In the past four months, the social media usage by players on the North Carolina football team played a significant role in embroiling the Tar Heels program in an NCAA investigation that may leave the team without many key contributors for at least Saturday night’s season opener.

Subsequently, one-third of the ACC schools that previously did not have official social media usage policies in place have begun work to initiate them. While all 12 ACC athletic programs said they have warned student-athletes about the risks of using Twitter, Facebook and MySpace for the past few years, recent examples of the potential perils of such mediums have led several schools to make a more thorough examination of their guidelines.

» via The Washington Post

On Monday morning, Mike Wise, a sports columnist at The Washington Post, published to his Twitter account that the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended for five games.

Now Mr. Wise himself is suspended.

» via The New York Times

The defining idea of the coming era is actually the loss of an idea we never had to worry about losing before. It is the decay of belief in the specialness of being human.

As an example of what that would mean, consider the common practice of students blogging, networking, or tweeting while listening to a speaker. At a recent lecture, I said: “The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn’t to make me feel respected, but to make you exist. If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”

Decay in the belief in self is driven not by technology, but by the culture of technologists, especially the recent designs of antihuman software like Facebook, which almost everyone is suddenly living their lives through. Such designs suggest that information is a free-standing substance, independent of human experience or perspective. As a result, the role of each human shifts from being a “special” entity to being a component of an emerging global computer.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults – namely their parents – for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies. And they know that technical tools for restricting access don’t trump parental demands to gain access. So they find new ways of getting around limitations. And, in doing so, reconstruct age-old practices.

» via apophenia

As part of the draft of a law governing workplace privacy, the German government on Wednesday proposed placing restrictions on employers who want to use Facebook profiles when recruiting.

The bill would allow managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web and to view their pages on job networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing. But it would draw the line at purely social networking sites like Facebook, said Philipp Spauschus, a spokesman for the Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière.

» via The New York Times

This summer, incoming freshmen at five universities can use a Facebook application to find their roommates. Students can use the application, RoomBug, to fill out forms about their preferences for living and qualities they’d like to see in a roommate. Students can then request a match, which the other incoming freshman must confirm.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Anyone in the US can receive Tweets on their phone even if they haven’t signed up for Twitter. This is a simple way for people to get information they care about in real-time. For example, let’s say you want to get Tweets from New York City’s office of emergency management (@NotifyNYC). Just text ‘follow NotifyNYC’ to 40404 in the US.

» via The Twitter Blog

“I’ve learned that the world has changed when it comes to launching a product because of Twitter,” Mr. McCue said. “We knew people would like it, but we didn’t expect this kind of instantaneous, explosive rush to the door, and that would not have happened had it been a world pre-Twitter.”

» via The New York Times

Although it’s a scholarly work, the pain of the stories is clear. A student named Leslie checked her Facebook profile late in the day and found out the guy she thought was her boyfriend was announcing on his newsfeed that he had a new girlfriend. Then, Gershon writes, Leslie noticed that her own profile had changed because her now-ex boyfriend was no longer listed as the person she was in a relationship with.

Facebook’s role is unique because it is so public, Gershon says. (In one class, her students compared it to the abstract gaze described by French philosopher Michel Foucault). “Facebook official” has emerged as a new stage in a relationship, Gershon says, but the meaning can differ from one person to the next. Gershon says that some people will claim that a breakup isn’t official until it is Facebook official, while others point out that changes in Facebook status may just be a sign of trouble; in many cases it’s unclear whether the breakup will take.

Texting creates other problems. A student named Rebecca had an on-again, off-again relationship with her boyfriend, Ted. Just when she thought things were going well, she got a text that said, “this isn’t working out.” The rest of the breakup was conducted entirely by texting; Ted refused to answer the phone, e-mails, or Facebook messages. Rebecca got angrier and angrier because she couldn’t engage him in an actual conversation about what had gone wrong, Gershon says.

» via Newsweek

Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) according to new research released today from The Nielsen Company. The research revealed that Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging.

» via nielsenwire

The expansion of our digital universe — Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter — has shifted not only how we spend our time but also how we construct identity. For her coming book, “Alone Together,” Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., interviewed more than 400 children and parents about their use of social media and cellphones. Among young people especially she found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” Referring to “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark description of the transformation of the American character from inner- to outer-directed, Turkle added, “Twitter is outer-directedness cubed.”

» via The New York Times

On Tuesday, Amazon.com took a step toward making the shopping experience on its Web site more social.

For many people, shopping is as much about socializing as it is about buying something — a chance to run into neighbors at the farmers’ market or spend time with a friend at the mall. And people who go shopping with a friend inevitably ask advice before buying. But it’s hard to do that when online shopping.

Now, Amazon shoppers who connect their Amazon and Facebook accounts transport their Facebook friends to Amazon — and can get recommendations from those friends on what to buy.

» via The New York Times