Social media

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab are studying Twitter use in the small Spanish town of Jun, Fox News Latino reports. “It’s believed to be the first town to adopt the social network as the dominant method of communication.”

BetaBoston reporter Curt Woodward writes about a new study by researchers from the MIT Laboratory for Social Machines examining how the government of Jun, a small town in southeastern Spain, is using Twitter to interact with residents. The researchers found that “residents’ tweets are incorporated into livestreamed city council meetings.”

MIT graduate student Maia Majumder speaks with Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston about her digital habits. Subbaraman writes that Majumder, “uses Twitter as a professional tool to discuss her research and to interact with colleagues around the world.”

Peter Shadbolt of CNN reports that MIT researchers have incorporated social networking into clothing, creating a T-shirt that displays the wearer's interests and associations. "We wanted to examine more tangible ways of representing ourselves in social media," explains graduate student Viirj Kan.

Robert Lane Greene writes for The Economist about a new paper by MIT researchers, which examines the importance of specific languages by studying how languages are connected to one another. The researchers found that for many languages “their connectivity has little to do with their home country’s modern power.” 

A study by Prof. Thomas Malone found that social perceptiveness can be gained through electronic communications, writes Financial Times reporter Jonathan Moules. “People develop social intelligence skills even when they cannot see into each others’ eyes,” says Malone.

MIT researchers have traced how information flows to see which languages are the most influential, reports Michael Erard for Science. The research shows that “if I want our ideas to spread, we should pick a second language that’s very well connected,” explains MIT alumnus Shahar Ronen. 

Kristi Hedges writes for Forbes about Professor Sherry Turkle’s research that indicates that technology may be having an adverse effect on our connections to one another. Hedges writes that Turkle’s research suggests that “we’re creating a culture where we prefer an artificial presentation of ourselves through social media and texting."

Colleen Shalby reports for the PBS NewsHour that MIT is launching a new laboratory to examine how people use social media, in particular Twitter. Twitter is granting MIT researchers access to every tweet sent in the social network’s history as part of this new project. 

WBUR reporter Zeninjor Enwemeka writes about the new MIT laboratory launched this week to analyze social media.  “The new lab will focus on understanding how people behave across various types of media, and develop tools to make sense of social patterns,” writes Enwemeka. 

Andrea Chang of The Los Angeles Times writes about a new partnership between Twitter and MIT to study social media patterns. Twitter is providing the MIT Media Lab with $10 million to study and make sense of content across social and mass-media platforms.

“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Twitter are teaming up on a $10 million project to better understand social networks and figure out new ways to benefit from them,” reports the Associated Press. The partnership will allow MIT access to Twitter’s archive, as well as real-time monitoring of new tweets.

Joshua Brustein writes for Bloomberg Businessweek that MIT is launching a new laboratory, funded by a $10 million committment from Twitter, to study social patterns on the web. “There are a lot of people at Twitter who are interesting in leveraging Twitter for social good,” says Professor Deb Roy.

The MIT Media Lab has received a $10 million committment from Twitter to examine data from tweets, writes Jordan Graham for the Boston Herald. The lab will develop technologies to analyze “all the different kinds of media, mass media and social media that make up public opinion,” explains Professor Deb Roy.

“Twitter Inc on Wednesday gave $10 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for research that would explore how people use and achieve shared goals using social networks,” writes Christina Farr for Reuters. The committment will fund a new laboratory where researchers will develop tools to analyze social media patterns.