Vitak's blog

At the Pew Internet and American Life Project, we recently published a report titled Writing, Technology and Teens, which considered the impact of informal writing styles, as commonly found in the infinite number of shorthand conversations young people have each day over text messaging and IM. The primary question we wanted to answer with this research was if these informal writing styles, which make liberal use of writing shortcuts such as acronyms (e.g., LOL, ROFL, BRB, etc.); abbreviations (e.g., "cu2nite", meaning "see you tonight"); and emoticons, such as the recently-turned-10-years-old smiley face, had any effects on teens' more formal writing, such as what was required from them in a school environment.

As Nicole recently wrote, the results from this research reveal that while most teens do not consider these forms of interaction as "writing," the habits developed in quick messaging conversations do bleed into their more formal, school-based writing. Since I considered the communication habits of college students for my master's thesis work, I thought it might be interesting to look at the questions posed in our teens' research in light of my data on a slightly older crowd. Below is a cross-post that I have also published on Pew's website; the original post can be found here.  Read More »

The U.S., which has never been a leader in mobile technology, may finally be catching up (ever so slightly, at least) with foreign markets, thanks in large part to Google and Apple's recent efforts to make the Internet mobile.  Read More »

Howard Rheingold has been writing about the impact of computer-mediated communication on interaction for the last three decades. I am currently reading his 1993 book, "The Virtual Community," on the rise of web-based communities and namely the influence of the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) on the way people interact online.

However, one of Rheingold's more recent books, "Smart Mobs," holds special relevance in light of recent global events.  Read More »

Over the course of the last six months or so, I have become an avid consumer of technology blogs, especially those dealing with social networking sites, and most especially with Facebook. While much of the blog postings are rather boring in nature and deal with the perpetual argument over the pros and cons of Facebook versus MySpace or how Facebook doomed itself with the Beacon debacle in November, every now and then I find a tidbit that shakes my very existence.  Read More »

Let’s perform a little experiment. As you read my blog – which you would not be reading without the aid of 1) the Internet and 2) a computer – consider how you did anything 15 years ago. Now for some of you, you might have been in kindergarten, but I think it’s safe to say most of us were at least in high school by this time. How did you conduct research for a school project? How did you contact your friends? How did you look up the number for the local pizza delivery joint or directions to the mall two towns over?  Read More »