What makes content go viral on the Internet? Theories abound, and the answers given often relate to the inherent quality or catchiness of the “meme,” or information unit. But research suggests that factors intrinsic to social networks may make the process more random — and less explicable — than is often assumed.
Concerns about the decline in personal privacy have long troubled citizens, scholars and politicians. The issue was most famously raised in “The Right to Privacy,” published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 by jurists Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice.
News coverage of the “Arab Spring” has often focused on the potential role of social media in facilitating the Middle East’s ongoing political upheaval. Tools such as such as Facebook and Twitter, it has been suggested, helped citizens communicate and organize when governments were persistently unresponsive to their requests, and may have played a central role in the still-unfolding events.
