Sublime

Moreover, the size of the average person’s social network decreased by one-third in the same time.2 In fact, more people say that they don’t have a confidante than those who say that they do.3 Americans, particularly those under thirty, are not participating in formal religious organizations as much as people did even a generation ago.

Social groups grow from the illegible but stable center of the status spectrum, and leak at the legible but unstable edges.

notice that anything that’s alternative is going to be lacking in resources and lacking in outreach—it’s like alternatives to automobile production: you can do it, but it’s going to be extremely difficult. So I don’t know the details, but I imagine that if you compare the resources behind, say, F.A.I.R. [Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a left-w

In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements, ranked by the increasing degree of coordination employed. Groups of people start off simply sharing with a minimum of coordination, and then progress to cooperation, then to collaboration, and finally to c

there was around a 40 per cent turnover in network membership (technically known as ‘churn’) over the eighteen months that we had been tracking them.

Facebook’s own data and found that most of the directed posting activity is between a core group of around ten (in the case of boys) or sixteen (in the case of girls),

it allowed them to increase community size from a value of around 75 in their predecessors to the 120