By Dan O'Connor on September 30, 2009
And so, dear readers, to the first in an occasional series which we might call ‘Google’s Cultural Tin Ear’.
It will have escaped the notice of none that Google have recently gifted the world with their latest innovation, which goes by the surfy-beachy-hip-and- greenish monicker of ‘Wave’. It is, so we are told by a reliably breathless BBC tech reporter, a combination of email, IM and wiki-style editing. It is, apparently, how email would look were it invented today. According to its developers, it is all about collaboration and communication. So bleeding-edge is it that, naturally it remains for the time being invitation only.
It also shares a name with noted contraversial teaching experiment, ‘The Wave’ which, of course, showed us all how easy it is for a group of people to collaborate together and become fascists.
I just think someone ought to google these names before they adopt them.
Posted in Email, Internet Technology, Social Networks, Stories, Wikis |
Dan is responsible for translating social media research into the analytic and conceptual frameworks which underpin the team’s product and service development. He is particularly interested in how social media has changed the ways in which people exchange information within networks, and the impact that these changes have had on traditionally top-down information systems, such as those prevalent within the health, education and NGO sectors, where he leads RMM’s activities.
Dan’s focus upon health and education stems from his background in academia: He has a PhD in History and, as well as being Head of Research at RMM, he is a member of faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. He has published and lectured widely on the ethics of social media use within healthcare systems, and is involved in the application of social media in medical education at Johns Hopkins hospital.
Dan likes cooking, martinis, and irony. Frequently at the same time.
[...] Let me Google that for you, Google. [...]