A really interesting set of connections - a line of thought worth pursuing. I'm mildly sceptical of the notion of Internet (or social media, or game) addiction, though I've supervised projects and adjudicated on a few papers on the topic, so I accept that there are arguments to be made. But the cage metaphor is a useful way to create focus that avoids pronouncing too much one way or the other: whether or not it's addiction, there are certainly people that feel some compulsion and/or constraint, beyond the intrinsic pleasure of using such systems. That's interesting, whatever the cause.

As with all things technological, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it. For some people, using some systems, social media are anything but isolating (e.g. dating sites, netroots phenomena, community action, not to mention the notably personal use of emerging ephemeral tools like Snapchat or WhatsApp for sustaining and nurturing meatspace relationships). For some people (notably those isolated for some other reason), social media can be incredibly liberating. One of the reasons I much prefer critiques from the likes of Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, and Eli Pariser, is that they start from a vastly more technically savvy background, and they recognize both the value and the risk in ways populist authors like Carr and Keen deliberately fail to do.

I can't recall seeing much recent research on the subject, but it was always a good answer to those that complained about modern kids retreating into virtual spaces like computer games that research overwhelmingly showed that such kids were more active, social, and engaged in other areas of life too. I have become complacent in believing this to remain true. It depends on many factors, and the boundaries of technical and social space are shifting all the time. Most researchers either seem to want to find averages (an enticing but terrible idea for such complex phenomena) or rely on case studies or (in the case of Carr, Keen, etc) just anecdotal evidence and personal observation. Neither extreme - average or specific- is of much use in itself. From the qualitative studies, we need to generate good testable models to help differentiate kinds of involvement,  kinds of system, and different ways of using them, that can be applied in larger empirical studies. We need technologists to tinker with ways of building tools that apply or generate models, which in turn can have very large effects on the future behaviours, and that may invalidate previous studies because they change the variables. Reliable models are thin on the ground and constantly subject to challenge from new technologies, changing large-scale patterns, and so on. It's what makes this field really interesting and poorly charted territory!

Daryl, I agree that it's a bit unfair to compete the Athabasca library with general internet, especially for academic research. Much of the searches I did that led to academic research in Google and whatnot were ultimately help behind a pay wall. With Athabasca U's journal licensing, we have access to the IEEE, ACM articles and so on whereas I found if I wasn't signed into the library and just searched for things of this technical nature on the 'Net I would ultimately get many of the same articles, with a paywall.

-bp

Nice article Daryl, i never thought of it before (that search engine speech is actually protected by free speech).  My point of view is that search engines can have their own decision on what to return in their results. I think its better that way in terms of censoring contents that they think are not appropriate or sites that are reported as malicious. If they dont do that, i dont think we will have results that actually contain good contents. Bots and robots will just consume the top rankings so to me some kind of doctoring is needed. Besides, it does not stop me to go directly to the site I wanted or just try out a different search engine.

Hi Daryl, 

Check this series of videos out. It gives a basic foundation on a free data mining tool with lots of examples. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqQn6YfyGs0&list=PLm4W7_iX_v4OMSgc8xowC2h70s-unJKCp&index=1

Hi Louie,

Professor Witten's videos series is very helpful in introducing and explaining the core topics in data mining. I believe he developed the Weka data mining software and his explanations in the videos in explaining how to use Weka for specific tasks is very helpful.

Thanks for the list Daryl. I will look into the tools on the list and add feedback.

https://www.springboard.com/blog/9-best-free-data-mining-tools/Contains most of the tools in the link above with some newer tools.