February 2012

If the past is any guide, it is almost certain that Facebook's February 1 filing of an IPO, which could value the company at as much as $100 billion, will generate major attention online.

In the realm of social media, Facebook is a major and enduring topic. Since PEJ began tracking the conversation on blogs in January 2009 and Twitter in June 2009, Facebook has been among the top five topics on one of those platforms in 39 different weeks. And that interest seems to have grown over the past year. In 2011, Facebook was among the most popular subjects on either blogs or Twitter 18 weeks compared to eleven weeks in 2010 and 10 weeks in 2009. These are some findings of a special edition of the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which examined how often and over what issues Facebook has risen to the top of the conversation.

Conservative complaints about a liberal bias in the media do not hold up, at least not when it comes to the free-spending groups known as “super PACs.”

News companies and their executives donated more than $350,000 to conservative super PACs in 2011, according to financial disclosure forms filed with the Federal Election Commission. The donations included $100,000 from St. Paul-based Hubbard Broadcasting to the American Crossroads super PAC, which was created by Bush White House strategist Karl Rove. Hubbard is a family-owned media company with a dozen local TV stations, 21 radio stations — including D.C.’s leading news channel WTOP — and a national cable channel.

It's game day for a Chicago wireless network startup. ExteNet Systems, which builds antenna networks that prepare wireless carriers for expected demand surges, has been chosen to amp up coverage for the Super Bowl in Indianapolis (IN).

The Lisle-based company built an outdoor network that covers part of downtown Indianapolis in December and recently added another network in and around the Omni Severin Hotel near the stadium that will host the Super Bowl. CEO Ross Manire already is thinking about the next big event, closer to home, when the G8 and NATO summits come to Chicago in May. Extenet already provides the network at McCormick Place, which will host the summit. There haven't been any requests yet for more equipment, but Mr. Manire says, “We're looking at how we can assist at providing additional capacity. We're looking forward to it.”

[Commentary] The question occurred to me as I spent an hour browsing the Web, and on inspection, it seemed to me not entirely nutty. Technology is changing the way we think about all kinds of theological concepts, such as community, prayer, ritual and worship. Why should it not expand our definition of “soul”?

The most intriguing approach to the question of the Internet’s soul, however, comes from the provinces of conventional theology. To many, a “soul” is not just a thing that inhabits an individual; it is also part of a radical union with God and all the world’s other souls, going backward and forward in time, beyond the constraints of bodies and geography. The Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined “above the animal biosphere, a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls.” He called that realm the noosphere — the sphere of thought — but it might just as well be the Internet, a place where the world’s souls, living and dead, gather together to share of their essential selves and join their sacred individuality together. At the very least, as a universe of songs, images, research projects, existential yearnings and daily disappointments of hundreds of millions of selves, the Internet forces us to imagine in new ways the places where souls, if you believe in such things, might ultimately reside.