Is The Kindle's Antisocial Nature Holding It Back?

from the interesting-quotes dept

We've discussed in the past how idea sharing and content sharing is "the new normal" for many people, thanks to the internet these days. The "old" view of things -- the broadcast view -- was that big professional creators of content or journalism put a stamp of approval on some content and shipped it along to a waiting audience. But, the rise of the internet has muddied this picture greatly, showing that people actually prefer to be a part of the process. They want to share content. They want to comment on it. They want to modify it. They want to link to it. They want to promote it. They want to respond to it.

Content, itself, has become part of the social process.

Now, we spend lots of time discussing how that's mucking around with business models based on the old view, but it may be causing some troubles for technology as well. In a brief message on Twitter, Mediashift author Mark Glaser, highlighted a fantastic point by Dan Pacheco about why he preferred an iPhone to a Kindle for reading content:

Most content I share starts from the iPhone. Kindle's antisocial nature is what bugs me most.

This point made me realize why I have so little interest in a Kindle. You can't do much with the content on it. It's delivered to you in that old "we're the content creators, you're the content recipient" method. You can annotate it for yourself, but it's not social at all. And these days, so many of us have learned to interact with content socially. For something like eBooks to really take off, my guess is that it will take a much more social approach, where people can do more to interact over the content that they're reading.

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Yet Another Study Points Out That Video Games Aren't Evil

from the and-again-and-again-and-again dept

We've seen a bunch of similar studies over the years, but the folks at the Pew Internet and American Life Project are out with their latest study noting that video games don't turn kids into isolated angry loners unfit to deal with the real world. Yeah, that seems obvious, but you wouldn't know it listening to some of the rhetoric from politicians and anti-video game activists. What the study found, instead, was that nearly every child (both boys and girls) now plays some form of video game, and many of them use video games as a social activity to interact with their friends. Also, video gaming doesn't take away from other social activity. And, finally, video games are often useful tools for teaching kids decision making and how to approach moral dilemmas. Most of this shouldn't be all that surprising, but it's nice to see it confirmed by yet another study. Hopefully this means we're on the tail end of Congress blaming video games for things, and we can move on to the next technopanic.

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