Online relationships

Less than a week after going live, a new social network called Pair has been downloaded over 50 000 times and seen more than a million messages sent.Here’s the thing, it doesn’t connect with everyone you’ve ever known. It isn’t even a great professional networking tool. In fact, the only ...

Susan Sontag said that photographs "furnish instant history, instant sociology and instant participation." Nowhere is this truer than on Facebook. A user’s photos create an "instant history". "Instant society" is created by who is tagged in the photographs and where, and "instant participation" by the ability that all the friends ...

A “desperate, adolescent narcissism”. That’s the internet’s "defining vice", according to New York Times op ed columnist Ross Douthat. He is not the first to make this observation, and when American politicians accidentally tweet embarrassing photos of themselves (thus demonstrating that, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean you’re not ...