It's fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people as well.
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
Even in high school, I had friends that I didn't know were gay until years later. I'd find out on Facebook or something and be like, 'Oh, that explains some things,' or 'Wow, no wonder they were so cool.'
I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.
StumbleUpon has humanized the Web and mastered a way for people to discover online content by incorporating an individual's personal preferences and recommendations of friends and like-minded people.
When you write, you are alone. It can be a bit of a shock later to discover that people have read what you've written!
I didn't know feminism was actually a thing until I left home and found out the country didn't run the way my mom's house did.
The biggest part of Loopt is about discovering the world around you, never replacing a social experience - only adding to it.
My upbringing was so middle-class and repressed. It wasn't until I was placed in Lunghua that I met anyone from any other social strata. When I did, I found them colossally vital.
Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are.
My kids download 10 games. They play them all for two minutes. They throw away the eight they don't like. Then they play those last two obsessively for a month. That's alien to those of us who buy a $60 game and play it for 40 or 50 hours. The discovery mechanism is completely social, and I don't think you get that genie back in the bottle.
Today technology permits knowledge to bubble up from more dispersed sources that are filtered through more competitive mechanisms, sustaining a more decentralized and accurate system of social discovery. We can acquire general expertise without being beholden to particular experts.
I was quite naïve, a boy from Southport. When I went to art college in Leeds, I lived in a basement flat, and I heard clunking on the stairs all night, and I thought it was just nurses going to work on the night shift at the local hospital! Then I found out it was all working girls upstairs. I suppose I came from a protected background and had my eyes opened wide by that side of city life.
