"Guns don't kill people. People kill people." A saying we've all heard before, and while we may all have differing opinions about gun control, we can all agree that there are some very passionate people on either side of the argument. My question has nothing to do with gun control, but has a similar ring to it: "Is the internet killing society, or are people?"

In some sense, it's not possible for people to kill society. As long as human interaction exists so will some for of society. So clearly this isn't what we mean when we ask if the Internet is killing society. Rather, what they mean to ask is whether the Internet is changing society for better or worse.

The Interweb is still relatively young. In other words, we're still in that awkward stage of life just before puberty where we're still not sure how or why boys and girls would ever like each other. But for some of us our voice is starting to change.

The future is near. New media or social media or the information revolution or (insert catch phrase about new trends of information sharing over the web) has already begun to dramatically change how and who we relate to. Example: with twitter or a blog post I might connect with people that I would otherwise never connect with because they are outside of my geographic location or run in a different circle of friends. Society and culture are no longer bound along geographic regions. Neither are people bound to one single society or culture. For better or worse, the Internet is changing all the layers of our life (paraphrasing Nora Young).

But blogging, facebook, twitter, thats just the start. We're approaching an age of mobile ubiquity. "Six in 10 people around the world now have cellphone subscriptions, signalling that mobile phones are the communications technology of choice, particularly in poor countries..."  We're becoming a world that is constantly connected. 

What will this new world look like where bloggers are the societal curators and a new ecology of information emerges? Four minutes after Flight 1549 it was a twitter post that was covering the story with pictures and all. In one case it looks like a couple of biology teachers sending their student home to watch vodcasts instead of doing homework. Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams are creating video podcasts which they have there students watch before class. Rather than give lectures in class, they have more time for group work, lab experiments, student-to-student interaction, and student-to-teacher interaction. Not only is this approach radical, its working! Grades have significantly improved and skeptical parents are being won over. More and more teachers at the school are seeing the benefit and starting to follow in their steps.

This is an example of where the Internet actually enabled people to spend more face time together. It's also an example of where to ordinary people questions some assumptions that had gone unquestioned for quite some time now. If anything, I believe this causes us to move into tomorrow asking what assumptions are going unquestioned? And when we start answering that question I think we will find two truths emerge:  

1. We get an opportunity to make some important decisions about how and why and when we will use the Internet and social media to relate to one another. How do we make space for deeper shared learning and at the same time maintain human connections with one another (with my personal bias being towards the variety of human connection we often refer to as "face-to-face")? 
2. There are some things we don't get to decide. One of those things is the decline of information scarcity. Information scarcity will last but a little longer and hoarding and hiding away information will no longer be viable business model. As we build businesses and as we write laws we need to be careful they aren't outdated before they even hit the pavement.

What do you think is the Internet changing our society for better of for worse?

Sometimes when I stop to think about it I am absolutely blown away by how much information is being posted and sent and shared and read on the Internet. Take a second; think about it…

... ok, so you've thought about all those instant messages, web pages, blog entries, forum posts, emails, tweets, wiki edits, MySpace comments, and Facebook invites that are being shared and read at any given moment? Did you close your eyes? (That probably wasn't necessary) Don’t you agree it’s insane?!

It’s never been so easy to get information. It’s never been so easy to get lost in it all. Can you imagine if there was a way we could take a step back and make sense of it. Well, there isn’t. But, there are couple projects that attempt to give us a sense of what people are "feeling" (or at least communicating about what they are feeling) on the web. These projects “harvest” or “scrape” the web for information and then show it to us in some sort of visualization.

Most notably, WeFeelFine (when you get to the home page click “Open We Feel Fine” and then explore) searches blog entries for occurrences of “I feel” and “I am feeling” and shows the sentence it was found in. Here are couple examples:

• i feel like an abandoned tadpole (from someone)
• i may be feeling the happiest lady on earth that I will hug the person till he/she suffocated to death & i will have one more ticket (from a 99 year old)
• i feel like i cant breathe right (from someone)
• i had pretty much forgotten what it was like to be alone and it feels awesome (from a 22 year old in florida)
• i feel your pain can i make it right (from someone)
• im starting to feel a little guilty though (from someone in Canada)

Merely entertaining at first, it becomes intriguing, and maybe for some addictive. What a 99 year old says might put smile on your face, you might find you totally relate to what that 22 year old from florida said, or you may become overwhelmed with sadness when you read that someone feels "like an abandoned tadpole". I think that alone can provide an interesting experience. However, with all that data being aggregated and with a certain ability to record demographic information we can start answering some interesting questions:

“do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.”

Not surprisingly, the stats shows that 1,209,983 women have expressed 953,436 feelings while only 326,726 men have expressed 668,746 feelings. As one might expect men aren’t likely to start a sentence with “I feel”, but is it representative of how little men share what they are feeling online? Probably. I would encourage you to explore the different views that the site offers.

I feel glad that there are only a few people feeling "deranged" right now.

Note to tech-dorks (being self-inclusive): it has an open API. For example, you could ask it to give you the last 50 feelings from women in Tokyo who feel sad.

Along a similar vane (though often more witty due to the nature of twitter) Twistori shows a feed of “tweets” (i.e. posts to twitter) that contain either “I love”, “I hate”, “I think”, “I believe”, “I feel”, or “I wish”. Here are a couple examples:

• i love taking naps. now, i'm full of energy.
• the bees are buzzing. the birds are chirping. blarg! i hate that i love spring
• i think i just injured myself playing wii bowling...
• not only do i believe that 1 person can make a difference, I think it's the only way we can make a difference: helping one person at a time.
• there isn't much that i feel i need: a solid soul & the blood i bleed.
• i wish that i could go really fast on a really slushy road and slam on the brakes and have the car slide for a long distance