Are we too apathetic when it comes to social media user experiments? A few months ago, Facebook got into trouble for experimenting with some of their users. In the name of “science,” the company decided to start tweaking people’s newsfeeds with an excess of either positive or negative status updates from friends. The study showed […] More »

Selfies: vain, fun, a cry for help, empowering and currently -kind of- a cancer awareness and fundraising tool.  MacBook’s have Photo Booth and savvy cell phone owners purchase apps that allow cats to indulge in a good selfie. Toronto’s OCAD University is currently hosting a student exhibition – All By Myselfie – with the explanation, […] More »

The “Hey girl…” feminist Ryan Gosling meme was huge—and the author, Danielle Henderson, even landed a book deal. We’ve been following some other feminist Tumblrs and Twitters. Here are some posts from our favourites: *Warning: working knowledge of Taylor Swift lyrics required* We are never ever ever ever / Asking for it — FeministTaylorSwift (@feministtswift) […] More »

After the sheer surprise of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots had dissipated, Canadian commentators tried to figure out what it all meant. Most beat their usual political drums—months later we’re blaming the pinko anarchists, capitalist pigs, and beer companies for making their products so darn tasty and portable. But this being 2011, many who broke windows […] More »

The G20 is less than two weeks away, and there’s a lot going on. You could just turn to the usual media suspects to get your news about the G20, but when it comes to the street-level collision of neoconservative colonialist plutocrats and anti-globalization activists (among many other blocs of interests), it pays to look […] More »

If you’re like me and you shudder to think of the store of personal information you’ve inadvertently let loose online, you’ll be happy to know that a few altruistic software programmers are on the case. Four NYU students recently decided they’d had enough of heavily centralized, corporate-minded social networking sites. They took on the task […] More »

Earth Hour is on Saturday, March 27, when people around the world will turn off all their electrical gadgets for one hour, starting at 8:30 pm, local time. Started in 2007 in Australia, Earth Hour has become a global juggernaut, with hundreds of cities and hundreds of millions of individuals participating. For the last few years, […] More »

A year of layoffs and anaemic ad buys has given journalists an excuse to turn inwards like never before. By now, even folks outside the industry must be sick of hearing about the Future of Journalism — my own fervent hope is to never read another article about social media for reporters. But I do […] More »

The sky is falling on news, said Mike Katrycz, but this isn’t the first time. The veteran news director joined a panel discussion called “Local TV News Under Siege” at Ryerson Journalism School on Wednesday night. With him were CTV managing editor Adrian Bateman, CBC managing editor Sophia Hadzipetros, and CITY Toronto reporter Farah Nasser. […] More »

In an age when CNN can get away with quoting Twitter as “a source” in its coverage of Iran’s high-stakes political bedlam, it’s more than fair to assume that as a society, we’re still ironing out the kinks in our relationship with interactive media. For some of us that might mean, say, late-night microblogging about […] More »