272 (iPhone & iPod compatible)
- Size: 7.5MB
- Length: 5 minutes, 39 seconds
Or you can look below for the full-quality video embedded from YouTube. (Please note our videos are now available in HD on YouTube as well!)
Show NotesRead more at www.macworld.com |
We are in danger of destroying rock-star mystique because the web is less in thrall to image than traditional media |
“In the last three or four years the internet’s taken a stranglehold and killed off the myth of the rock star,” Tom Meighan of Kasabian told Bangshowbiz last week. “You know when you used to buy records and there was a myth behind them? There’s too much on blogs now and I think it’s killed it off. There are so many rock stars writing these self-pitying blogs and it’s not in the spirit of rock’n'roll.” |
The irony of giving such a headline-grabbing opinion to an internet-only news service seems to have been lost on Meighan, but as a singer clearly in thrall to the mystique of Bowie, Bolan and Björk, he makes a good point. For all the wrong reasons. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
Almost all young men use the internet every day, and it is the technology they are most attached to, according to new study. Research conducted by Sparkler for Microsoft Advertising across the UK found that 99% of young males go online either every day or nearly every day, and half of them already use their mobile phones to do so. And 80% even go so far as to say that they would be lost without it. The Internet is the technology 57% of men between 18 and 44 are most attached to, closely followed by mobile phones with 49%, and TV with 46%. In fact, the internet is so important for today’s men, that it is often the first thing they think about when they wake up: 25% of young men admitted to checking their email and 18% to looking at social networking sites on their mobile phone before they get out of bed in the morning. Some 94% use email at least once per day, compared with 60% that use a social network such as Facebook. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
| LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An online survey of 895 Web users and experts found more than three-quarters believe the Internet will make people smarter in the next 10 years, according to results released on Friday. |
Most of the respondents also said the Internet would improve reading and writing by 2020, according to the study, conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina and the Pew Internet and American Life project. “Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge,” said study co-author Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center. But 21 percent said the Internet would have the opposite effect and could even lower the IQs of some who use it a lot. “There are still many people … who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools,” she said. Read more at www.reuters.com |
The internet has created the illusion of mass intimacy, but 151 friends is an unmanageable number, says an academic |
It’s the internet world now, so you can speak to anyone anywhere in the world
— right? Blog away, and every Tom, Dick and Harriet from Anchorage to Cape
Town can admire your wit, marvel at your wisdom and might even offer a
comment in return. Sign them up to your Facebook site, where you can now
boast 300, 500, 1,000 friends.
|
But how well do you really know all these people? Would you really respond
with a cheque for £50 to an e-mail plea from one of them? OK, OK, I know a
surprising number of people get hoodwinked by 15-year-old Nigerian spammers
on a cranky old village internet connection, but I’ll warrant that most of
you aren’t so gullible — and it’s precisely because you don’t treat everyone
on your Facebook list as equally worthy of interest.
Read more at technology.timesonline.co.uk |
| Bangalore, Feb 3: How do you like the idea of Internet being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2010? The world might see Internet succeed the 2009 awardee US president Barack Obama as it is officially fighting for the world’s most coveted prize alongside a Russian human rights group and a Chinese dissident. |
While a Princeton philosophy professor, Kwame Anthony Appiah nominated Liu Xiaobo, a recently jailed Chinese dissident, Norwegian politician Erna Solberg has nominated Russian rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and her group Memorial, media reports said on Tuesday, Feb 2.
It was the Italian edition of the Wired magazine which supported the idea of an inanimate object getting the prize. Wired reportedly nominated Internet for promoting “dialogue, debate and consensus through communication” as well as democracy.Read more at news.oneindia.in |
Leeds University study finds people classified as internet addicts are more likely to be depressed than non-addicted users |
British psychologists have found evidence of a link between excessive internet use and depression, research published today has shown. Leeds University researchers, writing in the Psychopathology journal (abstract here – subscription required for full pdf), said a small proportion of internet users were classed as internet addicts and that people in this group were more likely to be depressed than non-addicted users. The article on the relationship between excessive internet use and depression, a questionnaire-based study of 1,319 young people and adults, used data compiled from respondents to links placed on UK-based social networking sites. |
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