In less than a month, my new book – “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” – will be published.  This is the product of ten years worth of research into how social media has inflected American teen life.  If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ve seen me talk about these issues over the years. Well, this book is an attempt to synthesize all of that work into one tangible artifact.

Now I have a favor…. please consider pre-ordering a copy (or two <grin>).  Pre-sales and first week sales really matter in terms of getting people’s attention. And I’m really hoping to get people’s attention with this book. I’ve written it to be publicly accessible in the hopes that parents, educators, journalists, and policy makers will read it and reconsider their attitude towards technology and teen practices.  The book covers everything from addiction, bullying, and online safety to privacy, inequality, and the digital natives debate.

If you have the financial wherewithal to buy a copy, I’d be super grateful.  If you don’t, I *totally* understand.  Either way, I’d be super super super appreciative if you could help me get the word out about the book. I’m really hoping that this book will alter the public dialogue about teen use of social media.

via danah boyd | apophenia » blatant groveling: please buy my book.

[A little too theory-heavy for my taste, but some interesting ideas, and the piece sounds pretty good. -egg]

After completing her informal education in Berlin’s underground club scene, artist and musician Holly Herndon relocated to the Bay Area to pursue an MFA at Mills College’s esteemed music program. Now continuing her studies in computer-based music at Stanford, Herndon has an inquisitive approach to technology, finding common threads among often-divided disciplines and communities: electronic music, academia, the tech sector, and contemporary art. As a result, her work is not easily categorized, whether she’s composing music for brass ensembles or working on robotic sculptures with artist Conrad Shawcross, touring festivals in Europe or making dance music with heavily processed recordings of the human voice. This week, she released a 12″ entitled Chorus on RVNG Intl.

via Rhizome | Continuous Partial Listening: Holly Herndon in Conversation.

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users’ most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.

Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.

via NSA and GCHQ target ‘leaky’ phone apps like Angry Birds to scoop user data | World news | The Guardian.

How a 40-year-old IT consultant became nod, one of Silk Road’s highest volume heroin dealers, who turned informant and then fugitive.

The Daily Dot – The final confessions of a Silk Road kingpin.

xkcd: Cold.

[Love Monsanto or hate them, this is pretty interesting. Note: the use of the word “organic” in the headline is completely misleading; they mean “non-GMO.” -egg]

But here’s the twist: The lettuce, peppers, and broccoli—plus a melon and an onion, with a watermelon soon to follow—aren’t genetically modified at all. Monsanto created all these veggies using good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same tech­nology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia. That doesn’t mean they are low tech, exactly. Stark’s division is drawing on Monsanto’s accumulated scientific know-how to create vegetables that have all the advantages of genetically modified organisms without any of the Frankenfoods ick factor.

via Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie – Wired Science.

I just finished Cat Valente’s _Deathless_. One of the best books I’ve ever read. If you’re a Neil Gaiman fan, you owe it to yourself to read this as soon as possible. Valente isn’t Gaiman — she’s something rare and beautiful and unique — but his work is the closest point of reference I can offer. They’re both working in the realm of fairy tale as literature, fairy tale as high art. In this case it’s a Russian folk tale (warning! Spoilers on the Wikipedia article about the folk tale), woven together with the gritty history of the Siege of Leningrad. _Deathless_ is powerful and mythic and moving, and I give it my very highest recommendation. -Egg

[Really fantastic piece of journalism from George Saunders. -egg]

A legend is growing in Nepal, where people say a meditating boy hasn’t eaten or drunk in seven months. He barely moves, just sits under a tree, still as a stone. It’s impossible, some say. Is it a miracle? A hoax? Let’s find out.

via Longform Reprints: The Incredible Buddha Boy by George Saunders.

[I don’t give a damn about artisanal toast, but the story ends up really being about a pretty amazing person. -egg]

At first, Carrelli explained Trouble as a kind of sociological experiment in engineering spontaneous communication between strangers. She even conducted field research, she says, before opening the shop. “I did a study in New York and San Francisco, standing on the street holding a sandwich, saying hello to people. No one would talk to me. But if I stayed at that same street corner and I was holding a coconut? People would engage,” she said. “I wrote down exactly how many people talked to me.”

The smallness of her cafés is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it’s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. “No one can be mad at toast,” she said.

Carrelli’s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.

via How Did Toast Become the Latest Artisanal Food Craze? – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society.

[Want. -egg]

The ‘Skull Chair’ is part of my ‘Vanitas’ collection which is a collection of products inspired by the Dutch vanitas still-life paintings from the 16th and 17th century. The characteristic type of paintings where symbols of emptiness, time and death were placed on the canvas as a reminder of the vanity of earthly life. My goal was to combine the idea of thinking about death with a modern design vision and to allow the user of the product to enjoy every moment of his life by surrounding himself with the Vanitas symbols. This creates an environment that makes you understand the mortality and the absurdity of the present, but does so by letting you enjoy the very moment by giving an authentic and interesting product experience.

via Skull chair with brain ottoman – Boing Boing.