I was born in 1988 into a middle class family. I recall my father owning an early personal computer (if I recall correctly, a Timex Sinclair), and we obtained a used Commodore 64 when I was very young. It was used almost exclusively for the incredible electronic games that came with it, but it was…

Professor Yochai Benkler has described collaborative projects and open-source economics as a form of “commons-based peer production”. Peer production, in his terms, is an opportunity to practice virtuous behavior. The internet has enabled virtuous behavior to affect large scale projects, in turn spreading the virtues of the system and producing output that could not be…

There are countless places that you can find claims of a study which found that only 7% of communication is verbal. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that since the veracity of that claim cannot be determined, and that it’s difficult to prove that one rule would govern all communication like…

As Clive Thompson recounts for CBC, anonymous users of social media and message boards are just as likely to post negative content as logged in users, whether they use a pseudonym or not. This thought goes against the popular wisdom of anonymous commenters feeling freer to use negative emotions in discussion, yet makes sense in…