On Twitter, if you want to quote someone else, you say, RT, re-tweet, that person's name, and then what they said before. And it's a way of essentially saying, I'm not saying this, but my friend said this and I thought this was interesting.

When I'm playing with circular saws, I'm offline (though often listening to podcasts) and when I sit in the cabin to read or write, it's wonderful to be offline for a few hours at a time.

Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity.

Re-tweeting is a pretty common practice on Twitter, but on an average day, we see maybe one out of 20 posts is a re-tweet.

If I use Facebook to stay in touch with my high school friends who are church-going Republicans, I may be getting more ideological diversity than in hanging out with secular progressives on the World Politics sub-reddit.

I'm not nearly as well organized as I would like. I am a creature of to-do lists and calendars - if something doesn't get onto my Google Calendar, I don't show up for it.

It's becoming clear that the world is listening, so now we're trying to get new groups of people talking.